juhasz, Antonia
Antonia Juhasz, a fellow at Oil Change International, has two major books: The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time, which exposes oil relations with the Iraq war, and her most recent book The Tyranny of Oil : The World's Most Powerful Industry--and what we must do to stop it, which exposes the relationships between governments and oil.
Juhasz, Antonia. The Bu$H Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. New York: HC, 2007.
Juhasz, Antonia. The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry--and What We Must Do to Stop It. New York, NY: William Morrow, 2008.
She also had an article published in the New York Times: "Whose Oil is It Anyway" in the March 13, 2007 issue of the New York Times.
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Juhasz, A. (2006). The Bush agenda: Invading the world, one economy at a time. New York: HarperCollins. Chapter 2 Ambitions of Empire
...INTRODUCING THE AUTHORS: CHENEY, WOLFOWITZ, KHALILZAD, LIBBY, EDELMAN, AND POWELL
The clearest early rendering of the ideas that would become the Bush Agenda took shape in the 1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" (DPG), which was one of the final products of the George H. W. Bush administration (1989-1993): It provides much of the Bush Agenda's military framework. The DPG is a classified, internal planning guide for the Pentagon prepared approximately every two years. It is not intended for public consumption. It describes America's overall military strategy and represents "guidance" from the president and the secretary of defense to the four military services on how to prepare their budgets and forces for the future.
The 1992 DPG was written by six men who served in the administrations of both Bush presidents: Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Scooter Libby, Eric Edelman, and Colin Powell. These men, together with later authors of key Bush Agenda documents, have known and worked with each other, shared and sculpted ideas, and refined their positions for well over a quarter of a century.
. Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (a later author), and World Bank President and former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz have worked together in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Over the years, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz have increasingly demonstrated a commitment to the combined forces of absolute U.S. military dominance and corporate -expansion that have found their fulfillment in the Bush Agenda. At age twenty-eight, Cheney began his government career as Rumsfeld's assistant in the Nixon and then the Ford White Houses, , eventually replacing his mentor as Ford's chief of staff when Rumsfeld became defense secretary.
Under Ford, Cheney established his cold-warrior credentials as a steadfast opponent to detente with the Soviet Union. In fact, the only administration official credited with being more opposed to detente at the time was Rumsfeld. When the Republicans lost the White House in 1977 to Jimmy Carter, Cheney moved to the House of Representatives, while Rumsfeld went to work for multinational pharmaceutical company, G.D. Searle, eventually becoming its CEO. Cheney maintained a consistent conservative voting record for eleven years as Wyoming's sole member of Congress. Wolfowitz, who also began his government service in the Nixon administration at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, was increasingly focusing his attention on two highly interrelated issues: U.S. dominance over oil in general, and U.S. dominance over the Middle East in particular.
In fact, Wolfowitz has shown a greater commitment to these twin modes of building the Pax Americana than to any particular party affiliation. Thus, unlike most of his fellow authors, Wolfowitz continued his government career working in President Carter's Pentagon. In 1977, two years before Saddam Hussein even became Iraq's leader, Wolfowitz conducted the first extensive study of the need for the United States to defend the Persi
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Texan. After all, Bush was born in Connecticut, and he returned to the East Coast at age fifteen to attend the prestigious Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, followed by college and business school at Yale and Harvard, respectively.
As a result of his loss, Bush vowed that he "would never be out-Texaned again" in his political career.21 In 1984, Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation bought out Bush's oil companies. Although both of Bush's companies had failed, they were purchased and Bush was retained as Spectrum 7's chairman and CEO likely due to the fact that his father had recently become vice president of the United States. Spectrum 7, which owed more than $3 million in debts by 1986, was saved through a merger with Harken Energy, which retained Bush as a board member and consultant.22
:{:{Tapping into his many friendly and profitable connections to the Saudi royals, Bush raised $25 million for Harken by bringing Saudi real estate tycoon Sheikh Abdullah Taha Bakhsh onto the board. Harken subsequently received a gas and oil exploration contract with Bahrain in 1989. 23 After working on his father's presidential campaign as liaison to the religious right, Bush began his second career as an owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989.}:
When he sold his shares in 1998, he earned more than $14.5 million in profit. In the interim, he was elected governor of Texas in 1994 and again in 1998. Bush's policies as governor deeply favored corporations and the wealthy. For example, in 1999 Houston overtook Los Angeles as the smoggiest U.S. city. This was due in part to Bush's decision to allow Texas's more than 800 oil refineries and chemical plants (which were contributing 900,000 tons of pollution annually) to choose whether or not they would comply with the state's clean air regulations, rather than requiring them to do so.
Bush cut taxes on corporations and individuals and increased policies directing financial benefits to both. As a result, by 2000, Texas ranked forty-ninth among states in overall taxes collected and fiftieth in per capita state spending. Economic inequality overall in Texas rose dramatically during Bush's tenure as the incomes of those at the top soared and those in the middle and bottom either stagnated or dropped. Texas then joined Louisiana and New York as the three states with the worst income inequality in the nation.24
:{:{Bush was very good to the oil and energy sectors, and they, in turn, were very good to him. Kenneth Lay and the Houston-based energy services company, the Enron Corporation, were Bush's all-time career patrons, contributing more money than any individual and company to his political campaigns.}: That is, before Enron was found guilty of defrauding its investors, including the State of California, of billions of dollars, which led to the company's 2001 bankruptcy and Lay's 2004 indictment on eleven counts of securities fraud (for which he is currently standing trial).
In fact, Bush had an unprecedented ability to raise money for his campaigns. Charles Lewis of the Center on Public Integrity put it this way: "George W. Bush has altogether redefined the parameters of political fundraising," shattering all previous fundraising records in 1999 to 2000 and again in 2003 to 2004. 25
George W. Bush certainly had the right connections and the right politics, but, if there were any doubts that he belonged in the Pax Americana brotherhood, he put them all to rest with his 2002 National Security Strategy,}:}:
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Before the DPG -drafters reunited in 1997 to establish a virtual Bush government in waiting with the Project for the New American Century, each man pursued the ideas enshrined in the DPG in his own way. Cheney considered a run for president against Bill Clinton. In 1993 and 1994, he formed a Political Action Committee, which included Thomas Cruikshank, CEO of the Halliburton Corporation, the Texas-based energy services giant, and Stephen Bechtel, president of California's Bechtel Corporation, the largest engineering company in the world. The "Cheney for President" buttons he distributed are still highly sought after; the same, however, was not true of his candidacy. Cheney did not despair; in 1995, he accepted his first job in the private sector in more than twenty years as president and CEO of Halliburton. Paul Wolfowitz left the government as well. Apparently, President Cl...
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