[Dialogue] Petrodictators

[FacilitationFla at aol.com]

This is SOOOO true.
 
 
Fill  ’Er Up With Dictators  
By _THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html?inline=nyt-per)  
Published:  September 27, 2006 
Are you having fun yet? 
Skip to next paragraphWhat’s a matter? No sense of  humor? You didn’t enjoy 
watching Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez addressing the  U.N. General 
Assembly and saying of President Bush: “The devil came here  yesterday, right here. 
It smells of sulfur still today.” Many U.N. delegates  roared with laughter. 
Oh well then, you must have enjoyed watching  Iran’s President Mahmoud  
Ahmadinejad breezing through New York  City, lecturing everyone from the U.N. to 
the Council on  Foreign Relations on the evils of American power and how the 
Holocaust was just  a myth. 
C’mon then, you had to at least have gotten a chuckle out  of China’s U.N. 
ambassador, Wang Guangya, trying to block a U.N. resolution  calling for the 
deployment of peacekeeping troops to Sudan to halt the genocide  in Darfur. I’m 
sure it had nothing to do with the fact that the China National  Petroleum 
Corporation owns 40 percent of the Sudan consortium  that pumps over 300,000 
barrels of oil a day from Sudanese  wells. 
No? You’re not having fun? Well, you’d better start  seeing the humor in all 
this, because what all these stories have in common is  today’s most 
infectious geopolitical disease:  petro-authoritarianism. 
Yes, we thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall was  going to unleash an 
unstoppable wave of free markets and free people, and it did  for about a decade, 
when oil prices were low. But as oil has moved to $60 to $70  a barrel, it 
has fostered a counterwave — a wave of authoritarian leaders who  are not only 
able to ensconce themselves in power because of huge oil profits  but also to 
use their oil wealth to poison the global system — to get it to look  the other 
way at genocide, or ignore an Iranian leader who says from one side of  his 
mouth that the Holocaust is a myth and from the other that Iran would never  
dream of developing nuclear weapons, or to indulge a buffoon like Chávez, who  
uses Venezuela’s oil riches to try to sway democratic elections in Latin 
America  and promote an economic populism that will eventually lead his country into 
a  ditch. 
For a lot of reasons — some cyclical, some technical and  some having to do 
with the emergence of alternative fuels and conservation — the  price of crude 
oil has fallen lately to around $60 a barrel. Yes, in the long  run, we want 
the global price of oil to go down. But we don’t want the price of  gasoline to 
go down in America just when $3 a gallon has  started to stimulate large 
investments in alternative energies. That is exactly  what OPEC wants — let the 
price fall for a while, kill the alternatives, and  then bring it up again. 
For now, we still need to make sure, either with a  gasoline tax or a tariff 
on imported oil, that we keep the price at the pump at  $3 or more — to 
stimulate various alternative energy programs, more conservation  and a structural 
shift by car buyers and makers to more fuel-efficient  vehicles. 
“If Bush were the leader he claims to be, he would impose  an import fee 
right now to keep gasoline prices high, and reduce the tax rate on  Social 
Security for low-income workers, so they would get an offsetting increase  in income,”
 argued Philip Verleger Jr., the veteran energy  economist. 
That is how we can permanently break our oil addiction,  and OPEC, and free 
ourselves from having to listen to these  petro-authoritarians, who are all so 
smug — not because they are educating their  people or building competitive 
modern economies, but because they happen to sit  on oil. 
According to _Bloomberg.com_ (http://bloomberg.com/) , in 2005  Iran earned 
$44.6 billion from crude  oil exports, its main source of income. In the same 
year, the mullahs spent $25  billion on subsidies to buy off the population. 
Bring the price of oil down to  $30 and guess what happens: All of Iran’s income 
goes to subsidies. That would  put a terrible strain on Ahmadinejad, who 
would have to reach out to the world  for investment. Trust me, at $30 a barrel, 
the Holocaust isn’t a myth  anymore. 
But right now, Chávez, Ahmadinejad and all their  petrolist pals think we are 
weak and will never bite the bullet. They have our  number. They know that 
Mr. Bush is a phony — that he always presents himself as  this guy ready to make 
the “tough” calls, but in reality he has not asked his  party, the Congress, 
the people, or U.S. industry to do one single hard  thing to reduce our 
dependence on foreign oil. 
Mr. Bush prattles on about spreading democracy and  freedom, but history will 
actually remember the Bush years as the moment when  petro-authoritarianism — 
not freedom and democracy — spread like a wildfire and  he did nothing 
serious to stop it.  


Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida,  33156
305-378-1327; fax 305-378-9178
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