We can now see the first effects of the world energy crisis, as local grocery stores are creeping their prices of basic foods upward. The dollar stores also are not exactly dollar stores these days, and never will be again. There are two reasons for these price hikes.

First off, the Pentagon is doing this to us. We are throwing them money (and hence the military suppliers and contractors money, too) like it is going out of style. This is money we simply don’t have, and therefore it is coming from loans to our government, who then passes it off to those that have literally bought the government.

We know who eventually will get stuck with paying off these bad debts, too. It will be the working class and lower middle class of our country. And meanwhile, the rich suck at this gigantic welfare program (teat) with absolutely no shame, as they wave the American flag outside all their offices pretending to be the great patriots. The lower echelons of this fraud get 10% off!

Second cause of the rising prices is simply that we have hit the crisis of declining world oil supplies head on, and nobody has any solution to it beyond trying to corner the world supply (Thank you, Dick Cheney and Dumbo Dubya). But capturing control of world petroleum supply doesn’t exactly increase it, even if such a plot were to be ever successful. All in all, we still have yet to come up with an alternative to the mobility of oil transport, and we are dependent on oil, as we have been for all the later half of the industrial revolution.

Some think that the solution is turning back to coal. Some think it is turning to the deadly nuclear option. Some dream of sun, hydrogen fuel cells, and wind. Meanwhile, in the real world, it is still oil that fuels civilization, uh ‘civilization’ as we know it.

We currently have a rapacious economic system that expands constantly at nature’s expense. Nature is now fed up with it, even if our family and neighbors are not. Nature is run down, and will be run out if we continue this way.

Meanwhile, the prices have begun to inch up and we grow uncomfortable here at home. Elsewhere, things have grown more desperate from the start. Ahead, it is $4/ gallon prices this summer, and the sky will certainly be the limit. Oil barrel prices flown up from below $10 a barrel (not adjusted for inflation) as close back as the mid- ’80s some 22 years ago, to heading towards $120 a barrel right now. It is easy to see how our dollars are now being turned to pennies and we haven’t seen anything yet.

There are some horrible times for the world ahead as the world begins to run into shorter and shorter supply of oil. Meanwhile, let’s shop if we can, shall we not? It’s going to be much harder to do that soon.