September 27, 2006

Fill ’Er Up With Dictators

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Are you having fun yet?

What’s a matter? No sense of humor? You didn’t enjoy watching Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez addressing the U.N. General Assembly and saying of President Bush: “The devil came here yesterday, right here. It smells of sulfur still today.” Many U.N. delegates roared with laughter.

Oh well then, you must have enjoyed watching Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad breezing through New York City, lecturing everyone from the U.N. to the Council on Foreign Relations on the evils of American power and how the Holocaust was just a myth.

C’mon then, you had to at least have gotten a chuckle out of China’s U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, trying to block a U.N. resolution calling for the deployment of peacekeeping troops to Sudan to halt the genocide in Darfur. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that the China National Petroleum Corporation owns 40 percent of the Sudan consortium that pumps over 300,000 barrels of oil a day from Sudanese wells.

No? You’re not having fun? Well, you’d better start seeing the humor in all this, because what all these stories have in common is today’s most infectious geopolitical disease: petro-authoritarianism.

Yes, we thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall was going to unleash an unstoppable wave of free markets and free people, and it did for about a decade, when oil prices were low. But as oil has moved to $60 to $70 a barrel, it has fostered a counterwave — a wave of authoritarian leaders who are not only able to ensconce themselves in power because of huge oil profits but also to use their oil wealth to poison the global system — to get it to look the other way at genocide, or ignore an Iranian leader who says from one side of his mouth that the Holocaust is a myth and from the other that Iran would never dream of developing nuclear weapons, or to indulge a buffoon like Chávez, who uses Venezuela’s oil riches to try to sway democratic elections in Latin America and promote an economic populism that will eventually lead his country into a ditch.

For a lot of reasons — some cyclical, some technical and some having to do with the emergence of alternative fuels and conservation — the price of crude oil has fallen lately to around $60 a barrel. Yes, in the long run, we want the global price of oil to go down. But we don’t want the price of gasoline to go down in America just when $3 a gallon has started to stimulate large investments in alternative energies. That is exactly what OPEC wants — let the price fall for a while, kill the alternatives, and then bring it up again.

For now, we still need to make sure, either with a gasoline tax or a tariff on imported oil, that we keep the price at the pump at $3 or more — to stimulate various alternative energy programs, more conservation and a structural shift by car buyers and makers to more fuel-efficient vehicles.

“If Bush were the leader he claims to be, he would impose an import fee right now to keep gasoline prices high, and reduce the tax rate on Social Security for low-income workers, so they would get an offsetting increase in income,” argued Philip Verleger Jr., the veteran energy economist.

That is how we can permanently break our oil addiction, and OPEC, and free ourselves from having to listen to these petro-authoritarians, who are all so smug — not because they are educating their people or building competitive modern economies, but because they happen to sit on oil.

According to Bloomberg.com, in 2005 Iran earned $44.6 billion from crude oil exports, its main source of income. In the same year, the mullahs spent $25 billion on subsidies to buy off the population. Bring the price of oil down to $30 and guess what happens: All of Iran’s income goes to subsidies. That would put a terrible strain on Ahmadinejad, who would have to reach out to the world for investment. Trust me, at $30 a barrel, the Holocaust isn’t a myth anymore.

But right now, Chávez, Ahmadinejad and all their petrolist pals think we are weak and will never bite the bullet. They have our number. They know that Mr. Bush is a phony — that he always presents himself as this guy ready to make the “tough” calls, but in reality he has not asked his party, the Congress, the people, or U.S. industry to do one single hard thing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Mr. Bush prattles on about spreading democracy and freedom, but history will actually remember the Bush years as the moment when petro-authoritarianism — not freedom and democracy — spread like a wildfire and he did nothing serious to stop it.

From Sam Smith’s blog, undernews, a very interesting catch from Monday’s Wall Street Journal;

In yesterday’s WSJ in Section C there is a very, very interesting item in the article, Some Investors Lose Their Zest For Commodities. The article notes that over that past few months, commodity funds have been liquidating commodity holdings. But here’s the stunner: “Consider the Goldman Sachs commodity index, one of the most popular vehicles for betting on raw materials. In July, Goldman Sachs tweaked the index’s content by cutting its exposure to gasoline. Investors tracking the index had to adjust their portfolios accordingly – which sent gasoline futures prices tumbling.” Prior to Goldman’s July GSCI revision, unleaded gas accounted for 8.45% of the GSCI. Now unleaded gas is only 2.30%. This means commodity funds had to sell 73% of its gasoline futures to conform to the reformulated GSCI. . .

  As Smith notes, it lends credence to the theory that the current well-publicized commodities decline is just a well-timed, well-orchestrated head fake to benefit the incumbents in the run up to the midterm elections.  

The Green Institute hosted a conference on US policy in the Middle East entitled Surviving Victory: A New Definition of National Security last Wednesday.  The conference foreign policy analysts from both liberal and conservative perspectives, all of whom have become alarmed by Bush administration policies in the Middle East.

“This is really an effort to assess where we are right now in the wake of the catastrophe with Iraq and Afghanistan,” panelist Roger Morris, senior fellow with the Green Institute, said. “We want, above all, to point the way out. We want to ask: what are the alternatives here?”

“It’s an example of people coming together who agree on one thing and are willing to engage in healthy discussion even though they may not agree on other issues,” panelist Charles Pena said. Peña is a senior fellow of the Independent Institute and an adviser to the Status Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information. “We are fueling hatred in the Muslim world against us,” he said.

The panelists agreed that the situation in Iraq was now so chaotic and the prospects there so grim that no “fix” was possible, and that the United States had to choose the least bad of a series of bad options.  Staying the course meant the war would continue in the Middle East for decades and it would drain the U.S. budget while paving the way for more serious terrorist acts.

“Maybe the current situation is elevated to the point that it’s headed straight for disaster,” said panelist Winslow Wheeler, director of the CDI’s Straus Military Reform Project. America must leave, but it must be sensitive to its allies’ concerns in a practical way, he concluded. “We can’t leave in a manner like we came in.”

The broad range of political viewpoints at the meeting demonstrated a growing fear of the counsequences of Bush administration policies across the political spectrum in Washington.  The lessons of Iraq are going to haunt foreign policy analysts for years.

There are 14 Green Party campaigns for governor this year.  There would have been more except for some prohibitive ballot access laws.

Let’s get behind our candidates.  Visit their sites.  Donate something.  Let the candidates start seeing $10, $15, $25 coming in from out of state.  If 100 people donate it could make a real difference to a campaign.

California: Peter Miguel Camejo  

Connecticut: Cliff Thorton

Illinois: Richard Whitney

Maine: Patricia LaMarche

Maryland: Ed Boyd

Massachusetts: Grace Ross

Michigan: Douglas Campbell

Minnesota: Ken Pentel

Nevada: Craig Bergland

New York: Malachy McCourt

Ohio: Bob Fitrakis

Tennessee: Howard Switzer

Vermont: Jim Hogue

Wisconsin: Nelson Eisman    

It’s time to get a little internet buzz going! Time to shift the Green blogospeher into high gear. Here’s a list of Green candidates for U.S. Senate. We have 14 candidates for Senate this year–an all time high.

The voters need a true choice for peace, a true choice for change. But they won’t get the chance without your support.

Look at their webpages, give some money, some time … some money ….

We can’t make a difference without everyone’s help! If every registered Green gave $1 to each campaign, it would be $14 out of your pocket but $300,000 for each of these campaigns.

Please help make a difference!

California: Todd Chretien

Conecticut: Ralph Ferrucci

District of Columbia: Joyce Robinson-Paul