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control.

A democracy such as the United States should be interested in freeing itself from reliance on foreign and domestically controlled by foreign or multinational corporations fossil fuels for transportation power and should also seek to find a number of ways to support alternate means of lowest cost self-supported mass privately owned vehicle transportation systems. In Alaska the Governor just signed a bill to provide incentives for producers of a new natural gas line through Canada that would be subsidized by a half billion dollars of money of the people of Alaska-what kind of hair brained corporatism takes money from a state government, spends it in a foreign country to enrich multinational corporations with a little kickback in taxation to the dependent state bureaucracy? The answer is a corporatist tool government.

In Ali Alawi's 2006 book 'The Occupation of Iraq; Winning the War, Losing the Peace' interesting information on the corruption of Iraqi oil production and sales during the CPA (Constitutional Provisional Authority Era, during the time of the Interim Government and beyond are provided in a chapter on the Potemkin Government. The oil production and black market players continued over from the Saddamist era in large part and added new corrupt elements that even funded the growth of an insurgency in part. It's quite remarkable. It is a general American public error of understanding to believe that shifting a larger part of existing federal funds into public transportation would in some way create a better public transportation system.

In Iraq gasoline continued during the CPA to be sold to Iraq's at the unreal price of 1 cent per liter, while in neighboring countries stolen Iraqi gas could be sold for as much as $8400 a truckload at real market prices. Iraqis themselves might need to buy the rare fuel from black marketers at high prices, watered down by the liter from some kid with a liter or two on the sidewalk. With unnaturally deflated public transportation prices suppliers of the energy for that system will make a fortune selling energy to the public. Public transportation systems cannot perhaps become more efficient than the prevailing energy and transport technology of the era.

What a democracy can do is to determine what technologies it would like to adapt for development for the people generally that would simultaneously and intrinsically advance public transportation and energy savings, reduce the trade deficit and liberate citizens from reliance on global corporatist energy structures and their political control. In post 2003 war Iraq the centralization of electrical systems production continued and the people were subject to radical cut-offs. Saddam Hussein had formerly cut off power supplies to people unlike Bathist Government and insurgents could do the same. The concept of supplying Iraqis with independent solar and other thermal or wind independent personal electrical power back-up technologies that would reduce the harm caused by disruption of centralized state controlled power lines wasn't used (though I suggested it).

The government of the United States should become an actual democracy again in a number of ways and move away from the pathos of corporatism and socialism.

Learn more about this author, Gary C. Gibson.
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