Twenty years ago, there was a lively, good-time beer joint in my town of Austin called the Raw Deal. It served good beer, a serious plate of pork chops, fries cooked in what must have been 40-weight motor oil . . . and a heaping side of attitude. In the men’s room there was an automatic hand-drying machine with a sign on the hot air button that read: “Punch here for a message from Senator Phil Gramm.”
I miss the Raw Deal.
I’ve been thinking about that hot air machine lately as I hear George W. endlessly repeating — as if his Teleprompter is stuck — that his sweeping, globallistic, unrestricted, chop-a-matic, smoke-’em-out, suspend-the-Constitution, freedom-busting, antiterrorism campaign is about nothing but freedom itself. “We’ve got to be free,” he says, simply. Then he says it again. Only louder. Then once more.
Yet it is Bush, Cheney & Company — backed by a swarm of smiling oil lobbyists and a chorus of compliant Congress critters — who are dead set against actually setting us free. Think about it. The United States has been, is now, and will be into the foreseeable future shackled to foreign oil — specifically to the crude-pumping rigs of the oiligarchies of OPEC, including the pampered, despotic royal family that rules Saudi Arabia with an iron fist . . . and with the constant protection of 13,000 U.S. troops based there to slap down any uprisings by the common folk (see The Lowdown, Nov. 2001).
Bush the Elder put us into the Gulf War to preserve this totalitarian kingdom, thereby keeping its oil spigots open for ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and the rest. Daddy George said it was a war to “preserve our way of life,” but all he really did was tighten the shackles that keep our country dependent on their crude.
America spends $56 billion a year to buy Arabian oil and another $25 billion a year on our military and CIA efforts to keep the Arabian oil monarchies on their corrupt thrones — and this was before adding in the tab for George W.’s present crusade. As Newsday columnist Robert Reno put it, we are “the yo-yo at the end of a string held by OPEC.”
Are you as tired as I am of being yanked up and down by oil barons abroad and here at home? If we really want freedom, we need to cut that string and sever our nation’s pathetic dependence on OPEC’s — or anyone’s — oil.
Kris Kristofferson’s song “Me and Bobbie McGee” has a refrain that goes, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Well, what if we lost the need to put the blood of our troops and billions of our taxpayer dollars into oil politics? What if we lost the need to enrage the impoverished people of the world by constantly putting our military behind the despots that repress them? What if we lost the need to have our household consumers, farmers, truck drivers, and overall economy jacked around periodically by price spikes caused by the whims of oil manipulators? What if we lost the need to surrender our sovereignty to the handful of oil profiteers who not only control the flow of energy to our families, but also control the flow of energy policy through Washington?
What that would spell is freedom, for we’d no longer have anything to lose from the monarchs, oiligarchs, globalizers and greedheads. ... [ read more ]
Help us out by throwing some cash in the bucket:
"For too long," wailed the senator in a heart-tugging cry for justice, "some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process."
