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03 March, 2011 Countercurrents.org

Whatever the outcome of the protests, uprisings, and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: the world of oil will be permanently transformed. Consider everything that’s now happening as just the first tremor of an oilquake that will shake our world to its core.

For a century stretching back to the discovery of oil in southwestern Persia before World War I, Western powers have repeatedly intervened in the Middle East to ensure the survival of authoritarian governments devoted to producing petroleum. Without such interventions, the expansion of Western economies after World War II and the current affluence of industrialized societies would be inconceivable.

Here, however, is the news that should be on the front pages of newspapers everywhere: That old oil order is dying, and with its demise we will see the end of cheap and readily accessible petroleum — forever.

Ending the Petroleum Age

Let’s try to take the measure of what exactly is at risk in the current tumult. As a start, there is almost no way to give full justice to the critical role played by Middle Eastern oil in the world’s energy equation. Although cheap coal fueled the original Industrial Revolution, powering railroads, steamships, and factories, cheap oil has made possible the automobile, the aviation industry, suburbia, mechanized agriculture, and an explosion of economic globalization. And while a handful of major oil-producing areas launched the Petroleum Age — the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, Romania, the area around Baku (in what was then the Czarist Russian empire), and the Dutch East Indies — it’s been the Middle East that has quenched the world’s thirst for oil since World War II.

In 2009, the most recent year for which such data is available, BP reported that suppliers in the Middle East and North Africa jointly produced 29 million barrels per day, or 36% of the world’s total oil supply — and even this doesn’t begin to suggest the region’s importance to the petroleum economy. More than any other area, the Middle East has funneled its production into export markets to satisfy the energy cravings of oil-importing powers like the United States, China, Japan, and the European Union (EU). We’re talking 20 million barrels funneled into export markets every day. Compare that to Russia, the world’s top individual producer, at seven million barrels in exportable oil, the continent of Africa at six million, and South America at a mere one million.

As it happens, Middle Eastern producers will be even more important in the years to come because they possess an estimated two-thirds of remaining untapped petroleum reserves. According to recent projections by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Middle East and North Africa will jointly provide approximately 43% of the world’s crude petroleum supply by 2035 (up from 37% in 2007), and will produce an even greater share of the world’s exportable oil.

To put the matter baldly: The world economy requires an increasing supply of affordable petroleum. The Middle East alone can provide that supply. That’s why Western governments have long supported “stable” authoritarian regimes throughout the region, regularly supplying and training their security forces. Now, this stultifying, petrified order, whose greatest success was producing oil for the world economy, is disintegrating. Don’t count on any new order (or disorder) to deliver enough cheap oil to preserve the Petroleum Age.

To appreciate why this will be so, a little history lesson is in order.

The Iranian Coup

After the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) discovered oil in Iran (then known as Persia) in 1908, the British government sought to exercise imperial control over the Persian state. A chief architect of this drive was First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. Having ordered the conversion of British warships from coal to oil before World War I and determined to put a significant source of oil under London’s control, Churchill orchestrated the nationalization of APOC in 1914. On the eve of World War II, then-Prime Minister Churchill oversaw the removal of Persia’s pro-German ruler, Shah Reza Pahlavi, and the ascendancy of his 21-year-old son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Though prone to extolling his (mythical) ties to past Persian empires, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was a willing tool of the British. His subjects, however, proved ever less willing to tolerate subservience to imperial overlords in London. In 1951, democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq won parliamentary support for the nationalization of APOC, by then renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The move was wildly popular in Iran but caused panic in London. In 1953, to save this great prize, British leaders infamously conspired with President Dwight Eisenhower‘s administration in Washington and the CIA to engineer a coup d’état that deposed Mossadeq and brought Shah Pahlavi back from exile in Rome, a story recently told with great panache by Stephen Kinzer in All the Shah’s Men.

Until he was overthrown in 1979, the Shah exercised ruthless and dictatorial control over Iranian society, thanks in part to lavish U.S. military and police assistance. First he crushed the secular left, the allies of Mossadeq, and then the religious opposition, headed from exile by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Given their brutal exposure to police and prison gear supplied by the United States, the shah’s opponents came to loathe his monarchy and Washington in equal measure. In 1979, of course, the Iranian people took to the streets, the Shah was overthrown, and Ayatollah Khomeini came to power.

Much can be learned from these events that led to the current impasse in U.S.-Iranian relations. The key point to grasp, however, is that Iranian oil production never recovered from the revolution of 1979-1980.

Between 1973 and 1979, Iran had achieved an output of nearly six million barrels of oil per day, one of the highest in the world. After the revolution, AIOC (rechristened British Petroleum, or later simply BP) was nationalized for a second time, and Iranian managers again took over the company’s operations. To punish Iran’s new leaders, Washington imposed tough trade sanctions, hindering the state oil company’s efforts to obtain foreign technology and assistance. Iranian output plunged to two million barrels per day and, even three decades later, has made it back to only slightly more than four million barrels per day, even though the country possesses the world’s second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Dreams of the Invader

Iraq followed an eerily similar trajectory. Under Saddam Hussein, the state-owned Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) produced up to 2.8 million barrels per day until 1991, when the First Gulf War with the United States and ensuing sanctions dropped output to half a million barrels daily. Though by 2001 production had again risen to almost 2.5 million barrels per day, it never reached earlier heights. As the Pentagon geared up for an invasion of Iraq in late 2002, however, Bush administration insiders and well-connected Iraqi expatriates spoke dreamily of a coming golden age in which foreign oil companies would be invited back into the country, the national oil company would be privatized, and production would reach never before seen levels.

Who can forget the effort the Bush administration and its officials in Baghdad put into making their dream come true? After all, the first American soldiers to reach the Iraqi capital secured the Oil Ministry building, even as they allowed Iraqi looters free rein in the rest of the city. L. Paul Bremer III, the proconsul later chosen by President Bush to oversee the establishment of a new Iraq, brought in a team of American oil executives to supervise the privatization of the country’s oil industry, while the U.S. Department of Energy confidently predicted in May 2003 that Iraqi production would rise to 3.4 million barrels per day in 2005, 4.1 million barrels by 2010, and 5.6 million by 2020.

None of this, of course, came to pass. For many ordinary Iraqis, the U.S. decision to immediately head for the Oil Ministry building was an instantaneous turning point that transformed possible support for the overthrow of a tyrant into anger and hostility. Bremer’s drive to privatize the state oil company similarly produced a fierce nationalist backlash among Iraqi oil engineers, who essentially scuttled the plan. Soon enough, a full-scale Sunni insurgency broke out. Oil output quickly fell, averaging only 2.0 million barrels daily between 2003 and 2009. By 2010, it had finally inched back up to the 2.5 million barrel mark — a far cry from those dreamed of 4.1 million barrels.

One conclusion isn’t hard to draw: Efforts by outsiders to control the political order in the Middle East for the sake of higher oil output will inevitably generate countervailing pressures that result in diminished production. The United States and other powers watching the uprisings, rebellions, and protests blazing through the Middle East should be wary indeed: whatever their political or religious desires, local populations always turn out to harbor a fierce, passionate hostility to foreign domination and, in a crunch, will choose independence and the possibility of freedom over increased oil output.

The experiences of Iran and Iraq may not in the usual sense be comparable to those of Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Oman, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen. However, all of them (and other countries likely to get swept up into the tumult) exhibit some elements of the same authoritarian political mold and all are connected to the old oil order. Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Oman, and Sudan are oil producers; Egypt and Jordan guard vital oil pipelines and, in Egypt’s case, a crucial canal for the transport of oil; Bahrain and Yemen as well as Oman occupy strategic points along major oil sealanes. All have received substantial U.S. military aid and/or housed important U.S. military bases. And, in all of these countries, the chant is the same: “The people want the regime to fall.”

Two of these regimes have already fallen, three are tottering, and others are at risk. The impact on global oil prices has been swift and merciless: on February 24th, the delivery price for North Brent crude, an industry benchmark, nearly reached $115 per barrel, the highest it’s been since the global economic meltdown of October 2008. West Texas Intermediate, another benchmark crude, briefly and ominously crossed the $100 threshold.

Why the Saudis are Key

So far, the most important Middle Eastern producer of all, Saudi Arabia, has not exhibited obvious signs of vulnerability, or prices would have soared even higher. However, the royal house of neighboring Bahrain is already in deep trouble; tens of thousands of protesters — more than 20% of its half million people — have repeatedly taken to the streets, despite the threat of live fire, in a movement for the abolition of the autocratic government of King Hamad ibn Isa al-Khalifa, and its replacement with genuine democratic rule.

These developments are especially worrisome to the Saudi leadership as the drive for change in Bahrain is being directed by that country’s long-abused Shiite population against an entrenched Sunni ruling elite. Saudi Arabia also contains a large, though not — as in Bahrain — a majority Shiite population that has also suffered discrimination from Sunni rulers. There is anxiety in Riyadh that the explosion in Bahrain could spill into the adjacent oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia — the one area of the kingdom where Shiites do form the majority — producing a major challenge to the regime. Partly to forestall any youth rebellion, 87-year-old King Abdullah has just promised $10 billion in grants, part of a $36 billion package of changes, to help young Saudi citizens get married and obtain homes and apartments.

Even if rebellion doesn’t reach Saudi Arabia, the old Middle Eastern oil order cannot be reconstructed. The result is sure to be a long-term decline in the future availability of exportable petroleum.

Three-quarters of the 1.7 million barrels of oil Libya produces daily were quickly taken off the market as turmoil spread in that country. Much of it may remain off-line and out of the market for the indefinite future. Egypt and Tunisia can be expected to restore production, modest in both countries, to pre-rebellion levels soon, but are unlikely to embrace the sorts of major joint ventures with foreign firms that might boost production while diluting local control. Iraq, whose largest oil refinery was badly damaged by insurgents only last week, and Iran exhibit no signs of being able to boost production significantly in the years ahead.

The critical player is Saudi Arabia, which just increased production to compensate for Libyan losses on the global market. But don’t expect this pattern to hold forever. Assuming the royal family survives the current round of upheavals, it will undoubtedly have to divert more of its daily oil output to satisfy rising domestic consumption levels and fuel local petrochemical industries that could provide a fast-growing, restive population with better-paying jobs.

From 2005 to 2009, Saudis used about 2.3 million barrels daily, leaving about 8.3 million barrels for export. Only if Saudi Arabia continues to provide at least this much oil to international markets could the world even meet its anticipated low-end oil needs. This is not likely to occur. The Saudi royals have expressed reluctance to raise output much above 10 million barrels per day, fearing damage to their remaining fields and so a decline in future income for their many progeny. At the same time, rising domestic demand is expected to consume an ever-increasing share of Saudi Arabia’s net output. In April 2010, the chief executive officer of state-owned Saudi Aramco, Khalid al-Falih, predicted that domestic consumption could reach a staggering 8.3 million barrels per day by 2028, leaving only a few million barrels for export and ensuring that, if the world can’t switch to other energy sources, there will be petroleum starvation.

In other words, if one traces a reasonable trajectory from current developments in the Middle East, the handwriting is already on the wall. Since no other area is capable of replacing the Middle East as the world’s premier oil exporter, the oil economy will shrivel — and with it, the global economy as a whole.

Consider the recent rise in the price of oil just a faint and early tremor heralding the oilquake to come. Oil won’t disappear from international markets, but in the coming decades it will never reach the volumes needed to satisfy projected world demand, which means that, sooner rather than later, scarcity will become the dominant market condition. Only the rapid development of alternative sources of energy and a dramatic reduction in oil consumption might spare the world the most severe economic repercussions.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A documentary film version of his previous book, “Blood and Oil,” is available from the Media Education Foundation. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Klare explains how resource scarcity is driving protest and much else on our planet, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2011 Michael T. Klare

 

03 March, 2011

AFP

ROME (AFP) – – World food prices have hit record highs and oil price spikes could push them even higher, the UN food agency warned on Thursday, as increasing violence in Libya sent jitters through commodity markets.

The Food Price Index, which monitors average monthly price changes for a variety of key staples, rose to 236 points in February from 231 points in January, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said.

It was the highest level since FAO began monitoring prices in 1990.

“Unexpected oil price spikes could further exacerbate an already precarious situation in food markets,” David Hallam, director of the Rome-based FAO’s trade and market division, was quoted as saying in a statement.

“This adds even more uncertainty concerning the price outlook just as plantings for crops in some of the major growing regions are about to start.”

FAO economists warned that food prices were likely to remain high until the outlook for this year’s harvests is known by around April.

Crude prices dipped on Thursday after pushing higher in nervous trading amid fighting in oil-rich Libya between Moamer Kadhafi loyalists and rebel forces.

Brent North Sea crude for delivery in April fell 63 cents to $115.72 per barrel. New York’s light sweet crude for April, known as West Texas Intermediate (WTI), shed 61 cents to $101.61.

Prices jumped on Wednesday by nearly three dollars in New York.

“Persistent uncertainty in the region continues to support fears of contagion,” British bank Barclays Capital said in a report.

“Lost output from countries like Libya and the increasing likelihood of a pushback in foreign investment is set to support longer-term prices,” it said.

Analysts at Germany’s Commerzbank warned: “There is still a risk of the unrest spreading to other oil producing countries of the region.”

The International Energy Agency said oil exports from Libya had been cut by between 850,000 and one million barrels per day, out of a total of 1.6 million barrels sent mostly to European buyers before the uprising.

Loyalist attacks on the strategic Libyan oil port of Brega, home to major petroleum operations, added to concern, while popular unrest also affects the Arabian Peninsula with protests in Bahrain, Oman and Yemen.

Higher oil prices affect all aspects of the food production chain, from fertiliser to transport.

The FAO has warned that rising food prices are in turn driving unrest around the world, including recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.

Aid agencies have called on the international community to take urgent action to put an end to the recent food price volatility.

The G20 group of leading world economies has vowed to take action.

The FAO said the February increase in its Food Price Index was the eighth consecutive monthly rise, with dairy prices up 4.0 percent from January and cereal prices up 3.7 percent due to increased maize demand and lower supply.

The UN food agency said that this was due to “larger use of maize for ethanol production in the United States” and “statistical adjustments to China’s historical supply and demand balance for maize.”

Meat prices meanwhile rose 2.0 percent from January, while the price of oils and fats rose only marginally and sugar fell slightly.

A breakdown of Thursday’s FAO data showed that in China prices for rice and wheat flour stabilised after government assurances on reserves but they remained 23 percent and 16 percent above their levels for February 2010.

The data also showed that coarse grain prices have started to increase in Africa, while in South America wheat and maize are also trending higher.

In the former Soviet Union, wheat prices stabilised or decreased.

© 2011 AFP

 

 

 

 

 

02 March, 2011

Countercurrents.org

As workers all over the U.S. become inspired by the massive demonstrations in Wisconsin, a dangerous idea is being voiced by some working-class allies that could unravel it all. The threat lies in the following argument: to protect the bargaining rights of unions, state and city workers must be prepared to make concessions over wages, benefits, etc. This line of reasoning is not only false to the core, it’s suicidal.

Take for example a recent New York Times article on the battle in Wisconsin:

“It is not yet clear whether Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin will succeed in his quest to strip public employee unions of most of their bargaining rights. But by simply pressing the issue, he has already won major concessions that would have been unthinkable just a month ago.”

This is extraordinary: The Governor makes a radically anti-union threat, and some union leaders are ready to give him EVERYTHING, just not the kitchen sink.

The article continues:

“Some of Wisconsin’s major public sector unions, faced with what they see as a threat to their existence, have decided to accept concessions that they had been vigorously fighting…translating into a pay cut of around 7 percent…But Mr. Walker is not settling for that. He said that those concessions were “an interesting development, because a week ago they said that’s not acceptable.” (February 28, 2011).

So the anti-union Governor is making the unacceptable acceptable, merely by voicing a threat. If this precedent were established, what future do unions have? Especially when one considers that state budget deficits are projected to continue for years.

Imagine the following scenario: A war is declared by a foreign army and the defending General responds by announcing to the invaders, “I will only fight one battle to preserve this particular parcel of land (bargaining rights), and will wave the white flag over all other territory (wages, benefits, etc.).

Of course the foreign army would conclude “the enemy is already defeated!” And fight without mercy for total victory.

This is the situation in Wisconsin and other states. War has been declared on unions and some labor leaders are pretending that they can offer concessions to appease their attackers. Unfortunately, this strategy has failed for years, and is in fact why the right wing felt confident enough to officially declare war.

Every time unions agree to lower wages and benefits — as they have been doing for years — they weaken themselves internally, thus opening the way for further, deeper attacks. The right-wing attack on bargaining rights did not appear from nowhere; it was the result of years of concessionary bargaining, which inevitably leads to worker demoralization within the union. An army which concedes every battle will be composed of demoralized soldiers.

The union policy of concessionary bargaining is the policy of committing slow suicide, and after years of providing their executioners with nooses, some labor leaders act stunned when their hanging is announced. They believed that they could befriend the hangman, as long as they didn’t create too much trouble by aggressive protesting or well-planned strikes.

But hangmen are hangmen, and they must be treated accordingly.

Labor unions must mobilize the entire community in every state to demand “No Concessions” for all public workers. The fight to save collective bargaining can only be won if workers believe that collective bargaining will save their wages and benefits; the two cannot be separated.

Contrary to what the mainstream media and politicians constantly tells us, the general public would support such a fight. A recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that “Those surveyed said they opposed, 56 percent to 37 percent, cutting the pay or benefits of public employees to reduce deficits.” (March 1, 2011).

The battle in Wisconsin proves that private-sector workers do not hate their public-sector brothers and sisters, they passionately support them.

How can labor unions mobilize the general public towards a pro-worker solution to the state budget deficits? By exposing another media lie: that Americans are against ALL tax increases. In fact, the same pollsters discovered in 2009 that 74 percent of respondents “support higher taxes on the rich.” (April 6, 2009).

Labor unions must place this demand at the head of their campaign to save collective bargaining rights and workers wages and benefits. Workers will be further encouraged to fight for their wages and benefits when they see that there is a solution to the budget crisis.

Rose Ann DeMoro of National Nurses United agrees:

“So it’s time for all of us to say it loud: No More Cuts in Public Sector Pay, Pensions, or Health Benefits; Balance Budgets By Closing Corporate Tax Loopholes, Restoring Fair Share Taxes on Corporations and Wealthy Individuals; Guarantee Retirement Security and Healthcare for All.”

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org) He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

 

08 March, 2011 WSWS.org

Officially, the Obama administration and Washington’s allies are still drawing up “contingency plans” to intervene in the Libyan crisis. In reality, intensive military and intelligence operations are underway within and around the oil-rich country.

Under the hypocritical banner of stopping “unacceptable violence” against the Libyan people, the US and the European powers are seeking to install a regime in Tripoli that will be even more subordinate to their interests than Muammar Gaddafi’s has proven to be over the past decade.

Unlike its response to the revolutionary movements in Tunisia and Egypt—Obama did not once call for the ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali or Hosni Mubarak and is supporting the retention of their regimes headed by new personnel—the US government has openly called for Gaddafi’s removal.

Washington is doing so in the name of democracy and humanitarian concerns even as it backs, and continues to arm, anti-democratic regimes across the region, notably in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen, while they use police-state repression and violence to suppress popular uprisings.

The US is intent on working with top-level defectors from the Gaddafi regime, including those in the opposition interim government in Benghazi, to establish a puppet administration in Libya that will not only protect the substantial oil and gas interests of the US and other Western countries, but also provide a staging post for operations against the revolutionary struggles that are continuing in neighbouring countries.

An indication of the scale of the US-led operation was given by Thom Shanker in the New York Times on Monday. Citing administration officials, he reported: “The latest military force to draw within striking distance of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, is the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard two amphibious assault ships, the Kearsarge and the Ponce. The unit provides a complete air, sea and land force that can project its power quickly and across hundreds of miles, either from flat-decked ships in the Mediterranean Sea or onto a small beachhead on land.

“In this task force are Harrier jump-jet warplanes, which not only can bomb, strafe and engage in dogfights, but can also carry surveillance pods for monitoring military action on the ground in Libya; attack helicopters; transport aircraft—both cargo helicopters and the fast, long-range Osprey, whose rotors let it lift straight up, then tilt forward like propellers to ferry Marines, doctors, refugees or supplies across the desert—landing craft that can cross the surf anywhere along Libya’s long coastline; and about 400 ground combat troops of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines.”

In addition, he explained, “ample” US planes were based in Europe to strike “valued government or military targets” in Libya, and the aircraft carrier Enterprise and its strike group were “carefully sailing” up the Red Sea, bound for the Mediterranean. Other options being prepared included inserting Special Operations teams to assist the opposition forces, as was done in both Afghanistan and Iraq before the US-led invasions of 2001 and 2003.

Shanker said the expedition was initially being presented as a humanitarian one, helping to airlift international refugees from Libya, but had an unmistakeable objective. “The flotilla can be seen as a modern-day example of ‘gunboat diplomacy’—intended to embolden rebels and shake the confidence of loyalist forces and mercenaries, perhaps even inspiring a palace coup.”

Speaking from the Oval Office in the White House yesterday, President Barack Obama delivered his most explicit statement yet about using military force to oust the Gaddafi regime. He declared: “We’ve got NATO, as we speak, consulting in Brussels around a wide range of potential options, including potential military options, in response to the violence that continues to take place inside of Libya.”

Addressing reporters after a meeting with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, he said the two countries “stand shoulder to shoulder” in sending “a very clear message to the Libyan people that we will stand with them.” The Australian government had already publicly called for military intervention, via the imposition of a “no-fly zone”.

Behind the scenes, US and European military and intelligence operations are proceeding apace, as evidenced by the embarrassing detention of eight members of the UK’s Special Air Service (SAS) in Benghazi last Friday, and the earlier capture of Dutch marines by forces loyal to the Gaddafi regime.

Robert Fisk, the Independent’s veteran Middle East correspondent, yesterday reported that US AWACS surveillance aircraft had been flying around Libya, tracking Libyan planes, including Gaddafi’s private jet, for several days. On Sunday night, Al Jazeera television broadcast recordings made by American aircraft to Maltese air traffic control requesting details of Gaddafi’s plane. On Monday, NATO announced that the AWACS mission had been extended to 24 hours a day.

Fisk also reported that the US had asked Saudi Arabia to supply arms to the opposition council in Benghazi, starting with anti-tank rockets and mortars, and then ground-to-air missiles to shoot down Libyan fighter-bombers. Fisk noted that “their assistance would allow Washington to disclaim any military involvement in the supply chain—even though the arms would be American and paid for by the Saudis.”

The Saudi royal family has a track record in this regard. During the 1980s it was involved in the illegal Iran-Contra operation by the Reagan administration to secretly arm rebels in Nicaragua, and it helped the US arm Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration’s request to the Saudis is extremely revealing. The White House is working hand-in-glove with its despotic ally—even as the Saudi monarchy bans all demonstrations in advance of planned “day of rage” protests—in order to protect strategic US military, diplomatic and oil interests in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa.

Washington has been reluctant to openly intervene militarily in Libya, which could require a full-scale invasion, for fear of triggering a popular backlash across the region and in Libya itself. There is deep hostility to the neo-colonial role of the US, both for its occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and its sponsorship of all the Middle East’s repressive regimes, from Egypt to the Gulf emirates.

For that reason, and to attempt to give a fig leaf of legality to its intervention, the Obama administration has asked its European allies to take the lead, publicly at least, via NATO and the European Union. Reports of Libyan military attacks on civilians are being used to justify a more direct military assault, possibly commencing with a no-fly zone, which would require air strikes on Libyan targets.

Yesterday, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said attacks against civilians in Libya may amount to “crimes against humanity,” making it difficult for the world to stand “idly by”. Shortly afterward, British Foreign Secretary William Hague told the British Parliament there were “credible reports” that Libyan government forces had used helicopter gunships against civilians. Hague said Britain and some other countries were working “on a contingency basis” on a United Nations Security Council resolution allowing for a no-fly zone.

As revealed by the abortive British SAS operation, the European powers are also spearheading efforts to liaise with the Gaddafi defectors who led the formation of a self-proclaimed Libyan National Council in Benghazi last Saturday, declaring itself the sole representative body for all of Libya. Despite the setback of the SAS fiasco—it appears that the Benghazi leadership objected to the too naked involvement of foreign troops—Defence Secretary Liam Fox stated that “a small British diplomatic team” was in Benghazi.

On Sunday, the French government hailed the creation of the national council. Paris “pledges support for the principles that motivate it and the goals it has set itself,” French Foreign Ministry spokesperson Bernard Valero said. The next day, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Farttini said Italy—which ruled Libya brutally from 1912 to 1943—had begun discreet talks with the council, boasting that Italy had better contacts in Libya than most countries.

Significantly, one of the first actions of the Benghazi council was to assure the Western powers that it would honour all contracts to supply oil from the east of Libya, where most of the country’s oil reserves are concentred. Saad al-Ferjani, the council member managing economic affairs, told Al Arabiya television on Sunday: “We will cover all of our contracts, they cannot be changed.”

This statement exemplifies the pro-Western and capitalist character of the embryonic regime, whose leading public figures were mostly all serving in the Gaddafi regime until very recently. They include former justice minister Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil, who chairs the council, General Abdul Fattah Younis al Obaidi, the former Libyan interior minister and head of Gaddafi’s special forces, Ali Essawi, a former ambassador to India, who heads foreign affairs, and Omar Hariri, another former military officer, who was appointed head of the military.

In another clear statement of the council’s orientation, Jeleil said it would like to be recognised by the Western powers. He told Al Jazeera: “There are official contacts with European and Arab [countries].” Worried that Gaddafi would politically exploit the council’s collaboration with the US and its allies, Jeleil said it was opposed to any foreign military intervention. However, he has backed the imposition of a no-fly zone.

Because of their leading roles in the Gaddafi regime, these figures have many intimate military, intelligence, financial and diplomatic connections with the US and its allies. Over the past decade, Gaddafi provided intelligence to the West, entered into lucrative deals with global oil companies and invested an estimated $65 billion in Europe and the US, via the Libyan Investment Authority alone.

Yesterday, Gaddafi, while accusing his Benghazi-based opponents of aiding and abetting “foreign interference” and the return of “colonialism” to Libya, issued a thinly-veiled plea for a renewed accommodation with the imperialist powers. He invoked his regime’s collaboration in the “war on terrorism” and in preventing African refugees from entering Europe. “Libya plays a vital role in regional peace and world peace. We are an important partner in fighting Al Qaeda,” he stated. “There are millions of blacks who could come to the Mediterranean to cross to France and Italy, and Libya plays a role in security in the Mediterranean.”

On the ground in Libya, fighting continued yesterday between pro- and anti-Gaddafi forces, with both sides focussing on vital oil-related facilities in the Gulf of Sirte and west of Tripoli. The mainstream media, which is reporting the clashes almost exclusively from the Benghazi side, has begun emphasising the incapacity of the opposition forces to match the firepower of Gaddafi’s forces, thereby laying the basis for more open military intervention.

 

 

07 March, 2011

Michaelmoore.com

America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here’s what I learned: Money doesn’t grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don’t pay their fair share of taxes, the state can’t function. The schools can’t produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs. That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.

The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It’s part of the Big Lie. It’s one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can’t win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.

The truth is, there’s lots of money to go around. LOTS. It’s just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn’t work, they’ve got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:

1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day – this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart — because you — yes, you, too! — might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep your head down, your nose to the grindstone, don’t rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.

2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it’s Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin’ awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. “Here! Take our money! We don’t care. We’ll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!”

The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1).

Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant know as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone tells us America is broke and broken. It’s just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!

So how do we get this? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

Thank you, Wisconsin. You have made people realize this was our last best chance to grab the final thread of what was left of who we are as Americans. For three weeks you have stood in the cold, slept on the floor, skipped out of town to Illinois — whatever it took, you have done it, and one thing is for certain: Madison is only the beginning. The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn’t have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury. They couldn’t be satiated by simply removing millions of jobs and shipping them overseas to exploit the poor elsewhere. No, they had to have more – something more than all the riches in the world. They had to have our soul. They had to strip us of our dignity. They had to shut us up and shut us down so that we could not even sit at a table with them and bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours sleep so he or she can do their job — their $19,000 a year job. That’s how much some rookie pilots on commuter airlines make, maybe even the rookie pilots flying people here to Madison. But he’s stopped trying to get better pay. All he asks is that he doesn’t have to sleep in his car between shifts at O’Hare airport. That’s how despicably low we have sunk. The wealthy couldn’t be content with just paying this man $19,000 a year. They wanted to take away his sleep. They wanted to demean and dehumanize him. After all, he’s just another slob.

And that, my friends, is Corporate America’s fatal mistake. But trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement — a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us. Many people in the media don’t understand this. They say they were caught off guard about Egypt, never saw it coming. Now they act surprised and flummoxed about why so many hundreds of thousands have come to Madison over the last three weeks during brutal winter weather. “Why are they all standing out there in the cold? I mean there was that election in November and that was supposed to be that!

“There’s something happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you…?”

America ain’t broke! The only thing that’s broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it’s one person, one vote, and it’s the thing the rich hate most about America — because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!

Madison, do not retreat. We are with you. We will win together.

Michael Moore is an Academy-Award winning filmmaker and best-selling author. Follow Michael Moore on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MMFlint

 

 

02 March, 2011

Democracy Now!

Forces aligned with Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi have launched new assaults to regain control of several towns captured in a popular uprising over the past two weeks. Meanwhile, two U.S. warships have moved through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea toward Libya under orders by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. As talk of potential Western military intervention grows, we speak to Horace Campbell, a professor of African American studies and political science at Syracuse University.

AMY GOODMAN: Fierce battles are raging in Libya. Forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi have launched new assaults in an attempt to regain control of several towns that had been captured in a popular uprising over the past two weeks. Earlier today, Gaddafi addressed a small group of supporters in Tripoli in his third televised appearance. He continued to deny the uprising, saying opposition to him is led by terrorists and al-Qaeda operatives.

Meanwhile, two U.S. warships have moved through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean after orders by Defense Secretary Robert Gates that they should move closer to Libya.

For more, we’re joined by Horace Campbell, professor of African American studies and political science at Syracuse University. He has written extensively on African politics. He’s joining us now by Democracy Now! video stream from his home.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Campbell. Your assessment of the situation in Libya?

HORACE CAMPBELL: Good morning, and thank you very much for inviting us to discuss the delicate stage of the revolutionary situation in Libya. It is a situation that is maturing with very deliberate and great dangers for the revolutionaries. The dangers arise from the number of areas: firstly, the massacres that have been carried out by Gaddafi himself and the clique around Gaddafi; secondly, the dangers that are coming from the drumbeats for Western military intervention; and thirdly, the kind of xenophobia and anti-African, anti-black sentiment that is being stirred up among sectors of the Libyans who are rising up for freedom.

So, in this context, it is very important, for those who have solidarity with the Libyan uprising, with those fighting for freedom in Libya, to support the people in Libya and at the same time denounce any attempts by the Western forces, especially elements within the administration in the United States and Great Britain, for military intervention. We have seen, from the testimony yesterday from the Senate Armed Services Committee, that the chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is very uncomfortable with military intervention. Gates is uncomfortable with military intervention. And the head of the U.S. Central Command said that a no-fly zone is a prelude to military activity. And then, on the other hand, we have John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton and those forces calling for a no-fly zone and military intervention.

It is up to the peace and justice movement in this country to stand with one voice to say that at this point any kind of humanitarian intervention must be through the United Nations and to support those who are suffering at the borders and those who are suffering inside of Libya. We do not need military intervention by Britain, United States or any forces of NATO at this present moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Campbell, when you hear “forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi,” I don’t know if that’s actually an accurate term, because of the number of people he is paying to do this, to fight the pro-democracy groups. But can you talk about the mercenaries and where they come from and why they would support Muammar Gaddafi or work for him?

HORACE CAMPBELL: Well, I am going to be very careful of the use of the term “mercenaries,” because every government that say they have the control over state power use the instruments of the state to employ persons to fight for that state. So the fact that the United States of America employs other nationals to fight their wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, those persons are not called “mercenaries.” So I want to be very careful in the use of this term “mercenaries.”

Gaddafi and his children have access to billions of dollars. There are many citizens of countries all over the world, from the Middle East and from Africa, who have been in Libya, especially those from Africa who were aligned with forces like Charles Taylor from Liberia, Foday Sankoh from the Sierra Leone, the elements from Chad, where Gaddafi has been supporting for many years. Added to this, there are a number of Africans who were kept prisoners in Libya, who were caught trying to escape to Europe because they believed in freedom of movement of labor, just as in the international economy we have the freedom of capital. Now, many of these persons have been caught in this battle. And some Africans who are being paid by Gaddafi are called “mercenaries.”

Now, one has to do intense work among the governments of these states to do the diplomatic work to extricate their citizens who are caught in this fighting. And one has to also, at the same time, do very clear, deliberate work with the people fighting for freedom in Libya, that they do not, in their fight for freedom, whip up any kind of xenophobia against Africans, as if Libya is not an African country, or what we would say, against black Africans who are caught in this crossfire of Gaddafi manipulating citizens who are supposed to fight to keep him and his family in power.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Campbell, we’re also joined by Elizabeth Tan, deputy regional representative for UNHCR in Cairo, Egypt, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. The refugee crisis is getting more intense every day, Elizabeth Tan, both on the Tunisian-Libya border and on the Egyptian-Libya border. Can you talk about what is happening now?

ELIZABETH TAN: Yes. The crisis is indeed getting worse by the day in Tunisia. There are thousands and thousands of people stranded there at the border who are trying to get back to their homes. Many of them are from Egypt. There are efforts underway to go and to repatriate them, but the border is extremely congested, and UNHCR is very concerned about the humanitarian situation there. We are, together with the International Organization for Migration, trying to mount an air operation to bring people back to Egypt. There are, of course, a lot of other persons stranded at the border both here in Egypt and even more in Tunisia, people who are desperate to get home, to get away from the situation at the border there, thousands and thousands of people stuck who want to go home.

AMY GOODMAN: How can they best be helped?

ELIZABETH TAN: I think for the—certainly, there is a need to decongest the area around the border in Tunisia. In Egypt, I would say that there is—that the situation is better. There are less people there. And most of the people crossing are Egyptian, so they are directly going to their homes. In Tunisia, UNHCR is providing shelter, and agencies are providing food and trying to set up sanitation facilities there, but I think the main need is really to provide transportation for people to get home.

AMY GOODMAN: And food? How are people getting access to food? And what about word that Muammar Gaddafi’s forces are now moving into the border areas, where people have been able to go freely back and forth until now?

ELIZABETH TAN: I think certainly there are a lot of humanitarian agencies, and the governments of both Egypt and Tunisia are helping the people who are at the borders. In terms of—I am based in Cairo. So, there are no problems of people accessing the border, with the exception of people—refugees and persons of—from sub-Saharan Africa who are stuck in their homes, who are very afraid to move, as the other speaker on your program was mentioning. UNHCR is very concerned about those people. But on the eastern side, otherwise, the access to the border is OK.

AMY GOODMAN: Elizabeth Tan, I want to thank you for being with us, deputy regional representative for the U.N. High Commission on Refugees. She’s speaking to us from Cairo, Egypt.

Also, still with us, Professor Horace Campbell, professor of African American studies at Syracuse University. Professor Campbell, I wanted to read to you from The Guardian newspaper. This is a pseudonym, Muhammad min Libya, who wrote this. But he said, “As the calls for foreign intervention grow, I’d like to send a message to western leaders: Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy. This is a priceless opportunity that has fallen into your laps, it’s a chance for you to improve your image in the eyes of Arabs and Muslims. Don’t mess it up. All your previous programmes to bring the east and the west closer have failed, and some of them have made things even worse. Don’t start something you cannot finish, don’t turn a people’s pure revolution into some curse that will befall everyone. Don’t waste the blood that my friend Ahmed spilt for me,” he writes. He is speaking against intervention, Professor Campbell.

HORACE CAMPBELL: I think that is a sentiment that is seen very clearly from sectors of those who are hungry for freedom in Libya, because any kind of intervention by the United States and NATO forces would send a signal to anti-imperialist forces that the revolution in Libya has been instigated by the West and would throw sentiments in favor of Gaddafi at this moment when he’s carrying out massacres against the people. In fact, I would think that the opportunistic and cynical elements in the military establishment in the United States and Britain, in particular, are calculating that keeping Gaddafi in power longer would be to the benefit of the West, because it would destabilize the revolutionary forces in both Egypt and in Tunisia. And I would think that the concern that is being expressed by Lieberman, McCain and Hillary Clinton is not for the revolution in Libya, but is a concern for oil and for the destabilization of the Egyptian revolution, because of the long-term implications of this revolution for Africa and the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: What about, Professor Campbell, the fact that it is usually referred to as rebellions, uprisings, revolutions that are taking place “in the Arab world”?

HORACE CAMPBELL: Yes. And one of the major challenges is for the people who call themselves progressives to be very careful in their language about this so-called revolution in the Arab world. Libya is on the African continent, long historic ties to Africa. Tunisia is on the African continent. Egypt stands at the headwaters of the Nile River that comes out of Central Africa. All of these states work very hard to be citizens and members of the African community. We only need to look at the African nation—Cup of Nations Cups and to see the role that Tunisia and Egypt plays in African soccer. So, these are African societies. In these African societies, they have citizens who are of an Arab extraction, and many of these people call themselves Arabs. So what we can see is that the revolution in North Africa links the Arab revolution of Arabia and North Africa.

This intersection of Arab and Africa has been positive in the past during the period of Nasser, when Nasser was anti-imperalist. What we have to be very careful about in this period is those who call themselves Arab carry on the arrogance and chauvinism and racism of Western Europeans who look down on Africans. And it is in a revolutionary process that revolutionaries themselves have to have a higher standard of ethics, morality and racial and gender consciousness so that they do not reproduce the hierarchy and racism that looks down on Africans who are called black Africans, because Tunisians, Libyans and Egyptians are also Africans.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Campbell, the issue of Saudi Arabia? We are hearing protests in Yemen, in Oman, in Bahrain, in Jordan. Saudi Arabia, we have heard there have been some strikes, but what about how Saudi Arabia fits into this?

HORACE CAMPBELL: This is the real clincher for the revolutionary process underway. I have been following the writings of Robert Fisk, and Robert Fisk has said that the real challenge will be the extent to which the revolutionary process gets underway in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, like Egypt under Mubarak, like Gaddafi’s police state, like Ben Ali’s police state, these are police states where the political leaders have billions of dollars to repress the people, where the political leaders use the resources of the state to recycle for Western armaments companies. And the leaders of Saudi Arabia are very conservative, oppressing not only the people, but particularly the women of Saudi Arabia. So there are large and huge pent-up sentiments and hunger for freedom within Saudi Arabia.

It is precisely because the Western strategic thinkers understand the potential for revolution in Saudi Arabia, along with all over the Arabian Peninsula, why it is urgent for them to intervene in North Africa, because from the time of Cleopatra right down through the Nazis in Germany, the occupation of Libya, right next to Egypt, was strategically important for access to North Africa and Arabia. So the strategic thinkers in Washington, in London, in Paris and Brussels are considering that with the impending isolation of Israel, with revolutionary processes all over Arabia and North Africa, it is very important for the West to have a foothold.

It is in this very moment they need ways to divert the working peoples of North America and Western Europe from the practice of capitalism. As we’ve seen in Wisconsin, the workers in Wisconsin gained confidence, gained support, gained courage from the peoples of Egypt. We’ve seen signs where the people say they’re standing up for their rights. In moments like these, when the Governor of Wisconsin is cutting back on expenditure on health, on education, for the poor, and the Pentagon is spending over a trillion dollars in its budget, it is times like these that the conservative forces need to whip up a new militarism in the United States of America to divert attention from the struggles of the working peoples, from students, from women, from the youth, who are against the capitalist system as it exists. We are in the midst of the most intense capitalist crisis since 1930s. This struggle internationally is a struggle against capitalism.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Campbell, I want to thank you very much for being with us, a professor of African American [studies] and political science at Syracuse University, African American studies and political science at Syracuse. He’s written extensively about African politics. As we move on now from talking about the protests from the Middle East and North Africa to the Midwest to Iraq, we’ll be going to Iraq in a minute.

 

 

 

 

 

 

08 March, 2011

Cassandra’s legacy

One of the lectures of my class in materials science involves showing to the students an inflated balloon. I puncture it with an needle and it explodes. Then I ask to the students to explain to me exactly what has happened. Why did the balloon explode and not just deflate gradually?

It is not an easy question and, usually, my students cannot answer it. We learn as children that some objects break more easily than others. It is after a good number of failures that we learn how to handle glasses and china. And, yes, we do learn that puncturing an inflated balloon with a needle makes it explode. It looks normal to us because we have seen it happening many times. But it is difficult to explain exactly why.

Human societies, it seems, have some elements in common with inflated balloons. A society is not as simple as a balloon, of course, but it can easily explode in revolutions, collapse, breakdowns, civil wars and all sort of rapid and unpredictable changes. Societies, it seems, are fragile, at least in terms of the stability of their governments. This behavior looks normal to us because we have seen it happening many times. But, just as for balloons, it is difficult to explain exactly why societies “explode.”

Of course, the difficulty of the problem has not prevented historians from proposing various causes for past collapses and revolutions in terms of economic, political, and social factors. Recently, crude oil has become popular as the cause of dramatic social changes. For instance, the collapse of the Soviet Union has been related to the local peaking of oil production (see this post of mine on The Oil Drum). Could crude oil be the “needle” that has been puncturing North African countries as well?

But how exactly is peak oil related to collapse? Why doesn’t society simply adapt to the new conditions? I think we can gain some insight on these points if we consider human societies as complex systems which obey the laws of physics.

There are some common physical elements in the behavior of balloons, human societies and many other systems. One is that these systems accumulate energy. A balloon accumulates energy as pressurized gas, a society accumulates energy in forms that we tend to call “capital” (human capital, monetary capital, industrial capital, etc.). Both inflated balloons and societies are systems defined as “out of thermodynamic equilibrium” because of this accumulated energy.

The second principle of thermodynamics says that system will try to find the fastest possible way to reach equilibrium, that is the condition of maximum entropy. That means dispersing the accumulated energy to the largest possible number of states. The system will do that by following the available pathway that leads faster to that condition.

Thermodynamics doesn’t say that a pathway (fast or slow) to equilibrium must necessarily exist. In the case of an inflated balloon, as long as the balloon walls are intact, there is no such pathway and the balloon stays inflated. But, if we puncture the balloon, we create a fast route to entropy increase. In the right conditions, that is, if the accumulated energy is sufficiently large, the crack created by the needle tip generates a rapidly expanding fracture. The balloon explodes.

Human societies are much more complicated than a balloon but, in the end they tend to reach equilibrium by dispersing the accumulated energy – that is, reaching a condition of maximum entropy. That means transforming the accumulated energy into what we call “waste” or “pollution”. The dispersal process can take many different routes: a society is a tangle of feedbacks; with some stabilizing the system while others destabilizing it. Societies also grow new structures and new stocks of energy as they exploit natural resources. Then, when the stocks of non renewable energy are gradually exhausted, the rate of energy processing slows down – that’s something we sometimes call “The Hubbert cycle.” The fact that production shows a peak (“Hubbert’s peak”) is typical of crude oil, but it is a normal feature of dynamic systems of this kind. The cycle of a society often follows a “bell shaped” curve (e.g. for the Roman Empire)

Sometimes, the process of energy dispersal is smooth, but sometimes it is not smooth at all. Societies seem to be easily subjected to rapid and sudden changes as the system finds new pathways to disperse energy. In some cases, a growing society gets rid of a stumbling block to energy dispersal. This could be a good model for events such as the French Revolution that found such a stumbling block in the aristocrats of the time. In other cases, when a society is declining or reaching a peak, the problem may be that some structures built in order to manage large fluxes of energy become useless and must disappear. That may have been the case of the Red Army and of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. In all cases, the social system is blocked in an out of equilibrium condition because of the lack of a path to release the stored energy. Such a path may be created, however, by positive feedbacks generated by apparently minor events, for instance an increase in oil prices. Then, when the pathway appears, the transition may be abrupt: it is what we call revolution or collapse.

How about Northern African countries? In this case, we don’t have yet a clear picture yet of what is happening, especially for the case of Libya. But we know that the uprising in Egypt arrived shortly after that the curve of internal consumption crossing the one of national production. Egypt “exploded” when it became a net importer of crude oil (see e.g. this paper by Gail Tverberg). Tunisia went along the same path with consumption surpassing production around 2001. In the new condition of oil scarcity, these societies needed to get rid of energy expensive structures in the form of static governments that had been around for decades. That, of course, was not easy to do and it needed a trigger; something that released the accumulated pressure. Not unlike a punctured balloon.

We should always be careful about simple explanations for complex events. More than all, we should be wary of falling in the trap of seeing a simple chain of cause and effects in complex systems. Oil prices are not a “cause” of the unrest – just a trigger for something that needed to happened for other reasons.

But, even with these caveats, we know that oil – as our main source of energy – plays a role in the recent unrest in North Africa and will continue to do so in the future -. and not just in North Africa.

To know more about energy dispersal and entropy in out of equilibrium systems, you may give a look the papers by Arto Annila and coworkers at the University of Helsinki. Not the kind of stuff you read to relax in the evening, but – if you can manage to digest it, at least in part – it can answer a lot of questions you have always been wondering about.

At present Ugo Bardi is a professor of Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Firenze, Italy. He started with this position in 1992, before that he was staff researcher at the Department of Applied Chemistry in the same university.

 

 

 

 

The whole gang is back: The parties of the European Left (grouping the  “moderate” European communist parties), the “Green” José Bové, now allied with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who has never seen a US-NATO war he didn’t like, various Trotkyist groups and of course Bernard-Henry Lévy and Bernard Kouchner, all calling for some sort of “humanitarian intervention” in Libya or accusing the Latin American left, whose positions  are far more sensible, of acting as “useful idiots” for the “Libyan tyrant.”

Twelve years later, it is Kosovo all over again. Hundred of thousands of Iraqis dead, NATO stranded in an impossible position in Afghanistan, and they have learned nothing! The Kosovo war was made to stop a nonexistent genocide, the Afghan war to protect women (go and check their situation now), and the Iraq war to protect the Kurds. When will they understand that all wars claim to have humanitarian justifications? Even Hitler was “protecting minorities” in Czechoslovakia and Poland.

On the other hand, Robert Gates warns that any future secretary of state who advises a US president to send troops into Asia or Africa “must have his head examined”. Admiral Mullen similarly advises caution. The great paradox of our time is that the headquarters of the peace movement are to be found in the Pentagon and the State Department, while the pro-war party is a coalition of neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists of various stripes, including leftist humanitarian warriors, as well as some Greens, feminists or repentant communists.

So, now, everybody has to cut down his or her consumption because of global warming, but NATO wars are recyclable and imperialism has become part of sustainable development.

Of course the US will go or not go to war for reasons that are quite independent of the advice offered by the pro-war left. Oil is not likely to be a major factor in their decision, because any future Libyan government will have to sell oil and Libya is not big enough to significantly weigh on the price of oil. Of course, turmoil in Libya leads to speculation that itself affects prices, but that is a different matter. Zionists are probably of two minds about Libya: they hate Qaddafi, and would like to see him ousted, like Saddam, in the most humiliating manner, but they are not sure they will like his opposition (and, from the little we know about it, they won’t).

The main pro-war argument is that if things go quickly and easily, it will rehabilitate NATO and humanitarian intervention, whose image has been tarnished by Iraq and Afghanistan. A new Grenada or, at most, a new Kosovo, is exactly what is needed. Another motivation for intervention is to better control the rebels, by coming to “save” them on their march to victory. But that is unlikely to work: Karzai in Afghanistan, the Kosovar nationalists, the Shiites in Iraq and of course Israel, are perfectly happy to get American help, when needed, but after that, to pretty much pursue their own agenda. And a full-fledged military occupation of Libya after its “liberation” is unlikely to be sustainable, which of course makes intervention less attractive from a US point of view.

On the other hand, if things turn badly, it will probably be the beginning of the end of the American empire, hence the caution of people who are actually in charge of it and not merely writing articles in Le Monde or ranting against dictators in front of cameras.

It is difficult for ordinary citizens to know exactly what is going on in Libya, because Western media have thoroughly discredited themselves in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine, and alternative sources are not always reliable either. That of course does not prevent the pro-war left from being absolutely convinced of the truth of the worst reports about Qaddafi, just as they were twelve years ago about Milosevic.

The negative role of the International Criminal Court is again apparent, here, as was that of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in the case of Kosovo. One of the reasons why there was relatively little bloodshed in Tunisia and Egypt is that there was a possible exit for Ben Ali and Mubarak. But “international justice” wants to make sure that no such exit is possible for Qaddafi, and probably for people close to him, hence inciting them to fight to the bitter end.

If “another world is possible”, as the European Left keeps on saying, then another West should be possible and the European Left should start working on that. The recent meeting of the Bolivarian Alliance could serve as an example: the Latin American left wants peace and they want to avoid US intervention, because they know that they are in the sights of the US and that their process of social transformation requires above all peace and national sovereignty. Hence, they suggest sending an international delegation, possibly led by Jimmy Carter (hardly a stooge of Qaddafi), in order to start a negotiation process between the government and the rebels. Spain has expressed interest in the idea, which is of course rejected by Sarkozy. This proposition may sound utopian, but it might not be so if it were supported by the full weight of the United Nations. That would be the way to fulfill its mission, but it is now made impossible by US and Western influence. However, it is not impossible that now, or in some future crisis, a non-interventionist coalition of nations, including Russia, China, Latin America and maybe others, may work together to build credible alternatives to Western interventionism.

Unlike the Latin American left, the pathetic European version has lost all sense of what it means to do politics. It does not try to propose concrete solutions to problems, and is only able to take moral stances, in particular denouncing dictators and human rights violations in grandiloquent tones. The social democratic left follows the right with at best a few years delay and has no ideas of its own. The “radical” left often manages both to denounce Western governments in every possible way and to demand that those same governments intervene militarily around the globe to defend democracy. Their lack of political reflection makes them highly vulnerable to disinformation campaigns and to becoming passive cheerleaders of US-NATO wars.

That left has no coherent program and would not know what to do even if a god put them into power. Instead of “supporting” Chavez and the Venezuelan Revolution, a meaningless claim some love to repeat, they should humbly learn from them and, first of all, relearn what it means to do politics.

Jean Bricmont teaches physics in Belgium and is  a member of the Brussels Tribunal. His book, Humanitarian  Imperialism, is published by Monthly Review Press. He can  be reached at Jean.Bricmont@uclouvain.be.

 

 

08 March, 2011              Countercurrents.org

Afghan civilians intentionally targeted by NATO/ISAF Forces

Careful examination of numerous reports, and images/video footage, along with eye-witness and victim testimonies, clarify that Afghan civilians are the main targets of deadly attacks by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Although the Coalition forces claim that previous civilian massacres were accidental, Afghan-led peace movements believe that the killings are at best negligent to at worst intentional in nature.

Foreign military presence and intervention in the past ten years has worsened the Afghanistan situation while civilian casualties have increasingly created tension between the Coaliton forces, the Afghan government, and the people of Afghanistan. These events have further brought into perspective the sheer human and material damages of the war. No one should become accustomed to or believe in this illogical method of bombing the country to peace. This mentality is not justifiable and should not be the norm. Acts of violence must always be questioned. The people of Afghanistan want justice and accountability. Not surprisingly, they get the usual response from NATO – an initial denial of civilian casualties, a shift of blame on insurgency, occasional investigations with an admittance to a tweaked number of civilian deaths, and rarely a contrived apology. This has become a wanton pattern. Explaining away repeated deadly civilian attacks as “mistakes” is unacceptable. Furthermore, this proves that the military solution to Afghanistan is not a viable option.

NATO-led forces are equipped with the most advanced technology with the capability of zooming in on even the smallest of objects with precise vision. This begs the question as to why so many civilians are dying. To put it into perspective, below is a compiled short summary of recent NATO attacks:

It was reported that a total of three civilian atrocities were committed by the Coalition forces within the last two weeks. The correct estimate is actually four.

Alahsay district of Kapisa province (5 civilians) Feb 17, 2011

Khoygani District of Nangarhar province (6 civilians) Feb 20, 2011

Ghazi Abad District of Kunar province (60+ civilians) Four Day Operation February 17/18/19 (different reports)

Mountains of Nanglam in Kunar province (9 children/boys) March 1st, 2011

In Kapisa province on Thursday February 17th, Alahsay district Governor Mohammed Omari confirmed that five civilians were killed by a air strke from the NATO-led ISAF. The five civilians- three of them adult males and two children ages 12 and 13 – were reportedly without meat for the last few months and were desperate to hunt, hence why they were carrying bird hunting equipment.

In Nangarhar province on February 20th, an entire family of six was killed by a NATO air strike into their home in the Khoygani district. A photo captured by Reuters shows that the missile directly hit the roof of the family’s home. The parents and their four children were all inside when the reportedly stray missile landed in their residential community. The father was a soldier for the Afghan National Army who died of excessive bleeding after troops delayed his arrival to a hospital.

After a four day operation by ISAF and NATO in Kunar province over 65 civilians. More than half of the casualties were women and children, and this was confirmed by the governor of the province. Contrary to the abundant evidence, NATO claimed no civilians were killed and later insisted that insurgents were among the deceased, although villagers rejected this assertion.

Two reports from the Afghan investigation team:

“As soon as the villagers heard the shooting and planes roaring overhead, they all struggled to take refuge in an old trench that was used by the mujahedeen during jihad [against the Russians].”

“Those who succeeded in reaching the trenches were killed when the trench collapsed after it was hit by rockets or bombs being fired from coalition helicopters,” he said. “Those who were on their way to the trench were killed by rockets or bullets. I visited the trench. I saw old, dried blood. I saw women and children’s garments. I saw blood-stained walls of the trench. I saw pieces of blankets and cotton from the quilts the villagers wrapped themselves in because of the cold weather.”

In an attempt to hide the news story ISAF detained two Al Jazeera journalists, Abdullah Nizami and Saeedullah Sahel. They were detained during the investigation of the Kunar massacre of over 65 civilians. Samer Alawi, the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Kabul, strongly described the detentions of Nizami and Seedullah as repressive acts since it kept them from reporting. Another report released this past month by Columbia Journalism Review, has documented the difficulty of reporting honest accounts of the Afghanistan war.

On March 1st, NATO helicopters killed 9 Afghan boys, and injured one. This occurred without any warning signals as the children were targeted “one after another”. Aged seven to nine years old, the boys were from poor families, and were collecting firewood in the mountains. This is once again an attack on the young children of Kunar. How is it that NATO soldiers, again, confused children for insurgents, and this time by gunfire?

General David H. Petraeus apologized for this killing, yet regarding the previous attack in Kunar (that killed over 65 civilians), he erroneously accused the Afghan parents of intentionally burning their children due to cultural practices of discipline. Hamid Karzai’s spokesman Waheed Omar described the US Generals comments as being “outrageous, insulting and racist.” Karzai, himself, has rejected the apology. Mohammed Bismil, the brother of two of the boys killed, did not care for Petraeus’ apology but said, “The only option I have is to pick up a Kalashnikov, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] or a suicide vest to fight.”

The father of two of the boys killed cried, “They don’t value humanity and don’t care about our children.”

Waheed Mujda, an Afghan political analyst stated that, “[for international forces], Afghan people’s blood is of no value. For the Americans, apologising for a mistake is a very big deal but for Afghans it is not. ISAF troop actions that raise anger among Afghans are a major reason for people joining the insurgents or Taliban.”

These are the four war crimes committed by the Coalition forces in the past two weeks. Victimization and the feeling of betrayal continues to spread all across Afghanistan.

While this article initially started on the four recent attacks by NATO, it is important to look at the previous events as well. In doing so, we realize that these are not isolated incidents or simply negligence but an ongoing pattern of the failures of the “military solution to Afghanistan”.

Apologies from the Coalition, as rare as they are, mean little to nothing to Afghans. Months earlier in 2010, after initially choosing not to investigate, NATO forces offered an apology for killing a fourteen year old girl. Her father Mohammad Karim simply responded, “Now, what should I do with ‘sorry’?”

Earlier in Nangarhar, in May 2010, when NATO soldiers raided a home shooting at least nine civilians indiscriminately, a mourner said:

“If the Americans do this again, we are ready to shed our blood fighting them. We would rather die than sit by and do nothing. If there was anyone here trying to destroy our country, we would capture them and hand them over to the government. It is our land and our duty to defend it against both foreigners and insurgent infiltrators.”

He spoke further on this by saying, “If the military keeps doing this, the people will go into the mountains to fight them. When I saw my daughter injured, all I could think about was putting on a suicide jacket.”

Last month was the one year anniversary of the killing of two pregnant mothers, men and a teenage girl by a NATO night raid. In an attempt to cover it up, the US forces literally dug the bullets out of the victims bodies. In a Democracy Now interview Glenn Greenwald said, “Here you have an incident that we know about only because of sheer luck with the determination of a single reporter, and again the military lying about what took place.” A recent report on survivors of night raids gives a close look at how foreign troops justify killing civilians. One witness of night raids, Anwar Ul Haq, said, “Whenever they shoot or kill anybody, they call him al Qaeda whether he is or not.”

Without regard for civilians, the Tarok Kolache village in Afghanistan’s Arghandab River Valley was completely destroyed with 25 tons of bombs. Is the destruction of entire villages, which are the support system for the majority of Afghans, a logical tactic in counter-insurgency? Clearly, the Afghans who have suffered due to this disagree. A farmer of the Arghandab district asked “Why do you have to blow up so many of our fields and homes?”, while one angry villager accused the military of ruining his life after the demolition.

In addition to witness and victim testimonies, the Coalition forces themselves have made eye-opening revelations on the target killings of civilians. In September 2010, it was revealed that a dozen US soldiers faced charges in their involvement of not only killing innocent Afghan civilians at random for sport, but also collecting the victims finger bones, leg bones, teeth, and skulls as trophies. The military refuses to release photos that show US soldiers posing with naked, mutilated and charred corpses of their victims. Sound familiar? The father of one of the victims killed was quoted as saying, “The Americans really love to kill innocent people.” In fact, they had planned on killing more civilians had it not been for one soldier, Spc. Adam Winfield, and his father who tried relentlessly to blow the whistle. He had said his squad leader “gives high-fives to the guy who kills innocent people and plans more with him.- I have proof that they are planning another one in the form of an AK-47 (machine gun) they want to drop on another guy.” Instead of honoring Winfield for exposing the truth, he was instead charged with the same crimes. His father had reported Winfeld’s statements to Army officials, but they turned a blind eye. One can’t help but to wonder whether the killing of civilians for sport is more abhorrent or the apparent negligence and silence by the higher ups in the Armed forces.

Speaking of higher ups in the Armed forces, General Mattis, who replaced Petreaus as chief of US Central Command, said “Its fun to kill people…it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot [Afghans].” He continued: “Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with you, I like brawling.” A bit later he spoke of the “emotional satisfaction you may get from really whacking somebody.”‘ He reportedly even told his troops to “have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”

Afghans have been resisting this dehumanizing way of life where they are regarded as savages or merely objects to be killed for sport. A recent poll conducted in Afghanistan shows that more than half of the Afghans interviewed believed NATO-led forces should begin withdrawing from the country in mid-2011 or sooner. Afghans no longer want anything from NATO but to simply leave. Massive protests and demonstrations against the Coalition following recent attacks are now erupting throughout Afghanistan in cities like Kunar, Kabul city and Nanglam, where Afghan demonstrators have been marching in streets chanting, “death to the invaders” and “We don’t want the invading forces.” Another man explained, “We say to ISAF that revenge is part of our culture. We say to our leaders, our government, that this kind of violence should be investigated. Those responsible should be punished.” A woman held a placard that read, “Occupation = Killing + Destruction.” In one demonstration, angry protesters burned a pile of blankets, clothing, and other items donated by Coaltion troops. An independent member in the legislature, Ramazan Bashardost, said “These killings must be stopped or the people will rise against foreigners and we will stand by them.”

Civilians fear not only NATO and ISAF but also suicide bombings by Armed Opposition Groups. Simultaneously with the terror by Coalition forces, recent suicide blasts have taken the lives of around 100 Afghan civilians.

The almost decade long war and occupation has done more harm than good, escalating violence in Afghanistan to its peak, and continues to deteriorate chances of peace for the future. Afghanistan has already been subjected to previous decades of war and now each new generation is haunted with both the memory and reality of endless bloodshed, death, and misery. The fact remains that Afghans continue to live with hunger and worsening poverty, torture and humiliation, planted with weapons, escalating air strikes and night raids.

The responsibility lies on the Afghan government, Taliban, warlords, and especially NATO/ISAF forces, including top commanders like General Petreaus, who must be brought by the people of Afghanistan and the world through a judicial process to account for their crimes, failed military solutions, and indiscriminate killings. Instead, the corrupt system in power continues to leave Afghans helpless and without a voice, and has them convinced that they are incapable of self-determination. However, it must not be forgotten that Afghanistan has a long history of independence and are more than capable of running their affairs. It is vitally important to listen to Afghans. It is the right of the people to decide the fate of their country and there are no exceptions. With the recent revolts in Arab countries, it’s only a matter of time before Afghans follow their lead. This requires immediate change and an honest vision for a truly democratic Afghanistan. In doing so, we must be aware of the ground realities, namely the presence of NATO, Taliban, warlords as well as regional intervention.

Global Afghan-led peace groups such as Afghans for Peace (AFP), Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers (AYPV), and the Afghan Canadian Student Association (ACSA) stand in solidarity with the people of Afghanistan in their struggle for justice and freedom. They fully acknowledge and strongly condemn these cruel, targeted massacres of innocent human life. AFP, AYPV and ACSA calls on the people of the world, especially Afghans, to rightfully demand an end to this illegal war and occupation. When children are being killed one by one, as was the case in Kunar last week, all of humanity suffers. When civilians have become the targets, it is time for everyone to stand up.

Signed by:

Afghans for Peace Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers Afghan Canadian Student Association

 

 

09 March, 2011                          Countercurrents.org

(1) If the rich paid their fair share in taxes and if corporate loopholes were closed, the Wisconsin deficit would disappear overnight. The rich and the corporations have consistently lobbied to keep their taxes low. And by providing generous political contributions to both Democrats and Republicans, they have succeeded.

(2) During the past three decades inequalities in wealth have shot off the charts. They are now greater than ever before in U.S. history, because of a massive transfer of wealth from working people to the wealthy. This is in part because the rich and the corporations have succeeded in lowering their taxes and eliminating regulations on their businesses, in part because fewer workers are unionized, and in part because jobs have migrated overseas or have been wiped out by technology.

But these growing inequalities are undermining the U.S. economy. The corporations are sitting on record profits, but they are not hiring because there is little demand for their products. When the rich monopolize the vast majority of society’s wealth, working people are left struggling to make ends meet and curtailing their purchases.

If the Wisconsin public workers make concessions, the inequalities in wealth will be increased, crippling the economy even more. And capitulation will invite more attacks. Public workers in other states will be told they are making too much. And once all the public sector workers suffer defeat, then the private sector workers will be targeted once again on the grounds that they make more than public sector workers. It will be a race to the bottom, and the inequalities in wealth will further accelerate because the rich will assure you that they can never have enough.

(3) We can wage a stronger battle in Wisconsin if we refuse to accept concessions.

At the outset of the struggle, many Wisconsin union officials signaled that they were prepared to accept concessions, which are being demanded in many states by Democrats and Republicans alike. But when Wisconsin public workers themselves were interviewed, one after another rejected the concessions. They know better than anyone that the concessions are not affordable, especially when they come on the heels of earlier concessions they felt compelled to accept.

Then the National Nurses Union came to the defense of the public workers by demanding no concessions. They organized a strategy meeting in Madison on this basis. And when Michael Moore addressed the crowd on March 5 in Madison and implied there should be no concessions, the huge crowd roared its approval.

So the question of concessions has introduced a wedge between the union officials on the one hand and many of the public workers and their supporters on the other hand. Removing this wedge will result in a much stronger movement.

But even more, what public worker would want to throw him or herself entirely into a struggle for a 10 – 15 percent reduction in pay and benefits?

(4) The union officials would say in their defense that according to polls taken in Wisconsin before the battle began, the public supported concessions for Wisconsin workers.

But a more recent New York Times/CBS poll reported that 56 percent of Americans now reject imposing cuts on public workers. Union officials must not make a fetish of polls, because public opinion can change rapidly. Once Wisconsin workers started putting up a fight, it changed everything. They caught the public’s attention. And the Wisconsin firefighters’ strong support of their public sector coworkers made an impact, because the firefighters were not facing the same threat of cuts.

Ordinary people get it immediately when presented with the facts about the growing inequalities in wealth, the ever-decreasing taxes on the rich and the corporations, and the increasingly difficult struggle of working people to maintain a dignified standard of living. Instead of capitulating to the polls, unions must launch their own offensive, stand up for what is right, educate the public by purchasing one-page ads in Wisconsin newspapers across the state, lay out all the facts clearly, and then let the people of Wisconsin make an informed decision. Union officials must not abandon public opinion to the corporate-owned media.

United we can win!

Ann Robertson is a Lecturer at San Francisco State University and a member of the California Faculty Association. Bill Leumer is a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 853 (ret.). Both are writers for Workers Action and may be reached at sanfrancisco@workerscompass.org