Mainstream journalists are beginning to notice that $3 per gallon gasoline now looks routine and that it won't be too long before we see $4 a gallon.
Hmmm. Which candidate for Texas Attorney General said a year and a half ago that the 2006 escalation in gasoline prices was not a temporary up-tick and that the price at the pump would keep going up?
For approximately 20 years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, gasoline prices were relatively stable.
But in the late 1990s, the biggest of the giant Big Oil companies began to merge and create even more gigantic companies in a series of mind-staggering mergers. Exxon and Mobil; Shell and Texaco; etc. The continual escalation in gasoline prices of the past 9-10 years began with the beginning of the Gigantic Oil mergers and corresponds with the series of mega-mergers that took place over a few years' time.
These mergers naturally decreased competition. That was their purpose. When competition decreases, robber baron monopoly power increases, and unless there is government price regulation, prices go up. It is a rule of economic power as old as time. Instead of a free market, we end up with a monopoly market and a robber baron economy. It wasn't an accident that we ended up here. It is the very reason for the mergers.
Today, under the Clintonite-Bushite economy (sorry folks, some may find it hard to admit, but Big Bill opened the floodgates to the runaway monopoly economy), our government institutions protect monopolies from the people instead of protecting the people from monopolies.
As long as our public institutions continue to protect the monopolization that is at the root of the robber baron economy, there will be no end in sight for we the people from ever-worsening Giganto-Oil price squeezes - not to mention from the similar depredations of the Big Insurance, Big Health Care, Big Pharmaceutical, Big Toll Road, Big Banking, and other Big Robber Barons. And as long as we the people stand back and fail to take control of our public institutions, then those institutions will continue to protect the robber baron economy.
Isn't it time we get serious about taking control?
The toughest brawl Bill Clinton was willing to wage (besides saving his own hide from impeachment) was against the Democratic base: for the corporate-backed NAFTA. Through the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Bill brought us far more media conglomeration than George W. He pardoned well-connected fugitive financier Marc Rich, while leaving Native American activist Leonard Peltier to rot in prison despite pleas from Amnesty International and others.Hillary’s contribution to Clinton I was her botched healthcare proposal, a corporate-originated “reform” that would have enshrined a half-dozen of the largest insurance companies at the center of the system, and was so convoluted it never came up for a vote.
What we’ve seen of Hillary Clinton in the Senate and on the campaign trail suggests that Clinton II would indeed be a sorry sequel. Today she’s winning the endorsement of Republican CEOs, after having had (Rupert) Murdoch host a benefit for her at the Fox News building in 2006. Just as Bill Clinton’s spine achieved a rare firmness while battling for NAFTA, we recently observed in Hillary a rare passion and firmness on a single issue: her YearlyKos defense of lobbyists, including those who “represent corporations that employ a lot of people.”
To no one's surprise in a world where top White House aides with any president eventually write a book about it, former Press Sectetary Scott McClellan will be coming out with his volume in April.
It's called "What Happened" and its publisher, Public Affairs, at its Web site carries this brief excerpt:
"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
"There was one problem. It was not true.
"I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the president himself."
While most people are lamenting the violence in Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan and Iraq, apparently it's not enough bloodshed for Vice President Dick Cheney.Last month in a caravan of 15 sport utility vehicles and an ambulance -- no jokes, please -- Cheney made his way to Clove Valley Rod & Gun Club, about 70 miles north of New York City, near Poughkeepsie, for a day of controlled bloodletting.
Cheney landed at Stewart Air Force Base and took off the following day for the upscale gun club at a cost of $32,000 for local law enforcement officials who guarded his hotel, protected his motorcade and diverted school buses. ...
Some hunters say shooting the pellet-ready tame animals, which offer no resistance, is like having sex with a blow-up doll.
But others say hunting itself is like sex with a blow up doll and that the 10 percent decline in hunters seen in the United States since the late '90s -- from 14 million to about 12.5 million -- coincides exactly with the debut of impotence drugs like Viagra.
Still for the veep to pursue his addiction to the "programmed massacre of scores of tame, pen-raised birds" despite all the "negative publicity it has generated for him" suggests a deep psychological disorder, writes Gerald Schiller in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Especially since criminologists have long recognized that premeditated, sadistic treatment of animals is a strong predictor of criminal and homicidal violence.
Sociopaths Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Speck were both big on animal cruelty. And they weren't running foreign policy.
