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WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? |
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August 4, 2004 - Dick Cheney says that after three and one half years of Republican control of the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court the Democrats are responsible for the record high oil prices rippling through the world’s economy. His analysis avoids discussion of the impact of oil consumption required by military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan or how much that increasingly costly consumption is adding to the already record deficit. It does not reflect on the record profits recorded by Exxon-Mobile and Texaco-Chevron announced last week. It does not consider the effect of the Bush Administration’s stubborn insistence on paying more and more to Big Oil to divert production into the so-called Strategic Oil Reserve. It simply claims that the Democrat minority’s failure to support new tax breaks for Big Oil to subsidize drilling is the sole cause of the price you have to pay at the pump and the drag on an already burdened world economy.
That Cheney blames the Democrat minority is no surprise. All throughout the Bush occupation of the White House we have been told that Bush is not responsible. What the Bush campaign can’t blame on the Clintons they find a way to blame on Jimmy Carter. And if Clinton did something and it worked well then he was just reaping the benefit of George H. W. Bush’s handiwork when Poppy was President. Halliburton has just settled a complaint by the SEC that it concealed from the shareholders and the market that it was a change in accounting treatment of cost overruns that allowed then CEO Dick Cheney to publicly announce astounding growth in recorded earnings when without the change the company would have recorded a loss. Cheney’s statements are just the kind of corporate half truths that landed Enron’s Ken Lay in the defendant’s dock. Halliburton’s CFO and Chief Accountant took responsibility for the concealment and paid fines. The SEC couldn’t find any evidence that CEO Cheney knew that the posted profits were merely paper entries in the books. Of course the change sure did not hurt the CEO’s compensation package. Vice-President Cheney is said to have testified in the inquiry and did so under oath successfully sending the blame somewhere else. In a sense Cheney has a point. The responsibilities for the results that matter are not solely that of the Bush-Cheney team. We, you and me, share the responsibility as well. We let them get away with it. |
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