$1.64 gallon when Bush took over .. how does it feel FLOCK members?

[Anti GWB]

You get what you deserve .....

I hope you are feeling the pinch as there is no sympathy from the left for
the way your asses defend oil corps that rip off Americans

Enjoy it ... the Bush game plan as outlined by Rove via emails Greg Palast
snagged is working just as planned by BUSHCO

[mr merlin]

As a rich republican I am happy and amused that most of the poor democrats are suffering!

[Anti GWB]

Sure ya are Merlin ....

you have what in your savings? maybe $100??

[Jeff Jones]

The only thing going up at a more ridiculous rate than the price of gasoline is Ant-GWB's post count.

[Anti GWB]

Jones ....

perhaps you have mistaken me as someone who gives a rats ass about
your comments

[Jeff Jones]

Same old thing. Poster tells me he doesn't care but then cares enough to post that he doesn't care.

You have to love forums.

[MRRIGHT]

I don't like high gas prices anymore than the average person, but it is the speculators driving the price higher.... Not Bush.

[Anti GWB]

Bullshit .....

Go read Palast story on the emails he busted Rove on regarding gas prices

[mr merlin]

All I know is that the higher gas prices go, the richer the honorable Dick Cheney and his friends at halliburton will be... and whats good for halliburton is good for the country!

[G. K. TEMUJIN]

Originally Posted by Anti GWB

Jones ....

perhaps you have mistaken me as someone who gives a rats ass about
your comments

[G. K. TEMUJIN]

The Self-Righteous Rich

Rockefeller Family Fables

By SHARON SMITH
On April 30th, reporters flocked to the penthouse suite of a Midtown Manhattan hotel where fifteen representatives of the Rockefeller dynasty were holding court. There, the Rockefellers chastised oil giant Exxon-Mobil for failing to invest in “alternative energy” sources, invoking their own moral authority as Exxon-Mobil’s longest standing shareholders.

Family spokesperson Neva Rockefeller Goodwin sanctimoniously recalled the memory of her great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and originator of the family fortune. “Kerosene was the alternative energy of its day when he realized it could replace whale oil,” she argued. “Part of John D. Rockefeller’s genius was in recognizing early the need and opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and cleaner fuel.”
But the indignation of today’s generation of Rockefellers—who inherited their own exorbitant wealth from Standard Oil, Exxon-Mobil’s parent corporation—is aimed more at ensuring the continued financial health of the family’s trust funds than concern for the future of the world’s population.

As Peter O'Neill, great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, commented at the press conference, “I have a world of respect for what the company has done well. In fact, if the next 20 years of the energy business were just going to be about oil and gas, we probably wouldn't be here today.”
Nevertheless, the corporate media obediently described the Rockefellers as concerned environmentalists. The New York Times ran the headline, “Can Rockefeller Heirs Turn Exxon ******r?” News outlets quoted freely from the Rockefellers’ press release, which described John D. Rockefeller as “one of the first major philanthropists in the U.S. and the World” and the family’s Rockefeller Foundation’s mission as "promot[ing] the well-being of mankind throughout the world.”
The family fable concocted above warrants a rebuttal. Standard Oil was the world’s first oil monopoly, and Rockefeller’s greed was insatiable. Indeed, the Rockefeller family legacy is deeply entangled with the U.S.’ current reliance on oil—and automobiles. Moreover, the family’s “philanthropic” pursuits include a peculiar preoccupation with lowering the birth rates of the world’s black and brown populations throughout the twentieth century—highlighting the absurdity of their claim to be promoting the well being of humankind. Mainstream journalists could easily uncover these unsavory aspects of the family history but instead report the Rockefellers’ self-sanitized version, with all its glaring omissions.

* * *

Indeed, the family’s selective memory of its patriarch, John D. Rockefeller, as a saintly philanthropist stands in sharp contrast to his role as a nineteenth-century robber baron.

“God gave me my money,” he said. “Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.”

Rockefeller’s conscience apparently did not dictate paying his employees more than a starvation wage. His admirers praise him for making gasoline affordable to average Americans, and he did indeed aim to produce large amounts of "cheap and good" gasoline for mass consumption, successfully lowering the price of gas from 58 cents to 8 cents a gallon. But he achieved this goal through ruthless union busting, hiring his own private militias to crush workers who dared to go on strike to demand higher wages.

The private armies of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Rockefeller was a cutthroat capitalist who built his oil monopoly in the decades after the Civil War using methods more in keeping with the bribery, blackmail and back stabbing of a mafia family than an honest entrepreneur. As he once proclaimed, "I would rather earn 1 percent off a [sic] 100 people's efforts than 100 percent of my own efforts.” This credo made him the richest man in the world.

As he quietly bought up his smaller oil competitors with these methods, Rockefeller entered into secret—and illegal—agreements with railroad magnates that gave discounts as off-the books rebates to his growing oil monopoly, easily driving smaller refiners out of business. By 1879, Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of the oil refining business in the U.S. When the Supreme Court finally forced Rockefeller to formally disband Standard Oil as a monopoly trust in 1911, the damage was done. Indeed, the breakup doubled the value of his stock and gave birth to oil conglomerates Esso and Mobil (now Exxon-Mobil), Arco and Amoco (now BP), Pennzoil (now Shell), Chevron and Conoco. Rockefeller spent his remaining decades playing golf.

* * *

John D. Rockefeller’s descendents have happily carried on in the robber baron’s tradition, alongside a public relations machine that routinely airbrushes the family history. These heirs have never needed to work a day in their lives to afford the best of everything money could buy. The Rockefeller name ensures each generation a ten-figure trust fund and a guaranteed spot at an elite university, enabled by the Rockefeller family’s generous donations. The many chapels, libraries, museums and other buildings bearing the Rockefeller name on private campuses across the U.S. bear testament to the family’s self-serving approach to gift giving. Most recently, David M. Rockefeller, Sr., former chairman, president and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank, and former chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Group, donated a record $100 million to Harvard University, citing his fond memories as part of the class of ’36.

By design, the Rockefellers have received no blame for their pivotal role in destroying the vast trolley car system that dominated U.S. cities before the 1940s, thereby increasing city dwellers’ dependency on automobiles and gas-fueled bus lines. Yet the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of California joined General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum to form the National City Lines holding company, which bought out and dismantled more than 100 trolley systems in 45 cities (including New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Minneapolis and Los Angeles) between 1936 and 1950.

In 1949, these corporate defendants were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize transportation services. Indeed, the corporations behind National City Lines were each fined just $5,000—while each of their directors paid a mere $1 fine—a small price to pay for the windfall in profits they all enjoyed in the decades that followed. Congress offered up tax dollars to build the enormous highway infrastructure that encouraged automobile travel in the 1950s, while federal investment in mass transit and train systems languished. As Noam Chomsky noted, “By the mid-1960s, one out of six business enterprises was directly dependent on the motor vehicle industry.”

* * *

No Rockefeller family history would be complete without highlighting their central role in shaping twentieth century population control policy, aimed explicitly at curbing birth rates among the non-Caucasian poor. Beginning in 1910, Rockefeller money flowed into organizations such as the Race Betterment Foundation and the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association, which spearheaded the eugenics movement—the “science” of “improving heredity.” These organizations, also funded by the upstanding Carnegie, Harriman and Kellogg families, sponsored academics claiming that those at the top of the social ladder had proven their racial superiority, while those at the bottom were biologically incapable of success. The eugenics movement encouraged the “superior” races to marry each other and have lots of children, while promoting forced sterilization, racial segregation and deportation of immigrants of those deemed “unfit” to reproduce.

The “superior” races so admired by the eugenics movement were “Nordic,” with blond hair and blue eyes, and the movement soon gained an admirer in Adolph Hitler. In 1924’s "Mein Kampf," Hitler noted, "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States." By the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation was already providing hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund eugenics research in Germany; in 1929 alone, $317,000 of Rockefeller money went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, according to Edwin Black, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003. Although the Rockefellers had withdrawn all funding to German research by the onset of the Second World War in 1939, Black argued, “[b]y that time, the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.”


By the 1930s, the wheels for forced sterilization were also in motion inside the U.S. Laws were enacted in 27 states in 1932, calling for compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded, insane, criminal, and physically defective.” In 1939, the Birth Control Federation of America, as historian Dorothy E. Roberts described, “planned a ‘Negro Project’ designed to limit reproduction by blacks ‘who still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear children properly.’” In 1974, an Alabama court found that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor black teenagers had been sterilized in that state alone.
After World War Two, population control agencies set their sights overseas. In the 1960s, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, heavily funded by the Rockefellers alongside the U.S. government, played a key role in a coercive sterilization programs targeting Third World populations. By 1968, one-third of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico—still a U.S. colony—had been permanently sterilized, often without their knowledge or consent. Rockefeller-funded programs sterilized 40,000 women in Colombia between 1963 and 1965, according to feminist author Bonnie Mass. These are just two examples among many.


The self-righteous claims of the current generation of Rockefellers must be viewed in this context. They have kept silent since the 1989 Exxon-Valdez Alaskan oil spill, even as Exxon-Mobil has refused to pay court-ordered compensation to the nearly 33,000 Alaskans who won a lawsuit against Exxon in 1994 for the company’s “reckless” behavior. Nor have they uttered a word of protest following news that growing numbers of employed workers across the U.S. are lining up at food pantries due to the skyrocketing price of food and gasoline. As Bill Bolling, founder of the Atlanta Community Food Bank, told CNN, "People are giving up buying groceries so that they can pay rent and put gas in the car."

Today’s Rockefellers praise Exxon-Mobil for its current status as the most profitable corporation in U.S. history, having raked in a record $40.6 billion in profits in 2007. They are merely watching out for their own parasitical futures.

Sharon Smith is the author of Women and Socialism and Subterranean Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States.

Sharon Smith: Rockefeller Family Fables

[DimeDR]

Merlin
All I know is that the higher gas prices go, the richer the honorable Dick Cheney and his friends at halliburton will be... and whats good for halliburton is good for the country!

thought id seen it all from the Woolites

[Anti GWB]

Dick Cheney is "honorable"????

Let us rundown other "honorable" fellas who Merlin admired:

---

---

[G. K. TEMUJIN]

The following is an image of the new $5 dollar bill

[G. K. TEMUJIN]

May 14, 2008

Worried About the Price of Gas? End the Wars

Oil Wars

By ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH
Despite all the recent talk of soaring prices at the pump, political and economic pundits rarely mention the impact of war and political instability in the Middle East on the skyrocketing price of oil. There is strong evidence, however, that the heightened price of energy is a direct consequence of the destabilizing wars and geopolitical insecurity in the region.

These include not only the raging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the threat of a looming war against Iran. The record of soaring oil prices shows that anytime there is a renewed U.S. military threat against Iran, fuel prices move up several notches.

Not long ago the price of oil was about a quarter of what it is today. But soon after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq the price of oil began to escalate in tandem with the escalation of war and political turbulence in the Middle East. The fact that the rise in the price of oil has followed the heightened insecurity in oil markets is neither accidental nor a simple correlation; it represents a causality that runs from the heightened insecurity in oil markets to the inflated price of energy.

The war also contributes to the escalation of fuel cost in indirect ways; for example, by plunging the U.S. ever deeper into debt and depreciating the dollar. As oil is priced largely in U.S. dollars, oil exporting countries ask for more dollars per barrel of oil as the dollar loses value.

Not only are the raging wars in the Middle East responsible for energy price inflation, they are also responsible for price inflation of many other commodities, especially grains and other foodstuff, whose production and transportation depend on fuel. According to the World Bank, food prices have more than doubled over the past three years. The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147% over the past year alone. The mounting food prices have caused hunger and deadly violence in many countries, including Haiti, Egypt, Thailand, Indonesia, Senegal, and Malaysia.

This shows that the disastrous consequences of U.S. wars of choice go beyond Iraq, Afghanistan, and the United States. The skyrocketing costs of fuel and food tend to plunge many of the world economies into a 1970s-style stagflation (a combination of stagnation and inflation) that threatens many lives and/or livelihoods around the globe.

Neoconservative forces in and around the Bush administration and beneficiaries of war dividends—wishing to deflect attention away from war as the main culprit for the skyrocketing energy prices—tend to blame secondary or marginally relevant factors: OPEC, China and India for their increased demand for energy, or supply-demand imbalances in global markets.

Whatever the contributory role of these factors, the fact remains that the current oil price hikes started with the beginning of the Bush administration’s wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, a closer examination of these factors reveals that their roles in the current price inflation of oil have been negligible.

The claim that there is a supply-demand imbalance in global energy markets cannot be backed by facts. The alleged disparity between supply and demand is said to be due to the rapidly growing demand coming from China and India. But that rapid growth in demand is largely offset by a number of counterbalancing factors. These include slower growth in U.S. demand due to its slower economic growth, efficient energy utilization in industrially advanced countries, and increases in oil production by OPEC, Russia, and other oil producing countries.
Nor can OPEC be blamed for the current energy crisis. OPEC’s desire to sometimes limit the supply of oil in order to shore up its price is limited by a number of factors. For one thing, OPEC members are not unmindful of the fact that inordinately high oil prices can hurt their own long-term interests as this is bound to prompt oil importers to economize on fuel consumption and search for alternative sources of energy.

For another, OPEC members also know that inordinately high oil prices could precipitate economic recessions in oil importing countries that would, in turn, lower demand for their oil. In addition, high oil prices tend to raise the cost of oil producers’ imports of manufactured products as high energy costs are bound to be reflected in higher costs of those products.

For these reasons leading OPEC members such as Saudi Arabia and Iran have repeatedly stated that they prefer stable, predictable, and moderate oil prices to short-term oil price hikes that result from war, political turbulence and unstable markets.
The political implications of this discussion are clear: to bring down the prices of fuel and food requires bringing home the troops. By lowering the energy costs of production and transportation this will help save our own and many other economies from the plagues of inflation and stagnation. It will bring relief to hundreds of millions worldwide who are burdened by crippling energy bills and the crushing costs of feeding their families.

Not many people would doubt the devastating socio-economic consequences of the U.S. wars of choice, both at home and abroad. The question is: why can’t they be stopped?

The answer is that while the war has been ruinous to many, it has been a boon for a few, the powerful special interests who not only benefit from war (both economically and geopolitically), but who have also positioned themselves within the U.S. power structure in ways that allows them to constantly invent new enemies and make new wars in order to further their nefarious interests.

Who are these powerful special interests, the highly influential beneficiaries of war dividends who camouflage their evil objectives behind national interests in order to perpetuate war and militarism and fill out their deep pockets, or further their geopolitical interests in the Middle East?

A most widely-cited factor behind the Bush administration’s drive to war and the soaring energy cost is said to be Big Oil. Despite its popularity, however, this claim cannot be supported by facts; it tends to rest more on perception and precedent than reality.

It is true that for a long time, from the beginning of Middle Eastern oil exploration and discovery in the early twentieth century until the mid-1970s, colonial and/or imperial powers controlled oil either directly, or through control of oil producing countries—at times, even by military force. But that pattern of exploitation of global markets and resources has now changed.

It is also true that, once the Bush administration commenced with the invasion of Iraq, American oil companies set up shop in Baghdad in order to partake in the spoils of war. But this was not limited to oil companies; many non-oil transnational corporations likewise rushed to Baghdad to make an economic killing.

The larger part of the perception, however, stems from the fact that oil companies handsomely benefit from oil price hikes that result from war and political turbulence in the Middle East. Such benefits are, however, largely incidental. Surely, American oil companies would welcome the spoils of war. From the largely incidental oil price hikes that follow war and political convulsion, most observers automatically conclude that Big Oil must have been behind the war.

There is no hard evidence, however, that oil companies pushed for or supported the Bush administration’s plans of invading Iraq—just as they are now leery of the administration’s threat of a military strike against Iran. “The big oil companies were not enthusiastic about the Iraqi war,” says Fareed Mohamedi of PFC Energy, an energy consultancy firm based in Washington, D.C. “Corporations like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco want stability, and this is not what Bush is providing in Iraq and the Gulf region,” adds Mohamedi [1].
During the past few decades, major oil companies have consistently opposed U.S. policies and military threats against countries like Iran, Iraq, and Libya.

They have, indeed, time and again, lobbied U.S.
foreign policy makers for the establishment of peaceful relations and diplomatic rapprochement with those countries. The Iran-Libya Sanction Act of 1996 (ILSA) is a strong testament to the fact that oil companies nowadays view wars, economic sanctions, and international political tensions as harmful to their long-term business interests and, accordingly, strive for peace, not war, in international relations.
The 1996 Iran-Libya Sanction Act, which amounted to a total trade and investment embargo against these two countries, penalized not only Iran and Libya, but also major American oil companies, especially the Conoco oil company that had just signed a $1 billion contract to develop fields in Iran.
It is no secret that the major force behind the Iran-Libya Sanction Act was the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The success of AIPAC in passing ILSA through both the Congress and the White House over the opposition of the major U.S. oil companies is testament to the fact that, in the context of U.S. policy in the Middle East, even the influence of Big Oil pales vis-à-vis the influence of the pro-Israel lobby [2].

So, if Big Oil no longer favors war and political turbulence in oil markets, what, then, are the driving forces behind the Bush administration’s war and military adventures in the Middle East?

Many would immediately point to the power and influence of neoconservative forces in and around the Bush administration. While obviously this would not be false, it would not be the whole truth either; it hides more than it reveals. Specifically, it tends to lose sight of the bigger, but largely submerged, picture: the powerful special interests that lie behind the façade of neoconservative figures.

There is clear evidence that the leading neoconservative figures have been long-time political activists who have worked through think tanks set up to serve either as the armaments lobby, or the pro-Israel lobby, or both—going back to the 1990s, 1980s and, in some cases, 1970s. These corporate-backed militaristic think tanks include the American Enterprise Institute, Project for the New American Century, Center for Security Policy, Middle East Media Research Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Forum, National Institute for Public Policy, and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

There is also evidence that the major components of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, including the war on Iraq, were designed long before George W. Bush arrived in the White House—largely at the drawing boards of these think thanks, often in collaboration directly, or indirectly, with the Pentagon, the arms lobby, and pro-Israel lobby. Even a cursory look at the records of these militaristic think tanks—their membership, their financial sources, their institutional structures, and the like—shows that they are set up to essentially serve as institutional fronts to camouflage the dubious business and political relationship between the Pentagon, its major contractors, and the pro-Israel lobby on the one hand, and militaristic neoconservative politicians, on the other [3].
While the Bush administration’s unilateral wars and military adventures have brought unnecessary death, destruction, and economic hardship to millions, including many in the United States, they have also brought fortunes and prosperity to war profiteers. Pentagon contractors constitute the overwhelming majority of these profiteers. They include not only giant manufacturing contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing, but also a complex maze of over 100,000 service contractors and sub-contractors such as private army or security corporations and “reconstruction” firms.

The rise of the fortunes of the major Pentagon contractors can be measured, in part, by the growth of the Pentagon budget since President George W. Bush arrived in the White House: it has grown by more than 76% percent, from $297 billion in 2001 to almost $520 billion in 2008. These figures do not include the Homeland Security budget, which is close to $40 billion for the 2008 fiscal year alone, and the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which amount to nearly $200 billion per year.

The skyrocketing Pentagon’s share of public money has meant that, for example, in the current (2008) fiscal year military spending represents 58 cents out of every dollar spent by the U.S. government on discretionary programs [4]. (Discretionary programs include everything except Social Security and Medicare, that is, education, health, housing assistance, international affairs, natural resources and environment, justice, veterans’ benefits, science and space, transportation, training/employment and social services, economic development, and several more items.)

The soaring military spending has also meant that beneficiaries of war dividends are essentially looting the national treasury in order to line their pockets. These include not only the Pentagon and its military contractors but also members of the key Congressional committees who have grown increasingly addicted to generous contributions to their reelection that come from the fortunes of the Pentagon and its business clients.

U.S. lawmakers have additional, more direct, financial interests in war and military spending: “Members of Congress have invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contractors to provide goods and services to U.S. armed forces.” This means “lawmakers charged with overseeing Pentagon contractors hold stocks in those very firms” [5].

It also means that our esteemed lawmakers know how or where to invest most profitably: “Shares of U.S. defense companies have nearly trebled since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq. . . . The feeling that makers of ships, planes and weapons are just getting into their stride has driven shares of leading Pentagon contractors Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., and General Dynamics Corp. to all-time highs” [6].

It is not surprising, then, that many elected officials with input or voting power in the process of the appropriation of the Pentagon budget find themselves in the pocket of defense contractors. Neither is it surprising that these dubious relationships should serve as breeding grounds for the near legendary levels of waste, inefficiency, and corruption that surround the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Two major conclusions follow from this discussion. The first is that, as pointed out earlier, war and political instability in the Middle East are the major driving forces behind the soaring price of oil; and that, therefore, to contain or reverse the rising trend of energy prices requires bringing U.S. troops home. The second conclusion is that achievement of this goal, the goal of ending U.S. wars of aggression, is possible only if (a) money or profits are taken out of war, and (b) money is taken out of elections [7].
References

[1] See Roger Burbach, Bush Ideologues vs. Big Oil: The Iraq Game Gets Even Stranger, CounterPunch.
[2] Melinda K. Ruby, “Is Oil the Driving Force to War?” unpublished Senior thesis, Dept. of Economics and Finance, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa (spring 2004); see also Herman Franssen and Elaine Morton, “A Review of U.S. Unilateral Sanctions Against Iran,” Middle East Economic Survey 45, no. 34 (26 August 2002), pp. D1-D5 (D section contains op eds. as opposed to staff-written articles).
[3] William D. Hartung & Michelle Ciarrocca, “The Military-Industrial-Think Tank Complex,” Multinational Monitor (Jan./Feb. 2003); DiLip Hiro, Secrets and Lies: Operation Iraqi Freedom and After (Nation Books 2004).
[4] Hartung, W. D. 2007. “Bush Military Budget Highest since WW II