Reply #20: True -- but not the whole story [View All]

Palast is correct -- the Bush Administration is a creature of the oil industry and the entire history of that industry has been one long effort to control production levels to prevent price flattening gluts. For many decades in my home state of Texas, it was called "prorationing" and it was enforced by the Texas Railroad Commission. Fancy that -- government interference in the market to keep prices up. Since 1973, the oil industry and its whores in American politics have perpetrated the fraud that the OPEC cartel is some sort of evil aberration from the pristine beauty of a free market. Look at oil profits since the hoked up "boycott" supposedly triggered by the Yom Kippur War to see how OPEC became a global version of the Texas Railroad Commission.

But depressing oil output to raise prices is not the only way to make money off of this war.

The defense contractors obviously make money; this phenomenon has reached new and absurd lows under the Cheney/Halliburton system of boodle -- large parts of the war have been privatized. Then, you have "The Mouse That Roared" twist: in the words of Colin Powell, "You broke it, you bought it." In the Bush Era of geopolitics, once America invades and occupies a country, then we have to spend tens of billions of dollars more to undo the damage done by our shock and awe weaponry. This, in turn, sets up the bizarre situation in Iraq where bags of cash were literally tossed around from hand to hand until they disappeared without a bureaucratic trace.

Finally, the financial community gets a taste -- this entire war has been conducted on credit. The Russian Roulette genius of Cheney and Company has been to deal the Chinese into the war profits by borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from them to make them part owners of the whole shebang.

This is the most treasonous aspect of the whole Mafia program -- because the Chinese are no fools and they know that the USA will never be able to climb out of the debt hole that Bush has dug for us. Eventually, the Chinese will foreclose.


The "intellectuals" at PNAC who now staff this 21st Century globalized version of Tamany Hall are the junior partners in this Ten Figure Boondoggle -- ultimately silly eggheads who write the scripts for phony wars of conquest, drawing as much fire from the "left" as possible while selling the American People the pipe dream of infinite power.



Somebody recently posted an analysis of the Bush Administration that compared it to The Sopranos story line about David Scutino, the sporting goods store owner with the gambling habit who had to turn his store over to Tony and the boys. Soprano's doctrine of "maximum value" dictated that the real asset of the store was its credit, and Tony milked every last cent of it before forcing poor David to take bankruptcy. This was also a brief story line within Goodfellas as Paul Cicero became the partner of a poor sad sack restaurantuer who needed protection from Joe Pesci. In the end they burned the joint down and collected on the insurance to cap off the bust out.

This method of looting a business has been applied to countries before -- just never to America.