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  Thursday  May 11  2006    04: 02 PM

oil

The Real Oil Story: The Oil in Iraq


Oil is pretty slippery stuff. The press is playing up $3 a gallon gasoline, record oil company profits, and the $400 million retirement package for Exxon’s former CEO. But these stories are trivial compared to the oil story they have ignored all along. The war in Iraq. It’s an oil war. And you don’t have to take my word for it. Read former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips new book, “American Theocracy" : the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.” The corporate media may have failed us but authors like Phillips are providing the needed analysis.

Bush, Cheney, Rice and other key Bush players have impeccable oil industry credentials. When they came to the White House, so did the oil industry. Cheney, Rumsfeld and others also have strong ties to the Project for a New American Century, a neo-conservative organization which unabashedly advocates U.S. world supremacy through pre-emptive war, regime change for governments they don’t like, and permanent military bases in the Persian Gulf to secure U.S. interests – foremost among them oil. U.S. world domination requires not only access to oil but control of it – a tall order since 65% of the world’s oil reserves lie within the boundaries of a handful of Arab countries.

Phillips explains that coveting and safeguarding Persian Gulf oil has long been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. We’ve struck deals, propped up royal families, supported coups, and armed dictators to keep the oil flowing in our direction and to give U.S. oil companies a piece of the action. We’ve also waged at least one prior war for oil, the first Gulf War in 1991. If Bush did not consider oil when deciding to invade Iraq, it would be the first time in fifty years that guaranteeing an uninterrupted flow of Persian Gulf oil was not a central element of U.S. foreign policy.

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Science Fiction
by Jim Kunstler


Riding the van out of the airport Friday night to the Park-and-Fly lot, with the planes floating down in the distant violet gloaming, an eerie recognition came over me that life today is as much like science fiction as it will ever get -- at least as far ahead as I can see. Some of my friends' kids may never fly in airplanes. They may never own cars. At some point twenty, thirty years ahead, they may not take for granted throwing a light switch in a dark room.

Our sense of normality will be coming up for review soon, and hardly anybody seems ready to face it. The now-consistently moronic New York Times played a story in the Sunday business section which said that "consumers" were just shrugging off three-dollar gasoline and spending like gangbusters in the super discount box stores. It seems not to have occurred to the editors that perhaps three dollars a gallon is not the final destination of our pump prices. They were so triumphal over the public's supernatural immunity to the three-dollar-flu that they failed to essay what four-dollar or even five-dollar a gallon gasoline might do to America's shopping heroes.

My own guess is that it is liable to drive the NASCAR grandstand ticket prices a wee bit higher, at least.

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