Sen. Levin continues ugly ''blame the Iraqis'' meme

Carl Levin is like a landlord who goes to collect the rent and finds an apartment door open. In a barcolounger, he sees the husband stinking of alcohol, passed out drunk with a gun in his lap. On the floor, he sees the wife, dressed for her job as a waitress, but with swollen black eyes, bruised arms and legs, and blood trickling out of her nose and mouth, seemingly beaten unconscious.

After surveying the situation, he throws a glass of water in the wife's face to wake her up, then demands to know why the rent is late.

There is actually a couple of problems with my analogy. First, the landlord knows the woman is not his wife. The ''husband'' killed her real husband and her kids five years ago, threw her in his trunk, and took her home as his slave. The wife is Iraq.

Likewise, the landlord would more accurately be the owner of the neighborhood liquor store, who knows full well who is doing all the drinking, but rather than bothering the drunk and possibly losing his business, he picks on the ''wife'' because he knows she has hidden some money from the drunk, hoping that someday she can use it to escape his abuse. The drunk is of course Bush and his big oil and other corporate cronies.

I just got this email from Carl Levin saying he wants to investigate why more Iraqi oil money isn't going into reconstruction. At first glance that might seem reasonable, but then I wondered if by reconstruction Bechtel, Halliburton, and others who have done only token work and pocketed most of our tax dollars that were meant to help Iraqis.

Getting our money back from them and giving it directly to Iraqis should be a higher priority than brow-beating the Iraqis about how they spend their money (aren't they supposed to be sovereign, you simpering corporate boot-lick?)

Likewise, it is almost criminal to mention Iraq's oil income without mentioning that Bush is strong-arming them to sign an oil law that will give 88% of their oil income to big oil companies, a deal no other oil rich country in the Persian Gulf would take without a gun to their head. Levin has gone as far as demanding that the Iraqis hurry up and pass this bill that robs their country of its one source of wealth. You would think that if the war had anything to do with reducing terrorism, we would let the Iraqis pass an oil law that no one in the country could possibly find exploitive.

Levin has misdirected our attention before and even lied about Iraqis ''wanting'' us to stay.

These lies and misplaced priorities must be addressed because we cannot end the war in Iraq until our elected representatives are honest about the big oil and other corporate interests that are keeping us there. Iraq has tens of trillions of dollars worth of oil. Most politicians in Washington are pursuing business for past or future corporate employers, so them invading Iraq and saying it was to stop terrorism or spread democracy is like Homer Simpson breaking into a donut shop and saying he just wanted to do a health inspection.

People like Carl Levin must be asked:

Who the fuck do you work for?

Are you working for the American people or a handful of banks, corporations, and wealthy individuals even when it means impoverishing and endangering the rest of us, and even taking the lives of Americans and those in other countries?

Senator Levin, represent us and stop behaving like corporate moral filth.

IRAQ OIL THEFT RESOURCES