Finally we are getting close to the hardcore criminals. What took so long?

I blogged against Bush for 5 years and the best, most carefully researched blog post I ever wrote was about how Goldman Sachs conspired with the Saudi royal family to bring down the price of oil ahead of the 2006 mid-term elections. In fact, they manipulated prices so carefully that a low point (20% drop in 3 months) was hit on the very day of the election (and then back up again ASAP, of course - link at sig).

Now would be a good time to ask, "How did they do it and why did they do it?"

At the time, the Bush cabal knew they were in real trouble. Public outrage was then closely linked to prices being charged at the pump, in fact various graphs showed Bush's popularity directly linked to gas prices (then a record high $3.08).

As I explained on my blog, the politically-motivated attack on oil prices was two-pronged:

On the one hand, we had the Saudis and other pro-US players in the Middle East playing a delicate balancing game by promising their OPEC friends that they would cut production, but then failing to commit to the cuts and even raising production slightly instead. The market reaction was an interesting and significant factor here: none of the experts actually believed that OPEC would cut production before the US mid-terms, so the price never went up.

On the other hand, we had Goldman Sachs dumping more than $6 billion in gasoline futures contracts. This move was like a clarion call to the markets: when the big funds change their weighting, smaller funds quickly follow suit. Even if the move is actually contrary to market realities, it doesn't matter. As Lew Rockwell explains, what Goldman Sachs did is called "painting the tape"...

It's worth noting here that Henry M. Paulson Junior, the 74th Secretary of the Treasury, appointed by Bush in June, 2006, was the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs. In Wall Street slang, he's now a big part of the US government's Plunge Protection Team.

The Plunge Protection Team (PPT) are the super-intelligent economic gurus *cough! * who were supposed to have ensured that what's happening right now would never happen. Heckuva job, Paulson.

I should do a search of my blog now and find all the manifold other occasions where Goldman Sachs was the Bush cabal's banking institution of choice, on many a strange occasion. But ICBB.

So what happened after Bush scraped through those 2006 mid-terms, bruised but unbowed? Well, here's what happened at Goldman Sachs:

The Wall Street Journal, citing unidentified sources, writes that Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, is in line for compensation exceeding $50 million, and analysts told the newspaper that that some other chief executives, such as James Cayne of Bear Stearns and E. Stanley O’Neal of Merrill Lynch, could get $40 million to $50 million, or higher.

Heckuva job, GS! So what exactly did they do to earn those bonuses, hmmn?

It was all, always, all about oil, and the $$$ and power that entails. Just imagine if Bush's coup in Venezuela had succeeded, or if the USA had been able to seize total control of Iraq's oil supplies. Where would we be today? Probably saluting President Jeb Bush.

As I wrote on my blog:

Many people criticize Bush as a bumbling incompetent, because they judge him as a supposed representative of the US public's interests. But Bush's masters are actually the richest of the rich, a global elite who flitter from country to country in private jets, and they think he is doing a fine job, a fine job indeed. As Bush famously told a charity dinner crowd in 2000:

"This is an impressive crowd — the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base."

So who is Obama's base?

PS: Now would also be a good time for Obama to dig out records of those Energy Task Force meetings that Cheney was so desperate to keep secret.

PPS: Like I said, link at sig.