must-read of the day
be sure to read the whole thing...Here are some other things that are not being said:
The average consumption lifestyle of the United States, which keeps politicians in office, is based on extortion, violence, and plunder in places we don't see, and from activities the media seldom mention. To maintain that lifestyle, which is an imperial political payoff for a quiescent home base, requires ever expanding inputs of finite resources -- many from abroad -- and the continued ability to back up financial extortion with military force where necessary. The pivotal resource that makes it possible to make all the other consumer goods, be they cars, clothes, computers, or whatever, is fossil energy. The United States, with five percent of the world's population, used 26% of the word's energy supplies. Our domestic production has been falling since 1973, even as our aggregate demand has continued to rise steeply. The United States has allowed car companies and developers to establish an economic infrastructure that depends absolutely on private automobiles. This massive fleet of around 250 million automobiles runs on oil. This oil cannot be replaced by biofuels, contrary to the bullshit being propogated to support a fresh new vote-buying-and-corporate-welfare scheme for Cargill, Monsanto, and Archer-Daniels-Midland.
Follow the logic.
The US economy cannot continue to operate as it is without guaranteeing its access to fossil fuel that comes from abroad. The establishment wants this to be our dirty little secret, and that's why we twist ourselves in knots talking about it, including deluding ourselves that we can continue our energy profligacy and ignoring the wet work that gets done to maintain control over a region as strategically vital to this end as Southwest Asia. This, of course, means that when Republicrats use coded language about "vital American security interests in the Middle East," they are really talking about maintaining secondary political control over the human beings who live on top of those energy lakes. If you accept that maintaining the American way of life is the highest priority, then you have to accept that the US has to intervene with force when necessary to get the energy supplies, and even that this force be maintained through a constant threat, i.e., a permanent US military presence in the region and support of unsavory regimes to act as our surrogates.
If you believe that people in that part of the world should have the right to decide when, where, and how to use their own resources, then you have to accept that this might result in a dramatic and painful change in the "American way of life."
It's that simple, that stark.
