Deep Blade Journal

After a two-week lull, will the latest surge on the oil market crack the $60 level?

Please see Wampum for additional notes on the Republican Earth Day gift in the form of the odious Energy Bill I discussed yesterday. One article cited is an Aljazeera piece stating, “A report prepared by energy economists at the French investment bank Ixis-CIB has warned crude oil prices could touch $380 a barrel by 2015.”

Wampum also points to a New York Times article with an angle on the oil situation that has bugged the heck out of me for a long time:

…even as prices cling above $50 a barrel, those fears [of recession] have proved to be exaggerated. So far, the economy has weathered the price increase with remarkable ease and there is reason to believe that high fuel costs do not have quite the impact they once did.

The reason is that oil has been knocked off center stage in the American economy. The decline in manufacturing and the rise in service-oriented jobs means oil is not as indispensable for economic growth. Manufacturers and electricity-generating plants, once among the biggest users of oil, now depend primarily on natural gas, coal and, to a lesser extent, nuclear power.

This is essentially nonsense designed to soothe the rich — including those people who have profited handsomely from the destruction of US manufacturing and labor. The fallacy here is that because the factor by which oil consumption tracks economic growth and the %-mix of primary energy sources in various sectors has changed over the years, “oil is not as indispensable.”

Well, it is indispensable. Globalized economic activity would grind to a halt without its primary transport fuel and precursor chemicals for its plastic. We won’t find this out until actual shortages develop. When this happens, prices will rise much more rapidly than they are now while bottlenecks in the delivery of fuel and goods to voracious consumers appear. But we are not to this point of shortage yet.

For now, we must contend with a monopolistic cartel pattern in the energy sector. Greg Palast lays this out here (on Democracy Now!) and in an article for the April 2005 Harpers (not online yet), in context of the US taking of Iraq. Current high oil prices for the moment are actually good for the rich, as energy companies corral stupendous profits. This keeps a lot of balance sheets in the pink for the time being.

However, a day of reckoning is on the horizon. We can’t know for sure when that day will come, 2015 or whatever. But when it does and oil is $380/barrel, articles like the one cited from the Times will be a thing of the past.

Energy bill passes chamber of people’s deputies

They don’t care

The Energy Bill that just passed the US House of Representatives is yet another attempt to push through this travesty of a decorated Christmas tree of polluters’ pork that is void of progressive ideas like increased fuel economy standards.

If you want to know the details, please read the extensive analysis published last fall by the Boston Globe. They calculated that, “…entities with a stated interest in energy policy spent $387,830,286 lobbying Washington last year.”

What favors for industry and pork projects will we get from this bill? Drilling the arctic and lawsuit immunity for makers of the groundwater-polluting chemical MBTE are only the beginning. A cadre of rapacious land developers has hitched a ride aboard this bill in order to get the public to swallow in a laughable “greenbonds initiative” the all the risk for a plethora of dicey projects, including the $2 billion mega-mall project in upstate New York known as DestiNY USA.

Also on the dream list in the bill is an incredible $1 billion nuclear reactor/hydrogen fuel boondoggle for Idaho and its local pork dealer, Senator Larry Craig. Deep Blade blogged about this incredible proposal back in November 2003. Meaanwhile, the hydrogen car initiative the nuclear-hydrogen fuel program would support is seen as “bullshit” by House Resources chairman Richard Pombo, Republican of California.

And while they’re at it, they figure this is a good time to jumpstart the Enron economy by repealing the Public Utility Holding Company Act.

It’s all so sickening. We find our planet on its steepest downward trajectory since the first Earth Day 35 years ago in 1970. Maybe this year something will happen to help wake people up and turn this thing around. The HOPE Festival is in Orono tomorrow!!

If this is what the Democrats are doing, I’m through with them

DNC Chair Howard Dean screams support for Bush and the occupation of Iraq (Photoshop credit: Evil Pundit)

The one-time Democratic presidential front runner in the 2004 primary campaign declared before a crowd of 1000 at the Minneapolis Convention Center that, “Now that we’re there, we’re there and we can’t get out.”

Myth. There is nothing, zero, zip, nada that the US is holding together in Iraq, except for the resistance to its own presence. Removal of the US would allow Iraq to face its serious struggles (yes, they would be serious) as a sovereign country. It would do much better than any paternalistic American commentator suggests.

Dean went on to throw a big lollipop of support for President Bush, whose deceit incited the destructive war. Read more about the pathetic posture of Dean and the Democrats in this piece by Kevin Zeese.

Underscore that last post — this is not winning

Insurgents Down Civilian Helicopter Near Iraqi Capital: 6 Americans Among Victims; More Bodies Found in Tigris (Washington Post story, AP photo)

The Post story cited describes more horrors and makes clear the extent of resistance control of major routes:

On…Baghdad’s dangerous airport road, a bomb exploded Thursday, killing two foreigners and wounding three, Iraqi police said. The strike highlighted the inability of U.S. forces and their allies to prevent attacks on one of the most heavily traveled and most reliably targeted corridors in Iraq.

At least 15 people have been killed and 17 wounded in a week of bombings and ambushes by gunmen on and around the airport road….

Also in this report, there is evidence about how the resistance operates that illustrates perfectly the analysis of Steve Gilliard I cited yesterday. The Post story says:

In Ramadi, a western base for insurgents, a message posted early Thursday afternoon on the gates of a mosque that has served as a bulletin board for alleged insurgent statements asserted that an attacker with a shoulder-fired missile launcher had waited three days on a hilltop for his successful shot at a foreign aircraft.

The statement described the weapon as a Soviet-designed Strella heat-seeking antiaircraft missile, the insurgent statement claimed.

These guys are heavily armed.

Another Post story is well worth reading — an account of riding on patrol in a Humvee written by an embedded journalist. This is a harrowing experience by any stretch of the imagination — one thousands of US troops are having every day for months on end:

Horror Glimpsed From the Inside of A Humvee in Iraq

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 21, 2005; Page A01

… Within seconds, a powerful blast ripped into the Humvee a few yards ahead of us, shooting a cloud of debris high into the air.

McMaster swore loudly, then yelled, “Stop!” We braced for additional blasts. When they didn’t come, McMaster ordered Haycox to pull forward away from the area where the bomb went off and get into position in case of more attacks. The bombed Humvee swerved off the shoulder into a ditch and jolted to a halt. Two soldiers staggered out, one covered with blood. Seeing the men’s shocked faces, I instantly realized theirs was the vehicle I had been riding in 10 minutes earlier. The Humvee’s right rear door was ripped off, the surrounding metal burned black, and the gunner was sprawled face down on the side of the road….

My only reaction is to say our troops need to be brought home now. At the very least, President Bush should announce that the US has no intent for material control of any of Iraq’s resources or assets, and will withdraw on a firm, rapid timetable.

“Success” is the code word that washes over much mainstream reporting on the US taking of Iraq. Even on its own terms, the project is anything but.

Mopping up the damage from yet another resistance attack in Iraq

We hear it all the time in mainstream reports and from politicians. Going back to last fall, despite trying to paint the president as a poor manager of the war, the Democratic candidates actually sided with Bush because Kerry and Edwards were “committed to success in Iraq”. This was routine campaign spiel, as Deep Blade reported after an Edwards appearance in Orono, Maine on September 8, 2004. Any suggestion that the US ought actually to stop what it’s doing in Iraq and bring the troops home was treated as radioactive by all the Democrats.

Everything we are supposed to know about the US in Iraq is put in terms of this jingoistic success and self-satisfied optimism. Another example — Last month, US Senator from Maine Susan Collins did so as she cleansed US war crimes in Fallujah. She wrote in a March 5, 2004 oped in the Bangor Daily News,

The most encouraging part of my visit to Iraq was our trip to Fallujah, a city once synonymous with danger and firmly in the insurgents’ control. Once a sanctuary for insurgents, Fallujah is now what one Marine described as the “safest city in Iraq” due to a fierce battle in which the Marines rooted out the insurgents and destroyed scores of weapons caches. This success has also encouraged more than a thousand Iraqis in the Fallujah area to have the confidence to come forward to fill police and army positions.

Can you imagine more blatant falsehoods and mischaracterization of the situation in Iraq? That is why we need the perspective of Steve Gilliard. In an essential post on Looking at Iraq from April 20, Gilliard reviews the US military’s entire situation there. After all the air power, all the killing, all the home invasions, the imprisonment of tens of thousands of Iraqis, all the torture, and the flattening of Fallujah (supposedly to quell the hotbed of the resistance), here are a few of Gilliard’s many pithy observations of the situation:

…

· The Iraqi resistance has also limited the use of the roadnet. Without convoys, resupply is impossible. This control is so dominant that US units now get some supplies by air.

· They have also thoroughly penetrated US assets in Iraq. No Iraqi unit can move without the guerrillas eventually finding out.

· US units are unable to leave their bases except on patrol. During the Vietnam War, Americans could frequent bars and live in the cities. No American can live in Iraq without security at the risk of kidnapping and death.

· The lack of infantry leaves the US unable to sustain military successes when they do occur. The scarcest military resource is not armor, but trained combat infantry. Sure, you can send artillerymen out on patrol and get tankers on foot. But infantry is irreplaceable for guerrilla warfare.

Every day, US forces go out, take casualties and go back to their bases, trying to survive yet another attack that night. The US, in two years, have lost lives and material, but gained little. There is not one area the US can say that guerrillas cannot operate. And that is the most important fact. After two years and 1500 dead, the guerrillas control the highway to the airport, Baghdad’s main drags and the country’s highways.

The essential US propaganda front we hear repeatedly — including in Collins’s piece — about the optimistic future of Iraqi forces creating “security” for Iraq is laid bare as a big lie by Gilliard.

US troops do not belong in this situation. No kind of “Iraqiization” of the project is possible while the US is casting its shadow and applying its firm hand. I completely come down on the side of Naomi Klein in any discussion about whether the troops should be brought home sooner rather than later. She goes even farther than Gilliard by explaining how security for Iraqis has never been the main objective of US policy. On Democracy Now! for April 20, Klein argued:

The resistance largely controls Baghdad at this point, a situation where there are between 50 and 60 attacks a day. The militias that Erik [Gustafson] is warning about already control large sectors of Iraq, because providing security for the people of Iraq has never, from day one, been a priority of this occupation. We saw the abandonment immediately by allowing the looting to take place and only guarding the Ministry of Oil, and it’s only gotten worse. You know, when I was in Iraq a year ago, this was the most persistent complaint — was spiraling crime. And that’s actually how the militias were created. They were created as a response to the fact that US Occupation never, ever prioritized giving security to Iraqis. The other issue is this idea that somehow US forces are helping to train Iraqi police, and that it’s just a problem of training. What’s actually happening is that there is — is that the greatest liability for Iraqis to gain control over their own country security-wise, is the fact that the security forces have been embedded in the occupation itself and are seen as an extension of the hated and loathed occupation. So they get attacked as collaborators and slaughtered. They’re not provided with any protection, and so on. So the best way for them to build up their own force and their own credibility, which is really what’s needed, is a clear break with the occupation, which means immediately announcing a withdrawal of troops and setting up a transition plan. The first step has to be the announcement of troop withdrawal.

Yes, bring home our relatives, friends, and neighbors who are asked to fight this war on false optimism and pretenses of future “success” that are really nothing like the truth Klein has outlined.

“Outrage” in Iraq over harsh treatment of an assembly member by US troop at checkpoint

Employing Israeli methodology, the US military has from the beginning of the invasion made its cordons and road checkpoints places of horror for the Iraqi population. Now a member of the newly-elected assembly has been given a taste of American freedom:

U.S. troop’s treatment of assembly member sparks outrage in Iraq

By Dogen Hannah
Knight Ridder Newspapers

An outraged Iraqi National Assembly demanded an apology from the U.S. government Tuesday for the rough treatment one assembly member said he received from an American soldier at a military checkpoint….[Fattah] Al-Sheikh was shaken and crying as he struggled to tell the assembly that a U.S. soldier had manhandled him. The incident occurred at a checkpoint leading into the heavily fortified Green Zone, the central Baghdad compound where the assembly meets, he said.

“I was dragged to the ground,” said al-Sheikh, a member of a small party sympathetic to rebel Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. “There were cars beside mine at the checkpoint, but I was the only one who paid this price.”

Al-Sheikh and witnesses said a soldier kicked his car, pulled him from the vehicle, grabbed him by the neck and handcuffed him. When he protested that he was a member of the assembly, a soldier scoffed at the group, al-Sheikh said.

What I find most troubling in these stories is the sense of impunity and superiority that is pervasive in the way America conducts itself in Iraq. Too many US troops behave with contempt towards the Iraqi people, belittling Iraqi customs and behavior, using derisive terms like “Hadji”, implying that every Iraqi is a terrorist and Islam is a damned religion — following the leadership of General Boykin.

Does America have any chance of redemption for its crimes in Iraq? These kind of incidents and ones much worse that happen to ordinary Iraqis every day only dig the hole that much deeper. The earliest this question will be answered is decades from now after Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and most of us are long dead.

It is about oil

According to Yergin writing in The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (Simon & Schuster, 1991), “Baku was the territory of `the eternal pillars of fire’ worshipped by the Zoroastrians…more prosaically, the result of flammable gas associated with petroleum deposits.” By the way, note how Azerbaijan sits on top of Iran like a tight-fitting hat.

Azerbaijan’s Defense Minister Safar Abiyev hosted Rumsfeld on April 12. (bakutoday.net)

According to a story posted at EurasiaNet, Rumsfeld visited the state located west of the Caspian Sea “under extreme secrecy, with limited public information.”

The US press, as far as I can tell, completely missed this side trip. They were too busy filing stenographic coverage praising “fledgling democracy and noting the improving capabilities of Iraqi security forces” and “several positive trends in the two-year-old war” during the Pentagon boss’s quick fling to Iraq early on April 12. Naturally, US coverage lacked any apparent sense of irony as Rumsfeld scolded the Iraqis for corruption and then told them they could not purge any Saddam-era officials brought into the puppet interim defense and interior ministries under Pentagon tool Ayad Allawi.

Shrouded in secrecy and without official announcement on Rumsfeld’s schedule, his stop in Azerbaijan following the Iraq visit has generated some speculation in international press. What is being set up there? According to EurasiaNet,

Recent statements from Pentagon officials about strategic needs in the Caspian Sea region appear grounded in this “rapid reaction” strategy. General James Jones, commander of US troops in Europe, confirmed in recent congressional testimony the Pentagon’s interest in creating a special “Caspian guard” that would protect the Caspian Sea’s oil infrastructure as well as the nearly finished Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The Wall Street Journal on April 11 reported that the US plans to spend $100 million on such a “Caspian guard” capable of responding to crisis situations in the Caspian Sea region, home to one of the world’s largest reservoirs of oil. This would include the development of a command center in Baku, responsible for monitoring ships in the Caspian Sea. [emphasis added]

There you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth. Michael Klare expands on these oil-interest aspects of current US military planning, including indications Iran will be attacked by the US this year, in a recent piece on TomDispatch.

Our allies
Who are these Azeri guys with whom Rumsfeld and the Pentagon are so keen to solidify basing arrangements? An excellent, extensive posting, Secret Agent: Rumsfeld Sneaks Off to Baku Unreported in U.S. press, he stalks oil and Iran in Azerbaijan, describes the “democracy” and human rights situation there in terms straight off the US embassy’s site:

·Ilham Aliyev, the son of former president Heydar Aliyev, was elected President in October 2003 in a ballot that did not meet international standards for a democratic election due to numerous, serious irregularities.

·Members of the security forces committed numerous human rights abuses.

·The Government’s human rights record remained poor, and it continued to commit numerous abuses. The Government continued to restrict the right of citizens to peacefully change their government. There were four deaths that occurred in custody allegedly due to beatings. Police tortured and beat persons in custody, and used excessive force to extract confessions.

·The Government continued to restrict freedom of speech and of the press. Defamation lawsuits brought by officials against independent journalists and newspapers and high court fines for libel remained significant problems for the media.

·The Government restricted freedom of assembly and did not sanction any demonstrations by opposition political parties during the year. The Government continued to restrict freedom of association by harassing domestic human rights activists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

·There were some restrictions and abuses of religious freedom, and low-level and local government officials continued to harass minority religious groups.

·Violence against women, societal discrimination against women and certain ethnic minorities, trafficking in persons, and limitations of some worker rights remained problems.

What else does any rational person need to know about Bush’s sincerity — or at least his thrust on “force” — when he speaks of “the force of human freedom”.

New York Yankees swept by Baltimore Orioles

George Steinbrenner in one of his calmer moments

After the 3-game sweep extended their losing streak to four games in the Yankees mediocre 4-8 start to the baseball season, the Boss said today,

Enough is enough. I am bitterly disappointed as I’m sure all Yankee fans are by the lack of performance by our team.

It is unbelievable to me that the highest-paid team in baseball would start the season in such a deep funk. They are not playing like true Yankees. They have the talent to win and they are not winning. I expect Joe Torre, his complete coaching staff and the team to turn this around.

It’s all sweet music to this Red Sox, Twins, and Cubs fan.

“Bullish” ministers nonetheless still worried about oil

The money managers from the world’s wealthiest country met this weekend in Washington where they discussed their usual agenda of how best to extend extreme neoliberal policies — for example, opening the Chinese currency to speculation under the guise of correcting “imbalance”, denying struggling people in poor countries debt relief through endless “case-by-case analysis of HIPC [Heavily Indebted Poor Countries] countries”, and keeping these same countries and their people wide open for foreign exploitation and easy repatriation of profits — while destroying unions and our local manufacturing jobs in the process.

But this time they had to sooth nervous capitalists with a salve of faux bullishness in order to explain away the recent slide on Wall Street — often a leading sign of deepening economic hard times.

For example, US Treasury Secretary John Snow was quoted in this AP story:

The upbeat joint statement by finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of Seven major industrialized nations broke little new ground, but their meeting provided an opportune moment to issue soothing words about the outlook. Coincidentally, the meeting came after several days of turmoil in financial markets that culminated Friday in Wall Street’s worst single-session loss in nearly two years.

“I don’t comment on stock market moves. What I do comment on is underlying fundamentals, and the underlying fundamentals remain strong,” U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said at a news conference following the meeting with his counterparts from Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Canada.

But the ministers clearly remain rattled by high oil prices. (Please see extensive Deep Blade post on this subject from October 2004.) The terse language on oil issued in the communique reads,

Higher oil prices are a headwind, and the expansion is less balanced than before.

We welcome efforts to improve oil market data, increase medium-term energy supply and efficiency.

Supply, supply, supply. The belief that the world oil industry will drill its way to perpetual economic growth is part of the subtext here, as is some degree of worry that this just is not so — and that peak oil is real.

“It now appears that, far from improving the quality of life for Iraqi youngsters, the US-led military assault on Iraq has inexplicably doubled the number of children under five suffering from malnutrition. Under Saddam, about 4% of children under five were going hungry, whereas by the end of last year almost 8% were suffering.

“These results are even more disheartening for those of us in the Department of Making Things Better for Children in the Middle East By Military Force, since the previous attempts by Britain and America to improve the lot of Iraqi children also proved disappointing. For example, the policy of applying the most draconian sanctions in living memory totally failed to improve conditions. After they were imposed in 1990, the number of children under five who died increased by a factor of six. By 1995 something like half a million Iraqi children were dead as a result of our efforts to help them.”

Let them eat bombs: The doubling of child malnutrition in Iraq is baffling
Terry Jones in The Guardian, Tuesday April 12, 2005

See also previous Deep Blade post. Thanks to Ruth Group (an excellent reality-based blog) for the link.