Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
It Was Oil, All Along
Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be... the bottom line. It is about oil.
Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, "... Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." He elaborated in an interview with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war."
Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. "... We had virtually no economic options with Iraq," he explained, "because the country floats on a sea of oil."
Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie There Will Be Blood. Half-mad, he exclaims, "There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet!" then adds, "No one can get at it except for me!"
No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except... guess who?
Here's a recent headline in The New York Times: "Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." Read on: "Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power."
There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts -- that's right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places.
Let's go back a few years to the 1990's, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That's when he told the oil industry that, "By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty-million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."
Fast forward to Cheney's first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates have been headed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO's and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old pal, now Vice President Cheney.
The meetings are secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq -- and a list of companies who wanted access to them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.
Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don't know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that's enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren't so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq -- the press mogul Rupert Murdoch -- once said that a successful war there would bring us $20 a barrel of oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?
At a congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who exactly twenty years ago alerted Congress and the world to the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that there's a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen, who the administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and nature in opposing efforts to deal with global warming.
Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded for life, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an "energy protection force," doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself. One thinks again of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. His lust for oil came at the price of his son and his soul.
82 Comments so far
Show AllCripes, that was a bad film review. "There Will be Blood" is an powerful movie that does a good job of grabbing the viewer's attention, suspending some disbelief; realistically, an examination of something far more complicated then the first emotional impulse it may evoke. Bill Gates is modern day sociopath, and hero to many especially when he was metaphorically cutting throats and shooting people.
Likewise, Iraq it isn't so simple at all. Oh yeah, a lot of Oil, but control is key.
"The meetings are secret, conducted under tight security"
This is the only line that needs be said. If the people can't read between that line, and take appropriate action, i.e. revolution, then they are lost puppies and probably deserve what they get.
Unfortunately, the Iraqis got what they didn't deserve. This is the big problem with Lost Puppydom.
Unfortunately, it´s not about oil. It´s about empire. That´s the beast. Oil is just the blood of the beast.
No real news here.
As usual, the voices in the know, the truly aware ones(people like Chomsky), are ignored by the ignorant many and months or years later the many come crawling to the realization that some of us had from the beginning.
Most of the mainstream media - newspapers, television (yes even PBS for you agine radicals who haven't smelled the coffee), radio (PBS included), and magazines wallow in the morass of ignorance or criminality and the public, with rings firmly placed in noses, are led around to even greater ignorance.
I have nothing but disdain for the mainstream media (read old and co-opted). Not only are they not very good at telling us what's really happening, they don't tell on purpose - that makes them complicit.
Yesterday I tried to listen to NPR's weekly roundup and PBS's Nightly News and couldn't stand it. I lasted about 10 minutes collectively before turning them off. I gave up on Washington Week long ago and I no longer read any newspaper. What does that say about our Fourth Estate - the great free press(?). We know that governments lie, now we can add that mainstream media also lies.
If one wishes to hear the truth just listen to those who are either being ignored or attacked by the MSM.
Such a revelation - the Iraq invasion and occupation were all about oil. Gee who would have guessed?
We see that Iraq was invaded for its oil with 911 providing the requisite justification. Empire is about dominance of material resources. Oil is currently the target prize, but next it'll be food, water, habitable real estate...until material resources are exhausted and the planet is no longer habitable. It's the concept of dominance itself that has to be transformed in order for life to be sustainable on earth. Cooperation is our salvation, and minds need to change expeditiously!
The first step that has to be taken in order to solve everything and find out everything that has been hidden is for Congress to impeach the President and many of his administration ... until that step is taken, all of this is just talk ... and it should never have come as a surprise since it has been all about oil since before WW2 ... blinded have we been .......................
now, very quickly something very serious must be done about the atmosphere of our planet ... the rest of it will fall into place .... perhaps Robert Fisk will finally reveal his solution for the problems in the "Middle East" ........
If you can be put to death for raping a child, what do you get when you rape a whole country? Why are Bush and Cheney still among the living? Justice? Where?
The dimshits that run/ruin our country were hoping to increase Iraq's oil production from 2.5 billion barrels to 6.5.(with the help of Exxon,BP, etc.) If that happened we'd be good oilwise/empire wise for another 30 -40 years.
But-surprise, surprise-Iraq oil production is still at 2.5 billion barrels and will be for quite a while with all the turmoil we created.
So, the best laid pipe dreams of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, assorted neo-cons are like the mythical Ozymandis--nothing, nada, gornicht...
OOPS,sorry for the mistake, we thought it was a war against terrorists.
Now that the mistake has been corrected, let's get on with the accountability for over 4000 Americans DEAD, thousands of Americans wounded, countless emotional problems and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and wounded and a country in ruins.
This occupation has left the economy of our nation in chaos.
As a senior, I have seen my retirement in jeopardy since my resources have decreased and the future is to short to repair, and I am not alone!
Where are the Democrats on white horses? Session after session of congress goes by and shit happens. Nothing is accomplished that will support bringing this nation to a recovery. Oh, they (House of Reps) named Post Offices after some local crook and streets and avenues after some long forgotten star GOLFER, but what else?
The drill outfits may want to drill but it is the oil companies and the banks that must back them.
Why would they invest in more drilling when they make a ton of money more by not doing anything.
When they start to build a new refinery in the west than you will know there might be more drilling.
The oil companies are aware that alternatives are the future and their bottom line is fast profit so they are doing what they say their shareholders demand, rising stock prices (while everything else sinks) and they don't ask the share holders about (While everything else sinks).
They also invest in the growing alternatives and the higher the barrel of oil the faster their investments in alternatives becomes profit...
Oil under LA, the Great Lakes, Montana and the Gulf but why would they drill it if the price rises faster by having a shortage?
Third world and growing industrial nations can always drill and produce oil cheaper just like everything else we buy from them.
If corporations must act in the interests of the public, It is a law nobody has passed yet.
It was oil all along? No oil is one of the main commodities, it is about the exploitation of all resources and cheap labor and don't expect business that wants to sell you anything to tell you the whole truth....
There Will Be Blood, oceans of it.
It was pointed out by Greg Palast, amongst others, that the entire idea isn't to provide oil, but to control it so the price won't drop and the profits will soar.
Saddam was our poster boy until he started playing with OPEC and put oil prices on a roller coaster. When he did that, he had to go.
The Ministry of Truth reports that Big Brother will lower the price of gasoline to $5.00 by September.
It's sad that the country's top journalists are just now figuring this out.
Should it take this long for any self-respecting journalist to connect the dots?
The reported so-called "proven oil reserves" of Iraq are 100 billion barrels. That number has been obtained by voodoo. It sounds like much but is not. Perhaps 30-40 billion barrels might be readily recoverable. To compete with Aramco, Iraq would have to produce some 10 million barrels per day or 3.5 billion barrels per year. Iraq's vaunted ocean of oil will be gone in 10-15 years if not earlier because Iraq's oil fields are old and tottering. The invasion of Iraq may well have been about oil but it may turn out to have been for much, much less oil than anticipated. I hope that the "four thieves" will lose a bundle. Would serve them right.
Oil futures speculators are laughing all the way to the bank while the rest of us scramble to figure out ways to get where we need to go without our cars. And we can thank this criminal administration that should have been removed long ago but for the fact that the Congress we elected to get us out of Iraq and to impeach the lot of them in the administration refuses to do either.
I am fed up to the teeth with the inaction in Washington. Why aren't we taking to the streets in massive numbers to demand action and to foment a new American Revolution? We want our jobs back, and this time, producing environmentally friendly items and clean, green renewable energy. We want manufacturing that can't be sent to China OR India and outsourced for cheaper labor. We want true, single payer universal health care. We want our Constitution back. We want a lot of things that no one is willing to help us with, so by God, we have to do it ourselves with our good old fashioned American know-how, grit and independence.
Don't wait for Washington to do anything for you. They have no motive to do so. It does not serve their interests and never will. So we have to take the bull by the horns and create the kind of country WE want. By ourselves. So what are we waiting for, anyway? Get your duffs off the sofa and go DO SOMETHING!!!!
rtdrury,
"The meetings are secret, conducted under tight security"
"This is the only line that needs be said. If the people can't read between that line, and take appropriate action, i.e. revolution, then they are lost puppies and probably deserve what they get."
Yes, that's true, but what about the rest of us who can read between the lines, but are ill-affected along with the "lost puppies" regardless of knowing better?
3 choices - align with the powers, be blissfully ignorant and obedient, or suffer your knowledge and wisdom in silence?
Or, a 4th choice... you think?
As an aside, the advocates of drilling for more oil in more places really don't get it! Control money and energy and you control the world. Or is the most humane idea to exploit people and resources to the absolute maximum threshold at every opportunity?
Why is it so hard for some folks to understand that harmony only exists when all is in balance?
No informed and rational person could possibly have thought otherwise from the outset. It's quite important, however, to refine the "about oil" statement just a little. It's about CONTROLLING petro-resources along with others that are sources of revenue and profits for the unfettered capitalist machine.
When most of us think "about oil", we tend to see it as an energy resource. To properly and fully understand the underlying motivations of the war-generating machine, however, it needs to be considered as a financial resource. From the latter perspective, your energy needs are inconsequential. You can freeze in the dark for all they care, so long as they control the profitabiltiy factors.
"Unfortunately, it´s not about oil. It´s about empire. That´s the beast. Oil is just the blood of the beast."
Ditto, within Empire also need to mention Iraq as threat to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc plus present Iraq as buffer state to Iran.
Re: language games.."it's not oil"--It strikes me that the American Defence Department are all using post-structuralist language where one signifier slides under another signifier in a chain of indefinite meanings. It's nice to see the American communication specialists have read their Derrida with their freedom fries.
The following resources as per my other post don't speak of the war on Iraq being for oil, per se, although the one by Max Fuller does conclude with a brief statement saying that there's most clearly this relationship. Besides for that singular reference in explicit terms, however, we can seriously, clearly, strongly SEE that what the following resources provide for MUCH information of critical-to-know order is NOT for the sake of Israel, nor for "joy rides" or exercises; but IMPERIALISM, and oil is going to be if not the sole, then definitely among the few most principal reasons. Israel profits, but the war is not for the sake of Israel, which really is only useful to the imperialist ruling elites of the West for profit and for strategic military ally due to Israel being the Middle East's superpower, the 5th or 6th most powerful military on Earth, and hellishly, extremely insane, psychopathic, ready to murder upon request of the imperialist elites of the West. They control Israel; NOT the other way around. And they need allies ready to be evil for "assistance", politically and militarily.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/28/9951/#comment-311274
There's a second redirection, I believe, but they're both CD pages, which load in a snap, and I have to disconnect ... fast, for others to have the phone line and not seek my decapitation.
Moyers and Winship really say nothing to prove their main thesis: i.e. that the war was about oil first and foremost. Actually, each neocon/chicken hawk in the Bush maladministration had his or her own top reason for invading Iraq. For Rove it was the prospect of ensuring a win in the 2004 election. For Bush, it was in order to please his "Higher Father". For Wolfowitz, it probably had something to do with ensuring Israel's security.And for Cheney, it was simply because it would be so much fun.
I've been saying since 1991 that US escapades in Iraq are all about the oil. That was completely transparent all along, but I guess the government and MSM narrative was much more palatable to many people.
The real issue in my mind is the formal dependence of modern civilization on oil. What immediately comes to mind is the addiction paradigm, and it is fairly easy to see how "withdrawl" effects are going to be very unpleasant for almost everybody. At this point, everyone living in any industrial or post-industrial nation is dependent, in myriad ways, on oil and what oil enables.
We had a choice in the late 1970s to deal with the reality that US oil had peaked. The choice was: a) restructure the country to minimize dependence on oil, or b) continue our dependence on oil by stealing it from other countries, using any means necessary. The election of Reagan pretty much sealed the deal. Americans wanted their oil fix, no questions asked about means.
Now, the powers that be have us over a barrel; like any drug dealer, it is in their best interests to keep us dependent and they are doing a damn good job of it.
What would be criminal on an individual level becomes justifiable, with a few handy lies, on the collective level of government action.
There is something disastrously wrong in the US national consciousness that the people:
1. believe the lies that the government has used for so long;
2. consider the government as an entity separate and very remote from themselves;
3. condone the use of "war" and the killing that follows as intelligent means, means which most would not employ themselves individually.
The thinking within the US on all sides is badly muddled. This "war" has created countless problems within the nation and created vast international distress. And until it is finished, and the nation of Iraq is back in the hands of the Iraqi people, the US will make no progress on any of the numerous domestic fronts which have already fallen into chaos and disrepair. The US government is as out of control as the nation of Iraq.
The US leadership—and I take great license in calling it that—is________________________. You can pick the description yourself.
A new approach, a new direction must emerge.
www.uspeacegovernment.org
One must realize that the Baathist government of Iraq did something else that put it on a collision course with the US empire: they started trading oil using euros instead of dollars.
When the major oil nations convert ot euros, the US empirial project is as good as dead.
Can you imagine the US soldiers living on the hundreds of foreign US bases paying for goods and services using almost valueless dollars?
How about building those miles-and-miles of walls in Baghdad or paying off those tens of thousands of Sunni members of "Awaking" Councils.
In other words, when the dollar stops functioning as the currency of world trade, we will go the way of the last Imperium: England.
After WWII, England was an economic and social wasteland.
It was only granted a few decades of continued life when the US elite bankrolled it and its elite got on board as the new empire's junior partner.
However, there is no new global imperial center in the wings ready to become the workshop, bank, shopkeeper, and policeman of world capitalism.
A nation only becomes the new hegemon after participating in a world war that massively destroys the economic capacity of the hegemon's nearest competitors. Of course, the hegemon's national center has to remain physically untouched by the global war.
In othe words, we won't be the future benefactors of an emerging hegemonic power. Thus we will take on all of the characteristics of post-WWI England and England of the immediate post-WWII period.
Russ: I think you actually stated three aspects of the same phenomenon. USans (not unlike everyone else) want to regard themselves as decent, kind and generally admirable folks, imparting to the rest of the world nothing but the generous beneficence of the "greatest democracy on earth". But they can only hold themselves in such high self-regard if they buy into their government's propaganda. When that proves impossible, they must sometimes distance themselves from their government's activities that don't fit their idealized picture and/or rationalize those activities (even including war) as 'necessary evils' in order to achieve the entirely laudable ends that do fit their self-image.
Lets see. The Iraq war is currently calculated to cost around one trillion dollars. Iraq produces 2.5 million barrels per day. So the expenditure has been $400,000 per barrel-day to "secure" the oil. At the current price of $140 that would buy all the oil for 7.8 years.
So who paid the expense for this stupid economic and strategic blunder? The US taxpayer and the poor sods who are dead or crippled for life on both sides.
Will all those who said so before the invasion raise their hands.....
This is a collective, "Told ya."
"Should it take this long for any self-respecting journalist to connect the dots?" - ruthru
On a personal level I'm sure the dots were connected long ago for the likes of Moyers. To me the basis of our current challenges lie in the fact we are not only separated from knowing our brothers and sisters as humans, but also ourselves.
In listening to The Power of Myth, a conversation between Moyers and Joseph Campbell, Moyers asks "...if a Journalist can know these things?" - this is a schizoid split that predominates American culture: defining oneself in terms of a job or career as opposed to a human being.
To me if we don't start recognizing ourselves as human, and also our enemies, then there really isn't much of a reason for this experiment and experience of Life on Earth to continue. Certainly I would have appreciated it if the authors wrote this article in the context of impeachment hearings, but to them I suppose this would have transgressed the boundaries of pure journalism.
Who has, where do you find, the human talent and insight to make such a leap?
Don't forget about companies like Bechtel and Haliburton. It wasn't about oil alone. The Iraq war has been a 5 year feeding frenzy for corporate predators.
For oil eh? Imagine that!
The only way to prevent the types of corruption we have faced for the past 28 years, starting with Raygun and continuing through Bu$h is to prosecute the shit out of anyone in office suspected, tried, and fuond guity. I know...nothing will happen, nothing will change. Ultimately, the only way for possible change is for those Muricans that continue to get their education from the likes of Charlie Gibson. not to even mention imbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and the rest of the fascist talking heads is to either get them to read alternative news sources on the net (and for crissakes not hannity.com) and TRY to informthem as friends that have being mislead.
I have to say though...afater listening to a lot of the yokels around here where I live (East Texas) I feel VERY depressed if not hopeless. Believe it or not, MOST of the people around here think Bu$h/Cheney have been excellent leaders for taking prayer out of public schools leaders and have no intention of voting for any commie liberal, ever, because they are the ones responsible. In fact, this letter writer ws outraged that a school in Louisiana was forced to remove the Gideon Bible from the list of school textbooks. They still think Iraq was responsible for 9/11, and still think our troops are over there to protect America. Probably 1/3 of the popuation here are losing jobs, if they already haven't, due to the closing of manufacturing business to move them "to more economically possible location" read China or India. Yet they will vote for more of the same right after patting BU$h on the back for doing such a good job at raping them, and call for more of the same. All McCain has to do is once again say he is for family valuues (I guess that means murder, lieing, fraud, trampling of the Constitution), you know....THOSE family values. Sheesh!!!
Robert Conklin says:
"Unfortunately, it´s not about oil. It´s about empire. That´s the beast. Oil is just the blood of the beast."
Yes - that's a very important distinction. America's obsession with "empire" has been the underlying cause of every war we have ever had - including the American Revolution. In fact, we never stopped being British. Robert Kagan did not title his book "Dangerous Nation" for nothing.
I just finished reading Chuck Hagel's (excuse for a book) "America, the Next Chapter", and all through the damn thing is the constant mantra of the United States as the "Leader of the World", "with the only the purest of intentions", "the most powerful nation - militarily and economically", "we have the best of everything", and "we ARE the BEST! -- When the historical truth is that we fuck up everything we do, and then have the gall to still blab to the world of our self annointed greatness. UGH!!!!!
And - do you know what? that mantra of America's greatness is believed and expounded by the vast majority of Americans. If you don't believe that, try denouncing American foreign policy in any group you choose.
Orrections...sorry, my bad. First, I know Bu$h/Cheney didn't take prayer out of public schools, merely encouraged putting it back. Rather, what I meant to say they blame the liberals for doing so.
Robert Conklin, "Unfortunately, it´s not about oil. It´s about empire. That´s the beast. Oil is just the blood of the beast."
I would like to add to that that it's about empire out of fear. The neocons are chickenhawks- they have always feared communist Russia annd China. Once they got in the drivers seat they had the grand idea of trying to further encircle this region, and to solidify what they saw as Reagon's achievement of breaking the communist's back. They figured Reagan won the cold war... and that they needed to KEEP WINNING the Cold War.
So they turned up the heat... invading countries like Afghanistan in Russia's backyard. They turned up the heat- building missile defense (a very 'fearful' decision on their part). They turned up the heat trying to expand NATO. And they seized the oil of Iraq because they fear empty gas tanks in their little toy army. In short, Capitalism fears Communism. That is the basic principle of this greed and fear which is manifesting itself in so many ugly ways.
Re: SallyUUKent
"I am fed up to the teeth with the inaction in Washington. Why aren't we taking to the streets in massive numbers to demand action and to foment a new American Revolution?"
I'm curious to know, looking at your moniker, if you're actually a current resident of this country, or whether you're writing from the UK (UKent). Because if you are a resident here and have been paying close attention to various developments that have been taking place over the past seven years, you should know that there are a number of very good reasons most Americans aren't "fomenting a new American Revolution".
First and foremost is those new facilities that have been going up all over the country, which have been specifically designed with people like you in mind: check out the (no-bid, of course) contracts awarded to KBR in '06 to build a series of "detention centers", i.e. concentration camps, in the event of such a thing as "revolution" happening in this country. Not only have the facilities been constructed, the constitution has been informally amended by a series of directives from the White House ostensibly to ensure "continuity of government", which establish the president's "right" to seize power over all three branches of government and impose martial law, if any one of several events occur, among them being another large-scale natural disaster such as Katrina, and terrorist attack. Laws have also been passed by Congress guaranteeing the right of all American citizes to be treated the same as the current residents of Guantanamo: to be treated as an "enemy combattant", and stripped of all constitutional rights (such as habeus corpus) formerly assumed to be the birth-right of every American.
What does one have to do to be deemed an "enemy combattant"? Criticize America's conduct of foreign wars, support organizations the government decrees sponsor or support terrorism (ignorance is no defense here) and other, similar offenses. Basically, you're an enemy combattant if the government says you are. Anyone considered guilty of such conduct(not in court, and not by trial)may have all their assets seized, without warning, and may be subject to arrest and indefinite detention without access to a lawyer or the anyone else on the outside.
And you wonder why Americans don't rise up and "foment an new American Revolution"? You're welcome to try it; go down to any street corner in any major American city and carry a sign or make a speech urging American citizens to bring down the government, demand that the current chief executives be put on trial for war crimes, etc. Try that in public, and see where that takes you. How many followers do you think you'll attract, who'll be happy to follow you all the way into one of those nice, new KBR concentration camps -- sorry, "detention centers"? We've seen what a great job KBR has done re-building Iraq; their state-side accomodations should be even more luxurious.
Get real! Most people who read CD have known for some time that we're living in a crypto-fascist country, where the kind of "revolution" you're urging has already been anticipated by those who've taken us down this road. They've been planning their actions since the 80's, possibly even as early as the post-Nixon years of the 70's; of course they realize, as things grow increasingly desperate, it will become more likely folks like you will grow emboldened to follow our founding fathers' example and attempt to cast out the tyrants in power. After all, they may be crooks, but they're not stupid crooks; in fact they're two steps ahead of you.
Make your move, your grand, revolutionary gesture; just don't be surprised if your family and friends wonder why they haven't heard from you in days, weeks, months. You'll have become a "desaparacido", like those who vanished from the streets of Santiago under Pinochet.
Blackwater has been training local police forces throughout the country to deal with protestors, revolutionaries, "insurgents" and "enemy combattants" like you -- and THAT'S why you won't find many Americans panting for revolution; they're not stupid either -- not with the prospect of being sent to a one of KBR's new Guantanamo's hanging over their heads.
GOOD NEWS!
Aussie troops leave Iraq and return to Oz—
http://www.globalgoodnews.com/world-peace-a.html?art=121466485947379684
Yeah, we know that one already. So what's next?
"Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded for life, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars."
to the criminals on wall st. and penn. ave, this is but a SMALL price to pay!
This is old news. Who cares at this point! The damage has been done.
Granted, I'd like to see our sad excuse for a "President" and his criminal VP behind bars, but truth be told, we are all guilty: DemocRats (Lieberman and friends), Republicans, Reporters (? pundits), and the SUV generation. We act like a bunch of fools with maxed-out platinum cards, looking for new ones to pay off the old ones. It's time to cut the B.S. and pay the bank.
The faster we make clean alternative energy sources affordable and available, the faster we can put all these oil-pigs and Neocons to bed. Stay focused!
Love you Bill, but this one is over your head. Way too little, too late!
If you want to do something useful, first try cleaning house at PBS. With all the "support ads" from fortune 500 companies, it's obvious that "Public B.S." has become the "Private B.S." -- especially when the CEO of Chevron is allowed to soft-peddle his company on the Maclear News-Hour, and has the nerve to claim, with a straight face, that the politics and human-cost in countries they exploit are not their concern or responsibility -- and the interviewer simply smiled??!! It was pathetic!
Long live Bill Moyer, the Inernet and Commondreams
Treason, Bribery, Hang `em High Crimes and Oil - the death of our Republic.
And guess what? Most Americans knew all along it was about oil and also believe the USA is "the greatest nation on Earth, and the greatest nation to have ever been on Earth," as McCain and his FOX propagandists are wont to repeat ad nausea. And they have no problem with "our" securing and controlling the resources needed to maintain our universal pole position, whether they want to admit it or not - and, like racists, most would prefer to not. But that's why there are no protests, that's why troops aren't rebelling in droves, and that's why so many continue to support the GOPathologicals and their Dem teammates.
"It's time to cut the B.S. and pay the bank."
Correction- it's time to cut the BS and STOP paying the bank.
Leisure Elf: SallyUUKent – lives in Kent, Ohio (not the UK), where she is active with the Universalist Unitarian church – hence the UU Kent.I do not know her but live in a neighboring community and know her as a regular CD poster.
It's so tragic that U.S. oil reserves should happen to be located underneath Middle Eastern countries.
to sally uukent:
We are now back in the robber baron days. Except now it is a worldwide game. And we Americans are now among the pawns just like everybody else. It will be a long hard road to bring about justice, but it can be done. Look at what the roosevelts accomplished: both Teddy "trustbuster" and Franklin WPA/CCC/Social Security. These are the kinds of initiatives and directions that will slowly turn things around, along with a national drive for truly green renewable energy. (Note: if carter had stayed in office since 1980- just to suppose a fantasy scenario- we would probably be there already, and not fighting futile wars for oil.)
SCIENTIFIC BETRAYAL & ITS PARALLELS OIL SIGNIFICANCE
Never before have Americans experienced such dangerous manipulation of essential scientific data, as used by this administration to derail vital environmental reforms, conservation, family planning-- and the list goes on. The resulting long term environmental and social damage are beyond measure, and can only worsen if not curtailed.
This war is no exception
Despite their clandestine cloak, or environmental friendly disguise, these sellouts have been evident since Bush first was handed the presidency. They have been exposed by defectors from the EPA, health & human services, etc; and have been documented and chronicled by numerous dedicated environmental organizations including The Union of Concerned Scientists.
The gravity of these unprecedented betrayals eclipses the Monica Lewinski scandal which led to an impeachment, and pose greater dangers than Watergate which terminated a presidency.
Blame for these dreadful consequences falls mainly on the five supreme court justices who placed politics ahead of the law and put him in office against the voters choice; our legislators for allowing such reckless and dangerous behavior from this unlearned president guided by his financial and radical supporters; and especially the apathetic populace for tolerating this unprecedented outrage
It's partly about Global Positioning, Greed, Control, & Paranoia with a little controlled market capitalism on the side.
Oil is a convenient excuse to fall back on when the first layers of lies inevitably fell away and BP/Exxon etc moving back in reinforces the ruse. Many sites track the global production, export and import of oil and natural gas and there is no significant change over the past 10 years to explain the five-six fold increases in the last five years... not in increases in developing countries and not decreases in producing countries... Just as with grains, pharmaceutical products, textbooks, and regional and global peace and security, we are being herded and culled and manipulated. One poster just scratched the surface with his unusual criticism of PBS/NPR - Take a serious look at the membership in Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Bilderbergers and some surprising names come up. Add some contemporary context such as Dan Rather(CBS) and the Bush Military (accurate)records disclosure later falsely discredited; Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and Judith Miller(NYT) and the Valerie Plame disclosure; http://www.ctwilcox.com/CFRroster.pdf is an unsubstantiated but partially annotated list and there are numerous others.
For those who might miss the bi-partisan nature of CFR amidst the hundreds of names, this rendering pretty much lays the theater and players we are observing on primetime these days:
http://www.thought-criminal.org/2007/08/15/cfr-stacks-the-deck-with-both-democrat-and-republican-presidential-candidates
The US is unique in the numbers of embassies and consular offices with intelligence collecting activities going on 24/7 in most of the 192 countries of the world.
The US, Israel, UK, Russia, PRC and a handful of others also have global munitions investments in R&D and production and stockpiling. A regional conflict is crucial, and books have been written about how they are instigated within and without to ensure billions of dollars of munitions get used up before their useful shelf life expires and in order that profits can finalize and produce replacements with latest technologies. All the weapons producing countries and their military contractors and GI-Joe administrations share in the benefit to these globally contrived flareups.
More important strategically than Iraqi oil are the Bush 41 pipelines across Afghanistan/Pakistan to the Indian Ocean and the Clinton pipelines across the Caspian to the Med - the former now back in serious trouble akin to circa 1998 thanks to Bush 43.
More telling as to longer term intentions are the proposed 40 permanent military bases in Iraq and the handful of "defensive" missile bases going into eastern European states of the former Soviet bloc... a centroid of which is Israel... and to east lie Russia and China ...
In the meantime, African regions are being stirred up within, mostly from without according to many signs, and not one significant move to intervene by any major power. To what purpose?
Some have referred to US/USSR(Russia) energy projection R&D into the earth and into the ionosphere since the fifties for weather modification among other intended and discovered applications. To what purpose? (An interesting benefit to the Arctic Ocean melting under the topic of global warming is $billions/year savings in shipping costs)
Whenever I come to a point where all I can do is post my disgust on the internet (which is not enough), I invite my conscience to doubly sink this in:
The worst of humankind have ruled the United States unchallenged for the past eight years -- wrecking the little bit that was good about our country and shitting their jig just as piggishly onto the rest the earth's peoples.
Unless these American monsters (I mean the entire Bush Admministration and all who went and continue to go along in congress) are thrown out of office, and the Bush executives held legally accountable by impeachment processes for what they have done, nothing will be learned by the masses of trusting mis-governed citizens-- and future rule of the US by similar or worse monsters will be so much the easier -- guaranteed.
Anonymous citizens can't instantly force an official accounting of government misrule (we need a parlimentary system), but all of us who care can demand the accounting more directly than we do here. What we do on websites alone will never be enough.
Today (6/28) by chance I got my US Senator on his constitutent cell phone (the last time I'm sure, he'll ever talk to me), and read him my citizen riot act for betrayal of his 2006 election promises to bring US troops home by 2007. He politely listened at first, because I know him personally and he knows I contributed a lots of my money and time to get him elected based on his campaign positions.
He finally hung up on me after I said to him '...but that's not the reform politics you ran on, gaddammit..' in response to his previously barking at me "...you dont understand what's happened to national politics, Jimmy....'
My point is, while this guy can and will now dismiss me as a 'nut,' he and other congress types like him/her would have a harder time of doing that if 1000 constituents like me called him and then submitted the blowoff responses as OP ED letters to our local newspapers.
CD furies - please don't mock me for my confront-your-congressperson suggestions unless you have better short term ideas. I'm already working for Nader's run - so I don't need your lectures about that.
Here's one thing we can all do: Write letters to the editors of all of your local papers. Write (briefly) about the specifics of these facts. (If they do NOT publish your letter - call the editor(s) and ask why not.) Call in to talk radio shows - not JUST the liberal ones but all. Too many people sit in comfortable complacency and don't have a clue about this massive deception AGAINST the American people by the current administration and big business.
Tell your friends. Cut 'n' paste this article, print off copies, leave them on tables at Starbucks, other coffee shops, in bookstores, in church lobbies where they stack religious literature, on bulletin boards at stores, libraries, public bldgs. Bike and walk to these places if possible.
Get the word out. Bring these bastards out of their hiding places.
"Here's a recent headline in The New York Times: "Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." Read on: "Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power."
There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts — that's right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places."
***************************************
I feel like we've been RIPPED OFF! Big Time. All this talk about renewable energy out there, knowing our planet is slowly dying off, and our government, with our money, from our treasury, has been wasting dollars (and lives) over some crazy dream that they can own every oil source in the world!
We should all demand better service from a government which is now run For, By, and Of the Dollar. If the U.S. government really was a business, no customers, no investors would stand for this waste, they'd demand their money (ie. taxes) back and put them out of business!
Welcome to 2002, geniuses! Or even 1991 as someone upthread mentioned. This sham was blatantly obvious before we even went in there. Bush is too stupid and too poor an actor to have pulled it off. His statements about using diplomacy first were so transparent. He never intended to involve the UN in any way and it was so clear. He'd make the face and overdo the lie and use that shoulder-shrugging faux worried tone and you just knew we'd be invading soon. What a bogus pile of crap. And yet people, even credible people who had to have known better, humored him and his lie squad, eating up whatever flimsy excuse they were pushing that month until it collapsed under its own ridiculousness, at which point it was replaced with a new justification. Years of this buffoonery. It's 200flipping8 and it's just now clicking for these guys? Well whattaya know, it was about oil after all! Good grief. You'd expect more out of Bill Moyers. This administration ought to be in jail for life. When has there been a worse crime than this in the past 50 years?
*(in the past 50 years, let's say)