All The News That Eventually Gets Printed

An enraged George Tenet, drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar's Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him:

A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes. "They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."

And then this:

"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the rlght wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exasperation as, "the Jews."

From the prologue of Patrick Tyler's forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, about America's curious relations with the Middle East. (And hat tip to Jesus at Church and Empire, right margin.)

Twenty-Year Old News

(NYT Redux)

After seven years of war, Afghanistan presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure, and forbidding terrain.

Will Kill For Oil

I wondered a few posts ago what Preznit and his coterie would be doing after the election, and a graphic artist has donated their patriotic time to answer the question. If only Thomas Paine had Photoshop, and King George had Total Information Awareness, semantic analysis, and millions of terabytes of retrievable phone conversations stored on optical disks, history would seem so much more alive.

This picture, gleaned from the keenly visual Cat in the Bag blog, telegraphs the dissonant tragedy that is the Bush Administration. They were so certain of their course, and why it would be good for everybody. It's one of life's kick-ass ironies that if you start out certain you're on the road to ending up with doubts, and if you start out with doubts you've got a good chance to close in on certainty, at least part of it, and cuff it.

Crude Awakening: Barrels Of Oil Per Ounce Of Gold

As we teeter off the tipping point of a non-negotiable way of life, we collectively suffer from multiple illusions, these still shored up by past observations logged by our inductive social brains. We're like Bertrand Russell's examplary thought-chickens, so convinced of our keepers' benevolence by continued feedings that we say, "See, these humans ain't so bad, look how good they been to us lot! Worth trading a few eggs for, I'd say. Hey what's that sharp metal thing Farmer John's carryin'?" The past lulls us into thinking it's always prologue. It's not, and having been outside this box, my thinking is unorthodox.

I say Farmer John is bent on murder. To wit, the diverging lines in the graph above. The blue and red lines ascending skywards on Jacob's ladder represent the Dollars and Euros required to buy a barrel of oil. The purple line snailing its flat path across the chart is the number of barrels of oil an ounce of gold will buy. Oil and gold are commodities, so they have intrinsic value; dollars and euros are pieces of paper, so they do not. The price relationship between oil and gold has been remarkably stable for the past 70 years. Therefore it's not so much the price of oil which is going up; it's the value of currencies which is going down. That's the key to understanding what is happening to the US place in the world economy, and its likely implications, and whether or not the Eagle is become as paper, as the Bear once was.

Most analysts would probably point to Peak Oil as the cause of oil's price increases, but US demand for oil fell year-on-year by 4% this January, world oil production went up by 2.5%, and world consumption increased by only 2% over the same period. Refiners such as Valero have cut production, called off expansion, and laid off workers because of low margins, yet gasoline reserves are at the highest level in the past 16 years. In this case, Peak Oil or the gas and oil "shortage" touted by the US President and his Secretary of Energy are illusions, and ungloving their hidden hands is easy.

Investment in speculation probably accounts for more than 50% of oil's price increase. Not surprising, since price volatility attracts speculation, and sustained price movements build their own momentum to create price bubbles. The total market in oil futures was worth $9 billion in 2001. It's now worth $250 billion. As the speculation extends, the more it attracts new entrants, and there's little reason to think oil speculation is in a late stage.

But there's something deeper going on than extraordinary oomph in one commodity. Across the board, commodities are up by more than double their year-prior price. Copper, rice, bauxite, silver, chicken feed, flour, you name it. Wheat futures went up by 70% on one Friday a couple of months back. Such broad-based sustained buying is consistent with a flight from currency into alternative values, and it's never happened to this extent in my lifetime. Granted, oil is a special case due to heightened global political risk and to clear domestic policy intentions to work up price--with both POTUS and VPOTUS being influential oil men, they've rewarded their own.

But two causal roots are anchored still further in the earth, and both are tolling knells to continued American leadership in the world. Each is a clear signal of lost fiscal confidence, at least in US tender. Primo, foreign banks want to unload gigantic dollar holdings, and they've been doing so. China alone has a $1.5 trillion reserve and has been hoarding commodities for years now. Secondo, the dollar monopoly on oil exchange is now broken, and it's why current US leadership is still considering an attack on Iran.

Suffocating Iran's anti-dollar initiative is critical to maintaining dollar hegemony. If that cannot be done, a day will come when the US government can't print up paper and buy all-you-can-eat energy with it. That means no operational military might, no further capacity to borrow. Government actions would have to be earned by building foreign exchange reserves. I'll turn to Brother Tim (who runs the always-principled, oft-provocative Blog of Revelation) and surface his comment on a previous post (What's That Got To Do With The Price Of Rice?):

The Iranians have now opened up their oil bourse, accepting mainly petro-euros and yen, and a few lesser hard currencies. Absolutely no petro-dollars accepted.

Last September Iran started accepting only yen from the Japanese. The Japanese and the Chinese account for a large part of Iranian oil exports, around 20% each.

Iranian production is capable of 6 million barrels/day, as witnessed in the 70s and 80s. Iranian consumption is just over 1 million barrels/day. They're now producing around 4 million barrels/day, exporting 3. So, roughly 3 million barrels/day has been pulled off the open market (NYMEX & IPE).

Add to that 'Private Oil'. This is backroom dealing between producers and consumers, effectively eliminating the middle-man (NYMEX & IPE). An example of this is the Chinese deal with Sudan to get 200,000 barrels/day @ $60.00/barrel for 10 years, in exchange for investment capital for infrastructure and exploration. Russia and Venezuela have made similar deals with China. Every barrel that is sold or traded in this way is one more barrel taken off the open market. THIS is a big part of the rising oil prices, and will surely get worse as time goes by.

Many think the New York Mercantile Exchange and London's International Petroleum Exchange are invincible. They believe that since the two largest Exchanges are basing oil on the dollar, that the dollar cannot fail. However, when those two Exchanges collapse (and they will) the dollar will go belly-up with them. Every barrel bought with yen, euro, or renminbi, is a barrel lost to the dollar.

Every barrel bought with yen, euro, or renminbi is a barrel lost to the dollar. Because it weaken's the dollar's liquidity. The economic conflict is broken down the old capitalist/communist fault line, except now the capitalists owe the communists huge sums of money. That chart above explains much about how the war is going, and nearly everything about the United States' choice of enemies. Tim, you seem to have an excellent grasp here, and I'd appreciate it if you could expand as you see fit.

iWhack

"America has hardly even begun to repay its debt to Iraq. This is an immoral request because we didn't ask them to come to Iraq, and before they came in 2003 we didn't have all these needs."

Abdul Basit, the head of Iraq's Supreme Board of Audit, an independent body that oversees Iraqi governmental expenditures, after being asked why US forces in Iraq are charged an average of $3.23 and citizens buy it for $1.36 per gallon. Last year, the US spent over $5 billion on petroleum products in Iraq. The Iraqi government is expected to capture $70 billion from oil sales in 2008, with the majority of that windfall being sent to foreign shelters.

A New Dance--South American Proxy Wars

Colombia, a United States satellite and illicit drug source since the Polk Administration (1845-49), invaded Ecuador to kill some harbored FARC leaders; what at first blush seems a routine violation of a weak nation's sovereignty is on deeper reflection more serious. A domino's track of consequences is likely to tip, the most immediate of which is that Ecuador and Venezuela have withdrawn their ambassadors, and Hugo Chavez just ordered Venezuela's armored forces to the Colombian border. These actions must be considered a challenge to a long-established sphere of northern influence.

The background of US-Colombia relations may be obscured or even hidden from most Americans, but US interventionism has been a direct, violent, and frequent feature of Colombian life for over 150 years. Polk signed a treaty with Colombia in 1846 to control access to the railway across the narrow isthmus separating the Atlantic and Pacific, preparing for the vision of a trans-oceanic canal. And before 1900, US troops were called in to crush native rebellions six times.

In 1903, the Hay-Herran Treaty granted the United States renewable 99-year leases to a promising swath of land in return for $10 million plus a yearly stipend. The amount was considered insultingly small and Colombian senators refused to ratify the treaty, so US commercial interests found it expedient to support a rebellion in a region of Colombia known as Panama. The region broke away as a protectorate under the New Panama Canal Company, becoming a de facto US territory and a tremendous strategic asset. Goods and vessels of any offending nation could be barred passage through the portage, and eventually the Canal. The only alternative was the long journey around Cape Horn, a squally, ice-berg ridden graveyard with strong winds, currents, and notorious 100-foot high rogue waves dreaded by mariners to this day. As Panama's right-hand anchor, controlling Colombia has been a steady necessity.

Successfully upholding pro-US policies contrary to the interests of Colombia's majority, dictatorships have been beset by its by-products: chronic government weakness, a steeply stratified society, cartel combinations, violence, a golden parachute mindset amongst elites, popular resistance, kidnapping, and persistent forms of organized rebellion. The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) is a usual enemy of Colombia's para-military dictators, President Uribe a latest incarnation. Roughly 40 years old, FARC is a somewhat anachronistic Marxist-Leninist guerilla organization with upwards of 10,000 troops, and it was their international spokesman Raul Reyes and a reported 14 others who were killed yesterday in Ecuador.

In the past 7 years, the situation in South America has changed dramatically, to the extent that merely breaking the FARC will not tilt the balance in North America's favor. In 2001, the Bush Administration consciously shelved plans to nip a budding Hugo Chavez in favor of focusing on greater Iraq's transformation. The intervening time has allowed the ghost of Simon Bolivar to haunt. Ecuador elected its first native President, a government which naturally favored the FARC and its sentiments, Chavez has been piling up abundant oil revenues and parceling out anti-imperialist favors across the region in which China is replacing an ejected Exxon, and undersea oil has been discovered just north of Cuba. Chavez has bought Russian arms, munitions, training, and the world's best fighter jets.

Chavez is a man with an exquisite sense of the hour, a master of anti-imperialist positioning, and his timing is impeccable. Now, in the twilight of a distracted and frustrated BushCo, a retrograde threat of retaliation, and the coming regime change in the US, he knows it's an excellent time to up ante. His tanks will probably not cross the border into Colombia, but he can credibly claim active US aggression, real or imagined, and Venezuela is the closest and biggest foreign supplier of oil to North America. If he shuts off the spigot, anyone else in the world will pay the same (rather higher), and the resulting temporary supply disruption would serve his domestic and foreign diplomatic needs nicely.

Any incoming Administration would have to negotiate with Chavez, validating his approach and giving leverage to Simon Bolivar's pan-American agenda. Colombia's position is tenuous in terms of American support, low down on the priority list; Venezuela and Ecuador could probably embarrass it in a border war. That may not fully develop, but we should expect a Venezuelan oil embargo, its price going to $125 per barrel in May or June.

Kosovo: Independent State, Or Mephitic Gas?

On the surface, what with all the favorable press coverage and foreign endorsements, you'd think Kosovars did a good thing by declaring independence from Serbia. Nobody really knows where Kosovo, Serbia, and Albania are, because they're next to Macedonia and Montenegro, and nobody knows where they are either. Sure, Alexander the Great was born in Macedonia, but that was a long quaint time ago, and few people have recently been blessed with any idea why they should care about Serbia and Kosovo.

So here goes. This is how crashingly, igneously ignorant the erupting situation is, and how cold-blooded its planned containment: Kosovo declaring independence from Serbia is like the Alamo declaring independence from Texas, only worse. The brief aggregation called Yugoslavia (or "south of Slavland") was once formed from a chunky stew of violent religious migrations and wars. In their fundamental concept of nationhood, the Serbians (Greek Orthodox) persevered over persecution, holding fast against all comers. They still see themselves fighting off Muslims (Bosnians), regular Catholics (Croats), teeming Albanians (Various Bastards), al-Qaeda (Saudi Foreign Legion), and the Nazis (formerly played by themselves, now by NATO). I'm greatly simplifying the area's bloody, complex history, and skipping over an unsavory present. The point is, Serbians see themselves doing all this fighting across ancient and recent history, right from the heart of Kosovo, and they make Texans look like Comanche-cuddling candy-asses.

The US embassy in Belgrade was burned as a declaration of war. Most US diplomats and Foreign Service staffers have been sent home. The burning isn't going to stop, and it isn't going to "cool down" with a little diplomacy and PR. Serbians could care less if a tidy Western oil pipeline should cut through Kosovo, they understand they will get bombed with US warplanes once more, and they are turning to the Russians for more and better weapons. If NATO plans to go in there to protect Kosovo's independence, it will face a vicious insurgency it's not prepared for, one it can't quell without serial-killer determination.

Yet US and NATO support for Kosovan independence is an entirely logical extension of what was started in Clinton's 1998 intervention. Then as now, it isn't about freedom, self-determination, or halting ethnic genocide. Kosovo is a pawn in a cavalier, supercalifragilistic game in which our players acknowledge neither the limits of their intellects nor their powers. The reason we should care now? It's not just about them. The protectorate is perched on Russia's southern doorstep, and this time, Serbia is set to serve as a proxy, if not more, in an energy war widening from the Mid-east to the Caspian to the Balkans. Western oil companies have been unsuccessfully seeking a transport route into the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles since 1994, and they want to build one through an expanded and secured Albania. Enter Russian premier Vlad Putin from stage left:

"Those who do this, subjugating their allies to their will and by force of arms, are not thinking about the consequences of what they are doing. This is a double-edged sword, one whose second edge will snap back into their gobs sooner or later."

The best diplomatic outcome in Kosovo is to not take our players seriously, and cajole the opposition into treading water for a year. Many see BushCo as simply a continuation of US aggression, and true enough. But it's also an apotheosis, one overstretching everywhere. We've arrived at the confused, panicked, unjust cave in A Passage To India, and every noise yelled into the cave returns an unwelcome 'Boum!' The menu for the next US leader will be where to retreat, how to consolidate, how far and and how fast. As for friendship, may well we come to it, but even the earth and sky seem to say, 'Not yet.'

Information Warfare: Mid-East Has Its Intertubes Tied

It's worth wondering why the fiber optic cables to Iran, Egypt, and Dubai were cut. While making some sport of it in my first post, and the title of this one, it's also cause for serious concerns. Ones I didn't vent at first. Conspiracy theories? Uhn-uh. To think 5 cables got cut in a total of 6 places from ships dropping anchors, the only explanation offered thus far, is to buy a lifetime membership in the Ignorance Is Bliss Gated Community.

Under current US and Israeli war doctrines, knocking out the enemy's communications infrastructure is Priority One. Those undersea cables would be the first thing to go, because if you're making war, crippling them is risk-free, high-payoff. It not only seriously degrades the enemy's advanced communications, but it also gives you mastery of the public relations message to the world. Al-Jazeera can't transfer, upload, or air video over the internet in real time. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), not to mention the virulent nation itself, knows that it is first and foremost a propaganda machine. An awesomely effective one. (Remember, it's The Holocaust, and none other holocausts shalt come before it.)

Israel has to be the prime suspect in this gig, with the US a close second or an outright participant. Various other possibilities readily present themselves: countries wanting more censorship, Islamic extremists, a self-inflicted test, a psy-op...but each of these is also relatively easy to dismiss.

Naj from Iran Facts finds the censorship angle ludicrous, since manual, ad hoc measures are fully effective in the eyes of her former government. It's highly doubtful Islamic extremists possess the coordination or inclination to carry out such an operation, nor with such a light touch. A self-inflicted test on infrastructure effects carries some appeal, yet it's a stretch to imagine exactly what multinational Mid-east body would've wanted to conduct one. An intelligence psy-op study is even more appealing, but it would almost have to be a rogue operation, one whose scale makes it unlikely; the Mid-East is an active war zone where the military takes precedence.

A telecommunications professional of long acquaintance briefly mused that the cables may be tapped; while technically possible, bouncing light signals out of thousands of underwater optic strands is arduous and, due to signal loss, obvious, compared to sniffing right on the server nodes. Still, surveillance can't be ruled out, with resulting service disruption playing nicely into multiple purposes.

While very bad, I don't think the internet vasectomy signals immediate war as an attack would've (probably) already happened. It would be difficult to imagine, even granting the past and current imperial wooden-headedness in the region, giving an enemy so much time to re-adjust. This incident reads more like a message of mastery, an ape beating its chest and thumbing its nose. Strategically, it's an excellent way to signal you're escalating the threat level up another notch. You can safely sit back, gleefully gauge the reaction, and send a witty note to make your point. As mentioned in the first post below, the countries in the region are about to break down the fence and stampede off the dollar farm, and giving them electric collar shocks is just about the only means of non-violent control either primary suspect has left.

Unfortunately, the move is openly aggressive, illustrates what a wider regional war would first look like, and gives the Mid-East abundant and well-founded reason to stock up on three things: paranoia, desire for payback, and making communications infrastructure and procedures more redundant and secure.

Strange Mid-East Intertube Outages

What are the odds all these undersea fiber optic cables got cut by burrowing mollusks?

Mena Report:

A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

A hundred million people in the Mid-East are without fast internet:

Internet connectivity still remains slow in several Middle East countries due to the cable damage near Egypt, Iran and Dubai. An improvement is not expected soon as operators claim there are many complexities involved in fixing the problem. In addition, all voice calls, corporate data and video traffic were also affected.

The first two cables, off Alexandria in Egypt, were cut on January 23. Over the weekend a looped cable in the Gulf waters was cut in two points, off Dubai and off Iran's Bandar Abbas. The cuts have raised many conspiracy theories on their reasons.

However, the International Cable Protection Committee, an association of 86 submarine cable operators dedicated to safeguarding undersea cables, has declined to speculate on the cause of the breaches, adding investigations were underway.

In possibly related news, Saudi Arabia unpegged its interest rates, not following the September 18th drop by the Federal Reserve Bank. The Saudi currency (the riyal) has risen to a 20-year high against the dollar. A meeting of the Saudi financial advisory council is scheduled for February 17th, when it is widely expected that other oil suppliers will decide to revalue their currencies against the dollar. Maybe on the verge of connecting too many dots here, but somebody cut those cables, and I doubt it was "The Evil-Doers."

Exxon Mobil Makes Monster Profit

Wonder where all this money will end up going...

(AP) Exxon Mobil Corp. on Friday posted the largest annual profit by a U.S. company - $40.6 billion - as the world's largest publicly traded oil company benefited from historic crude prices at year's end.

Exxon Mobil also set a U.S. record for the biggest quarterly profit, posting net income of $11.7 billion for the final three months of 2007, besting its own mark of $10.71 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005.

The previous record for annual profit was $39.5 billion, which Exxon Mobil reported for 2006.

The eye-popping results weren't a surprise given record prices for a barrel of oil at the end of 2007. For much of the fourth quarter, they hovered around $90 a barrel, more than 50 percent higher than a year ago.

Crude prices reached an all-time trading high of $100.09 on Jan. 3 but have fallen about 10 percent since.

Petroliana, Part Two

In Part One, I related the pleasant memories of my grandparents filling up their Mercury Comet at the Atomic station north of Mayfield, New York, with me in the backseat killing brain cells, huffing the intoxicating fumes of leaded gas. For a decade and more thereafter, the long-chain benzene smell of gasoline would fairly infuse my being with happiness, building into full consciousness. The characteristic smell is tinged at this remove with varied resins of regret--for declined villages of my youth; for the freedoms of the travels I later embarked upon; and for the creeping realization of the oft-gruesome lengths to which I and my culture have gone to procure and command the substance itself.

It was gasoline ripped apart my village. My family. Me. To my undiscerning, innocent eyes, my world was still a serene harbor of middle-class, working-class enjoyments, rather than a small failing mill town basking in the temporary wake of a Great War which had won a prosperous respite. Despite my illegitimate situation, the insecurity of which has never left me, my family loved me, and I dearly loved them even if I felt apart from not having or knowing my dad. But I had a family, it was just there, pre-packaged, and I didn't have to go and figure out how to build another like some idiotic refugee.

It was deemed perfectly safe to walk to kindergarten, a lovely anachronism compared to a city where even in the safest neighborhoods children of any description hoofing it down a sidewalk are about as common as meteorites. In my village, near inhabitants were known of long acquaintance, and by force of sustained probity, civic duty, or commonality, virtually all were well-liked. I will not sketch paradise, not at all, there were those who were marked as those to be avoided, but the structures and scales of the village were decidedly more Victorian than modern, more early industrial than late. Although delight in internal combustion engines and their shiny steel envelopes was in full bloom, walking across town was still very common among adults.

And it wasn't all delight. No. Cars killed and maimed more people than died in wars, and I was not even allowed to ride with my great aunt Lil. Nor with my neighbor, mentor, and dear, dear friend Walt Allen who first taught me, starting when I was 4 years old, how to mow lawns and women. Going with them was forbidden, their driving techniques demonstrably learned on inappropriate things, she on stagecoaches delivering mail in the Adirondacks, he on bulldozers making airfields on the Aleutian Islands.

Driving had not fully defined my local environment, and nationally, Eisenhower's Interstate Road System (intended for rapid nuclear missile deployments) was not yet complete. My path to school would usually cross between three imposing, four or five-storied wooden buildings, leather mills sited along a stream, two of them nearing a hundred years old, one for rendering, one for tanning, and a newer one for cutting animal hides. The stream had strained to aid industry since Colonial times, and its noxious sludges and vapors ran the visible gamut of a chemical rainbow, and smelled like something which could probably dissolve you. Nonetheless it was still common for five-year olds to cross a train trestle over the Cayadutta creek in Gloversville, New York, hopping from tie to tie over the pickled waters below. That was the tiny scale of our commute, a naughty word most of us would learn only much later in adulthood.

My grandparents and their contemporaries, in fact most adults I knew, were part of 'the greatest generation,' the one celebrated for winning a war advertised as Good. They were heroes enough to me, for sure, but they would've shared a good laugh at both appellations. Then, they would have paused and looked up to solemnly thank their luck. Not only for making it through ok, but for the houses they bought, the families they grew, the businesses they started, and any educations they pursued were financed with easy-going GI Bill loans--worth more than $100,000 is today, available to every veteran.

My Uncle Franz, or Frank, affectionately known to his two older brothers as "the Professor," went to college and later became Controller of a national timber and paper company. The veterans and cronies felt lucky to be Americans, not Japanese, Russians, or Germans. They were well aware that if any single thing had made the fighting easier, it was America's ability to fill tankers with abundant petroleum products and send them off, on bargain-basement terms, to dodge torpedoes and fuel the foreign allies. To serve deep purposes. To them, it was simple. They won because the enemy had run out of fuel. Dick Guggenberger was a marine from Guadalcanal until Okinawa, everybody knew without him saying so that he'd killed more Nips than seismic activity, and he said, "Shooting them took way too long. We only won because we hit the refineries and sank the tankers, just like with the Krauts."

Five-year olds can remember things like they were yesterday. America was gushing oil in the 1940s. Germany was decidedly not, and amongst other powers such as the United States, it was conniving for control over unimaginably vast Mid-east oil fields. When I once asked assembled vets why the Nazis lost after instigating such dreaded perturbations, my uncle Hank, or Heinrich, answered: "No gas."

By contrast, in early 1945 he had enough spare juice for his halftrack to once drive a considerable distance east to his aunt's house in Czechoslovakia, clear outside a war zone (I assume as part of Patton's "Creeping Offensive"), to personally deliver Red Cross packages to her. Here is Uncle Hank's full dissertation on his lengthy participation in the Battle of the Bulge, all the firefights, the unthinkable attacks into the Hurtgen Forest, winning his medals and capturing scores of German soldiers: "It was cold." Then he took a few gulps of Genessee in the firelight. US control of the region's oil was secured by secret coup in 1953 Iran (see Iran's Short, Iterative History), then by British/French humiliations at the Suez Canal, by their indebtedness to America, and by secret unilateral treaty with Saudi Arabia in 1958 (see The Return Of Containment).

It was my pleasure to be the Bringer of Cold Beer to these men and their friends, who in my mind's eye still sit around a stone chimney they had built on top of the long reddened pine needles on summer evenings, fire-flies phosphoring, mosquitoes trying to brave the smoke, men analyzing news of the world with ancient heat under an overarching canopy. They joked and and reminisced while I fed needles into the fire, listening waiting for the smoke to come and the sudden burst into flame. I got to hear them talk unguarded, so their thoughts, as honestly as they would share them with each other, were shared with me and absorbed. When I die, theirs is the council fire to which I will return.

Not an officer among them, but they all grasped the conflict's essential nature, and each voiced measures of horror, disgust, skeptical perspective...from what they said, I suspect they knew the Second World War was fought over access to energy. As was the First, somewhat less obviously. They would not have known, nor desired to know, the energy's exact extent and particulars which had been won. But they knew victory was huge, they had been used and got lucky in some ways, they knew defeat would have been more huge. Their lives had been bet, they won, and it all had to do with oil.

Modern war runs on combustion, and the extent of petroleum's importance in deciding the 'Good War' is difficult to overstate. One example: Franco, the fascist victor of the Spanish Civil War, stayed neutral in exchange for oil, making Allied victories less costly and perhaps saving my beer quaffers' lives. As they served in uniform, the US agreed to supply 80% of Spain's pre-1940 rate of consumption, so it may be surmised that from 1940-1945, nearly all petroleum used in that country came from the US (and, technically, Britain). When in 1942 Franco supplied "volunteers" to the Eastern Front, encouraged a vehemently pro-Axis press, and victualled German subs at Vigo, the spigot was shut off, and Franco was quickly forced to acquiesce. Again. He beseeched Germany for oil, but none came. Not a drop.

Had Spain not been neutralized, Gibraltar, the British Navy's bottle cap to the Mediterranean, would probably have been taken by the Germans, who itched to undertake Operation Felix. It never came off, the price, oil, too steep for Hitler. And not taking Gibraltar was the same as not taking Russia. Churchill's desperate war in North Africa to wall off the oil fields was nearly lost despite keeping that maritime keystone, and it must have been lost if a fascist dictator who owed his very rule to Hitler and Mussolini, his country a mere rope's length across the Straits of Gibraltar, had not been bribed away.

The year I remember best under the pines was probably 1968, when America's relative prosperity and oil productio happened to be near their peaks. Sometimes before fetching my grandfather's beer, a Genesee, I asked if it was ok to take a sip. He said yes, but just a little. I will bring you a six-pack when I come back, grandfather. Before he came home in 1945, the US was producing 1.7 billion barrels of oil per year, and as I popped the top in 1968, output had doubled to 3.4 billion barrels per year, all downhill from there. My grandparents would soon upgrade from their Comet to a big-ass Chevy Impala. It was the hay-day of the muscle car, auto manufacturers were engaging in horsepower wars and, in all earnestness, trying to figure out...how to consume more gasoline.

There was a good deal of uneasiness about Vietnam around the evening fireplace, even disagreement, both about the military conflict itself and the bubbling fallout, social discords fully or semi-connected. My mother, uncle, and aunt were each in their own way harbingers of dislocation, my mother by having me, my uncle by commuting to General Electric an hour distant, my aunt by running entirely away with a hippie who could've played the role of Jesus in a movie.

My beloved cousin David, who was so kind to me, was a new college-graduated engineer at Dow Chemical. He was Uncle Hank's son, and his Corvette went off the New York State Thruway with his fiancee' when he was driving his beautiful fiancee home late one night, two weeks away from their wedding. No skid marks. Both dead. My family never recovered. His mother my aunt Sophie walked to his headstone every day for the rest of her life and prayed over it in snow and rain, and my Uncle Rocky his brother asked, "Why couldn't God have taken me?" That was my first worst day, when I first contemplated nothingness, terrifying nothingness, I saw it and asked my mother, "What happens when we die?" I can still hear my grandmother's cries just as they occurred, perfectly preserved, when she answered the phone that morning in the still-dark-outside, her voice, always disposed to kindness, begging god and fate itself for another chance, another reality. Because sometimes it's best to deny this one.

Gasoline. Enough of it to burn the bodies of my heroes and my village and their children with. Still, nothing seemed directly, fundamentally amiss in greater Petroliana. How could it? "There's nothin' like the face, of a kid eating a Hershey bar," sang a jingle on TV, and my grandfather would then watch hippies on the nightly news and be moved to yell, "Get your hair cut!" I would peer out happily from underneath the coffee table and wait for a visitor to drop in by the expediently unlocked back door and say, "Hi, how ya doin'? Whatcha got cookin', Evvy?" I wanted to screw Mary Anne on Gilligan's Island first I saw her, and can't turn down such bread and circuses.

We dimly apprehended the intrusion of another dimension, an entirely additional plane on which we would have to compete, one trumping the familial interdependence and community fellowship we so took for granted. There's a lot of ways to kill a man, there's a lot of ways to die. Few of them are quick. Humans are pretty tough. But we had no idea our domain started to end in 1971, and when it happened, it wasn't on the nightly news, or if it was, it was beyond the ken of us and Walter Cronkite. We couldn't identify the source of the calamities to come, sufficiently numerous and significant to require a Part Three.

Petroliana, Part One

From the detritus of the past, little dots can be sifted up, bits by themselves which convey little meaning at the removes we may find our societies and souls. Yet they can often be connected into plots which yield meta-meanings, and by those, I mean empyrean meanings. These live in a netherworld with neither up, nor down, nor axis, but are the eternal forces which suspend in love and lightly gird a primum mobile, which watches down on the hubbub of our material heavens. They are best perceived from the perspective of eons, the kind of meanings which govern life.

Is it possible to back up far enough, to achieve perspective that sees truths in their less temporal forms? The only aid I know is history. I am thinking of a museum at Zaandam, a grassed-over industrial complex on the outskirts of Amsterdam, a museum made only of windmills. A quarter-millenium ago, on a dam squared off from Zaanstad by canals, is the birthing place of Europe's industrial revolution. Where there were once a thousand windmills packed tight together, four remain. One of the twisting, creaking propellor-houses, the one known as "De Schoolmeester," mixed the slurry for the very paper upon which the Declaration of Independence was penned.

The Dutch offered fine parchment at a bargain price. Their industry and empire was powered by the wind their coasts braced up in such abundance, geographically untethering makers from reliance on water wheels, while uncontracting the miserable muscles of many serfs and slaves. Rather improbably, the Dutch became an energy cult which ruled the earth by harnessing and learning the finer points of atmospheric dynamics, and with this lever they extended their lowlands out into the sea, using wind to pump out water, going so far as to transform their country's visage on maps. Such was the reach of their agency, and their royal symbol was and remains the orange tree. Dutch primacy would only be eclipsed by the hell-fires of coal, an alien substance to them, one which released far more energy, far more predictably, than wind.

What a regime was coal. I am thinking of southern Provence, where at a villa not far from the winter lair of Richard Perle, we were surprised by a bookish, bespectacled woman who had come down from Birmingham to study what were once the last functioning coal mines in Europe; the shafts at nearby Hely d'Oissel closed in 1962. As a scholar, she thought the mines' importance self-evident. She would explore them for herself, so she could transform their remnants into wisdom. To me, she put in mind all the rail and factory museums in England, where the next major expansion of the industrial revolution ensued after its breeze-kissed delivery in Holland. The copious red brick of the professor's native Birmingham once enclosed naught but teeming machines and workers, blacked with carbon. Over that period, her country transformed the world, tormenting much of it and burning half the coal on earth.

English industry was so amazingly productive, its products so awesomely ubiquitous, so restlessly scientific, that it would bend world language itself with its force. While the reverend Adam Smith walked near the factories of Glasgow, gazing at slag heaps and contemplating the nature, causes, and repercussions of wealth, other natives were swinging cheap sturdy steel blades to hack trails through jungle vines a half-globe away, but every blade bore the stamp of Manchester. It's where the word "machete" came from. Britain's vast wealth and fluency with coal brought mastery over pan-Arabia, the richest source of coal's more potent liquor. Oil. Yet its imperial destiny was wedded to coal, and oil was a mistress it never really mastered or particularly delighted in. England was burdened with an infrastructure almost exclusively configured to burn coal, and at the start of the Second World War, 90 percent of its homes were still heated by it, its trains still ran on it, as many would be right into the 1970s. If coal stoked hell-fires, oil was the scorching fire itself, sunshine liquified and sunk back into the earth, and it was to be the province of another culture with special affinity.

In 1771, George Washington bought 250 Virginia acres because they held oil and gas springs. Blessed affinity, and I am thinking of my favorite gas station in the world. It was under a 50-foot high 'Atomic' sign, set down a side embankment across the highway from the south end of both Sacandaga Lake and the Adirondack Park, where my grandparents had met and, after the War, built a lakehouse they called 'the camp.' It was about a half hour's drive away from their house, which I grew up in, and their hearts were in the Adirondacks. In summers, the Atomic station was a natural spot to fill the tank of my grandparents' conveyance, a Mercury Comet, with its gasoline. The pumping smelled distinct, intoxicating, and permeating in a pleasant way, and I was not afraid, not then, to breathe the hydrocarbon vapors deep. I almost savored them, as I savored being with my grandparents, going to the large reservoir where they could relax into softer versions of their selves. To me, gasoline was freedom and discovery, even unfolding possibility, and the station's store would greet me with the sheltering cold of its ice cream freezer, its garishly colored plastic toys, and the delicious, complex menage of candy smells coming through their bright plastic wrappers. My favorite candy, once I was old enough to fit it into my mouth, was the cinammon-hot ferocity of the Fireball, which I would pop out of its wrapper and into my mouth while still under the looming sign.

The United States of my birth was a self-sufficient energy culture still brimming with oil, a net exporter to other countries, and the gusher was still the defining characteristic of American power. Oil defined everything about twentieth-century America, and it was arguably was the country's true uniting force. Oil took a population already far more mobile than its overseas forebears, in fact vocationally, inherently, and geographically mercurial by comparison, sat them on explosive devices, and set them out onto open roads to have fun. Is it any wonder that, as a people, we're nostalgic for Route 66? That one of our favorite literary decodings is called On the Road? Even amongst my father's father's generation during the time of Ford Model As and Ts, before Kerouac imagined tossing back a drink in a roadhouse bar, the favorite vacation was to get out and see the country, roam the wilderness, and scale the mountains. With a car, and preferably a fast one.

The whole country's built around speed, and that's not going to change. It's right on our national self-selected D4-7 allele, a spot at the DNA drive-in that's a marker for mania. No, it doesn't seem like the system could change if it wanted to, with Congress bought like rouged whores milling around sailorpreneurs. Smart writers I link to and read, smart people I know and spend time with, they largely don't buy that it can change. They say it largely doesn't matter who winds up running this Financial Services Cruise Ship next. Well, now, Merrill Lynch and Citibank selling their bodies to Singapore and the Arab Emirates, that's change without much choice, a deflowering certainly not on kind terms. Not the kind of change we want. Change isn't always a choice. Sometimes it's an empyrean dictate, a verdict from the seraphim regarding the fate of the nephilim.

If there isn't a difference between candidates and possible futures, why is the whole world watching, expectantly waiting on whom we will choose? If there is not such a thing as good government, then why must we have one? This post is long enough already, so I'll follow with a Part Two. Right now, I am thinking about taking off on a beautiful day from Schipol airport, the jet climbing and curving gently over the Zuider Zee. I'm looking down at fields of glinting diamonds on the shore, forty square miles of solar panels like windmills squashed flat, black, and shiny, catching the sky and all the colors of its prism, and sending it into my eyes.

The Beginning Of The World As We Know It (Part One)

Having gotten all the nice spiritual Rumi-stuff out of my system in the previous post, on to practical things; to the world's problems, and their solving. My ersatz leaders keep telling me how anything wrong is all my fault, so I thought, why not? Let's have a go and make it good. Our problems are only as big as the wind and the waves, as the sun and the rain.

At first, my working title was 'Why Democrats Are A Bunch Of Drooling Catamites.' You see, my case of Two-Party Immune Deficiency Syndrome (TPIDS) is late-stage, and the Democrats surely play their part as Complicit Mommy Government to perfection, as a companion and helpmeet to our Abusive Daddy Government. Whom it's our enviable task to either kill, beat sense into, or run away from. So, yes, let's start off with the Party of the Damned, or what I choose to call "the Dims." I changed the title above to something more active, with an eye to an ongoing series; by way of power law and microcosm, Dims are great projectors for our Big Problems. As the old military recruiting jingle goes, "what a great play-ace, it's a great waay...to start!"

Isabelita, the thoughtful cookie at Learning to Sequence, noted in the comments section of Shorter Clinton, Shorter Obama that Hillary:

'seems like a "kinder gentler" form of the GOP, and Obama seems insubstantial. There's not a single Democratic candidate I'd vote for; wonder if we can outsource the leadership of this country to, oh, say, New Zealand?'

Iz sums up my sentiments well. If Hillary gets elected, we will be renting and watching "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" as en-masse comfort food. Paradoxically, though, the inmates of Casa Lord have given money to Obama and were invited to lunch with his wife. We have an Obama sign hanging in our window. Yet, something inside me still wants to crisply slap each side of the guy's face with a pair of wet leather gloves and bellow like George S. Patton, "Be a man, fer chrissakes!! There are brave candidates out there fighting and dying, and you're hiding in the make-up room like a coward!" Sigh.

But what else is left? I've considered supporting Dennis Kucinich, and even Ron Paul, because at least they take an unequivocal stand against The War. The obvious political lesson they, or any well-choreographed goose-steppers provide, is this: Take a stand, you existentially challenged boobs, take a stand! (Note: See goose-steppers.) So at least Kucinich and Paul "get" the basic prerequisite. Fortunately or not, however, neither can get "elected."

It all starts with The War. In the beginning was The War. The War is run by the War Machine, which now makes up most of the country's remaining manufacturing base...you know, just like it did for The Soviet Freaking Union back in 1984. That being the case, if the Democrats truly didn't want us to invade/occupy/eternally exploit Iraq, would we still be there, or ever have gone? Would Cheney still be President? Would Hillary Clinton have been the one who first used the phrase after 9/11, "You're either with us or against us? (Yep, she was first, and beat Dumya to it.)

The truth is, the Dims support The War Machine, and that's why they support The War. They're bending over, busy slurping at the Money River, looking up to carp threats occasionally and then backing down to slurp again at the life blood of this nation, this precious gift of governmental innovation, as it runs in rivulets and rills down into the scuppers of FACISM. The same ugly thing this country pulled out all the stops to defeat 60-odd years ago, bombing every major city full of evil German and Japanese people to smithereens, not to mention the Italians and French who got in the way. People keep wondering and marveling how craven, how caved-in and sold-out Congress can be, but it's really simple. It's as simple as buying and selling hogs. Fascists love hogs. [Sotto voce: And fascism's better, because run! Cower! Twitter like fluffy yellow chicks, and be afraid! (Looking left and right for spies.) The only alternative is so-cial-ism. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!]

To paraphrase the idiot son of an asshole, "Being an Empire is hard work." Yes...yes, Fearless Leader, you masturbatory imbecile, it is hard work. So here it is, the answer, the solution to our problems: smarter work. The only way to save what's left of imperial standing melting away like run-off from a denuded hill, and our domestic freedoms at the same time, two-birds-one-stone style, is to wise up. And make a big, hard, brave yet obvious choice. A choice which is ultimately necessary anyway. Amongst smaller hard choices, the Democrats have to not only renounce The War, they must renounce The War Machine. Nothing much other than a tack into the wind, merely risking political and physical assassination domestically and a heapin' helpin' of Humble Pie internationally. So how, other than fitting our alleged representatives with electro-shock collars and pumping them full of 100 mikes of LSD, do we work them up to the gargantuan tasks common to vertebrates?

Somehow I can't picture my Senators (Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell) driving that bus in Selma. Actually, I'm picturing it right now as they're dragged off the bus by police and savagely beaten with batons. Ha-ha! To be realistic, look, we're dealing with a government that told us with a straight frigging face to go out and buy duct tape in case of a nerve gas attack, and that kerosene can melt steel. (Mental Note: I suppose duct tape could be used as a way to cover your mouth and nostrils so as to induce a less painful death. Kerosene and jet fuel don't melt steel, not in my back yard.) A direct frontal assault on The War Machine won't work. It would simply send Terminators after us like Skynet and shoot us with plasmatic death-rays.

But what we can do is start small. An insurgency they don't see coming, an infiltration, a Rat Attack. It's already got plenty of foot soldiers, even investors. We can do things that my darling Senators, the Bobbsey Twins, will enthusiastically support. They just won't know the full implications, and when they finally glom, it'll be ok by them. Because they care about money. Every Constitution, every Estate, is based on money, on a currency. A currency is a metaphorical basis for storing power and wealth. We need to switch the fundamental basis of our power and wealth. The US has switched its currency basis at least four times in its history, and it will do so again.

Power and wealth. And beer! Mmmm. The focus of our big ol' technologized Teddy Bear, our throwing-candy-to-the-children-while-it-kills-them War Machine, is oil. Our currency isn't The Dollar. Our currency is oil. This is a VERY BIG problem. First, its worldwide production has begun to go into decline--9.5 million Saudi barrels a day wen down to 8.5 over the past year, but they "could pump more if we wanted to!," sure, and Iran, well, they're desperate for nuclear power because the mullahs know how wildly overstated their reserves are, and the rate at which their wells are declining--plus, we're losing control of the damned stuff anyway. That's why we're building military bases on top of wherever we can find new, relatively helpless sources of it. Even if that quixotic effort starts getting a lot cheaper or miraculously succeeds, well...we're still, for all practical purposes...Going To Run Out of Oil.

We need to switch our currency. This implies a future Manhattan Project, a huge national investment and roll of the dice, on sustainable energy. And that will, at some point, happen. But the Rat Attack doesn't have to wait for a Manhattan Project. It can germinate and advance incremental change. Its weapons are not just wind farms and solar panels, not bipolar Priuses and biodiesel Passats, but all manner of gardening, all sorts of ruminants (including ponies), tree-planting, urban bee-keeping, de-centralized heating, and simply giving a damn. Raising chickens on your patio, damn the Bird Flu, full speed ahead. This is how the Amish and most of the world survive on two bucks a day. We should probably do A-OK on forty thou per capita. And if a schlumpf like me can do organic gardening,anyone can.

This might be a good place to note that Exxon's corporate profits were bigger than the Gross Domestic Product of all but about a dozen countries last year. Exxon and other distended, artificial, inhuman structures like it are The Enemy. These are the enemies who are stealing your money. By the way, they also want to kill you, slowly, so they can wring every last bit of useful output and consumption out of your body. They've calculated the calories, and want to turn the world into one big "Arbeit Macht Frei" concentration camp, their kapos as commandants, and they're succeeding. Every drop of oil you don't use and every ray of sunshine you do sends these monstrous mutants, and many of their large shareholders, into fits of depression and murderous rage. Because they know, deep down in their black insatiable selves, that no one owns the wind, the sun, or the rain. Although they've hired lobbyists to address that disadvantage.

We need to start an anti-oil insurgency, and it's going to be surprisingly easy. I belly laugh at the prospect because, you see, we're not going to have much choice. Soon enough, driving 40 miles to save five bucks on t-shirts made by slave labor fed by slop troughs in some distant Work Zone is going to look exactly like what it is: stupid. We're going to live in a world where you can walk, float, or teleport to bars and stores. I'm not speaking from high moral terrain here. It's simply going to be cheaper than going through violent machinations and invasions to coax flammable goo from under far-off ground.

Recent Iran Attack Hints

Blowing stuff up isn't all glory and honor. It takes a lot of logistics work to make things happen, and logistics are very expensive to fake. If you go to all the trouble of putting materiel in spot X, it's twice the trouble to move it back to spot Y. Logistics leave a trail. The Persian Gulf is getting crowded with aircraft carriers again, and Centcom is stockpiling jet fuel at its long-range bomber base in the Indian Ocean. Remember US Admiral William Fallon's statement that an attack on Iran won't happen on his watch? Sure hope he meant it. Other signs to look for will be the whereabouts of tanker planes necessary to rendezvous with the big bombers for mid-air refueling, with Diego Garcia a likely candidate.

(via Larisa Alexandrovna's blog and Naj's Stop the Second Holocaust)

"LONDON, Nov 23 (Reuters) - The U.S. military has stepped up chartering of tankers and requests for extra fuel in the U.S. Central Command area, which includes the Gulf, shipping and oil industry sources say. A Gulf oil industry source said the charters suggested there would be high naval activity, possibly including a demonstration to Iran that the U.S. Navy will protect the Strait of Hormuz oil shipping route during tensions over Tehran's nuclear programme.

The U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command (MSC) has tendered for four tankers in November to move at least one million barrels of jet and ship fuel between Gulf ports, from Asia to the Gulf and to the Diego Garcia base, tenders seen by Reuters show. It usually tenders for one or two tankers a month to supply Gulf operations, which include missions in Iraq."

A separate requirement is for a tanker to move 147,000 barrels of ship fuel from Singapore to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, close to the Gulf and Arabian Sea.

As Larissa notes:

'that is indeed unusual according to a military friend of mine, who in an email this morning wrote: "It has gotten my attention. I don't have an explanation."'

Diego Garcia:

The US is secretly upgrading special stealth bomber hangars on the British island protectorate of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to military sources. The improvement of the B1 Spirit jet infrastructure coincides with an “urgent operational need” request for £44m to fit racks to the long-range aircraft. That would allow them to carry experimental 15-ton Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs designed to smash underground bunkers buried as much as 200ft beneath the surface through reinforced concrete.

L'Exploration du Vent

(Very French accent:) Zere eez ho-ope fohrr us-all.

Dynamite commercial.

'Baghdad Burning' Blogger To Flee Quadrillage

A young Iraqi blogger known as "Riverbend," whose reports on the war and occupation were so eloquent and thoughtful they were collected and made into a book, is leaving. Her family knew it was time to go when Coalition Forces started erecting a wall around A'adhamiya and the remaining Sunni sections of Baghdad. Here's an excerpt from her post, which is worth reading in full. If you do read it, it's difficult to avoid confronting the full reality of what the United States, my country, is doing in Iraq:

The wall, of course, will protect no one. I sometimes wonder if this is how the concentration camps began in Europe. The Nazi government probably said, "Oh look- we're just going to protect the Jews with this little wall here- it will be difficult for people to get into their special area to hurt them!" And yet, it will also be difficult to get out.

The Wall is the latest effort to further break Iraqi society apart. Promoting and supporting civil war isn't enough, apparently- Iraqis have generally proven to be more tenacious and tolerant than their mullahs, ayatollahs, and Vichy leaders. It's time for America to physically divide and conquer- like Berlin before the wall came down or Palestine today. This way, they can continue chasing Sunnis out of "Shia areas" and Shia out of "Sunni areas".

I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq). They refuse to believe that their religiously inclined, sectarian political parties fueled this whole Sunni/Shia conflict. They refuse to acknowledge that this situation is a direct result of the war and occupation. They go on and on about Iraq's history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. I hate that a handful of expats who haven't been to the country in decades pretend to know more about it than people actually living there.

I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn't know what our neighbors were- we didn't care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.

On a personal note, we've finally decided to leave. I guess I've known we would be leaving for a while now. We discussed it as a family dozens of times. At first, someone would suggest it tentatively because, it was just a preposterous idea- leaving ones home and extended family- leaving ones country- and to what? To where?

Since last summer, we had been discussing it more and more. It was only a matter of time before what began as a suggestion- a last case scenario- soon took on solidity and developed into a plan. For the last couple of months, it has only been a matter of logistics. Plane or car? Jordan or Syria? Will we all leave together as a family? Or will it be only my brother and I at first?

She goes on to note that Jordan and Syria have begun to turn refugees away, and how difficult it is to decide what to leave, and what to save. Riverbend's blog tagline is, "...I'll meet you 'round the bend, my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend." I hope she makes it out, that she survives to see the gang of criminals who did this and worse to her and so many others be "brought to justice," to see their own parlance and metaphors turned upon them, so they twist slumped and slow on creaking ropes in the wind.

They are, by the small and large definitions of the term, truly War Criminals. Mass murderers. Most people say that justice is never going to happen, or isn't a realistic hope. Maybe they're right. Yet even the all-powerful Stalin, near the end, having steeped so deeply in evil, was not immune to a justice born of his own paranoia. He slept on a sofa, never left the security of one room, feared to eat food, and nightmares devoured more and more of his sleep. Admittedly, maybe Stalin had more of a conscience than the collective Bush Administration, but the "Clash of Civilizations" they have conflated is far from over. First I wish you safe arrivals, Riverbend. Then justice.

No Oil Favoritism To US? Why Not, Goddammit?

If what Iraq's VP says is true, it is an outrage. And it made me spill the battery acid I was about to drink. I mean, can't the US even plunder a country it has conquered and holds in its powerful grasp?? What's all this crap about "unitary executive this" and "dictatorial powers that" if it's not about beating up third world countries and taking stuff they're too poor to appreciate? And if Iraq wasn't invaded to steal its oil, so I can keep my car running, my Amazon deliveries coming, and doing my job as a corporate by consuming like an obsessive-compulsive nymphomaniac strung out on benzedrine, then...what good was it?

DAVOS, Switzerland -(Dow Jones)- Iraq's Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi Saturday rejected rumors that its thorny and long-delayed oil law guaranteed the U.S. access to a share of its oil, adding implementation of the law will happen after it had spent "some weeks" being discussed among Iraq's lawmakers.

"It's absolutely not true" that the U.S. or any other named country had preferential treatment under the proposed law, Abdul-Mahdi said, which is seen as essential to develop Iraq's battle-torn oil industry.

Oh. I see. It's not a law yet. It's "proposed." Ok, heart rate going down. Breathing. Breathing. But geez, now that I think about it, "proposed" could mean trouble.

The official declined to comment on areas where disagreements continue in the law.

The federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government have clashed over the drafting of the law. The Kurds want control of oil resources in their territories and a big share of oil revenue.

Big foreign energy firms are eager to know what form contracts will take in the hydrocarbons law and how much, for example, of a given oil block or field will be owned by the Iraqi government and what level of cost recovery they can expect from the government for investing billions of dollars.

I know, I know. This sounds like a job for Batman. And Robin. And especially Cat-Woman. But there's really no problem with uppity Iraqis passing this law to screw us out of our oil. The Iraqi Parliament hasn't been able to gather enough representatives to vote on a damned thing in over three months. They're all waiting it out in Dubai, Jordan, and London. Let's hear what one of the refugees from parliament, neocon chum Adnan Al-Pachachi, has to say:

“People are totally disenchanted,” Mr. Pachachi said in a telephone interview from Abu Dhabi. “There has been no improvement in the security situation. The government seems to be incapable of doing anything despite all the promises.”

Though the Constitution grants Iraq’s only elected body wide powers to pass laws and investigate, sectarian divisions and the need for a two-thirds majority in some cases have often led to deadlock. Sunni and Shiite power brokers have blocked efforts to scrutinize violence connected to their own sects.

“Parliament is the heart of the political process,” Mr. Mashhadani said in an interview at his office, offering more hope than reality. “It is the center of everything. If the heart is not working, it all fails.”

That's right, Radar. If the heart is not working, it all fails. Just ask Dick Cheney. I don't think we have to worry about Iraqis giving our oil away for a long time. At least not legally.

(Hat-tip to Jesus del Norte over at Church and Empire for catching this story from the excellent Healing Iraq blog. And to the New Yawk Times for doing some reporting once in a while.)

Let's Bomb Iran, Sung To The Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann"

You absolutely must watch this agit-pop mash-up. It's wizzard-prang.

Re-post From Chris Floyd's "Empire Burlesque"

{This is encouraging; it indicates spines are re-growing at the margins of Congress, they've taken up whips and chairs and are starting to back the bureau-whores into a corner. I wanted to do a post on this, but Chris already did a better job than I could've, and so here you go.}

Rising From Their Knees: New Bill Strikes Blow at Oil Barons

Friday, 19 January 2007

House Votes to Rescind Oil Drillers’ Tax Breaks (NYT) Excerpts: House Democrats easily passed legislation on Thursday that would rescind $14 billion in tax breaks and subsidies for oil drillers and reserve the money to develop alternative energy projects and conservation technologies. The measure passed 264 to 163, with many Republicans joining a bloc of Democrats...The bill will rescind $7.6 billion in tax breaks for oil drillers that Congress passed in 2004 and 2005 and will add $6.3 billion in royalties from companies that pump oil and gas in publicly owned waters of the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska... “Big Oil is hitting the taxpayer not once, not twice, but three times,” Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said. “They are hitting them at the pump. They are hitting them at the Treasury through the tax code. And they are hitting them with royalty holidays.” This is good news, although it faces a certain Bush veto -- if, that is, it gets by the Senate in any strong form, as it's easier for Big Oil to pick off a few "moderates" in the smaller body than a passel of pols in the House. Still, the real importance of such bills lies in the fact that they force Republicans and "moderate" Democrats to take a public stand for their corporate paymasters. It smokes them out and puts them on record as voting for big tax breaks for oil companies who are now making not just record profits but world-historical rakeoffs unseen since the loot of the Caesars. We fight wars for these people -- we die by the thousands and we kill by the hundreds of thousands; they can at least pay a little more chump change (for that's all the amounts involved are to the oil barons) for the blood and treasure we've given them. With the thin Democratic majorities in both houses -- majorities that are riddled with spineless timeservers, bagmen and Bush-coddlers -- it is not likely that any strong legislation proposed by Democrats to rectify some of the monstrous imbalances and perversities of the Bush years will pass. Very few, if any, such bills will command enough support to be veto-proof. But again, the Democrats should be relentless in sending this kind of legislation (and even stronger bills) to the White House, over and over and over. Force Bush to veto every week some bill that would benefit the vast majority of Americans. Force him to veto a bill that would strip away some of the overwhelming bias toward the richest and most powerful that now distorts and corrupts the Republic. Make sure that all those -- Republican or Democrat -- who stand with Bush in perpetuating this immoral bias are put on the record as doing so. And then hang this record around their necks at election time. Enough already of this bullshit bowing and scraping to the rich. Let's take the country back.