Art & Creativity Quote by Peter DeFazio

“Sold off the books” is doing a lot of work here: it’s not just an accounting detail, it’s a moral accusation dressed as a market description. Peter DeFazio frames the crude oil trade as a parallel economy - vast, routine, and deliberately hidden - where the absence of oversight isn’t a technicality but the business model. By leading with “about 75 percent,” he borrows the authority of a statistic to make the scale feel undeniable, then pivots to the more explosive claim: behavior that “would be illegal” in a regulated market is normalized because this one isn’t. The implication is blunt: illegality isn’t prevented by ethics; it’s prevented by rules, and the rules have been strategically kept out.

The line also smuggles in a critique of power. “They” is intentionally vague, a catchall that can encompass traders, oil companies, middlemen, and the political ecosystem that protects them. That vagueness is rhetorical: it invites the listener to map “they” onto whichever villains they already suspect, while keeping the charge broad enough to indict an entire system.

Context matters: DeFazio, long associated with transportation and infrastructure oversight, is speaking from the regulatory worldview, where markets don’t self-police - they exploit gaps. The quote’s real target isn’t just oil traders; it’s the ideology that treats regulation as interference rather than as the price of legitimacy. The final clause, “of course they do not want to regulate it,” lands like a knowing shrug, casting industry opposition not as principled disagreement but as self-interested inevitability.