“Finance is a gun and politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.”

In the movie Godfather Part III Michael Corleone is trying to leave his mafia connections behind by moving his looted wealth into legitimate businesses. In a moment of candor Michael angrily tells his sister Connie, “The higher I go in society, the more crooked it becomes!”

With oil at $135.00 per barrel and gasoline approaching $5.00 per gallon, there has been a lot of Sturm und Drang among politicians over what is causing these prices. One thing is clear, explaining the entire mess as being due to supply and demand is simply insulting. The actual cause for high oil prices are many and involve a confluence of events that begin with that secret conference Vice President Cheney had with the energy industry during the spring of 2001. During those meetings Cheney agreed to rein in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The CFTC is the federal agency that regulates oil trading. The CFTC in 2001 began exempting financial firms from rules that limit speculative buying. The CFTC has also waived regulations on U.S. investors who trade commodities on overseas markets, allowing them to accumulate large quantities of the future oil supply by making purchases on lightly regulated foreign exchanges. Oil futures are then bundled into securities and sold off to investors, mostly big banks and hedge funds.

After deregulating the oil futures market, Bush and Cheney conned the American people into the Iraq war and financed the war on borrowed money thereby weakening the dollar. Since oil is purchased on the international market in dollars, a weaken dollar drove the price of oil up. On top of all these high finance shenanigans, the Federal Reserve continued following it’s policy of low interest rates. Other central banks then drove up their interest rates in order to attract more investment in their currencies which further weaken the dollar. Then Saudi Arabia took a several hundred billion dollar drubbing in the United States sub-prime real estate market.
Finally, the Bush government is pumping millions of barrels of oil into the Strategic Oil Reserve (SOR). If Bush instead pumped out a million barrels per day over the entire summer, the SOR would by depleted by a mere 15% and oil prices would come way down.

Near the climax of the Godfather Part III, Don Lucchesi, interlocker of the Italian political establishment and the mafia, tells Michael Corleone’s bastard nephew Vincent Mancini, “Finance is a gun and politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.” In our America today George Bush and the political establishment are pulling the trigger but only a bang flag pops out.


June 2008

Hillary and Joe Lieberman

Traditionally only two political parties have dominated the competition for power in the United States . What most Americans don’t realize is that since 1985 a third political party has been vying for power and has actually won the Presidency of the United States. The American corporate media ignores this third party pretending that is is nothing more than a wing of one of the other parties. On the far right the Republican National Committee (RNC) dominates. In the center, because there are no viable left-wing social democratic political parties in the United States, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) rules the roost. In between, employing the strategy of “Triangulation” the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) has staked out its piece of the political landscape.

The present Chairman of the DLC is Harold Ford. Mr. Ford last year lost his bid to represent Tennessee in the United States Senate. Past DLC chairs reads like a whose-who of conservative democrats: Sam Nunn, Bill Clinton, John Breaux, Joseph Lieberman, Evan Bayh, and Tom Vilsack. Prominent national DLC members today include Max Baucus, Hillary Clinton, Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Terry McAuliffe, John Edwards, Rahm Emanuel, Al Gore, and John Kerry. California DLC members are Juanita Millender-McDonald, Loretta Sanchez, Adam Schiff, Susan Davis, Cal Dooley, Ellen Tauscher, Gavin Newsom, Jane Harmon, Lois Copps, and Dianne Feinstein.

Paul Wellstone, criticizing the DLC said,"I'm from the democratic wing of the Democrat Party." According to Howard Dean, the present chair of the DNC, DLC operatives actively worked to sabotage his candidacy for the US Presidency in 2004. Senator Barack Obama opposes the DLC. In 2003, he discussed why his positions against NAFTA, the War in Iraq, and in support of universal healthcare were at odds with the DLC, saying that "...these positions make me an unlikely candidate for membership in the DLC. That is why I am not currently, nor have I ever been, a member of the DLC."

It was reported in the New York press last summer that Hillary Clinton quietly funneled money into fellow DLC’er Joe Lieberman’s successful campaign to become an Independent Democratic representing Connecticut in the U.S. Senate.
If Barack Obama becomes the DNC’s Presidential nominee, will he chose another DNC’er for Vice President or will he pick a DLC type? The answer to that question will tell us how unified the Democrats really are.

June 2008

P.S. Obama picked the DNC Joe Biden for his Vice President. After winning the election in November 2008, Obama stacked his cabinet and under secretariats with DLCer.