ding dong the wicked witch is dead ... or soon will be ...
no one is quite willing to say that the Dems will definitely retake the House and the Senate ... make no mistake about it, the republicans are hanging on for dear life right now ... if they're planning some sort of October surprise, it's going to have to include massive destruction on US soil because none of the little rovian goofy games is going to fix the mess they're in ... this election has always had a bi-polar personality ... if republicans could keep the focus local in a my guy versus your guy kind of way, their losses would be small ... if the Dems were able to nationalize the election and make it be a national referendum on bush, ballgame over ... if you're reading today's tea leaves, it looks like the election is going national and it looks like the invincible republican fascade is about to shatter ... but that's not what this post is about ...
when the new Dem tide washes over Washington, the last thing i'm going to want to hear is about the "new spirit of bipartisanship" ... forget it!!!! and i am not just looking for cute little liberal "adjustments" to the tragic legislation we've seen slime its way through the Congress over the past 6 years ... forget it!!!!
it is time to RIGHT THE WRONGS ... it is time to strip those who profited from all this corruption and immorality and greed ... it is time to strip away the tax savings handed to the rich ... it is time to nationalize BIG OIL and take back the ill-gotten gains from their top execs and their shareholders ... in short, it is time to undue the wrongs we've seen ... the bastards are lucky heads will not be guillotined away in the town squares ...
but again, that's not what this post is about ... what it IS about is the greatest obscenity we've seen under bush and the obvious need to set things as right as we can set them ... now that would make an interesting poll: bush's greatest obscenity ...
well, here's my candidate: almost 3,000 Americans have died in Iraq and another 20,000 or so have been severely wounded for nothing, absolutely nothing, but oil ... and lay on top of the graves of these dead Americans another 655,000 Iraqis or whatever number of needless deaths you care to believe ... the obscenity is NOT that so many have died ... the obscenity is that they died for greed and for oil and for Big Oil's obscene profits ... stop believing those who tell you it just wasn't so ... this war was, and is, all about oil ... you can go read those PNAC documents all you want to; maybe even some of their signers believed in the PNAC mission ... in the end, though, control in the Middle East was not motivated by the national interest of anti-terrorism or regional stability or, give me a break, spreading democracy ... does anyone actually believe the goal was spreading democracy after seeing what's been done to our own Constitution? shredding democracy maybe; but spreading democracy? ummmmmmm, no, let's get real ...
so, what are the REAL FACTS about all this oil business? ... is it just a bunch of lefty rhetoric? are there any facts? what exactly was and is being done to the Iraqis to steal their oil? the following article is very long ... it's impossible to do it justice with just a few excerpted paragraphs ... when it comes time to have a national dialog about taking back all the illegal booty that was stolen by the neocon imperialists, please refer back to this article so you can help spread the word ... the only way these crimes will ever be prosecuted is if the American people refuse to tolerate this type of corporate abuse ... if there's a new bi-partisan, feel good wind in Washington when the Dems go marching in, these oil thefts are going to continue ... unless every penny they took is taken back from them, and then they are punished with jail and fines and worse, they will wait for the very next opportunity to wage another war for oil knowing that crime does indeed pay ... let's make sure that does NOT happen ...
source:
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43045/Iraq is sitting on a mother lode of some of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on earth, and the rules that will determine who will control it and on what terms are about to be set. The Iraqi government faces a December deadline, imposed by the world's wealthiest countries, to complete its final Oil Law. Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil producers, and locking in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies future elected governments might want to pursue. <skip>
But the execs from Big Oil didn't just want access to Iraq's oil; they wanted access on terms that would be inconceivable unless negotiated at the barrel of a gun. Specifically, they wanted an Iraqi government that would enter into Production Service Agreements (PSAs) for the extraction of Iraq's oil. PSAs, developed in the 1960s, are a tool of today's kinder, gentler neocolonialism; they allow countries to retain technical ownership over energy reserves but, in actuality, lock in multinationals' control and extremely high profit margins -- up to thirteen times oil companies' minimum target, according to an analysis by the British-based oil watchdog Platform. <skip>
Clearly, the idea was to pursue a radical corporatist agenda during the period of the Coalition Provisional Authority when the U.S. occupation forces were a de facto dictatorship. And that's just what happened; under L. Paul Bremer, the CPA head, corporate taxes were slashed, a flat-tax on income was established, rules allowing multinationals to pull all of their profits from the country and a series of other provisions were enacted. These were then integrated into the Iraqi Constitution and remain in effect today. <skip>
'This constitution (the Iraqi Constitution) was cooked up in an American kitchen not an Iraqi one.'
With a Constitution cooked up in DC, the stage was set for foreign multinationals to assume effective control of as much as 87 percent of Iraq's oil, according to projections by the Oil Ministry. If PSAs become the law of the land -- and there are other contractual arrangements that would allow private companies to invest in the sector without giving them the same degree of control or such usurious profits -- the war-torn country stands to lose up to $194 billion vitally important dollars in revenues on just the first 12 fields developed, according to a conservative estimate by Platform (the estimate assumes oil at $40 per barrel; at this writing it stands at more than $59). That's more than six times the country's annual budget.
To complete the rip-off, the occupying coalition would have to crush Iraqi resistance, make sure it had friendly people in the right places in Iraq's emerging elite and lock the new Iraqi government onto a path that would lead to the Big Four's desired outcome.
See part two tomorrow.
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