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Good And Bad Elections
Georgia’s election was jubilated in the "Western" press, Belarus’ election is damned. But are both of these results realistic at all?
| Good elections: |
| Georgia, 4 January 2004 |
| Mikheil Saakashvili |
96.0% |
| Total turnout |
82.8% |
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| Bad elections: |
| Belarus, 19 March 2006 |
| Alexander Lukashenko |
82.6% |
| Total turnout |
92.6% |
It just goes to prove that the Russians CAN learn from the West.
On a more serious note, it is clear that these elections are not about “Democracy”, or the will of the people, in any meaningful sense. What we have going on is a replay of the cold war shrunk into a bottle. Instead of the old SU and the US manipulating client states for control of the world, we now have a vastly engorged US, and a regional power, Russia, struggling for control of Northwest Asia.
Again, when we talk about the “US” or “Russia,” we are employing a shorthand symbolizing the elite that control the vast wealth of those countries. I, as a USA’an, unfortunately, do not get ANYTHING from who wins or who loses.
The stakes are much higher for a cornered Russia. The West had a measure of control of Russia under Yeltsin, put Putin has proved far wilier and wrested that control away. (On a side note, the practice of elevating the moribund to leadership has worked far better for the US than the USSR, and its successor, Russia. cf: Reagan, Yeltsin, Andropov, etc.)
The important question here, as asked by Feelgood, is why are the results being so unbelievably skewed? I believe there are two reasons for this.
First, the stakes are so high in this conflict, neither side can afford to lose. The capitalist US, bloodied and weakened by Iraq, like a shark, needs to be continually moving into new markets to soak up excess capital and spur business growth. Unregulated markets, the wild west of capitalism, which we see in the Russian satellites, are particularly attractive. The US also feels that if it can continually chip away at the old Soviet sphere, it can eventually regain control over Russia, the Grand Prize. This is essential leverage needed for the coming conflict with China.
How does the West plan to engineer this? I believe that they need to regain control of Iraq, Iran and Nigeria, in order to create one last oil glut, driving prices back down into the $20/bl range, and thus toppling the remaining oil fiefdoms of Russia and Venezuela. (This will also weaken Canada, and bring it further under American domination.)
For a while, I have become increasingly suspicious of the absolute plethora of beautifully designed “Peak Oil” sites popping up all over the web, the story making its way to PBS, with its “faux” greenwashing commercials for BP and others, the cover of National Geographic, and elsewhere.
Having worked in the oil industry, I know the level of knowledge, competance, and long-range planning, in a very capital-intensive industry, to be high. I just can’t believe the party line that virtually no one saw this coming.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that the very concept of Peak Oil is a myth; or that it will not come eventually, probably sometime within the next 20-30 years. What I am saying is that all those Chicken Little’s who say that Peak Oil has already arrived, probably in 2004, or whatever, are either incredibly wrong in their analysis, or CIA plants.
Clearly, the current rise in oil prices has been engineered by the US. Iraq could be pumping an additional 6 MBPD, equivalent to 8% of world-wide consumption, if it weren’t for sanctions and the invasion. Nigeria could be far more productive too, if it weren’t for the strife caused by the absolutely brutal treatment of the population and despoilation of the environment by the ruling junta/oil company consortium. We already have seen evidence here at “Moon” that some of the “strikes” against Saudi facilities were less than credible. Additionally, the US has recently quietly engaged in an almost unprecedented expansion of its strategic petroleum reserves, something that would be impossible is a severe world oil shortage.
Alright, getting back to the original topic of this post, how does Russia see the situation? Their interest has to lie in setting up a valid countervailing global union to the US. They need time to do this, and to do this in such a way that they do not end up as a mere appendage to someone else’s empire. They need the US preoccupied, harrassed, and weakened, with other regional conflicts. It appears that they have learned what they need to know to combat US “Democracy,” and I’ll come back to that later.
They need to increase their economic integration with Europe, principally through increasing European reliance on Russian energy and resources. We see that already in the deal inked with Gerhard Schroeder for an undersea pipeline connecting the two regions.
Next, they have to increase their cooperation and integration with China, who is really the far stronger of the two. We see that in the regional security pact (SCO) inked several years ago.
Finally, they cannot completely relinquish their influence in the subcontinent. Little more than a year ago, Putin and a high powered delegation visited India with just that goal in mind. Russia desires energy integration, the US counters with weapons integration. The situation in India currently is immensely complex, far beyond the simplicity of a simple slogan, and beyond the range of what I would like to cover here.
I do not believe that Russia can really hope to regain its former empire status, but I believe that, if it plays its cards right, it can achieve far more than the poodle role which the UK now plays to the US.
Its hope lies in the establishment of a multi-polar alliance between Europe, Russia, China, and ideally, the Subcontinent, with control over the former Soviet satelites. Russia might not be the senior partner in such an alliance, but its geographical location as the hub, combined with its vast wealth of mineral resouces, make its role essential in what might be termed a partnerhip of necessity.
The achievement of the above scenario requires extraordinary adroitness, intelligence, and flexibility, but if we have seen anything from Putin, we see that he exemplifies these qualities. He is inadvertently aided by the US inexplicably assuming the former Soviet role of “lumbering bear.”
Let’s return to the current issue, regional elections, and the product that both sides are marketing.
The US, under the direction of George Soros, and his fiefdom of various “Democracy” organizations, initiated the first parry. They created an out of the box solution that could be readily and speedily employed in a cookie-cutter fashion. This consisted of a virtual army of sly western marketing consultants, politicos, and propaganda and media experts, all armed with bottomless barrels of cash. It featured simple (actually simplistic, but who cares?) slogans, bright symbolic colors, the ability to marshall public constituencies, and the western flair for using media to project consensus. (I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t also a laboratory for future western elections. If confidence in the two-party system erodes sufficiently, don’t be surprised to see a cowboy in a white hat riding on to the scene, with a white daisy–symbolizing the ordinary man–braided into his horse’s hair.) Also evident is the Western mastery for deflecting all attention away from substantive issues, like privatisation, to meaningless slogans like cries for democracy.
How is the Russian led team countering this? First, they now have ample historical documentation to convince people that appeals for democracy may sound nice, but offer little good, and possibly much bad.
Putin has spent years refining his own product, and knock-offs of it, little Putins, Putinettes, is what we should expect to see. What are the hallmarks of his product? It is essentially a conservative message. In Russia, he has managed to blend many strands together. First, there is the appeal to nationalism, and former national greatness. This will also be used in the satellites as their position deteriorates. Second, there is the appeal to stability. This is essential in a region that has seen much turmoil. Next, there is the appeal to religion. In Russia, it is not the apocalyptic evangelical extremism that Bush represents, but an old-time conservative appeal to faith to see one through hard times, that is very closely allied with the sense of nationalism. Then, there is the appeal of a strong ruler. Soviets have lived for years under strongmen, and they are not as afraid of them as we are. There are substantial constituencies in all these countries that remember when times were better, and in their analysis, a strong leader is the reason. There is still great sympathy for a return to “communism,” or shall we say, state capitalism in the region. Finally, there is the appeal of competance. Putin has not done so badly in Russia, after the Karsk incident. Everything Bush touches turns to shit.
The Russian product appeals to an older constituency, the Western product appeals to a younger constituency. If the Russian product does not prevail, I believe we will see the intentional incitement of the youth to fascism to counteract, and destabilize Western successes. This will not be to anyone’s advantage. On the brighter side, there is some hope that Russian-influenced governments will be forced to increase pensions and benefits for the elderly, poor, and underprivileged, to counteract the appeal of Western “freedom,” and free market solutions. In these days of rising economic insecurity in the West, it is worth recalling that the former Soviet Union did ensure employment, housing, health care, and pensions, for all– however meager these benefits were, they most assuredly are better than nothing.
All great leaders have more than one strategy, and must remain flexible in light of changing events. This brings us to the second reason for the skewed results. There is an argument to be made that it is in Russia’s interest to discredit “Democracy” and elections altogether. It is also in the US interest to discredit elections when they lose. That certainly indicates more momentum towards discreditation, than accreditation.
Sorry for the length of this post folks. As usual, I sit down to type with two simple resons in my mind, thinking that it might take three paragraphs to explain things. Then I start to think it all out as I type. And this is what results. Ohhhhh…
Posted by: Malooga | Mar 23 2006 18:38 utc | 10
“Peak Oil does not mean oil has run out–on the contrary, half of it is left! But it does mean that PRODUCTION has peaked, and cannot be much INCREASED.”
Peak Oil primer #1
Originally, Peak Oil meant the point at which half the planet’s supply of oil was consumed. These days it is often confused with “Maximum Sustainable Output,” or how much you can get out of the ground in any given period.
These are really two different concepts with different implications. Imagine a honey jar. When you turn it over, the first half pours out very fast, but it takes a lot of time and scrapeing to get the second half out. Now imagine a plastic gallon jug of milk. The first half pours out slowly, because there is no way for air to enter the bottle, but the second half pours out very quickly.
Read all the PO literature. Even the most ardent proponents trip up on this and use the term interchangeably depending on the argument they chose to make. I find the lack of intellectual rigour troubling.
In any event, it is Maximum Sustainable Output that is really the immediate bottleneck.
Next, one has to distinguish between physical limitations, technical limitations, and geopolitical limitations.
Iraq being essentially off-line now, is a geo-political limitation.
That is a simplified view of the supply side.
Now even with just these three variables it is very hard to predict when Peak Oil will arrive. It might even arrive, and then be overcome for a period, and then arrive again.
There is also the demand side to be taken into account.
Further, as the price of oil rises, more oil becomes economical to extract, and comes on line.
There is no more $20/bl oil left in Texas, but there is $30. At $60-80, tar sand extraction becomes cost-effective. Also, in that range is the huge Falkland Island reserves, which are only just now being assayed.
Hint #2: If you come across a website that says something to the effect of, “The first oil that comes out of a field is sweet, later it turns sour and is very hard to refine.”, which they all seem to, run the other way because you know they are just reprinting boilerplate and have no idea what they are saying.
Oil can get a little more sour as a field gets older, but essentially oil is either sweet or sour on its own; it has nothing to do with the age of the field. Oil, being something that comes out of the earth, varies quite a bit in its composition. I recall from my refining days, that we had a manual which listed somewhere around 250 different major types of oil, along with its constituent components and the essential “recipe” for refining each type.
Oil is not “hard” to refine, because it is not physical labor. Certainly, sour oil is more complex to refine than sweet, and a little more expensive, but refining is a very mature technology. We were refining sour Pennsylvania crude in the 1870’s. There are two slightly different “tracks” you would take, depending whether you were refining sweet or sour crude. The refinery I worked at had the ability to process the sourest crude around–it specialized in the crap no one else wanted. It is no big deal to convert a refinery from sweet to sour crude. To refine most efficiently you might need to build several new process units, but that is all. It could take anywhere from 6 months-2 years to make the conversion.
Anyway, without getting into a whole epistemological discussion about how we “know” something, the point I am trying to make is that if you don’t know it yourself, and it isn’t referenced to a source you trust, then don’t trust what you read on peak oil websites anymore than you would trust what you read on whitehouse.gov. For some reason, the fear these sites arouse tranfixes people and they become very accepting.
I also would not trust anyone who claims to know with absolute certainty when PO will arrive, especially if you don’t see his assumptions and calculations.
I’m not saying that PO won’t arrive, of course it will. And it might arrive sooner rather than later, but it also might not.
Certainly we should be doing everything possible to support the development of cleaner, more decentralized, renewable energy, and even more importantly, conservation.
Posted by: Malooga | Mar 24 2006 7:46 utc | 25
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