Some Truly Horrifying Shit

I’m on my way home from Pinedale, Wyoming, where my family has had a cabin for 10 years now. It used to be an awesome escape to a little town of 1,200 that just built their first movie theater less than 5 years ago. But recently a huge natural gas deposit was found near our house and over the next 10 years, they will drill more than 10,000 wells and completely ruin my neighborhood, the hunting, fishing and quaint little small town feeling. Actually, the small town feeling is already ruined. See, when they do these things, they do environmental impact studies and they tell everyone that despite the ugliness of the wells, it’s really not going to hurt the land that much, the animals will be fine, etc. But they don’t talk about the impact on people. When you build that many wells, you need a ton of manpower and equipment. And when you bring hundreds of men into a town without hundreds of single women, you’re absolutely asking for trouble. Crime is up, violent crime is up. You don’t recognize people in town. It’s downright scary going to what used to be friendly, neighborhood cowboy bars. May my town rest in peace.
But this wasn’t meant to be an indictment of the murder of small-town America, although we could certainly talk for day about that.
What struck me as interesting during my visit were all of the Halliburton vehicles driving around town. I guess what really caught me by surprise was my underestimation of the size of that company. They have vehicles and equipment being blown up in Iraq daily, they have contractors and employees being kidnapped, killed, beheaded and ambushed all the time and yet, on the other side of the world in Wyoming, it’s just business as usual.

And I’m trying to duplicate this conversation that I had with my dad about it. And I can understand that it’s just so hard to wrap your brain around after all that you’re taught in schools and you hear in the mainstream media and you try so hard to believe in the ideals of this country that this stuff couldn’t be true. But if you look at the facts on some of this stuff, it’s just shocking and overwhelming and completely frightening. It’s the feeling that no matter what we do, no matter how we vote or how we live, that we’re just completely outnumbered and basically, fucked. It’s a tough thing to realize that you really can’t do anything about it. It’s a horrible thing for me to say, but I honestly believe that what’s going on in this world is too big for us to stop. It’s out of our hands. Thanks for playing, please come again. The status quo is too entrenched, the wheels are already in motion.
The oil companies posted record breaking profits last year in the 10’s of billions of dollars. Exxon made $28 billion in profits alone. That’s not just revenue…that’s money they made above and beyond the massive expenses of that company. During that entire time, Americans were caught at the pumps complaining about gas prices. Now I’m a fan of the laws of economics, so I’m not saying that Exxon shouldn’t have priced competitively and made as much money as humanly possible, because that’s the idea behind business. You make as much as you can. But, what I am saying, is that when you look at those numbers, and you look at the people who stand to benefit from those numbers, it’s not a big surprise why we’re fighting where we are fighting and why we are willing to put up with death and destruction and human rights travesties and all the other byproducts of this war. Because the war is still profitable.
How many trucks does $28 billion in profits replace? How many pieces of equipment? How many lobbyists? How many government officials? How many soldiers and officers can be promised high-ranking security jobs? How many terrorist attacks can you afford? (And that includes 9-11, because it cost a few thousand lives, 4 planes and a few really nice pieces of real estate. Add that up and it was a fucking drop in the proverbial $28 billion dollar bucket. I hate to minimize that event in those terms, but that’s what they’re doing, so for the sake of this argument, I must as well.)
And most importantly, how many deaths does $28 billion in profits get you? And it may make you sick to the very core of your stomach to think of death in terms of cost, but that’s how those companies and this government is looking at it. It’s just the cost of doing business for them. It’s the reality of the situation that people are going to die. The companies (and we’ll go ahead and lump the government under the “company” umbrella from now on, because they are one.) will pay the families, express their pseudo-condolences, pretend on their faces that they’re actually upset and that something needs to be done, but in their minds, in their board rooms, in their corner offices, there is a chart, a cost-benefit analyses, a return-on-investment breakdown that puts a price on those lives and determines just how many they can lose before the profit dries up. And I don’t know if most of us even want to fathom that number. It’s high. If I had to guess, I’d say somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.
When I had this conversation and swished these things around in my brain for a while, the statement was made, “I have to believe that if there was a better way. If there was a renewable energy source, if there was a way to quench this thirst, a way to market new energies that would be cheaper, easier to use, better for our environment and would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and make us safer that we would do it.” And I can’t blame that person for making that statement. Because that thought is based in the ideals and the values that we’re all brought up with. We’ve read them in our textbooks, been told them by our parents, politicians and priests. We’ve bought into them, and none of us are at fault for wanting to believe that the people in power really are doing the best they possibly can to move America forward. But they’re not. Because there is no money in it.
And it’s too hard and scary and dangerous anyway to even think about doing it differently. There is very little doubt in my mind that the brilliant minds in this country have thought up and attempted to develop at least 50 different ways -- if not more -- to completely relieve our dependence on oil and I feel strongly that the oil companies, the power companies, the powers in this country didn’t hesitate a bit to buy that idea and bury it. Why wouldn’t they? The money is in the status quo. Always has been. For these companies, there is no benefit in them finding a new way to do it. You find me a company who has changed and adapted and grown into new technologies and new ways to do things; better, cleaner, healthier ways to do things and has stayed relevant over the last 50 years. It hasn’t happened. Sure, there have been plenty of companies in business that long, but they’re all still using the core ideas and philosophies of their original business. When someone finds something new and better, they don’t bring it up in an old company. They start (or buy) a new one. Google, Microsoft, Saturn, Gateway. All had a new idea, and did it themselves (and even now those companies are getting old and slow and they’re the ones buying the new ideas ie youtube). Research and development of new ideas takes forever, costs a lot and there’s no guarantee of any money in it. That’s a basic business tenet. So tell me what incentive Exxon, Shell, BP or Halliburton has to do it any different? None.
It’s absolutely easier and safer for them to maintain the status quo. Do you think the government is going to make them? They own the government, democrats and republicans alike. They own this war. They’re bloody fingerprints are all over it.
The only reason America is in Iraq is to maintain that status quo. Those companies and this government -- that they own and influence -- is only in that country because there is a monetary interest in being there. Their return on investment will be so massive when Iraq settles down. And if it costs billions of dollars in equipment and thousands of lives, fine. I guarantee you it’ll be worth it financially to them. Would they like it to be all settled now? Sure, but I’d like my Microsoft stock to go through the roof right now. Will it? No, but I’m in for the long haul because it’s worth it. The only difference between them and me is the scale of it.
And if you think for a second that what I’ve said about ROI being the only reason we’re there, answer me this. Why don’t we have a standing army of 100,000+ in Darfur? How about in Somalia? Ghana? The Ivory Coast? The Congo? Russia? Why aren’t we there? The same things that happened in Iraq are happening in those places. Actually most of those places are definitively worse. (The people of Iraq were probably in less danger of dying horrifically before we got there to be honest. But that’s another blog, for another time.) But the bottom line is that we’re not in those other places because there’s not enough money to be made there. In the business world, they would say that those places carry a negative cost-benefit analysis.
What I’ve said is not hard to understand, it’s not radical and it’s not all that revolutionary. It’s basic business. It’s free trade. It’s the basis for all that we accept. And that’s the truly scary part.