...why not privatize the whole commons for the fun and profit of every corporation with the money to spend on their own private governments and armed forces?

I'll tell you why not.

Because then we're right back where we started from prior to the French Enlightenment, circa 1750 or so. Think of your friendly neighborhood corporation as a castle and its board of directors as your feudal lords. Welcome to serfdom in the 21st century.

Progressives may waste alot of time trying to mollycoddle those who always seem to suffer, but conservatives kill innocent people and then leave progressives to clean up their filthy messes. Progressives try to take responsibility, conservatives obfuscate and then blame others. You can't drive forward into the future using your rear view mirror, unless you're always in reverse. But common sense has never stopped a conservative from being idiotic before, so why should it now?

It wasn't the corporations that gave us all of this wealth, it was the ingenuity of the American worker, period. And we did it in spite of corporate control and influence, not because of it.

Fascism doesn't work. The reason there was a third reich was because the first two failed. And the fourth reich will, after much human suffering and bloodshed, fall just as the three before it. The efficiencies of fascist dictatorships are quickly lost to a leadership class enamored by all the power they are given. The power rots them into common hoodlums who are then undone by their own depraved indifference to those who make their jobs possible.

Corporations have, for the past 150 years, operated under the assumption that human beings are little more than cattle, a fixed asset that declines in value as it ages. Human beings are capable of far more than corporations can tolerate or can possibly contain and so they must oppress the working class in order to retain their hegemony. Thank you, George Orwell.

Vast concentrations of wealth only benefit a leadership class that quickly grows too accustomed to using leverage to accomplish what should be done with one's bare hands. Hence we have inflation because the leadership class devised the Federal Reserve system to subvert the US Constitution and keep all of our pockets picked clean whenever they choose to do so.

Hence we have Prescott Bush saying of our 41st President (when he was a young man), "I don't know what I'm going to do with that stupid son of a b*tch." The projection of ineptitude of father to son only became worse in each successive generation. Two generations later we have a complete idiot running a 3 trillion dollar economy into the dirt simply because no one can make any money unless the demolition is controlled. And conservatives think progressives are cynical? Get a load of the Bush Family's conniving contrivances!

Hypocrite? I suck air in the 21st century; therefore, I compromise. And so do you, Stubby Johnson. If going from a 1 to 1 calorie exchange between petroleum and edible food to a 2000 to 1 ratio in less than 50 years is not about fatuous indignity, then what is? All brought to you courtesy of those free-thinking brainiacs populating the board rooms of some of our finer oil corporations.

The same ones who hung Ken Saro Wi Wo because they couldn't make their numbers unless the Ogoni people got used to eating their rice with a dollup of sweet crude. The same ones who insisted on importing Nazi expertise into the American Defense establishment lest they lose all of that valuable information gleened from years of scientifically torturing men, women and children.

The level of naivete required to believe that corporations are our friends, always willing and able to lend a neighborly hand with the groceries or the garage can not be found outside of the rabbit hole these idiots through our entire species down with their tales of the Easter Bunny and of dead men rising from the grave to save us from all those evil, nasty poor people.

Look, we still have people who see Elvis in shopping malls because he sang, "love me tender," so purdy.

If publically beating a human being half dead and then stringing him up so the birdies can feast on his eyeballs for days after he quits breathing doesn't put the rumors of resurrection to bed, nothing will.

There will always be those who claim Saddam was framed and that he really was a gentle soul, as far as psychotics go. Didn't he feed the birdies his bread while he was waiting to become the Iraqi version of the Times Square ball drop?

No one needs to see a deposed dictator dead before they can accept the salvation of sub-dollar a gallon of gas.

What we need to see are all of the war criminals from WWII to the present day brought to justice and somehow permanently quarantined. None of this falsifying of emigration documents, none of this schmaltzy, "ain't Hitler grand," baloney, simply lock up all the criminals who wouldn't allow Nazi Germany to die the death it was intended to die and we can all move forward.

WWII was CAUSED by WWI?

Read the real history of WWI. WWI was the FIRST invasion of Iraq, and that one was for oil, too. No offense to Archduke Ferdinand's family, but he really wasn't that popular a feller.

Get rid of all the huge concentrations of wealth and political power and bring the whole system back into balance.

The only thing that causes war are the people who can profit from it. The majority of the people never want war and have nothing against other people from other countries. The drumbeats are all ballyhoo. Peace is possible once and for all.(*)

(*)Except for hockey and the occasional soccer tournament.