TO HELEN THOMAS: cover oil motive for Iraq War

Helen,

When I saw the headline of your column asking Democratic presidential candidates to "come clean on Iraq," I thought you meant about the true motive for the war, a prize worth tens of trillions of dollars, which none of the candidates for president, with the exception of Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, have directly addressed apart from tangential references to "strategic access": OIL.

Investigative reporters who have documented the oil motive have found a stronger case for giving control of Iraq's oil to multi-national corporations rather than trying to secure a cheap supply to run our economy. In fact, before the war, Oil & Gas Journal said that without a war against Iraq, when the sanctions came off Saddam would pump too much and drive prices down.

Invading Iraq was a win-win situation for the major oil companies. If it had gone smoothly, they would have gained control of the spigot in Iraq, and by controlling supply, they could control the price, keeping it relatively high so they get more profit for less work. If the war went poorly, which it has, less of Iraq's oil would make it to market which would also drive up the price.

The most obvious piece of evidence though is the Hydrocarbon Law Bush and even the Democratic congress have tried to force on the Iraqis. Only a few lines have to do with how the oil is divided between the ethnic groups. The rest is designed to give up to 88% of the oil revenue to oil companies, a deal no other major oil country would accept without a gun to their head.

When someone bothered to poll Iraqis about this, more said they would trust a national oil company to develop their oil resources than the private corporations Bush is fronting for. Iraqi oil workers, scholars, and bureaucrats from the former regime familiar with what the administration is advocating all oppose it as well.

If we were just concerned about spreading democracy and having a steady supply of oil, we would be pushing for a law that no Iraqi could possibly object to. Instead, Bush's eagerness to line the pockets of his cronies is probably getting more of our troops killed than any peace marchers here or Iranian subversion over there.

Politicians will dodge this question by saying it's water under the bridge, but if you don't know who will profit from us staying in Iraq, you cannot effectively fight them to get our troops out and begin to salvage our reputation in the Arab world.

Sincerely,





MORE IRAQ WAR OIL THEFT MOTIVE SOURCES

Rudy Giuliani's swan song: Nosferatu (sung to tune of "Desperado" by Henley & Frey)

Nosferatu...
Sung to the tune of ''Desperado''
(by Don Henley/Glen Frey)

Nosferatu,
Why don't you come to your senses
Ben talking nonsenses, for so long now
Oh, you're a hard one
say you are Mr. 9/11,
but you are screwing the victims, you villain
we all know it somehow

Don't you dress like the queen of diamonds boy
Far right will beat you if they're able
You know that finding new wives is always your best bet
But till then your gay friends will set a place at their table
Far right caught you there, they would beat you to death

Nosferatu,
Oh, you ain't gettin' no younger
Your vain and your hunger, they're drivin' you on
And freedom, oh freedom, well that's just something worth squashin'
Your prison is waitin' and Kerik will welcome you home.

Don't your heart get cold in the wintertime
The voters won't show and the press keeps lying
It's hard to tell when they cover you everyday
but you're losin' all your polls are low
Ain't it funny, they all want you to go away

Nosferatu,
Why don't you come to your senses
Be a lobbyist for defenses, open the gate
It may be rainin', but there's a rainbow above you
You better let some lobby hire you, Wall Street will love you
You better let bloodsuckers love you
Before it's too late...

Fuck experience: in this election, it equals betrayal

Actually, it has equaled betrayal for a couple of decades if not always.

If you look at the ''experienced'' candidates' record in power, it is largely one of betraying the middle class and kowtowing to corporations, particularly on trade and foreign policy.

While the war in Iraq is the most glaring example of this, their support of trade deals that eviscerated American jobs and neoliberal shock therapy for other countries that reduce most people to poverty and demand the end to any New Deal type social programs have been going on for decades with bipartisan support.

After 9/11, experts familiar with what Wall Street has directed our foreign policy to do to other countries said they were surprised the hijackers weren't from Latin America given our century of crushing their desire to raise their standard of living and control their own natural resources since it would have cut into mining, sweatshop, and banana plantation corporations' profits.

In the Middle East, our experienced leaders have supported vicious dictators like Musharraf, the Saudi royal family, the Shah of Iran whose rule led to our current bad relations with that country, and even Saddam Hussein until 1991. So long as these guys played ball with American corporations, our experienced leaders did not give a rat's ass about what they did to their own people and even trained them in how to keep the plebes in their place.

In Iraq, already a profit-making machine for defense and rebuilding contractors, Bush is twisting the arm of the Iraqi parliament to pass an oil law that will give 88% of their oil wealth to big oil companies, a deal other oil-rich countries would never accept without a gun to their head. Do you think that might some Iraqis mad enough to have killed some of our 4,200 troops who are dead? Was giving that oil to ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, and BP worth killing over a million Iraqis and spending up to half a trillion tax dollars, more than the whole federal budget was in 1988.

And in case you haven't noticed, those corporations have a bad track record of sharing the profits from those foreign assets acquired with our military with the rest of us. The privatize the profits and socialize the cost.

Our representatives in Congress knowingly lied about the causes of the Iraq War as well. Every member of Congress is old enough to remember the Cold War knows that even if Saddam Hussein or any other third rate dictator gets a handful of nukes, he would not dare use them on us or give them to terrorist who would because we have 10,000 nuclear warheads and would burn their country off the map before the mushroom cloud cleared here. And we would still have enough left over to do the same to every other country on earth every day for a week. That was enough to stay the hand of the Soviet Union for four decades even though they had MORE nukes than us. Americans may have forgotten that, but the rest of the world has not.

To the degree that we have a legitimate need for defense, it is in part to protect us from those who have suffered at the hands of our experienced leaders.

I would trust someone more who isn't on a first name basis with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright, George Shultz, Colin Powell or any of the other technicians of these policies.

With the exception of Dennis Kucinich, presidential candidates in both parties have the ''experience'' of largely supporting these policies that impoverished average Americans and the rest of the world. Kucinich is largely ignored and mocked by the media precisely to prevent him from getting power or even being able to force the debate to the realities of our policies and away from haircuts and fairy tales about spreading democracy and fighting the boogey man.

This makes two relatively inexperienced candidates, Edwards and Obama, look more attractive. Both have their drawbacks. Neither would cut insurance companies out of health care altogether. Obama takes corporate donations. Edwards voted for the Iraq War. But their relative inexperience means they are more likely to change their ways just as a relatively inexperienced JFK did once in office and as his brother did before he ran for president.

So in this election, fuck experience.

Comparison to Bush Disgusts Chimps

Comparison to Bush Disgusts Chimps

by Milo Cornelius Science Newswire staff writer

December 13, 2006

(Science Newswire) DES MOINES -- Conservatives howl when anyone compares George W. Bush to Hitler, and the left rolls their eyes when the right compares Bush to Winston Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but no one has taken much offense when Bush is compared to a chimp—until now. Chimps who have been taught to communicate with humans have unanimously expressed anger and dismay at being compared with President Bush.

Over the last few decades, researchers have been able to teach primates to communicate with American Sign Language, lexigrams, and computers. Although their vocabulary is rudimentary, it is more than adequate not only for asking for basic needs to be met, but for expressing feelings and opinions.

Their distress was first discovered when a researcher was working on basic math with signing chimp Washoe, and she overheard another scientist refer to Bush as a “chimp faced moron.” She stopped her lesson to sign over and over “bush dirty bad stupid not chimp,” and persisted until the offending person told her that he agreed Bush was not a chimp, and that chimps are not dirty bad and stupid like Bush.

In another case, Lana, a chimp taught to use lexigrams on a computer, asked her trainer to show her pictures of other chimps on the internet. When websites like Smirking Chimp or Bush or Chimp came up instead, Lana gave a distress howl and defecated on her computer viewing stool, which is highly unusual for the otherwise potty trained chimp.

At other research centers and zoos, scientists believe overhearing similar comments has led chimps to withdraw from communicating with humans because they feel mocked and disrespected by them. At the Dubuque City Zoo, the primate enclosure was too small for chimp Zena to get out of earshot of Bush jokes, and the humiliation led her to take up smoking.

As a solution to the growing problem, the Primate Center at the University of Eastern Nevada have begun testing chimp reactions to references to Bush as a lower primate or other mammals.

“They seem to be offended by referring to him generically as a monkey, but don’t seem to mind if he is described as a specific lower primate like a lemur, macaque, or baboon,” said Dr. Natalie Trundy, director of the Primate Center.

“We hope that others replicate these results, so we can make recommendations to pundits, comedians, and cartoonist that will allow them to accurately lampoon the president without causing further harm to the self-esteem of these articulate, intelligent, and caring chimpanzees, who obviously have nothing in common with him apart from a physical resemblance that they can’t help.”


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GOP Memo calls religious right "wackos"

This is why abortion won't be overturned: the GOP is using it to drive people to the polls. Unfortunately, Democrats often play this game with left wing cultural window dressing while screwing us on economic issues too.

KEY EXCERPTS:

Abramoff-Scanlon School of Sleaze

By Michael Scherer

....one memo highlighted in a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday that Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, sent the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to describe his strategy for protecting the tribe's gambling business. In plain terms, Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious "wackos" could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/11/03/abramoff/

It's time to get our head out of our asses. School prayer, the flag, the Ten Commandments, aren't going to put food on the table, or get your kid medical care when he's sick. When we decide who to put on the Supreme Court and in elected office, we should be spending more time looking at how they are going to deal with corporate America than those other issues that are used primarily to get our panties in knot.


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