Texas buddy system

Hey ya'll [Helmutian note: I know it's more appropriately spelled "y'all," but it is commonly spelled in Texas as "ya'll"], how 'bout that food for oil? Not a bad gig gettin' money out of a system for poor starvin' brown people. We Texans know a good deal when we see it. Tommy-Boy, Kenny-Boy, W,.... Well, maybe not W. But, like I says, we know a good deal when we see it, and W has been a good deal. (Link via Norwegianity).

Oscar S. Wyatt Jr., the flamboyant Texas oil trader who flaunted his close ties to the regime of Saddam Hussein, was indicted yesterday in federal court in New York on charges that he paid millions of dollars in kickbacks to the regime to sell Iraqi oil under a United Nations program.

The indictment says that Mr. Wyatt was informed by Iraqi officials sometime in the fall of 2000 that he and other traders would have to begin paying secret surcharges to continue to be granted the right to sell Iraqi oil under the United Nations oil- for-food program.

In fax messages and telephone calls over the next two years, the indictment says, Mr. Wyatt arranged for the secret payments to be made through Swiss intermediaries and overseas companies that he set up. The money, the indictment says, was deposited in Iraqi government accounts in a bank in Jordan.