[Dialogue] Petrodictators

Thu Sep 28 10:23:36 EST 2006

Sometimes I wonder how this kind of nonsense sees the light of day.  
Ahmadinejad and Chavez dictators?  These Presidents who were elected by 
overwhelming majorities in countries are called dictators by a 
journalist in a nation where its own leadership was not elected by the 
popular vote nor does the leadership, acting very dictatorially,  
respect the international and national laws?  Friedman's hypocritical 
condemnations of the actions of the twice democratically elected Chavez 
trying to influence other national elections fly in the face of the US 
of A which itself has sponsored a military coup to oust Chavez not to 
mention brutal CIA coups in other Latin American Countries?  The Chavez 
who has done more for the impoverished people of Venezuela using the oil 
revenues than the Crawford Ranch vacationing, draft dodger whose tax 
cuts ruin the nation's educational and health systems for 20 million 
children?  If Chavez is a buffoon; Bush must be a complete  moron or worse.

Ahmadinejad doesn't question the happening of the holocaust as much as 
saying that if the Europeans and Americans were so devastated by the 
event why did they have to punish the Palestinians by taking their land 
away when setting up the state of Israel?  Why didn't they create the 
state in the US or Europe?  And is Iran really building nuclear 
weapons?  Do we continue to buy into Dubyah's propaganda machine that 
claims, even against numerous reports by IAEA inspection teams in Iran 
saying the contrary, Iran is enriching uranium and building bombs?  
Another set of fictitious weapons of mass destruction story?  Is it the 
ploy to using nuclear weapons against Iran?

America's oil problem is not the problem of the oil producing nations no 
matter how much Friedman tries to blame them for causing fluctuating oil 
prices.  The profits the Iranians made off of their crude oil all of 
last year was less than the third quarter profits of the US and British 
oil companies.  The high prices the Americans pay at the pump mean 
fabulous wealth to Bush's supporters in the oil business.  The real 
Petrodictators are not the legitimate international leaders hated by 
Bush and his cronies, instead, it is the capitalists who corrupt ours 
and other governments with their enormous petrodollars.  According to 
our foreign politics, ruthless dictators which actually exist are 
inconsequential unless we have some national interest in their 
countries, they are welcomed to stay and rule.  Likewise if a 
democratically elected government conflicts with US interests or their 
demise promotes political agendas, they are likely to be hurt or 
destroyed until we get our way.

I'm sorry, but in this article, Friedman has not only crossed the line 
of sanity but seems to have dropped of the edge.

Jim Baumbach

FacilitationFla at aol.com wrote:
> 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
> http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla
>
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