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Leading By Example …
… and playing politics with the the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Under pressure from angry drivers and leaders in both political parties, President Bush said today he was taking steps to at least slow the rising price of gasoline.
He said that deposits of oil in the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve would be halted for the summer to increase supplies available to the public.
[…]
The president traveled in a 14-vehicle motorcade to deliver his speech at a hotel in Washington. A pool reporter noticed that the prices posted at an Exxon station near the Watergate building complex were $3.29. $3.39 and $3.49 a gallon.
Bush to Halt Deposits to Oil Reserve
WaPo; April 25, 2006
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Q Sir, Senator Kerry has suggested halting shipments to the emergency oil reserves. Your energy bill is a long-term strategy. What are some short-term steps that can be taken?
THE PRESIDENT: If people had acted on my energy bill when I submitted it three years ago, we would be in a much better situation today.
Secondly, we will not play politics with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That Petroleum Reserve is in place in case of major disruptions of energy supplies to the United States. The idea of emptying the Strategic Petroleum Reserve plays — would put America in a dangerous position in the war on terror. We’re at war. We face a tough and determined enemy on all fronts. And we must not put ourselves in a worse position in this war. And playing politics with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would do just that.
President Discusses Iraq, Economy, Gas Prices in Cabinet Meeting
White House; May 19, 2004
Apologies ahead of time for the rant. I’m avoiding life this afternoon.
Yes, jj-
The Antonia Juhasz was very good at dispelling some of the “liberal” myths about Iraq. I was reading the two Anthony Cordesman analyses last night and deciding whether I had the energy to write a long post decoding them. (I didn’t, unfortunately.) Nevertheless, they are essentially political documents, filled with many levels of rhetoric. And along the way there ARE some stunning insights.
One thing that leapt out at me was this: He was describing the failure that Iraq had become, and he pointed out that the state under Saddam had deteriorated until it was — now get this wording — a “command kleptocracy”. That phrase, command kleptocracy, struck me as an equally apt way to describe later-stage neo-liberal capitalism under Bush. It was another one of those projections this administration so often makes where their descriptions of their enemies are actually descriptions of ther own motives and actions.
Now, let’s be clear about this for all those who believe that somehow the Democrats will ride in on their white steeds and save us from this fate. Clinton, who presided over a period of extraordinary economic growth and a slowdown (not a reversal) in neo-liberal structural adjustment at home — a period characterised as a “rising tide lifting all boats,” only it lifted CEO’s boats into space orbit while workers got an extra percent or two — also set the stage for what is happening now through changes in laws enacted while we were all drowsing, or worrying about Y2K. (Remember that?)
Anyway, it is ludicrous to take Bremer’s mea culpas as anything but a public advertisement for selling his own services; services he promises will lead to better outcomes than what we are now seeing. (Prospectus upon demand. This should not be taken to imply that your returns will, blah, blah, blah. Billmon could flesh that angle out better than I could.)
Furthermore, if I haven’t stated it elsewhere, I believe the current oil crunch is just as engineered as the California energy shortage. I’m not saying that peak oil will not arrive at some point, only that it has not arrived in any structural way as of yet, and that political events seem designed to maintain the world-wide oil shortage and the windfall profits of the former “seven sisters,” now reduced to three or so. Oil prices, and profits, will stay high until shortly before the 2008 election, when the problem will be “solved.” None of this will happen until the suppossedly weakened Bush, and his Republican legions, aided and abetted by the always helpful Democrats, push through the next generation of nuclear reactors, built and run by companies with guaranteed cost plus contracts and no liability whatsoever.
To quote from my writings elsewhere:
Now a word about Peak Oil. I know you thought that you were very cutting edge running programs about Peak Oil the same month that the radical screed, “National Geographic,” ran a cover story about it(0805). But let’s examine the evidence. Worldwide output is 80M bpd. Iraqi oil output is down 2m bpd since the invasion, and an additional 2m bpd since sanctions were first placed on the country. With peace, the country has the potential to produce at least 8M bpd, or 10% of world supply, (an additional 8%). This is being artificially kept off the market by the invasion and war. Then there is the strife in Nigeria, which could easily be resolved with more equitable working conditions and a small sharing of the wealth produced with the local population (1M bpd). Now there is the saber rattling designed to make us worry about Iran’s 4M bpd. We also have the 1/2% of (gulf) worldwide production still offline from Katrina. This all adds up to a lot of oil! Additionally, the US quietly increased its reserves to record levels this winter — quite a feat if there is not enough oil to go around already!
All of this is not accounting the contribution of the Canadian and Venezuelan Tar Sands production, due to come on line soon. Chavez was recently quoted on Democracy Now as claiming to have oil reserves, including the Tar Sands, of 15 times that of Saudi Arabia, or 200 years worth of output. Now, again, a very sophisticated game is being played, which most people will miss. Chavez has called for the price of oil to be fixed internationally at $50/bl. That is high enough to make it cost effective for Venazuela to produce its Tar Sands oil, but not high enough for
Canada ($60-70/bl).
Rather than ask why prices for oil are so high now, one might ask why the prices of oil were artificially low up until a few years ago. The answer is that the ultra-low prices (below the cost of production for many) served to force sufficient oligopic consolidation of the industry. With that consolidation completed, there is now no longer any need for low prices.
In any event, I only seek to demonstrate several basic points here: Oil is being deliberately kept off the world market by US military policies. The high prices of oil benefit primarily Bush’s major supporters, the oil companies, who are recording record profits. The high prices, combined with talk of Peak Oil (which further justifies the prices), is serving to bring the hitherto moribund Nuclear industry, both in the US and abroad, back to life.
Peak Oil, as Chomsky himself stated last year, will certainly arrive at some point in the future. The question is when. We also need to distinguish between a physical peak of output, where we simply cannot pump more out of the ground fast enough, and a geo-politically induced peak, where the US goes to war to prevent oil from being produced. My theory is this: The appearance of Peak Oil is currently being engineered and promoted by the Cheney/Bush cabal for four purposes: Justifying Keynesian war spending, padding the pockets of their friends, bringing back centralized nuclear power, and propping up Cheny’s buddies, the coal industry (Wyoming is the largest domestic producer). These four purposes only make sense if this is done before peak oil really hits. It is also not credible to believe that China and India would not be aware of the true nature of world oil resources, and would be basing their development, and their future, on an increasingly scarce and expensive resource. So, my prediction is that Peak Oil will arrive, probably within the next thirty years, but not today, and not until the elite firmly re-establish nuclear power. But who am I, and my compelling evidence, and arguments, compared to Mike Rupert and his blanket categorical assertions?
In any event, the masses are restive and angry, because our one freeedom which Democracy promises us is being impinged upon: namely, the freedom to consume. We are NOT free to understand the inner workings and machinations of the world; that is something a very few of us get together on sites like this, with the aid of Uncle $cam’s links, to try to suss out. We are not free to care for our fellow human beings, in anything but a purely symbolic way. Capitalism, and the race to the bottom, mitigate against that. Besides, Charity is now a media event, an entertaining spectacle designed to pacify and mollify us, engaged in by celebrities and experts, the Bonos, Gates, and endless parade of money-sucking liberal NGO’s — none of which are democratically accountable, and all of which support the neo-liberal capitalist order and foster a patronizing dependency among its recipients. We are not free to be stewards of the earth, in any but a purely symbolic way — by joining Greenpeace or the Sierra club — that too is left to nameless and faceless “planners” in the halls of government, who are more concerned with stewarding the continual extraction of resources and the future profits of TNCs. So everything has been expertised, professionlalized, and the public, or as they are more properly termed, consumers, can only act in symbolic ways in the charade. Even consumption is merely a symbolic exchange of symbolic green “chits” for symbolic ephemeral status and the false promise of security.
Or as my buddy, John Berger, says:
The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating [envy.] The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams….
Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being acheived by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
Not bad for a thirty five year old book of art criticism. We are moving back to an era where extensive deprivation forces us to define our interests as narrowly as possible. I pointed this out during the immigration debate. The only solution is to see the entire world for what it truly is, and band together to define our interests as broadly and inclusively as possible in a form of enlightened activism against the rampages of voracious faceless capital. The Bremers and Kissengers and Kerrys and Bushes and Powells and even Cordesmans and Langs or the world are there to pick us apart, dispose of the unruly ones, and imprison us in our separate lobster pots of envy and greed, and turn up the heat in a controlled and civilized manner.
Buddhists refer to “Hungry Ghosts.” Bob Marley says, “Dem bellies full, but dem hungry…” The hunger is the hunger of powerlessness, but the manna to save us is not the manna of power. It is the manna of unity and responsibility and stewardship. One should never confuse power with responsibility. Bush, Bremer, and Kissenger never would.
Posted by: Malooga | Apr 25 2006 20:43 utc | 8
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