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WORD COUNT
662
JULY 2, 2008
AN OIL CONSPIRACY?
HEAVEN FORFEND! – by Donald Kaul
As we all know, gas
prices have taken off like a Jupiter rocket and people are mad as hell
about it. They’re thrashing around, looking for somebody to blame.
Last week Congress
held hearings on the matter, the 40th they’ve held this year, trying to
find out what is causing these ungodly prices.
They haven’t found
out yet (it would take Congress five hearings to learn how to find its
hip pocket with its left hand) but they’re getting closer.
The main suspect
these days seems to be speculation. As John (He Who Speaks With Straight
Tongue) McCain said recently:
“Investigation is
underway to root out this kind of reckless wagering, unrelated to any
kind of productive commerce, because it can distort the market, drive
prices beyond rational limits, and put the investments and pensions of
millions of Americans at risk.”
If you don’t
understand that, don’t worry about it. I don’t either. It’s not English.
It’s not Spanish. It’s not even Esperanto.
It is Washingtonese,
a language used by politicians to disguise the fact that they don’t have
anything to say.
Personally---defender
of Free Enterprise that I am---I’ve always thought speculation was the
purest form of capitalism. You buy a commodity or piece of land or
whatever in the expectation it will rise in price. If it does, you sell
it and make a lot of money. If it doesn’t you say “Waiter, check
please.” (There are also speculators who bet on prices going down, but
the principle is the same. You make a bet and you cash it or you don’t.)
So I really don’t
think that speculation is the reason your eyes fill with tears every
time you have to fill your tank. But I do have a theory.
I think it’s the
fruit of a vast conspiracy set in motion by the oil companies in
collusion with high-ranking members of the Bush administration,
including the two rankest. I mention no names.
I know it’s not
fashionable to believe in conspiracies. We’re all supposed to accept
that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin acting alone and to do it
without giggling. I know that.
But I’m an
old-fashioned kind of guy and when I see something that looks like a
conspiracy, walks like a conspiracy and quacks like a conspiracy I say
“Damn the torpedoes, it’s a conspiracy.”
Let us consider the
evidence:
Mr. Bush (whose
family fortune was made in munitions and oil) took us to war in
Iraq on a series of
premises that had the tensile strength of wet toilet paper.
We went to war not
because Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction or Saddam was giving sanctuary to
terrorists or even because he was a bad, bad man (although he was). We
went to war because President Bush and the oil gang wanted to install a
puppet regime to ensure that Iraqi oil flowed to favored oil companies.
Mr. Bush’s White
House then proceeded to botch the war but the conflict did help drive up
oil prices resulting in record profits for the oil companies. In the
meantime, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, made a
ton of money helping to botch up the war. So everybody was happy (with
the exception of the families of the young people who were actually
fighting the war, not a large cohort).
Meanwhile, back at
home, the administration was making every effort to thwart efforts to
reduce consumption of oil, from pooh-poohing the threat of global
warming to refusing to consider an EPA report that suggested raising
mileage standards for autos would be good for the economy.
Oil prices kept
rising until the time was right for proposing more oil-gang assaults on
the environment---offshore drilling, tapping into
Alaska’s Arctic
Wildlife Refuge.
And then, last month,
Iraq leaders
tentatively OK’d no-bid oil contracts with the Western oil giants:
ExxonMobil, Shell, Total and BP.
Hark! Was that a
quack I just heard?
Me thinks it was.
--
Don Kaul is a
two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing
Washington
correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong.
Email:
dkaul2@earthlink.net -- A
photo of Donald Kaul is available CLICK
HERE
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