Reply #45: You assume -- wrongly -- the laws of supply and demand still work. [View All]

[newswolf56]

They don't. These fuel prices aren't functions of supply and demand. Like everything else that's being done to us -- downsizing, outsourcing, looting of pensions, forcible wage reductions, forcible give-backs, destruction of the socioeconomic safety net and soaring prices (not to mention the fact the U.S. has by far the worst -- and most steadily worsening -- health care, education and public transport in the industrial world) -- all this is about the concentration of wealth, not just in terms of skyrocketing executive pay and the highest profits in human history, but the concentration of political power to protect that wealth: the methodical subversion of American liberty and its replacement with theocratic fascism.

All of this is connected: it is, quite simply, the ruling class making certain it will weather the coming storms of environmental apocalypse (global warming) and post-Peak Oil socioeconomic collapse.

And because that is precisely what it is, the ONLY way we can make sense of it is by viewing it through the historical lens of class-struggle: hence the greater-than-ever relevance of Marx, who by capitalism's response to the environmental and natural-resource crises is proven to have been absolutely right after all.

Though Marx is only half the solution. (The other half is to be found in the principles of ecofeminism.)

Even so, it is far too late. The sorts of rail systems you envision will NEVER be built; the ruling class will simply not allow its money to be so spent, and in any case the ever-upward price of real estate -- the one true yardstick of the deepening worthlessness of the dollar -- has already reached the point that land acquisition for rail systems has become impossible. And while children can learn to ride motorcycles, adults cannot; one is either a biker by the time one is a teenager or one takes up motorcycling as as adult and becomes a very dead biker soon afterward: the United States has the highest incidence in the world of bicyclists and motorcyclists wantonly killed by automobile drivers.

Bottom line, I think the time will come -- and very soon, in a matter of months not years -- when we will nostalgically consider $3 per gallon gasoline as having been inexpensive. These soaring fuel prices will monkeywrench every economy save those of the Islamic oil theocracies, but the only nation they will totally destroy is the United States -- precisely because the U.S., a nation run exclusively by, for and of the greedy, will do absolutely nothing, not now, not ever again, to protect its peoples from the unprecedented looming hardships.

The American Dream and the American Experiment are both dead, murdered by capitalism and never to be resurrected.

We are entering -- or more accurately resuming -- the Dark Age that began with the Edict of Milan 1,693 years ago, and the greatest darkness ever -- a global collapse of truly unprecedented magnitude -- is fast encroaching. The only question is whether socialism will survive the forthcoming frenzy of invasions and coups that U.S. capitalists will launch in their attempt to seize or dominate all the world's resources. If socialism survives, humanity may yet again have another chance to fulfill its formerly bright potential even in the post-apocalyptic climate of eternal scarcity; if not, the Dark Age will last forever -- that is, until humanity itself becomes extinct.

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Edit: typo.