NOVANEWS
Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem
Chair of West Midland PSC
So I recently drove from Ithaca to New York. Along the way, I filled up my gas tank. Not cheap: about 40 dollars at roughly 3.87 to the gallon. I don’t drive much. But in Central and upstate New York, others do, and that absurdly high gas price functions as a regressive tax. More of their disposable income goes to gas, less goes to either savings, or other forms of consumption. Money spent on gasoline leaves their communities and goes to ExxonMobil. Some of the area of Central New York and northeast Pennsylvania I drive through is also Glenn Beck country: these people are furious, they know that their lives are deteriorating, their wages are stagnant, and they pay more and more money every month for gasoline, and no one is giving them answers why.
Beck et al blame the Muslims and whir up nationalist and nativist hysteria – hysteria contributing to an atmosphere drenched in propaganda, suffused with hatred of brown people. Next thing you know, we’re bombing some dusky folk to freedom again, while gas prices are zooming to the stratosphere. Forget the hysterics. Stephen Walt informs us that we start wars because we can [not sic] and because Congress has abdicated its responsibility. Meanwhile, “one could add more items to this list (e.g., the passive press, the military-industrial complex, etc.),” he adds, in one of America’s leading foreign policy journals. Thanks Steve.
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
An oil economist adviser to the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation, Dr Salameh says that among the world’s biggest oil producers, Iraq alone has enough reserves to increase flow substantially. Production in eight others – the United States, Canada, Iran, Indonesia, Russia, Britain, Norway and Mexico – has peaked, he says, while China and Saudia Arabia, the remaining two, are nearing the point of decline. Before the war, Saddam Hussein’s regime pumped 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, but this has fallen to just 2 million barrels.
Salameh told a British parliamentary committee last month that Iraq had offered the US a deal, three years before the war, that would have opened 10 new giant oil fields on “generous” terms, in return for lifting sanctions. “This would certainly have prevented the steep rise of the oil price,” he said. “But the US had a different idea. It planned to occupy Iraq and annex its oil.
(H/t Naked Capitalism)
Annex oil? What does that mean? Assert sovereignty over it? Stitch it into the national territory? And why would a war for oil result in less oil being pumped? Bizarre. Or not bizarre. When oil companies capture the state, they don’t make money by “annexing” oil. They make money by making chaos in the Middle East and ratcheting up the price we pay at the pump. Meanwhile Iraq, seriously under-explored for decades, will be the next Saudi Arabia as the KSA’s reserves wane over the next couple decades.* Israel? The oil companies love that place: it rattles its saber incessantly at Iran. When it does so, oil prices per barrel shoot up, like they did three years ago when they popped up 8 percent in one day. The anti-war and Palestine solidarity movements don’t need a slogan. They have it: no blood for oil dollars.
*Peak oil is a myth. We’ll all be dead in a world that’s turned into an oven before we exhaust the trillions and trillions of barrels oil that’s recoverable at prices above 40 or 50 dollars a gallon – oil that is located frequently in the United States.
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