In the United States, life is now thoroughly governed by five corporate capitalist industrial complexes: the automotive-, medical-, military-, entertainment/mass media-, and processed food-industrial complexes.  The automotive-industrial complex is by far the least publicly debated and understood of these five profit centers/lifestyle shapers.

This is no accident: From the standpoint of our overclass, the automotive-industrial complex is the least dispensable.  Hence, it must also remain the least publicly discussed element of the system.  As our overlords know, the day cars cease to dominate life in the United States is the day capitalism here and everywhere will begin falling into its long-deserved grave.

Because of this reality, the investing class is now rushing to prepare its latest diversionary strategy.  The quasi-official ribbon-cutting speech for this effort was provided in January, when George W. Bush announced that "America is addicted to oil."  As the planners and sponsors of our politicians' thoughts and words know full well, the only reason "America is addicted to oil" is that corporate capitalists could never live the lifestyles to which they are accustomed without the continuing existence of autos-über-alles in America.  For these sponsors and politicians, the key is to do whatever it takes to to shield our criminally stupid and wasteful transportation system from public scrutiny.

Already well on its way to mesmerizing most environmentalists and other should-be opponents of autos-über-alles, our overclass is about to fully inundate us with the flood of "green fuels" propaganda.  By convincing ordinary Americans that hybrid engines, ethanol, and other "alternative" ways of powering cars offer any serious hope of making autos-über-alles sustainable, the powers-that-be are planning to continue pumping their automotive lifeblood.

If you doubt this, I invite you to examine this, the latest piece of PR from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers: www.discoveralternatives.org/.

Beneath this slick and frighteningly seductive propaganda lies the cold, hard truth: As the historical materialist scholar Richard Heinberg puts it, "The automobile is one of the most energy-intensive modes of transportation ever invented.  This is true not just because of its direct use of fuel . . . but [also because of] the energy embodied in the construction of so many individual units that require replacement every few years."

Of course, the built-in wastes Heinberg describes are, notwithstanding their severe threat to the continuance of human social progress, supreme capitalist virtues.  This reality is at the eye of the unprecedented socio-political hurricane bearing down on us.

Not coincidentally, M. King Hubbert, the geologist who correctly predicted the peaking of domestic U.S. oil production, described this coming storm back in 1969:

The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible . . . systems: 1) the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and 2) the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin.  The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise . . . of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance.  The second, an inheritance from the pre-scientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system.  Nevertheless, the monetary system, [which] has no constraints, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed.  [This control means] "a crisis in the evolution of human society . . . unique to both human and geologic history.  It has never happened before and it can't possibly happen again.  You can only use oil once.  You can only use metals once.  Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered."

As Hubbert knew, the "monetary system" is now within a stone's throw of proving itself to be literally unsustainable.  No "alternative fuel" will save autos-über-alles in America.  Hybrids are still massively wasteful.  Growing enough corn, switch-grass, or anything else to convert the whole US auto fleet from gas to alcohol would crowd out all other agriculture.  Hydrogen cells are merely newfangled batteries, not sources of new energy.  The transportation future, if we are to have one, lies not in cars, but in trains, bicycles, and human feet.

Unfortunately, as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his deservedly famous "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."  In present circumstances, this behavioral law means that, if we genuinely hope to decently survive growing eco-social storms over "oil," we must transcend the corporate capitalist proposal that buying a Prius or E85 is an adequate road ahead.  The problem is not fuel.  The problem is capitalism and its most indispensable commodity, the private automobile.