Years ago, I used to play poker with friends every so often. This was well before the current Texas Hold’em craze, so we’d play Draw, Stud, Black Mariah, Low-Hole Chicago, Screw Your Neighbor, what have you. Everyone would buy in for $20, chips would ebb from one side of the table, flow the other way, mass in one pile then split into several, as chips are wont to do.

After an hour or two, we’d end up playing either Guts or Ace-Two-Three for the rest of the night. Both games involved playing for the pot, such that one winner takes the pot, one or more losers match it, and it could grow pretty fast. Inevitably, someone would go in (often with a great hand but not always) and lose a pot that would bust ‘em. If they didn’t have the cash to cover, the table had no choice but to let them write an IOU, otherwise the people that had lost real money wouldn’t have a chance to win it back. So, if the busted player didn’t win their IOU back, someone else would own their paper.

Now here’s the thing about IOU’s on our table. If you had to write one out, well, that was that, you were in the hole and we were okay with that. If you held someone’s IOU, you could sell it to someone else at the table for chips, and the bidding depended on whether or not people thought you were good for it. There were some fairly hilarious scenes where someone watched indignantly as their IOU’s were bought and sold for fifty cents or a quarter on the dollar. In some cases, someone might throw down with “I’ve got twenty Woody-bucks for whoever gets me a beer from the fridge.” Woody’s credit rating was less than stellar.

But under no circumstance was it okay to put someone else’s IOU into a pot in lieu of money. The pot would take your IOU if you were busted, but not until your last chip, dollar, and penny was gone, because everyone else was putting real money on the table. The rare attempts to pull such a stunt resulted in shouting and ridicule, with the offender sheepishly replacing the note with chips or cash.

So here we are, with several “too big too fail” companies, bloated with mountains of IOU’s, trying to force we-the-people to buy them with real money that we get from our I-get-up-every-goddam-day-and-go-to-work-for-a-living wages, at what they say is a fair price. For my family of four, they want us to put up somewhere between eight and fifteen thousand dollars to buy these IOU’s at full face value. And we’re going to have to do this because they took these fucking IOU’s from anyone and everyone, over and over again, and were calling them “chips” the whole fucking time.

These Diamond Jim motherfuckers, these blow-thirty-grand-on-coke-and-strippers Wall Street scum, want my real wages in exchange for their shitty IOU’s. The wages I earn by going to work five days out of seven, fifty weeks out of every fifty-two. The wages from which taxes are taken to keep our roads in repair, to fund my children’s education, to give some relief to folks in a jam and a boost to folks who need a hand getting on their feet. The wages that they all said couldn’t support the tax revenue that might give us single-payer health care, subsidize college tuitions, or build up a respectable transit infrastructure.

Well fuck that. Any bill that comes out of Congress seeking to rescue these dishonest, avaricious sociopathic sons of fucking bitches without getting an equity stake, and without giving me my pound of flesh, is unacceptable. Otherwise, I say we let the whole fucking thing collapse.

I like Bernie Sanders take on it. Too big to fail? Too big to exist.

Devilstower at DailyKos asks Robert Zubrin, author of Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil, about the importance of getting off foreign oil, and about the potential role of biofuels in kicking the habit.

Most of what I’ve heard about biofuels as a drop-in replacement for petroleum is pretty pessimistic, and I’m skeptical about the scalability of combustion-oriented solutions given the dire climate situation we’re facing. However, Mr. Zubrin does raise interesting points about how biofuel can dramatically change our foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East.

This year, the USA will import 5 billion barrels of oil. At $100/bbl that is $500 billion dollars taxed out of the US economy by the collection of foreign governments known as OPEC, some of whom are using it to promote terrorism directed against the United states and numerous other countries. When George Bush took office in 2001, we were paying $90 billion per year for foreign oil. So the Bush administration has effectively responded to 9-11 by increasing our financing of the enemy fivefold — and now we are actually paying OPEC more than we are paying our own defense department (the US DOD budget this year is about $435 billion).

Not only that, but this OPEC price rigging is driving our economy into a recession. Consider this: The Congress just passed a law to take $150 billion out of the treasury to pass out to taxpayers in the hope that they will spend it and thus stimulate the economy away from falling into a recession. However, even as Congress is raiding the treasury to try to put $150 billion into our pockets, OPEC is taking $500 billion out of our pockets. That is an economic de-stimulus package three times as big as the effort Congress is paying for.

The fact that we’re paying the Saudis more than our astronomical defense budget is stunning. But if our economy’s being slapped around a bit, the rest of the world is taking a vicious beating to keep up with OPEC’s prices.

People need to understand this: OPEC’s price rigging amounts to a huge extremely regressive tax on the entire world economy. Setting oil prices at $100/bbl is harmful to the advanced industrial countries, but it is brutally destructive to the third world. It is one thing to pay $100/bbl for oil when you live in a country where the average worker makes $45,000 per year. It is quite another when you make $1000 per year. Effectively, the high oil price amounts to taking hundreds of billions of dollars away from the world’s poorest people and giving it to the world’s richest people.

Think about this: In 2006, Saudi Arabia, with a population of 24 million people (15% of whom work) raked in $200 billion in foreign exchange from its oil exports. In the same year, Kenya, with a population of 36 million people (the majority of whom work) earned $2.5 billion in foreign exchange in exports of all categories combined. Distributed elsewhere, the $200 billion taken by the Saudis for their overpriced oil would double the foreign exchange of 80 countries comparable to Kenya.

Now, personally, I’m a bigger proponent of conservation and human-powered transportation, or at least more focused on those pieces of the puzzle. Neither is a panacea, but applied where easily applicable, I think both will be important components of an alternative energy strategy. While biodiesels, hybrids and plug-in electric vehicles will reduce emissions, I just don’t see how adding a giant, toxic battery to every 2-3 ton car on the road is going to clear up the many problems that car-oriented culture creates. We’ll still be left with this:

72 people by car, bus, and bike

Also, reading through the comments, there’s abundant skepticism to Zubrin’s assertions (ranging from polite disagreement, to personal attacks, to Ultimate Pissing Championship strikes and choke holds, ’cause that’s how DailyKos comments roll). Amidst the din, there are some serious objections worth weighing, and I’ll be curious to see if these are addressed in the book, as well as what Zubrin’s literary critics have to say. Maybe he’s wrong, or short-sighted, or maybe he’s even full of shit.

But no single solution is going to solve our energy problems, and it’s going to take time to bring oil alternatives online. In the very near term, I think that these two points, about OPEC’s toll on our economy, and that of the global economy, are valid and definitely worth consideration. Whether or not Mr. Zubrin’s particular argument for how to deal with these problems is viable, the goal’s still worth pursuing.