BOYCOTT GAS - SPREAD THE WORD!!!!

“DO whatever you can to boycott gas. Prices are ridiculous and we are getting gouged. Boycott the oil companies, especially exxon/mobile as much as possible.

Tell everyone you know to do the same! This is serious, the oil companies should not be allowed to get away with this!”

“Can't. I need to get to work. Its not bad around here. My car gets excellent milage so its less then $20 to fill it from empty.”

“Does that include all things made from petroleum and petroleum by-products? No plastics, no rubber, no oils (no oil-based lubricants of any kind)?? Is it OK to use things that use these products, just so long as we don't buy more to replenish what's used up? Does that include heating oil?”

“I do need a car for both my jobs, but I am definitely driving slower and trying to conserve gas. I already avoid driving when I can.”

“I'm afraid it's a necessary evil for me. I need the gas to get to client sites so I can make money. On the other hand, I'm not doing a lot of "optional" driving and combining my errands into one trip rather than several trips.”

“I'm gonna start walkin' to work!!!1




Hey, wait a minute............I do walk to work!!”

“You can't boycott unless you walk or ride a bike to work. The thing to do is conserve. Drive slower, don't accelerate from a stop as quickly, make fewer trips to the mall and grocery store. Buy stuff on-line so that the fuel used is by UPS, the USPS, FedEx etc. They do this all day long so it's more efficient than everyone driving willy-nilly all over town. Use the small car instead of the truck or SUV if you have the option. And most of all make sure you laugh at the fools that pass you when you pull up behind them at the light. Better yet, if there is a clear lane time the light just right so you can wave at them as you slide by.”

“What did you expect with Bush & Cheney's oil co background? What company's do you think put heavy, heavy dollars into his election? How did an idiot become president? We like personable folks & big money likes puppets. His father helped too, as he is proffiting handsomely too.

This is what happens when folks become emotional & gullible.”

“Only an idiot would blame the price of fuel on Bush and Cheney.”

“I say that both are profitting. Did you think that they wouldn't? They control a large segment of the oil producing world by chance? I think not.”

“catshiker, interesting notion. how are bush and cheney profiting from the current high price of oil? can you cite any credible news articles or investigations into it? I am interested to hear.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Haliburton Planned for Oil Rewards from War

By Jason Leopold
Scoop Media
May 14, 2003

Months before the United States military showered Iraq with bombs and missiles, the Department of Defense was secretly working with Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton Corp., on a deal that would give the world's second largest oil services company total control over Iraq's oil fields, according to interviews with Halliburton's most senior executives.

Moreover, classified Halliburton documents obtained over the past month prove that the war in Iraq was as much about controlling the world's second largest oil reserves as it was about overthrowing the regime of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein.

The deal between the Department of Defense and Halliburton unit Kellogg, Brown & Root to operate Iraq's oil industry, which was hatched as early as October 2002, according to the documents, and could ultimately be worth $7 billion, couldn't have come at a better time for Halliburton.

Back in October of last year, Halliburton was saddled with a multibillion-dollar asbestos liability and the company was also suffering through a slowdown in domestic oil production. Halliburton's stock price responded swiftly, plummeting to $12.62 in October 2002, from a high of $22 the year before. Rumours began to swirl that the company would be forced to file for bankruptcy.

But news of a pending war in Iraq meant that Halliburton's financial troubles would, like Saddam Hussein's regime, be history. Classified documents from November 2002 show that the Department of Defense recommended that The Army Corps of Engineers award a contract to Brown & Root to extinguish Iraqi oil well fires in addition to "assessing the condition of oil-related infrastructure; cleaning up oil spills or other environmental damage at oil facilities; engineering design and repair or reconstruction of damaged infrastructure; assisting in making facilities operational; distribution of petroleum products; and assisting the Iraqis in resuming Iraqi oil company operations."

"The fact that the Department was planning for the possibility that it would need to repair and provide for continuity of operations of the Iraqi oil infrastructure was classified until March 2003," the agency said on its web site. "This prevented earlier acknowledgement or announcement of potential requirements to the business community."

The Army Corps of Engineers has declassified portions of some documents related to its deal with Brown & Root. The deal memo can be viewed at:
http://www.hq.usace.army.mil/cepa/iraq/factsheet.htm

Since October, when Halliburton was awarded the contract to repair Iraq's oil industry, the company's stock has nearly doubled. On Tuesday, the stock closed at $23.90.

Publicly, when the Army Corps of Engineers was criticized by Washington lawmakers earlier this year for awarding the no-bid contract to Brown & Root because of the company's strong ties to Cheney, the agency said Brown & Root would do nothing more than extinguish oil well fires. Brown & Root was chosen, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, because Brown & Root could be "deployed" on short notice.

However, according to interviews with Halliburton executives, company employees were working out of a hotel room in Kuwait City as far back as November assessing the Iraq's oil infrastructure and mapping out plans for operating Iraq's oil industry.

A report in the magazine Business 2.0 from April 2003 makes this point clear.

"From behind the obsidian mirrors of his wraparound sunglasses, Ray Rodon surveys the vast desert landscape of southern Iraq's Rumailah oilfield. A project manager with Halliburton's engineering and construction division, Kellogg Brown & Root, Rodon has spent months preparing for the daunting task of repairing Iraq's oil industry. Working first at headquarters in Houston and then out of a hotel room in Kuwait City, he has studied the intricacies of the Iraqi national oil company, even reviewing the firm's organizational charts so that Halliburton and the Army can ascertain which Iraqis are reliable technocrats and which are Saddam loyalists," the story says.

Halliburton, in a March news release, said it first began working on a plan to repair Iraq's oil infrastructure at the request of the Defense Department.

"The DoD, through its US Army Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) III contract with KBR, tapped the company in November 2002 to develop the contingency plan. Implementation of the plan is being executed through a separate contract KBR now holds with the US Army Corps of Engineers," the news release says.

A half-dozen Halliburton employees said that they don't believe Cheney played any role in the company securing the lucrative contract from the government, but they noted that the Army Corps of Engineers purposely downplayed the company's role in repairing Iraq's infrastructure because of Halliburton's ties to Cheney and the criticism that would likely come from Congressional Democrats who claim the government is playing favorites.

"Halliburton has been working with the United States government since the 1940s," said one executive who supplied documents and requested anonymity. "But because Vice President Dick Cheney used to run the firm everyone automatically assumes that he had something to do with the government contracts we now get."

Since 9-11, Halliburton's Brown & Root division is the only company that has profited from the so-called war on terror.

Based on its performance providing U.S. troops in the Balkans with housing, food, water, mail, laundry, and heavy equipment (a job for which Halliburton has been paid $3 billion so far), the company won an unprecedented ten-year deal in December 2001 to supply similar logistical support to U.S. military operations around the world.

"The Pentagon's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program pays Halliburton through what's called a cost-plus arrangement, meaning that KBR is guaranteed to recover its expenses, plus receive a set profit, provided the contract terms are met. To date, KBR has received $830 million from the program. The company is also helping to run Incirlik Air Base and other U.S. military facilities in Turkey (where an initial contract, set to expire in September, was worth $118 million) and received $65 million to support bases in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. What's more, it earned $33 million building cells for suspected al Qaeda members at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Overall, Halliburton's backlog of government revenue expanded 40% in the last three months of 2002 alone," Business 2.0 reported.

What is most troubling about the sweet deals Brown & Root has been awarded and what has lawmakers like Congressman Henry Waxman, D-California, up in arms is how the company ripped off the government to the tune of $2 million on several occasions while Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton and the company's long history of supporting terrorist regimesincluding Iraq, Iran and Libyadespite U.S. sanctions on such countries.

Last year, KBR agreed to pay the U.S. government $2 million to settle allegations it defrauded the military while Cheney was chief executive of parent company Halliburton. KBR was accused of inflating contract prices for maintenance and repairs at Fort Ord, a now-shuttered military installation near Monterey, Calif. The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento, alleged KBR submitted false claims and made false statements in connection with 224 delivery orders between April 1994 and September 1998.

KBR and Halliburton has also paid out settlements to end investigations and lawsuits on half-a-dozen other occasions.

In 1978, a grand jury indicted KBR on charges that it colluded with a competitor on marine construction work. KBR paid a $1 million fine to settle the charges. In 1995, the U.S. fined Halliburton $3.8 million for violating a ban on exports to Libya. Four years later, a Halliburton subsidiary opens an office in Iran, despite a U.S. ban on doing business in that country. In 2001, Halliburton shareholders lashed out at company executives for its pipeline project in Burma, citing that country's human-rights abuses. Also in 2001, watchdog groups blasted Cheney for placing 44 Halliburton subsidiaries in foreign tax havens.

Halliburton's dealings in six countries - Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria - show that the company's willingness to do business where human rights are not respected is a pattern that goes beyond its involvement in Burma.

So how does the company continue to win such lucrative contracts with the government, as in the case of Iraq, in spite of its shady record?

"KBR was selected for the award based on the fact that KBR is the only contractor that could commence implementing the complex contingency plan on extremely short notice," Halliburton said in a March news release.

Despite Waxman's criticism of the government awarding the bulk of the work in Iraq to Halliburton unit Brown & Root, it appears that the company's role in the country is getting bigger by the second. And plans to open up the bidding to other companies appear to be a dead issue.

On Monday, the Army Corps of Engineers said it awarded Brown & Root another $24 million contract, this time to distribute gasoline and cooking fuel in Iraq.

The Army Corps of Engineers said the delivery order was awarded to Halliburton subsidiary on May 4 as part of the $7 billion umbrella contract awarded to the company in March for fire fighting services in Iraq.

The Army Corps last week said the Halliburton subsidiary had received about $75 million in orders so far, and the total amount would likely reach about $600 million, far less than the worst-case figure of $7 billion estimated before the Iraq war.

Corps spokeswoman Carol Sanders said the new order fell under the broad terms of the original contract and rejected criticism from Waxman, who said Halliburton now appeared to have a more lucrative and direct role in rebuilding Iraq's oil industry.

She said Iraqi people urgently needed cooking oil and gasoline as they began rebuilding their country. Given the need to boil water to prevent disease, it was not feasible to competitively bid the work.

"We made the contract broad enough so we could handle issues just like this," she said.

Specifically, Sanders said KBR was bringing supplies of liquefied national gas and gasoline to regional storage centers, where Iraqis were managing its distribution.

KBR spokeswoman Wendy Hall said the latest contract was part of the broader contract, which aimed to maintain "the continuity of operations of the Iraqi oil infrastructure."

Jason Leopold is a freelance journalist based in California, he is currently finishing a book on the California energy crisis. He can be contacted at jasonleopold@hotmail.com.

FAIR USE NOTICE. This document contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. India Resource Center is making this article available in our efforts to advance the understanding of corporate accountability, human rights, labor rights, social and environmental justice issues. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.”

“The Caspian Sea region has potentially the world's largest oil reserves (6 trillion dollars worth), likely making Central Asia the next Middle East. The problem is piping it out. Afghanistan occupies a strategic position between the Caspian and the markets of the Indian subcontinent and east Asia. It's prime territory for building pipelines, which is why the oil company Unocal -- as well as the U.S. government -- welcomed the Taliban's rise to power in 1996 as a promising source of "stability." And while this stability didn't materialize, people like Bush Jr. and the oil men around him have never given up on the tremendous profit possibilities that Central Asia offers.

Remember that both Bush and Vice President Cheney are wealthy oil men and Cheney's Haliburton Corporation will probably be building the multi-billion dollar oil pipeline across Afghanistan that will be needed to bring much of that oil to market. It is also important to be aware that Zalmay Khalilzad who is the US Envoy to Aghanistan was a Unocal advisor. (http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/01/113169.php). Therefore a forced conflict with people they already have no regard for was the perfect vehicle to enable them to set up shop with the U.S. population's explicit approval.
As for legal grounds, the November 26th issue of Newsweek states:

Secret Legal Document Gave Bush Wartime Powers, Including Holding Secret Tribunals

NEW YORK, Nov. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- After he signed an order allowing the use of military tribunals in terrorist cases, President George W. Bush insisted he alone should decide who goes before such a military court, his aides tell Newsweek. The tribunal document gives the government the power to try, sentence -- and even execute -- suspected foreign terrorists in secrecy, under special rules that would deny them constitutional rights and allow no chance to appeal. Bush's powers to form a military court came from a secret legal memorandum, which the U.S. Justice Department began drafting in the days after Sept. 11, Newsweek has learned. The memo allows Bush to invoke his broad wartime powers, since the U.S., they concluded, was in a state of "armed conflict." Bush used the memo as the legal basis for his order to bomb Afghanistan.

If that's not a dictator using his power for personal gain and the gain of corporate interests then I don't know what is. Now dig this:
http://www.bushwatch.net/oil.htm

The U.S. Eyes Oil in Central Asia and Steps on Russia's Turf THE NEW COLD WAR

WASHINGTON, D.C.: As the war winds down, the U.S. is eyeing Central Asia as a new colony. And as America projects its power across the region, it runs the risk of setting off a new cold war with Moscow. A few reasons why:

Big Oil is once again taking a hard look at prospects for building a pipeline carrying Caspian Sea oil across Afghanistan and down through Pakistan to ports on the Arabian Sea. "The large-scale projects aimed at building gas and oil pipelines linking the Caspian region with the attractive international market of the Arabian Sea may become the principal, if not the only, means to breathe a [new] life into Afghanistan,"

Martha Brill Olcott, a Carnegie Endowment scholar, told the Moscow paper Izvestia.

Turkmenistan, which used to be part of the Soviet Union and has huge natural gas deposits, is key to controlling the region. In late October, Turkmenistan's president, Saparmurat Niyazov, sent a letter to the UN leaders advocating construction of a pipeline bringing Turkmen gas across Afghan territory to Pakistan's Arabian Sea ports. The Far Eastern Economic Review reports Niyazov claimed the pipeline "will help rebuild this country [Afghanistan], normalize peaceful life and work of the Afghan people and also accelerate socio-economic development of the entire adjacent region."

In Moscow at the end of last month, Niyazov declared, "We could sell to foreign markets about 120 billion cubic meters of gas annually, but we can not do this due to the lack of pipelines."

Another important reason for the war in Afghanistan is for control of the opium poppies used to make most of the heroin in the world. One would think that President Bush with his 'War on Drugs/Terror' would seek to stop the manufacture of heroin in Afghanistan now that the U.S. has taken over control of the country. But instead it has been reported that the new ruling Northern Alliance is expanding substantially the growing of opium poppies and the manufacture of heroin in Afghanistan (http://www.orion-online.net/
vnews/display.v/ART/2001/12/12/3c16c334d37ad).

According to the Glasgow Herald, a United Nations survey showed that fields used for poppy production almost tripled in size in the last year, going from 5,000 to 13,000 acres. Those fields weren't bin Laden's. They were the Northern Alliance's. Could it be that the Bushes, Cheney and the CIA really are involved, as long-rumored, in heavy-duty drug trafficking all over the world?

Just food for thought...”

“Firm's Iraq Deals Greater Than Cheney Has Said
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post
June 23, 2001

During last year's presidential campaign, Richard B. Cheney acknowledged that the oil-field supply corporation he headed, Halliburton Co., did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries. But he insisted that he had imposed a "firm policy" against trading with Iraq.

"Iraq's different," he said.

According to oil industry executives and confidential United Nations records, however, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that signed contracts to sell more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer of the Dallas-based company.

Two former senior executives of the Halliburton subsidiaries say that, as far as they knew, there was no policy against doing business with Iraq. One of the executives also says that although he never spoke directly to Cheney about the Iraqi contracts, he is certain Cheney knew about them.

Mary Matalin, Cheney's counselor, said that if he "was ever in a conversation or meeting where there was a question of pursuing a project with someone in Iraq, he said, 'No.' "

"In a joint venture, he would not have reviewed all their existing contracts," Matalin said. "The nature of those joint ventures was that they had a separate governing structure, so he had no control over them."

The trade was perfectly legal. Indeed, it is a case study of how U.S. firms routinely use foreign subsidiaries and joint ventures to avoid the opprobrium of doing business with Baghdad, which does not violate U.S. law as long as it occurs within the "oil-for-food" program run by the United Nations.

Halliburton's trade with Iraq was first reported by The Washington Post in February 2000. But U.N. records recently obtained by The Post show that the dealings were more extensive than originally reported and than Vice President Cheney has acknowledged.

As secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, Cheney helped to lead a multinational coalition against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War and to devise a comprehensive economic embargo to isolate Saddam Hussein's government. After Cheney was named in 1995 to head Halliburton, he promised to maintain a hard line against Baghdad.

But in 1998, Cheney oversaw Halliburton's acquisition of Dresser Industries Inc., which exported equipment to Iraq through two subsidiaries of a joint venture with another large U.S. equipment maker, Ingersoll-Rand Co.

The subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, U.N. records show. Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts -- later blocked by the United States -- to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that U.S.-led military forces destroyed in the Gulf War.

Former executives at the subsidiaries said they had never heard objections -- from Cheney or any other Halliburton official -- to trading with Baghdad. "Halliburton and Ingersoll-Rand, as far as I know, had no official policy about that, other than we would be in compliance with applicable U.S. and international laws," said Cleive Dumas, who oversaw Ingersoll Dresser Pump's business in the Middle East, including Iraq.

Halliburton's primary concern, added Ingersoll-Rand's former chairman, James E. Perrella, "was that if we did business with [the Iraqi regime], that it be allowed by the United States government. If it wasn't allowed, we wouldn't do it."

Dumas and Perrella said their companies' commercial links to the Iraqi oil industry began before the U.N. Security Council imposed an oil embargo on Baghdad in the wake of its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

They returned to dealing with Iraq after the council established the "oil-for-food" program in December 1996, permitting Iraq to export oil under U.N. supervision and use the proceeds to buy food, medicine and humanitarian goods. The program was expanded in 1998 to allow Iraq to import spare parts for its oil facilities.

The Halliburton subsidiaries joined dozens of American and foreign oil supply companies that helped Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in 2000. Since the program began, Iraq has exported oil worth more than $40 billion.

The proceeds funded a sharp increase in the country's nutritional standards, nearly doubling the food rations distributed to Iraq's poor.

But U.S. and European officials acknowledged that the expanded production also increased Saddam Hussein's capacity to siphon off money for weapons, luxury goods and palaces. Security Council diplomats estimate that Iraq may be skimming off as much as 10 percent of the proceeds from the oil-for-food program.

Cheney has offered contradictory accounts of how much he knew about Halliburton's dealings with Iraq. In a July 30, 2000, interview on ABC-TV's "This Week," he denied that Halliburton or its subsidiaries traded with Baghdad.

"I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal," he said. "We've not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn't do that."

Cheney modified his response in an interview on the same program three weeks later, after he was informed that a Halliburton spokesman had acknowledged that Dresser Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump traded with Iraq. He said he was unaware that the subsidiaries were doing business with the Iraqi regime when Halliburton purchased Dresser Industries in September 1998.

"We inherited two joint ventures with Ingersoll-Rand that were selling some parts into Iraq," Cheney explained, "but we divested ourselves of those interests."

The divestiture, however, was not immediate. The firms traded with Baghdad for more than a year under Cheney, signing nearly $30 million in contracts before he sold Halliburton's 49 percent stake in Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. in December 1999 and its 51 percent interest in Dresser Rand to Ingersoll-Rand in February 2000, according to U.N. records.

Perrella said he believes Halliburton officials must have known about the Iraqi links before they purchased Dresser. "They obviously did due diligence," he said.

And even if Cheney was not told about the business with Baghdad before the purchase, Perrella said, the CEO almost certainly would have learned about it after the acquisition. "Oh, definitely, he was aware of the business," Perrella said, although Perrella conceded that this was an assumption based on knowledge of how the company worked, not a fact to which he could personally attest because he never discussed the Iraqi contracts with Cheney.

A long-time critic of unilateral U.S. sanctions, which he has argued penalize American companies while failing to punish the targeted regimes, Cheney has pushed for a review of U.S. policy toward countries such as Iraq, Iran and Libya.

In the first expression of that new thinking, the Bush administration is campaigning in the U.N. Security Council to end an 11-year embargo on sales of civilian goods, including oil-related equipment, to Iraq.

U.S. officials say the new policy is aimed at easing restrictions on companies that conduct legitimate trade with Iraq, while clamping down on weapons smuggling and other black-market activity.

If the plan is approved, there would be "nothing to stop Iraq from importing [as many] oil spare parts as it needs" from Halliburton and other suppliers, according to a British official who briefed reporters on the proposal when it was introduced last month.

Cheney resigned as chairman of Halliburton last August. Although he has retained stock options worth about $8 million, he has arranged to donate to charity any profits from the eventual exercise of those options, Glover Weiss said. Confidential U.N. documents show that Halliburton's affiliates have had broad, and sometimes controversial, dealings with the Iraqi regime.

For instance, the documents detail more than $2.5 million in contracts between Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. and Iraq that were blocked by the Clinton administration. They included agreements by the firm to sell $760,000 in spare parts, compressors and firefighting equipment to refurbish an offshore oil terminal, Khor al Amaya.

The Persian Gulf terminal was badly damaged during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War and later was destroyed by allied warplanes during Operation Desert Storm. At the time, Cheney was secretary of defense.

Washington halted the sale because the facility was "not authorized under the oil-for-food deal," according to U.N. documents. Under the terms of the oil-for-food program, Baghdad is permitted to export crude oil, subject to U.N. supervision, through only two terminals, Ceyhan in Turkey and Mina al Bakr on the Persian Gulf.

The equipment was never delivered to Iraq, but Baghdad subsequently repaired the Khor al Amaya facility on its own. A senior Iraqi oil ministry official, Faiz Shaheen, told an official Iraqi newspaper that Iraq would soon be able to export about 600,000 barrels a day of crude oil from the terminal.

Dumas said he was not aware of the dispute over the Khor al Amaya terminal. It was unlikely, he added, that Cheney or other top Halliburton executives would have known about the specific deals. "We had great independence in running our business," he said.

U.S. officials say the Bush administration is prepared to allow Iraq to resume exports from Khor al Amaya, as long as the earnings are placed in a U.N. escrow account that is used to pay for humanitarian supplies and further improvements to the oil industry.

"The U.S. attitude towards Iraqi exports has evolved considerably," said James A. Placke, a Washington-based analyst for Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm. "They used to tightly restrict Iraqi oil exports, and now there is no limitation on Iraqi exports."

Iraq's power to entice foreign investment, meanwhile, has increased with the soaring demand for oil. U.S. companies, which have been able to trade with Iraq only through foreign subsidiaries and middlemen, are wary of dealing with Baghdad but eager to get a piece of the action, according to industry sources.

"The American oil industry is very interested in trying to enter Iraq," said J. Robinson West, chairman of Petroleum Finance Co., a consulting firm. "But I think that they are quite respectful of U.S. policy towards Saddam Hussein. There is a very strong feeling that in fact he is the greatest threat to oil production in the Middle East."”

“Bush Name Helps Fuel Oil Dealings

Bush's Texas building
The old Petroleum Building in Midland, where George W. Bush had his oil company offices.
(By Susan Biddle – The Post)
By George Lardner Jr. and Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 30, 1999; Page A1

Sixth of seven articles
As world oil prices plummeted in the winter of 1985-86, George W. Bush faced the most serious crisis of his 11-year career as a West Texas oilman.

Spectrum 7, his exploration and development company, had reported a net loss of $1.6 million in 1985, due to the fast-deteriorating value of its holdings. As the price of oil fell from $25 to $9 a barrel, the firm was on its way to losing another $402,000 by mid-1986. Bush's company owed more than $3 million in bank loans and other debts with no hope of paying them off in time. His investors had disappeared.

On the cusp of his 40th birthday, Bush had two choices: Cut his staff to the bone, hunker down and pray for oil prices to climb before the banks foreclosed; or find a bigger company that was willing to scoop him up, debts and all. "I'm all name and no money," the son of the then-vice president used to say.

Bush's name, however, was to help rescue him, just as it had attracted investors and helped revive his flagging fortunes throughout his years in the dusty plains city of Midland. A big Dallas-based firm, Harken Oil and Gas, was looking to buy up troubled oil companies. After finding Spectrum, Harken's executives saw a bonus in their target's CEO, despite his spotty track record.

By the end of September 1986, the deal was done. Harken assumed $3.1 million in debts and swapped $2.2 million of its stock for a company that was hemorrhaging money, though it had oil and gas reserves projected to produce $4 million in future net revenue. Harken, a firm that liked to attach itself to stars, had also acquired Bush, whom it used not as an operating manager but as a high-profile board member.

"One of the reasons Harken was so interested in merging was because of George," said Paul Rea, a geologist who had been president of Spectrum 7. "They believed having George's name there would be a big help to them. They wanted him on their board."

The buyout not only rescued Bush financially but gave him the collateral for an investment a few years later in the Texas Rangers baseball team that eventually made him a millionaire. In addition to the seat on the board, he received more than $300,000 of Harken stock, options to buy more, and a consulting contract that paid him as much as $120,000 a year in the late '80s, when he was working full time on his father's presidential campaign.

It was one of the biggest breaks of Bush's life. Still, the Harken deal completed a disappointing reprise of what was becoming a familiar pattern. As an oilman, Bush always worked hard, winning a reputation as a straight-shooter and a good boss who was witty, warm and immensely likable. Even the investors who lost money in his ventures remained admirers, and some of them are now raising money for his presidential campaign.

But the story of Bush's career in oil, which began following his graduation from Harvard Business School in the summer of 1975 and ended when he sold out to Harken and headed for Washington, is mostly about his failure to succeed, despite the sterling connections his lineage and Ivy League education brought him.

Thanks to his and his family's ties to wealthy investors around the country, including prominent Republicans, Bush was repeatedly able to raise money to invest in oil drilling, especially when prices were booming and tax breaks were inviting in the late 1970s. But connections could not help with the tricky business of picking profitable holes to drill, and Bush never made a big score.

In fact, Bush lost money for most of his well-connected investors. At the same time, the management fees and other expenses he collected from them kept him in business and enabled him to buy oil reserves for his company's own account, including the reserves that eventually attracted Harken's attention.

Three times during his years in Midland, Bush was saved from financial trouble or stagnation by the appearance of new partners or financial angels who gave him a fresh start. One was a Princeton classmate and friend of James A. Baker III, who was to serve as his father's secretary of state; another was a fellow Yale man who shared Bush's love for baseball.

The third was Harken, which was to save Bush from humiliating failure but also create a target for later criticism. Reporters would scrutinize the deal as early as 1990. Led by then-Texas Gov. Ann Richards, Bush's opponent in the 1994 gubernatorial election, his political critics have asked whether Harken used Bush's name to obtain oil business. Even now, questions linger about a 1990 sale of Harken stock by Bush that was the subject of a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

When it was over, Bush's oil career had merely perpetuated the nagging pattern that marked his life until past the age of 40: Once again, he had followed his father's path but failed to achieve his father's success.

Fresh Out of Harvard, Into the Oil Business
The idea to move back to Midland came from Jimmy Allison, a family friend and publisher of the Midland paper who had run Bush's father's first congressional race. On the way to Arizona during spring break in his last year at Harvard Business School, Bush stopped off in Midland and his childhood friend Joe O'Neill met him at the airport. O'Neill himself had just moved back to Midland to be in the oil business, and it didn't take Bush long to decide that was where he wanted to be too.

"I was unencumbered in the sense of I was single and didn't have any possessions," recalled Bush, "and I wasn't tied to any plan that somebody had outlined for me. I got out there and it was clear this is the place I wanted to go."

That he would be imitating – or trying to imitate – his father, who had become a near- millionaire in Midland in the 1950s, never consciously occurred to him, Bush says. He says he saw it simply as an opportunity that caught his imagination after years of shuffling from one temporary job to another. To others, it was clear. "George was following in his father's footsteps," said Paul Rea, who befriended Bush early on and later teamed up with him.

His resources were minimal – about $13,000, he said – the remainder of a Bush trust fund that paid his way through Yale and Harvard. He started out as a free-lance "landman," someone who tries to turn a buck by researching the titles to mineral rights at county courthouses and then going door to door as a front man for an oil company interested in leasing those rights.

"Geologists decide where to buy the leases," Rea said. "Landmen deal with people. George was ideal for that."

One of the first people Bush contacted was Martin Allday, a local oil and gas attorney and family friend who promptly took George under his wing. Allday sent him to county records offices to learn the ropes with young lawyer-landmen in Allday's firm.

Bush organized his first company, Arbusto Energy Inc. ("Ar-boo-stow" is Spanish for Bush) in 1977 on the eve of a run for Congress and quickly put it to use as a credential for the political contest. But according to records on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Arbusto didn't start active operations until March 1979, months after Bush lost the race to Democrat Kent Hance. Bush opened a small office in Midland's aging Petroleum Building, the same structure where his father started out in 1950.

From there, Bush began looking for investors to launch the annual drilling funds that he proposed to set up for oil and gas exploration and drilling activities. The Bush name, family ties and friendships, Ivy League credentials and Wall Street connections proved invaluable. Most of the recruiting was done by his uncle Jonathan Bush, a prominent investment manager and broker who was also active in Republican politics and fund-raising.

Jonathan Bush said he offered to help. He'd been busy raising money as a one-man show for his brother George's presidential explorations under the name of the Fund for Limited Government and then became national finance co-chairman when the older Bush announced his candidacy on May 1, 1979. Not surprisingly, some of the father's contributors also wound up on Bush's list of investors.

"George was an easy sale," says Jonathan Bush. "I mean, the people that met him would say, right away, 'I'd like to drill with this guy.' ... He had run for Congress. He was an upstanding guy. They figured he knew what he was doing, but mostly they figured they'd get a fair shake with him. There were a lot of people bilking investors in the oil business in those days."

Fast-rising oil prices were another drawing card, jumping from about $13 a barrel when Arbusto got going that spring to $30 by the end of the year. Oil exploration companies and their investors were always hoping for a big strike – an "elephant" or big field that would make them immensely rich – but failing that, Jonathan suggested, they could still console themselves with a modest income from less-risky drillings in proven areas, in which Arbusto participated, along with the big tax write-offs then available.

"The only people who go into it are people that aren't going to miss the money," Jonathan Bush said with a laugh. If they could have "a shot" at a big payoff and still take "a huge write-off," they considered it a gamble worth taking.

Russell E. Reynolds (Yale '54), a prominent executive headhunter who was selected for the elite Whiffenpoofs ensemble by Jonathan (Yale '53), remembers Jonathan calling him up one day and saying, "I've got this nephew who lives in Texas. He's terrific, he's in the oil and gas business and he's looking for investors. Would you like to meet him?" Reynolds said yes and shortly thereafter, Bush stopped by Reynolds's Park Avenue office. "I thought he was one of the most attractive people I'd ever met – very classy, very smart," Reynolds said.

Reynolds put up $23,250 for Arbusto's 1980 drilling program and a similar amount in a later partnership. He doesn't invest in oil and gas ventures anymore. "I think I ended up getting back 20 cents on the dollar," Reynolds recalled, though the write-offs he got "mitigated the pain."

The roster of prominent partners in Bush's oil ventures could have been extracted from a business world's who's who: drugstore magnate and onetime New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Lewis Lehrman and Lehrman family trusts ($140,500 over a three-year period); George L. Ball, then head of E.F. Hutton Inc., a New York stock brokerage ($100,000); George L. Ohrstrom, head of a New York investment management company and scion of one of Virginia's richest families ($100,000); California venture capitalist William H. Draper III ($93,000); and John D. Macomber, chief executive of the Celanese Corp. and an old Yale friend of Jonathan's ($79,500). Draper became president of the Export-Import Bank under President Ronald Reagan and Macomber held the same post under President George Bush.

Not all were recruited by Jonathan Bush, who was paid commissions for his work. Ball, for instance, was enlisted by Barbara Bush's brother-in-law Scott Pierce, an associate at E. F. Hutton. Ohrstrom, who doesn't give interviews, said through his wife that he and Bush's father went to school together (they were four years apart at Greenwich Country Day). And Bush lined up others on his own, like Stephen Kass, a friend and classmate from Harvard Business School.

Kass said he knew oil investments were risky but recommended his stepfather put up $25,000 on behalf of the family. "It was money that was not essential for our family's well-being," he said. "We wrote the money off the minute we invested."

Great Access to Investors Despite Middling Performance
Access to the rich and famous, of course, isn't available to everyone. But Bush and his father see no reason to apologize for it.

"My father's name helped me attract early investors for my business," the former president said in response to written questions submitted by The Washington Post. "If my name did the same for 'W,' great! To keep political backers and investors happy, you have to perform. 'W' has."

In fact, Bush's performance was about average, at best. By 1985, Arbusto had drilled, or had taken part in drilling, 99 wells, hitting oil or gas about 50 percent of the time. "There's a lot of luck and a lot of science to oil drilling," Rea said. "Drilling is hit or miss. He didn't have the luck."

Most who invested lost money. By the end of 1984, securities filings show, Bush's limited partners had invested $4.66 million in Bush's various drilling programs but they had received cash distributions of only $1.54 million.

They also got $3.89 million in tax deductions thanks to generous federal laws covering the oil industry. If the investors were in the highest tax bracket (70 percent in 1979, sliding down to 50 percent in 1982), those deductions would have given them tax savings of $2.91 million.

Bush's company, 80 percent owned by Bush before a 1984 merger, did better than the investors. It put a total of $102,000 into the drilling funds and got back cash distributions of $362,000. From what the investors put up, it also took $216,000 off the top for management fees. With the addition of $100,000 in general and administrative fees (used to pay for travel, in-house legal fees, secretarial services and the like), Bush's company collected $678,000 in fees and cash distributions on an investment of only $102,000.

Bush has a more upbeat recollection than the balance sheets suggest. Before oil prices collapsed, he said, "I [was] slowly but surely building a solid, small producing company and I thought we'd developed a reputation as honest operators who worked hard [and], who gave people a fair shake.

" ... I'm not going to pretend it was any huge success at the time," Bush said. But "the story not told [by the balance sheets] is what prospects were being developed or what potential we had. ... I had some good leases in our inventory."

A Straight-Shooter Who Made Contacts
Despite frequent disappointments, Bush gained a reputation for straight-dealing, dogged effort and unshakable good humor. "There are people who live in $4 million homes, and have a yacht and then drill dry wells. That wasn't the case with George," said Kass, who visited Bush in Midland. "If you saw how George lived in Midland, no one could think he was living off their money."

Bush would hit the local bars and country clubs at night, but colleagues say his having fun was good business too. In Midland back then, "a lot of people liked to go out and play," said Mark Owen, a geologist who worked for Bush from 1980 to 1984 as vice president in charge of exploration. "That's how you make contacts. That's one of the reasons George got to know everybody in town."

Bush has acknowledged he drank too much in those days, but people who worked for him say that it didn't keep him from showing up at the office each morning at 8 and staying till 5 p.m. or often later.

Even though he wasn't a geologist, Bush "had a pretty good intuitive sense about the business," Owen said. "He had a real good feel for it. And he was great at raising money, putting deals together." Bush would travel around the country, sometimes with Owen, sometimes by himself, looking for partners. "That, in my mind, was George's strength," Owen said. "He knew a lot of people."

James McAninch, who joined Arbusto in 1982 to take charge of production, said Bush at that point was operating about 15 wells in the Midland area in which he had a majority interest.

"George was a good operator – very honest and straightforward," McAninch said. "He hired you for what you were qualified to do. He didn't interfere. He turned you loose. He'd say, 'Man, it's your responsibility. You do your job, no problem.' ... He could make quick decisions too. ... He had enough savvy to ask almost all the right questions. And [months later] he'd remember what the answers were. He was very savvy about the oil fields."

Million-Dollar Transfusion for a Troubled Operation
That, of course, didn't save Bush from dry holes, and the constant search for new investors.

In 1982, he decided to raise more money by going public. But first, in January 1982, he got a generous $1 million transfusion from Philip A. Uzielli, a New York investor who paid that much for 10 percent of Arbusto's far less valuable stock.

It was a badly needed boost. Arbusto's balance sheets showed that at the end of 1981, it had little more than $48,000 in the bank and more than half of all its assets consisted of "accounts receivable," money owed to it by others. At the same time, the company owed almost $300,000 in bank loans and close to $120,000 to other creditors.

Bush said in interviews that he met Uzielli through Ohrstrom, though he can't remember how he met Ohrstrom. A partner in Ohrstrom's investment management company, Uzielli earlier had put up $50,000 for Arbusto's 1980 program in the name of Executive Resources Corp., a company then headquartered in the Dutch West Indies. Bush said he didn't know at first that Uzielli was also a Princeton classmate and friend of Baker, the manager of George H.W. Bush's 1980 presidential primary campaign, but was aware of it by 1982 when Executive Resources, now headquartered in Panama, produced the $1 million.

While it might seem that Uzielli was putting in more than the company was worth, Bush said the balance sheets didn't reflect "the unexplored potential ... all the reserves or all the leases we had."

"He's a sophisticated investor," Bush said. Uzielli, who could not be contacted, told an interviewer in 1991 that he "lost a lot of money. ... Things were terrible."

Bush's public drilling partnership made its debut in April 1982 under the name of Arbusto, but the "Bust" label the company had taken on may have hampered it. In what he has described as a "marketing" move, the vice president's son changed the name to Bush Exploration and in June issued a new prospectus.

The offering was still a flop. Bush sought to raise $6 million but he drummed up just $1,141,000, less than he'd raised privately in each of the previous two years. He said oil prices had been sliding a bit and drilling funds were losing their appeal. Tax deductions weren't as generous. (In 1985, the investors who did get in were offered 10 cents on the dollar to bail out.)

By 1984, the outlook was bleak. "We didn't find much oil and gas," said Michael Conaway, Bush's chief financial officer. "We weren't raising any money."

Then, as Bush's father was headed for reelection as Ronald Reagan's vice president, two investors from Cincinnati, William O. DeWitt Jr. (Yale '63) and Mercer Reynolds III, stepped in. Heads of an oil exploration company called Spectrum 7, they'd met Bush earlier, around 1982, at a luncheon arranged by Rea, their man in Midland. DeWitt's father, whose baseball career stretched back to 1916, had been owner of the St. Louis Browns and later the Cincinnati Reds and his love of baseball infected Bill Jr. Knowing what "a great baseball fan" Bush was, Rea decided the two should meet, and a lunch was arranged at the Midland Club atop the First National Bank Building.

DeWitt and Reynolds say they had never met Bush's father and were "not involved in politics in any significant way" at the time.

DeWitt said they stayed in touch with Bush in the months that followed and eventually decided a merger would be a good idea. They joined up on Feb. 29, 1984, in a stock exchange that left DeWitt and Reynolds with 20.1 percent each of Spectrum 7 and Bush with 16.3 percent (1,166,400 shares). Bush was named Spectrum 7's chairman and CEO with a $75,000-a-year salary and Rea was named president with $85,000.

"Arbusto and Bush Exploration were fairly unsuccessful," Rea said, but the Bush name was "definitely a drawing card."

"We wanted [Bush's] leadership abilities, and his operational ability which we didn't have," DeWitt said. "And he actually operated wells. We took parts of wells, we never operated wells."

Asked whether the fact that Bush was the vice president's son was an attraction, DeWitt said he did not think it helped them raise any more money than before.

"There was obviously some notoriety because of who [Bush] was, but it didn't open any doors for us," DeWitt said. "I mean our doors were already opened."

Rea remembers it somewhat differently. Bush's name "was definitely a drawing card" as they traveled around the country, talking to stockbrokers, looking for investors. "Sometimes 30 to 40 people would come," Rea says. "He would never mention his dad but there was always the possibility that he [the senior Bush] would become president. People wanted to come and see what young George looked like."

The merger with Spectrum carried Bush only another two years. Then, the stunning price collapse in 1986 "just dried up all exploration money," the lifeline of small independent companies. "We couldn't afford to continue doing what we were doing," Conaway said. "No one wanted to invest. ... Business as usual was not an option."

The only hope seemed to be finding another angel. Bush, Rea and Conaway started looking for small or medium-sized companies they might approach. Rea remembers they contacted at least one, in Pennsylvania, and were turned down.

Harken ended the search for them. The company had been taken over in 1983 by a group headed by a New York lawyer and management expert, Alan G. Quasha, who seems to have had a penchant for stars on his board. Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros was one; he was listed as the company's biggest stockholder (46.8 percent) in 1986. Representatives of Harvard University's endowment fund and a wealthy Saudi real estate magnate were given seats on the board in 1987.

Bush's name was one of Spectrum's obvious assets, but, according to Jeffrey Laikind, who was on Harken's board at the time, not the most valuable one.

Laikind said that in Spectrum, "we saw an opportunity to buy a company at an attractive price" for its leases and potential. He said Bush's name drew attention "much more" for the fact that he was "somebody who had been in the oil patch, somebody who had experience," although his status as the vice president's son was "not a fact you could ignore." He said the deal was all the more attractive because "we were able to do it for stock." No money changed hands.

The merger became final in September 1986, with Harken handing over one share of its publicly traded stock in return for roughly five shares of Spectrum.

Bush doesn't dispute the notion that his name may have been a factor, but he said, "It was really a reserve play ... an economic investment as well. ... I think you're going to find that a publicly traded company must have a better rationale than to be able to acquire just a person's name."

Full-Time Oil Days Over, Son Turns to Dad's Campaign
With the sale complete, Bush's days as a full-time oilman were over. He spent most of his time in the next two years working for his father's election campaign. He remained on the Harken board, and former board member Stuart Watson describes him as "a straight-arrow type ... very able and capable."

But four years later, his sale of his Harken stock prompted an SEC probe into whether he had engaged in insider trading. The probe centered on Bush's sale of all of his 212,140 shares of Harken stock for $4 a share on June 22, 1990, just before the conclusion of a second quarter that produced huge losses. The transaction was to net Bush $835,307, according to the "notice of proposed sale," signed and dated June 22, that Bush was required to send to the SEC as a member of Harken's board.

Bush said he made the move because he wanted to pay off a $500,000 bank loan he had obtained in 1989 to buy his slice of the Texas Rangers. "I didn't need to pay it off," he said in an interview. "I did it because I just don't like to carry debt."

Eight days after Bush's stock sale, Harken wound up its second quarter with operating losses from day-to-day activities of $6.7 million, almost three times the losses it reported for the second quarter of 1989.

The public didn't learn of this until Aug. 20, when the company, now known as Harken Energy, announced in a press release that its overall losses for the quarter, including non-recurring expenses as well as operating losses, totaled $23.2 million. Harken's stock had slipped to $3 a share earlier that month when Iraq's invasion of Kuwait stirred fears that it would endanger a potentially lucrative offshore drilling contract with Bahrain. On Aug. 20, the stock dropped to $2.37.

Did Bush know of the impending losses when he sold his stock in June? Federal securities law prohibits corporate "insiders" from trading "on the basis of" material information that is not publicly known.

Bush says he did not know, even though he had a seat on Harken's three-member audit committee as well as its eight-member board of directors. He said he had no idea Harken was going to get an audit report full of red ink until weeks after he had made the sale.

"I wouldn't have sold if I had," Bush said. "I got clearance by the lawyer [Harken general counsel Larry E. Cummings] to sell this stock. I was mindful that this transaction would be completely scrutinized. I knew the law and I sold at a time that I was cleared to sell."

Bush said he didn't seek a buyer, but was approached by a Los Angeles broker, Ralph D. Smith. Now retired, Smith said he had an institutional client who wanted a large bloc of Harken stock. Smith said he called other Harken officials before calling Bush on June 9, 1990.

"I had no takers until I got to him," Smith said. "It was just like a shot out of the blue."

Bush's lawyer, Robert Jordan, who also represented Harken in the SEC inquiry, said Bush and other board members were not informed until July 13, 1990, in a communication from Harken president Mikel Faulkner that "operating losses were incurred in the second quarter, which will be further quantified and explained." Even then, Jordan said, Faulkner did not provide details. Many companies project and announce expected profits and losses before the end of a quarter, but Jordan said this was not done at Harken.

Asked for a copy of the July 13 communique, or permission to inspect it, Jordan checked with company officials and said they would not allow it. He said Harken has "a policy of keeping internal documents private."

Before Bush's stock sale, Harken's audit committee – Bush, Watson and another Harken director, Talat Othman – met on June 11 with Faulkner and auditors from Arthur Andersen & Co., Harken's accountants. Jordan, however, said the committee "did not discuss operating losses that might be coming up, because that would be in the realm of conjecture and speculation." The minutes of the meeting, Jordan said, "show that."

Asked for a copy of the June 11 minutes or permission to inspect them, the company, through Jordan, again declined to make the records available. Jordan said company officials felt that granting the requests would put them on "a slippery slope."

Before giving Bush clearance to sell his stock, Jordan said that company counsel Cummings "checked with Mr. Faulkner at least and maybe others" to see if there was "any material, undisclosed information out there that would prevent the sale." The answer was no, Jordan said.

Faulkner, a certified public accountant who used to work at Arthur Andersen and who has spoken frequently with reporters over the years, declined through Jordan to be interviewed. So did Cummings.

The SEC investigation was launched in April 1991 when it found that Bush apparently failed to submit notice of actual sale of the stock (as distinct from the separate "notice of proposed sale") until eight months after the deadline. Bush said he is sure he did, but the filing couldn't be found.

The inquiry became an issue in the 1994 governor's race when Richards, the incumbent Democrat, challenged its thoroughness, calling it "at best, incomplete, and at worst, a coverup."

Bush was prepared, having obtained a letter from a top SEC official, associate director for enforcement Bruce A. Hiler, a year earlier.

Dated Oct. 18, 1993, three weeks before Bush announced his candidacy for governor, the carefully worded letter was addressed to Jordan and said that "the investigation has been terminated as to the conduct of Mr. Bush, and that, at this time, no enforcement action is contemplated with respect to him."

Bush took that as vindication. "The SEC fully investigated the stock deal," he said in October 1994. "I was exonerated." Supporting Bush, the head of the SEC's enforcement division, William McLucas, went beyond the letter and stated publicly that "there was no case there."

Hiler, however, was more cautious. His statement said it "must in no way be construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated or that no action may ultimately result from the staff's investigation."

How thorough the SEC inquiry was remains unclear. Jordan said Harken provided investigators with "thousands of pages" of documents, including the June 11 minutes and Faulkner's July 13 communique. Investigators interviewed Cummings, stockbroker Smith and a member of the Arthur Andersen auditing team, but they did not talk to Faulkner or any other officers or directors of Harken.

In an interview, McLucas said the investigation was handled "the same way we would handle any inquiry as to [insider] trading or delinquency in reports," but such matters are usually not accorded high priority.

Staff researchers Madonna Lebling and Margot Williams contributed to this report.”

“bush and cheney make tricky dick look good.”

“cathiker, interesting articles. thanks for posting them! I am going to print them out and read them with interest!”

“Hahaha, me too.”

“Heard an interesting positive to the highh oil costs today. The city of Houston TX gets oodles of tax money from big oil as the price climbs so does the tax check. The city of houston will be able to pay for a huge portion of the aid needed for the evacuees coming from N.O. and elsewhere freeing up federal funds and donations for other regions, a sliver lining on a dark cloud.”

“I take the bus.”

“I don't read cut and paste, but I will have one more reason to ride my bike to work. I fill my Subaru about once every three weeks as it is.”

“Just drive slower, drive less and car pool. And don't drive gas guzzlers.

If/when the gas prices come back down....people will still be buying big SUV's....sadly.”

“Only an idiot would blame the price of fuel on Bush and Cheney.


Thanks! Good reads and links catskhiker. Nothing is more satisfying that seeing an idiot like bacpac be made a fool of.”

“So which article provided the data to support the outrageous accusation that President and Vice President were responsible for the current price of fuel?

Only an idiot would consider editorials from six years ago to be a valid arguement for the price of gasoline today.”

“The whole Iraqi war is all the proof I need.”

“no plastic? no rubber? there goes my sex life... :P”

“SH, Oh, the war. So maybe we can at least agree that all that fluff catshiker posted was irrelevent and if someone were to provide some relevent facts it would not make any difference to you.”

“So bacpac - what reasons do you see for causing the high price of oil?”

“Bacpac?
Perhaps only an idiot would comment on this without being able to offer an explanation of his own.”

“So the petroleum companies are charging what they want for the fuel rather than what people want to pay for it? What should they be charging for gas?”

“Nothing like exploiting a natural disaster pitts.

To be honest, I think a voluntary cap on fuel prices by the fuel companies for the next month would do them more good than bad in the long run.”

“…yet another piece of pointless cartoon propaganda.

What I asked was do people think the petroleum companies are charging what they want (can get) or what people want to pay? I personally think they are charging what they can get. I don't think that many people would disagree with me. I am not sure why this would be so controversial.

By the way, the person that posted this as a "gear thread" needs to get a clue. I ain't been here that long and I know better.
last edited: 9/04/05 11:32:34 AM”

“Well, the fuel companies here in New Jersey that didn't raise their prices with all the others sold out all their gas within minutes, and then for the remainder of the week were forced to turn away cars because they no longer had gas left.

This is a bad time to have a 35-mile-each-way commute to work with no mass transit options...”

“If I have investments that include stock in giant oil companies, does that mean I'm profiteering off the misery caused by Katrina? Seems I've got some $$$ in Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, BP, etc, and their stocks have gone up about 20% this year).

Then again, I don't really profit unless I've sold my investment and realized the gain, right?”

“yes, congrats on your profits!”

“So bacpac - what reasons do you see for causing the high price of oil?”
y2
9:58:56 AM
9/04/05

Supply and demand.”

“the oil companies are the most evil companies in the world. The people in leadership within those companies are pure and utter scum”

“See you're right bacpac, but only partically. Much of the price at the moment is being set by fear. Fear at the instability in the oil regions of the world. Oil producation is up and rising, though many traders see the supply as being fragile, so the increased risk factor is pushing up prices. Sure there are some upward pressures on crude, such as the growth of demand in China and India, but this doesn't account for the record highs.

Bush's foreign policy does have an effect on this.”

“Opinions on the extent of the fear premium vary, but traditionally you're looking at $10-$20 a barrel.
Given events in Iraq, in the rest of middle east, in venezuela and Nigeria, and in on the gulf coast you could perhaps double that estimate with prices up near or above $70.
Demand and supply has chnaged enough in the past five or six years to drive the prices up from $19 a barrel in 1999 to where it is now.

Oh, and the policies of the world's only superpower and largest consumer of oil certainly does have a major impact on the fear factor in the market.”

“the oil companies are the most evil companies in the world. The people in leadership within those companies are pure and utter scum”
EarthNsky
1:23:43 PM

now thats my kind of scum... pure capitalism at its finest. they have a product and we need it.....for a little longer at least.

If you really dont care for modern life we have a large group of fine citizens here in PA that dont use much gas ect in thier daily lives not to mention very low stress and an all around healthy lifestyle...best of all they dont pay any taxes.”

“almost forgot. with hydrogen fueled cars not too far away a little last minute profit taking was expected and helpful to those developing the technology. There are only two real issues left for them. How to safely refuel the cars in a standardised fashion ( good bye self serve?) and how to produce hydrogen cheaply. ( or cheaper then gas )

We should thank Bush and Co. for helping us to a new cleaner economy. :)”

“Boycott gas? You have people who are trying to buy EXTRA gas!!!! Some places I see on tv are out of gas.”

“Bush says he's tapping into our reserve, so we will see if that will bring prices down. He could have done that when he first saw that gas was not being produced or delivered because of the hurricane.

I guess he is out at his ranch riding horses so he himself does not need gas. I knew we should have gone back to the horse and buggie days. I love horses and would love to travel by horse. I say rip up the paving on the streets, put it back to dirt and bring back horses!!!!”

“Ironically in New Jersey, the Exxon and Mobil stations have the cheapest gas right now, largely because almost all of their refining operations are here in NJ...”

“Conserving fuel is the best defense against high prices. I am going to start riding my bike to work again.

Of course I need to spend about $350 to replace my ragged out ten speed. It will take about 5 months to break even at current prices.”

“I say rip up the paving on the streets, put it back to dirt and bring back horses!!!!”
lipstick hiker
3:40:42 PM
9/04/05

lol@lips
and we can use dried horse doo-doos to heat our homes
last edited: 9/04/05 4:41:05 PM”

“I wonder what kind of gas mileage a limo gets. Especially with all that armoring and bullet proof glass. Maybe he should go around in a Yugo!”