Readers, be informed, and beware! Sam Bodman, US Energy Secretary, is a Bush appointed Yes-man. Bodman states that insufficient production is making oil prices soar. Bush wants you to think that the OPEC countries are responsible for high oil prices, but the truth is, OPEC has been significantly increasing production over the past several months. Where is all that oil going? It's being stockpiled by US investment banks, who are creating a fake shortage to drive up the price. Congress has already started to investigate this criminal practice. Bush, who has deregulated the banking industry, tries to blame it on OPEC. By now you should be familiar with Bush's MO: he says you should be very afraid of Muslims. But who you should really be afraid of are investment bankers at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers. Check this out:
Michael Masters of Master Capital Management (a global investment manager) testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Government Affairs a couple of weeks ago. Quotes from his testimony:
"Today, Index Speculators are pouring billions of dollars into the commodities futures markets, speculating that commodity prices will increase. In the popular press the explanation given for rising oil prices is the increased demand from China. According to the DOE, China's demand for petroleum has increased in the last five years from 1.88 billion barrels to 2.8 billion barrels, an increase of 920 billion barrels. Over the same five year period, Index Speculators' demand for petroleum futures has increased by 848 million barrels. THE INCREASE IN DEMAND FROM INDEX SPECULATORS IS ALMOST EQUAL TO THE INCREASE IN DEMAND FROM CHINA. Index Speculators have now stockpiled, via the futures market, the equivalent of 1.1 billion barrels of petroleum, effectively adding EIGHT TIMES as much oil to their own stockpile as the US Government has added to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the last five years."
"The Senate has asked the question "Are Institutional Investors contributing to food and energy price inflation?" And my unequivocal answer is "YES." In this testimony I will explain that investment banks are one of, if not the primary, factors affecting commodities prices today. Clearly, there are many factors that contribute to price determination in the commodities markets; I am here to expose a fast-growing yet virtually unnoticed factor, and one that presents a problem that can be expediently corrected through legislative policy action..."
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL. They're supposed to be protecting us from these kinds of abuses, but Bush allowed loopholes in the CFTC regulations that you can drive a truck through. An oil truck, that is.
Links to Masters' Senate testimony, and 2 articles:
http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/052008Masters.pdf
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20011.htm
http://globalresearch.ca
THE WORLD FROM WASHINGTON
Michael Hirsh
The Long Goodbye
A humbled Bush administration is delivering valedictories everywhere—and pointing hopefully to 'structures' it will leave behind.
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Of all of George W. Bush's senior officials, Condoleezza Rice has changed the most. No, the secretary of State hasn't exactly acknowledged this or admitted major mistakes, but she has been the most influential official in transforming the president from a my-way-or-the-highway unilateralist in his first term into a passionate multilateralist in his second. She also evinces a humility that remains notably absent in others such as Vice President Dick Cheney—who, when asked recently about flagging U.S. support for the Iraq War, responded, "So?" Rice was once Bush's black-booted generalissima, full of confidence about "the birth pangs of a new Middle East." Now, in the current issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, she delivers an apologia that is most notable for its defensive language and tentative conclusions.
Rice makes the administration's farewell arguments for an array of policies—from the decision to invade Iraq to its fateful choice to force elections on the Palestinians. And while she still gives short shrift to the United Nations and other multilateral bodies, Rice ends up embracing the "international community" she had dismissed as "illusory" in the last big essay she did for Foreign Affairs, back in early 2000. In the new essay, Rice also rediscovers policies very similar to those championed by the once-derided Clinton administration, among them nation-building. What Bill Clinton's former national-security adviser, Tony Lake (now a key foreign-policy adviser to Barack Obama) once embraced as the "enlargement" of democracy and markets as a way of securing U.S. interests, she calls a new "American realism." "An international order that reflects our values is the best guarantee" of national interest, she writes. In fact, there's nothing new about it: it is a policy that goes back at least to Woodrow Wilson, and was embraced by FDR, Truman, Reagan and every other president with an internationalist bent. Rice's essay calls to mind T. S. Eliot's famous line that "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
Rice is hardly the only one gingerly laying out the administration's case for posterity, even as a new Pew poll shows that global views of America have started to improve in anticipation of Bush's departure in six months.
Bush himself, in interviews and remarks to foreign counterparts and reporters, has sought to plead his brief to the historians. "I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric" in the first term, he told the Times of London this week. He fretted that the now-infamous phrases from that period—his vow to catch Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" and his chesty call to "bring on" Iraq's insurgents—"indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."
Some of these arguments may soften the judgment of history. Others will simply be scorned. The new report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, for example, shows that Bush was hardly behaving as a "man of peace" when he defied the doubts of his own intelligence analysts to actively justify a war with Iraq that his former spokesman, Scott McClellan, says didn't have to be fought. Why did Bush do it? Rice's essay seeks to dispose of the matter in one line. "The United States did not overthrow Saddam to democratize the Middle East. It did so to remove a long-standing threat to international security," she writes. Shorn of its evidentiary undergirding—Rice's essay mentions nothing about the "grave and gathering danger" of Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds as smoking guns or Saddam's alleged links to Al Qaeda—the statement seems feeble.
Indeed, Rice is uncharacteristically vague and cryptic in delivering judgment on this, the biggest, most dramatic move the administration has made in seven and a half years. The decision to topple an Arab autocracy like Iraq's in the middle of the fight against Al Qaeda, she says, was an effort to attack the "underlying cause" of the terrorist group's support. "Perhaps it would have been possible to manage these suppressed tensions [in Arab societies] for a while" longer, she writes. "Indeed, the quest for justice and a new equilibrium on which the nations of the broader Middle East are now embarked is very turbulent. But is it really worse than the situation before?" She never really answers the question. If she's not sure that things are better, why should the rest of us be?
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