41 years after Higgins prediction of oil and food shortages there is a glut of oil, the US is the world's largest producer of energy and the biggest threat to American health is obesity.
Go figure!
I was born in the house my father built
But the oil in the Mideast is still mostly controlled by Arabs/Muslims. They can pretty much dictate the price they want to sell the oil for....which could have a domino affect on the economies of other nations which could eventually affect us.
So Higgins' prediction is still plausible to some degree.
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The movie has a plot hole?!?
EVERY FRIGGIN' MOVIE HAS A FRIGGIN' PLOT HOLE!!!!!
I'd say a whole lot more probable than plausible. The reason there is presently a glut of oil with an accompanying low price is due entirely to the actions of the Middle East, i.e., OPEC. It's a global, long-term strategy designed to make it too expensive to use alternate means of finding oil in other, non-Middle Eastern parts of the world and drive all of those endeavors out of business.
Once accomplished, OPEC will again be one of the sole suppliers of the world's oil. Anyone think the price of oil will be low then?
Although four years after Condor came the 1979 oil shock resulting from the Iranian revolution, which pushed the price of oil nearly three times higher per barrel and triggered the kind of panic buying last seen in 1973 in many places in the US. Then came the 1980 Iraq invasion of Iran, further depressing oil exports in the region, which triggered a global recession that did not ease until the mid-1980s.
And the root cause of the Iranian revolution lies in the installation of the Shah, Reza Pahlavi, in 1953 following the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh as he wanted to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, which at the time was dominated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which later became British Petroleum, then simply BP, the same company that brought the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the worst oil spill in history.
That 1953 coup in Iran was engineered by British and American intelligence, notably the CIA, which finally admitted publicly the planning and execution of the coup in 2013, only 60 years after it happened. The US provided extensive backing to the Shah, with the CIA training the dreaded secret police, SAVAK, as Iran acted as a "cop on the beat" in the Middle East, in the words of Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon's defense secretary. Under the Shah, Iranians lived under repression and terror as Western business interests, primarily the oil companies, fattened their bottom lines from their dealings with Iran. A revolution was inevitable, and by 1979, it came in the form of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Long before its public admission, the CIA tacitly acknowledged its role in the coup. In fact, the term "blowback," meaning the unintended negative consequences of a covert operation, was coined as early as 1954 in a CIA report about the Iran coup. Knowledge of CIA involvement in the coup, though hardly touted in the educational system and media, would nevertheless hardly have been unknown in 1970s America, particularly in the wake of the 1960s turmoil including Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, the Ervin Committee investigation of Watergate, and other official investigations such as the House of Representatives' Pike Committee and the Senate's Church Committee, both of which investigated CIA activities starting in the same year as the release of Condor. In fact, the movie is an exemplar of the popular suspicion and paranoia about these operations by the "cloak-and-dagger boys," as President Harry Truman called them. He should know: His administration brought the CIA into existence--and he later expressed regret over that.
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"The past is never dead. It isn't even past." -- William Faulkner
The oil thing was a big deal long before in '79. Already in '73 OPEC dropped its "oil bomb" on the world and there were gas lines all over America during Carter's presidency.
shareWas thinking the same thing upon watching this film, I was like, "Huh, this sounds suspiciously familiar." It's really scary how fiction could become reality. Except this time, it took a terrorist attack on U.S. soil (which might quite not be what we initially thought it was) to spark such an event. It honestly makes this movie feel even more relevant today, and I'll bet it could pass for today.
shareyeah, the secret plan was the weakest part of the film, but wasn't really essential to the plot, just that there was a secret plan to stumble on.
shareThis post didn't age well.
shareWaaaaaaail.... they DID talk about invadin' the Middle-East, an' destabilizin' regimes, so....
It wasn't all hogwash, was it ?
The deeper insight is also true - if the USA ran out of something critical, things would get real, real quick. We're not accustomed to doing without.
none of it was hogwash , the OP's post is bullshit , except maybe the obesity bit
"US is the world's largest producer of energy"
ha!
riiiiight
largest USER sure , not producer.
but we were under trump.
the pipeline was shut down on inauguration day 2021, which cut our production. before that, we were leading
It is often hard to see remarkable men like George Mitchell when making future doomsday predictions.
i think higgins making those ominous predictions was due to the fact that that was the prevailing sentiment of that day. During the late 60s on into early 80s, the world was in a very uncertain posture and oil was center stage in all that. plus, gotta also consider the impact the young environmental movement had on the pop culture, as well as alvin toffler's book (1969 i believe) and a helluva lot of unrest in the middle east at that time, as well as the USSR growing (seemingly, at that time) stronger than ever.
yeah man, there were a lot of irons in the fire then. it was very real in people's minds that catastrophe could be just around the corner, and likely in the form of some kind of energy or hunger event. i was alive then and i remember the sentiment was very dark. long lines for gasoline, NYC had a blackout, 3 mile island, the cuyahoga river caught on fire. etc etc it just goes on and on
it was very real in people's minds that catastrophe could be just around the corner, and likely in the form of some kind of energy or hunger event.
This is still the case!
Nothings changed except a further 40 years worth of oil has been burnt and the worlds population has doubled , neither of which will help the situation.