Chris

“Oil men, like producers of other raw materials, could not continue to sell their products below cost...For prices to be raised, production had to be controlled, and to bring production under control, Ickes began with an all-out campaign against the "hot oiler,"...This bootleg oil was secretly siphoned off from pipelines, hidden in camouflaged tanks that were covered with weeds, moved about both in an intrcate network of secret pipelines and by trucks, and then smuggled across state borders at night.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes...reach the light of day?”
― Goodman, Amy

“protected businesses never, never become competitive ... Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all other U.S. corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the U.S. government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot - all at taxpayer expense.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“Why should a financial engineer be paid four, four times... to a hundred times more than the, uh... real engineer?
A real engineer build bridges, a financial engineer build, build dreams.
And when those dream turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it.”
― Andrew Sheng