Wikileaks: Speculators Helped Cause Oil Bubble [New]
From Rolling Stone and Matt Taibbi, based on a McClatchy report about WikiLeaks documents:
Goldman Sachs, while outrageously predicting a “super spike” that might cause oil to reach as high as $200 a barrel, blamed piggish American consumers and preached conservation as a bulwark against oil supply disruptions. The bank’s “Oracle of Oil,” Arjun Murti, even broadcast the fact that he owned two hybrid cars.
Well, thanks to Wikileaks, we now know that when the Bush administration reached out to the Saudis in the summer of ’08 to ask them to increase oil production to lower prices, the Saudis responded by saying they were having a hard time finding buyers for their oil as it was, and instead asked the Bush administration to rein in Wall Street speculators.
According to the McClatchy report, the Wiki cables show that Saudi ministers repeatedly told Bush administration officials that increasing production might be counterproductive.
It would be amusing if the US government was the only one surprised (or is it shocked, shocked, shocked, to paraphrase Claude Rains in Casablanca?) to learn Wall Street gamblers deliberately jacked commodity prices in 2008 (and today, one presumes), causing the starvation of millions in the Third World, among other pleasant effects. Plus massive windfall profits for oil companies. Feigning ignorance, of course, exempts the US government from actually taxing these windfall profits, never mind stopping them.
And whatever happened to the Assange rape case and all the thundering about WikiLeaks endangering our troops? So far, WikiLeaks has only shown us our overlords are venal, corrupt, and eager to do anything to prevent the truth from coming out. And that includes Obama in March 2009 secretly trying to shut down a Spanish investigation into US torture.
And, finally, it’s also interesting that WikiLeaks is the gift that keeps on giving, confirming our worst suspicions about all sorts of underhanded political and economic behavior of our ruling elites going back decades. Isn’t that a hoot? Who could have predicted that outcome?
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