Three months ago, I predicted airlines would feel the first pinch of peak oil. They’re pinched and passengers are screaming. My ears are full of complaints from friends who’ve been traveling in the past month. I’ve got to fly in 10 days; I’m not looking forward to it.

The price of oil is creeping toward 80 bucks a barrel, the price of air travel is rising to similar heights. Higher costs mean fewer people making opportunistic trips and the airlines are consolidating flights. If they once had four flights per day between two cities, they may now have two. If you’re on the second flight and you miss a connection, you’ll spend an extra night away from home. Maybe you can book a last-minute seat on another airline or route yourself through a third city and still get where you’re going tonight, but don’t count on it.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press ran an article Sunday on the effect of the price of oil on airlines. Martin Moylan wrote that fuel costs are now the highest single expense for airlines, higher than insurance, higher than labor costs and unlike the other two, no standard of performance or negotiation will bring the cost of fuel down.
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As this year turned, the People’s Republic of China was busy persecuting journalists and democracy activists with the assistance of American internet service providers like Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and Cisco. Spokespeople for the corporations pleaded that their companies need to “operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based.” At the time, I wrote, “The people in the Bush administration who would make a totalitarian nation of the U.S. are watching China, they’re watching the response of American companies to China and they’re watching the response – or non-response – of American citizens.”

Few people paid attention, another outrage – Iraq, Guantanamo, domestic spying – surfaced again and focus shifted. In its July fourth edition, the New York Times reported that Monday, Wang Yongqing, vice minister of the legislative affairs office of China’s State Council, announced that all media outlets – both domestic and foreign – are now forbidden from reporting on “sudden incidents” without permission. “Sudden incidents” includes outbreaks of disease, natural disasters ands social disturbances. “Sudden incidents” is as good a definition of “news” as any. Violators will be fined $12,500 per report.

“If a Chinese reporter goes to France or Britain, he also has to abide by your laws,” Mr. Wang said. “If you engage in reporting activity, you also have to obey these rules.” Sound familiar? Perhaps someone, or more than one someone, has been paying attention to the non-response.
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Sometimes I wonder if Jesus Christ knew what he was talking about. He once said, “The poor will be with you always,” and, yes, there are poor people everywhere and their lives become more desperate every month. But are they “with us”?

I’m in Washington, DC this week; poor people are everywhere, performing menial labor – the “jobs Americans won’t do.” Some of these poor are immigrants, illegal or otherwise, many were born in this country, many born in this city. There’s a building boom in the city; high-rising condominiums, nightclubs and new hotels. Low-income housing and small businesses that trade with poor folks are being pushed to the edges of the city, across the Anacostia River to the parts of town where middle class and rich folks rarely go, unless they’re lost.

Numbers generated by the government and private organizations tell us the gap between rich and poor grows wider every year and more people are pushed to the poor side of the ledger. So Jesus waight about the permanence of poverty, but with zoning laws, gated communities and valet parking we have become clever about making sure they are not “with us.” We have made the poor invisible, even as they wash our cars and haul away our garbage. Still poorer people than these make our clothes and grow our vegetables, but we’ve sequestered them thousands of miles away.
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Evidence continues to grow that U.S. marines murdered non-combatants in the Iraqi town of Haditha last November. It remains to be seen whether anything more than Abu Ghraib wrist slaps are dispensed and whether Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld continues to refuse to resign even as he racks another war crime.

The arc of the story is familiar. Marines initially said civilians were killed by an insurgent’s bomb; no investigation was made of that claim until TIME magazine published a different version of events in March. Since then, the Marine Corps has promised to compensate victims’ families. Stories are also spreading that marines offered the families money, but only on the condition that survivors endorse the marines’ original tale.

The military absolved itself of the deaths of 15 civilians killed in Ishaqi on March 15, although Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has called the army’s investigation a whitewash. An investigation continues into who killed a civilian in Hamdamiyah on April 26.
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