Oil prices have climbed to $140 per barrel of late. Yet they leveled, the Iranian President pointed out, as Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, announced it will increase output to its highest rate in decades. This as consumption has slipped as well, and there are signs that a slowing US economy could lower prices. Could it be that some hedge funds and oil brokers are hoarding oil futures….

[Excerpts http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3420.shtml

After demurring for years, supposedly because it would “help Chavez”, the state of New Hampshire is now going to help itself to Chavez’s offer of free heating oil, which offer no “US oil company” has joined in making.

Besides Kucinich, I see no politician on the national scene worth paying any really serious attention to.

It is a curiosity that so many continue to pay such attention to the dramatis personae of the Bush administration, and its nefarious deeds, as well as to the Democrats, but do not join Kucinich in his call for immediate impeachment.

Paul Craig Roberts is one of the few honest brokers on the scene, left or right, and with the economic insight to grasp what is going on.

The USD is no longer the world reserve currency.

The Americans can threaten to bomb any sandbox, and deliver on it if the American people put up with it, but as the world knows, and most Americans seem not to, the fat lady is preparing to sing, and the song is a satire of the American national anthem.

The Israelis meanwhile are building up a reserve of Euros, as are “the nation’s top five oil companies”, as Fox News incongruously calls them in regard to Maxine Waters’ supposedly inadvertent summons to the “socialization” of oil.

Finally, the mainstream media, if one pays close attention, has begun a systematic campaign to persuade the morons who pay any mind to what it promulgates as “reality” that oil at $128 per barrel is just peachy, and at such a low premium that the American economy may survive at that price level.

Walk more, eat less–the jingle goes–”Americans” will be happier and healthier in the concentration camp Chertoff is building to protect them from–are you ready?–”terrorists”.

One may or may not see on Monday what a U.S. ultimatum to Iran is worth in the price of oil and the collapse of USD.

Lets hope that whatever “action” is “needed here by all of us” carries absolutely no resemblance to the jackassity just forged by Glenn Greenwald together with the blessing of the Barr Campaign called Accountability Now and Strange Bedfellows. Pretending to be in rebellion with fellow “progressives” and allied “libertarians” against those members of the Democratic Congress that have consistently sided with the Republicans on the war and on privacy questions, Greenwald’s out to get ‘em. Why he’s going to go right into their districts and run embarrasing ads, that’s what he’s going to do. But all of that outrage won’t have anything to do with the Obama candidacy. No sir, Obama, his FISA vote and his AIPAC grovelling are going to get a pass:

“Speaking only for myself, anyone devoted to these issues ought to prefer an Obama presidency to a McCain presidency, and those are the only two choices.”

It never seems to occur to Greenwald – or to Barr – that any meaningful accountability is an accountability of the system, not simply isolated aspects of it. And no, “those” aren’t “the only two choices”, there are Nader and Baldwin besides.

Greenwald just has to be one of the most formidable self-promoters since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene and that requires his being system through and through, of course. In this respect, Greenwald never disappoints. With all the kvetching he manages about perfidious Democrats, when it really counts, Greenwald has no more courage than they do.
Any meaningful remedial action must be action bent on dismantling the system, that and nothing less. I’ve seen enough Shirley Temple outrage of the Greenwald variety.