VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: Most US citizens are just now beginning to grasp how completely all institutions of their state have passed into the hands of the corporate, kleptocratic elites. The commonwealth is destroyed by the activities of the banksters of Wall Street, the authors of the financial melt-down, plundering the public treasury, or other big corporations using the military to assure their ownership of the US oil beneath the sands of Iraq, or still others seeking the outlet to the sea for the oil and gas of formerly Soviet central Asia via Aghanistan's Helmand province and Pakistani and Iranian Baluchistan, and then the detestable insurance corporations assuming the power to compel the citizenry to gain even the most minimal access to medical care at exorbitant cost.

...and the U6 statistics, until Bill Clinton's regime the classic measure of unemployment, now hover near 18%.

The US population has had in the past few months a first rate lesson in civics. Until November of 2008 they had hope that some change in this dismal equation could be accomplished via the formal political process. This misplaced optimism is now gone.

The failure of the corporate state to attain legitimacy, in terms of popular support is now complete. I meet Democratic Party stalwarts every day who now apologize to me for their refusal to listen to my skepticism about Barack Obama and the rest of their misleaders.

Defectors from the International Energy Agency at the United Nations have spoken to the British Guardian newspaper revealing how the USA has used every means to prevent accurate reporting of oil production -- we are now at, or more probably, have passed peak oil production. A figure of 82 or 83 million barrels per day seems to be the limit, not the 102 mbd hitherto spoken of as possible.

This fact is of cardinal importance to the rational understanding of US policy. Our country is utterly dependent upon unlimited supplies of relatively cheap gasoline. Our population is dispersed and the private automobile is essential to personal existence. We say the US worker works to buy gasoline, and buys gasoline in order to work. This syllogism is now fatally compromised.

Consider the lessons of past wars: The invasion of Stalin's Russia by the Nazis in 1941 is incomprehensible rationally unless be look at the map and see that the Ploesti oil fields were until then vulnerable to a possible Soviet attack. And why did Hitler turn south and meet his great defeat at Stalingrad when he should have struck at the Soviet heartland around Moscow? The oil of the Caspian basin.

The USA can no more ignore the oil around Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo, or in the Orinoco region, than Germany could ignore the oil deposits of Romania, or of Batu. We here in the United States of America are even more dependent upon foreign sources of oil than was the German Reich ... and anyone who purports to study our polity without that understanding is not worth listening to.

President Hugo Chavez Frias of Venezuela is a former military man. He knows these facts better than most.

When he moves more of his troops into the border areas in the western part of his country (adjacent to the most valuable oil producing regions) this is not evidence of Venezuelan militarism but, rather, a natural and inevitable consequence of the deals the United States of America has made with narco-Colombia to establish military bases which (in our own budgetary documents) are designed for offensive operations throughout Latin America.

No responsible national leader can afford to ignore the implosion of US democracy; our transition to a corporate state.

Whether we like it or not the opening battles of World War III are raging from Central Asia to the Amazonian jungles.

From the imperial capital

Chris Herz
chris.herz@vheadline.com

http://www.vheadline.com/herz