Pillaging Ain’t What it Used to Be.
For three days in New York, I walked, took taxis, hopped on the subway, and bussed it to all my destinations. It was so convenient that I didn’t even think about it until I returned to Los Angeles, and had to fill up my 24 gallon gas guzzling SUV, which cost me well over $100 to keep on the road.
Which makes it a good time to be a New Yorker, and a bad time to be an Angelino. Because New Yorkers don’t have to drive. Their public transportation system allows them the luxury of being disconnected from the oil crisis. Where as in Los Angeles, the second largest city in the country we can’t transport a person from one end to the other in under 3 hours because the folks in Beverly Hills with their $10 million estates don’t want a train running through their yard.
I’m sure this is the point where an over obsessed eco-warrior whose mother chained herself to a gas pump and father was responsible for dumping red paint on Ga Ga Gabor’s mink coat will tell me that I shouldn’t be driving an SUV. I should be hugging trees and carpooling to work in Dicaprio’s prius.
But guess what? I don’t like the prius or coca-cola drinking polar bears. I like my SUV. I like knowing that when I drive, I can run a prius off the road. In fact, in a head to head combat, I will take down just about anything in my path. Which is important to me because in Los Angeles nobody knows how to drive.
Which means that I just want cheaper oil.
But of course, we’re in an oil crisis which makes absolutely no sense. It’s like saying that there’s a shortage of hot dogs at the Dodger’s game.
Everybody wants to point there fat little fingers at China and India because globalization combined with the influences of capitalism have created a thrid world middle class that’s sucking down the oil like chocolate milk through a crazy straw. But 2 billion people didn’t just hit the Communist lotto.
In the last 5 years, the price of oil has risen from $40 a barrel to a whopping $135 a barrel. And it’s not because bike riding rice farmers want to buy hummers.
The problem is that the dollar is shit. If it had just kept pace with the Euro we’d be paying $70 a barrel. But it didn’t. Because that’s what happens when you have trillions in debt, you borrow from other countries, and then use that money to fuel a war that adds no attainable economic benefit to your country. Because it’s not like the good old days where you could invade a country and then claim their resources, like we tried to do with the sugar fields in Cuba, Latin America, and the DR.
No we actually have to let Iraq keep their oil. Which means that unless you’re the manufacturer of big ugly weapons that can kill thousands of people at the flip of a switch, there’s really no money in war anymore. Which is a shame because I think we would have been pretty good at rape and pillaging.
