Greg Palast provides his own version of Season's Greetings with a Tiny-Tim-size message of hope.

Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth:
A Quechua Christmas Carol
by Greg Palast
December 24th, 2007

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I know this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.

But maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is Good and Evil. Read more…

Because it's not like the rest of the world won't buy. Just imagine what would happen if enough OPEC members decided that it's not "profitable" enough to keep the supply to the US flowing, and instead focused on developing other markets instead:

UL. 12 11:41 A.M. ET Venezuela-owned Citgo Petroleum Corp. has decided to stop selling gasoline at some 1,800 stations in the United States following calls by President Hugo Chavez to nix contracts that benefit U.S. consumers more than Venezuelans.

Citgo, which is wholly owned by Venezuela's state oil company, currently has to purchase 130,000 barrels a day from other refining companies to meet its service contracts at 13,100 stations across the U.S.

The Houston-based company has decided to sell only the 750,000 barrels a day that it produces at three U.S. refineries in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Corpus Christi, Texas, and Lemont, Illinois, according to a statement late Tuesday.

That will mean that over the next year Citgo will withdraw completely from 10 states and stop supplying some stations in four additional states, Citgo spokesman Fernando Garay said Wednesday.
Chavez has long claimed that parts of Citgo's business produce losses for Venezuela and constitute a subsidy for the U.S. economy. Read more…

I honestly believe that most of Bush's Iranwar chatter is hot air. I just don't see the Chinese, to whom we owe something like a trillion dollars and without whom our entire economy would collapse, letting him get in the way of their oil. Exhibit A:

Twenty-two Arab nations have agreed to boost energy cooperation and increase trade with China at the end of a two-day meeting in Beijing.

Analysts see the meeting as part of Beijing's strategy of pushing for stability in the Middle East in order to secure future oil supplies.

Middle East nations already provide China with about 44 percent of its oil imports and with its economy showing no signs of slowing down, Beijing wants to get more oil from the region. For that to happen, China's leaders say, there first needs to be peace in the Middle East and the key to that is the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Read more…