A friend of mine posted this youtube video of a hearing on facebook with the headline, “Halliburton charged with selling nuclear technology to Iran.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0giXvhEWMo&feature=share. The lead to the story: “Halliburton, the notorious U.S. energy company, sold key nuclear-reactor components to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005, using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent U.S. sanctions.”

My friend’s comment with the link was, “And we wonder why the US taxpayer has ‘had it’?? These clowns circumvent US law to do contracting with Iran – a terrorist state. VP Cheney draws a massive pension from these guys now. They shelter their profits on the Cayman Islands. Does anyone not think its time for a wholesale change in DC? Watch it – in disbelief.”

This example cites the core problem, that DC electoral politics is but a small, and probably non-material, part of the picture. These corporations are multinational (trans-national is probably a better expression) ruling forces that have imposed an “inverted totalitarianism” on the U.S. and other countries that makes use of nationalism but trumps electoral politics. Demonizing Obama or even Bush or Cheney is but a distraction, I’m starting to think. At some point we will have to face up to some difficult facts, such as: 1) to drive an SUV and then intellectualize about companies like Halliburton is just silly; and 2) to believe that in an inverted totalitarian state, where inverted means that economics trumps politics (vs. in classical totalitarianism where politics trumps economics), electoral politics will make a difference, is a naive point of view. An economic solution will be necessary, and a political solution will perhaps fail. I’m not sure if enough of us stops buying oil products like gasoline that that will provide a solution or not. I’m trying to think about what might make a difference, and doing more reading about it. And I’m trying not to assault my facebook friends too much with this stuff so I’ve started a blog and have started to do some writing about it there.