Robert Scheer's column reminds us of the machinations on behalf of Big Oil that began with the $200 million that jump-started W's 2000 campaign and have continued up through more current developments that appear to have gone unnoticed beneath the cover of primary season hoopla. Few besides Scheer seem to have noticed that oil prices, which recently slipped below $90/bbl., have climbed back toward the $100 mark with the oil export restrictions imposed by President Chávez in response to Exxon/Mobil's legal action to freeze Venezuelan assets--this with the support of the Bush Administration. In his attempt to "punish" Big Oil, Chavez has only succeeded in padding corporate coffers' already bloated profits.

But who could have guessed that Chávez would retaliate by cutting off oil exports to the US? Perhaps the same people who predicted that war in Iraq would open the spigots to plentiful, cheap oil from the Mideast and precipitate a shower of rose petals welcoming American liberators to the heart of the Islamic world. From its very inception, the current administration has been a government of Big Oil, for Big Oil and by Big Oil; prayer in school, opposition to stem cell research, the defense of Terri Schiavo etc. have all been a sideshow, a sop tossed to the great unwashed of the Republican electorate whose witless complicity was the necessary technical precondition for the unfettered rule of Big Oil. To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, whenever this administration has protested that its policies were "not about the oil," they've always been about the oil. Give the petro-devils their due, they do know their business, and while the rest of the economy circles the drain, Big Oil has never had it better. A tidy return on the meager $200 million investment it took to buy a presidency for themselves.

Thanks to persistent attention on the part of journalists like Robert Scheer to details behind the usual noise and squalor that pollute the common means of public information, we can still hope that voters in the current round of carnivalesque desportments known as the "primary season" will see past the clutter and make more considered choices than heretofore.

Roger L. Strange

Bend, OR

Just once before Robert Scheer or someone like him goes on another rant about Exxons' hugh profits, I wish he would at least consider the question of how much it cost them to make those profits (compared to a previous year), which is the true key to the question of whether or not the public is being gouged or not.

Notable also that Mr Scheer would quote Hillary on what she plans to do with Exxon's profits: Wonder how he'd feel if she suddenly began "planning what to do with" his profits? Thievery is thievery, regardless of scale. You want to really lose your independence, Mr. Scheer? Just keep supporting thieves like Clinton.

Charles Thornton

Reisterstown, MD