SCARY S#!T

Greg Palast: And most importantly, this plan would guarantee that Iraq does not produce beyond its OPEC quota. In other words, we want the oil, but not too much, because that would bring down the price of oil.

In the book, I actually show the pages from these plans for Iraq, and one says the purpose is to enhance the Iraq government’s relationship with OPEC. As you can imagine, OPEC is the oil cartel which basically has its foot on the world’s economic windpipe at the moment - $70 a barrel gasoline. Three bucks a gallon at the pump is what it comes out to. We are literally in there right now to make sure that Iraq remains good members of OPEC. They were afraid that Saddam was going renegade, and he could not be trusted to play ball with OPEC, which is basically an illegal cartel controlled by Saudi Arabia and big oil.

That was the winning plan for the oil. In other words, if you wonder why your cousin is shivering under a tank in Fallujah, it is to enhance Iraq’s relationship with OPEC. There it is, guys – black and white.

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Let’s put it this way. Iraq can pump 6 million barrels a day. As long as they are members of OPEC under Saudi control, they can only pump 3 million a day. With the oil for food program – we put a clamp on Saddam – it was 2 million a day. People misunderstand this one. We were screaming in the streets: no blood for oil, which, of course, you know, most Americans consider a bargain – blood for oil, as long as it’s not their blood, right? But in fact, it wasn’t blood for oil. It was blood for no oil. It was blood to make sure that not too much oil would flow and bust the market. Oil had been down under Bill Clinton to eighteen bucks a barrel. Now it’s over $70 a barrel.

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... I was able to obtain a document. That’s why we have all these illustrations in the book – because I want people to actually see these things. I got a document from inside the Department of Energy, which says that Venezuela – in other words, Hugo Chavez - has more oil than Saudi Arabia, and that’s a real shake-up.

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I showed the chart to Chavez himself last month in Caracas, and he said, “That’s absolutely right. And we’re going to demand that OPEC recognize Venezuela, not Saudi Arabia, as the leader.” That’s big, bad news for the Bush House of Saud cartel because you have to understand that King Abdullah will always sell us his oil. He’ll never cut it off.

But that’s not the most important point here. Abdullah sends back his oil earnings. After he takes his slice and gives his slice to Exxon, the remainder goes back to the United States in the form of Treasury Bill purchases. They would never lend a dime to their Muslim brothers. They just lend it back to George to fund his oil wars and his tax cuts. And that’s the game. Abdullah lends us back the petro-dollars, and we lend him the 82nd Airborne to stay in business.

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The reason George Bush was chauffeuring King Abdullah around the Crawford ranch in his golf cart – well, first of all, because George is afraid of horses – no kidding. The second reason, though, is to make sure that he keeps giving us those petro-dollars back as loans or purchases.

And Chavez told me, “I’m just not going to do it.” In fact, knowing that I’d be reporting on BBC International News, Chavez said, “I’ll drop the price of oil to fifty bucks - knock off a third – a buck a gallon off your gas tank charges. But I've got to have a deal with George Bush.” He wants no more assassination plots and a stabilization of the oil market, which the Saudis absolutely hate, because the Saudis crank up the price so that we choke, and then about every six to eight years, they dump the price to wipe out any alternatives, whether it’s solar power or Chavez’s oil, which is heavy crude, which is expensive to get at.

In other words, Abdullah plays his game of jerking the market way up and way down. That’s how the Saudis keep control of the oil market. Chavez says, I’m not playing that game. I’m not giving George Venezuela’s oil money. In fact, Chavez withdrew $20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve and lent it to Argentina, Ecuador and other Latin American countries. When you start withdrawing your money from the Federal Reserve and giving it out, instead, to Latin America, you basically are getting a date with a bullet.

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...When we talk about revaluing the Chinese currency, you mean devaluing the dollar. Very, very important to Bush to dump the dollar. His cronies are trying to evacuate the United States financially, and that’s what privatization of Social Security is about as well. It’s about getting dollars out of this country, and so we devalue the dollar. That devalues the debt held by these guys. It raises our interest. It kills our pension funds and our economy is slowly dying off.

BuzzFlash: Why do they want to do that?

Greg Palast: There are a few reasons. One, higher interest rates as well as high oil rates have completely demolished the auto industry. General Motors is heading right into bankruptcy. High oil rates have also demolished the airline industry while enriching the oil companies, and the high interest rates have enriched the banks.

That means basically the Democratic stronghold industries - the last unionized industries in America, which are auto and airlines – are going down. In other words, "Mission Accomplished." Money is flowing into Houston. We pay three bucks a gallon for gas, and they collect it. Mission accomplished. Oil’s at $70 a barrel. Mission accomplished. The dollar’s down, and we are exporting a quarter trillion dollars a year to China in cash, so we could import their manufactured goods. That’s mission accomplished. The idea is that American capital is fleeing this country.

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If you thought that we went into Iraq to get that oil, then we failed. But the oil companies are not in the business of finding oil. They’re in the business of finding profits, and they make profits by not finding oil – by locking up these fields.

The history of Iraq is a history of locking up their fields so they don’t produce. So it is mission accomplished. You have to understand - Exxon-Mobil Corporation, the number one, lifetime, career giver to George W. Bush after Enron - is making $10 billion clear profit every three months. We haven’t seen cash like that since the pharaohs. This is mission accomplished.

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...Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris scrubbed tens of thousands of black voters off the voter rolls. They called them felons when their only crime was voting while black. That gave little George the White House.

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But how do I know Kerry won? The whole BBC team did an incredible investigation, and we found 3.6 million votes cast but not counted. It was called "spoilage" - and that’s everything from hanging chads to paper ballots that have extra marks, and are junked and thrown away – you name it.

But it’s not just anyone’s ballot that doesn’t count. Whose votes are they? We did a precinct-by-precinct analysis of whose votes were thrown away. If you are in a black majority precinct, the chance that your vote will be thrown in the electoral dumpster is 900% higher than if you’re in a white precinct. If you are Hispanic - 500% higher than if you’re in a white precinct. This also includes something called "rejected provisional ballots," a whole new gimmick. A million people were shunted to back-of-the-bus ballots called provisional ballots. And over half a million of those were never counted – never counted. And who made the decision not to count them? The Secretaries of State, like the Secretary of State of Ohio, who is also the head of the Bush reelection campaign.

Whose votes are thrown out? It’s black voters and poor voters. That’s why the Armed Madhouse subtitle says “Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.” Vote theft is class war by other means. Not everyone’s vote gets thrown out. In fact, do the arithmetic nationwide. 54% of the votes in the electoral dumpster are cast by black voters. Another third cast by Hispanic voters? Something like only one in five lost votes is cast by white voters, and those are the poor white voters. The electoral dumpster is filled with basically a Democratic pile of uncounted votes. That’s how they did it. And they’re planning to do a better job of not counting those votes in 2008. It’s the non-count of the vote – it’s not the count – that picks our president.

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It will only get worse, because they’ve added a new gimmick. Part of the way they knock out voters is using databases. That’s how they did it in Florida. They manipulated databases to wrongly tag people as unqualified voters. In 2004, we found something called "caging lists" of tens of thousands – and we know it had to really be hundreds of thousands – of voters, almost every one of them an African-American voter, targeted for challenge by the Republican Party – the first mass challenge of voters since the Jim Crow era. We found these illegal lists – these caging lists.

That pumped up the number of uncounted votes enormously – again, black votes. In 2006 and 2008, they’re targeting the Hispanic demographic, because they’re going to steal it in New Mexico, in Utah, in Colorado, in Arizona, and Nevada. That’s where they’re going to be stealing the votes. And they’re targeting the Native American vote as well, which is a big demographic in the West. How are they doing it? They’re starting this new game of voter ID and national ID cards. They’re creating tremendous databases to come up with "gotcha rules" that are going to tag people as ineligible voters – so-called "suspect" voters. This is what they did in 2004, completely unreported in the U.S. press.

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...where are they getting these databases? The answer is the war on terror. People keep talking about how they are attacking our civil liberties by keeping these big databases on Americans. What are they for? They’re not to keep you safe from al-Qaeda. There’s not a war on terror. It’s a war on democracy.

ChoicePoint is the biggest data mining outfit – it basically has the biggest data mine in the United States – at minimum, 16 billion records on Americans. It’s illegal for the U.S. government to keep those records, but ChoicePoint as a private company can. Then the U.S. government simply dips into the data mine and pulls out the nuggets it wants. We saw this in 2000, with them falsely attacking people as felons.

In 2004, completely unreported in the U.S. press, but big news from our BBC investigation -- and it’s in Madhouse -- are the caging lists, in which again we know hundreds of thousands of people were tagged as having so-called suspect addresses. Suspect addresses, in case you’re wondering, causing people to lose their vote, included page after page after page of black soldiers sent overseas, so that their home address was now suspect.

If they've got the databases, they’ve got the election. And they’re getting the databases from the war on terror and the war on immigrants. 3.6 million votes were cast and not counted last time. Look for 5 million in 2008.

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