Category: Snake Oil

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Santoro’s Holey Stockings

Santoro revealedAngry and embarrassed, Howard accepts Santoro’s resignation – in the light of previous resistance exemplified by a declaration that Santoro’s lapse of memory was a mistake, not a sackable offence, we are left in no doubt that the prime monster’s vaunted code of ministerial conduct has been garish window-dressing to cover up shameless debauched hypocrisy.

Howard has enjoined all his ministers to scrutinise *their* shareholdings – thus prospects for ongoing hilarious political entertainment have been improved considerably over and above the still-pending federal police investigation into three MPs over allegations of abuses of their printing allowances. The latest Morgan polls show Labor maintaining a stunning lead 61/39 – looking very grim for the Libs at this juncture.

Companies which Santoro absent-mindedly held and or traded through his and his wife’s family trust since late 2005 are (courtesy of William Burrough’s Baboon):

Continue reading “Santoro’s Holey Stockings”

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Wowsers at Work

“All your children are poor unfortunate victims of lies you believe. A plague upon your ignorance that keeps the young from the truth they deserve.” – Frank Zappa 1968

Censorship is badMewling net nanny Helen Coonan has been pushing the ill-considered, atrociously framed draft Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Services) Bill 2006, recently leaked gleefully by staunch defenders of free speech and Oz democracy, Crikey.

All commercial content was proposed to be classified by the blackshirt bookburners at the OLFC– and contravenors punished retrospectively. Howard and his dunderbrained prigs are apparently willing to threaten and sacrifice the profitability of a vast number of thriving net industries perhaps in case Kevvie’s mob goes the whole hog and usurps the intellectually challenged fundo vote as well as the middle of the road religious folks.

Peter Black cogently points out several major problems with the proposed legislation.

MudslingersStill, one might regard this libtrog piece of wowserism as a flailing last ditch attempt to jerk public interest back to good old safe rightard family values and away from the embarrassing “Who’s Helped the Most Crooks and Who Has the Most Crooks” sacrificial chess game which little Johnny looks to be losing by a resignation or two at present.

The silly bill has been withdrawn and we will have to wait in shuddering anticipation of a possible reemergent succubus. Meanwhile, we’ll ponder once more horror writer Stephen King’s immortal advice:

“What I tell kids is don’t get mad, get even. Run, don’t walk, to the first library you can find and read what they’re trying to keep out of your eyes. Read what they’re trying to keep out of your brains. Because that’s exactly what you need to know.”

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Little Johnny’s List O’ Lies

This list is courtesy of beloved net identity, pusssycat, who in turn purrrloined it from a site now oddly defunct.

JOHN HOWARD LIE:

“I can promise you that we will follow policies which will, over a period of time, bring down the foreign debt . . . our first priority in Government economically will be to tackle the current account deficit.”
John Howard, Doorstop interview, Debt Truck Launch, 20 September 1995

The Truth:
Foreign debt was $361 billion at the end of September 2003, an increase of 90 per cent on the September 1995 level. The current account deficit was $11.9 billion at the end of September 2003, an increase of 112.5 per cent on the September 1995 level.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, ABS@, Time Series Spreadsheets (Balance of Payments and Investment Position, Australia 5302.0, Reserve Bank of Australia (H) Bulletin, Current Account)

And now:

Current account deficit soars to over $15b. Australia’s current account deficit has widened by 20 per cent in the December quarter. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show the current account deficit has climbed to just over $15 billion. Imports of plant, transport equipment and machinery contributed heavily to the rise.

There was also a big surge in imports of consumer goods.

The ABS says the deficit on goods and services will detract 1.3 percentage points from GDP in the fourth-quarter.

Australia’s net foreign debt now stands at $521 billion.

JOHN HOWARD LIE:

Labor MP question to the Prime Minister: “Prime Minister, was the government contacted by the major Australian producer of ethanol or by any representative
of his company or the Industry Association before its decision to impose fuel excise on ethanol?”

John Howard: “Speaking for myself, I did not personally have any discussions, from recollection, with any of them.”
John Howard, Question Time, 17 September 2002

The Truth:
John Howard had met on 1 August the head of Manildra Group [Dick Honan], which makes 87 per cent of our ethanol, and they discussed how to help the Australian ethanol industry.
Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Official Record of Meeting, 1 August 2002

Continue reading “Little Johnny’s List O’ Lies”

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The Great Iraqi Oil Robbery

Iraq Oil Liberation

The Coalition of the Gobbling has now set the scene for massive exploitation by its vampirish associates of Iraq’s oil without so much as a murmur from the Iraqi puppet government.

The law is set to be approved in March.

On Monday, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s cabinet in Baghdad approved the draft of the new Iraqi oil law. The government regards it as “a major national project”. The key point of the law is that Iraq’s immense oil wealth (115 billion barrels of proven reserves, third in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iran) will be under the iron rule of a fuzzy “Federal Oil and Gas Council” boasting “a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq”. That is, nothing less than predominantly US Big Oil executives.

The law represents no less than institutionalized raping and pillaging of Iraq’s oil wealth. It represents the death knell of nationalized (from 1972 to 1975) Iraqi resources, now replaced by production sharing agreements (PSAs) – which translate into savage privatization and monster profit rates of up to 75% for (basically US) Big Oil. Sixty-five of Iraq’s roughly 80 oilfields already known will be offered for Big Oil to exploit. As if this were not enough, the law reduces in practice the role of Baghdad to a minimum. Oil wealth, in theory, will be distributed directly to Kurds in the north, Shi’ites in the south and Sunnis in the center. For all practical purposes, Iraq will be partitioned into three statelets. Most of the country’s reserves are in the Shi’ite-dominated south, while the Kurdish north holds the best prospects for future drilling.

Iraq Freedom

The approval of the draft law by the fractious 275-member Iraqi Parliament, in March, will be a mere formality. Hussain al-Shahristani, Iraq’s oil minister, is beaming. So is dodgy Barnham Salih: a Kurd, committed cheerleader of the US invasion and occupation, then deputy prime minister, big PSA fan, and head of a committee that was debating the law.

But there was not much to be debated. The law was in essence drafted, behind locked doors, by a US consulting firm hired by the Bush administration and then carefully retouched by Big Oil, the International Monetary Fund, former US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz’ World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development. It’s virtually a US law (its original language is English, not Arabic).

Scandalously, Iraqi public opinion had absolute no knowledge of it – not to mention the overwhelming majority of Parliament members. Were this to be a truly representative Iraqi government, any change to the legislation concerning the highly sensitive question of oil wealth would have to be approved by a popular referendum.

In real life, Iraq’s vital national interests are in the hands of a small bunch of highly impressionable (or downright corrupt) technocrats. Ministries are no more than political party feuds; the national interest is never considered, only private, ethnic and sectarian interests. Corruption and theft are endemic. Big Oil will profit handsomely – and long-term, 30 years minimum, with fabulous rates of return – from a former developing-world stalwart methodically devastated into failed-state status.

Once the insurgents, guerillas and Iraqi public become aware of the impending oil rape by the Coalition of the Gobbling, it is quite possible that there will be a strategic unification and uprising against the common colonialist enemy which no Doodoo surge will be able to suppress.

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Coalition of the Gobbling vs Iraq 11

Dick and John deals

The Iraqi prize – its oil – is about to come under Coalition of the Gobbling companies’ control.

… Now comes new evidence of the big prize in Iraq that rarely gets mentioned at White House briefings.

A proposed new Iraqi oil and gas law began circulating last week among that country’s top government leaders and was quickly leaked to various Internet sites – before it has even been presented to the Iraqi parliament.

Under the proposed law, Iraq’s immense oil reserves would not simply be opened to foreign oil exploration, as many had expected. Amazingly, executives from those companies would actually be given seats on a new Federal Oil and Gas Council that would control all of Iraq’s reserves.

In other words, Chevron, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum and the other Western oil giants could end up on the board of directors of the Iraqi Federal Oil and Gas Council, while Iraq’s own national oil company would become just another competitor.

The new law would grant the council virtually all power to develop policies and plans for undeveloped oil fields and to review and change all exploration and production contracts.

Since most of Iraq’s 73 proven petroleum fields have yet to be developed, the new council would instantly become a world energy powerhouse.

“We’re talking about trillions of dollars of oil that are at stake,” said Raed Jarrar, an independent Iraqi journalist and blogger who obtained an Arabic copy of the draft law and posted an English-language translation on his Web site over the weekend.

More recently from Raed’s blog:

My contacts in the Iraqi government, in addition to some fellow Iraqi bloggers, confirmed that the oil law draft was submitted to the Council of Ministers last week, and is expected to reach to the Council of Representatives (the Parliament) very soon after it gets approved in the Council of Ministers. The law will be considered active in case it gets approved by the parliament.

For a clear analysis of the Coalition of the Gobbling’s proposed endgame for the current episode of the Great Game and its plans for global oil dominance, read William Clark’s stunning article of December 06.