Revision as of 18:41, 31 May 2015

It doesn't take long or a lot of work to find dots and snippets of the past that give us glimpses of what was to come. This page contains links gathered by anonymous people over four years (crowdsourced as it were) on "things" -told and leaked stories, whistle spit (and working theories) for further investigation into and analysis of "things", for finding (counter) moves healthy for ourselves, life, and others.

Merchants of Death

September 4, 1934 "Merchants of Death": On a hot Tuesday morning following Labor Day in 1934, several hundred people crowded into the Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building to witness the opening of an investigation that journalists were already calling "historic." Although World War I had been over for 16 years, the inquiry promised to reopen an intense debate about whether the nation should ever have gotten involved in that costly conflict. To lead the seven-member special committee, the Senate’s Democratic majority chose a Republican—42-year-old North Dakota Senator Gerald P. Nye. Typical of western agrarian progressives, Nye energetically opposed U.S. involvement in foreign wars. He promised, "when the Senate investigation is over, we shall see that war and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few. ^[1]

It's the oil, stupid!

Oil and the Outcome of the Iran-Iraq War

An article with excerpts from a report by Thomas McNaugher and William Quandt of the Brookings Institution, published on May 14, 1984 by Cambridge Energy Research Associates. These excerpts appeared in Arab Oil and Gas (Paris), June 1, 1984. ^[2]

The Iran-Iraq war is reaching a critical phase. As a result, there is more of a chance today than ever before that a major change in the war is at hand. This could have both major consequences for the flow of oil in the near term, and broader implications for power and influence in the region over the longer term. Although we are not yet convinced that the Iran-Iraq war threatens a major disruption in the flow of oil, the odds are beginning to change in the direction of greater danger for Western interests -- meaning that the threat to the world oil market could become larger in this new phase. But the gravest threat could come not during the war itself but from the outcome of the war.

Mentioned are three scenarios: Scenario One: Balance of Power; Scenario Two: Iranian Hegemony; Scenario Three: Continuing Attrition and Oil Disruption.

Occidental Petroleum and the U'wa

An ongoing story since 1990: ^[3]

Occidental Petroleum, a U.S. based petroleum company, has had its sights set on the 1.5 billion oil barrels that lie beneath the ground in the Samoré Block (the name for the entire cloudforest region within which the U’wa territory lies) since the early 1990s. The oil company’s history is linked to human rights violations and environmental destruction. Occidental (or “Oxy” as it is commonly referred to) was the parent company of Hooker Chemical, which is the company responsible for the “Love Canal” disaster of the 1940s and 1950s. [...] More recently, Oxy has set up an oil pipeline north of U’wa territory in the Arauca region, which has been responsible for the displacement of many native people and rendered the water in the region too polluted for human consumption.

Oil and the Gulf War

In a 1991 article in the Middle East Research and Information Project: ^[4]

The arrangements that will follow the US defeat of Iraq will likely produce a kind of joint “oil dominion” between major consumer countries and a core of oil exporters which will override the interests of the poorer oil importers and exporters alike. At the center of this new alignment will no longer be the “seven sisters” -- the major private companies that dominated the industry before the 1970s -- but what South magazine has dubbed the “four stepsisters” -- Saudi Aramco, PDV, and Exxon and Shell, the two largest private firms. But OPEC will have to confront some serious conflicts within its ranks which may well split the organization. Producers like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela are investing huge amounts of capital to expand their production capacity: Will they be ready to scale back their market share once Iraq and Kuwait resume production? The new world order of oil could bring unprecedented producer-consumer cooperation for the privileged states and companies, and increasingly harder times for the rest.

Defending oil supplies

In 1998, in Fueling Global Warming: Federal Subsidies to Oil in the United States ^[5]:

The United States needs oil. Despite some progress on alternatives, oil continues to fuel our transportation fleet and our military. However, much of the nation’s oil is transported through fairly precarious means. Approximately, 25 percent of our domestic crude flows through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, and about 45 percent of our total petroleum consumption is transported through a limited number of oil tanker channels.

These delivery systems are vulnerable to disruption. Markets react in three primary ways to vulnerable supplies. First, they demand a higher price to reflect the higher risks. Second, they invest in approaches to make the supply less risky. This includes diversification of suppliers, the development of new supplies, the establishment of stockpiles to cover demand if supply is interrupted, and the attempt to reduce the likelihood of supply disruptions. Third, markets develop substitute materials and ways to use the limited supplies more efficiently.

In the oil industry, corporations have invested in diversifying their supply base across countries. However, it has been the United States government, rather than private firms, that has developed the largest stockpiles (such as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, described later in this chapter) and spent billions of dollars in defense costs to reduce the likelihood of supply interruptions and price shocks. Because the government has borne these costs of securing supply, they are not reflected in the current price of oil. Thus, producers and consumers lack important price signals that would encourage investment in substitutes. The government’s costs act as a subsidy to oil. We estimate the costs of defending oil shipments and stockpiling reserves for our base year, 1995. This estimate has two elements: defending oil shipments from the Persian Gulf and the costs of building and maintaining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We also qualitatively discuss oil-related military activities within Alaska. In order for markets to make well-informed decisions between energy types, these costs should be reflected in the price we pay for oil.

And it's not just the oil, stupid!

In the mid 1990’s economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner noticed a funny thing. One would think that countries that were well endowed with oil, gas and mineral wealth would be correspondingly economically well off – but in fact just the reverse seemed to be true. Some peeps have dubbed it “The Resource Curse” alias “Paradox of Plenty”: countries and regions with an abundance of natural resources, specifically point-source non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. This is hypothesized to happen for many different reasons.

Natural resource abundance and economic growth

In November, 1997, in Natural resource abundance and economic growth: ^[6]

One of the surprising features of modern economic growth is that economies abundant in natural resources have tended to grow slower than economies without substantial natural resources. In this paper we show that economies with a high ratio of natural resource exports to GDP in 1970 (the base year) tended to grow slowly during the subsequent 20-year period 1970-1990. This negative relationship holds true even after controlling for many variables found to be important for economic growth by previous authors. We discuss several theories and present additional evidence to understand the source of this negative association.

In an oxfam report from 2001, Extractive sectors and the poor: ^[7]

With this increase in the environmental and social impact of resource extraction, economists and activists in both the North and South are challenging economic models that base development on the extraction of non-renewable natural resources. They point to the fact that many countries in the developing world possess tremendous oil and mineral wealth yet continue to suffer from crushing poverty. For a variety of reasons, these countries simply have not converted their resource wealth into real improvements in the lives of the majority of their citizens.

Despite these failures and the challenges made to the “extractive paradigm,” national governments and international financial institutions such as the World Bank continue to promote these industries for poverty reduction purposes.

Drilling into Debt

In Drilling into Debt: An Investigation into the Relationship Between Debt and Oil of July 2005: ^[8]

Countries that produce oil tend to be poorer and less productive economically than they should be, given their supposed blessings. This has been well documented over the last decade. Further research has confirmed that oil export-dependent states tend to suffer from unusually high rates of corruption, authoritarian government, government ineffectiveness, military spending, and civil war.

Coupling these previous efforts with our key findings we see a disturbing picture of a global oil economy that primarily serves the interests of Northern consumers, creditors, and governments, while running counter to the interests of poverty alleviation, development, and a stable climate in the rest of the world.

Glimpses of planned information operations

In 2005 the BBC reports that the US military is planning to win the hearts of young people in the Middle East by publishing a new comic in order to "achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East" ^[9] and reveals in 2006 US plans to 'fight the net': A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks ^[10].

The Raw Story reports in 2007 that CENTCOM sent emails to "bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information" ^[11].

More alarming seems to be the article from the Register on wargame simulations: Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale informing us that the US DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and artificial reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda ^[12].

2009 is the year the US Air Force releases ‘Counter-Blog’ marching orders to its airmen as part of an Air Force push to "counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the U.S. government and the Air Force" ^[13].

Natural resources and conflict in Africa

Paul Collier posted November 2009: ^[14]

Why has Africa had so much civil war? In all other regions of the world the incidence of civil war has been on a broadly declining trend over the past thirty years: but in Africa the long term trend has been upwards. Of course, every civil war has its ‘story’ – the personalities, the social cleavages, the triggering events, the inflammatory discourse, the atrocities. But is there anything more? Are there structural conditions – social, political or economic – which make a country prone to civil war? Might it be that the same inflammatory politician, playing on the same social cleavages, and with the same triggering events, might ‘cause’ war under one set of conditions and merely be an ugly irritant in another?

Although I am an Africanist, I like to set Africa in comparative perspective. If Africa is different – as it clearly seems to be in respect of civil war – there are two possible types of explanation. Africans could simply behave differently from others when faced with the same situation. Alternatively, for a given situation their behaviour could be much like anyone else’s, but the situations they face could be systematically different. To sort this out we need to look globally, not just regionally. Together with Anke Hoeffler, I have analyzed global data covering the last forty years, trying to see why most countries at most times have avoided civil war, while others have not. Our approach has been statistical – trying to see whether any characteristics of a society could account for a subsequent eruption into war. Within the limits of data availability, we have tried to include social factors (such as inequality, and the ethnic and religious composition of a society), history (such as the time since decolonization), and politics (such as the extent of democratic political rights) as well as economic characteristics. We find a pattern and we find that Africa fits that pattern.

[...] Natural resources generate what economists term ‘rents’ – meaning profits that are much higher than the minimum level needed to keep the activity going. The trouble from natural resources stems from these rents. There are six routes by which natural resource rents increase the risk of violent conflict; four relate to political economy and two are straight economics. Let’s start with the political economy. The most obvious route is that natural resource rents are a ‘honey pot’. Politics comes to be about the contest for control of these revenues. This produces a politics of corruption – aided and abetted by foreign corporate behavior – and sometimes directly a politics of violence.

Libya is "freed"

The tension was tangible through linguistic patterns in the IRC channels of the anonymous hives in 2011. An anonymous operation was starting up ^[15]. Photos and messages kept appearing on atrocities commited by Ghadafi. Do-gooders jumped in, farts saw an opportunity for leadership. But all was not what it seemed as we'd learn later. Human rights investigations reported NATO bombing the Great Man-Made River ^[16], RT reported on the plundering of Libya by Goldman Sachs ^[17] and two weeks later again, with the numbers ^[18]. O aye, and many more lies behind the West's war on Libya appeared ^[19]. It is not as if the anonymous operation made any real difference, but still the old adage goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice ...

Spin and Occupy Wallstreet

Also in 2011, Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and a US expert on crafting the perfect political message, said, "I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death. They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism." Next Luntz offered tips on how Republicans could discuss the grievances of the Occupiers, and help the governors better handle all these new questions from constituents about "income inequality" and "paying your fair share." Yahoo News sat in on the session, and counted 10 do’s and don’ts from Luntz covering how Republicans should fight back by changing the way they discuss the movement ^[20]. And young turks followed up on that ^[21].

It's really not just the oil, stupid!

The price of steel

The International Network for Economic, Social & Cultural Rights reports in June of 2013: ^[22]

The Price of Steel: Human Rights and Forced Evictions in the POSCO-India Project documents the human rights abuses being carried out to facilitate the establishment of the POSCO-India project, and the associated illegal seizures of land which threaten to forcibly displace as many as 22,000 people in India’s eastern state of Odisha. The report, produced by ESCR-Net and the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) at NYU School of Law, calls for a suspension of the POSCO-India project and a halt to the human rights abuses.

The French African Connection

It is 2014, and Al Jazeera publishes a three-part series telling the story of 'France Afrique': a brutal and nefarious tale of corruption, massacres, dictators supported and progressive leaders murdered, weapon-smuggling, cloak-and-dagger secret services, and spectacular military operations: The first story reveals the lengths the former colonial power has gone to – from coups and assassinations to rigged elections and embezzlement – in order to satisfy its thirst for energy; The second episode reveals France's ongoing mission to secure access to oil and maintain a firm grip over its former colonies; and the third story outlines France's gradual loss of power in its former colonies - some called it reverse colonisation; others called it independence. ^[23]

Banning Golden Dawn

In September of 2013 there was talk of banning Golden Dawn ^[24]. This target could not have been chosen better if authorities wanted to introduce people to banning and proactive arrests becoming "normal" in Greece and Europe.

References

1. ↑ US Senate website: Merchants of Death http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/merchants_of_death.htm
2. ↑ Oil and the Outcome of the Iran-Iraq War http://www.merip.org/mer/mer125-126/oil-outcome-iran-iraq-war
3. ↑ The U’wa struggle against Occidental Petroleum http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/Jones/uwa.htm
4. ↑ Middle East Research and Information Project: Oil and the Gulf War http://www.merip.org/mer/mer171/oil-gulf-war
5. ↑ Fueling Global Warming: Federal Subsidies to Oil in the United States http://www.earthtrack.net/files/legacy_library/GP%20Ch4_Defending%20Oil.pdf
6. ↑ Natural resource abundance and economic growth http://www.cid.harvard.edu/ciddata/warner_files/natresf5.pdf
7. ↑ Oxfam: Extractive sectors and the poor http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/ross/oxfam.pdf
8. ↑ Drilling into Debt: An Investigation into the Relationship Between Debt and Oil http://priceofoil.org/2005/07/01/drilling-into-debt-an-investigation-into-the-relationship-between-debt-and-oil/
9. ↑ US army to produce Mid-East comic http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4396351.stm
10. ↑ US plans to 'fight the net' revealed http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4655196.stm
11. ↑ Raw obtains CENTCOM email to bloggers http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Raw_obtains_CENTCOM_email_to_bloggers_1016.html
12. ↑ Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/
13. ↑ Air Force Releases ‘Counter-Blog’ Marching Orders http://www.wired.com/2009/01/usaf-blog-respo/
14. ↑ Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa http://the-beacon.info/countries/africa/natural-resources-and-conflict-in-africa/
15. ↑ International Lulz: Anonymous Aids Rebellions in Tunisia, Algeria and Libya https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110520/15384614363/international-lulz-anonymous-aids-rebellions-tunisia-algeria-libya.shtml
16. ↑ NATO bombs the Great Man-Made River http://humanrightsinvestigations.org/2011/07/27/great-man-made-river-nato-bombs/
17. ↑ Goldman Sachs Rips Off Libya, Donald Trump Admits Screwing Gaddafi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvIPUHVI3Cg#t=21
18. ↑ Bankers raping and pillaging Libya. Goldman Sachs and Colonel Gaddafi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sfY-OR_olQ
19. ↑ The lies behind the West's war on Libya http://www.pambazuka.net/en/category.php/features/72575
20. ↑ How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/republicans-being-taught-talk-occupy-wall-street-133707949.html
21. ↑ Leaked: Republicans Scared of Occupy Wall Street https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B3Fw5TPJK8
22. ↑ The Price of Steel: Human Rights and Forced Evictions in the POSCO-India Project http://www.escr-net.org/node/365209
23. ↑ The French African Connection http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2013/08/201387113131914906.html
24. ↑ Calls to ban Greek far-right party after murder of anti-fascist rapper http://rt.com/news/greek-rapper-funeral-tension-074/