Month: November 2022

Biden threatens new tax to end ‘war profiteering’

Record profits for oil firms are the “windfall of war,” the US president said

US President Joe Biden has vowed to impose new taxes to restrain the “excess profits” of American oil companies, insisting they must help to lower prices for consumers while accusing firms of reaping undue benefits from the war in Ukraine.

The president took the oil industry to task during a Monday address, speaking alongside Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Treasury head Janet Yellen. He argued that companies have seen “profits so high it’s hard to believe” since fighting erupted in Eastern Europe earlier this year, and must start acting beyond their “narrow self-interest.”

“Oil companies’ record profits today are not because they’re doing something new or innovative. Their profits are a windfall of war – the windfall from the brutal conflict that’s ravaging Ukraine and hurting tens of millions of people around the globe,” he said, adding that firms have “a responsibility to act in the interest of their consumers, their community, and their country.”

If they don’t, they’re going to pay a higher tax on their excess profits and face other restrictions. My team will work with Congress to look at these options that are available to us… It’s time for these companies to stop war profiteering.

The president went on to note the significant earnings reported this year by oil giants like Shell and Exxon, with the former company recently announcing $9.5 billion in profit for the third quarter of 2022, almost doubling what it made during the same period last year. Exxon, meanwhile, said it brought in $18.7 billion in profits the last quarter, “nearly triple what Exxon made last year and the most in its 152-year history,” Biden said. “It’s never made that much profit.”

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While he did not specify exactly what the new taxes would entail, Biden said companies must “invest in America by increasing production and refining capacity” in order to lower prices for consumers. Prices at the pump have dropped from a recent peak of more than $5 per gallon in June, though the president claimed that was largely due to the White House’s decision to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve earlier this year.

The threat to oil firms comes a little more than a week ahead of the midterm elections, where record-high inflation and surging consumer prices have become top issues in many races. The White House has reportedly been weighing options for new taxes on oil and gas firms since last summer, though has apparently yet to work out any specific legislation with lawmakers.

There are no progressives in the U.S. Congress.

Eric Zuesse

The common idea that there are progressives in the U.S. Congress (Senate and House) is entirely false — a put-on show, with no reality behind it.

A progressive’s main commitment is to strengthen, and side with, the weak against the strong who threaten or abuse the weak; and, in the real world, the biggest application of that commitment is to support any nation that poses no threat to a more powerful nation, if the more powerful nation tries to take over that weaker and non-threatening weaker nation — tries to turn it into a colony (i.e., to replace its sovereignty, by enslavement to that foreign power). A progressive opposes all forms of enslavement — especially imperialism (which is enslavement on an international scale).

Foreign affairs, international relations, are more important to the super-rich (who control international corporations) than domestic affairs (such as the goal that all ethnicities or ‘races’ will have equality of rights), because their wealth is based upon buying and selling around the world, and because being headquartered in the most powerful nation means therefore having its taxpayers fund the global gendarmes (the military) that stand behind and protect their investments — protect the corporations that they control. That gives U.S.-based international corporations an enormous freebie that none others (no foreign ones) have. It’s an enormous competitive advantage. The U.S. military are the global gendarmes for America’s billionaires. Ever since the end of WW II (specifically 25 July 1945), America has been Government by the super-rich, for the super-rich, that is paid for by all U.S. taxpayers, on the basis of the myth that it is instead (as it formerly was) Government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Ever since 1945, it has been just one massive con. (It’s true even for the ‘progressives’)

There never was a U.S. Department of ‘Defense’ until 1947 when America’s “standing army” (the permanent-warfare U.S. military) was created, and the U.S. Department of War (which had no standing army, no permanent-war economy) ended, and the U.S. Department of ‘Defense’ (Aggression) was created to replace the U.S. Department of War (which had been created by America’s Founders — who were anti-imperialists to their bones). This decision for America to take over gthe world had been made on 25 July 1945 by President Harry Truman on the advice of his hero, General Dwight Eisenhower. In the beginning, the only people who suffered America’s growing empire were the people who suffered the U.S.-imposed dictatorships that replaced their national democracies in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), and many lesser-known coups and invasions, right up till U.S. President Barack Obama’s coup that grabbed control over Ukraine in 2014 because Ukraine’s border is the closest of any nation’s to The Kremlin in Moscow and so bringing Ukraine into NATO would enable U.S. nuclear missiles to be posted on the Russian border only 300 miles away from Moscow, just five minutes of missile-flying time for Russia’s central command to be able to identify that launch and respond to it by launching their own retaliatory missiles. This would be “checkmate” against Russia.

The scheme had actually been invented by the British aristocrat Cecil Rhodes, who ran Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) and later Cape Colony (now called South Africa(). In 1877, he first wrote in his private papers that he must organize in his will a Trust to fund subversion of the U.S. Government so that it would become again controlled by the Crown and would supply the might that would enable continued growth of the Empire. One of Rhodes’s proteges was the then very young Winston Churchill, who, shortly after the intensely anti-imperialist U.S. President FDR died on 12 April 1945 and Harry Truman replaced him, Prime Minister Churchill concluded that the time for Rhodes’s plan might be now. Here is how Wikipedia describes Churchill’s “Operation Unthinkable”:

Operation Unthinkable was the name given to two related possible future war plans by the British Chiefs of Staff against the Soviet Union in 1945. The plans were never approved or implemented. The creation of the plans was ordered by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in May 1945 and developed by the British Armed Forces Joint Planning Staff in May 1945 at the end of World War II in Europe.[1] …

In response to an instruction by Churchill of 10 June 1945, a follow-up report was written on “what measures would be required to ensure the security of the British Isles in the event of war with Russia in the near future”.[10] American forces were relocating to the Pacific for a planned invasion of Japan, and Churchill was concerned that the reduction in supporting forces would leave the Soviets in a strong position to take offensive action in Western Europe. The report concluded that if the United States focused solely on the Pacific Theatre, Britain’s odds “would become fanciful”.[11] …

One plan assumed a surprise attack on the Soviet forces stationed in Germany to “impose the will of the Western Allies” on the Soviets. “The will” was qualified as “a square deal for Poland”,[2] which probably meant enforcing the recently-signed Yalta Agreement. The planners decided that without massive American help, Britain would probably fail. …

The initial primary goal of the operation was declared as “to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire. Even though ‘the will’ of these two countries may be defined as no more than a square deal for Poland, that does not necessarily limit the military commitment”.[2] (The Soviet Union is referred to as “Russia” throughout the document, a metonym that was common in the West throughout the Cold War.)

The chiefs of staff were concerned that both the enormous size of the Soviet forces deployed in Europe at the end of the war and the perception that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin was unreliable caused a Soviet threat to exist in Western Europe. The Soviet Union had yet to launch its attack on Japanese forces and so one of the assumptions in the report was that the Soviet Union would instead ally with Japan if the Western Allies commenced hostilities.

The hypothetical date for the start of the Allied invasion of Soviet-held Europe was scheduled for 1 July 1945, four days before the United Kingdom general elections.[7] The plan assumed a surprise attack by up to 47 British and American divisions in the area of Dresden, in the middle of Soviet lines.[7] That represented almost half of the roughly 100 divisions available to the British, American and Canadian headquarters at that time.[5]

Churchill was hoping that Truman would come to agree with him that America and the UK should reject the agreements that FDR had made with the Soviet Union, but the person who really persuaded Truman of this was instead Truman’s hero, General Dwight Eisenhower, who argued that either the Soviet Union would take over the entire world or else the United States would.

What had happened is that when the first atomic-bomb test succeeded on 16 July 1945, Truman turned against Stalin; then on 25 July 1945, Truman told Stalin that the lands which the Soviets had liberated would not be recognized by the U.S. unless and until elections were held there. And the Marshall Plan reconstruction aid would go ONLY to countries that the Soviet Union had NOT liberated — so that those Soviet lands would get reconstruction-aid only from a Soviet Union that had lost 20-27 million dead from defeating Hitler, which meant they’d receive very little. (America had lost only 419,400 dead.) The aim was to make the Soviet-liberated lands hate the Soviet Union and wish they’d been liberated by America instead. And it worked.

Then on 24 February 1990, U.S. President GHW Bush started instructing the leaders of America’s vassal nations (first being Germany’s Helmut Kohl) that The West’s promises to Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded were to be a lie, and that the goal now would be to conquer Russia itself, by expanding NATO right up to Russia’s borders — exactly what they had verbally promised to Gorbachev they WOULDN’T do.

The closest foreign border to The Kremlin is Ukraine, 300 miles away; second-closest is Finland 500 miles away. That’s respectively 5 minutes and 7 minutes missile-flying time away. And this is how America aims finally to conquer — to “checkmate” — Russia. A nuclear-blitz first strike to annihilate Russia’s central command is their goal.

And, finally, on 26 October 2022, the U.S. House Progressive Caucus, plus Senator Bernie Sanders, backtracked from advising Biden to seek a negotiated end to the Ukraine war, and returned to their prior mealy-mouthed obfuscations and lies against Russia, which they more clearly than ever now urged must be defeated in the battlefields of Ukraine. They know that they are liars and that Obama started the war in Ukraine in 2014, Putin didn’t start it in 2022. So: now, we know that they ALL are neocons (supporters of extending the U.S. empire everywhere).

There are no progressives in the U.S. Congress. There are merely rabid neocon liars who all are ultimately in the pay of the billionaires who control U.S. international corporations.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.