Stan Goff. from a post regarding the Democratic War Machine, and why
America doesn't seem to care if their political system has two
right-wings of one party.
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
mentions.
To maintain that lifestyle, which is an imperial political payoff
for a quiescent home base, requires ever expanding inputs of finite
resources — many from aborad — 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.
<http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2007/09/15/ping-and-pong-you-are-the-ball/>
