Buying In, Selling Out

Former Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, is honestly befuddled. Despite being let-off by a deadlocked jury, federal prosecutors still intend to try and convict him for bribery. And he's not the only one. As lawyer, Scott Turow, points out in his NYTimes Op-ed , thanks to the Supremes barefaced decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a virtual endorsement of corporate corruption, the bribing of public officials is now simply the way that business is done. Call it greasing the wheels of commerce. What poor Governor Blago is apparently too dense to understand is that while it may be common practice we must just not say it out loud.

For instance, consider this: the Washington Post reports that three out of every four lobbyists who represent oil and gas companies previously worked in the federal government. And not just anywhere in government. They are mostly lawmakers from oil-producing states. Fifteen of the 18 former members of Congress who now lobby for oil and gas firms are from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma or Kansas. After blasting the Obama administration for wanting to halt off shore drilling in light of the BP disaster, Louisiana Gov. Mary Landrieu hightailed it to her annual "Crawfish Fest" fundraiser, hosted by (among others) seven oil industry lobbyists -- six of whom previously worked on Capitol Hill. But it would impolitic to impugn the good Governor's integrity. Despite the $17,000 her campaign received in '08 Ms. Landrieu insists she is not the oil industry's handmaiden.

Bad for Business

According to Forbes magazine laws like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act are just more make-work for lawyers: "companies can find themselves getting extorted in foreign lands, only to get extorted again by Washington." So sad, so sad. Money would flow so much more freely if the public wasn't so damn squeamish. As any modern day Republican or free market Democrat will tell you, regulations just gum-up the works and end up hurting the little guy. I mean we can see how well bribery and extortion has worked out for Africa. Thanks to benevolent oil company largesse Sudan can now boast an endless supply of well-funded war-lords, see-no-evil politicians and a war-torn landscape increasingly unable to sustain human life. For the companies cashing in it means added annual profits in the billions of dollars. As Fatal Transactions reports: in Sudan, roughly 25% of total production value disappears out of the country.




Conflict Zone Darfur Region

Now neighboring Chad finds that the blessings of oil has left it mired in poverty and violence, in no small part, for having had the gall to spurn the U.S. in favor of China. In other words, China's presence means Africa's internecine conflicts are no longer minor proxy wars between the U.S. and France, their politicians expect the bribes to be more than gestures. Without a Berlin Wall in place bribery is now just part of the deal. And as any good governor knows, the higher the stakes the more it takes, governance be damned.

But hey, that's Africa's problem ... it can't happen here ...

Disabling Web of Deceit

One of the biggest differences between the Clinton presidency and our 8 year nightmare under Bush was the former president's knack for thinking strategically. The Great Game, otherwise known as the global proxy oil wars between the "East" and "West" has been likened to a chess match. Thanks to Bush and Cheney's thickheaded neocons and their fateful lust to grab that last tempting piece (Iraq) the U.S. has been left with strategic weaknesses all across the board. Not only are its pawns no longer solidly connected its once powerful pieces, having been foolishly placed, are now vulnerable and rapidly waning in strength.

For instance Cheney and McCain's greedy blundering has finally cost us one of our strategic allies in the Caucasus. Clinton had plotted a clever role for the energy-poor republic. Georgia was to become part of an "energy corridor" for the export of Caspian basin oil and gas to the West, bypassing Russia altogether. It would start with an "early-oil" pipeline built to carry petroleum from Azerbaijan's energy fields on the Caspian Sea to Supsa on Georgia's Black Sea coast. This would be followed by the tactical construction of a 1,000-mile BTC pipeline from Baku to Tbilisi then on to Ceyhan on Turkey's Mediterranean coast.

But with the typical short-sightedness that guides Bush and the neocons instead of telling Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili, (as Condi Rice supposedly advised) to chill his boots and be satisfied playing his role as pipeline guardian, they backed his crazy fantasies. By trying to retake breakaway regions of Abhkazia and South Ossetia Saakashvili and the neocons handed Putin the opening for a counterattack he craved ever since taking over from Russia's former big man and blunderer-in-chief, Boris Yeltsin.

Unfortunately as recent revelations about Jane Harman's incestuous ties to the neocon cabal have made painfully clear, the warmongering parasites that continue to profit from U.S. foreign policy have their grasping tentacles in every branch and party in Washington.

Killing For Oil? Tragedy, Comedy or Farce?

Less than a fortnight after the Iraqi parliament agreed on a Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) calling for U.S. forces to leave Iraq's cities by mid-2009 and withdraw from the country altogether by the end of 2011 a suicide bomber kills 55 people dining in Kirkuk.

Official reports say Arab tribal leaders were lunching with members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and were there to discuss ways of defusing tensions among Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen in the oil-rich province.

Cui Bono?

Mere hours after the fatal blast Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for Iraq's Shia-dominated government led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, announces that some residual U.S. forces will be needed for at least 10 more years. Curious since before the vote in parliament the Maliki government had been insisting that its military would be ready to take over security by the summer of 2009.

The SOFA agreement (without which any continued U.S. military presence would be in violation of international law) had only been achieved after drastic compromise. The Sunni Arabs seeing themselves as the vulnerable (oil-free) minority under a Shia-Kurdish government were determined to wring major concessions as a condition for their support (such as the release of Sunni political prisoners being currently detained by U.S. troops). And despite the ongoing ethnic and tribal tensions, most Iraqis remain firmly nationalistic so that anything less than the assurance of a complete American withdrawal would have doomed the Sadrists along with the current government in Iraq's upcoming provincial elections.

So Who Gets To Be Rich?

“We believe that oil and gas belong to the Iraqi people, to all the Iraqi people,” Wael Abdul Latif, an independent member of the Iraqi parliament and a former magistrate.

Good luck with that...

Iraqi oil dispute bubbles to the surface December 09. 2008 9:26PM UAE

Iraq has put the squeeze on private investors by saying it will not give preferential treatment to Kurdistan crude. Nabil al Juran / AP Photo

Prospects for settling a protracted Iraqi feud over regional oil development have once again receded, following an apparent breakthrough last month over negotiations to export crude from the country’s autonomous Kurdistan region.

Late last month, in a surprise visit to the north-eastern regional capital of Erbil, the Iraqi oil minister, Hussein al Shahristani, agreed in principal to allow two recently discovered oilfields in Kurdistan to be connected to the state-owned pipeline that exports crude from northern Iraq to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

That constituted a major concession that seemed to break a deadlock in oil discussions between Iraqi central authorities and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The snag is that Baghdad last week made clear that it still planned to treat Kurdistani crude developed with private-sector investment in the same way as oil from state-owned fields.

It is both perverse and all too common to hear the Iraqi conflict described in terms of Islamic terrorism or sectarian strife, but just as in the tragedy that occurred in Mumbai, the antipathies of race and religion are merely the nurtured fuel being fed to the oil-war's consuming fire.

Ironically, just as the ill-conceived Iraq invasion has contributed to the United States becoming fiscally bankrupt, the fight for Iraq's resources has left the country's infrastructure so badly damaged, its leadership so steeped in corruption, its greedy occupiers will be hard-pressed to profit.

"While Iraq's oil industry will continue to face problems with security in 2009, the country's crumbling production and pipeline systems are more likely to disrupt crude exports"
-- the London-based Exclusive Analysis (EA).

"[T]he two 50-km subsea oil pipelines that transport the crude to the terminals are at imminent risk of failing due to severe corrosion and vulnerability to rupture"
--October report from the U.S. Congress.



There are but fine lines between comedy, tragedy and farce.

Sarah Palin's Quiet Queenmakers

When John McCain announced he was picking Sarah Palin, a neophyte 1st term governor from Alaska he made two groups ecstatically happy: the oil lobby and the Council for National Policy. Sarah Palin is "an American Margaret Thatcher" crows way-the-winds-blow, Dick Morris

So just who is the CNP and what are their goals? Well, superficially, the organization claims to be a group of social, economic and religious conservatives formed to provide a "counterweight" to Washington's "liberal" institutions and the Rockefeller's Council on Foreign Policy. But a look at the top names among their membership reveals that they are the coalescence of the hard Religious Right and the John Birch Society. If all of this is new to you then that's just the way the Council intended it.

CNP policy states:

“The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before or after a meeting."

The membership list is “strictly confidential.” Guests can attend only with the unanimous approval of the organization’s executive committee. Members can be banned for referring to the council by name, even in e-mail messages.

New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick was finally able to pierce the CNP veil in August of '04 when he attended a gathering of the group in New York City just before the Republican convention, where the organization presented former Senator Bill Frist with the “Jefferson Award.”

The Times described the CNP as consisting of “a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country” who meet “behind closed doors at undisclosed locations…to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.”

The Council was not satisfied with the '08 slate of Republican candidates. It seemed even flat-earther Mike Huckabee was considered too liberal, both for the religious conservatives and their allies among the neocons. They would vote for McCain but if he wanted their full support he had to pick a V.P of their choosing.

THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR PRIVATIZATION

The council is tied to an earlier group founded by Willard Garvey, (No Relation!) the National Center for Privatization [NCP]. Its 1986 Board of Directors included Garvey and Robert D. Love, a founding member of the council for The John Birch Society who, according to a JBS publication cited by The Belmont Brotherhood, was "a Thirty-second Degree KCCH Mason, a member of the Median Shrine." 4.

The purpose of Garvey's group was "to educate Americans about the then-new concept of 'Privatization'".

It's manifesto stated: "the foremost objective of the National Center for privatization is to encourage by all practical and legal means, the transfer of activities and responsibilities now being funded with coerced tax dollars, to the private profit and voluntary sector of the economy."

In 1984, Willard Garvey wrote a letter to the President which described the objective of the National Center for Privatization -- non-profit organizations and the private sector must render the cumbersome machinery of representative government obsolete! Garvey's letter [see below] was published in a media promotion for an International Conference On Family Choice/Educational Vouchers that was sponsored by the NCP on Sept. 30-Oct. 2 of 1985. Speakers for the "Privatizing Education" conference were members of the secretive Council for National Policy -- namely James Dobson, Tim LaHaye and Phyllis Schlafly, and also free market economist, Milton Friedman and Secretary of Education, William Bennett.

6 April 1984

President Ronald Reagan
Executive Office of the President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington , D.C. 20500 Re: Privatization

President Reagan, congratulations on rejecting the political system negatives. Now why not adopt the all positive system -- privatization? Hold a White House conference on Privatization and appoint a Presidential Task Force on privatization.

Privatization is documented in the enclosed paper from the Heritage Foundation and dates back at least to Adam Smith, Plato, Aristotle and Jesus.

Privatization's more recent advocates include most of the non-profit sector-- and the entire profit sector. To name a few, Peter Drucker, Milton Friedman, Heritage Foundation, Reason Foundation, Pacific Institute, Manhattan Institute, National Legal Center for the Public Interest, VOLUNTEER -- National Center for Citizen Involvement, International Executive Service Corps, United Way with its Services Identification System, churches, labor unions, etc.

Privatization is now "an idea whose time has come" The knowledge, communication, and computer industry can make political representatives obsolete!

Privatization might well be the theme for the 200th anniversary of the Constitution. Privatization is essential for national salvation.

To restore privatization is the National Center for Privatization's purpose. May we help you?

With best wishes,

Willard W. Garvey

WWG:ks

Encl: Heritage Foundation paper
National Center for Privatization brochure

Chief among the leadership of the Council for National Policy is Richard Viguerie who pushed for Palin's selection.

Richard Viguerie, Godfather of the Reactionary Conservative Movement

Viguerie started his own direct mail fundraising company, RAVCO, now Viguerie Communications, using Barry Goldwater mailing lists. In 1970s, he did fundraising for Paul Weyrich's Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and in 1976 ran for the presidential nomination of the neo-fascist, Klan-infested American Independent Party (AIP) of George Wallace. In 1975, he created The Conservative Caucus (TCC) with Howard Phillips.

In 1986, Viguerie was rescued from near bankruptcy thanks to earning an account for distribution of the Unification Church-owned Insight magazine. In 1987, Bo Hi Pak, a former Korean military-intelligence officer and Moon's top U.S. operative, paid $10.06 million for Viguerie's office building. Also, in 1987, Viguerie became Secretary of the Moon-controlled American Freedom Coalition (AFC), an alliance of political conservatives and conservative religious groups and individuals. In this position, Viguerie mailed millions of letters appealing for funds to lobby aid to the Contras and promote Oliver North's testimony before Congress.

Viguerie's past and present clients include: NCPAC, The Conservative Caucus, Christian Crusade, Korean Cultural Freedom Foundation (Rev. Moon), Gun Owners of America, YAF, Free Congress Foundation and numerous election campaigns. Among his wealthy contributors are right-wing billionaires Joseph Coors and William Herbert and Nelson Bunker Hunt.

Viguerie described his conservative brethren as being "cranky" over the choice of McCain and boasted his success in forcing Palin onto the ticket: "Some folks raise questions about John McCain's health, but we know one thing about his health: His hearing works just fine."

In case any of us are inclined to think the hard right will not back McCain/Palin 100% here's what Viguerie client and fellow Council member said about supporting George W. Bush in 2000:
"the Bush campaign apparatus is doing its best to suppress conservative activism." Bush had apparently not spoken with sufficient fervor against abortion and refused to establish an antiabortion litmus test for his running mate and judicial appointees. Weyrich went on to threaten that "Bush will fail to fire up the social conservative activists he needs to carry him on to victory"

Weyrich was blowing smoke, and thanks to the Supremes, we all know how that turned out. But make no mistake the real heavyweight backing Sarah Palin is Big Oil and in particular, Koch Industries, (the Council's secret underwriter and Birch Society co-founder). They'll even pretend she was against them before she was for them.