Texas Hold 'Em Up

(originally published April, 2007 in The Burro magazine)

For the last few years, the craze has grown for the poker game ‘Texas Hold ‘em’. But an even bigger Texas frenzy has developed at the same time. That would be, of course, the explosion of profits by oil companies, at the expense of a captive American public.

Should we expect different? We did, after all, allow two Texas oil men to take over the White House. Should we be surprised when Exxon posts the largest quarterly profits of any corporation ever-- topping $10 billion in profit every quarter in 2006? Should we be surprised when gas prices near $3 a gallon?

Like any good poker game, when you have the big pile of chips, you push the bets up until the other guy quits. But most Americans can’t walk away from the table in the game of gas price gouging. Repression of electric car technology by American car companies and the big oil companies have left us with no real market choices when it comes to automobiles that don’t use gasoline.

I am a huge fan of electric cars. My current favorite is online HERE . But having someone build an all-electric two seat sports car (that costs over $100,000) does most of America no good whatsoever. Since GM took the EV-1 off the market, deciding to play nice with oil companies, and take California to court for the audacity of pushing electric car technology for the masses, there have been almost no options for the average consumer.

Now, rumors are piling up about missing oil reserves in Iraq. And the company filling the gas tanks of our troops in Iraq-- Dick Cheney’s Halliburton-- has just decided they should move their corporate headquarters to Dubai.

Coincidence? Or did they learn from Enron, and decide that a few thousand miles between them and federal investigators would make paper shredding a whole lot easier?

Could it be possible that stolen Iriaqi oil is being billed to our government by Halliburton? Who knows? But certainly we can say this-- the American public is not only being taken for a ride on gas prices, it’s the most expensive ride our nation has ever seen. It is the duty of lawmakers everywhere to stop this corporate orgy of greed and social irresponsibility.