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Comments on Greg Palast's New Book Armed Madhouse

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George W. Bush has done it with a vengeance to service his corporate allies and fight his illegal wars with no end. His administration killed OSHA workplace ergonomic work rules that were more than 10 years in the making; revoked grants to study workplace safety and health; cut funding for job training; cut enforcement positions in OSHA and the Mine Safety and Health Administration; proposed paying welfare recipients below-minimum wages; denied Homeland Security employees the right to bargain collectively and have protection for being a whistle-blower; blocked release of funds to monitor the health of rescue workers at Ground Zero in New York; cut health care benefits for veterans; proposed privatizing 850,000 federal jobs over a number of years; changed overtime work rules that will deprive millions of overtime pay; made it much harder for low-income workers to get the Earned Income Tax Credit; left every child behind (except those of the rich) in his education plan that helped his corporate allies and allowed public education to become even more degraded than it already was; allowed New Orleans to drown from Katrina and much of its majority black population to be ethnically cleansed so private developers could turn a rebuilt city into a theme park for the rich and tourist trade; allowed his Big Oil friends to manipulate the price of their product by controlling refinery output, resulting in everyone getting gouged by high gasoline and heating oil prices (compared to Hugo Chavez's Venezuela where gasoline costs the public 12 cents a gallon); managed to get passed huge tax cuts for the rich and big corporations at the expense of the rest of us, and so much more.

And if all that wasn't bad enough, George Bush got the Democrats to go along with just about all of his programs including two expensive and illegal wars of aggression with one or two more on the drawing board in an endless assault on the world for corporate power and profit and the destruction of our civil liberties at home. And all of it was justified by the scam scare tactic of a "war on terror" against enemies that don't exist.

For the moment at least, we can take some comfort that the Bush administration failed or perhaps more accurately stalled in its effort to achieve its central domestic economic goal after its successful tax cutting scam to benefit the rich - the privatization of Social Security beginning with just a small portion of it. So far, mass public opposition to the idea of turning over the financial future of millions of Americans to the sharks on Wall Street to skim off big fees from retirees combined with multiple Washington scandals and the President's plummeting approval rating has at least temporarily derailed the whole idea. However, it's hard to imagine this Lazarus won't one day rise up to haunt us again because the payoff for Wall Street is so great - between $400 billion to $1 trillion according to an estimate by one University of Chicago economist. Should this plan ever come to fruition, it would be what another writer calls "the granddaddy of all pension rip-off schemes" and what I have called in another article the grandest of grand thefts. That hardly matters to the Bush administration and the leadership in both parties only concerned with showering favors on their corporate paymasters and doing it at the expense of the public welfare.

One Other Key Issue Palast Raises in His Book

Greg discussed one other issue I just wrote about in another article and found myself embroiled in the middle of a maelstrom from having done it. It's the issue of "peak oil" and the man who wrote about it 50 years ago - M. King Hubbert. Having already discussed this subject in another article (available on VHeadline.com, many other web sites and my own blog site - sjlendman.blogspot.com) and paid the price for it once, I don't wish to do it again except to report that Greg discussed it and why it's important.

Greg got into the so-called notion of "peak oil" which M. King Hubbert (a well-respected geologist of his day) explained in a research paper he published in 1956. Hubbert's theory has been interpreted, misinterpreted and now reinterpreted as part of the debate especially prominent now on how close the world may be to "peak oil," the decline in its availability and the effect that will have when there's not enough of it around to meet the demand for this essential commodity. I don't think anyone disagrees there's a finite amount of every commodity. It's just a question of how much there is and what theory best tells us.

There are many knowledgeable people today claiming we've about reached the "peak oil" stage or are close to it, and from then on the available supply will decline and eventually fail to keep up with demand. But there are others with a much different view. Greg is in the latter camp believing in his words "the Peak Oil crowd is crackers." After some of the responses I got from my last article, I want to emphasize this is what Greg believes and these are his words, not mine. I'll keep my views to myself so responders this time can praise or scorn Greg and leave me out of it.

Here's Greg's case based at least in part on the views of a former CIA oil expert now working in the Department of Energy (DOE). He names him in the book. Greg, that analyst and others believe we're nowhere near peaking or running out of oil. He and they claim we have enough oil to last many decades into the future. Why? Because there's oil, and then there's oil. There's the easy to find and refine kind called "light sweet" that's abundant in the Middle East, and there's also the harder to find, more expensive to refine so-called "heavy crude" and oil available from tar sands and oil shale. When these other categories are added in, the potential amount of total oil available skyrockets to off-the-chart numbers. But when those who believe these alternate sources will provide the oil of the future state their views publicly, the fireworks begin. I've learned there are strongly differing views on this controversial subject and both sides think the other one is "crackers."

Here's the case for the believers in heavy crude, tar sands and oil shale. When oil is priced at $10 a barrel, the supply is low because only the easy and cheap to extract and refine kind are economically feasible. But at $70 a barrel, it's a whole new oil market. The heavy stuff and the rest become more economical to extract and refine, and a new far higher finite supply is realized almost magically. In short, it's just a matter of supply and demand with the price of a commodity depending on how much of it consumers want. Too little demand and the price is low, but when it's high like now and rising, then so does the price.

Greg also discussed the way this relates to Venezuela and how this increases that country's available crude reserves to off-the-chart levels. I reported earlier that Venezuela may have reserves of about 350 billion barrels if all their known heavy and light crude are counted. That number is far more than is now officially recognized by OPEC which means the country has greater reserves than the Saudis by that number alone.

But there's more, a lot more. Greg reports his DOE expert believes Venezuela holds 90% of the world's super-heavy tar oil reserves which he estimates to be an astonishing total of 1,360,000,000,000 (1.36 trillion) barrels. So with a report like this coming from a source Greg feels is credible (I make no such claim), it's easy to understand why Venezuela is so strategically important to the US and why it will do whatever it takes to secure control over that supply by any means including an act of aggression to seize it. The US goal isn't access to the oil. It's the control of the supply and its price, what companies profit from it, and overall how control of as much of this resource as possible can be used as a strategic weapon. The stakes for the US are enormous, and the battle lines are drawn in the global game of where the supply of oil is located and how an aggressive and predatory US will make every effort to control as much of it as possible even if it takes waging war to do it.

Greg goes into some detail about why Venezuela is so important to the US, and I've written a great deal on this subject as well explaining that the US is now planning for the fourth time to oust Hugo Chavez after failing three times to do it. Greg has been to Venezuela where he interviewed Chavez. At least from his visit and that contact he understands and writes of Chavez's courage to challenge US hegemony, but having done it finds himself vulnerable as a target for forcible removal including the option I've written about - trying to kill him.

A Summation

Greg's book is an important contribution for readers to gain insight into the machinations of the Bush administration from stealing elections to waging war on Iraq and the world and much more as well. You won't learn than ever on CNN or National Public Radio which has about as much to do with the public as Pravda did in the former Soviet Union. I highly recommend the book as I did his earlier one The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. I've written on that subject myself and know how true it is. Those of us living in the US are governed by a band of out-of-control rogues wanting total world dominance with no "outliers" allowed abroad or dissent at home. The result is a dangerous world for us all and one in which our only defense is good information. Only from that can we understand the problem and know why we need to work for our own self-preservation. Greg's book gives us lots of help. I recommend it strongly and hope those who read it will use it to resist more and fight back for a better, more secure world we all deserve but won't ever get unless we're willing to work for it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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