Dear Friends, Patriots and Warriors of Truth:

What are we running short on? What are we running out of?

Is the world actually short of petroleum, yet? No, not yet, but as there is a finite amount of it in the planet, this natural resource will eventually "run out." Gasoline prices are high because the political leaders of the U.S. and Great Britain have deliberately allowed the oil industry giants to merge, to cut down their employment base, and to recoup those merger costs by raising the price of gasoline both at the wholesale level and at the pumps that they control.

One of the lesser-noticed actions of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton era was to complete enforcement of rules which shut down hundreds of small gasoline stations, nearly all of them owned by Mom & Pop distributors or small chains that had enough capital to resist corporate buy-outs. What the oil giants could not purchase, they had the Clintonista EPA kill off. It is true that some of the older stations had leaky oil tanks, and these are a terrific hazard. But the policies of the Bush-Clinton-Bush era have been consistent: subsidize the giants while starving the independents into submission or termination and death. That is the Rockefeller credo of one hundred years ago and is remains operative today.

Are we running out of new metals? The argument is made that we are running out of copper and zinc and so on, because it is getting harder to mine those ores and because refining (smelting of metals), is getting more expensive. But the fact is, that nearly all of the metal ever mined in the history of this world is still in use. That which isn't in use can be located, like finding the wreck of a Japanese or German battleship on the floor of the ocean. We may be getting short on "new" metal but there is plenty of old metal which can be reclaimed, resmelted, reused by foundries and factories. We are not running out of metals.

Are we running out of food? The answer to that is, no. We live in a world where edible food goes to waste every day because the systems which we use to distribute that food are functionally limited. People go hungry because the farmers in their area cannot produce enough, and because they do not have cash enough to buy canned foods from other parts of the world; and, because it is impracticable to ship fresh food from New Zealand (where it is in abundance), to parts of Africa where it is needed.

Are we running out of medicine? No. There are more people in the world, today, engaged in the production, testing, and delivery of medicines than ever in recorded human history. Yet, those who go without medicine do so because they lack the cash to pay for the medicines which the capitalist economies have created and the socialist economies have let go to waste. So there is a shortage of cash, not a shortage of medicine.

Are we running short on doctors and nurses? The anwers to that question are -- yes, we are -- but only temporarily. Again, the solution to that problem is a political one: find the cash to raise wages for nurses and young women will abandon Wall Street and the fading Dot Com sector and go back to nursing schools. Find the political will to set doctors free of their HMO slavery and more physicians will return to practice and more young men and women will seek out careers in medicine.

What we are running short of, "in short," is political will power and political persuasion based on principle. What we are most desperately short of is -- political idealism. That is always rare and never more rare than at the beginning of this new century, this new millenium, this new era.