Rhinocrisy

I highly recommend this article by Michael Klare on the subject of America’s oil dependence and its effect on our superpower status. The best summary of it is in this calculation:
19 Mbbl/day * $120/bbl * 365 days/year * 0.65 = $540 billion per year spent on oil imports. That’s about on par with the Pentagon’s budget and about 4% of US GDP.

(Via ATR)

So, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. But by whom?

To an American the answer is obvious: al-Qaeda did it. This is the assumption of Anthony Zinni, former CENTCOM:

Zinni rattled off reasons for al-Qaeda’s wanting Bhutto dead, including her commitment to democracy, her secular views, the blowback it will create for Musharraf, and her gender. Beyond that, Zinni says al-Qaeda — making marginal progress in Afghanistan, backsliding in Iraq, and rebuffed in Somalia — is looking for a new battlefield.

They’ve also allegedly claimed responsibility.

To an Indian this is just as obviously the ISI (i.e., Musharraf). That name describes a bogeyman commensurate with the Mossad or the KGB in that part of the world, with a long list of terrible deeds tallied up beneath it. And certainly Musharraf is a very credible suspect; we’ve seen in recent days that he is quite determined to hold onto power, and Bhutto was certainly a threat to that.

And - are these really alternatives? The ISI was instrumental in bringing al-Qaeda to the point where it is. It nursed on one teat the mujahideen movement in Afghanistan, serving as the main conduit for US money into the region.^* On the other teat clung the mewling babe that grew into the Taliban movement, brought up in madrassas all throughout Pakistan. They didn’t acquire the weapons and funding necessary to wrest misrule of Afghanistan from its savage and well-armed warlords by magic; tanks don’t grow on trees. (Much of this, ironically, went on during the reign of Benazir Bhutto.) And only after September 11 were there moves to divest the ISI of any trace of sympathy for either of these parties.

Was this effort sincere? Is Musharraf genuinely interested in reigning in these militants, or merely in playing a shell game that convinces the US he is doing what they want? I’ve always suspected the latter. His moves are too half-hearted, his purges temporary, his discipline mere gestures. And I’m not alone in being incredulous of the idea that the ISI was well and truly cleansed. And in this instance their interests are well-aligned.

Bhutto herself complained of specific individuals within the ISI who she thought were closely involved in her previous assassination attempts. At the very least the government is guilty of being lax, of looking the other way while interested parties tried to kill her. That much is fact.

Does it amount to conspiracy? Did Musharraf want Benazir Bhutto dead? Certainly we’re not going to get any useful information out of official investigations. We’ve known for decades that those do nothing to settle the question of who assassinated whom. I propose the following metric: If Musharraf postpones elections, then he is not guilty.

Commence twiddling thumbs.

Strange. I was reading about the Venezuelan terrorist just freed on bail when I saw this Google Ad at the bottom of the screen that said something like “Coffins for everyone!” I had to click. It was for these mass-casualty coffins, easily folded and stacked and then assembled and stacked again. Clever! Too bad they are 100% tropical hardwood. Boo hiss. What’s wrong with a pine box?

But on the topic of the terrorist, it’s sad to see liberals agitating against Posada’s bail. I agree he should face murder and terror charges at least, if not extradition to Cuba or Venezuela. But bail is ok. I don’t support the hypocrisy of letting a CIA asset right-wing nutjob off the hook for terrorism. But I do support bail for all, even those facing terror charges. Prisons suck.

There is no shortage of clever ideas for solving climate change once and for all. I’m not talking about amateur-hour stuff like electric cars or planting lots of eucalyptus trees. I mean serious proposals with at least a little scientific backing that might screw everything up for everyone but would solve some aspect of climate change. They might prevent some of the tipping scary feedback loops from accelerating out of control. And the good news is they are guaranteed against any unforeseen effects. After all, everyone knows that reengineering the world’s climate is a simple, linear process that has no possibility of failure.

Here’s one that was presented at a scientific conference in December with the I-wish-I-were-joking title, “Are Salps A Silver Bullet Against Global Warming And Ocean Acidification?” No, the term “silver bullet” isn’t being used sarcastically. It’s a concept by this fellow to pump nutrients out of the deep ocean to increase the population of salps, strange jelly-like creatures, which then shit out lots of carbon-rich excreta which drop to the bottom of the sea, sea-questering it for “ever.” The nice inventors appear to be positioning themselves to make money with this kind of scheme when carbon credits go above $26 a ton, as companies will pay them big bucks to sequester carbon so they can keep pumping out more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Another idea is to spray sulfur compounds into the upper atmosphere to reflect light and “counterbalance most of the warming associated with the greenhouse gas forcing. Surface temperatures return to within a few tenths of a degree(K) of present day levels. Sea ice and precipitation distributions are also much closer to their present day values. The polar region surface temperatures remain 1-3 degrees warm in the winter hemisphere than present day values.” They note that they didn’t study “the important ethical, legal, and moral issues that are associated with deliberate geo-engineering efforts.”

The ongoing discussion in comments about whether the U.S. could have or would have stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur if it weren’t for those darn Chinese reminds me of a tendency I’ve seen again and again in foreign policy. That is the “who wants to play the heavy this time” game. Because few country’s governments really want to, say, sign the Rio Declaration (the proto-Kyoto), or outlaw bribery, or enact any number of other measures that sound good to the public but are deeply opposed by the people who Matter. So what they do is they figure out, subtly, who in the group will pay the fewest consequences by blocking action, and then they all go home and shrug and say, “We tried but XXXX wouldn’t let the measure move forward” and then go sip fine scotch with the people who Matter. Sometimes the public take these statements literally and they pass laws that put their own country into good moral standing, other countries be damned. So Europe tries to live up to Kyoto, with or without the U.S., for a while at least.

In the case of global warming, of course, the U.S. has played spoiler. For nuclear issues, France has been handy. Japan won’t let anyone really save the whales. Chile spoils other marine endangered species protections. Nobody who Matters wants that treaty to restrict small-arms sales, not even Sweden, home of Phil

bang.^*

Late update: N. Korea appears to have flunked its test. Maybe less Song of Experience, more the last lines of The Hollow Men. Or, as the news networks delighted in reminding us today, like this.

^*I remember when George Bush was elected and I thought, `well, if we can just drift through the next four years without any major crises, how much harm can he do?’

I’m only three years late discovering this - maybe I heard it before and it slipped my memory. Yes, yes, that will do nicely.

Anyway, it was a bit about Iran offering a fairly comprehensive negotiation with the U.S., including ending support for armed groups, recognizing the state of Israel, and accepting much tighter IAEA controls, in exchange for access to “peaceful nuclear technology”, normalization of the relationship between the U.S. and Iran, and a two-state solution for Palestine. Some more detail is here, including the incredible U.S. response:

But in 2003, Bush refused to allow any response to the Iranian offer to negotiate an agreement that would have accepted the existence of Israel. Flynt Leverett, then the senior specialist on the Middle East on the National Security Council staff, recalled in an interview with IPS that it was “literally a few days” between the receipt of the Iranian proposal and the dispatch of a message to the Swiss ambassador expressing displeasure that he had forwarded it to Washington.

Astounding. I think my blood is actually boiling - steam is coming out of my ears.

Some Democrat Senators are trying to get a windfall profits tax put in place on oil companies, and alarm bells are ringing. Especially since some Republican senators are apparently discontented as well, recognizing that high gasoline prices are going to be a significant electoral issue this year. Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) tried to put an amendment onto the latest megalithic spending bill winding its way through Congress^* taxing profits 50% on oil revenues over $40/barrel. Punishing bloated capitalists^† is an easy way to earn yourself points when consumers are suffering. The bill currently in play is sponsored by Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, who has tried to get such a bill passed before, post-Katrina, and includes exemptions for money reinvested in further exploration. Even Arlen Specter says it’s “worth considering” a windfall tax amongst “a number of options”.^‡

A windfall profit tax is fine by me, although I do think if people are suddenly going to start taking anti-capitalist positions because of obvious market failure, they should at least have the decency to stay that way.^§ And lest you have any doubts about how this is being played, there’s little or no talk about oil shortage or how global demand is going to grow; that sort of talk would lead to talk of “conservation”, which during an election year is verboten. Senate Democrats (e.g. Harry Reid) are talking about removing the gas tax to ease the burden on consumers. Removing the gas tax. Anything to allow Americans to continue gassing up without worry. This is bad medicine: treat the symptoms, not the disease.

Anyhow, all this talk of a windfall profit tax is bringing up the last time there was a windfall profits tax, in the early 1980s. Like the unfortunately named House Majority Leader, John Boehner (R-Ohio):

“The windfall profits [tax], when it was tried in the ’80s, failed miserably because it led to less discovery. It led to less production and was a failure,” Boehner said. “There is no reason for us . . . to go there again.”

There’s also a whole slew of papers and talking points reiterating the above line, like this Heritage Foundation article. These make basically two claims: first, that a windfall profits tax would not generate much revenue, since the one in the 1980s didn’t, and second, that the tax sets an unnecessary burden on domestic producers and would depress production.

The former claim is perhaps true, since the 80s tax made a paltry $40 billion net, as opposed to the projected $369 billion. This is because the price of oil crashed in the 80s as a result of extremely good conservation measures, and eventually OPEC ramping up production again; after 1986, the price of oil dropped below the floor set for the windfall profit tax; after this point there was no more windfall to tax, and even before then declining prices made the tax untenable. If such a situation were to repeat itself, we’d have little cause for complaint - if the revenue vanishes because of a collapse in the price of oil, well and good. This, however, should be no reason not to pass the tax by itself.

The latter claim usually cites a Congressional Research Service study from 1990; in light of recent events the author (Salvatore Lazzari) published an update, available here. His argument is this: since the price of oil is determined on a global market, a windfall profits tax imposed on domestic producers means that the effective price per barrel of oil is reduced by the amount of the tax, per barrel. We may then compute, based on what we think is the price elasticity of supply for oil, the effective reduction in oil output this must have precipitated. Based on that, the study concludes that there was (depending on what the price elasticity actually was) somewhere between a 3 and 6% reduction in domestic production in the 1980s.

I’ll make the caveat that my economics is for shit, here; the study’s calculations are reasonable, although one might debate the price elasticity figures employed. In the original study, the lower-bound was 0.5, while in the 2006 update the author acknowledges that lower figures might be correct. I’m not qualified to debate this matter.

But what I do take issue with is the study’s assumption that the full value of the tax should be deducted from the price per barrel. Lee Raymond is adequate evidence of this: capitalists eat profit. Not all of the profit is reinvested, and so we needn’t assume that in the absence of a windfall productivity would suffer. It would just mean some rich people would be a little less filthy fucking rich than they otherwise would have been. This is a key assumption made by proponents of the tax and one that the study fails to acknowledge.

All of that said, I think this tax is a waste of time. And as a political dodge, it’s worse than ineffective, since it distracts from actual measures that would promote real reductions in the price of oil. Giving rebates from tax revenues to customers would certainly be a popular measure, but it’s, first, not going to have any impact on the price of oil, and second, couldn’t possibly provide substantial relief from high gasoline prices - probably 1 or 2% at most. And since we’re unlikely to see drastic increases in output from any major producers (all of whom are running basically at capacity), we’re not going to see a drop in gasoline prices unless we force conservation. Anything that detracts from that is pointless.

^* Which apparently has gotten George Bush’s knickers all in a twist. After spending us $8 trillion into debt, he and the Senate Republic leadership have suddenly decided they are fiscal conservatives again and want to cut the porky bill from $105.6 billion down to a lean $92.2 billion. Ah, election year!

Quimby: Demand? Who are you to demand anything? I run this town! You’re just a bunch of low-income nobodies!
Aide [whispering]: Election in November! Election in November!
Quimby: What? Again!? This stupid country.


^§ In other words, I’m bitter because I was on the “dispossess the ruling class” wagon way before these ruling-class jerks showed up on it.

I woke up to NPR’s Morning Edition. Evil, demonstrated.

It would be evil to contemplate aggressive war, which violates the most basic international law. It would be really evil to discuss it as if it were no big deal. No big deal at all. Not only that, but to ignore other options other than about 10 words at the beginning of the story referring to vague “diplomatic options.” And at the same time to ignore the fact that diplomacy can not work while nuclear states get respect and non-nuclear states get invaded.

It would be evil to discuss how to reduce the horrors faced by coal mine workers while offering cures that still essentially place all responsibility for safety on individual workers, rather than on mine managers. Rather than enforcing mine safety laws that already exist — the Sago mine had over 200 violations in the year before 12 workers died there — so the cure is to provide more oxygen tanks and electronic tags to keep track of exactly where miners are. Electronic tags, of course, will also help bosses fire people they think are lollygagging. And oxygen tanks? Yeah, that will do a hell of a lot of good against fires and collapses. Relegate structural solutions to silence. What’s good for the mine owners is good for America.

And most of all, it would be evil to wake up millions of Americans with a 7 a.m. newscast that spouts so much sinister nonsense. Time to go walk in front of a bus.