From the vaults...

I just ran across a draft email in my hotmail that's been sitting unsent since St. Patty's Day 2008. This was in response to my mom having spammed her contact list with this truly idiotic viral 'here's how to get gas prices to drop!!!!!' scheme.

And there's the not-too-crazy idea, posited by Greg Pallast in his Armed Madhouse, that we invaded Iraq not to pump its oil but to keep it largely in the ground—which is precisely what has happened. It is true that Iraq's fields contain the world's richest supply of untouched oil. The greatest threat Saddam's Iraq posed to the world's richest men was the idea that they would step up production of oil, flooding the market and causing OPEC's meticulously constructed cost scheme to collapse. Since the Bush family and the royal house of Saud (Saudi Arabia being the single biggest player in OPEC) go back as friends and business partners at least three generations, whether or not it was our explicit intent to do so, by invading Iraq we basically took care of "OPEC's little problem" for them, benefiting not only Saudi Arabia but also all the American oil interests. (Saudi Arabia, needless to say, is not exactly a paragon of human rights and individual liberties, but we never say anything bad about them, do we? And our invasion certainly wasn't about Saddam Hussein: we've countenanced far more evil and murderous dictators in other countries. Hell, sometimes we've enthroned them to begin with.)

It's high time to realize: the super-rich are the new royalty, and we are all expendable serfs. I used to think the movie Rollerball was about a dystopian future where corporations were overtly the governing organizations. Now I'm not so sure it wasn't really that way in the '70s when that movie came out; it positively is today. We don't fight wars for freedom, democracy, or any other hifalutin ideals. We fight them for capital, for the preservation and expansion of the most obscene piles of wealth in existence. That's why the newly Democratic Congress in 2007 put up no serious fight whatsoever to Mr. Bush's war: they are owned just as surely as he is.

Plus ça change, eh?