The International Writers Magazine: Comment

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SOLUTIONS FOR OPEC PRICE GOUGING • James Campion I think this space has made perfectly clear its low expectations for our Boy President. Many liberals think him evil and mad. He isn’t. Those on the right celebrate his tough frankness. Not exactly. The best and worst you can rate George W. Bush against most modern presidents is limited. I have used mediocre to describe his tenure. I still think it’s apt, no matter how many of the poor he lets die.

We’re at war, ostensibly for oil, or freedom, or security, or some such shit.

Granted, the second term thing carries with it a predictable kind of doom, like the ragged end of his incoherent sentences, but for the most part, Captain Shoo-In is unlucky, unprepared, and a shitty leader. Establishing this, there is one thing we did not count on - this pathetic inability to manage these OPEC cretins.

Regardless of what you think of Dick Chaney or Donald Rumsfeld or the Halliburton gang or whomever you'd like to name for crimes against humanity or heroic duty against all odds, none of us thought these rich bastards would allow OPEC to sink the world economy, and with it, the Republican Party. And this Republican congress; what a bunch of pussies. Where is the GOP iron fist? Where is the big corporate greed for the good of the US dollar? Where are the strong words and calming aphorisms from the fiscally sound party?

I’d be willing to put up with these outlandish civil rights abuses, land rapes, the gay bashing and religious fanaticism if somebody would make even a veiled attempt at ceasing this oil price gouging. Maybe we can exhume Regan and prop him up on the world stage like the old days. We’ll get Springsteen to play "Born In The USA" and then complain its been co-opted by kill freaks.
I don’t want to hear about alternative sources of energy either. This is nonsense. That dog didn’t have wings during the Carter Gas Crisis, and it can barely trot now. I wonder how many Arabs we have to kill to get this under two bucks a gallon. Is it wrong to call for an assassination in a column? Hearst did it. McKinley, I think. Then someone shot the poor bastard and we were all giddy about the power of the pen. But I wouldn’t write such nonsense. Not now. Hearst was a maniac. His wife was a dummy and his best newsmen spent weekends in opium dens. He had his reasons, and I have mine.

We’re at war, ostensibly for oil, or freedom, or security, or some such shit. I don’t know. I do know that three bucks a gallon for gasoline is stupid, especially with oil barons running things. And if they have the future of their party’s majority standing in congress at heart, they will end this madness.

So in lieu of murder I call for our president to use the WTO to file a business grievance with OPEC for obvious racketeering and overt mockery of trade laws. He likes to bully easy targets like the UN. I say to hell with that atavistic slough. We need the tough guy act to hit these fuel criminals where it hurts. Failing that, someone should be shot. Shake up the cartel a little, a kind of Mafia thing.

Did I just write that? Doesn’t matter. It will never make press. Someone dying for gasoline? It’s absurd. It would have to top four dollars before bodies started turning up, right? Who knows? We’re through the looking glass now, people. Black is white and up is down. Wait until the winter comes. You’re going to see some bitching then. Killing OPEC chairmen will be the tamest suggestion.

One more reasonable solution is to start attacking EXXON and MOBILE like the Clintons went after the tobacco crowd. Start with full investigations, audits and sanctions; an all-out smear campaign complete with Texas fat cats chewing on fresh placenta. Paint those in charge as spawns of Satan and the ruination of American youth. We can get one of these evangelist nuts that think Adam and Eve played with dinosaurs to start weeping on television. Maybe some soccer moms with signs. No hippies, though. People hate hippies.

But let’s start with legal matters: the complaint. It’s easy. Six of the seven OPEC cartels are part of the WTO. Threaten them with pulling our engineers. No American engineers, no oil production. No oil production, no printing money. Balls in a vice. Prices lower. The citizens of the richest nation are happy and willing to send more of their kids to die in the desert to secure Iraqi religious fanatics for civil war.

Of course this won’t happen. Forget about the 10% kickback for the oil barons, what about this insane spike in gas tax? It’s an incremental raise every time these prices jump. I know the federal government needs the money. We have a huge deficit and a dipshit in the White House. But enough is enough.
© James Campion September 18th 2005
realitycheck@jamescampion.com
(Spare a thought for the UK where gas is $8 dollars an imperial gallon) Ed Sept 19th

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