“War is Good for Business”: Big Oil, Wall Street and the Pentagon’s “New Cold War” Against Russia
By Bill Dores
Global Research
May 08, 2014
The Soviet Union no longer exists. The Russian Federation is not a socialist state. But the U.S. military and political establishment still seek to destroy Russia. That’s the object of the crisis the Pentagon, State Department and CIA are orchestrating in Ukraine.
What drives this seemingly irrational course of action?
The same thing that drove the George W. Bush regime to invade Iraq in 2003. The same thing that’s driving the violent anti-China rhetoric from the Pentagon and the White House: financial need and cold economic calculation.
Not the financial need of the hungry and homeless, of the millions who need jobs at living wages, of those who can’t pay their rent or mortgages or who must choose between heating and eating.
It’s the need of Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs to pump up their profits, stock prices and rates of return on their invested capital amid a global economic slowdown caused by capitalist overproduction.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that the United States will replace Russia this year as the world’s top hydrocarbon energy producer. It says the U.S. will replace Saudi Arabia as the world’s No. 1 oil producer by 2015.
This is the result of the U.S. capitalist class investing hundreds of billions of dollars over the past 10 years in fracking — the hydraulic fracturing of oil and natural gas from shale rock. ExxonMobil, the world’s most profitable company, spent $41 billion in 2010 to buy fracking giant XTO Energy. ExxonMobil is now the largest U.S. natural gas producer.
Chevron, Phillips 66, Valero, Berkshire Hathaway and General Electric are other top 10 Fortune 500 companies betting billions on the superprofits they hope fracking will bring. Some of them have ascended to the top 10 based on these investments. Halliburton, the Koch brothers and hedge funds like KKR are heavily invested. So is every major bank.
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