Joe Bageant, the Sage of Winchester, is in unusually (even for him) acidic form today. Long, but good stuff. Samples:

Then there are Obama’s noble efforts to fight terrorism by beefing up troop “deployment” in Afghanistan. Deployment may be construed to mean an American style armed gangbang, in which everybody piles on some wretched flea bitten hamlets for all they are worth, with periodic breaks for pizza and video games.

Now if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, compared to NATO country forces there, you’ll find them in a nice even line along what could easily be mistaken for an oil pipeline route. One that taps into the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and, by the purest coincidence, just happens to bypass nearby Russia and Iran. But we all know that “It’s about fighting terrorism over there so we won’t have to fight it here!” That still plays in Peoria, so we’re sticking with it…

As I remember, it was a Mexican diplomat who once told me that graft, theft and bribery are socialized in his and other Latin American countries — democratically distributed throughout much of society. But in America, he said, this sort of criminal activity is legislatively institutionalized. Only the elites are allowed to practice usury, theft, insurance blackmail and other forms of non-violent looting (violent looting being reserved for oil bearing Middle Eastern countries).