Provisional
Truth |
Essays | May 2006 Petro Victims Search For
Clues
As we are wont
to do in this great land of the victim class, we must find someone else
to blame for our problems and predicaments. And, of course, someone to
pay, someone with very deep pockets. As with our other
addictions, tobacco foremost, we have been quite clever in extracting
great sums of money from those evil corporations that hooked us on such
a wretched weed chock full of addictive nicotine. Money to pay for the
burden of medical care as chronic, addicted smokers lose their battle
with life, and money to compensate their relatives. Money to pay to
educate children and teens about the risks of smoking to prevent them
from being hooked in the future. Lots of money.
Now we
discover we also are addicted to oil. The president said so in January,
which means it's not our fault. Once again we are victims -
blameless, faultless victims. This time we are the victims of an evil,
greedy corporate conspiracy to sell us cheap petroleum products. So
cheap they induced the great automakers to succumb to the demands of the
addicted and become unwitting co-conspirators by developing and selling
gas-guzzling luxury cars, suburban utility vehicles and trucks (yeah,
it's a Hemi).
All along the
evil oil companies knew that if they sold us highly addictive cheap
gasoline, and if we bought increasingly energy-wasteful SUVs, trucks,
luxury cars, boats and recreational vehicles, they'd have us hooked. So
at great expense to the bottom lines of their corporations and to their
own personal stock-option fortunes, the executives of the evil oil
companies conspired to create a long-range plan in the mid-1980s to
drive down the cost of oil to almost nothing, and hold it low for half a
generation, knowing that fun-loving, amnesiac American consumers would
fall for the very trap that indeed it has become. (Not to worry, the
outgoing CEO of the world's largest evil oil company was recently
rewarded with a $400 million retirement package to make up for all those
“lean” years.)
The evil
oil-lords even went to great lengths and further expense to stack the
deck in Washington, getting oil-friendly and wealth-friendly politicians
in control of Congress in 1994, and, finally, putting another
oil-friendly man in the White House to insure that when the right time
came to set the hook, there would be no resistance.
And set the
hook they did. When that right time came, the oil-friendly president, in
gratitude to his benefactors, conveniently arranged for the pre-emptive
invasion of an oil-rich Middle East country of no real national security
significance. This, of course, has so unsettled the world that oil
prices have nearly tripled to $75 a barrel in a matter of a few years
and evil oil company profits accordingly have skyrocketed.
So we are
addicted and it's certainly not our fault. Evidence clearly shows that
the evil oil companies deliberately kept prices low to fuel our habit,
knowing we would drive ourselves both mad and to the brink of bankruptcy
when the rug was pulled.
Now it's time
to find someone to pay, someone with very deep pockets. Set up some
treatment programs, buy us all bicycles, mopeds and small cars that get
80 miles per gallon, teen driving abstinence courses, and such. But the
evil oil companies won't do this voluntarily. They still deny that there
is anything addictive about oil, so, like the evil tobacco companies,
we'll have to do it the old-fashioned way – sue 'em.
This could be
the mother of all class action lawsuits, unless the one the Baby Boomers
file in 10 or 20 years because there's no Social Security money left
becomes bigger. Are there enough lawyers in the house?
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