I learned recently that my father had printed out one of these posts, and my grandmother had read it, and remarked, “Someone’s trying to be funny.” When she found out it was me, and that I frequently try to be funny here on my blog, she simply replied, “Blogs are ruining the world.”

Ruining the world! It’s nice to know that my grandmother believes I’m involved in something as important as ruining the world, really warms my heart, but I can’t take credit for it. I wasn’t involved in creating violent video games, movies with ratings of “R” or better, comic books, Howard Stern, pulps, jazz, country, or rock and roll. I didn’t replace live musicians with 78’s, vaudevillians with movies and television, or telegraph messengers with telephones. I haven’t modernized or downsized or offshored anyone’s manufacturing job. I haven’t sold anyone a tranch of anyone else’s shitty mortgage, nor have I sold anything resembling an insurance bet on anyone’s tranches of other people’s shitty mortgages. I didn’t replace human-scaled towns and cities with unwalkable automobile slums, and I sure as fuck didn’t fill these streets with luxury automobiles the size of train cars, complete with cybernetic navigation and personal multimedia systems to absorb all the surplus cognition their drivers have left over from buying these asinine metal mammoths and paying almost no attention to actually piloting them.

But perhaps that’s not the part of the world she’s talking about. Perhaps she’s referring to the world of opinion journalism, a Broderian utopia in which respected public figures like Michael Gerson can take to the pages of the serious, tempered, grown-up pages of the Washington Post and opine…

American conservatism — intellectually ascendant during three decades in which relatively low taxes and a stable money supply produced the greatest accumulation of national wealth in history — is now staring into an abyss.

…without some anonymous scoundrel from a steel town responding…

Low fuel costs, improved communication technology, and the political disintegration of a competing economic sphere allowed companies to shift production overseas. Cheaper labor combined with inexpensive transport made it more profitable to build shit there even if the main consumer market remained in America. With the end of an effective labor movement and the decline of productive industry, real wages stagnated, but financial institutions, ever more central to the so-called service economy, made it increasingly easy to obtain credit. The “engine” of the American economy became the consumption of commodities produced cheaply overseas and sold domestically. The financial institutions playing the credit game conceived of a series of increasingly elaborate hoaxes to make what was at root the provision of seemingly limitless IOUs to individuals and businesses regardless of collateral assets or ability to repay seem like a profitable business model. The only major area of non-military domestic production that remained viable and vibrant was the construction of bullshit, half-assed houses in which Jenn-Aire 8-burner ranges and Sub-Zero side-by-sides gave the nouveau riche sheen to 6,000 sq. ft. houses with 4″ interior walls and brick on the street-façade only. Successive governments, declaring home-ownership a sort of human right, not to mention patriotic duty, along with their colluders in the Fed, made monetary policy to encourage easy lending and financial institutions folded that in right along with consumer credit to drive a go-go economy of trade-up houses, credit-card purchases, and new cars every 18 months. The Ponzi-themed fantasy-game of infinitely rising home prices made everyone feel richer than they really were. The inevitable point at which the money due would become unrealizable seemed . . . evitable. The stocks of the shell-game players kept rising, buoyed by the titanic confidence of those who believed that cycles and bubbles had been beaten. The foreign nations who sold us greater and greater quantities of oil and produced greater and greater quantities of shit for our domestic markets bought our currency and financed our consumption. The greatest, Babelian tower of horseshit phoney-baloney non-wealth ever in the history of everything anywhere amen hallelujah inshallah was constructed over thirty years in an orgy of bland consumptive excess that would impress in a Satanic sort of way were it not so monumentally crass, asinine, soul-vacating, and chintzy. We were not even good at being gaudy, as the above-mentioned mass-produced mansion and its matching driveway Hummers suggests.

I realize, of course, that it’s just a matter of perception. When I look at the discursive world she thinks is being ruined, from where I’m standing it’s a crispy smoldering lump without much in it worth saving. I’ll consider it substantially closer to unfucked when IOZ has a bi-weekly column in the Washington Post, while Gerson checks his mailbox, fingers crossed, hoping he’ll find a check from Pajamas Media.

Also in my unfucked world: Joe Scarborough is arrested, but it doesn’t make the news, because who the fuck is Joe Scarborough? In my grandmother’s unfucked world, by contrast, people don’t say “fuck” on the Internet, or anywhere else. You can understand how we’d be pretty far apart on the most effective route to media Nirvana.

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.