Gasoline Prices

Idiots and Bailouts

dlindorff — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:54:55 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

It’s a safe bet that within the next several months, Congress will
vote to bail out General Motors. It will be a colossal boondoggle
involving, probably, upwards of $50 billion when it’s through, and it
will fail in the end.

The reason is before our eyes. This bloated megacorporation is being run by idiots.

For years, as it became evident to everyone that oil prices were
going to soar because demand has been exceeding both production and
supply and will continue to do so, it has been obvious that to succeed,
a car company had to offer well-made cars that could demonstrate high
gas mileage. GM, perhaps more than any other company, ignored that
reality and has been paying the price, watching its share of the car
market wither.

Now the company, worth about what Starbucks used to be worth, its
stock now down to where it was in the depths of the Great Depression,
has bet the farm on a new car, the Volt, which it promises will, two
years from now, be able to go all of 40 miles purely on electric power.
It will have a motor too, and not a small one, but rather one the size
of what you get in a typical conventional Honda Civic—1.4 ltr. That
motor wouldn’t drive the car; rather it would keep charging the Volt’s
huge lithium-ion battery so the car could keep going for a few hundred
miles.

Wow.

The management wizards at GM obviously don’t do much driving. If
they did, and found themselves in typical commuter traffic, they’d see
that maybe 90% of the cars, or more, have only one person in them.
Occasionally, they’d see a passenger. On a typical 45-minute trip from
the burbs into Philadelphia at rush hour, I can count the number of
cars I see with three or more people in them on my fingers.

So why is GM making the Volt as a full-sized four or five-passenger
car? That’s not where the market for an electric car is. What is needed
is a two-seater little car.

Because GM is trying to make an electric family car, they’ve made
something so big that, if they are lucky, they’ll be able to get it to
40 miles on electric drive only, but at a cost in excess of $40,000 and
perhaps much higher, which will put it out of almost everyone’s reach.
The car is destined to be a bust.

And yet, because President-elect Obama will want to win Michigan
next election, and because Congressional Democrats don’t want to be
seen as ignoring the fate of GM’s workers, GM will be bailed out and
the Volt will be funded right through to its introduction and
subsequent disaster in the market.

I’m not opposed to the idea of government support of industry, but
that support has to involve government input or even control over
decision-making.

Maybe GM wouldn’t make much profit on a little electric commuter
car, but a little two-seater electric commuter car would have a huge
impact on reducing the output of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere,
particularly if efforts were made to increase solar and wind-generated
electricity. A small electric commuter car would also massively reduce
the amount of oil the US imports, making a major contribution to
reducing the nation’s trade deficit. Those are results that justify a
bailout.

Making an overpriced electric family car is not.

At this point, since the Democrats in Congress and the White House
are congenitally incapable of imagining a state-owned or partially
state-owned enterprise, it would be better to just let GM go under, and
maybe Ford too, if it comes to that (another stupid company). The
pieces could be sold off, and allowed to sink and swim on their own.
Maybe one of those smaller, more entrepreneurial fragments would see
the wisdom of developing what the public really needs.

The truth is that the entrepreneurs over at Tesla, a star-up in
California, have already made that car—a high-performance two-seater
commuter car that can go 200 miles on a charge and that doesn’t need an
auxiliary engine. Their problem is that small size and too little
capital have forced them to pimp it up into a high-priced luxury
show-off item for rich people costing $100,000. If they were to team up
with a GM spin-off—say Saturn—they could make a stripped-down version
of that baby and crank out 100,000 of them to start at a price ordinary
people could afford.

Meanwhile, regarding those poor autoworkers, they have a legitimate
complaint. While Republicans like to blame the auto industry’s problems
on them, saying they have demanded too much pay, and too much in
healthcare benefits, it’s not their fault that GM and Ford executives
have been stupid and greedy and short-sighted (besides, the high wages
and benefits that the United Auto Workers won over decades of bitter
struggle helped to set standards that raised the wages of all workers
across the nation). But let’s do the math. There are about 125,000
unionized hourly workers at the two companies. For a lousy $8.7
billion, every one of those people could receive a $70,000 buyout from
Congress. Double that if you want to give them two years to adjust and
find new work at an electric car plant or something else. That would
cost $17 billion, or less than half of what the doomed bailout of GM is
going to end up costing.

And of course, with the rest of us suffering from the massive
mismanagement of the nation’s economy by its corporate leaders and
their puppets in Washington, there’s no reason why our tax dollars
should be subsidizing those particular workers tat that high a level.
After all, companies are failing and will be failing all over the
place, without such largesse. Besides, if the bailout goes ahead, all
it will do is delay the time these workers will be out on the street
anyhow.

The point is, however, there are more cost-effective ways to help
out workers in failing businesses than to have the government simply
subsidize the continued operation of enterprises that have been
destroyed by management. In truth, all the talk in congress and in the
Obama camp about rescuing jobs is just a cover for bailouts that are
really aimed at rescuing managers and investors, not workers.

___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Auto Industry Bailout

music8200 — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:54:07 -0500

Congress will take up the Auto Industry Bailout when they re-convene this week. There is no better time than this moment to PUSH for concessions from the Auto Industry. Time is short. Democrat.com, can you help us act NOW? Here's a copy of a letter I just mailed to Speaker Pelosi: Dear Madam Speaker,

Please make the FLEXFUEL component a MANDATORY requirement for any Auto Industry bailout.
IT ONLY COSTS $100 to install this component on a vehicle during the manufacturing process. The only EPA approved retrofit costs $1300. All cars sold in Brazil are flexfuel ready. All cars that GM sells in Brazil are flexfuel compatible. There is no excuse and there should be no delay in making all cars sold in America flexfuel capable.
THIS IS THE QUICKEST CHEAPEST EASIEST WAY to make rapid reductions in our foreign oil imports.
If ALL cars sold in the US were Flexfuel compatible, alternative fuel manufacturers would gear up without the need for incentives because they would know they have a market for their fuel products.
THEN please help remove the $0.54 a gallon tariff on imported ethanol. That would allow foreign ethanol products to compete in the American market. The American consumer would benefit. We could even lift the economies of Third World Countries by contracting them to grow switchgrass or sugarcane for ethanol fuel.
Ultimately, let's provide incentives for the production of flexfuel plug-in hybrids. These cars would get 500 MILES ON A GALLON OF GASOLINE! We would never need OPEC oil ever again! Perhaps no imported oil at all.
PLEASE PLEASE make the flexfuel component a MANDATORY part of any Automobile Industry Bailout.
If you want good references on this topic, read the testimony of Anne Korin (of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security) before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of May 22, 2008:http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/kor052208.htm(see in particular the section entitled "17x17")
read R. James Woolsey (former director of the CIA) and Anne Korin's article in the National Review:http://energy.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTlmMjFjYWRjOWI3ZGI0MzUxZDJjYTBlMmUzOTc2Mzc=
or watch Anne Korin's lecture on CSPAN:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MVwL2PcCG8(highly recommended)
watch Robert Zubrin's FEW Keynote Address:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0O2YZwSkgM
Thank you and your staff for your time and attention,Scott Lawrence

What Nobody's Saying: The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

dlindorff — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:05:01 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

What nobody in the corporate media is mentioning amid all the
blather about the $700-billion Paulson bailout proposal is the impact
it will have on the US dollar.

We are told that this huge gift to the financial sector—the
assumption, at top dollar, of all the bad debt they’ve piled up--will
be at taxpayer expense, but that’s only the half of it. (Really only
the quarter of it because since the US government is technically
bankrupt already, spending more than it takes in each year, all that
money will be borrowed, and will be added to the national debt, meaning
that just as the real cost of the $500-billion Iraq War is closer to $2
trillion, the real cost of the $700 billion bailout will be more like
$1.5-2.5 trillion.)

But besides the direct bill handed to taxpayers for this gigantic
con, there is the fact that adding that much to the national debt is
also going to drive the dollar down precipitously against foreign
currencies. We’re already seeing that happen, even while they’re just
talking about the bailout. The dollar is falling against all major
currencies—the Euro, the Yen, the Renminbi and the British pound. And
it will continue to fall as the details of the bailout come out.

This will add to already powerful pressures in countries like Saudi
Arabia and China, which hold huge quantities of US dollars and US
dollar-denominated debt, to shift out of dollars and into other
currencies—particularly the Euro and the Yen. Last week, an article in
China’s People’s Daily, which like Pravda in the old Soviet Union, is
the official voice of the leadership in China, called for just such a
move. Russia is also calling for an end to the dollar as the
underpinning of the global economy.

For some years now, many economists have been predicting an end to
the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, but this latest plan by the
US Treasury will push such a shift forward from “some day” to “now.”

As long as the dollar has been the reserve currency—the currency in
which key commodities like gold or oil were priced, and the currency
that exporting nations stocked in their treasuries as a store of value
– it was protected against collapse. But once it loses that status,
there will be nothing to prop it up any longer, and it will quickly
slide to a value that it deserves. We got an inkling of what is going to happen today, as crude oil
prices leapt in the course of one hour by 25%, the biggest jump in the
history of the oil market. This was purely a move caused by loss of
confidence in the dollar. There was no oil supply disruption. In fact,
demand for oil has been sinking as the economic crisis grows. Oil
producers and traders simply realized that the dollar is going poof, so
they radically jacked up the cost of oil in dollars.

If you want to see what where the dollar is headed,, look to the
currencies of the debtor nations—countries like Mexico or perhaps
Mozambique. A nation that makes almost nothing, and that imports most
of its needs, cannot have a strong currency.

This might not matter much if we had a functioning domestic
economy, where people could find the goods and services they needed
without turning to sources from abroad. A big country like the US could
simply turn inward and function on by its own domestic economic
standards.

I remember back when the former Soviet Union was in a state of
economic and political free fall in the early and mid 1990s, the
currencies of the constituent countries, like Russia, Ukraine and
Belarus had had collapsed to virtual worthlessness on the international
market. A Byelorussian friend, an engineering professor from Minsk,
living and working near me in China at the time, explained that
although when he traveled the world, he felt like a pauper, things
weren’t so bad back home Belarus, where he and his family would go in
the summer. “My apartment only costs a few dollars a month to rent,” he
explained, “and our food is bought on the local market using rubles, so
it is very affordable.” The same was true for other needs, like
clothing and books for school, he explained. The only problem was
buying gas for his Russian Volga. “Gas,” he explained, “is priced as an
international commodity, so it takes me one month’s wages in Belarus to
buy the gas to drive once to and from our country dacha.”

You can start to see the problem. Since agriculture has been killed
off in most of the US, in favor of giant agribusiness enterprises
situated in the western part of the country and some parts of the
Midwest, most people elsewhere will not have local produce available,
and the cost of transporting food from California to places like New
York or Pennsylvania will be prohibitive once the dollar collapses,
since oil is priced internationally. Meanwhile, goods like TV sets,
computers, phones, cars (or at least the key components of cars),
clothing, etc., are no longer even made in the US, and will thus be
completely unaffordable. As for the service jobs that are supposed to
have replaced our old manufacturing sector, no one will be interested
in buying what they’re offering, because they’ll be scrimping just to
buy the key staples they need to survive, so of course joblessness will
soar.

Eventually, of course, entrepreneurially minded people will begin
establishing local farms again where they once flourished generations
ago, and small factories will be built to provide key essentials, but
all this will take time, and will have to cater to a market of people
operating at a much lower standard of living.

The banking sector, meanwhile, which is the proximate cause of this
monumental disaster, won’t mind any of this, for it will continue
operating on the international stage, shifting its focus to lending
money (no longer dollars, though), to growing economies in Asia and
Latin America and eastern Europe. And this is what, in truth, the
“rescue” of Wall Street is all about.

It’s not about saving Main Street, as Paulson claims. Main Street,
under the bailout, is toast. It’s about helping the banks and
investment banks and insurance companies that brought on this crisis to
ride it out in style, their astronomical losses bankrolled or absorbed
by the American public, so that they can shift their operations
overseas and continue with their rape and pillage of the global economy.

The US will be left behind, a smoking ruin, with Americans, like
Weimar Germans before them, going shopping with wheelbarrows full of
worthless green paper to exchange for a few days’ groceries.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

We're a Nation of Lemmings

dlindorff — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:27:20 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Listening to the endless stream of cars passing my house every day,
and knowing, from watching them from my mailbox, that they are almost
all carrying just one person, either commuting to work or running some
kind of errand, I know we are headed for disaster.

Two days ago, there was a report by Agence France Presse
about the ongoing destruction of the world’s remaining wetlands (60
percent have already been destroyed by man over the past century), and
how they contain within them an amount of stored carbon equal to all
the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Global warming and property
development are drying out those remaining wetlands, causing the
release of that carbon, which will more than negate even the most
radical efforts at reducing carbon emissions from power plants,
factories and automobiles.

There are also credible, well-researched reports
that even a few more degrees of temperature rise in the arctic regions
of Siberia and northern North America will melt the permafrost and
release as much 400 gigatons of methane gas trapped in frozen
clathrates for millennia—the release of which would cause global
temperatures to soar to levels not seen in 250 million years (methane
is 20 times as potent a global warming gas as CO2). Vast regions of
Siberia are already bubbling with releasing methane as the permafrost
line moves north.

Now I grant that our corporate media, ever focused laser-like on
important stories like Britney Spears’ return to the stage and on the
latest gaffe of one or the other presidential candidate, have not been
very interested in alerting the masses to these disasters now in
progress that could end humanity’s run on the planet (along with
exterminating most of the rest of the life on the planet too). But that
said, at this point everyone has surely heard enough, and witnessed
enough in person of the dramatic changes taking place in the earth’s
climate, to know that something scary is going on.

And yet, people are not just going about their business as
usual—they are actually, for the most part, complaining not about the
lack of highly energy-efficient transportation, the lack of alternative
and less energy-wasting public transit, and the lack of government
funding for a crash program into researching carbon-free energy
solutions, but rather about the high price for carbon fuels. People are
clamoring for solutions to make gasoline cheaper!

Years ago, back in the 1970s during an Arab-led oil embargo, when
gas prices soared, there were mass campaigns to organize car pools. No
such campaigns are being organized today, and if any are they don’t get
any media attention. Instead we read that geologists are saying that
massive quantities of untapped oil reserves exist in the far north.

Now the last thing we should be wanting to do is take that nicely
sequestered carbon out of the ground and burn it into CO2! But that’s
what many Americans want done. Screw the climate! We want our cheap gas!

There are so many things we could be doing right now to reduce
carbon emissions—as individuals and as a nation. Turning off
air-conditioners would be one. Why should entire houses be cooled by
central air? Cool one room and use it for the hottest part of the day
if need be. Live downstairs during the hottest months and close off the
upstairs when it gets too hot. Ditto in the winter. There’s no need to
occupy and heat an entire house when it gets really cold. Most
Americans’ homes are way too large anyhow, but if you need that much
room, use it when it doesn’t require all that extra energy to heat and
cool. (When I lived in Cambridge, England as a kid, we used to sleep in
unheated bedrooms under cozy comforters, and then in the morning, I’d
go down and light a fire in the living room where we’d be during the
day. It would be cold as hell until the fire started, but not for
long.) Share rides. Plan errands so that many things get taken care of
on one outing, instead of in multiple run-outs. Use bicycles. I have
yet to see, on my own bike rides in town or when driving anywhere,
someone who is actually riding a bike on some errand—carrying a load in
a basket or in a backpack. The only bikers I see are people dressed
like Tour de France racers out for some exercise. What’s the matter
with using bikes for a purpose, instead of the family car?

I’m not trying to criticize, or to say I’m more ecologically
virtuous. I’m looking at this as an unprecedented disaster that is
dooming my kids, or their future children, to a life of strife, misery
and maybe even catastrophe. If I don’t take serious action—and I don’t
just mean individual life changes, but political action—to try and save
their world, I am guilty of a serious crime. And so are we all.

What the hell happened to any sense of shared responsibility, not just for society, but for our own offspring?

Most decent parents are ready to sacrifice in their lifestyles in
order to send their kids to college, or to help them out financially
when they are starting out as young adults. But for some strange reason
nobody seems ready to sacrifice at all when it comes to rescuing their
collective future. This makes no sense.

And yet, this is what our mass culture has done to us. As a nation,
as a people, we cannot think beyond our own noses. We cannot even think
about the need to act in our own and our children’s interest.

Seventeen years ago, I had occasion while living in Shanghai,
China, to visit a rural area in Anhui Province that the year before had
been devastated by a flood so huge that the entire region had been not
just flooded, but put deep underwater. As I neared a county seat town
that was my intended destination, the bus I was on passed a
dike-building project. Thousands of peasants were laboring by hand,
with shovels and wheelbarrows, to erect a 50-foot wall of earth to keep
the river in its banks in the event of another such flood. I got off
the bus and, with my travel companion, started walking towards the
project. When we were spotted, thousands of those workers dropped their
shovels and ran towards us. It was a terrifying moment to have so many
people heading towards and surrounding us, but they were very
friendly—just curious because none of them had ever met a westerner. We
began talking with them, and learned that they were all peasants who
had left their fields to build this colossal new Great Wall of dirt.
They brought us to the worksite and showed us how they would bring
their wheelbarrows to the base of the dike, and then attach a cable,
which was connected to a winch operated by those ubiquitous
one-cylinder, two-stroke kerosene tractors used across rural China. The
winch would whip the barrow up the steep hillside, with a peasant
running up behind keeping it upright. At the last minute, the peasant
would flip the barrow, dumping the dirt and releasing the hook. Then
he’d be off down the hill to collect more dirt.

What struck me, besides their ingenuity, was how all these
thousands of people had left their own fields to labor for the
collective good that year.

I tried at the time to contemplate my fellow Americans doing the same thing, and couldn’t for the life of me imagine it.

Now we’re in that moment. We know the flood is coming, but no one is willing to join the brigade to take preventive action.

No. Buying a Prius is not taking action. Neither is upgrading the
insulation on your house or buying carbon offsets when you fly. We
need, as a nation, to commit to seriously ending our addiction to
fossil fuels, to rapacious development and the concomitant destruction
of forests and wetlands. We need to end our nation’s imperialist
policies and to instead devote the trillion dollars a year spent on war
to saving the planet from ourselves.

A good start would be seeing that people “get it.” That would mean
communities starting to organize around improving mass transit,
arranging for carpooling, and demanding climate-saving action from our
political leaders.

I’m not optimistic.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Paul Krugman and Blindness About the War and the Economy

dlindorff — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:36:00 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In a New York Times column on Monday (“Behind the Bush
Bust”), economics columnist Paul Krugman mused on whether President
George Bush could be blamed for the nation’s economic crisis. His
conclusion was that, yes, to some extent the crisis was Bush’s fault,
but he largely lets the current administration off the hook, instead
blaming Republican policies dating back 10-15 years.

Oddly, Krugman does say that a key cause of economic problems has
been rising energy prices, but he then attributes these to “growing
demand from China and other emerging economies,” and suggests that
prices might have been at least a bit lower had the US, after 9/11,
adopted “higher gas taxes and fuel efficiency standards,” a failing he
attributes to Bush.

The gaping hole in Krugman’s logic is the Iraq War, which the
columnist, incredibly, doesn’t even mention. Yet clearly, the invasion
and subsequent war and occupation of Iraq which was purely the result
of Bush/Cheney machinations, has been a major, if not the major cause
of oil price increases.

By destroying Iraq’s oil production, and by hindering much of
Iran’s production (Iran, seen as an enemy by the US, has been frozen
out of capital markets, blocking it from being able to modernize and
even maintain its own huge oil infrastructure), and putting even
Kuwait’s and Saudi Arabia’s production at risk, the US war in Iraq has
jeopardized about one-third of the world’s oil capacity—a fact not lost
on oil speculators. Every rumor of a longer occupation or a wider war
in the Middle East—especially a possible attack by the US on Iran--has
pushed up oil prices further, as has every attack on a pipeline.

It is no secret why crude oil, over the course of five years, has
soared four or five times in price. Demand has certainly not gone up by
that amount. It hasn’t even doubled. What has happened is that the
Middle East has been thoroughly destabilized by American military
action.

The rise in oil prices has been the major cause of the US dollar’s
stunning collapse, which in turn has limited the hand of the Federal
Reserve, which cannot risk lowering interest rates as much as it would
like to stimulate economic growth, for fear of further undermining the
dollar. This in turn has allowed the mortgage crisis to fester and grow
worse.

At the same time, the massive amount of industrial production that
has gone into the war effort—the building of planes, tanks, armored
cars, etc.—while perhaps producing some jobs, has been wholly
inflationary in its effect, since this is production that cannot add to
available goods and services in the civilian economy. That means that
there are more people with wages and salaries, chasing the same number
of things to buy—a sure-fire recipe for higher prices. Add to that the
huge war budget, all funded by debt, and you have even more downward
pressure on the dollar.

Bush’s and Cheney’s war in Iraq has been, it should be clear, a
huge catastrophe for the US economy, and yet somehow Prof. Krugman
managed to miss it completely. You could read his column and not even
know that the country is and has been, for the past seven years, at war.

I’m not sure what to make of this oversight on Krugman’s part. Is
he trying to downplay the war, figuring it’s soon to become a
Democratic venture? Is he unfamiliar with the argument that war is bad
for economies?

One thing is clear: You cannot look at a nation at war and analyze
its economy without considering the impact of the war, which is what
the usually astute Krugman has done here.

But let’s make the point crystal clear, even if Krugman doesn’t see
it or doesn’t want to see it: The slumping US economy, and the crashing
US dollar, which is heading towards Peso status as a trash currency,
are clearly the direct result of Bush/Cheney policies, aided and
abetted by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who have bought
the story line that war is good.

We will all be paying for this imperialist misadventure for years to come.
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Bush/Cheney and special contracts with Big Oil in Iraq - ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!

seandiego — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:32:23 -0400

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE TODAY (7/2/08). THE AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST UNITE TO SHOW THE WORLD WE DID NOT SUPPORT OR APPROVE OF THE INJUSTICES OF THIS ADMINISTRATION AND THE CRIMES IT COMMITTED AGAINST IRAQ, THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD. TO REGAIN OUR STATURE IN THE WORLD, WE MUST CHARGE BUSH AND CHENEY WITH WAR CRIMES BEFORE THE REST OF THE WORLD DOES IT FOR US. CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSPERSONS TODAY!

Opening Iraq's oil fields to Big Oil

By Bob Herbert
THE NEW YORK TIMES

July 2, 2008

It's getting harder and harder to remain deluded. With each day comes new facts to drag our heads out of the sand.

Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that four Western oil giants were on the verge of signing no-bid contracts that would return them to Iraq, the third-most bountiful petroleum playground on the planet. It was the kind of news that big oil lives for.

Giddy executives singing “Oh Happy Day” could be heard in the corporate offices of Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP, which had been shut out of Iraq for three and a half decades.

We also learned this week that a group of American advisers, led by a team from the State Department, played a key role in drawing up the contracts between the companies and the Iraqi government. Chevron and several smaller oil companies also got contracts.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney, both former oil company executives, have long tried to tell us this war was about terrorism, about weapons of mass destruction, about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, about anything but oil.

Said Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He didn't wait. It didn't matter that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States. Or that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The troops were sent into battle in early 2003 and there is still, after more than five years and more than 4,000 American deaths, no end to the war in sight.

One of the starkest examples of U.S. priorities came during the eruption of looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. With violence and chaos all about, U.S. troops were ordered to protect one particularly treasured target – the Iraqi Oil Ministry. As David Rieff wrote in The New York Times Magazine in November 2003:

“This decision to protect only the Oil Ministry – not the National Museum, not the National Library, not the Health Ministry – probably did more than anything else to convince Iraqis uneasy with the occupation that the United States was in Iraq only for the oil.”

How convenient that the peculiar perspective of the oil-obsessed Bush administration can now be put to use advising the Iraqi government on its unusual no-bid contracts with big oil.

The contracts themselves are not huge. They are like the keys on a coveted ring that will begin opening the doors to Iraq's vast oil reserves. As the Times reported Monday, “At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world's largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry.”

A prize, yes. But at what cost?

In addition to the terrible toll of Americans and Iraqis killed and wounded, the war in Iraq has diverted attention and resources from critical problems here in the United States, where the housing market has been crippled, the stock market has tanked, gasoline has soared past $4 per gallon, unemployment is increasing and an extraordinary number of debt-ridden working families are staring into a financial abyss.

Even as oil companies are enjoying staggering profits, many Americans – in July! – are already worried sick about the potentially ruinous cost of heating their homes next winter.

And then there's the so-called war on terror.

The latest news is that al-Qaeda, the terror network that actually did attack the United States, has successfully regrouped in the tribal areas of Pakistan and has reconstituted its ability to institute terror attacks from the region.

For an administration joined at the hip to the oil industry, the lure of Iraq's enormous reserves was stronger even than the impulse to conquer an enemy that murdered more than 2,700 civilians on Sept. 11, a toll greater than the number of Americans killed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

Referring to al-Qaeda members who regrouped in Pakistan, the Times reported on Monday:

“Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.”

Who knows how long it will be before the United States disengages in any significant way from Iraq. What you can take to the bank is that this country will not make any major advances in energy policy, in health coverage, in rebuilding its infrastructure, in improving its public schools or in curtailing runaway public and private debt until our open-ended commitment to this catastrophic multitrillion-dollar war comes to an end.

How long will it take before that finally sinks in?

More Blood Money from Our Democratic Congress and Democratic Presidential Candidate

dlindorff — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:49:05 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Laid-off American workers will be getting temporary extended
benefits as the nation sinks into recession, thanks to Congressional
Democrats, who cleverly tacked a funding provision onto a bill giving
the president all the money he asked for (and then some) to fund the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars on out through next June. Veterans of the
Iraq War will also be getting tuition benefits equal to the full cost
of in-state public college tuition plus $1000 a year for books and
supplies.

When workers pick up those unemployment checks from their state
Department of Labor offices, though, they should see them as dripping
blood. Those checks have been bought with the blood of American men and
women in uniform who have been sent over and over into harm’s way in
those two countries in misbegotten and criminal adventures that have
nothing to do with defending America and everything to do with boosting
the profits of oil companies and defense contractors, and with getting
Bush re-elected and Republicans elected.

Iraq Vets, too, should not
overlook the blood on their VA education benefits checks, because their
tuition will be paid by the blood of active-duty comrades still left
stranded in battle zones overseas.

It didn’t have to be like this.

For generations, Congress has voted supplemental funding for
unemployment benefits to be extended during economic downturns—not
always willingly, but always eventually, following enough pressure from
workers and the labor movement.

For generations, too, Congress has voted for education benefits for veterans.

This being an election year, passage of a freestanding supplemental
benefits bill for unemployment insurance and a restoration of decent
education benefits for Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans would have
been a sure thing. Even Republicans facing the prospect of re-election
campaigns would have signed on to both measures by Labor Day and the
votes would have been there to override any Bush veto. Neither
measure—both important in themselves and badly needed—had to be tied to
a war-funding bill.

But Democrats in the House and Senate leadership weren’t really
thinking about the plight of the unemployed or the needs of returning
veterans in this case. They were, rather, thinking of a way of putting
some “progressive” window-dressing on a war-funding bill that they
wanted to pass without having to take responsibility for it. Their
objective was to push the whole issue of funding the wars out past
Election Day, in hopes of not having to discuss it in the coming
campaign.

Funding Bush’s and Cheney’s war in Iraq especially has, after all,
become a more and more unpopular and difficult affair for Democrats. In
this last go-round, fully 141 House Democrats voted against further
funding of the war—nearly the same number as voted for it (149). At
first, back in mid-May, the measure didn’t even pass, because
Republicans cleverly joined with the anti-war Democrats in blocking the
measure, forcing Democratic leaders to scramble to round up the votes
to pass a bill the second time around.

Americans clearly don’t want the war to continue, and Democrats
don’t want to have to face the voters, as every member of the House and
a third of the Senate have to do this November, being labeled as war
backers. That’s why they come up with these pathetic excuses like, “I’m
opposed to the war but we have to support the troops.”

Any sentient being in the country by now knows that most of the
long-suffering and abused troops, as polls have shown, think that the
best way to support them is to bring them home immediately. A Zogby
poll of active-duty troops in Iraq taken in 2006 found that 72% wanted
the US out within a year, while one in four wanted all US troops out
immediately. Only one in five supported staying “as long as necessary.”
(With many of those troops on yet another rotation, in some cases their
fifth, those numbers are probably even more in favor of immediate
withdrawal today.) Military experts have also written about how all the
troops in Iraq could be pulled out safely in as little as two weeks’
time. All the Pentagon would need to do is start running a constant
convoy of trucks south to Kuwait, carrying troops and weapons systems.
They could leave the porta-potties, the McDonalds stands, the bowling
alleys, the gyms and the barracks to the Iraqis and then blow up
whatever they didn’t want falling into the wrong hands. It would be
easy and fast. There’s no need for Obama’s proposed 16-month staged
withdrawal, which would just mean more unnecessary deaths and killings.

Democrats in Congress know all this, but congenitally spineless and
devoid of principle, they’re afraid if they don’t fund the war they
could be accused by Republicans of being “soft” on defense—as though
the Iraq War had anything at all to do with protecting America.

And so they have come up with this shameless ruse of attaching a
$95-billion domestic spending package, including unemployment funding
measure and a veterans’ education benefits measure, to a $162-billion
atrocity—a measure that assures more death and destruction in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and more dead and maimed American military personnel.
They’re pretending that they “pulled one over” on Bush by forcing him
to sign an unemployment extension bill and a veterans’ bill, when they
know Republicans would have forced him to sign those anyway, later in
the summer.

The real joke is on the American people, and on those very workers
and veterans who will be receiving the unemployment checks and tuition
reimbursements funded as a result of this duplicitous tactic.

The $162 billion that Congress has voted for the continuation of
the two pointless and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together
with the money already allocated for the so-called “War on Terror,” is
all borrowed, and is a major contributor to the collapse of the dollar
and to the resulting soaring of the price of oil, electricity and
imported goods. It is thus a major contributor to the credit crisis and
the collapse in the housing market that has pushed the nation into what
may be the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

Furthermore, the blood-money unemployment and tuition checks bought
through his gutless subterfuge by House and Senate Democrats will be
pissed away in no time on higher gas prices spent by workers on
desperate job searches, or on long commutes to distant jobs or commutes
if they are lucky enough to find them. It will be pissed away too for
veteran/students on their commutes to college, and on higher heating
bills for their families at home.

Equally important, the $160 billion wasted in Iraq, along with the
half trillion dollars being wasted every year on military spending for
a military colossus that encircles the globe for no good purpose other
than intimidation of other nations, assures that those Democrats who
control Congress can do nothing of consequence to shore up retirement
funds, to develop a national health program, to improve our dismal
school system, to repair our crumbling infrastructure, or to develop
alternative, non-polluting energy sources that could combat global
warming.

The Democratic Congress has shown itself to be worse than useless.
It is part of the problem. That includes Sen. Barack Obama, who like
Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain, signed onto this
contemptible funding bill.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Want Cheaper Gas and Oil? End the Damned Wars!

dlindorff — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:00:29 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Americans are in a panic over rising gas and heating oil prices, and with reason. For months, the price of a barrel of crude oil has been rising steadily, hitting a record $127 yesterday.

Analysts keep getting trotted out on TV and in print, attributing the dramatic price rise to everything from “peak oil”—the idea that producing countries have reached their peak of productive capacity, and that the only direction for oil supplies looking forward is down, while demand continues to rise—to increasing demand in China and India, to supply bottlenecks, to specific news events, like a pipeline break in Nigeria, or a closed refinery in California.

Politicians, like Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, have called for a two-month moratorium on federal gas taxes, but with taxes running at something on the order of 18 cents a gallon, this is not going to do much to bring prices down—in fact it might do nothing, since retailers would be free to just raise prices to match the tax break, and pocket the profits.

One analyst, economist Ismael Hussein-Zadeh, a professor of economics at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, has a different explanation for the price rise, and American motorists and homeowners should pay close attention.

“Oil prices have gone from the mid $20 range in the fall of 2002 to $127 yesterday—a rise of $100/barrel in just over five years,” he says. “And the bulk of that increase can be attributed to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the threats of war against Iran.”

Hussein-Zadeh’s analysis looks at a number of ways that the Bush/Cheney wars have contributed to rising oil prices. Chief among these are two factors: the threat to supplies, particularly from the Persian Gulf region from which 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies come, and a falling dollar, because oil is priced in dollars, and as it loses value, oil producing countries raise their prices to compensate.
In an article titled Worried About the Price of Gas? End US Wars, Hussein-Zadeh writes, “Soon after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq the price of oil began to escalate in tandem with the escalation of war and political turbulence in the Middle East.” Furthermore, he says, “Anytime there is a renewed US military threat against Iran, fuel prices move up several notches.” If the US were to actually make good on Bush’s and Cheney’s threats to attack Iran, in Hussein-Zadeh’s view “the sky would be the limit” to oil prices, with $200/barrel being a starting point.

The dollar’s fall, too, is significantly a result of the wars—particularly the Iraq War, he says. That war has been costing the US $200 billion a year, all in borrowed funds. That in itself is a huge hole that has to be funded by borrowing from China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and other nations. But as Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the true cost of the Iraq War, when interest on debt, health costs of injured veterans and other long-term costs are factored in, is more like $3 trillion and rising. And when currency speculators and traders—the ones who really set the value of the dollar—make their bets, they’re looking at that bigger number, not the little one.

Moreover, it’s not just oil that has been driven up in price because of the war. As energy costs have gone up, so has the cost of food, in no small part because most fertilizer is oil-based, and because transportation costs are also largely a reflection of oil prices. As well, to the extent that American’s food is imported, they are paying in shrinking dollars, whose value is being driven down because of the war.
Hussein-Zadeh says the Bush/Cheney administration and its neoconservative war promoters have worked hard to offer other more benign explanations for the crippling rise in energy prices, and food prices. As he puts it:

Neoconservative forces in and around the Bush administration and beneficiaries of war dividends—wishing to deflect attention away from war as the main culprit for the skyrocketing energy prices—tend to blame secondary or marginally relevant factors: OPEC, China and India for their increased demand for energy, or supply-demand imbalances in global markets. Whatever the contributory role of these factors, the fact remains that the current oil price hikes started with the beginning of the Bush administration’s wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, a closer examination of these factors reveals that their roles in the current price inflation of oil have been negligible.

Common sense bears him out here. China’s and India’s economies have indeed been growing rapidly, and with them, demand for oil, but over the past five years, oil prices have risen 400%, and the same cannot be said for demand. Even if Chinese and Indian growth figures of 7-9 percent per year were accurate (and there is reason to believe they are grossly inflated), that at best would amount to perhaps a 50% increase in economic activity over five years. In fact, during this time more efficient energy use in the developed countries has largely offset much of the increasing demand for oil in China and India, and even in China and India, much of the energy growth has involved replacing inefficient vehicles and power plants with more efficient ones, so oil consumption isn’t rising in lock step with economic growth.

The answer then, to rising oil prices, is obvious then. It is not some silly two-month moratorium on federal taxes—what Sen. McCain referred to, in a candid moment, as a “little gift” to American vacationers. Nor is it opening up the Artic refuge to drilling—a move that would take years to lead to any significant new supply, and which in any case would have minimal impact on overall supply, or on prices. Nor is it opening up the Strategic Oil Reserve—another drop in the barrel. Nor is it boycotting Exxon/Mobil. Nor is it hammering OPEC to boost production—something they have already done. No, it is much simpler. As Hussein-Zadeh so eloquently puts it:

The political implications of this discussion are clear: to bring down the prices of fuel and food requires bringing home the troops. By lowering the energy costs of production and transportation this will help save our own and many other economies from the plagues of inflation and stagnation. It will bring relief to hundreds of millions worldwide who are burdened by crippling energy bills and the crushing costs of feeding their families.

Got that people? If you want to see gasoline drop back below $3.89/gal, if you want to cut your food bills, if you want to see people in the developing world having enough to eat, get Congress to end the war! Meanwhile, each time you pull the trigger on that gas pump, think of the liquid that's running into your tank, and the money that's flowing out of your wallet, as blood, because that's what it all comes down to.

It’s that simple.
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

How "Conservatives" Pick Your Pocket

davidswanson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:00:42 -0400

By David Swanson

"Jacked: How 'Conservatives' Are Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for Them or Not)" is a short book by Nomi Prins that makes an excellent education for those remaining Americans who still do not understand that right-wing politicians take from those who work and give to those who live in luxury off the sweat of others.

At the end of World War II, corporations paid half the cost of the federal government. They now pay 7 percent, and many of them pay 0 percent. Unless you are very wealthy, you pick up the tab, and the tab has grown. The federal government now spends more than what it spends on everything else on the military alone, and that cost keeps rising.

So does the price of oil and gas, which is great for oil corporations, and maybe even for the chance our species has of surviving on earth, but not for your wallet. Americans are going more heavily into debt than ever, which is great for the credit card companies, banks, and blowhard politicians, but the most reckless debtor of all is the federal government, which makes things even worse for us.

Pensions are vanishing along with unions and jobs. Student loans are shrinking and college costs rising. Health care costs, too, are rising, while health insurance slips out of reach. Washington is still working hard to trash (or "privatize") Social Security and Medicare.

New Orleans still lies in ruins. Home insurance companies have still not paid up. Washington has still not stepped up. And Bush has neither apologized nor ceased making jokes about people's suffering.

Bush, on one of his Katrina-damage tours, remarked:

"An old lady walked up to me... and I said, 'How are you doing?' And she looked at me and she said, 'Not worth a darn.' And I said, 'Well, I don't blame you.' She said, 'I've been paying all my life for my insurance. Every time that bill came, I paid it... And, all of a sudden the storm hit, Mr. President, and it came time to collect, and they told me, no.' And she was plenty unhappy and she was looking for anybody she could be unhappy with, and I just happened to be the target."

Prins comments:

"No, Mr. President, you actually WERE someone she thought might be able to help her, a subtle difference that may have gone above your head."

The trouble is that it may have gone above some of his listeners' heads too. There are people who take it for granted that Bush can choose to destroy entire nations, but who accept at face value his claim that he has no power whatsoever to see that the victims of a hurricane are cared for. And it goes over even more heads that the two things are intimately related. We are killing and dying for the fossil fuels that lead to the destruction of global warming, and the financial cost of the killing and dying produces massive destruction in our economy. Meanwhile, we've allowed our government to empower loan sharks and insurance agents of all varieties to defraud us and defenestrate us from our homes.

Prins' advice is to write hand-written letters to your congress member's district office. Mine is to get this book read by any non-millionaires you know who believe "conservatism" to be something other than a cover for robbing the poor to enrich the wealthy. If enough people understood what we were doing, perhaps we could go to Washington with the message: "We've come to collect, and you don't just happen to be our target, and we won't take No for an answer."

The Eve Of War

Chris Elliott — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:45:23 -0500

US / Iranian rhetoric is at fever pitch. Both sides are claiming to have “evidence” of military foul play. Both sides are holding military exercises in each others faces and the Gulf is so full of warships it must be highly dangerous to navigate. Both sides are threatening a massive military response to any use of force. Both presidents have backed themselves into political corners and neither shows the slightest sign of backing down.

A second US carrier strike group has just arrived in the Gulf bringing the total number of US (and allied) warships there to about 50 and a third group, headed by USS Reagan has just been ordered to rendezvous in the Western Pacific with destroyers from Pearl Harbour before sailing to the Gulf.

This is in addition to the large US and allied navies operating in the Eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Syria, purportedly to “keep the peace in Lebanon”, and the numerous military airbases that surround both Iran and Syria on multiple fronts. Not to mention the massive military base that is otherwise known as Israel.

In just a few hours from now the 60-day deadline that the US forced through the United Nations in December, demanding Iran cease all nuclear enrichment and research will expire. The question is what will follow? Threats of yet more economic sanctions are unlikely to achieve anything. China has no reason to cut off their oil supply and Russia has nothing but contempt for Bush’s foreign policy. Even European countries are signing long term energy contracts with Iran.

These dubious reports about Iranian weapons being used in Iraq (the ones conveniently labelled in English and dated using the Western calendar no less) seem to indicate that only a military solution is being considered and Bush is now desperate for his casus belli. If Iran tells the UN to shove it’s 60 day deadline and proceeds with nuclear enrichment then Bush will either have to back down and face international ridicule or force Iran to stop via military means.

Today the Iranian president rejected the Western demands to cease nuclear enrichment unless the West also ceases nuclear enrichment, a reply that was laughingly dismissed in Washington.

Even if the Bush administration lacks the nerve to launch an attack on Iran, the close proximity of so many ships, subs, aircraft and missiles all flexing their muscle is the perfect environment for accidents to happen, staged or otherwise. All the ingredients for a major conflict are in place, only a spark is required to set the whole region ablaze.

Congress does have the power to block a new war with Iran. But congress has already given permission to the armed forces to bring stability to Iraq by any means (the so called ‘surge’) and now suddenly we have all this ‘evidence’ of Iranian activity in Iraq. A possible reason we are seeing this now is that they intend to exploit this congressional loophole and make Iran the reason for the disaster in Iraq and consequently deal with the Iranian 'problem' by any means necessary. The media seem to be pushing this idea already.

Additional related articles:

US Warships to Persian Gulf

The March to War: Naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.

U.S. diplomat tells Iran to back off in Gulf

Syria's terror networks

Venezuela Preparing for 'Asymmetrical' Showdown With U.S.