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Spoils of War

Oil, the U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area and the Bush Agenda

By Antonia Juhasz

Remember oil? That thing we didn’t go to war in Iraq for? Now with his war under attack, even President George W. Bush has gone public, telling reporters last August, “[a] failed Iraq … would give the terrorists and extremists an additional tool besides safe haven, and that is revenues from oil sales.” Of course, Bush not only wants to… return to article

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    Wow ! What an impressive comeback. Guess what, I’m still here.

    United States Posted by blondemike on Mar 1, 2007 at 1:46 PM

    Too bad!! Doesn’t say much for the overall judgement or professional standards of the ITT staff. Free speech is one thing. You are a disgraceful bigot!

    United States Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 2, 2007 at 10:24 PM

    Sore loser ! I cleaned your clock in every exchange we had which is why your Stalinist ilk is forced to resort to holohoax denial laws because the
    facts are not on your side. People like you always preface their advocacy
    of goon squad censorship by saying they are for free speech BUT..........
    Take those “butts” and shove them up yours.

    United States Posted by blondemike on Mar 4, 2007 at 1:19 PM

    You cleaned nobody’s clock in any sense. And by the way you are not the one who gets to decide on that issue. The opinions of other qualified people count more. I have provided historical evidence to all your repetitive lies and quotes of discredited sources. Your “evidence” consists of phony data and adhominem attacks and name calling. You also repeatedly engage in race and Jew baiting as if it were a form of argumentational logic. By most lights you are an extremely bigoted, dishonest, ignorant, and vicious individual with whom civilized and enlightened debate is utterly impossible.

    One of the reasons that you dominate on this site is that the ITT website is so full of trolls that the progressive and intellectually inquisitive element has been utterly alienated from any participation whatsoever. This is quite a shame and a disservice to free debate. Congratulations to you and other rightist scum like Jay Cline, Chopper, Scorp, Tina1, and a host of others who used name calling, lies, disinformation, hysteria, misleading propaganda, and obfuscation in order to disrupt and demoralize a once informed and progressive debate.

    The spreading of rightist disinformation about key issues in order to spread confusion, the repeatitive use of dumb cliches (cut and run, trickle down, pro-life) and the propagation of political myths, the use of wedge issues like “partial birth abortion” which doesn’t even exist, and which has in any case been long banned, in order to spread hysteria and misdirect people’s focus, and the reprehensible spread of pro-Nazi propaganda has been just some of the demoralizing crap that is the stuff of the far rightist trolls on ITT. It is no wonder ITT is no longer home to a vibrant progressive discussion. A left/right debate is fine. No one wants another “lefty love-in” in place of real political discussion. But what has occured is pure demoralization for political purposes. This has occured through the far right’s incessant obnoxious spewings.

    That the ITT website allowed the degeneration of its once respected forum is testimony either to its stoic committment to free speech or just plain laziness. I know a right wing site would not have allowed this shit. Congratulations to all you fascist morons. You succeeded in doing only what you do best, Sabotage.

    United States Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 4, 2007 at 4:28 PM

    I am more qualified than 99.99% of the population to make an informed judgment on holohoax revisionism. You are not since you are unread in this area. Nor is it a left-right issue, it goes across those arbitrary categories. I have cleaned not only your clock but the clocks of everyone who was ill-considered enough to enter into this debate. I hadn’t even intended to debate here but your off the wall, intemperate libels forced me to respond. You are a disgrace to the Jewish group. I never engaged in ad hominems as a SUBSTITUTE for references to document my statements here. The Jew-baiting is a figment of your sick mind and you are the one who repeatedly used that ad hominem libel as a substitute for thought and reasoned debate. My wife tells me that you are the reason so many nice Jewish women are marrying out of the group. I’m sorry that your shiksa has crabs and has shat in your gypsy cab but is that really ITT’s problem or mine ? Several of the rightists that you listed I’ve totally demolished including Scorpy Doobie AKA Master Bates and the anti-Arab virulent racist El Taco Beanerbrain AKA TexASS Independent. I’ve also debated Cline, WTH, Wolf and other rightists, so far from having driven progressives from the ITT board it’s been Scorp and other rightists who’ve become scarce. You have provided no “evidence” historical or otherwise and the very few references you have provided have been refuted at length on the IHR and VHO websites. Apparently you don’t know the difference between utterly capricious assertions and evidence or even argument. You have verified\the stereotype that too many people have of mentally unbalanced hysterical Jewish males. All you can do is shout “Auntey Seamite” and with every shout it becomes less effective. The principle of inflation works in intellectual circles as much as in our currency. An anti-Jewish person is one who hates Jews qua Jews. I am bringing the GOOD news that not nearly as many Jews perished as commonly thought in WW2. That you are so distressed by this shows you to be a rather extreme self-hating Jew. Too bad but not relevant to the progressive cause. I also find your utter silence in regard to TexASS’s extreme anti-Arab racism rather revealing. You were pretending to be a friend of the Palestinians when you are a Racist Zionist. No one is more qualified than myself to make definitive judgments in the area of WW 2
    revisionism unless it be the original scholars like Rassinier, Faurisson, Leuchter, Rudolf, Barnes, Sanning, Berg, Martin, Irving, etc. Chicago, rightist sites are almost all neocon lie the rightist talk show nuts like Limbaugh, Savage-Weiner, O’ Reilly, Hannity, Coulter, ad nauseum. Holocaust
    revisionism is NOT a rightist cause and thank you for finally admitting it.

    United States Posted by blondemike on Mar 5, 2007 at 12:18 PM

    Holocaust Revisionism is a purely rightist cause. The cause is to revive fascism as a political movement.

    United States Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 5, 2007 at 10:29 PM

    The State of Israel is a fascist state and the policies of the US Govt since Hoover-FDR have been corporate state fascism. Holocaust revisionism has nothing to do with either, it’s only purpose is to find the truth because truth is the first casualty in any war, WW 2 being no exception. Go pull your pod, Portnoy wannabe.

    United States Posted by blondemike on Mar 6, 2007 at 10:40 AM

    The State of Israel is not a fascist state although its illegal military occupation is undemocratic and oppressive and should cease. The US State is not corporate state fascism (whatever that means) and FDR’s New Deal was successful and widely supported not only by people of all strata but by big business as well. There was NO other way out of the Great Depression. Laisse Fairre economics is a total myth and never actually existed nor could it possibly exist. The State is instrumental to every single economic system’s establishment and maintanence because pure economics doesn’t exist, only an historically integrated system based power inequalities called “political economy.” Capitalism is a total system which uses the power of the state to establish and politically gaurantee itself, spread the risks and burdens of profit making throughout society, manage class conflict politically, and establish and maintain the institutional structures and processes needed for its reproduction. In this sense we have political economy. A regressive tax system shifts the costs of the reproduction of labor power onto society and away from capitalists (eg. Walmart employees getting supplemental government aid to keep wages low) while the US military uses taxpayer funds and poor people to secure profitable energy resources abroad. The state is not a burden to the capitalists. The state is the executive committee of the whole of the ruling class. This is capitalism functioning as usual. From the FDR period of Keynesian welfare state capitalism based on national middle class comsumption to globalization and neo-liberal capitalism based on global wealth concentration, we merely have different stages of capitalism’s historic development and different forms of state activity in pursuit of the accumulation process. The systems hasn’t changed. We don’t have different systems, just different historic stages of the very same system known as capitalism.

    As far as WWII is concerned, most sane people don’t support the outragous territorial claims of Adolph Hitler as do you, moron.

    United States Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 8, 2007 at 1:22 PM

    The State of Israel is fascist to the core as the late Israel Shahak, a Bergen Belsen survivor, demonstarted many times. So has Flapan, Chomsky, Lilienthal, Schlaim and many other Israeli & US Jewish authors. See The Founding Myths of Israel by Zeev Sternhell, an Israeli who specifically documents the Ben Gurion adherence to National Socialism and Fascism. In fact there was a great
    deal of Nazi-Zionist collaboration as the eminent American Jew Lenni Brenner has documented in
    several books. The whole economy is classic government-business corporatism which is the essence of fascism, the corporate state as the lifelong socialist Benito Mussolini proclaimed. Also see Sternhell’s earlier book on fascism in France titled, Neither Left Or Right. Fascism is the quintessential middle of the road between state socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. For a detailed explanation of how a laissez-faire society would work see the Atlas-sized Capitalism, over 1,000 pages by Dr. George Reisman. Also see Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises, Man, Economy and State by Murray N. Rothbard and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, the greatest book ever written and has influenced more Americans than any other book except the Unholy Bible, the Hebrew book of genocide. FDR’s New Deal was explicitly based on the fascist philosophy of Genoveni Gentile, as John T. Flynn proved in The Roosevelt Myth, also see As We Go Marching by Flynn and The God Of The Machine by Isabel Paterson. Hitler was much more popular in Germany than Roosevelt was here, so your “popularity” nonargument proves nothing. The New Deal was a total failure, by 1938 unemployment was higher than ever and like all dictators Roosevelt resorted to war to us out of the Depression. See Economics and The Public Welfare by Benjamin Anderson. WW2 was an inter-fascist war except for Communist Russia, which was far worse in EVERY respect than Japan and Germany. Pure laissez-faire never existed but to the extent we approached we had the greatest propsperity in world history, ergo for the UK. See America’s Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard for how HOOVER"s statist policies caused the great depression and were prolonged by FDR’s even worse policies. Hoover at least was pro-peace, FDR was a warmonger from WW1 on. We don’t have real capitalism.  Only a species of mixed economy statism, which is the cause of ALL our troubles. Pure economics DOES exist as Franz Oppenheimer proved in The State, the economic part is the productive part and the state part is the parasite part. The State was born in plunder and loot and is not necessary as Rothbard proves in For A New Liberty. Most of the merchant and common law was privately developed, see William Woolridge’s Uncle Sam, The Monopoly Man. Hitler’s territorial aims were very modest, see A.J.P. Taylor’s The Origins Of The Second World War, he only wanted back GERMAN territories stolen at Versailles and was even willing to part with Alsace-Lorraine, something Weimar wouldn’t consider. Hitler was a statist but a moderate one compared to mass murderers like FDR, Stalin and Churchill. Always nice to clean your clock, little Portnoy. Now tell your shiksa to stop crapping in your rattle trap cab.

    United States Posted by blondemike on Mar 8, 2007 at 3:40 PM

    I have read all of the Jewish “New History” authors listed above and not a single one claims that Israel is a fascist state. Ze’ev Sternhell comes closest in his analysis of “Labor Zionism” and its glorification of Labor not so much as a mode of class struggle in the Marxist sense of the workers struggling to appropriate the surplus of production or change the social system altogether but as a non-class based glorification of laborers as promoting the nation and national destiny through creative and productive work and thus defining their citizenship role. Here labor glorifies the state and the unique destiny of the volk through labor. There is a racist element close to Hitler’s idea of the Deutsche Arbiters Front in Nazi Germany. Yet Sternhell exaggerates to make a point which is still well taken especially because the phrase “Battle for Hebrew Labor” was meant to exclude Arabs. Still, and despite the occupation, none of the above cited authors would seriously describe the State of Israel as fascist.

    The Israeli state is no longer an example of government/business corporatism if indeed it ever was. The Parastatel enterprises have all been privatized and sold off by the state in the 1990s.  All countries including the US have a certain degree of business/government cooperation and coordination at times if for no other reason than practical policy making. This hardly constitutes fascism especially since it is done by popular consent.

    John Flynn never proved anything thing his counterfactual arguments are based on unjustified suppositions and dogmas about how a free market might have worked under other circumstances. The point is that no one including business was willing to take any other road to recovery than FDR’s and it worked tremendously. The stats prove it. The War did the rest. The fantastic rates of growth and recovery say alll that needs to be said. The US emerged as the top world economic power in 1945. The New Deal should get some credit along with the War.

    The highly disputable claim that Hitler was MORE popular than FDR does not mean that FDR was not wildly popular which he was. Hitler’s popularity waned even before the War and it is hard to know the real truth since Nazi Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship.

    What is “real capitalism” anyway. I would view it as one that actually exists rather than a hypothetical one that fits some unreal dogma.

    The idea that on economic actors are productive and the state is a parasite is an unwarrented dogma. The state is handmaiden to development very much welcomed by business. The state is often less parasitic than business which has collectively created some of the most wasteful economies through energy inefficiency, urban sprawl, wasteful resource use in transportation (cars vs. mass transit) and agribusiness (unnecessary water intensivity), and wasteful consumption.  The authors you cite don’t prove anything but offer dogmatic opinions. This is why they are not attracting a big following.  FDR was no warmonger and along with other waited for the real AXIS warmongers to attack, invade and conquer dozens of innocent countries killing countless people before intervening. This is the historic record even is you and other real fascists remain in denial about it. There were NO truely German territories stolen at Versailles only those taken up until than from France and Poland in the Partition which were majority Polish speaking. Hitler was bent on world conquest as he warned in Mein Kampf (I suggest you read it). He attacked many countries that had never had anything to do with Germany. Hitler was a statist and not a moderate at all as the German State was quite totalitarian by any standards. Stalin killed many people but FDR and Churchill did not, and certainly not more than Hitler. You are, of course, crazy. Again you cleaned no one’s clock and only made a Nazi fool of yourself. And leave my cab out of this!!

    United States Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 10, 2007 at 8:20 AM

    You have NEVER read any of the above authors then because they ALL claim Israel was a Fascist-National Socialist state from the beginning.  Germany was NOT totalitarian and didn’t even have central planning until well into the war. Stalin was absolutely totalitarian, made Hitler a lool like a libertarian and FDR & Churchill were total statists & absolute dictators during WW2. You NEVER read Mein Kampf either because nowhere in that book does he advocate world conquest or extermination of the Jews. There were several truly German areas taken from Germany at Versailles and after WW 2 Poland & Czechoslovakia expelled OVER FIFTEEN MILLION GERMANS FROM GERMAN AREAS AND OVER THREE MILLION DIED DURING THE EXPULSIONS AS EVEN THE ANTI-REVISIONIST BONN GOVERNMENT ADMITTED IN 1960. Again, you are simply totally wrong. The private enterprises were not sold off in Israel, they are joint government-business enterprises, the exact model of corporate fascism and national socialism. The labor Zionist movement was a racist, tribalist, collectivist movement deeply influenced by Mussolini and the Zionist Right like Shamir even wanted an alliance with Hitler against the UK as late as 1940. Pure capitalism can be discovered by reading the works of Rand, Rothbard, Reisman, Von Mises that I referenced for you last week. What the hell is a counterfactual ? See the 1956 updated & revised The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn and Flynn’s 1944 As We Go Marching for the fascist-national socialist essence of the New Deal. Some businessmen want the state and many other productive ones do NOT. You are preaching the discredited Marxian premise of no free economy only different pressure groups. FDR’s “popularity” waned much more than Hitler’s and he was a virtual dictator during the war. Again, no specifics to back up your assertions. Your taxi cab is a danger to the people of Chicago and that you allow your shiksa to shit in it is intolerable.

    United States Posted by blondemike on Mar 11, 2007 at 6:25 PM

    It is very clear that you know nothing of WWII, Israeli fascism, or shiksas shitting in cabs in Chicago. You were factually inaccurate on all three vital issues.

    United States Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 16, 2007 at 1:08 AM

    GO FUCK YOURSELF. I know a great deal about all three though you may know more about the third.

    United States Posted by blondemike on Mar 16, 2007 at 10:39 AM
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    Oil, the U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area and the Bush Agenda
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