"Oil: The High Cost of Low Price," or the world according to the film Syriana.

“Corruption keeps us safe and warm … corruption is why we win.”

On Sunday evening, the Confidential family attended a Baxter Avenue Cinemas screening of “Oil: The High Cost of Low Price,” otherwise known to movie goers nationwide as “Syriana,” yet another highly recommended film with George Clooney’s name attached to it.

See: Drop everything you're doing and go see “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

If you’ve seen the “Syriana” trailer, you know that the fast-paced and thought-provoking thriller features a large and talented cast, including Clooney, who produces the film along with Steven Soderbergh. It is directed and written by Stephen Gaghan of the “Traffic” award-winning screenplay fame.

Clooney and Soderbergh (who directed “Traffic”) generally are deflecting all due acclaim for “Syriana” to Gaghan, who like Clooney is a Kentuckian bearing little resemblance to Mitch McConnell. Gaghan's efforts are indeed worthy of high praise, both from polemical and filmmaking standpoints.

In this brief excerpt from an interview at http://www.cinematical.com/, Gaghan discusses a quote that he insists has been mistakenly attributed to him by Soderbergh, to the effect that “oil is the world’s crack addiction.”

… ‘Oil is crack?’ Who said that? Oh. I was mis-quoted. Well, what I was talking about really was the dealer-user paradigm; and what I mean by that is not some fancy phrase, because I’d had experience around drug dealers during my voluminous 19-year research for Traffic ...

... and I’d noticed some times when you could be in somebody’s house, and it could be a totally genteel type of drug dealer, or it could be a more gangster-y drug dealer, but whatever – there was often something similar about them, which is they have children, and the children are staring at violent television, cartoons or some shit, and they’re eating sugar-coated breakfast cereal and they look malnourished, there’s a handgun on the table – there’s always a handgun on the table, like on a coffee table or a table, and it’s so unsettling, and the TV’s going and you’re looking at the handgun and the children are over there and you want to say, 'I’ve got this great parenting book by Mary Hartsell and I just want to give it to you, because I think you could use some advice on parenting. …' But you don’t say that – because that would be breaking an unwritten code. And the unwritten code is the guy has something you need, and you really need it, and you’re not going to fucking bum him out.

… In America, in the West, we have this producer-consumer nation paradigm, and it works like this: 50 years of sort of a bi-lateral, multi-lateral maintenance of the status quo in the Middle East, which involved turning a bad eye to some really bad parenting. Whether it was a repressive regime, extermination of the Kurds, Saudi Arabia with women shrouded, walking 10 feet behind the men, etcetera, etcetera. But we weren’t going to say anything. Why? Because the producer nation, the dealer, has the shit we need – they got the good shit, and we don’t want to knock over the apple cart. To mix the metaphor. So that’s what I was thinking about, and I think it’s really apt. ...

Read the rest here.

We try to keep these considerations simple, and accordingly, Syriana follows the late autumnal Wal-Mart documentary film and previously digested books like “Fast Food Nation” and David Kessler's tobacco expose in the inter-related sense that they all demand that we look into the mirror, irrespective of discomfort, and consider the actual cost that goes into the final price of facets of life otherwise taken for granted at a misleading face value.

When it comes to calculating costs, everything’s intimately connected.

What do deregulated and dangerous slaughterhouses, now back in vogue a century after being exposed by Upton Sinclair, have to do with the price of the hamburgers at Rally's?

What does the calculated exploitation of a hostage local labor force have to do with the price of a sweater at Wal-Mart?

What do geopolitical strong-arm tactics that we claim to abhor – and periodically overthrow dictators for committing without our permission – have to do with the continued availability of petroleum from the Muslim world?

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On December 19, a letter by Edwin A. Hurt of Clarksville was published in the Courier-Journal. Apparently unsettled by recent grassroots campaigns against Wal-Mart, this frequent, plaintive voice from the right-field bleachers sought to provide readers with an economics lesson, writing:

A few weeks ago, I went shopping for some new jeans. The first store I visited had the jeans I wanted. Price? $21.99 per pair. So I decided to try Wal-Mart. There I found the identical jeans. Price? $14.97 per pair. Yes, I bought my jeans at Wal-Mart. In my budget-saving $14 is a good thing.

If people were less ignorant about economics, the hue and cry over Wal-Mart would quickly subside. Our price-coordinated economy rewards efficiency and punishes inefficiency. It should be obvious that it is more efficient to deliver 10,000 pairs of jeans to Wal-Mart than it is to deliver 1,000 pairs to 10 separate stores.

Thomas Sowell quotes the classic definition of economics as stated by British economist Lionel Robbins: "Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources, which have alternative uses." From this definition, it should be obvious that the scarce resources being used to deliver to Wal-Mart is a more efficient alternative use. Read Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell.

To paraphrase the Reagan-era Doonesbury, exactly how do you make sense of such wishful credulity as “rewards efficiency, punishes inefficiency” without resorting to hallucinogenic drugs?

All the more reason, then, for the Confidential household to laugh out loud at the regime-friendly theories of free-market economists like Sowell, who tells us with a straight face that “price coordination” governs the distribution of “scarce resources” that might otherwise be used for “different purposes,” all of which is well and good if applied to the elusive level playing field that most Americans cling to believing exists in spite of voluminous evidence to the contrary, thus enabling us to avoid the terrifying cognitive dissonance lurking behind the door of our collective anxiety closet.

Actually, it’s quite fine with me that we recognize capitalism for the stage-managed, fixed phenomenon that it really is – if, and only if, we agree to strip it of the naïve mythology that so clouds the rosy view of its predominantly unthinking adherents, effectively blinding them to the myriad ways that Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch and the U.S. government conspire to jury rig the “freedom” that we persist in believing is part and parcel of the economic mechanism.

Not coincidentally, it is the very same economic mechanism that best explains the reality of our involvement in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia, and as depicted in “Syriana,” it’s an ultimately constraint-free mechanism that has far more in common with crack addiction than most holiday mall rats, compliant churchgoers and Republican precinct committeemen care to fathom.