This one’s a bad movie: When we woke up this morning, George W. Bush was still president.
Talk about an endless loop: Bush, the failed “oilman” who is the son of a rich guy who himself dabbled in oil, wouldn’t be the U.S. president if we weren’t addicted to oil, and his family’s pals in the oil bidness hadn’t propped him up with their outrageous profits. And all he was doing in his State of the Union address was mouthing what one of his mentors, billionaire Richard Rainwater, has been saying recently.
Bush’s handlers are just trying to distract us, but the doomsaying is real…
[Fortune journalist] Ryan quotes Rainwater as saying:
“This is a nonrecurring event. The 100-year flood in Houston real estate was one, the ability to buy oil and gas really cheap was another, and now there’s the opportunity to do something based on a shortage of natural resources. Can you make money? Well, yeah. One way is to just stay long domestic oil. But there may be something more important than making money. This is the first scenario I’ve seen where I question the survivability of mankind. I don’t want the world to wake up one day and say, ‘How come some doofus billionaire in Texas made all this money by being aware of this, and why didn’t someone tell us?’”