‘The state of the union is disastrous. By its naked aggression, bullying, illegal spying on Americans, and illegal torture and detentions, the Bush administration has demonstrated American contempt for the Geneva Convention, for human life and dignity, and for the civil liberties of its own citizens. Increasingly, the US is isolated in the world, having to resort to bribery and threats to impose its diktats. No country any longer looks to America for moral leadership. The US has become a rogue nation. 

Least of all did President Bush tell any truth about the economy. He talked about economic growth rates without acknowledging that they result from eating the seed corn and do not produce jobs with a living wage for Americans. He touted a low rate of unemployment and did not admit that the figure is false because it does not count millions of discouraged workers who have dropped out of the work force.’ 

The US Has Become A Rogue Nation.

‘Although not quite as slickly eloquent as Willy before him, Dubya, like his predecessor, is proficient and experienced in the art of speaking one thing and meaning another. Just as often, he makes statements more flowery than they have to be, possibly intentionally so as to make what he’s saying sound less aggressive than if you were cut away the extraneous poetry to reveal the plain meaning of his words. Below are highlights from his State of the Union speech, translated into clear and candid English.’ 

Translating the Emperor's Speech

‘We are all trying to decipher last week’s State of the Union. We are a nation, it seems, where the enemy lives and thrives among us. Something must be done. But what? 

According to the 2006 SOTU, one of these enemies from within is the vibrant national movement for American isolationism, a movement that dominates both political parties at the grass roots. Led by the overwhelmingly popular American Conservative magazine, and fueled by the robust and militant Murray Rothbard/Garet Garret fan club, Bush believes that this resurgence of the Old Right will sweep the 2006 elections.  

This is an extremely dangerous situation for government, for Bush himself, for the existing Congress (to whom Mr. Bush was speaking) and for the military industrial complex in a time when we "are eating our seed corn," as Paul Craig Roberts explains.’ 

A Straussian Interpretation Of The 2006 SOTU

‘Tyson Slocum, acting director of Public Citizen's energy program, said oil companies are taking advantage of consumers. "Oil prices are definitely artificially high," Slocum said, "in large part because of anti-competetive practices by major oil companies. We've documented it, government investigations have documented it." Slocum testified before the Senate on Wednesday about the price squeeze induced by mergers in the oil industry. In the past 15 years, there have been more than 2,600 mergers in the oil industry, which Slocum says make this kind of price manipulation almost inevitable. 

"In 2001, the Federal Trade Commission did a major investigation of gasoline markets and found that oil companies could intentionally withhold capacities from the marketplace in order to create some scarcity to drive prices up," Slocum said. "Now when they create scarcity, they're not actually creating scarcity like long gas lines, but they're creating shortages that, in the wholesale market, translate to higher retail prices. If that sounds familiar to you, because that's exactly the economic strategy pursued by Enron and other electricity companies in California, where they literally were taking power plants offline, creating shortages that caused the prices of electricity to skyrocket, and they made tons of money."’ 

Raking In Profits At The World's Expense

Writing in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign
Affairs, Paul R. Pillar has launched a furious assault on the Bush
administration for its manipulation of prewar intelligence about Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) and links to al Qaeda.  

Mr. Pillar should know, because he was the CIA's
National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia (NESA) from 2000
to 2005. 

‘During the run-up to the
invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for
the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise,
politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw
intelligence to make its public case.’ 

Intelligence,
Policy & The War In Iraq

‘In Crude Designs, a report published by the
UK-based non-governmental organisation Platform and the US's Global Policy
Institute, oil analyst Greg Muttitt says if current plans are approved, Iraqi's
will "lose control of more than 85 percent of their oil resources to
foreign multinationals."’ 

Who Will
Possess Iraq’s Oilfields?