President Bush made another speech tonight, this time in front of Congress and the country, touting his latest plans to turn around this debacle of a presidency and somehow get the country back on the right track. Well actually he didn't admit that the country isn't on the right track. In the world of Bush administration speak, everything is wonderful and there are no worries and we're actually winning in Iraq, we're not spying on our own citizens, and the Katrina relief effort went swimmingly (unless of course you were poor or black or couldn't swim). Which is why I laugh at his latest attempt to change the national narrative away from his failings as a leader and as a human being and onto new issues, because you know what? It's far past the point where anyone - anyone with half a fucking brain - can take anything he says seriously. He and the Republican Congress have told so many freakin' lies, have covered up so much corruption, have promoted so many incompetents, that it just boggles the mind how they think we could still trust a damn word they say. Remember, I was a Republican - a diehard Republican - at the start of the Bush presidency. Now I'm at the point that I wouldn't vote for one if you paid me 1/10th of 1% of what Exxon-Mobil made last quarter. Oh wait, that would be $10 million. Ok yeah, I'd vote for a Republican for that. But anything less than that, not so much.
Speaking of Big Oil, Exxon's profits broke the all-time American record for a publicly traded company in 2005, with the top 2 all-time quarters in the 3rd and 4th quarter of this year. And do you want to guess whose record they broke? Their own. In 2004, Exxon Mobil made $25.3 billion in profits. This year, with record gas prices and home heating oil rates, it shot up to $36.1 billion. Billion. Profits. Not revenues. Profits. They also have the 5th spot on the all-time list, from 2003. And 3rd all-time was also set this year, by Citigroup. I wonder if the Republican brokered bankruptcy bill, which was underwritten by credit card companies, was a factor.
I don't exactly know what to do about that. Hey, companies are supposed to make money. And you can't necessarily expect them to have the public's best interest in mind at all times. But of course that's what the government is for, at least in some part. To put regulations in place that doesn't allow big business to gouge its customers to make obscene profits. Of course, almost every action that the Bush administration has taken since coming into power - with the exception of invading an oil-rich country for reasons that still remain murky at best and apparently did not include using any of their oil to ease gas prices over here - has been to assist big business at the expense of the rest of us. And if you're not a major shareholder in some big corporation, then you are the "rest of us". How Bush is still getting these poor, backwards Bible-toters down in the South to still love him despite it being against their economic interest is amazing. But I guess they just blame the blacks and gays and abortionists for the fact that they can't find jobs and their kids don't have medical care. Jesus.
On the bright side, the nation of Iceland recently announced that by the middle of this century, they will be oil independent, requiring all cars to run on hydrogen fuel instead of gasoline. The natural resources of the nation (where boiling water is found underground as a result of volcanic activity) certainly helps make this a realistic goal. But I just wish we had a leader even remotely courageous enough to try something like that. Of course, we could start with one whose family didn't make all of its fortune in oil. Or was best friends with Enron's chief criminal Ken Lay. But we can all dream, can't we?
I have a new found respect for you, Bill. -Amy
Posted by: Hasselbeck | February 05, 2006 at 05:22 PM