Smoking gun: the oil companies did write America’s energy policy

November 16, 2005

Short­ly after the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion took office, Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney held a series of secret meet­ings in the White House that have guid­ed Amer­i­ca’s ener­gy pol­i­cy over the last four years. The White House has refused repeat­ed requests for a list of par­tic­i­pants at the “task force” meet­ings. All we’ve known for sure is who was­n’t invit­ed: eniron­men­tal­ists and any­one else who might bring a per­spec­tive crit­i­cal of Amer­i­ca’s depen­dence on fos­sil fuels.
We’ve long sus­pect­ed that Cheney’s spe­cial guests were top oil com­pa­ny exec­u­tives and that these con­sul­tants large­ly wrote the ener­gy guide­lines that came out of the meet­ing. The pol­i­cy strong favor the eco­nom­ic inter­ests of “Big Oil” over envi­ron­men­tal or nation­al secu­ri­ty con­cerns. The oil com­pa­nies have repeat­ed­ly denied being at the meet­ings: Just last week, oil indus­try offi­cials from Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Cono­coPhillips tes­ti­fied at a joint hear­ing of the Sen­ate Ener­gy and Com­merce com­mit­tees that their employ­ees had been part of Cheney’s ener­gy task force.
Liar liar, pants on fire.
The Wash­ing­ton Post has obtained a White House doc­u­ment that exec­u­tives from Big Oil did indeed meet with the ener­gy task force in 2001. Inves­ti­ga­tions are in order. Sen­a­tor Frank Laut­en­berg of New Jer­sey said “The White House went to great lengths to keep these meet­ings secret, and now oil exec­u­tives may be lying to Con­gress about their role in the Cheney task force.” This issue is impor­tant not only to Wash­ing­ton Belt­way insid­ers but to all of us. Dis­as­ters like Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na and the ongo­ing quag­mire in iraq are fueled by Amer­i­can ener­gy needs. As long as we have Big Oil dic­tat­ing our ener­gy pol­i­cy we will con­tin­ue to have these wars and cli­mate tragedies. Peo­ple will die, lives will be ruined and we will all be taxed for our oil misadventures.

War of the Parents & the Peace Movement Standing Strong in the Flak

July 9, 2004

The Wash­ing­ton Post reports that in blue-collar Amer­i­ca, “it’s the par­ents are hang­ing up on war and on the recruiters”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35400-2004Jul7?language=printer try­ing to send their sons overseas:
bq. “It’s the par­ents hold­ing me back,” [Army recruiter] Broad­wa­ter says. When he calls, they hang up the phone, refuse to put their chil­dren on the line, tell him off. They try to talk their sons and daugh­ters out of join­ing, and, more often now, they succeed.
Lots of good com­men­tary on this arti­cle and what it means from “Under the Same Sun”:http://www.underthesamesun.org/content/2004/07/index.html#000100, where I found this link. USS draws some good ques­tions for the peace movement:
bq. So, what are we tell moth­ers of future dead sol­diers? We were afraid to be seen as less than sup­port­ing of the troops so we will let them be sent to kill and get killed in an immoral occu­pa­tion? I am not say­ing that it was not hard to voice these truths, espe­cial­ly before all the evi­dence became wide­ly avail­able and before the body bags and bod­ies miss­ing parts start­ed stream­ing back home. It is part­ly a ques

Where’s the grassroots contemporary nonviolence movement?

October 17, 2003

I’ve long noticed there are few active, online peace sites or com­mu­ni­ties that have the grass­roots depth I see occur­ring else­where on the net. It’s a prob­lem for Non​vi​o​lence​.org [update: a project since laid down], as it makes it hard­er to find a diver­si­ty of stories.

I have two types of sources for Non​vi​o​lence​.org. The first is main­stream news. I search through Google News, Tech­no­rati cur­rent events, then maybe the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Wash­ing­ton Post.

There are lots of inter­est­ing arti­cles on the war in iraq, but there’s always a polit­i­cal spin some­where, espe­cial­ly in tim­ing. Most big news sto­ries have bro­ken in one month, died down, and then become huge news three months lat­er (e.g., Wilson’s CIA wife being exposed, which was first report­ed on Non​vi​o​lence​.org on July 22 but became head­lines in ear­ly Octo­ber). These news cycles are dri­ven by domes­tic par­ty pol­i­tics, and at times I feel all my links make Non​vi​o​lence​.org sound like an appa­ratchik of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty USA.

But it’s not just the tone that makes main­stream news arti­cles a prob­lem – it’s also the gen­er­al sub­ject mat­ter. There’s a lot more to non­vi­o­lence than anti­war expos­es, yet the news rarely cov­ers any­thing about the cul­ture of peace. “If it bleeds it leads” is an old news­pa­per slo­gan and you will nev­er learn about the wider scope of non­vi­o­lence by read­ing the papers.

My sec­ond source is peace move­ment websites

And these are, by-and-large, unin­ter­est­ing. Often they’re not updat­ed fre­quent­ly. But even when they are, the pieces on them can be shal­low. You’ll see the self-serving press release (“as a peace orga­ni­za­tion we protest war actions”) and you’ll see the exclam­a­to­ry all-caps screed (“eND THe OCCUPATION NOW!!!”). These are fine as long as you’re already a mem­ber of said orga­ni­za­tion or already have decid­ed you’re against the war, but there’s lit­tle per­sua­sion or dia­logue pos­si­ble in this style of writ­ing and organizing.

There are few peo­ple in the larg­er peace move­ment who reg­u­lar­ly write pieces that are inter­est­ing to those out­side our nar­row cir­cles. David McReynolds and Geov Par­rish are two of those excep­tions. It takes an abil­i­ty to some­times ques­tion your own group’s con­sen­sus and to acknowl­edge when non­vi­o­lence ortho­doxy some­times just does­n’t have an answer.

And what of peace blog­gers? I real­ly admire Joshua Mic­ah Mar­shall, but he’s not a paci­fist. There’s the excel­lent Gut­less Paci­fist (who’s led me to some very inter­est­ing web­sites over the last year), Bill Connelly/Thoughts on the eve, Stand Down/No War Blog, and a new one for me, The Pick­et Line. But most of us are all point­ing to the same main­stream news arti­cles, with the same Iraq War focus.

If the web had start­ed in the ear­ly 1970s, there would have been lots of inter­est­ing pub­lish­ing projects and blogs grow­ing out the activist com­mu­ni­ties. Younger peo­ple today are using the inter­net to spon­sor inter­est­ing gath­er­ings and using sites like Meet­up to build con­nec­tions, but I don’t see com­mu­ni­ties built around peace the way they did in the ear­ly 1970s. There are few peo­ple build­ing a life – hope, friends, work – around pacifism.

Has “paci­fism” become ossi­fied as its own in-group dog­ma of a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion of activists? What links can we build with cur­rent move­ments? How can we deep­en and expand what we mean by non­vi­o­lence so that it relates to the world out­side our tiny organizations?

American Spies and Blood for Oil

January 15, 1999

Sad­dam Hus­sein was right: the U.N. teams inspect­ing Iraq did con­tain U.S. spies. His expul­sion of the teams was legit­i­mate, and the U.S. bomb­ing that fol­lowed was farce.

Karl Marx once wrote: “Hegel remarks some­where that all facts and per­son­ages of great impor­tance in world his­to­ry occur, as it were, twice. He for­got to add: the first time as tragedy, the sec­ond as farce.” We’re see­ing that today, with each suc­ces­sive mil­i­tary action by the U.S. against Iraq becom­ing ever more trans­par­ent and ridiculous.

Per­haps you haven’t heard the news. It was con­ve­nient­ly released the day before Pres­i­dent Clin­ton’s Sen­ate impeach­ment tri­al was to begin and the major Amer­i­can news net­works did­n’t give it much atten­tion. They were too busy with seg­ments on how the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Jus­tice designed his own robes. With hooks like fash­ion and sex attend­ing the impeach­ment tri­al, how could they be blamed for under-reporting more Iraq news.

But on Jan­u­ary 7th, the New York Times con­firmed rumors that Unit­ed States plant­ed spies on the Unit­ed Nations: “Unit­ed States offi­cials said on Wednes­day that Amer­i­can spies had worked under­cov­er on teams of Unit­ed Nations arms inspec­tors fer­ret­ing out secret Iraqi weapons pro­grams.” The Wash­ing­ton Post and Boston Globe fur­ther report­ed that the oper­a­tion was aimed at Sad­dam Hus­sein him­self. NBC News report­ed that U.N. com­mu­ni­ca­tion equip­ment was used by U.S. intel­li­gence to pass along inter­cept­ed Iraqi messages.

This is exact­ly what Sad­dam Hus­sein has been charg­ing the U.N. teams with. He has long claimed that the teams, run by the Unit­ed Nations Spe­cial Com­mis­sion or UNSCOM, were full of “Amer­i­can spies and agents.” It was for this rea­son that he denied the inspec­tors access to sen­si­tive sites. And it was this refusal that prompt­ed Pres­i­dent Clin­ton to attack Iraq last month.

So what’s going on here? Senior U.S. offi­cials told NBC News that the main tar­gets of last mon­th’s attack weren’t mil­i­tary but eco­nom­ic. The cruise mis­siles weren’t aimed at any alleged nuclear or bio­log­i­cal weapons fac­to­ries but instead at the oil fields. Specif­i­cal­ly, one of the main tar­gets was the Bas­ra oil refin­ing facil­i­ties in south­ern Iraq.

In a sep­a­rate arti­cle, NBC quot­ed Fad­hil Cha­l­abi, an oil indus­try ana­lyst at the Cen­ter for Glob­al Ener­gy Stud­ies in Lon­don, as say­ing Iraq’s oil pro­duc­ing neight­bors are “hop­ing that Iraq’s oil instal­la­tions will be destroyed as a result of Amer­i­can air strikes. Then the [U.N.-mandated] oil-for food pro­gram would be par­a­lyzed and the mar­ket would improve by the dis­ap­pear­ance of Iraqi oil altogether.”

Since the start of the Gulf War, Iraq has pro­duced relatively-little oil because of a com­bi­na­tion of the U.N. sanc­tions and an infra­struc­ture destroyed by years of war. A report by the Unit­ed States Ener­gy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion back in the sum­mer of 1997 stat­ed Iraq’s per cap­i­tal Gross Nation­al Prod­uct was at lev­els not seen since the 1940s.

Sau­di Ara­bia and Kuwait have picked up this slack in pro­duc­tion and made out like ban­dits. Before the Gulf War, Sau­di Ara­bia was only allowed to pump 5.4 mil­lions bar­rels a day under it’s OPEC quo­ta. Today it pro­duces 8 mil­lion bar­rels a day, a fifty per­cent increase that trans­lates into bil­lions of dol­lars a year in prof­it. If the sanc­tions against Iraq were lift­ed, Sau­di pro­duc­tion would once more have to be lim­it­ed and the Anglo-American oil com­pa­nies run­ning the fields would lose ten bil­lion dol­lars a year in revenue.

t’s time to stop kid­ding our­selves. This is a war over mon­ey. The U.S. and Britain are get­ting rich off of Sau­di Ara­bi­a’s increased oil pro­duc­tion and don’t want any­one muscling in on their oil prof­its. It is in the eco­nom­ic inter­est of the U.S. and Britain to main­tain Iraqi sanc­tions indef­i­nite­ly and their for­eign pol­i­cy seems to be to set off peri­od­ic crises with Iraq. France and Rus­sia mean­while both stand to get lucra­tive oil con­tracts with a post-sanctions Iraq so they rou­tine­ly denounce any bomb­ing raids and just as rou­tine­ly call for a lift­ing of sanctions.

Sad­dam Hus­sein is also mak­ing out in the cur­rent state of affairs. A economically-healthy Iraqi pop­u­la­tion would­n’t put up with his tyran­ny. He cur­rent­ly rules Iraq like a mob boss, siphon­ing off what oil prof­its there are to pay for fan­cy cars and pres­i­den­tial palaces. He gets to look tough in front of the TV cam­eras and then retreats to safe under­ground bunkers when the bombs start falling on the Iraqi people.

It is time to stop all of the hypocrisy. It is esti­mat­ed that over a mil­lion Iraqis have died as a results of the post-Gulf War sanc­tions. These oil prof­its are blood mon­ey and it is long past time that they end.