From the article that Juan Cole linked to:
The former Shell oil boss agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight: "Many neo conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that and the other. International oil companies, without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don't have a theology."
BBC - Newsnight
This is straight-up true. We have this idea of corporate profit-mongers as evil men intent on taking over the world. Yet every indication shows them to be short-term, visionless people who are primarily interested in meeting the next quarter's expectations. They don't undertake long-term, risky ventures for the same reason that Vin Diesel and Eddie Murphy are more likely to get their films made rather than my three-part epic "Caligula Versus George Washington" (I'm still looking for backers for that, in case you're interested).
Except for corporate hucksters like Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay who prefer wild-eyed speculation to hide their trickery, corporate leaders prefer stability and managed-growth. And the bigger the organization, the more stability and visionless they want to be. These are people who will purposefully increase quarterly expenses in order to shave off pennies from their earnings report to match Wall Street expectations; as Wall Street punishes companies who perform much better than they were expected to. As Juan Cole stated in his post, these people prefer to have as smooth a business cycle as possible; and risky strategies lead to unsmooth cycles.
The key to the corporate world these days is managing expectations, and stability is the key to that. They see the obvious risks in raping Iraqi's of their oil. They've got their established wells and their deep-sea exploration and their high oil prices and their full-capacity refineries, and they like it. It's the risk-taking morons like Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, and Bush who couldn't cut it in the business world who want to steal the oil for their own evil purposes.
And the irony is that, in the end, it's the corporate world's short-term strategies which have the long-term advantage over the neo-cons long-term plans. And with corporate oil fascists attempting to rein-in the politicians and Pentagon leaders, O'Henry couldn't have written it better.
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3 comments:
Hey dipshit. Stop sniffing the liberal glue. Cheney and Bush were both businessmen before opting to save our country from you freaks. And both Wolfowitz and Perle have strong corporate ties and sit on corporate boards.
Bzzt, try again.
Satan - What you say is true, except that you fail to grasp the reason why they have corporate ties. These are not successful businessmen who turned corporate success into political success. All four of them turned their government success and/or connections into corporate success.
Worst of all is George W., who had to rely upon his father's government success to build his business success...and STILL failed as a businessman. Upon which he built his failed presidency. His only success in life was as governor of my fine state, and that's widely regarded as a powerless figure-head position. He got the appearance of power and leadership, without being able to actually screw things up. I really wish he had stayed here.
This sounds right. I'm referring to Dr. Biobrain's post, not the silly rant in the previous comment. If Wolf-the-bitch is on a corporate board, it's because the corp wants to use him to get gov't contracts. They all want to screw the taxpayer, in other words.
--RAJ
BTW, discovered your site via Legal Fiction.
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