I was driving around before and as anyone who has Sirius radio can tell you, there is never a shortage of commentators to listen to! Being a fan of Bill O’Reilly, I was lucky enough to flip over to FOX News Radio to hear him go off on a tangent about gas prices (which, I think, we all know suck right now). He kept stressing that listeners go and read his latest column in an obvious plug for his website, but also because he thought that he had something important to say there.

So I went over and read it and he makes some greats points that I want to comment on.

First, he talks about “predatory capitalism” in conjunction with the futures markets. I thought that this was very important to comment on because it is too often that I am sitting in my graduate classes and a neosoc (extreme leftist liberal who is really a socialist) gets up on his or her soapbox and degrades capitalism because “it is a system where the poor inherently get left behind.” No it’s not, stupid. It’s a system that - when left completely unchecked by the government - can cause catastrophic collusion like we are seeing with the oil industry. And how does this happen? Through a ridiculous “futures” market that makes one group of people rich and one group of people poor. THAT is what sucks about capitalism - it can easily be turned into a game where those who financial know-how and a higher level of education completely dominate those who are stuck in a societal rut without any chance of success.

But good Lord you don’t degrade the entire capitalist system because it has run amock in the United States! And this isn’t any type of support for the Democratic Party, since they would be the traditional party to enforce stricter regulations against super gigantic corporations. No, in fact, this is a call to all politicians to stop the bullshit. Do you really need the extra whatever thousands of dollars in under the table money to vote in favor of big oil’s next move? I mean get serious here for a minute - both sides of the aisle (and any member of any other political party)…

How can you allow, as a government, a futures market that innately allows for the cost of gasoline to rise simply on speculation? Yes, I know that the entire stock market is based on speculation, but the entire stock market is not a commodity that 99% of the United States population requires on a daily basis! Any discussion about, “This is a free market,” and “The market will correct itself,” is bullshit because the oil companies own all of the politicians in this country - right or left wing.

Oh no? We’ve had a mixture of Republican and Democratic Presidential Administrations and Congressional control over the last few decades. Why is it that neither party was able to pass anything like they did in Brazil? Where they have absolutely no reliance on any other country in the world with respect to oil? They set standards for production and those standards were passed. Why can this not happen in America? And I don’t want to hear that Republicans blocked it when Democrats were in control or vice-versa. I think it’s time that everyone in this country put their political affiliations aside and look at the big picture here…

We are the world’s bitch when it comes to oil!

The President said it right during his State of the Union: “America is addicted to oil.” Yes, we are - there’s no question about it. But hey, this President was addicted to lots of bad shit in his day and chances are that a lot of the people reading this either know someone or have been themselves addicted to something in their lives. How do you deal with addiction? You get on a program to hopefully break that addiction. Where’s the 12-Step Program for breaking our addiction to oil? Where’s the 6-Ways to an Oil free life?

I’ll tell you one thing right now, it’s not through this ethanol bullshit that they’re trying to push on us. That whole thing is a sham from the start. They might as well say, “Yeah, come away from the big prices of big, foreign oil and come into the big prices of big, domestic ethanol.” Green technology - that’s a real first step. There should be a dramatic increase in the amount of funding put towards green technology and new forms of non-petroleum-based transportation units. It only makes sense, right? Why are we addicted to oil? Because every car, truck, or engine in the United States runs off of the crap, that’s why.

We need a real first step - who will be the one to offer it? At this point, it looks like neither the Republicans or the Democrats are willing to do what it really takes - break the back of the corruption that has led to the grossly inflated oil prices that we’re dealing with today.

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