by FPS Doug
Wed Jan 9th, 2008 at 11:41:40 AM EST
(From the notebooks of "Jacob Freeze")
Wouldn't it be pleasant to have a term for every entity that makes money from oil? "OPEC" leaves out Exxon, and "Big Oil" leaves out Iran. Maybe we should just call them "the lucky few"...
But actually most of the population of OPEC has no luck at all. The sweetest oil in the world comes from Nigeria, where the typical village is a shanty town built around a leak in a pipeline, and in spite of the record profits of GazProm, the most characteristic export of Russia and the rest of the old Soviet Union is whores. The latest international slang-word for whore is "Natasha," familiar to room service from London to Singapore: "Send us up a magnum of champagne and a couple of Natashas."
Now that Iran has moved up in the ranks of whore-exporters, it may be time to change the relevant acronym from OPEC to OWEC (the Organization of Whore Exporting Countries).
It would add a little reality to the next group photograph of all those oil ministers in their beautiful suits.
Update, 12 hours after posting:
Since this diary only attracted 3 comments on Daily Kos, all of them objecting to the word "whore," a much more serious issue for the "progressive" American bourgeoisie than the international traffic of brutalized and enslaved women, and I don't expect much more concern from bourgeois commenters in Europe, it's obviously up to the diarist to supply a few obvious questions about why oil-producing countries are such prolific suppliers of prostitutes for the foreign market. After all, there are much poorer countries than Iran and Russia.
The collapse of local economies is the main contributor to the flourishing export market in prostitution out of the oil-producing sheikdoms, dictatorships, and semi-dictatorships of OPEC. When the "lucky few" who control essentially all the money can afford beautiful pomodori imported by airmail from Italy, what business do they have with humble local tomatoes? Village economies collapse, excess female labor accumulates in the metropole, and predators appear.
In the oil-producing zones, these predators have access to sums of money that pitiful wannabee pimps in countries like Mongolia can't match, and however much the prostitutes of tomorrow may be brutalized in transit, their handlers still have to deliver them to London alive. You just can't smuggle a prostitute in the wheel-well of a car like a kilo of heroin. Oil money provides for all the little extra expenses involved in transporting human cargo, in one of the few instances where the "trickle-down" economics of Ronald Reagan and his friends actually operates as advertised.
