Bush's Words on Oil are Utterly Devoid of Meaning

by Joel McNally

The current political speechifying over rising gas prices may not accomplish anything to ease the financial pain of paying $3 for a gallon of gas, but at least it's providing us with laughs by the barrel.

There stands oilman President George W. Bush, presiding over the first government of the United States of oilmen, by oilmen and for oilmen.

Lately, every time the president opens his mouth, the most bizarre things come out. And, for a change, it's absolutely intentional.

One day, Bush is extolling the virtues of running our cars on cooking grease, sugar, grass, soybean oil, corn and wood chips. The next, he is talking about cracking down on Detroit automakers to force them to start building more fuel-efficient cars.

For a brief moment, I thought the CIA had tortured the Bush family into publicly confessing to all the vote fraud they committed in Florida and Al Gore had been installed as president after all.

Then you realize that the things George W. Bush says in public are totally meaningless. He will literally read anything that is placed in front of him, whether it is "My Pet Goat" or a stern speech against price gouging by his oilmen fraternity brothers.

They're just words. Some words are bigger than others and easier to pronounce. But the words uttered by this president on oil prices are utterly devoid of meaning.

George Bush has always been the Manchurian Candidate, placed in office by Texas oilmen and other multimillionaire robber barons for the sole purpose of cutting the personal income taxes of Texas oilmen and other multimillionaires.

So don't hold your breath waiting for that big federal initiative to develop automobiles that run on Crisco.

This is the same Republican-led Congress that has awarded the oil companies more than $10 billion in tax incentives, allegedly to encourage more drilling.

If anything gets greased in the current Republican Congress, it will be even more huge tax breaks for the oil companies to encourage them to open up some more refineries.

Why is it that there is a critical shortage in oil refineries in this country contributing to the high price of gasoline, you may ask.

Simple. As the oilman administration of George Bush lovingly oversaw oil company mergers reducing competition from 20 companies in the late '90s to six today, those merged behemoths began shutting down refineries to increase their profits.

It worked like a charm. Now those companies will be needing billions more dollars in tax incentives to jolly them into re-opening refineries. They call that free enterprise because our government keeps showering oil companies that are making record profits with more free money ours.

It's almost as if the entire energy policy of the current government was worked out behind closed doors in oilman Vice President Dick Cheney's office by a secret energy task force made up of oil company executives.

Consumers who want to deny the most corrupt multinational oil companies and their corrupt government co-conspirators from laughing at us all the way to the bank should consider buying their gasoline from Citgo.

It's frequently the smartest move anyway. The station near my house is consistently four or five cents lower than BP, the world's second largest corporation, or ExxonMobil, the world's third largest.

Even more important, Citgo is owned by the government of Venezuela, headed by President Hugo Chavez, who is definitely not a crony of Bush and Cheney.

Instead, Chavez is the democratically elected leader of Venezuela with the overwhelming support of the poor and the undying enmity of the wealthy classes and corporations that have been shut out of power in that country.

The money you spend on gasoline at Citgo will support democracy and uplift the poor in South America instead of filling the already bulging pockets of the Bush family's favorite sheiks in Saudi Arabia, the country that supplied most of the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center.

Actually, some of your money also will go to uplift the poor in our own country as well. Chavez recently began providing low-cost heating oil to some of the poorest neighborhoods in America, including hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.

No wonder the Bush administration considers Chavez such a dangerous man. If the president of another country starts taking action to assist poor people in our country, pretty soon the poor will start expecting their own president to do the same.

Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle and other Democrats already are agitating to place a limit on oil company profits and use all those obscene excess profits to cut home heating costs.

It will take more than a little anger over gas prices to bring about such a radical political change in this country. It would require a government that served the people instead of the oil companies.