$0.13 from every dollar you spend on gas goes straight to Osama Bin Laden!

Think about that for a minute.

OK, for the record, I don't know how exactly much of our money gets to bin Laden. I made up the 13 cents because I can't find that specific analysis. Its a useful placeholder though, because there is no doubt whatsoever that a huge amount of the money we pay for oil ends up in the control of terrorists and also undemocratic dictators like Hugo Chavez and Putin's Cabal.

Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat & Crowded breaks this down for us. A few highlights:

• Saudi Arabia is set to earn around $200 billion dollars in oil money in 2008, and Saudi interests have tens of millions of those dollars building thousands of mosques and hiring teachers to spread the most extreme form of anti-western Islam in Pakistand and Afghanistan.
• Iran, which is OPEC's 2nd largest oil producer aggressively finances terrorist groups including the Lebanese group Hezbollah. When Hezbollah launched war against Israel in 2006, Iran gave Hezbollah $3 billion-plus for payouts to Lebanese citizens during and after the conflict.
  
• Almost 50% of foreign insurgents in Iraq have been recruited by extremist Saudis and sent to join the battle carrying thousands of dollars to help finance operations.

There is more and I hope you remember that your pennies and dollars that go in your gas tank don't stop there. They go into the accounts of faceless corporations who have no qualms at handing them over to dictators who are exploiting the land and people who could benefit from an economy that does more than produce oil. Those dictators do many bad things with what is now their money, including paying people to kill themselves to take a few or a lot of Americans with them. Women around the world are being stoned to death and worse because dictators with lots of money tend to stay in power and tend to become increasingly intolerant. Children are denied education in anything but extreme Islam, which ensures they will never be able to progress economically and will therefore always be vulnerable to militant recruiters.

So, every time we fill our gas tanks, we should acknowledge to ourselves that in that act we are in fact sending some of our money to our enemies. Maybe if we remember that every time, we'll start deciding fuel efficiency really does matter even when the price of gas is relatively low.



p.s. Let me note from the "People are Stupid" file that in December '08 as gas prices dropped, Americans bought more trucks and SUVs than cars for the first time since February. Do these people really think prices won't go up again?