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1. The United States creates dollars, which costs them essentially nothing.

2. Over time, US military power compelled the biggest oil producers (starting with Saudi Arabia in 1974) to trade exclusively in dollars.

3. When a company needs oil, it needs dollars to buy it. You can obtain dollars in a number of ways: you can take a loan or you can sell shoes to the US or teacups to Europe. Notice that the factory has to ship actual shoes to the US or to third markets in order to obtain, basically, a bookkeeping entry that took the US microseconds to create.

4. The oil company receives the shoe factory's dollars in exchange for oil. It invests these dollars into US treasury bonds or securities, which is really the only sensible thing they can do --cash deprecates in value over time, and there are virtually no other risk-free places to park your billions of dollars worth of oil earnings.

5. The US puts part of the investment it received into military use, so that it can keep anyone who would dare to detach from this dollar hegemony in check. The rest goes to enrich the US. Return to step 1.

Note that this mechanism is essentially an obfuscated tax on the rest of the world. An Iranian shoe factory has to obtain dollars if it wants to buy oil, and the oil company is incentivized to store its dollars in the US treasury. This means that part of the value that foreign capitalists would otherwise pocket actually ends up in the United States.

To obtain a million dollars, the US government pushes a button; to obtain the same million a Bangladeshi factory has to sew 500 000 T-shirts.

Because the oil bill comes in dollars and the only deep, liquid, politically safe asset is a US Treasury bond, value flows to Wall Street.

In other words: The US creates money, manufactures a need for everyone to hold some of that money, and then incentivizes them to return that money to the US.

The petrodollar was only ever the beginning. Many things are gated behind the dollar: Shipping, aviation, SWIFT transactions, etc. Everyone needs dollars; if you can't get any you're going to struggle in the global capitalist economy. This is why the US gets to create seemingly endless dollars and have them still hold value, it's why the US can bend anyone reliant on the dollar to their will via sanctions; the dollar itself acts as a weapon. Of course, the status quo is maintained at gunpoint, and the dollar's value is ultimately backed by US military might. The United States exports death.

Because of all of this, the US has an enormous material incentive to keep oil flowing, to keep its military spending high, and to topple any and all projects that would endanger this system. To stop the flow of unequal exchange, to stop the coercive taxation over the rest of the world, would be to destabilize the US empire. Anyone who would provide an alternative must necessarily be seen as an adversary.

Want to nationalize your oil? Want to deal in another currency? Are you another military superpower? No? Too bad, here's one million drone strikes and a new *democratic* government for you.

Middle East residents: the USA military is a bunch of fascists that pillages the entire global south for a neocolonialist and religiously fanatical project

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

I distinctly remember the conversations we had where we decided to explicitly write into team's by-laws that transfeminine people were allowed to play on our team if they chose to do so. I remember working with our Captain, President, and VP to plan ahead for what we would do if a transfem joined our team and faced backlash, either internally or externally and how to protect her. I encouraged my transfem friends to join our team (although only one was slightly sporty and she leaned more towards something less full-contact because of her disabilities).

I also remember having conversations around allowing trans men on our team because the men's club team WOULD NOT let them join and we really just wanted to get as many underrepresented people exposed to rugby as possible.

But that was the whole point, the small group that had been cultivated at my university hated the segregated, hierarchical system placed on us. We wanted everyone, reguardless of gender to be able to participate in the thing that we loved and felt like made us so much stronger.

And thats why I am appalled how in 2026, almost 10 years later, so many people (cough cough queer tme and particularly cis women) into women's sports seem to have completely lost the plot when trans women start to be involved. I thought this stuff was basic feminism. I thought this was entry level stuff. But instead you let your transmisogyny regress you into something so vile that you forgot what you were even fighting for in the first place.

You forgot that all of this started by "women" being "too weak" to compete against "men" effectively and the counter argument that people's gender has nothing to do with their propensity for a specific sport. And now your head has gone so far up your own ass that you are peaking out the other side screaming that "poor weak biological girls can never compete against big biological men" and beg to keep your sports segregated.

Take one second to listen to the experiences of the trans women around you and the impact this has on them. Why should you get access to something that they are completely barred from purely for being transfeminine? You shouldn't.

there’s lesbians covered in mud. there’s a mascot that’s 80% awesome and 20% problematic. there’s Chappell Roan over the loudspeakers. there’s legends of women’s athletics throwing the first pitch and little children watching the future unfold from the stands. there’s Springfield, Illinois. there’s misogynistic weather. there’s people in the comments section on YouTube actively explaining the rules to newbies who are interested in the sport for the first time because it exists for them too now. there’s some rough times in the outfield. there’s stars from banana ball and little league and the olympics. there’s insane comebacks in the final inning. there’s commentators breathlessly anticipating a future full of equal access to development programs and athletic specialists. there’s a lot of wind.