I sometimes think the biggest price we pay for war is what might have been.

This war in Iraq makes millions of dollars for big corporations, either weapons manufacturers or those working in the reconstruction, such as Halliburton and its sister companies. . . It is crystal clear who benefits from igniting the fire of this war and this bloodshed: They are the merchants of war, the bloodsuckers who run the policy of the world from behind the scenes. President Bush and his ilk, the media giants, and the U.N. . . all are a fatal danger to the world, and the Zionist lobby is their most dangerous member. God willing, we will persist in fighting them. . .

If the United States was mad enough to attack Iran or aggress Venezuela again the price of a barrel of oil could reach $150 or even $200.

You of course appreciate that this industry of ours the is today the greatest in the world. Three or four years ago it passed, in volume, steel and steel products, the next largest industry. This means, expressed otherwise, that upon its prosperity depends the prosperity of many millions of our citizens and the degree to which it has become stabilized in turn has a tremendous influence on the stabilization of industry as a whole, and therefore on the prosperity and happiness of still many more of our citizens. Directly and indirectly, this industry distributes hundreds of millions of dollars annually to those who are connected with it, in one way or another, as workers. It also distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in the aggregate to those who have invested in its securities. The purchasing power of this total aggregation, as you must appreciate, is tremendous.

Moreover, Middle East oil was a great prize.

(Greer's response to: How would zero-point energy transform the global economy?] It would replace everything. You wouldn’t need oil, but the $30 trillion-a-year global economy would quickly grow to $200 trillion because there’d be clean, sustainable energy, and manufacturing and transportation would be very inexpensive. Eighty percent of the world’s population lives in amazing poverty, and it would lift that. It would revolutionize the planet. People talk about the “peace dividend,” but it’s time for a “space dividend.” The entity that runs this stuff is the world’s largested RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization]. They used to be called MJ – Majestic – 12 – but the last term I heard was PI-40. It’s not one society. There are sweeping conspiracy theories about the Masons, Bilderbergers, Trilateral Commission and Counsel of Foreign Relations. I know people in all these entities, and most of them couldn’t find their ass in a well-lighted room. It’s much more prosaic and nuanced than that.

The dismantling of the vast and wholly parasitic armaments industry had given an unprecedented — sometimes, indeed, unhealthy — boost to the world economy. No longer were vital raw materials and brilliant engineering talents swallowed up in a virtual black hole — or, even worse, turned to destruction. Instead, they could be used to repair the ravages and neglect of centuries, by rebuilding the world.

We're going to have something that you won't even believe. We will end inflation, slash prices. We've already ended inflation, raise wages, and give you the greatest economy in the history of the world.

Economists can take a good deal of credit for the stabilization policies which have been followed in most Western countries since 1945 with considerable success. It is easy to generate a euphoric and self-congratulatory mood when one compares the twenty years after the first World War, 1919-39, with the twenty years after the second, 1945-65. The first twenty years were a total failure; the second twenty years, at least as far as economic policy is concerned, have been a modest success. We have not had any great depression; we have not had any serious financial collapse; and on the whole we have had much higher rates of development in most parts of the world than we had in the 1920’s and 1930’s, even though there are some conspicuous failures. Whether the unprecedented rates of economic growth of the last twenty years, for instance in Japan and Western Europe, can be attributed to economics, or whether they represent a combination of good luck in political decision making with the expanding impact of the natural and biological sciences on the economy, is something we might argue. I am inclined to attribute a good deal to good luck and non-economic forces, but not all of it, and even if economics only contributed 10 percent, this would amount to a very handsome rate of return indeed, considering the very small amount of resources we have really put into economics.

There are some myths that are exploited on your television set several times a day, sometimes several times an hour. The first myth is that the oil and gas industry is controlled by free market forces. All of us believe in the free enterprise system, but there is no free enterprise system in the oil and gas market. The prices are not established by competition. The prices are established arbitrarily when the OPEC nation leaders meet in secret and say, next year this is what we will charge for oil. And, as you well know, immediately that oil price prevails in new oil discoveries in our country. We have a need, at least for our Government, to play a stronger role, as is played in other countries. But we ought to get away from the proposition or the thought that free market forces control oil or natural gas prices. Another myth is that there's an inherent conflict between conservation and production. This is not true. We are making good progress in exploration for oil. There's about an 8-month waiting period right now for new oil drilling rigs. If we triple the price of oil and natural gas, there could be no substantial increase in the rate of exploration. It would be just an enormous windfall of profits. The cheapest oil is what we save, and the cheapest natural gas is what we save. Quite often it costs nothing to save the equivalent of one barrel of oil per day. When we add expensive conservation measures, it costs maybe from zero to $3,500 to provide the saving of one barrel of oil per day. The oil that we are now going to bring down from Alaska costs about $20,000 in capital investment for one barrel of oil per day, used at its final place to heat a home. For the production of electricity, the capital investment required is much greater, maybe $50,000 to $100,000 for the equivalent of one barrel of oil used in your home in electricity. For nuclear powerplants, the investment is $200,000 to $300,000 per barrel of oil per day, when it's actually delivered to your home for use. So, to conserve a barrel of oil is much better than producing that barrel of oil in investment alone. And at the same time it reserves for future use these extremely scarce supplies.

You are going to approve one of the biggest tax cuts in history. You are going to approve one of the biggest tax increases in history. You are going to drive business out. Your regulations are a disaster, and you're going to increase regulations all over the place. And by the way, my tax cut is the biggest since Ronald Reagan. I'm very proud of it. It will create tremendous numbers of new jobs. But regulations, you are going to regulate these businesses out of existence. ... The things that business as in people like the most is the fact that I'm cutting regulation. You have regulations on top of regulations, and new companies cannot form and old companies are going out of business. And you want to increase the regulations and make them even worse. I'm going to cut regulations. I'm going to cut taxes big league, and you're going to raise taxes big league, end of story.

Since 2003, we are fully dependent on oil. Agriculture, industry, manufacturing have all regressed, accounting for not more than 1.25 percent of GDP. Our strategy is to reactivate agriculture, manufacturing and other productive activity, and at the same time provide protection to the people. In terms of social advancement, we want to strengthen s and . Iraq should not be a consumer-only market for the production activities of neighbouring countries.

Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes.

I built one of the greatest economies in the history of the world and I'm going to build it again. It's going to be bigger, better and stronger. But they're destroying our economy. They have no idea what a good economy is. Their oil policies -- every single policy -- and remember this. She is Biden. She's trying to get away from Biden. I don't know the gentleman, she says. She is Biden. The worst inflation we've ever had. A horrible economy because inflation has made it so bad and she can't get away with that.