Bill Moyers on Oil Pigs

In the backdrop of a war against alternative energy thats lasted for decades, and been financed by oil corruption dollars, now we have this. Iraq still pumps far less oil than it did under the oil for food sanctions under Sadaam. The purpose of the war was to fuel speculation, while stopping the oil from being pumped out of the ground in Iraq. Its time for Americans to throw corporate dollars out of elections, else we get this, Ike's prophecy::::

Saturday 28 June 2008
>
>by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
>
>Bill Moyers. (Photo: Peter Krogh / AP)
>
> Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and
> simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a
> dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of
> mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in
> smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the
> bottom line. It is about oil.
>
> Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal
> Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, "Everyone knows:
> the Iraq war is largely about oil." He elaborated in an interview with
> The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "If Saddam Hussein had been head of
> Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would
> not have been as strong as it was in the first Gulf War."
>
> Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld's
> deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic
> choice. "We had virtually no economic options with Iraq," he explained,
> "because the country floats on a sea of oil."
>
> Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the
> movie, "There Will Be Blood." Half-mad, he exclaims, "There's a whole
> ocean of oil under our feet!" then adds, "No one can get at it except for me!"
>
> No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the
> Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless
> antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except ...
> guess who?
>
> Here's a recent headline in The New York Times: "Deals With Iraq Are
> Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." Read on: "Four western companies are in
> the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return
> them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to
> nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power."
>
> There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and
> BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts - that's right,
> sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater. The
> kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these
> war profiteers have friends in very high places.
>
> Let's go back a few years to the 1990's, when private citizen Dick
> Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That's when he
> told the oil industry that, "By 2010 we will need on the order of an
> additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come
> from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the
> Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is
> still where the prize ultimately lies."
>
> Fast forward to Cheney's first heady days in the White House. The oil
> industry and other energy conglomerates were handed backdoor keys to the
> White House, and their CEO's and lobbyists were trooping in and out for
> meetings with their old pal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings were
> secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years
> ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were
> maps of oil fields in Iraq - and a list of companies who wanted access to
> them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed
> suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed,
> but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the
> press and public from learning the whole truth.
>
> Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before
> 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don't know
> what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry
> that's enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it
> weren't so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for
> invading Iraq - the press mogul Rupert Murdoch - once said that a
> successful war there would bring us $20-a-barrel oil. The last time we
> looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the
> facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?
>
> At a Congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate
> scientist who exactly twenty years ago alerted Congress and the world to
> the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil
> to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that
> there's a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen, whom the
> administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of
> black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and
> nature in opposing efforts to deal with global warming.
>
> Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his
> proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four
> thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded,
> hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million
> displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The
> political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than
> an "energy protection force," doing anything to gain access to expensive
> fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself. One
> thinks again of Daniel Plainview in "There Will Be Blood." His lust for
> oil came at the price of his son and his soul.
>
> -----------
>
> Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer
> of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs
> Friday nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog
> at <http://www.pbs.org/moyers>www.pbs.org/moyers.
>
> Editor's Note: This Bill Moyers comment on America's oil policy was
> presented on Friday 27 June 2008 on Bill Moyers Journal. Other portions
> of the program can be viewed
> <http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06272008/watch.html>here TO/vh
>
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