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Well, first of all I don't think it's conspiratorial. I think it's a basic principle of journalism
to follow the money. And we have conflict of interest rules precisely because people
are human. And when you can benefit personally, economically from policies that you are advancing,
then those policies are called into question and the questions are raised. So that's why
we have this legal architecture to prevent obvious conflicts of interest. And the Bush
administration . . . Key figures in the Bush administration have just shown enormous defiance
in the face of those rules, and twisted the White House lawyers in knots trying to rationalize
them holding onto these stocks. But to me it's a broader question about the economy
. . . what I call the "disaster capitalism complex". And the fact that I don't believe
. . . Well I think that there's a particular way of thinking that comes with being in the
business of disaster; being . . . You know and I'm not talking about just any old economic
holdings, right? I'm talking about those particular economic holdings that increase, or whose
fortunes increase when things go bad, right? So oil and gas. You know bad things happen,
the price of oil goes up. This we know, right, whether it's a hurricane. Whether it's a war.
Whether it's a fear of a war. Whether it's Chavez and Ahmadinejad hugging. Whatever it
is bad, the price of oil goes up, right? And the same is true for defense stocks. The same
is true of Homeland Security stocks. The same is true of drug companies that are in the
business of pandemics. So this is how I'm defining broadly the disaster capitalism complex,
which is bigger than the military industrial complex. The reason why Eisenhower warned
. . . gave that famous warning in his last presidential address about the danger of the
military industrial complex is precisely because this is an industry that has an economic incentive
for war and instability. So I think that there is something really significant that we need
to talk about in that the Bush administration -- the people who have been running the government
in Washington, but also the occupation of Iraq -- are card carrying members of the disaster
capitalism complex. You know I realize . . . I don't think it sounds conspiratorial. I think
it sound obvious, right? I'm in fact embarrassed to be pointing this out because it's such
an obvious point. But it amazes me that people don't talk about it all the time; that ***
Cheney was in the business of privatizing the U.S. military before he went into office;
that Donald Rumsfeld was in the business of profiting from pandemics before he went into
office; that Bush was in the oil and gas business before he went . . . came into office; that
his father was connected to the Carlyle Group, which is a major weapons dealer; that Paul
Bremer, the chief envoy in Iraq who laid the economic framework for the occupation, that
one month after September 11th he launched a Homeland Security company to advise other
corporations on how they could protect themselves in this new era; that Rudy Giuliani did the
same thing three months later. So these are all people who see profit directly from terrorism,
natural disasters, and pandemics. What is their economic incentive to get us off this
disastrous course? I mean we need political leaders who think disasters are bad. You know,
I mean that to me is a good starting premise.