PRESS RELEASE

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The `Long Record' of Barack Obama's New Friend, T. Boone Pickens

Aug 19, 2008 (EIRNS)—When Barack Obama was confronted as to why he was cavorting with T Boone Pickens, a known enemy of the Democratic Party, he brushed it off, saying Pickens "has a longer record than that," even going so far as to call him a "legendary entrepreneur." Here, from EIR files, are a few things which the presumptive Democratic candidate, and indeed all Democrats, should know about Mr. Pickens.

First of all, Mr. Pickens' $2 million contribution to the Swiftboating of John Kerry was no anomaly. Pickens aquired these dirty habits from his financial mentor, J. Hugh Liedtke, who was a major funder of CREEP's (Committee to RE-Elect the President—of Richard Nixon) Watergate operations.

Beyond that, Pickens is most emphatically not an entrepreneur, at least, not as most Americans would understand this term. He represents, to all honest Democrats, to unionists for example, all the worst and dirtiest of globalization business and finance since the 1970s. He is a "corporate raider," the Carl Icahn or Kurt Kerkorian of the oil industry; crusading under the doctrine of "shareholder value rules" at the expense of jobs, personal incomes and consumers. Pickens was a charter member of (convicted buy-out scammer) Michael Milken's "school" of buy-out thieves, who attended the "Predators' Balls" (throughout the 1980s), where these corporate raids were coordinated.

In addition to his "hot air" wind farms, then, his other "entrepreneurial" adventure during the last decade involves creating a water monopoly—he's been organizing a water combine of 400-500 landowners sitting over the Ogalalla water aquifer, to make a killing sending scarce water to Dallas.