No .... it's not!

IS WAR FOR OIL NATION BUILDING?

Based upon the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the first four years of the military occupation and war in Iraq cost American tax payers about $1 trillion dollars. This is $720 million per day or $500,000 each minute. Untold additional costs are incurred for pollution-induced health care and subsidies to assure fossil and radioactive energy preeminence over renewable energy options.

As admitted by economist Alan Greenspan and encouraged by influential war activists including Max Boot, William Krystol, and Ted Koppel, the US occupation of Iraq is to insure “democracy” with rules that enable oil companies to produce Iraq’s oil at low taking costs and export it for production of gasoline and diesel fuel that retail at prices controlled by oil companies. In other words American taxpayers sent troops to provide for record profits that are taken by oil companies and wealth was and will continue to be transferred from the earnings of the middle class to the rich.

It is a well proven formula for taking oil at the cost of pumping it from the ground, paying a royalty on the minimum cost of removal, refusing to consider or provide for the replacement cost, and selling refinery-controlled octane- or cetane-rated fuels to captive markets because engines are designed to be limited to operation on such narrowly specified refinery fuels.

Transportation markets are assured by an ever increasing demand to fuel octane- or cetane-dedicated engines but if another provider attempts to share this market, “gas-wars” are waged in which the price of gasoline (and/or diesel fuel) is lowered as needed to put alternate fuel providers out of business. Oil companies taking record profits have no trouble dropping the price of gasoline to put upstart competitors out of business.

WHAT WAS ACCOMPLISHED?

• Over 500,000 Iraqi and American lives were lost.
• Iraq’s education and health-care systems were destroyed.
• Every barrel of oil that has come to Americans from Iraq has about $115 in war costs before the market price of oil was added.
• Exxon, other oil companies, and speculators have admitted a series of record-breaking profits.
• A civil war has developed in Iraq to magnify the cost of American imperialism.

You can be sure that war for oil is not nation building. It is destructive to our nation and it harms every portion of the precious planet that all life depends upon.

DEFENSE OF THE PLANET – BUILDING GOOD WILL, HOPE, AND UNIFYING COMMITMENT TO HARD WORK FOR SUSTAINABLE PROSPERITY

After inauguration, President Obama could provide for much greater returns on American defense expenditures by utilizing the world’s mightiest military to launch training programs (that are easily justified as recruitment inducements) for safer and more efficient utilization of alternative fuels particularly including American made renewable fuels.

American manufacturers can truly become essential technology provider s for communities throughout the world that aspire to replace fear, apathy, and anger with the resolve to participate in a worldwide economy that provides opportunities for eventual achievement of sustainable prosperity.

By the way, Roy wrote this letter to President Obama. He is a writing machine!