Reply #20: Today's skyrocketing oil prices are historically unique in that...

[newswolf56]

they are not associated with shortages. The conventional "wisdom" is that the prices are a fear-response by investors to the possibility that supply might be curtailed by finite resources ("Peak Oil") or international instability: Iraq, the probability of the U.S. starting a covert-action war to overthrow the Marxist government of Venezuela, the likelihood of war with Iran, etc.

However, an objective analysis would more rationally conclude that the prices are the result of oligarchic greed driven to extremes by the fearful need to prepare for the impending total collapse of the petroleum-based economy: the maximizing of profit to facilitate maximum concentration of the world's (finite) wealth. This is precisely the same process that set in when the Roman Empire collapsed. The oligarchy moved to preserve its power (and -- by the consolidation of wealth {at that time mostly land and precious metal} -- established the foundations of the manorial economy and feudal "nobility" that ruled Europe for the next thousand years).

I also believe the Bush Administrating is tolerating (and thereby tacitly encouraging) the price increases in the hope the fury of the ever-more-burdened U.S. worker can be (mis)directed against the nation's enemies -- whether external or internal. Theoretically this would distract America's attention from the ever-more-vital class-warfare issues associated with oil prices, outsourcing, the collapsing dollar, the worsening divide between the oligarchy and the rest of us, etc. (Which once again makes absolutely clear and therefore totally relevant the basic Marxist analysis: that class warfare is the ultimate determinant of history.)

Moreover the fact the Bush Administration has no plans to cope with the economic ruination inflicted by oil prices is the most alarming aspect of the entire situation. But the probable deeper significance of this infuriating display of plutocratic "let-them-eat-cake" indifference is generally overlooked, even by the administration's more articulate critics. (Despite their opposition to the administration, these critics are nevertheless bound to parrot the oligarchic lie that soaring oil prices are but a temporary inconvenience -- that ultimately the economy is healthy. To say otherwise -- that is, to report the truth -- would surely result in their immediate censorship.)

Despite the false reassurances of the propagandists, objective analysis makes it clear these oil-price hikes are in fact permanent. Which makes the Bush Administration's indifference not just another symptom of plutocratic haughtiness but rather an important proof of the kind of future that is being deliberately inflicted on the working families of America. In truth, Bush's indifference to the suffering inflicted by fuel prices appears identical to his indifference to the victims of outsourcing. As part of the oligarchy, Bush knows the vampire of global capitalism has begun its final attack on the American workforce -- that this time the attack will not stop until all that remains is a drained, shrunken, shriveled corpse, which will then be cast off and abandoned even as the plutocrats celebrate the revenge they have taken on America for the New Deal and its all-too-brief decades of collective prosperity.

In other words, Bush doesn't give a damn about the tomorrow of America's workers because he already knows what that dread tomorrow will look like: a new Third World, with a tiny but all-powerful and obscenely wealthy oligarchy tyrannizing a huge, terrified, utterly degraded, hopelessly impoverished (and therefore easily exploited) workforce, with the ever-present prospects of starvation, homelessness and untreated disease merely acting as whips, goads and cattle-prods to further oppress the few workers lucky enough (and submissive enough) to be granted jobs.

The question is not so much whether this horror can be averted -- I believe it is already far too late for that -- but whether a bold new American Dream paradigm will arise from the nightmare: not just the restoration of political liberty, but -- at long last -- the achievement of economic democracy as well.