Published on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 by The New York Times
New York Times Editorial
he question at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court cases this year is simple: What constitutional rights should corporations have? To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their rights should be quite limited - far less than those of people.
This Supreme Court, the John Roberts court, seems to be having trouble with that. It has been on a campaign to increase corporations' legal rights - based on the conviction of some conservative justices that businesses are, at least legally, not much different than people.
Now the court is considering what should be a fairly narrow campaign finance case, involving whether Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, had the right to air a slashing movie about Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic primary season. There is a real danger that the case will expand corporations' rights in ways that would undermine the election system.
The legal doctrine underlying this debate is known as "corporate personhood."
The courts have long treated corporations as persons in limited ways for some legal purposes. They may own property and have limited rights to free speech. They can sue and be sued. They have the right to enter into contracts and advertise their products. But corporations cannot and should not be allowed to vote, run for office or bear arms. Since 1907, Congress has banned them from contributing to federal political campaigns - a ban the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld.
In an exchange this month with Chief Justice Roberts, the solicitor general, Elena Kagan, argued against expanding that narrowly defined personhood. "Few of us are only our economic interests," she said. "We have beliefs. We have convictions." Corporations, "engage the political process in an entirely different way, and this is what makes them so much more damaging," she said.
Chief Justice Roberts disagreed: "A large corporation, just like an individual, has many diverse interests." Justice Antonin Scalia said most corporations are "indistinguishable from the individual who owns them."
The Constitution mentions the rights of the people frequently but does not cite corporations. Indeed, many of the founders were skeptical of corporate influence.
John Marshall, the nation's greatest chief justice, saw a corporation as "an artificial being, invisible, intangible," he wrote in 1819. "Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence."
That does not mean that corporations should have no rights. It is in society's interest that they are allowed to speak about their products and policies and that they are able to go to court when another company steals their patents. It makes sense that they can be sued, as a person would be, when they pollute or violate labor laws.
The law also gives corporations special legal status: limited liability, special rules for the accumulation of assets and the ability to live forever. These rules put corporations in a privileged position in producing profits and aggregating wealth. Their influence would be overwhelming with the full array of rights that people have.
One of the main areas where corporations' rights have long been limited is politics. Polls suggest that Americans are worried about the influence that corporations already have with elected officials. The drive to give corporations more rights is coming from the court's conservative bloc - a curious position given their often-proclaimed devotion to the text of the Constitution.
The founders of this nation knew just what they were doing when they drew a line between legally created economic entities and living, breathing human beings. The court should stick to that line.
© 2009 The New York Times
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/22-5
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Weapons of Mass Democracy
On the outskirts of a desert town in the Moroccan-occupied territory
of Western Sahara, about a dozen young activists are gathered. They are
involved in their country's long struggle for freedom. A group of
foreigners-veterans of protracted resistance movements-is conducting a
training session in the optimal use of a "weapons system" that is
increasingly deployed in struggles for freedom around the world. The
workshop leaders pass out Arabic translations of writings on the theory
and dynamics of revolutionary struggle and lead the participants in a
series of exercises designed to enhance their strategic and tactical
thinking.
These trainers are not veterans of guerrilla warfare, however, but
of unarmed insurrections against repressive regimes. The materials they
hand out are not the words of Che Guevara, but of Gene Sharp, the
former Harvard scholar who has pioneered the study of strategic
nonviolent action. And the weapons they advocate employing are not guns
and bombs, but strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, tax refusal,
alternative media, and refusal to obey official orders.
Serbs, South Africans, Filipinos, Georgians, and other veterans of
successful nonviolent struggles are sharing their knowledge and
experience with those still fighting dictators and occupation armies.
The young Western Saharans know how an armed struggle by an older
generation of their countrymen failed to dislodge the Moroccans, who
first invaded their country back in 1975. They have seen how Morocco's
allies on the U.N. Security Council-led by France and the United
States-blocked enforcement of U.N. resolutions supporting their right
to self-determination. With the failure of both armed struggle and
diplomacy to bring them freedom, they have decided to instead employ a
force more powerful.
The Rise of Nonviolence
The long-standing assumption that dictatorial regimes can only be
overthrown through armed struggle or foreign military intervention is
coming under increasing challenge. Though nonviolent action has a long and impressive history [1]
going back centuries, events in recent decades have demonstrated more
than ever that nonviolent action is not just a form of principled
witness utilized by religious pacifists. It is the most powerful
political tool available to challenge oppression.
It was not the leftist guerrillas of the New People's Army who
brought down the U.S.-backed Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. It
was nuns praying the rosary in front of the regime's tanks, and the
millions of others who brought greater Manila to a standstill.
It was not the 11 weeks of bombing that brought down Serbian leader
Slobodan Milosevic, the infamous "butcher of the Balkans." It was a
nonviolent resistance movement led by young students, whose generation
had been sacrificed in a series of bloody military campaigns against
neighboring Yugoslav republics, and who were able to mobilize a large
cross-section of the population to rise up against a stolen election.
It was not the armed wing of the African National Congress that
brought majority rule to South Africa. It was workers, students, and
township dwellers who-through the use of strikes, boycotts, the
creation of alternative institutions, and other acts of defiance-made
it impossible for the apartheid system to continue.
It was not NATO that brought down the communist regimes of Eastern
Europe or freed the Baltic republics from Soviet control. It was Polish
dockworkers, East German church people, Estonian folk singers [2], Czech intellectuals, and millions of ordinary citizens.
Similarly, such tyrants as Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti, Moussa
Traoré in Mali, King Gyanendra in Nepal, General Suharto in Indonesia,
and, most recently, Maumoon Gayoom in the Maldives were forced to cede
power when it became clear that they were powerless in the face of
massive nonviolent resistance and noncooperation.
The power of nonviolent action has been acknowledged even by such groups as Freedom House [3],
a Washington-based organization with close ties to the foreign policy
establishment. Its 2005 study observed that, of the nearly 70 countries
that have made the transition from dictatorship to varying degrees of
democracy in the past 30 years, only a small minority did so through
armed struggle from below or reform instigated from above. Hardly any
new democracies resulted from foreign invasion. In nearly
three-quarters of the transitions, change was rooted in democratic
civil-society organizations that employed nonviolent methods. In
addition, the study noted that countries where nonviolent civil
resistance movements played a major role tend to have freer and more
stable democratic systems.
A different study, published last year in the journal International Security [4],
used an expanded database and analyzed 323 major insurrections in
support of self-determination and democratic rule since 1900. It found
that violent resistance was successful only 26 percent of the time,
whereas nonviolent campaigns had a 53 percent success rate.
From the poorest nations of Africa to the relatively affluent
countries of Eastern Europe; from communist regimes to right-wing
military dictatorships; from across the cultural, geographic and
ideological spectrum, democratic and progressive forces have recognized
the power of nonviolent action to free them from oppression. This has
not come, in most cases, from a moral or spiritual commitment to
nonviolence, but simply because it works.
Why Nonviolent Action Works
Armed resistance, even for a just cause, can terrify people not yet
committed to the struggle, making it easier for a government to justify
violent repression and use of military force in the name of protecting
the population. Even rioting and vandalism can turn public opinion
against a movement, which is why some governments have employed agents
provocateurs to encourage such violence. The use of force against
unarmed resistance movements, on the other hand, usually creates
greater sympathy for the government's opponents. As with the martial
art of aikido, nonviolent opposition movements can engage the force of
the state's repression and use it to effectively disarm the force
directed against them.
In addition, unarmed campaigns involve a range of participants far
beyond the young able-bodied men normally found in the ranks of armed
guerrillas. As the movement grows in strength, it can include a large
cross-section of the population. Though most repressive governments are
well-prepared to deal with a violent insurgency, they tend to be less
prepared to counter massive non-cooperation by old, middle-aged, and
young. When millions of people defy official orders by engaging in
illegal demonstrations, going out on strike, violating curfews,
refusing to pay taxes, and otherwise refusing to recognize the
legitimacy of the state, the state no longer has power. During the
"people power" uprising against the Marcos dictatorship in the
Philippines, for example, Marcos lost power not through the defeat of
his troops and the storming of the Malacañang Palace but when-due to
massive defiance of his orders-the palace became the only part of the
country he still effectively controlled.
Furthermore, pro-government elements tend to be more willing to
compromise with nonviolent insurgents, who are less likely to
physically harm their opponents when they take power. When massive
demonstrations challenged the military junta in Chile in the late
1980s, military leaders convinced the dictator Augusto Pinochet to
agree to the nonviolent protesters' demands for a referendum on his
continued rule and to accept the results when the vote went against him.
Unarmed movements also increase the likelihood of defections and
non-cooperation by police and military personnel, who will generally
fight in self-defense against armed guerrillas but are hesitant to
shoot into unarmed crowds. Such defiance was key to the downfall of
dictatorships in East Germany, Mali, Serbia, the Philippines, Ukraine,
and elsewhere. The moral power of nonviolence is crucial to the ability
of an opposition movement to reframe the perceptions of the public,
political elites, and the military.
A Democratizing Force
In many cases, armed revolutionaries-trained in martial values, the
power of the gun, and a leadership model based upon a secret, elite
vanguard-have themselves become authoritarian rulers once in power. In
addition, because civil war often leads to serious economic,
environmental, and social problems, the new leadership is tempted to
embrace emergency powers they are later reluctant to surrender. Algeria
and Guinea-Bissau experienced military coups soon after their
successful armed independence struggles, while victorious communist
guerrillas in a number of countries simply established new
dictatorships.
By contrast, successful nonviolent movements build broad coalitions
based on compromise and consensus. The new order that emerges from that
foundation tends to be pluralistic and democratic.
Liberal democracy carries no guarantee of social justice, but many
of those involved in pro-democracy struggles have later played a key
role in leading the effort to establish more equitable social and
economic orders. For example, the largely nonviolent indigenous peasant
and worker movements that ended a series of military dictatorships in
Bolivia in the 1980s formed the basis of the movement that brought Evo Morales [5] and his allies to power, resulting in a series of exciting reforms benefiting the country's poor, indigenous majority.
Another reason nonviolent movements tend to create sustainable
democracy is that, in the course of the movement, alternative
institutions are created that empower ordinary people. For example,
autonomous workers' councils eroded the authority of party apparatchiks
in Polish industry even as the Communist Party still nominally ruled
the country. In South Africa, popularly elected local governments and
people's courts in the black townships completely usurped the authority
of administrators and judges appointed by the apartheid regime long
before majority rule came to the country as a whole.
Recent successes of nonviolent tactics have raised concerns about
their use by those with undemocratic aims. However, it is virtually
impossible for an undemocratic result to emerge from a movement based
upon broad popular support. Local elites, often with the support of
foreign powers, have historically promoted regime change through
military invasions, coup d'états, and other kinds of violent seizures
of power that install an undemocratic minority. Nonviolent "people
power" movements, by contrast, make peaceful regime change possible by
empowering pro-democratic majorities.
Indeed, every successful nonviolent insurrection has been a
homegrown movement rooted in the realization by the masses that their
rulers were illegitimate and that the political system would not
redress injustice. By contrast, a nonviolent insurrection is unlikely
to succeed when the movement's leadership and agenda do not have the
backing of the majority of the population. This is why the 2002-2003
"strike" by some privileged sectors of Venezuela's oil industry failed
to bring down the democratically elected government of Hugo Chavez,
while the widely supported strikes in the Iranian oil fields against
the Shah in 1978-1979 were key in bringing down his autocratic regime.
Homegrown Movements
Unlike most successful unarmed insurrections, Iran slid back under
autocratic rule after the overthrow of the Shah. Now, hard-line clerics
and their allies have themselves been challenged by a nonviolent
pro-democracy movement. Like most governments facing popular
challenges, rather than acknowledging their own failures, the Iranian
regime has sought to blame outsiders for fomenting the resistance.
Given the sordid history of U.S. interventionism in that
country-including the overthrow of Iran's last democratic government in
1953 in a CIA-backed military coup-some are taking those claims
seriously. However, Iranians have engaged in nonviolent action for
generations, not just in opposition to the Shah, but going back to the
1890-1892 boycotts against concessions to the British and the 1905-1908
Constitutional Revolution. There is little Americans can teach Iranians
about such civil resistance.
Citing funding from Western governments and foundations, similar
charges of powerful Western interests being responsible for nonviolent
insurrections have also been made in regard to recent successful
pro-democracy movements in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine.
However, while outside funding can be useful in enabling opposition
groups to buy computers, print literature, and promote their work, it
cannot cause a nonviolent liberal democratic revolution to take place
any more than Soviet financial and material support for leftist
movements in previous decades could cause an armed socialist revolution
to take place.
Successful revolutions, whatever their ideological orientation, are
the result of certain social conditions. Indeed, no amount of money
could force hundreds of thousands of people to leave their jobs, homes,
schools, and families to face down heavily armed police and tanks and
put their bodies on the line. They must be motivated by a desire for
change so strong they are willing to make the sacrifices and take the
personal risks to bring it about.
In any case, there is no standardized formula for success that a
foreign government could put together, since the history, culture, and
political alignments of each country are unique. No foreign government
can recruit or mobilize the large numbers of ordinary civilians
necessary to build a movement capable of effectively challenging the
established political leadership, much less of toppling a government.
Even workshops like the one for the Western Saharan activists,
usually funded through nonprofit, nongovernmental foundations,
generally focus on providing generic information on the theory,
dynamics, and history of nonviolent action. There is broad consensus
among workshop leaders that only those involved in the struggles
themselves are in a position to make tactical and strategic decisions,
so they tend not to give specific advice. However, such
capacity-building efforts-like comparable NGO projects for sustainable
development, human rights, equality for women and minorities, economic
justice, and the environment-can be an effective means of fostering
international solidarity.
Back in Western Sahara, anti-occupation activists, building on their
own experiences against the Moroccan occupation and on what they
learned from the workshop, press on in the struggle for their country's
freedom. In the face of severe repression from U.S.-backed Moroccan
forces, the movement continues with demonstrations, leafleting,
graffiti writing, flag waving, boycotts, and other actions. One
prominent leader of the movement, Aminatou Haidar, won the Robert F.
Kennedy Human Rights Award last November, and she has been twice
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Those in the Western Sahara resistance are among the growing numbers
of people around the world struggling against repression who have
recognized that armed resistance is more likely to magnify their
suffering than relieve it.
From Western Sahara to West Papua to the West Bank, people are
engaged in nonviolent resistance against foreign occupation. Similarly,
from Egypt to Iran to Burma, people are fighting nonviolently for
freedom from dictatorial rule.
Recent history has shown that power ultimately resides in the
people, not in the state; that nonviolent strategies can be more
powerful than guns; and that nonviolent action is a form of conflict
that can build, rather than destroy.
Stephen Zunes wrote this article for Learn as You Go [6],
the Fall 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Stephen is a professor of
Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco
and chairs the academic advisory committee of the International Center
on Nonviolent Conflict.
YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps [7].
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License [8]
[8]
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License [8]
[8]Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/22-0
The Era of Xtreme Energy
Life After the Age of Oil
By Michael T. Klare
By Michael T. Klare
The debate rages over whether we have already reached the point of peak world oil output or will not do so until at least the next decade. There can, however, be little doubt of one thing: we are moving from an era in which oil was the world's principal energy source to one in which petroleum alternatives -- especially renewable supplies derived from the sun, wind, and waves -- will provide an ever larger share of our total supply. But buckle your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride under Xtreme conditions.
It would, of course, be ideal if the shift from dwindling oil to its climate-friendly successors were to happen smoothly via a mammoth, well-coordinated, interlaced system of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and other renewable energy installations. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to occur. Instead, we will surely first pass through an era characterized by excessive reliance on oil's final, least attractive reserves along with coal, heavily polluting "unconventional" hydrocarbons like Canadian oil sands, and other unappealing fuel choices.
There can be no question that Barack Obama and many members of Congress would like to accelerate a shift from oil dependency to non-polluting alternatives. As the president said in January, "We will commit ourselves to steady, focused, pragmatic pursuit of an America that is free from our [oil] dependence and empowered by a new energy economy that puts millions of our citizens to work." Indeed, the $787 billion economic stimulus package he signed in February provided $11 billion to modernize the nation's electrical grid, $14 billion in tax incentives to businesses to invest in renewable energy, $6 billion to states for energy efficiency initiatives, and billions more directed to research on renewable sources of energy. More of the same can be expected if a sweeping climate bill is passed by Congress. The version of the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, for example, mandates that 20% of U.S. electrical production be supplied by renewable energy by 2020.
But here's the bad news: even if all these initiatives were to pass, and more like them many times over, it would still take decades for this country to substantially reduce its dependence on oil and other non-renewable, polluting fuels. So great is our demand for energy, and so well-entrenched the existing systems for delivering the fuels we consume, that (barring a staggering surprise) we will remain for years to come in a no-man's-land between the Petroleum Age and an age that will see the great flowering of renewable energy. Think of this interim period as -- to give it a label -- the Era of Xtreme Energy, and in just about every sense imaginable from pricing to climate change, it is bound to be an ugly time.
An Oil Field as Deep as Mt. Everest Is High
Don't be fooled by the fact that this grim new era will surely witness the arrival of many more wind turbines, solar arrays, and hybrid vehicles. Most new buildings will perhaps come equipped with solar panels, and more light-rail systems will be built. Despite all this, however, our civilization is likely to remain remarkably dependent on oil-fueled cars, trucks, ships, and planes for most transportation purposes, as well as on coal for electricity generation. Much of the existing infrastructure for producing and distributing our energy supply will also remain intact, even as many existing sources of oil, coal, and natural gas become exhausted, forcing us to rely on previously untouched, far more undesirable (and often far less accessible) sources of these fuels.
Some indication of the likely fuel mix in this new era can be seen in the most recent projections of the Department of Energy (DoE) on future U.S. energy consumption. According to the department's Annual Energy Outlook for 2009, the United States will consume an estimated 114 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) of energy in 2030, of which 37% will be supplied by oil and other petroleum liquids, 23% by coal, 22% by natural gas, 8% by nuclear power, 3% by hydropower, and only 7% by wind, solar, biomass, and other renewable sources.
Clearly, this does not yet suggest a dramatic shift away from oil and other fossil fuels. On the basis of current trends, the DoE also predicts that even two decades from now, in 2030, oil, natural gas, and coal will still make up 82% of America's primary energy supply, only two percentage points less than in 2009. (It is of course conceivable that a dramatic shift in national and international priorities will lead to a greater increase in renewable energy in the next two decades, but at this point that remains a dim hope rather than a sure thing.)
While fossil fuels will remain dominant in 2030, the nature of these fuels, and the ways in which we acquire them, will undergo profound change. Today, most of our oil and natural gas come from "conventional" sources of supply: large underground reservoirs found mainly in relatively accessible sites on land or in shallow coastal areas. These are the reserves that can be easily exploited using familiar technology, most notably modern versions of the towering oil rigs made famous most recently in the 2007 film There Will Be Blood.
Ever more of these fields will, however, be depleted as global consumption soars, forcing the energy industry to increasingly rely on deep offshore oil and gas, Canadian oil sands, oil and gas from a climate-altered but still hard to reach and exploit Arctic, and gas extracted from shale rock using costly, environmentally threatening techniques. In 2030, says the DoE, such unconventional liquids will provide 13% of world oil supply (up from a mere 4% in 2007). A similar pattern holds for natural gas, especially in the United States where the share of energy supplied by unconventional but nonrenewable sources is expected to rise from 47% to 56% in the same two decades.
Just how important these supplies have become is evident to anyone who follows the oil industry's trade journals or simply regularly checks out the business pages of the Wall Street Journal. Absent from them have been announcements of major discoveries of giant new oil and gas reserves in any parts of the world accessible to familiar drilling techniques and connected to key markets by existing pipelines or trade routes (or located outside active war zones such as Iraq and the Niger Delta region of Nigeria). The announcements are there, but virtually all of them have been of reserves in the Arctic, Siberia, or the very deep waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.
Recently the press has been abuzz with major discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico and far off Brazil's coast that might give the impression of adding time to the Age of Petroleum. On September 2nd, for example, BP (formerly British Petroleum) announced that it had found a giant oil field in the Gulf of Mexico about 250 miles southeast of Houston. Dubbed Tiber, it is expected to produce hundreds of thousands of barrels per day when production begins some years from now, giving a boost to BP's status as a major offshore producer. "This is big," commented Chris Ruppel, a senior energy analyst at Execution LLC, a London investment bank. "It says we're seeing that improved technology is unlocking resources that were before either undiscovered or too costly to exploit because of economics."
As it happens, though, anyone who jumped to the conclusion that this field could quickly or easily add to the nation's oil supply would be woefully mistaken. As a start, it's located at a depth of 35,000 feet -- greater than the height of Mount Everest, as a reporter from the New York Times noted -- and well below the Gulf's floor. To get to the oil, BP's engineers will have to drill through miles of rock, salt, and compressed sand using costly and sophisticated equipment. To make matters worse, Tiber is located smack in the middle of the area in the Gulf regularly hit by massive storms in hurricane season, so any drills operating there must be designed to withstand hurricane-strength waves and winds, as well as sit idle for weeks at a time when operating personnel are forced to evacuate.
A similar picture prevails in the case of Brazil's Tupi field, the other giant discovery of recent years. Located about 200 miles east of Rio de Janeiro in the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean, Tupi has regularly been described as the biggest field to be found in 40 years. Thought to contain some five to eight billion barrels of recoverable oil, it will surely push Brazil into the front ranks of major oil producers once the Brazilians have overcome their own series of staggering hurdles: the Tupi field is located below one-and-a-half miles of ocean water and another two-and-a-half miles of rock, sand, and salt and so accessible only to cutting edge, super-sophisticated drilling technologies. It will cost an estimated $70-$120 billion to develop the field and require many years of dedicated effort.
Xtreme Acts of Energy Recovery
Given the potentially soaring costs involved in recovering these last tough-oil reserves, it's no wonder that Canadian oil sands, also called tar sands, are the other big "play" in the oil business these days. Not oil as conventionally understood, the oil sands are a mixture of rock, sand, and bitumen (a very heavy, dense form of petroleum) that must be extracted from the ground using mining, rather than oil-drilling, techniques. They must also be extensively processed before being converted into a usable liquid fuel. Only because the big energy firms have themselves become convinced that we are running out of conventional oil of an easily accessible sort have they been tripping over each other in the race to buy up leases to mine bitumen in the Athabasca region of northern Alberta.
The mining of oil sands and their conversion into useful liquids is a costly and difficult process, and so the urge to do so tells us a great deal about our particular state of energy dependency. Deposits near the surface can be strip-mined, but those deeper underground can only be exploited by pumping in steam to separate the bitumen from the sand and then pumping the bitumen to the surface -- a process that consumes vast amounts of water and energy in the form of natural gas (to heat that water into steam). Much of the water used to produce steam is collected at the site and used over again, but some is returned to the local water supply in northern Alberta, causing environmentalists to worry about the risk of large-scale contamination.
The clearing of enormous tracts of virgin forest to allow strip-mining and the consumption of valuable natural gas to extract the bitumen are other sources of concern. Nevertheless, such is the need of our civilization for petroleum products that Canadian oil sands are expected to generate 4.2 million barrels of fuel per day in 2030 -- three times the amount being produced today -- even as they devastate huge parts of Alberta, consume staggering amounts of natural gas, cause potentially extensive pollution, and sabotage Canada's efforts to curb its greenhouse-gas emissions.
North of Alberta lies another source of Xtreme energy: Arctic oil and gas. Once largely neglected because of the difficulty of simply surviving, no less producing energy, in the region, the Arctic is now the site of a major "oil rush" as global warming makes it easier for energy firms to operate in northern latitudes. Norway's state-owned energy company, StatoilHydro, is now running the world's first natural gas facility above the Arctic Circle, and companies from around the world are making plans to develop oil and gas fields in the Artic territories of Canada, Greenland (administered by Denmark), Russia, and the United States, where offshore drilling in northern Alaskan waters may soon be the order of the day.
It will not, however, be easy to obtain oil and natural gas from the Arctic. Even if global warming raises average temperatures and reduces the extent of the polar ice cap, winter conditions will still make oil production extremely difficult and hazardous. Fierce storms and plunging temperatures will remain common, posing great risk to any humans not hunkered down in secure facilities and making the transport of energy a major undertaking.
Given fears of dwindling oil supplies, none of this has been enough to deter energy-craving companies from plunging into the icy waters. "Despite grueling conditions, interest in oil and gas reserves in the far north is heating up," Brian Baskin reported in the Wall Street Journal. "Virtually every major producer is looking to the Arctic sea floor as the next -- some say last -- great resource play."
What is true of oil generally is also true of natural gas and coal: most easy-to-reach conventional deposits are quickly being depleted. What remains are largely the "unconventional" supplies.
U.S. producers of natural gas, for example, are reporting a significant increase in domestic output, producing a dramatic reduction in prices. According to the DoE, U.S. gas production is projected to increase from about 20 trillion cubic feet in 2009 to 24 trillion in 2030, a real boon for U.S. consumers, who rely to a significant degree on natural gas for home heating and electricity generation. As noted by the Energy Department however, "Unconventional natural gas is the largest contributor to the growth in U.S. natural gas production, as rising prices and improvements in drilling technology provide the economic incentives necessary for exploitation of more costly resources."
Most of the unconventional gas in the United States is currently obtained from tight-sand formations (or sandstone), but a growing percentage is acquired from shale rock through a process known as hydraulic fracturing. In this method, water is forced into the underground shale formations to crack the rock open and release the gas. Huge amounts of water are employed in the process, and environmentalists fear that some of this water, laced with pollutants, will find its ways into the nation's drinking supply. In many areas, moreover, water itself is a scarce resource, and the diversion of crucial supplies to gas extraction may diminish the amounts available for farming, habitat preservation, and human consumption. Nonetheless, production of shale gas is projected to jump from two trillion cubic feet per year in 2009 to four trillion in 2030.
Coal presents a somewhat similar picture. Although many environmentalists object to the burning of coal because it releases far more climate-altering greenhouse gases than other fossil fuels for each BTU produced, the nation's electric-power industry continues to rely on coal because it remains relatively cheap and plentiful. Yet many of the country's most productive sources of anthracite and bituminous coal -- the types with the greatest energy potential -- have been depleted, leaving (as with oil) less productive sources of these types, along with large deposits of less desirable, more heavily polluting sub-bituminous coal, much of it located in Wyoming.
To get at what remains of the more valuable bituminous coal in Appalachia, mining companies increasingly rely on a technique known as mountaintop removal, described by John M. Broder of the New York Times as "blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams." Long opposed by environmentalists and residents of rural Kentucky and West Virginia, whose water supplies are endangered by the dumping of excess rock, dirt, and a variety of contaminants, mountaintop removal received a strong endorsement from the Bush administration, which in December 2008 approved a regulation allowing for a vast expansion of the practice. President Obama has vowed to reverse this regulation, but he favors the use of "clean coal" as part of a transitional energy strategy. It remains to be seen how far he will go in reining in the coal industry.
Xtreme Conflict
So let's be blunt: we are not (yet) entering the much-heralded Age of Renewables. That bright day will undoubtedly arrive eventually, but not until we have moved much closer to the middle of this century and potentially staggering amounts of damage has been done to this planet in a fevered search for older forms of energy.
In the meantime, the Era of Xtreme Energy will be characterized by an ever deepening reliance on the least accessible, least desirable sources of oil, coal, and natural gas. This period will surely involve an intense struggle over the environmental consequences of reliance on such unappealing sources of energy. In this way, Big Oil and Big Coal -- the major energy firms -- may grow even larger, while the relatively moderate fuel and energy prices of the present moment will be on the rise, especially given the high cost of extracting oil, gas, and coal from less accessible and more challenging locations.
One other thing is, unfortunately, guaranteed: the Era of Xtreme Energy will also involve intense geopolitical struggle as major energy consumers and producers like the United States, China, the European Union, Russia, India, and Japan vie with one another for control of the remaining supplies. Russia and Norway, for example, are already sparring over their maritime boundary in the Barents Sea, a promising source of natural gas in the far north, while China and Japan have tussled over a similar boundary dispute in the East China Sea, the site of another large gas field. All of the Arctic nations -- Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States -- have laid claim to large, sometimes overlapping, slices of the Arctic Ocean, generating fresh boundary disputes in these energy-rich areas.
None of these disputes has yet resulted in violent conflict, but warships and planes have been deployed on some occasions and the potential exists for future escalation as tensions rise and the perceived value of these assets grows. And while we're at it, don't forget today's energy hotspots like Nigeria, the Middle East, and the Caspian Basin. In the Xtreme era to come, they are no less likely to generate conflicts of every sort over the ever more precious supplies of more easily accessible energy.
For most of us, life in the Era of Xtreme Energy will not be easy. Energy prices will rise, environmental perils will multiply, ever more carbon dioxide will pour into the atmosphere, and the risk of conflict will grow. We possess just two options for shortening this difficult era and mitigating its impact. They are both perfectly obvious -- which, unfortunately, makes them no easier to bring about: drastically speed up the development of renewable sources of energy and greatly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels by reorganizing our lives and our civilization so that we might consume less of them in everything we do.
That may sound easy enough, but tell that to governments around the world. Tell that to Big Energy. Hope for it, work for it, but in the meantime, keep your seatbelts buckled. This roller-coaster ride is about to begin.
Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Owl Books). A documentary film based on his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation.
Copyright 2009 Michael T. Klare
Bill Moyers: Conservative Radicals and the Politics of Vengeance
By Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal
Posted on September 21, 2009, Printed on September 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142754/
Editor's note: In the following interview, Bill Moyers and powerhouse NYT editor and author of "The Death of Conservatism Sam Tanenhaus discuss the last gasps of the conservative movement. Tanenhaus says that far from signifying a resurgence of conservative ideals, the Tea Party protesters and shock jocks like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh spell the doom of the conservative movement. The interview starts with some scenes from journalist Max Blumenthal's video of last weekend's right-wing protests in Washington. Check out the video, which features exclusive footage of the Tea Party protesters that swarmed the Capitol, at the end of this article.
BILL MOYERS: Conservatives were out in force in Washington last weekend. They had come to express their opposition to big government, to taxes and wasteful spending, and health care reform they fear would lead to a nightmare of bureaucracy. Max Blumenthal, author of REPUBLICAN GOMORRAH waded into their midst to sample opinions.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: So you're saying if the government eliminates Social Security and Medicare then you'll get out of the program?
WOMAN: No, I said if they get out of my life.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Out of your Social Security and-
WOMAN: No, out of everything.
BILL MOYERS: But they had also come to deplore and denounce President Obama- in their minds a tyrant akin to Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein.
MAN: I'm afraid he's going to do what Hitler could never do and that's destroy the United States of America.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: And what's the Obama revolution, what's going to happen?
MAN: Similar to Germany, like what Hitler did. He took over the auto industry, did he not? He took over the banking, did he not? And Hitler had his own personal secret service police, Acorn is an extension of that.
BILL MOYERS: They had found a new hero in Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican whose shout heard 'round the world was now the rallying cry of the weekend.
CROWD: You lie! You lie!
BILL MOYERS: Glenn Beck, their favorite pundit, had promoted this march and was reveling in its success.
GLENN BECK: This is a collection of Americans who but want both parties to stop with the corruption, stop with the spending and start listening to the people. Fox's Griff Jenkins is there now in Washington D.C., hey Griff.
GRIFF JENKINS: Glenn its unbelievable, thousands and thousands of people, look at this crowd right there. Do you guys have something you want to say to Glenn Beck?
BILL MOYERS: Watching those protestors you would have to say there's a lot of fight left on the Right, and you wouldn't be wrong. This rising tide of populist resistance to Obama, the anger over the massive government bailout of Wall Street and big failed corporations, have raised Republican hopes for a comeback. And it has Democrats scratching their head wondering how to respond.
So what do we make of this new book titled THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM? Has the author Sam Tanenhaus spent his time and considerable talent on a premature obituary?
Sam Tanenhaus edits two of the most influential sections of the Sunday NEW YORK TIMES - the Book Review and the Week in Review. He's has had a long fascination with conservatives and conservative ideas. He wrote this acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, the journalist who spied for the Russians before he became fiercely anti-communist and a hero to conservatives. Now Tanenhaus is working on a biography of the conservative icon William F. Buckley JR.
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL, Sam Tanenhaus.
SAM TANENHAUS: Oh my pleasure to be here, Bill.
BILL MOYERS: So, if you're right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people we see on television?
SAM TANENHAUS: I'm afraid they're radicals. Conservatism has been divided for a long time -- this is what my book describes narratively -- between two strains. What I call realism and revanchism. We're seeing the revanchist side.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean revanchism?
SAM TANENHAUS: I mean a politics that's based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that's been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for 'revenge.' It's a politics of vengeance.
And this is a strong strain in modern conservatism. Like the 19th Century nationalists who wanted to recover parts of their country that foreign nations had invaded and occupied, these radical people on the right, and they include intellectuals and the kinds of personalities we're seeing on television and radio, and also to some extent people marching in the streets, think America has gotten away from them. Theirs is a politics of reclamation and restoration. Give it back to us. What we sometimes forget is that the last five presidential elections Democrats won pluralities in four of them. The only time the Republicans have won, in recent memory, was when George Bush was re-elected by the narrowest margin in modern history, for a sitting president. So, what this means is that, yes, conservatism, what I think of, as a radical form of conservatism, is highly organized. We're seeing it now-- they are ideologically in lockstep. They agree about almost everything, and they have an orthodoxy that governs their worldview and their view of politics. So, they are able to make incursions. And at times when liberals, Democrats, and moderate Republicans are uncertain where to go, yes, this group will be out in front, very organized, and dominate our conversation.
BILL MOYERS: What gives them their certainty? You know, your hero of the 18th Century, Burke, Edmund Burke, warned against extremism and dogmatic orthodoxy.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, it's a very deep strain in our politics, Bill. Some of our great historians like Richard Hofstadter and Garry Wills have written about this. If you go back to the foundations of our Republic, first of all, we have two documents, "creedal documents" they're sometimes called, more or less at war with one another. The Declaration of Independence says one thing and the Constitution says another.
BILL MOYERS: The Declaration says--
SAM TANENHAUS: …says that we will be an egalitarian society in which all rights will be available to one and all, and the Constitution creates a complex political system that stops that change from happening. So, there's a clash right at the beginning. Now, what we've seen is that certain groups among us-- and sometimes it's been the left-- have been able to dominate the conversation and transform politics into a kind of theater. And that's what we're seeing now.
BILL MOYERS: When you see these people in the theater of television, you call them the insurrectionists, in your book, what do you think motivates them?
SAM TANENHAUS: One of the interesting developments in our politics, in just the past few months, although you could see signs of it earlier, is the emergence of the demographic we always overlook in our youth obsessed culture: the elderly. That was the group that did not support Barack Obama. They voted for John McCain. It was also the group that rose up and defied George W. Bush, when he wanted to add private Social Scurity accounts. It was a similar kind of protest.
BILL MOYERS: There's a paradox there, right? I mean, they say they're against government and yet the majority of Americans, according to all the polls, don't want their government touched. You know, there were people at these town hall meetings this summer, saying "Don't touch my Medicare." You know, keep the government out of my Social Security.
SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. This is an interesting argument. Because it's very easy to mock, and we see this a lot. "Oh, these fools. These old codgers say the government won't take my Medicare away. Don't know Medicare is a government program?" That's not really what's going on, I think. I think there's something different. A sense about how both the left and the right grew skeptical of Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson, and the argument was everyone was becoming a kind of client or ward of the state. That we've become a nation of patron/client relationships. And a colleague of yours, Richard Goodwin, very brilliant political thinker, in 1967 warned, "We all expect too much from government." We expect it to create all the jobs. We expect it to rescue the economy. To fight the wars. To give us a good life". So, when people say, "Don't take my Medicare away," what they really mean is, "We're entirely dependent on this government and we're afraid they'll take one thing away that we've gotten used to and replace it with something that won't be so good. And there's nothing we can do about it. We're powerless before the very guardian that protects us."
BILL MOYERS: So, how do you see this contradiction playing out in the health care debate? Where what's the dominant force that's going to prevail here at the end? Is it going to be, "We want reform and we want the government involved?" Or are we going to privatize it the way people on the conservative side want to do? The insurance companies, the drug companies, all of that?
SAM TANENHAUS: I think what we'll see is a kind of incremental reform. Look, we know that health care has become the third rail of American politics, going back to Theodore Roosevelt. The greatest retail politician in modern history, Bill Clinton, could not sell it. But here's another thing to think about. In the book I discuss one of the most interesting political theories of the modern era, Samuel Lubell's theory of the solar system of politics. And what he says is what we think of as an equally balanced, two-party system, is really a rotating one-party system. Either the Republicans or Democrats have ruled since the Civil War for periods of some 30-36 years. And in those periods, all the great debates have occurred within a single party. So, if you go back to the 1980s, which some would say was the peak of the modern conservative period, the fight's about how to end the Cold War, how to unleash market forces-- were really Republican issues.
Today, when we look at the great questions -- how to stimulate the economy, how to provide and expand and improve a sustainable health care system, the fight is taking place among Democrats. So, in a sense what Republicans have done is to put themselves on the sidelines. They've vacated the field and left it to the other party, the Democratic Party, to resolve these issues among themselves. That's one reason I think conservatism is in trouble.
BILL MOYERS: You write in here that they're not simply in retreat, they're outmoded. They don't act like it, you know?
SAM TANENHAUS: They do and they don't. What I also say in the book is that the voices are louder than ever. And I wrote that back in March. Already we were hearing the furies on the right. Remember, there was a movement within the Republican Party, finally scotched, to actually rename the Democrats, "The Democrat Socialist Party." This started from the beginning. So, the noise is there. William Buckley has a wonderful expression. He says, "The pyrotechnicians and noise-makers have always been there on the right." I think we're hearing more of that than we are serious ideological, philosophical discussion about conservatism.
BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the fact that the news agenda today is driven by Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Why are those organs of information and/or propaganda so powerful?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, there's been a transformation of the conservative establishment. And this has been going on for some time. The foundations of modern conservatism, the great thinkers, were actually ex-communists, many of them. Whittaker Chambers, the subject of my biography. The great, brilliant thinker, James Burnham. A less known but equally brilliant figure, Willmoore Kendall, who was a mentor, oddly enough, to both William Buckley and Garry Wills. These were the original thinkers. And they were essentially philosophical in their outlook. Now, there are conservative intellectuals, but we don't think of them as conservative anymore-- Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukayama, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lind, the great Columbia professor, Mark Lilla-- they've all left the movement. And so, it's become dominated instead by very monotonic, theatrically impressive voices and faces.
BILL MOYERS: Well, what does it say that a tradition that begins with Edmund Burke, the great political thinker of his time, moves on over the years, the decades, to William Buckley, and now the icon is Rush Limbaugh?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, in my interpretation it means that it's ideologically depleted. That what we're seeing now and hearing are the noise-makers in Buckley's phrase. There's a very important incident described in this book that occurred in 1965, when the John Birch Society, an organization these new Americanist groups resemble -- the ones who are marching in Washington and holding tea parties. Essentially, very extremist revanchist groups that view politics in a conspiratorial way.
And the John Birch Society during the peak of the Cold War struggle was convinced, and you're well aware of this, that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent, who reported to his brother Milton, and 80 percent of the government was dominated by Communists. Communists were in charge of American education, American health care. They were fluoridating the water to weaken our brains. All of this happened. And at first, Buckley and his fellow intellectuals at NATIONAL REVIEW indulged this. They said, "You know what? Their arguments are absurd, but they believe in the right things. They're anti-communists. And they're helping our movement."
Cause many of them helped Barry Goldwater get nominated in 1964. And then in 1965, Buckley said, "Enough." Buckley himself had matured politically. He'd run for Mayor of New York. He'd seen how politics really worked. And he said, "We can't allow ourselves to be discredited by our own fringe." So, he turned over his own magazine to a denunciation of the John Birch Society. More important, the columns he wrote denouncing what he called its "drivel" were circulated in advance to three of the great conservative Republicans of the day, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, from your home state of Texas, and Tower read them on the floor of Congress into the Congressional record. In other words, the intellectual and political leaders of the right drew a line. And that's what we may not see if we don't have that kind of leadership on the right now.
BILL MOYERS: To what extent is race an irritant here? Because, you know, I was in that era of the '60s, I was deeply troubled as we moved on to try to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by William Buckley's seeming embrace of white supremacy. It seemed to me to taint-- to leave something in the DNA of the modern conservative movement that is still there.
SAM TANENHAUS: It is. And one of the few regrets Bill Buckley ever expressed was that his magazine had not supported the Civil Rights Act--
BILL MOYERS: Really?
SAM TANENHAUS: …but you may remember that in the late '70s, he supported a national holiday for Martin Luther King--
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I remember that.
SAM TANENHAUS: …where someone like John McCain did not. I once heard Buckley give a lecture -- brilliant lecture in New York City -- about the late '90s in which he talked about the importance of religion in American civil life. And it was Martin Luther King who was the object.
BILL MOYERS: What changed him? I mean, because he was writing in the National Review about, endorsing the White Supremacy scheme of the country at that time.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, he actually did that, Bill, a little bit earlier.
BILL MOYERS: '50s?
SAM TANENHAUS: '50s. He did more of it. In the early '60s, even a great thinker and writer like Garry Wills, who was still a part of the "National Review," though he supported the civil rights movement, thought it might weaken the institutional structures of society, if it became too fervent a protest. Now, what the Republican Party did was to make a very shrewd political calculation. A kind of Faustian bargain with the South. That the southern whites who resisted civil rights legislation-- and as you know, Lyndon Johnson knew, when he signed those bills into law, he might lose the solid south as it had been called, the Democrats might lose them for a generation or more. And yes, the Republicans moved right in, and they did it on the basis of a state's rights argument. Now, however convincing or unconvincing that was, it's important to acknowledge that Republicans never-- conservatives, I should say, northern Republicans are different-- but conservatives within the Republican Party, because the two were once not, you know, identical-- thought that a hierarchical society and a kind of racial difference-- a sense of racial difference, established institutionally, was not so bad a thing.
They were wrong. They were dead wrong. But that sense of animus is absolutely strong today. Look who some of the great protestors are against Barack Obama. Three of them come from South Carolina, the state that led the secession. Joe Wilson and Senator DeMint, Mark Sanford who got in trouble. These are South Carolinians. And there's no question that that side of the insurrectionist South remains in our politics.
BILL MOYERS: When you heard Joe Wilson shout out, "You lie," and you saw who it was, did you think "the voice of conservatism today"?
SAM TANENHAUS: No. I thought "This man needs to read his Edmund Burke." Edmund Burke gave us the phrase "civil society." Now, people can be confused about that. It doesn't mean we have to be nice to each other all the time. Bill Buckley was not nice to his political opponents. What it means is one has to recognize that we're all part of what should be our harmonious culture, and that we respect the political institutions that bind it together. Edmund Burke, a very interesting passage in his great book, the "Reflections on the Revolution in France," uses the words "government" and "society" almost interchangeably. He sees each reinforcing the other. It is our institutional patrimony. When someone in the floor of Congress dishonors, disrespects, the office of the President, he's actually striking-- however briefly, however slightingly-- a blow against the institutions that our society is founded on. And I think Edmund Burke might have some trouble with that.
BILL MOYERS: There's long been a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this coalition that we call "conservative." I mean, you had the Edmund Burke kind of conservatism that yearns for a sacred, ordered society, bound by tradition, that protects both rich and poor, against what one of my friends calls the "Libertarian, robber baron, capitalist, cowboy America." I mean, that marriage was doomed to fail, right?
SAM TANENHAUS: It was. First of all, this is absolutely right, in the terms of a classical conservatism. And here is the figure I emphasize in my book is Benjamin Disraeli. What he feared-- the revolution of his time, this is the French Revolution that concerned Edmund Burke-- half a century later what concerned Disraeli and other conservatives was the Industrial Revolution. That Dickens wrote his novels about-- that children, the very poor becoming virtual slaves in work houses, that the search for money, for capital, for capital accumulation, seemed to drown out all other values. That's what modern conservatism is partly anchored in. So, how do we get this contradiction?
BILL MOYERS: Why isn't it standing up against turbo-capitalism?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, one reason is that America very early on in its history reached a kind of pact, in the Jacksonian era, between the government on the one hand and private capital on the other. That the government would actually subsidize capitalism in America. That's what the Right doesn't often acknowledge. A lot of what we think of as the unleashed, unfettered market is, in fact, a government supported market. Some will remember the famous debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman, and Dick Cheney said that his company, Halliburton, had made millions of dollars without any help from the government. It all came from the government! They were defense contracts! So, what's happened is the American ethos, which is a different thing from our political order-- that's the rugged individualism, the cowboy, the frontiersman, the robber baron, the great explorer, the conqueror of the continent. For that aspect of our myth, the market has been the engine of it. So, what brought them together, is what we've seen in the right is what I call a politics of organized cultural enmity. Everybody--
BILL MOYERS: Accusatory protest, you call it.
SAM TANENHAUS: Accusatory protest. With liberals as the enemy. So, if you are a free-marketeer, or you're an evangelical, or a social conservative, or even an authoritarian conservative, you can all agree about one thing: you hate the liberals that are out to destroy us. And that's a very useful form of political organization. I'm not sure it contributes much to our government and society, but it's politically useful, and we're seeing it again today.
BILL MOYERS: It wasn't long ago that Karl Rove was saying this coalition was going to deliver a new Republican majority. What happened? It finally came apart. Why?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, I believe it had come apart earlier than that. I really think Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 sealed the end of serious conservative counterrevolution. We forget that election. It seems like an anomaly, but consider, Bill Clinton won more electoral votes than Barack Obama, despite the presence of one of the most successful third party candidates, H. Ross Perot, another Texan, in American history. But that's not the most important fact. The most important fact is that George H. W. Bush got less of the popular vote in 1992 than Herbert Hoover got in 1932. That was really the end. But what happened was the right was so institutionally successful that it controlled many of the levers, as you say. So, what happened in the year 2000? Well, the conservatives on the Supreme Court stopped the democratic process, put their guy into office. Then September 11th came. And the right got its full first blank slate. They could do really whatever they wanted. And what we saw were those eight years. And that is the end of ideological conservatism as a vital formative and contributive aspect of our politics.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
SAM TANENHAUS: Because it failed so badly. It wasn't conservative. It was radical. It's interesting. Many on the right say, "George Bush betrayed us." They weren't saying that in 2002 and 2003. He was seen as someone who would complete the Reagan revolution. I think a lot of it was Iraq. Now, I quote in the book a remarkably prescient thing. The very young, almost painfully, 31-year-old, Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1835, he said you cannot export democracy, even then, to lands ruled by despotic priests. And he happened to mean Catholic, not Islamic priests. But he said you actually have to have a civil society established in advance. He said that's why the United States had become a great republic so shortly after the Revolution. We had the law of English custom here. You see? So, we were prepared to become a democracy. There were conservatives who tried to make that argument before the war in Iraq. Francis Fukayama was one, Fareed Zakaria was another-- they're both well outside that movement. There were people in the Bush Administration who tried to argue this -- they were marginalized or stripped of power. What America saw was an ideological revanchism with all the knobs turned to the highest volume. The imperial presidency of a Dick Cheney and all the rest. And we saw where we got.
BILL MOYERS: Here's another puzzle. Back to what we were talking about earlier. You say in "The Death of Conservatism" that, "Even as the financial collapse drove us to the brink, conservatives remained strangely apart, trapped in the irrelevant causes of another day, deaf to the actual conversation unfolding across the land." And the paradox is, it seems to me, they are driving the conversation that you say they don't hear.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, they have many mouths, Bill, but they don't have many ears. The great political philosopher, Hannah Arendt once said, in one of her great essays on Socrates, whom she wrote about a lot -- that the sign of a true statesmen, maybe particularly in a democracy, is the capacity to listen. And that doesn't simply mean to politely grow mute while your adversary talks. It means, in fact, to try to inhabit the thoughts and ideas of the other side. Barack Obama is perhaps a genius at this. For anyone who has not heard the audio version of "Dreams from My Father," it's a revelation. He does all the voices. He does the white Kansas voices, he does the Kenyan voices. He has an extraordinary ear. There's an auditory side to politics. And that capacity to listen is what enables you to absorb the arguments made by the other side and to have a kind of debate with yourself. That's the way our deliberative process is supposed to work. Right now, at a time of confusion and uncertainty, the ideological right is very good at shouting at us, and rallying the troops. But, you know, one of the real contributions conservatism made in its peak years, the 1950s and '60s, I think as an intellectual movement, is that it repudiated the politics of public demonstration. It was the left that was marching in the streets, and carrying guns, and threatening to take the society down, or calling President Johnson a murderer. Remember it was William Buckley, who said, "We're calling this man a murderer in the name of humanity?" It was the conservatives who used political institutions, political campaigns, who rallied behind traditional candidates produced by the party apparatus. They revitalized the traditions and the instruments and vehicles of our democracy.
But now we've reached a point, quite like one Richard Hofstadter described some 40 years ago, where ideologues don't trust politicians anymore. Remember during the big march in Washington, many of the protestors or demonstrators insisted they were not demonstrating just against Barack Obama, but against all the politicians-- that's why some Republicans wouldn't support it. They don't believe in politics as the medium whereby our society negotiates its issues.
BILL MOYERS: What do they believe in?
SAM TANENHAUS: They believe in a kind of revolution, a cultural revolution. They think the system can be-- what some would say hijacked. They would say maneuvered, controlled, that they can get their hands back on the levers. An important thing about the right in America is it always considers itself a minority position and an embattled position. No matter how many of the branches of government they dominate. So, what they believe in is, as Willmoore Kendall, this early philosopher said, is a politics of battle lines, of war.
BILL MOYERS: So, here, at this very critical moment, when so much is hanging in the balance, what is the paradox of conservatism as you see it?
SAM TANENHAUS: The paradox of conservatism is that it gives the signs, the overt signs of energy and vitality, but the rigor mortis I described is still there. As a philosophy, as a system of government, as a way all of us can learn from, as a means of evaluating ourselves, our social responsibilities, our personal obligations and responsibilities. It has, right now, nothing to offer.
BILL MOYERS: Now, they disagree with you. They think you have issued a call for unilateral disarmament on their part-- that brass knuckles and sharp elbows are part of fighting for what you believe in, and therefore, you're calling for a unilateral disarmament.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, that's what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style, is when it's always living on the verge of apocalypse. That defeat is staring you in the face, and the only victories are total victories. Because even the slightest victory, if it's not complete, means the other side may come back and get you again. This is not serious responsible argument. Much of my book is actually about the failures of liberalism in that noontime period of the 1960s. And many of the conservatives simply ignore that part of the argument.
BILL MOYERS: How to explain this long fascination you've had with conservative ideas, and the conservative movement. Why this fascination?
BILL MOYERS: Well, I think it has been the dominant philosophy, political philosophy in our culture, in America, for some half-century. What particularly drew me first to Chambers and then Buckley is the idea that these were serious intellectuals, who were also men of action. Conservatives have kind of supplied us in their best periods-- the days when NATIONAL REVIEW and COMMENTARY and THE PUBLIC INTEREST were tremendously vital publications, self-examining, developing new vocabularies and idioms, teaching us all how to think about politics and culture in a different way, with a different set of tools. They were contributing so enormously to who we were as Americans. And yet, many liberals were not paying attention. Many liberals today don't know that a great thinker like Garry Wills was a product of the conservative movement. It's astonishing to them to learn it. They just assume, because they agree with him now, he was always a liberal. In fact, he remains a kind of conservative. This is the richness in the philosophy that attracted me, and that I wanted to learn more about, to educate myself.
BILL MOYERS: The book is THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM. Sam Tanenhaus, I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for joining me.
SAM TANENHAUS: Oh, it's my great pleasure to be here.
Bill Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.
© 2009 Bill Moyers Journal All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142754/
With Global Capitalism Exposed as a Sham, All the Global Elite Have Left Is Pure Force
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on September 22, 2009, Printed on September 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142788/
The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are building on the ends of the political spectrum that have lost faith in the mechanisms of democratic change. You can't blame them. But unless we on the left move quickly this rage will be captured by a virulent and racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.
Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will do-stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.
"The leaders of the G-20 are meeting to try and salvage their power and money after everything that has gone wrong," said Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), who is in Pittsburgh for the protests. "This is what this meeting is about."
The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the established centers of power. The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.
The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world's wealthiest nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city's police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.
Larry Holmes, an organizer from New York City, stood outside a tent encampment on land owned by the Monumental Baptist Church in the city's Hill District. He is one of the leaders of the Bail Out the People Movement. Holmes, a longtime labor activist, on Sunday led a march on the convention center by unemployed people calling for jobs. He will coordinate more protests during the week.
"It is de facto martial law," he said, "and the real effort to subvert the work of those protesting has yet to begin. But voting only gets you so far. There are often not many choices in an election. When you build democratic movements around the war or unemployment you get a more authentic expression of democracy. It is more organic. It makes a difference. History has taught us this."
Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the planet struggle with hunger. Globalization has obliterated the ability of many poor countries to protect food staples such as corn, rice, beans and wheat with subsidies or taxes on imported staples. The abolishment of these protections has permitted the giant mechanized farms to wipe out tens of millions of small farmers-2 million in Mexico alone-bankrupting many and driving them off their land. Those who could once feed themselves can no longer find enough food, and the wealthiest governments use institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization like pit bulls to establish economic supremacy. There is little that most governments seem able to do to fight back.
But the game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham. Force is all the elite have left. We are living through one of civilization's great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all utopias that are sold as inevitable and irreversible, has become a farce. The power elite, perplexed and confused, cling to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the political and economic vacuum before us. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs caused the crisis. It led the G-20 to sacrifice other areas of human importance-from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution-on the altar of free trade. It left the world's poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits in human history. Globalization has become an excuse to ignore the mess. It has left a mediocre elite desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved and, more important, trying to save itself. "Speculation," then-President Jacques Chirac of France once warned, "is the AIDS of our economies." We have reached the terminal stage.
"Each of Globalization's strengths has somehow turned out to have an opposing meaning," John Ralston Saul wrote in "The Collapse of Globalism." "The lowering of national residency requirements for corporations has morphed into a tool for massive tax evasion. The idea of a global economic system mysteriously made local poverty seem unreal, even normal. The decline of the middle class-the very basis of democracy-seemed to be just one of those things that happen, unfortunate but inevitable. That the working class and the lower middle class, even parts of the middle class, could only survive with more than one job per person seemed to be expected punishment for not keeping up. The contrast between unprecedented bonuses for mere managers at the top and the four-job families below them seemed inevitable in a globalized world. For two decades an elite consensus insisted that unsustainable third-world debts could not be put aside in a sort of bad debt reserve without betraying Globalism's essential principles and moral obligations, which included an unwavering respect for the sanctity of international contracts. It took the same people about two weeks to abandon sanctity and propose bad debt banks for their own far larger debts in 2009."
The institutions that once provided alternative sources of power, including the press, government, agencies of religion, universities and labor unions, have proved morally bankrupt. They no longer provide a space for voices of moral autonomy. No one will save us now but ourselves.
"The best thing that happened to the Establishment is the election of a black president," Holmes said. "It will contain people for a given period of time, but time is running out. Suppose something else happens? Suppose another straw breaks? What happens when there is a credit card crisis or a collapse in commercial real estate? The financial system is very, very fragile. The legs are being kicked out from underneath it."
"Obama is in trouble," Holmes went on. "The economic crisis is a structural crisis. The recovery is only a recovery for Wall Street. It can't be sustained, and Obama will be blamed for it. He is doing everything Wall Street demands. But this will be a dead end. It is a prescription for disaster, not only for Obama but the Democratic Party. It is only groups like ours that provide hope. If labor unions will get off their ass and stop focusing on narrow legislation for their members, if they will go back to being social unions that embrace broad causes, we have a chance of effecting change. If this does not happen it will be a right-wing disaster."
Posted on September 22, 2009, Printed on September 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142788/
The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are building on the ends of the political spectrum that have lost faith in the mechanisms of democratic change. You can't blame them. But unless we on the left move quickly this rage will be captured by a virulent and racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.
Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will do-stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.
"The leaders of the G-20 are meeting to try and salvage their power and money after everything that has gone wrong," said Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), who is in Pittsburgh for the protests. "This is what this meeting is about."
The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the established centers of power. The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.
The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world's wealthiest nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city's police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.
Larry Holmes, an organizer from New York City, stood outside a tent encampment on land owned by the Monumental Baptist Church in the city's Hill District. He is one of the leaders of the Bail Out the People Movement. Holmes, a longtime labor activist, on Sunday led a march on the convention center by unemployed people calling for jobs. He will coordinate more protests during the week.
"It is de facto martial law," he said, "and the real effort to subvert the work of those protesting has yet to begin. But voting only gets you so far. There are often not many choices in an election. When you build democratic movements around the war or unemployment you get a more authentic expression of democracy. It is more organic. It makes a difference. History has taught us this."
Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the planet struggle with hunger. Globalization has obliterated the ability of many poor countries to protect food staples such as corn, rice, beans and wheat with subsidies or taxes on imported staples. The abolishment of these protections has permitted the giant mechanized farms to wipe out tens of millions of small farmers-2 million in Mexico alone-bankrupting many and driving them off their land. Those who could once feed themselves can no longer find enough food, and the wealthiest governments use institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization like pit bulls to establish economic supremacy. There is little that most governments seem able to do to fight back.
But the game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham. Force is all the elite have left. We are living through one of civilization's great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all utopias that are sold as inevitable and irreversible, has become a farce. The power elite, perplexed and confused, cling to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the political and economic vacuum before us. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs caused the crisis. It led the G-20 to sacrifice other areas of human importance-from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution-on the altar of free trade. It left the world's poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits in human history. Globalization has become an excuse to ignore the mess. It has left a mediocre elite desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved and, more important, trying to save itself. "Speculation," then-President Jacques Chirac of France once warned, "is the AIDS of our economies." We have reached the terminal stage.
"Each of Globalization's strengths has somehow turned out to have an opposing meaning," John Ralston Saul wrote in "The Collapse of Globalism." "The lowering of national residency requirements for corporations has morphed into a tool for massive tax evasion. The idea of a global economic system mysteriously made local poverty seem unreal, even normal. The decline of the middle class-the very basis of democracy-seemed to be just one of those things that happen, unfortunate but inevitable. That the working class and the lower middle class, even parts of the middle class, could only survive with more than one job per person seemed to be expected punishment for not keeping up. The contrast between unprecedented bonuses for mere managers at the top and the four-job families below them seemed inevitable in a globalized world. For two decades an elite consensus insisted that unsustainable third-world debts could not be put aside in a sort of bad debt reserve without betraying Globalism's essential principles and moral obligations, which included an unwavering respect for the sanctity of international contracts. It took the same people about two weeks to abandon sanctity and propose bad debt banks for their own far larger debts in 2009."
The institutions that once provided alternative sources of power, including the press, government, agencies of religion, universities and labor unions, have proved morally bankrupt. They no longer provide a space for voices of moral autonomy. No one will save us now but ourselves.
"The best thing that happened to the Establishment is the election of a black president," Holmes said. "It will contain people for a given period of time, but time is running out. Suppose something else happens? Suppose another straw breaks? What happens when there is a credit card crisis or a collapse in commercial real estate? The financial system is very, very fragile. The legs are being kicked out from underneath it."
"Obama is in trouble," Holmes went on. "The economic crisis is a structural crisis. The recovery is only a recovery for Wall Street. It can't be sustained, and Obama will be blamed for it. He is doing everything Wall Street demands. But this will be a dead end. It is a prescription for disaster, not only for Obama but the Democratic Party. It is only groups like ours that provide hope. If labor unions will get off their ass and stop focusing on narrow legislation for their members, if they will go back to being social unions that embrace broad causes, we have a chance of effecting change. If this does not happen it will be a right-wing disaster."
Economic Duplicity: Recession and Record Profits
In December 14, 2008, in his interview on the CBS sixty minutes show, Whitney Tilson an investment fund manager predicted that the subprime collapse was only half way of the total real estate bubble, and that the second half will begin take place around 2010 and will continue until about the year 2013. Tilson also discussed the two fancy Wall Street terms for bad mortgages namely Alt-A (Alternative-A paper) and option arms mortgages. These loans lured borrowers with teaser rates that will begin to reset this year.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=15273
Tilson has also predicted that seventy percent of these loans will eventually default, based on existing evidence of pre-reset default rates [1].
A mortgage reset is when the homeowner who bought a house with a low "teaser rate" and planned to refinance as soon as the house price went up suddenly gets a new payment that is usually far higher. Often, homeowners can't afford these resets.
The first wave of resets, as we recall was subprime. As this chart from Whitney Tilson shows, that's basically done with: [2].
However, Alt-A is actually a much larger category of mortgages, and the big Alt-A reset boom is just around the corner as Tilson’s second chart reveals.
Karen Weaver of Deutsche Bank observes that Alt-A mortgages are already mostly underwater. The combination of resets plus severely underwater status will likely exacerbate defaults and foreclosures. [2].
Ironically, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Tuesday September 15, 2009 that the worst recession since the 1930s is probably over, although he cautioned that pain especially for the nearly 15 million unemployed Americans will persist. [3].
So while unemployment keeps rising, consumer spending is slumping, inflation is creeping up (food, gasoline, and other commodities), the commercial real estate is plunging into the abyss, the dollar is weakening, and the other half of the housing bubble is exploding, Bernanke remains hopeful!
Could it be that Mr. Bernanke is anticipating the occurrence of a contrived international incident that will trigger an invasion of Iran ? A new war is always good for a military based economy! Or maybe Bernanke’s optimism on the economy is strictly founded on the performance of the global corporations and their profit margins?
Many of these transnational organizations have benefited from the recession. They have gobbled up bankrupted entities for pennies and made record profits, while others have consolidated and merged with weakened organizations to produce the largest monopolies in history. The end result was price fixing, and a total control of the US and the global markets.
Let’s take a moment to analyze this situation by discussing one of these global corporations like “Chevron of California,” to shed the light on a duplicitous economy ruled by a corrupt plutocracy.
Chevron’s 2008 Annual Report to its shareholders is a glossy celebration heralding the company’s most profitable year in its history. Its $24 billion in profits catapulted it past General Electric to become the second most profitable corporation in the United States . Its 2007 revenues were larger than the gross domestic product (GDP) of 150 nations. [4].
Global exchange has recently issued a scathing report about chevron’s upward movement into the global ranks, and the cost for that rank and the way it was achieved.
Brief history of Chevron
In 1876, Star Oil Works struck oil in southern California. The Pacific Coast Oil Company acquired the company a few years later, followed by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company in 1900—naming it the Standard Oil Company of California (SoCal) in 1906. In 1911 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the break-up of Standard Oil; SoCal was the third largest post-breakup company. In 1985 SoCal bought Gulf Oil—the largest merger in U.S. history at that time—and changed its name to “Chevron.” In 2001 Chevron bought Texaco (which had purchased the giant Getty Oil in 1984). Briefly called “Chevron-Texaco,” it went back to “Chevron” in 2005, the same year it purchased the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal).
Chevron makes its money in two primary ways: (1) producing oil and natural gas and (2) refining and then selling those resources as products—primarily gasoline. Chevron has increasingly focused on raising the profitability of the latter sector, with great success. Chevron is dominant presence in the refining sector allowed it to offset the drop in oil prices with a corresponding 10-fold increase in its refinery profits in the last quarter of 2008.
Chevron’s World Headquarters is located in San Ramon, California, USA. The company’s CEO is David O’Reilly, the 15th highest paid U.S. CEO with nearly $50 million in total 2008 compensation, and over $120 million over the last 5 years. (Forbes) Corporate Website www.chevron.com
Chevron’s profits were $23.9 billion in 2008, the highest in company history, and a 28% increase from 2007. Profits have increased every year since 2002, increasing 2100% from 2002 to 2008. Chevron’s oil Reserves and production stands at 7.5 billion (just behind Exxon’s 11 billion and BP’s 10 billion) reserves. The company produces nearly 3 million barrels of oil per day. Together, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, BP, Conoco-Phillips, Shell, and Marathon produce more oil than Saudi Arabia —about13% of the world’s total oil supply for 2006.
Chevron operates in 120 countries. Explores for, produces, refines, transports, and markets oil, natural gas, and gasoline. Major operations also include chemical, coal mining, and power generation companies. In addition, Chevron became the 2nd largest U.S. oil company, 3rd largest U.S. Corporation, 4th largest global oil company, and the 6th largest global corporation (by revenue). [4].
Many argue, however, that Chevron’s success is derived from methods that harm consumers, including unethical and illegal activities. Such concerns received considerable support when on April 3, 2009 the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals revived a class action lawsuit against Chevron. The suit accuses Chevron and other refiners of conspiring to fix gasoline prices in California . Like most suits against Chevron, the case has spent years in court. Originally filed in 1998, the plaintiffs, a group of wholesale gasoline buyers, contend that the companies intentionally limited the supply of gasoline to raise prices and keep them high. A federal judge dismissed the case in 2002, but, upon appeal, the Court reversed the ruling. [4].
Price Control
Chevron reports that in 2008, it operated five U.S. oil refineries and, between its Chevron and Texaco brands, owned and leased 9,685 U.S. gas stations.
In California, Chevron helps maintain the state’s oil oligopoly, with just four refiners owning nearly 80% of the market and six refiners, including Chevron, owning 85% of the retail outlets, selling 90% of the gasoline in the state. [6]. This is the primary reason why Californians regularly suffer the nation’s highest gasoline prices.
A wave of mega-mergers over the last 25 years has led to thousands of independent oil refineries and gas stations across the U.S. being swallowed or crushed by Big Oil. Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Conoco-Phillips, BP, Shell, and Valero control almost
60% of the U.S. refining market—nearly twice as much as the six largest companies controlled just 12 years ago. [5]. These same companies, with the exception of Valero, control more than 60% of the nation’s gas stations, compared with 27% in 1991. [7].
There has not been a single new refinery built in the U.S. in more than a generation. In 1981 there were 324 refineries, owned by 189 different companies. Today there are 150, owned by just 50 companies. [8]. The companies have, in turn, closed gas stations and ceased to build new ones. While the number of cars on the road has more than doubled over the last 25 years, the number of gas stations has declined by one-third, bringing about the near disappearance of the small, independently owned gas station. In 2008 alone, over 2,500 gas stations closed, leading National Petroleum News to conclude, “This is in line with the continued but increased consolidation in the industry in the past year.” [9]. Through consolidation, the companies have sought and achieved far greater control over how much oil gets refined into gasoline, how much gasoline is available at the pump, and how much the gasoline costs. This control is often believed to take the form of outright illegal manipulation. But proving manipulation is difficult and lawsuits that survive to trial are rare because they are notoriously difficult to win. Due to successful industry lobbying, information on refinery and gas station operations is rarely a matter of public record and is difficult to acquire.
A bill by California State Senator Joe Dunn to merely give the California Public Utility Commission the authority to monitor oil refinery production to ensure fair market competition got nowhere because, according to Dunn “The gasoline industry has an enormous voice... Too many [other legislators] were too concerned about what this industry might do in the campaign this fall.” [10].
Oil companies’ unparalleled financial and personnel resources allow them to crush challengers with drawn out, expensive, and complicated proceedings. When plaintiffs’ victories do occur, they are often settlements with sealed proceedings that leave no public record of corporate-wrongdoing, and force future cases to begin from scratch. Chevron likes to go further, kicking losing opponents when they are down by launching countersuits to recoup legal fees that mean nothing to its bottom line but can mean bankruptcy for those who dare to challenge the company. Moreover, the federal agency charged with overseeing collusion in the industry, the Federal Trade Commission, is overrun with lawyers who take brief stints at the agency in between jobs working for or on behalf of the very companies they are supposed to regulate. [11].
In 2006 Senator Arlen Specter called for “an examination of what oil and gas industry consolidations have done to prices... We have allowed too many companies to merge together and reduce competition.” Senator Dianne Feinstein concurred:
“What you have today is an oligopoly in the oil and gas industry, and I think it’s disastrous for the American people. [12].
The best politician oil could buy
Chevron is among the all-time largest corporate contributors to U.S. federal elections, giving more than $10.5 million since 1990-75% of which went to Republican candidates [13].
Chevron’s campaign giving reflects its areas of operations and key congressional committees. All but four of its 20 all time top recipients are Republicans, including Don Young of Alaska, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Phil Gramm of Texas , Craig Thomas of Wyoming , and Bill Thomas of California . Among the four Democrats is oil-rich Louisiana ’s senator, Mary Landrieu.
But California is the site of Chevron’s world headquarters as well as of half its domestic production and two of its six refineries, making it the primary focus of Chevron’s campaign giving. Thus, among Chevron’s top 20 list of all-time-highest recipients are senior Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Ellen Tauscher of California , both Democrats. Until very recently, Chevron’s number one all-time recipient was Republican congressman Richard Pombo, who represented San Ramon, the location of Chevron’s world headquarters, for 14 years. As Chairman of the House Resources Committee, Pombo did more than just about any other politician to support the interests of Chevron and Big Oil, earning him the number one spot on the League of Conservation Voters’ “Dirty Dozen” Members of Congress list for 2006, the same year that public outrage voted him out of office.
Until 2008, 2000 was the oil and gas industry’s most expensive election year ever recorded. On the eve of its Texaco merger, Chevron gave more than any other oil company to federal campaigns, with George W. Bush being its favorite candidate. Chevron and its employees contributed six times more money to George W. Bush’s candidacy than to Al Gore’s.
Chevron also gave to the Bush-Cheney 2001 Presidential Inaugural Committee, including a $100,000 donation by CEO David O’Reilly.
For its investment, the company received not only an oil government but also one of its own in the President’s inner circle. Condoleezza Rice, first appointed Bush’s National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State, served on Chevron’s board of directors from 1991 to 2001 and chaired its Public Policy Committee. A Chevron supertanker was named in her honor, the SS Condoleezza Rice.
The oil and gas industry’s 2008 federal election spending topped all its previous records, reaching nearly $35 million, 77% of which went to Republicans. Chevron was the third largest oil and gas company contributor that year, giving 75% of its money to Republicans. 2008 was also the most expensive presidential election for the oil and gas industry, with the industry as a whole giving nearly three times more to John McCain than to Barack Obama: $2.3 million vs. $800,000. [4].
Chevron’s executives gave heavily to McCain and the Republican National Committee (RNC), with individual donations in the tens of thousands of dollars. CEO David O’Reilly, for example, gave $4,600 to John McCain (the personal limit) and another $53,000 to the RNC. [13]. However, Chevron’s rank and file employees, with contributions in the hundreds of dollars, helped put Obama in the White House, causing Obama to become Chevron’s all-time highest campaign recipient, just barely inching out John McCain ($75,525 vs. $74,413). Richard Pombo is now the third all-time highest recipient, followed by George W. Bush.
Chevron’s executives still have something to celebrate. For, just as George W. Bush appointed a Chevron board member to be his National Security Advisor, so, too, did Obama, with the appointment of General James Jones.
Conclusion
So where do we go from here? What is the truth about the state of our economy? Do we have two parallel economies one for the rich and the other for the poor? Is the middle class being impoverished on purpose? Should we become optimistic about our economy based on Chevron’s record profits, and our corporate government’s sham forecasts? Is the recession truly over, as Bernanke the agent of the global corporation-banking cartel has proclaimed? Look at the facts and draw your own conclusion.
Notes
1. You tube, “A second wave of mortgage default is about to come.” CBS-Sixty minutes, December 14, 2008.
2. Businessinsider.com, August 27, 2009. Coming Soon: The Alt-A Mortgage Reset Bomb.
3. Associated press, September 15, 2009. Bernanke says recession 'very likely over’
4. Global Exchange.org, 08-2009. The True cost of Chevron: An alternative annual report.
5. Bob Burtman, “Running on empty,” Miami New Times, November 9, 2000.
6. Federal trade Commission, Bureau of economics, “The Petroleum Industry, Mergers, structural change, and Antitrust Enforcement,” August 2004.
7. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut attorney general, Testimony before the Antitrust Task Force of the house committee on the judiciary, May 16, 2007.
8. U.S. Department of Energy, energy Information Administration, Refinery tables.
9. NPS MarketFacts 2008, Highlights, weblink in online report.
10. Tom Chorneau, “Big Oil Lobbyists Stall Bills in Legislature that Industry Opposes,” The San Francisco Chronicle, July 14, 2006.
11. Antonia Juhasz, The Tyranny of Oil, pp. 240-252.
12. Senator Arlen Specter, “Bipartisan Legislation Seeking to Foster Competition and Reduce Oil and Gas Prices Receives Committee Approval,” press release, April 27, 2006.
13. CampaignMoney.com, weblink in online report.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=15273
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