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More Shifty lunacy...
The Adventures of T. Boone Pickens
Episode 3
by ThShifties
It’s just past midnight at one of the lesser-known Texas residences of T. Boone Pickens, legendary billionaire. The servants, exhausted, have gone to bed. Pickens sits alone in a leather easy chair, sipping Jack and soda. At the door, a soft knock.
Pickens: C’mon in.
The door opens. Senator McCain enters.
McCain: I have to be careful. Nobody knows I’m here.
Pickens: How-dee-do to you too, John-boy.
McCain: takes a chair opposite his host. I can’t be seen.
Pickens: Seems to me that not bein’ seen ain’t a big problem for you. It’s the Democrat on the TV every damn night.
McCain: Giuliani and I were on last night.
Pickens: snorts Rudy could dance naked with chicken feathers at Ground Zero and nobody’d bother watchin’. Sips his whiskey. Now, you done your homework?
McCain: Not really. I took the book with me, but then they wanted me to reshoot this commecial, so I had to get back in makeup, and then….
Pickens: Okay, okay. Let’s see how much you remember from last week. Where’d we leave off?
McCain: consults notes. Supply and demand.
Pickens: You try explainin’ it.
McCain: Well, let’s say demand for oil is high. The price will go up. But if you find a bunch more oil, the price will go back down again.
Pickens: Good. So if the price is high right now, what should the government do?
McCain: Authorize more drilling! So the price at the pump will go down!
Pickens: You’re not thinkin’. How does that help the oil companies?
McCain: Um, I’m not exactly sure…
Pickens: Because it don’t help the oil companies. What helps an oil company is high prices. The higher the better. In the first place, people use less oil, which means the supply don’t run out as fast, and you can squeeze a couple more decades of profit. And you still get rich. Sell less and make more – that’s capitalism.
McCain: So it’s not really in the oil companies’ interest to drill more oil? Then why do they want to drill in Alaska?
Pickens: puzzled Who says they do?
McCain: We do!! It’s all we talk about!
Pickens: shakes his head They don’t want to drill. They want the rights to drill. Say you’re an oil company. You got a bunch of oil that’s deep in rock – so deep you can’t possibly get the oil out without goin’ broke. But you figger that twenty or thirty years down the line, the science boys will have come up with some new way to drill so it’s affordable.
The idea is you tie up the rights now so you maybe can go back and drill later. Or sell it off to somebody else with more money than you.
McCain: I still don’t see how that lowers the price at the pump.
Pickens: I thought I just explained that. No oil company in its right mind wants to lower the price. Just cuz some politicians is complainin’? Hell, that’s what PR is for. You just need to look like you want to lower it.
McCain: I guess I’ll never understand economics.
Pickens: Let’s move on. Explain the Trickle Down theory.
McCain: That’s when you’re taking a piss, and you forget to shake it off when you’re done. So some of it runs down your pants leg onto your shoe…
Pickens: Okay, you got that one.
McCain: How am I ever going to learn all this in time to be President?
Pickens: I don’t think we need to worry about that, Johnny…
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