I was going to blog about the lovely autumn leaves and how beautiful it looks. Just like this.
...and that's quite nice, but maybe later.
I was going to post about local politics in Pennsylvania. How we met Bob Casey, how I used to live half a block away from him. How he's going to be the new Senator.
...and that's quite nice, but maybe later.
What I want to talk about is the war in Iraq. Now; you may argue against the viewpoint of Generals that are actually in Iraq and say "it's all going swimmingly". One Conservative spokesperson here in the US really said it was going "swimmingly". Ann Coulter. Sheesh, talk about a disconnect from reality. But I want to address one core idea about the war. It's an idea that was first voiced by people you might consider hippies.
And guess what? It turns out that, just like with Vietnam, the hippies were right!
I decided to see if the war was really all about the cold hard cash. Halliburton, a company that Dick Cheney used to be on the Board of Directors for (and a company that 'won' no-bid contracts in Iraq) will make or break the theory. War is profit.
This took just a few seconds of searching online. And it's not from a Liberal or Conservative political site. It's not a political site at all.
It's the Financial website of Yahoo! in the UK.
They have a graph function on their pages. Compare any share price's rise and fall to the Dow Jones Industrial in the US (_DJI) or the Financial Times Stock Exchange in England (_FTSE). Let's see how Halliburton (HAL) did against the US and UK average of 130 companies, over the last 20 years or so.
OK, not too well. Halliburton has done about as well as the 100 companies in the FTSE in London, but the 30 companies in the DJI completely trounced it. Mathematics don't lie. The benchmark of American companies was twice as good as Halliburton, an American company.
But now we're going to change the search parameters a little bit. Let's get rid of everything but the last five years. The Dow rose over 250% under Reagan (Republican) and over 300% under Clinton (Democratic), but let's keep this totally Cheney and G.W.Bush.
How did a company that barely keeps up with the FTSE do with friends in high places?
This is not some trick of mathematics. This is not 'spin'. We took the value of the DJI, the FTSE, and HAL. Rated them all at their 2001 (October 20th) closing price, and said "let's see how much you make for investors now..."
Those low points in the red line was when Halliburton was at $10 a share or so. Its 2006 high was $41.99.
A share that kind-of kept up with the market but underperformed it for decades suddenly shot off like a bottle rocket. A company that usually gave 50% suddenly went and gave canny investors eight times that in a few years. And it all seems to be concentrated just before that yellow line.
That yellow line in March, 2003. The start of the American invasion of Iraq. War is profit, if your ex-chairman is now Vice President of the invading country. Not spin, not bullshit. Fact. Mathematical, easy to see, no doubts at all.
Fact. War is profit. And there's the proof.
Listen: Don't Believe The Hype - Public Enemy.
