All We Need to Know About McCain/Palin - the answer is always "oil"
Florida
Johann Hari
Posted September 19, 2008 | 09:38 AM (EST)
The Scandal that Tells Us All We Need to Know About McCain and Palin
Is it possible to empty a presidential election of all political
content? The economy is crashing, the climate is unraveling, Iraq and
Afghanistan are hemorrhaging -- and the debate in the mainstream US
media about who should be the most powerful man in the world was
fixated for weeks on burbling trivia. Barack Obama called Sarah Palin
a pig! (No, he didn't.) Obama wanted to tell toddlers about sex! (No,
he wanted to warn them about pedophiles). The critics of Palin are
sexist! (McCain voted against the Equal Pay Act. That's sexism.)
Can the collapse of Lehman Brothers ram a rare taste of reality into
the campaign? The facts are plain. John McCain enthusiastically backed
every one of George Bush's moves to deregulate the banks and the
mortgage industry that caused this collapse, while Barack Obama
opposed them. This isn't just a credit crunch; it's a conservatism
crunch. The right got their dream of a totally unregulated 'shadow'
banking sector -- and it swiftly imploded, bringing the world economy
down with it.
Yet McCain's indignant promises to "close this casino" are being
reported straight, without even bothering to look at this record - or
noticing that he is cashing cheques from Wall Street lobbyists as fast
as they can be written. They know their man: McCain's mantra even
after this collapse began was "I am always for less regulation."
Indeed, McCain's current adverts saying he will not let the
"recklessness" that led to Lehman Brothers happen again are in part
funded by left-over donations from... Lehman Brothers.
McCain knows his stances on the economy and foreign policy are opposed
by 80 percent of the population as barely-trimmed Bush. So he needs to
toss up a confetti of distraction-issues instead - and Palin was the
biggest distraction of all. This attempt to run out the clock was
working with slick efficiency until the stock exchange's opening bell
started to sound like a death-knell. He is gathering fistfuls more of
confetti as we speak.
The best key to unlocking these tactics may lie in a story that might
seem at first glance a yellowing old scandal, but it is actually as
fresh as tomorrow's Google News. By 1920, the oil age had revved into
first gear. Cars were being bought all over America, so the petrol
price was at an all-time high. The bosses of Big Oil were desperate
for new oilfields -- and there was one in particular they coveted. In
Wyoming, there was a vast oil field called the Teapot Dome reserve,
shaped like a teapot and containing more oil than the whole of
California. But the oilmen were shut out: it had been set aside to
supply the navy with oil if there was ever a national emergency.
So Big Oil thought of a solution. They decided to buy the presidency.
A consortium led by Jake Hamon -- a J.R. Ewing for the Jazz Age --
started to buy the delegates to the 1920 Republican Convention with
brown-envelope bribes, one-by-one. Once they owned a hefty block, they
approached the initial front-runner -- General Leonard Wood -- and
said they would make him the Republican nominee if in return he had to
promise to make Hamon Secretary of the Interior -- and therefore boss
of Teapot Dome. Wood yelled: "I am an American soldier. I'll be damned
if I'll betray my country! Get the hell out of here."
So Big Oil picked a different candidate instead: an obscure, bumbling
Senator called Warren G. Harding, who had been a forty-to-one shot at
the start of the convention. He had barely been out of Ohio and had
only fuzzy ideas about politics -- but he could be marketed as Mr.
Normal, the 1920s equivalent of a hockey mom. Big Oil lavishly funded
a PR campaign selling him to ordinary Americans as One of You. He was
pictured at baseball games eating hot dogs with his sweet family --
while his opponent was presented as arid and "elitist."
As soon as he won, Harding began the payback to the real elite. Teapot
Dome was handed over to Big Oil. He even sent in the marines to clear
the land. Eventually, the scandal broke, and Harding only stayed ahead
of the investigators by dying. There's a consequential coda to this
story. Not long after the scandal, Big Oil shifted tactics -- but only
by a few inches. They decided that instead of under-the-table bribes,
they would start giving "campaign donations." This time, they would
give to all sides, Democrat or Republican, and they would make their
demands through "lobbyists." A scandal suddenly turned into standard
practice: almost the entire American political class became an oil-
igarchy. The other big interests -- especially Wall Street -- followed
close behind with an open cheque-book.
Until now. Barack Obama is the first major presidential candidate
since Teapot Dome to refuse to take money from Big Oil or lobbyists,
with 93 percent of his funding coming from small donors giving $200 or
less. Every other leading candidate (even Al Gore) took their cash and
saw the world through the bottom of an oil-barrel. Not him.
Most of the recent disasters of US policy are due not to the will of
its unfairly-maligned people, but to this oil-slick over Capitol Hill.
What has been the price of Big Oil owning American politicians? The US
government has vandalised all attempts to stop global warming, even
censoring its own scientists' reports. It invaded Iraq killing
hundreds of thousands of people because, as Dick Cheney put it in
1990: "We're there because... that part of the world controls the
world supply of oil." And it fawns over the House of Saud, which
exports a toxic brand of Wahabbism -- all the way to the Twin Towers.
What has been the cost of Big Banks owning American politicians? Watch
the front pages for daily updates.
Obama offers a rare chance to begin to dismantle the petrol pump and
the Wall Street cash-dispenser in the Oval Office. Yes, he would still
have to work with an oil-and-bank-funded Democratic Congress, but the
long-term public interest would at least be able to get a few lungfuls
of air.
Yet the people who brought us Warren Harding and George Bush are now
expertly packaging McCain-Palin as defenders of Main Street -- and
they are outspending Obama's small donors for the first time. They are
even paying for adverts which claim McCain and Palin "stand up to Big
Oil." True, McCain did once flirt with campaign finance reform, but
only after being caught taking money from a fraudster and in return
lobbying on his behalf. Today, he's back to his gut instincts, with
the Republican convention breaking into a chant of "drill, baby,
drill!" led by McCain's men, and the delegates whooping and hollering
for the men who caused this deregulation-crash. He is even committed
to giving his Big Oil donors a $4bn tax cut -- at a time of record
profits.
Jake Hamon couldn't have asked for more -- and he would be delighted
to see us revert to distraction-blather about Palin's cute kids and
her ability to shoot moose for the next fifty days. Unless Obama and
his army of citizen-donors can break through this wall of white noise,
it would appear we all live in Teapot Dome now.
______________________
George Z. Bush
in the Great American Outback take the time and trouble to read and digest
it before they allow themselves to be bamboozled by a cloud of "patriotic"
hype put out by the McCain camp.
George Z.
El Castor
<georg...@charter.net.nospam> wrote:
>Thank you for posting this piece. One can only hope that undecided voters
>in the Great American Outback take the time and trouble to read and digest
>it before they allow themselves to be bamboozled by a cloud of "patriotic"
>hype put out by the McCain camp.
>
>George Z.
>
And now for the truth -- something that George apparently has a
problem with.
"The key to Sarah Palin's popularity in Alaska might have something to
do with the fact that this Friday, her administration will give every
man, woman, and child in Alaska a $3,269 check. What did Palin do to
free up this kind of money? She increased the oil tax from a 10
percent gross revenue tax to a 25 percent profits tax. The result was
a massive influx of cash to state coffers. BP, for example, saw its
state taxes increase by 480 percent."
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/09/12/palin-s-oil-tax-heresy.aspx
"She was joined on the panel by state Republican Party Chairman Randy
Ruedrich, and months later, Palin was the driving force behind an
ethics probe of his activities. Ruedrich faced questions about
conflicts of interest with oil companies, the most serious of which
had to do with a sensitive document that was leaked to an energy
lobbyist. Commission staff also complained that he had used the state
office to do work for the party. As the commission's chairwoman and
designated ethics officer, Palin spearheaded the investigation that
ultimately prompted Ruedrich to resign from the commission."
http://www.nationaljournal.com/conventions/print_friendly.php?ID=co_20080831_8485
"Earlier this year, Palin signed an agreement with a Canadian company,
TransCanada, allowing it to start permitting and other work for
construction of a pipeline despite opposition from some of the major
oil companies - Exxon Mobil, Conoco Philips and BP -- working on
Alaska's North Slope."
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/sarah_palin_and_big_oil.html