Mercifully, I have a short drive to just about anywhere I’m likely to go. My day job is minutes away, my mom lives across the street, my sisters the next street over… in fact, none of my immediate relatives live more than 15 or 20 miles away, and they all work within spitting distance of where I live. Both of my wife’s and my vehicles, while ancient, are four-cylinder sedans, only one of which we drive with any regularity. If we clock 5,000 miles in a year’s time, that’s a lot for us, so I’m filling the tank of my ’93 Accord probably once every two weeks. A year ago, that cost around $30; now it’s $40 or so – manageable, thus far. But these precipitous price increases on gasoline are killing most people I know (and most of those I don’t know), and there appears no end in sight. It would be bad enough if it just hit you at the gas pump, but it affects everything else as well. The food you buy, the employer you work for, the community you live in – every aspect of our lives, it seems, is built on the assumption of cheap and plentiful fuel. Take that away, and our economy starts to scream.

I often wonder how many of my fellow Americans connect this phenomenon to the fact that our nation is run by rogues and oil men, including an administration that spent its first six years encouraging and facilitating rampant consumption of gasoline. How many see the connection between the single-passenger Hummer in the lane next to them and the skyrocketing prices at the pump? Yes, there’s increased demand from developing countries like China and India, but for chrissake… look at the freaking vehicles we drive! People have been driving trucks as passenger cars in mass numbers for over a decade now, and we’re feeling the effects. Back in the mid eighties, after nearly ten years of emphasis on making fuel-efficient vehicles, there was a worldwide oil glut even in the thick of the Iran-Iraq war. Oil fell to about $12 a barrel because (wait for it) WE WERE USING LESS OF IT.

Today people use more fuel because we have been relentlessly encouraged to do so over the past twenty years. Not sure if anyone recalls, but there was tremendous resistance to improving fuel efficiency standards back in the late eighties and through the nineties, with horror stories about how U.S. auto manufacturers would lay off thousands of workers, etc. (an important talking point in Dan Quayle’s bizarro performance during the 1992 Vice Presidential debate). Of course, the auto manufacturers shed enormous numbers of workers anyway in the years that followed, even with fuel standards that allowed massive V-8 engines and SUV’s that look like passenger trains. Most states – including my own state, under Gov. George Pataki – allowed the speed limit to move up to 65, causing greater fuel consumption (55 mph was determined decades ago to be an optimum speed for fuel efficiency). And who can forget the current administration deploying Ari Fleischer and others to defend gas-guzzling as central to the American way of life? This is a failure of leadership, to be sure… but it is also enabled by the goofy choices we make.

Not sure who the next president will be (though the next creepy Veep could be Mitt Romney, for chrissake) or who will control the Congress, but whichever way it goes, it will take some real pressure from below to get this monster under control.

luv u,

jp

Israelis celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of statehood this week. The festivities drew our lame duck president like a moth to flame, so in a sense, the Israelis gave us a gift for their birthday, by taking custody of Mr. 28% for a few precious days. Dubya was able to find people who adore him there – principally a bunch of failed politicians who wouldn’t last a week in office were it not for our massive decades-long investment in the ongoing stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians. The press dutifully played Bush’s visit as an effort to move the “peace process” forward (even as he pushed for war with Iran), but any child can see that there is no chance for a meaningful settlement under the current conditions… namely the fact that Israeli politicians have built their careers on the occupation and American politicians have built theirs, in part, on supporting and underwriting it. It is a hideous and corrosive symbiosis that those folks smiling about, whatever the people in the streets of Tel Aviv may be celebrating.

Sixty years ago a historic wrong was committed against the Palestinians, some 750,000 of whom were driven from their homes and into squalid refugee camps likely intended to provide shelter for no more than a stretch of months. Many are still there, along with their progeny, waiting for the dream of Palestinian nationhood to become a reality – a diaspora of several million now for whom the only hope of deliverance lies within the 22% of historic Palestine comprised by the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It is a hope that has consistently been squelched by Israel and the United States, which have invested fully in the policy of stalemate hatched by the Nixon administration back in the early 1970s. The two-state solution most recently re-introduced by the Saudis has in fact been on the table since that time and before; it has been accepted in principle by Palestinians, many (if not most) Israelis, and the rest of the world. But Washington and Tel Aviv have continually blocked this option, masking their rejectionism with advocacy for a vaguely defined version of Palestinian sovereignty that allows Israel to continue building on its interconnected settlement blocks in the West Bank, retain its control of the Jordan Valley, and incorporate East Jerusalem into Israel – a Potemkin Village peace plan that merely validates the ever-expanding occupation.

The spectacle of Bush and Olmert congratulating one another on this historic failure is enough to make anyone nauseous, apart from the dwindling number of people in either country who support these men. For myself, I can only swallow hard and make a few simple observations on this anniversary. First, Israel is a nation as legitimate (and as illegitimate, founded on violence and dispossession like the U.S.) as any other and, as such, has the same rights and responsibilities as any other. Second, in the territories it occupies beyond the Green Line, it has no rights, only responsibilities, as Noam Chomsky and others have frequently pointed out. This is true of any foreign occupier, so it is true of Israel. Third, the practice of meting out collective punishment and dictating terms to an occupied people is intolerable and a very serious war crime by any reasonable standard of international law, as is the continuing practice of colonizing occupied territory, which Israel has pursued for 40 years, through good times and bad. That this has been allowed to continue unchecked is no cause for celebration, in my opinion.

Those who hope for a U.S. brokered solution will likely be disappointed – whatever our sentiments, we behave like a nation of sheep, led by jackals who gladly sacrifice thousands of lives for political gain. It seems the only hope lies with the Israelis themselves – that they take the initiative and tell their leaders to end this occupation before their nation gets a single year older.

luv u,

jp

We’re dropping bombs on a ghetto. That is the kind of triumphant mission the Iraq war has devolved into – using high-tech air-delivered munitions on people who live on less than a dollar a day, hitting hospitals, killing children, all by accident (of course), though how you can drop bombs on a densely populated slum and not presume that you’re going to kill innocent people is beyond my understanding. (By the standards established at Nuremberg, this doesn’t hold any water as an excuse.) We’re also dropping bombs on Somalia, the other other war – the one in which we took the side of an invader, the repressive government of Ethiopia, and played a key role in bringing Somalia back to the brink of famine and chaos. The UN and NGOs are issuing warnings about hunger in that sorry object of our attentions. They are also putting out grim advisories on Gaza, where relief programs are being stymied by the siege Israel is imposing on that territory’s citizens, cutting off fuel supplies at a time of critical need… with our full support, of course.

This is looking more and more like a war on the poor. Much as Bush, McCain, and other madmen try to make this out as a titanic struggle against fanatics set on destroying our way of life, this global conflict always seems to target the destitute, the powerless, and the inconvenient. If it were just a matter of poor folks counting for nothing in the eyes of the powerful, that would be bad enough. But this is too consistent with past practice in conflicts dating back to European colonialism for this to be characterized as collateral injury. When the disenfranchised have leaders who do not toe the imperial line, it is the rank and file who pay the price. In Vietnam, we targeted peasants whose siblings, cousins, parents, neighbors, etc., belonged to the National Liberation Front. Same type of thing in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s – Drain the pond and the fish will die. Now it’s Iraq’s turn. Say what you want about Al Sadr, he’s more of an Iraqi nationalist than anyone in the U.S.-supported government. He wants foreign troops out – that’s why we hate him.

Rest assured, our president is thinking very, very deeply about the implications of this policy. (“We’re killing them,” he was recently heard to say.) He represents the worst case of senioritis I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. Far from “sprinting to the finish,” Bush is drifting through his last year, letting the dishes pile up in the kitchen sink, watching the lawn go to hell, and saving his dirty laundry for the trip home. Just bobbing along, not a care in the world. Let me tell you, friends – there’s going to be one hell of a party chez Bush when January 21 gets here… get your tickets now. As a warm-up, Dubya will continue to lob explosives at the neediest, building separation walls around Sadr City, and sending his legions into that sprawling slum that is home to 2.5 million – close to 10% of the total Iraqi population. No party for them.

And no party for us, either. Don’t think this will stop when Dubya lands in Crawford.

luv u,

jp