I'm at work, so I have to keep this short. But I wanted to make a point regarding what, in my view, is a persistent liberal gaffe when it comes to the Big Oil debate.
Everybody saw today's story on Exxon's slammin' new profits. I got an email from a liberal colleague asserting we should be angry about it. Another liberal colleague replied that we should all just shut up unless we were willing to boycott the purchase of gasoline, period.
More on noble idiocy, after the flip.
Pardon my French, but how the fuck is a working-class family (which describes most of us) supposed to survive without buying gasoline?
Like it or not, energy is a staple of civilization, no different from water or food. The lion's share of people cannot get by without it, period. We cannot boycot it, period. We have every right to complain about it, period. Everytime a liberal cries out to boycott gasoline, somewhere there is a conservative pig laughing all the way to the bank.
Government is supposed to protect the People from egregious actions of corporations. But in the Bush society, it's the other fucking way around: the government protects corporations from and at the expense of the People! And then we're told it's a moral value!
W gave Big Oil the biggest tax credit in its history, ostensibly in order to develop renewable energy sources. For the love of God, is it any wonder that we have no renewable energy but Big Oil has record profits? What absolute and utter lunacy. Was Big Oil ever going to use the tax credit to develop a new market that would dismantle the existing cash cow? This is a rhetorical question.
W is a fanatic supply-side idiot. And the only thing trickling down from Big Oil is the lint from its pockets, which has been forced out by all that cash.
So by all means, tell the working-class parents of two, who can barely afford their rent, to buy that hybrid they can't afford. By all means, ask that mother to walk thirty miles back and forth to work. Idiocy, though noble, is still idiocy. And it doesn't solve any problems.
Until the People vote these bloated, evil crooks out of office, the People deserve to suffer at the pump for putting them there in the first place.
End rant.