Who’s got the power?

OK, so let’s see here … the Medicare bill of last year—written by the pharmaceutical industry. The energy bill—written by the oil giants. The bankruptcy bill—written by the credit-card industry. With this trend surfacing in Washington, no one should be surprised when the next crime bill is written by Senator Soprano and Representative Walnuts. (Al Franken made the following point recently: “So in the Medicare Bill, we’ve got Canadian retailers purchasing prescription drugs from American pharmaceutical companies, but American citizens can’t buy those drugs from Canadian retail outlets because—they’re unsafe?”)

Numbers worthy of note:

Net income for Exxon-Mobil Corporation for the first quarter of 2005: $7.86 billion.

Net income for Shell in the same span: $6.8 billion.

British Petroleum: $6.6 billion.

Chevron: $2.68 billion (must be some embezzling problem going on for Chevron to post such a paltry figure).

Clang those numbers around in your head the next time you’re mainlining your petrol fix at the local gasadone clinic.

Speaking of gas, when was the last time you stood back and pondered the sheer size of the catastrophe the internal combustion engine has wreaked upon our planet? We’ve been burning oil for the last hundred years, and in that time, in that pitifully dinky, itsy bitsy amount of time, us homo sapiens have been able to muster up a bona-fide threat to the very systems that operate the billions-of-years-old Gaian super cell. We’re setting the stage for the seventh mass extinction, a situation that could well suck a few billion of us down the quantum rabbit hole, and all because we, as a species, got seriously strung out on gasadone.

And why the hell is Bushco fartin’ around with North Korea? If we don’t solve this whole North Korean nuke thing diplomatically and fast, our diplomatic corps is to diplomacy what Fred Flintstone is to six-pack abs.

I mean, goddammit, Kim Jong Il’s country goes dark at night. There are no lights in North Korea. If you look at a night picture of Asia, you can’t help but notice that North Korea is a big black hole. And you’re telling me that we are being threatened by a cretinous little ding-dong whose country goes black at night?

Next to North Korea, Afghanistan looks like frickin’ Germany. So would we please stop dicking around and buy this guy off? How tough can that be? His country fades to black at night. He needs power plants. He needs light bulbs. Let’s freely submit to nuclear blackmail. Let’s admit it: You build a bomb and a delivery system for the bomb, you win. At that point, we pay up. Who gives a good goddamn about saving face with this little turd? So what? Let’s build him a state-of-the-art, $500 million power plant, give him 32 billion light bulbs and be done with him.