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If you happen to be caught in a boat in a major storm, such as in this image by Hokusai, you’ll surely think you experiencing a major shock. However, it is also true that no storm changes the average water level of the oceans. So, the oil storms of the 1970s were perceived as major shocks, but did they change the average patterns of the world’s oil production? In this post, I argue that they didn’t. Just like a sea wave has to crash on a shore, sooner or later, so oil production had grown so fast in the 1950s and 1960s that it had to crash, sooner or later. And it did.

The oil crisis that started in the early 1970s is still widely remembered today and much of the interest in the vagaries of the present oil market is derived from a comparison with the events of that time. Yet, it may also be that the crisis was widely misunderstood while it was taking place and that it remains misunderstood even today; often reduced to the work of a small group of evil Arab sheikhs, perhaps the ancestors of today’s Daesh. But, as it often happens, every question may have an explanation that is simple, obvious, and totally wrong.

Last week, there was a meeting at the University of Venice, Italy, dedicated to this issue: what were the origins of the oil shock and of the countershock of nearly half a century ago? The conference collected for two days experts in subjects such as political science, economics, communication science, history, and more and I won’t even try to summarize for you all what was said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Can’t Anyone Fix This?

October 20, 2015

Can’t Anyone Fix This?

The legacy mainstream media has a collective brain like dog’s — it exists in an eternal present, so that whatever’s happening right now is all there is. Thus, Hillary’s performance in the first Democratic debate, being as bad but not worse than her competitors’, means she has a lock on the nomination for president. The better part of a year lies between now and the convention, and time would be on the side of whatever force or figure rises to oppose the woman whose “turn” in power rides a myth of inevitability.

What perhaps ought to be more alarming is the way that the two major parties are lining up to be a men’s party and a woman’s party, a perfect acting-out of psychological archetypes in a society churning out millions of lost souls year-by-year. The American people apparently want a Daddy to fix all the broken systems and they want a Mommy to reassure them that everything will be all right. Hillary, of course, wants to be both, but her problem is that a lot of voters won’t accept her as either.

Her record doesn’t suggest she’s much good at fixing anything. That’s why the Benghazi affair is such a good stick to beat on her with. That was a moment when America needed a Daddy with a toilet plunger or a screw gun and all they got were cables from the home office saying everything was going to be all right. Mommy couldn’t save the Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans slaughtered there. The big pretense, of course, is the idea that congress holds hearings “so something like this will never happen again.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Buying Power

October 11, 2015

Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.

These donors’ fortunes reflect the shifting composition of the country’s economic elite. Relatively few work in the traditional ranks of corporate America, or hail from dynasties of inherited wealth. Most built their own businesses, parlaying talent and an appetite for risk into huge wealth: They founded hedge funds in New York, bought up undervalued oil leases in Texas, made blockbusters in Hollywood. More than a dozen of the elite donors were born outside the United States, immigrating from countries like Cuba, the old Soviet Union, Pakistan, India and Israel.

But regardless of industry, the families investing the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations; cut taxes on income, capital gains and inheritances; and shrink entitlement programs. While such measures would help protect their own wealth, the donors describe their embrace of them more broadly, as the surest means of promoting economic growth and preserving a system that would allow others to prosper, too.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Hope, Power, and Delusion

September 30, 2015

Hope, Power, and Delusion

Jeremy Corbyn has won the race for leadership of the Labour party. But Greek and Spanish activists advise against placing too much faith in political parties.

Jeremy Corbyn has won the race for leadership of the Labour party, and the anti-austerity movement of the UK rejoices: “Finally we will see change”.

Theodoros Karyotis speaking at Debt Resistance UK:- Power Hope and Delusion. 10SEPT 2015

Simona Levi speaking at Debt Resistance UK:- Power Hope and Delusion. 10SEPT 2015. (Video credits: let-me-look tv)

I sit in front of my twitter feed perplexed.

I think back to an event I attended a few days ago in London, entitled “Power, Hope and Delusion”. It was a conversation with activists from Spain and Greece on the role left-wing parties are playing in the fight against the current neoliberal agenda and on their relationship with the grassroots anti-austerity movements across Europe.

The speakers were Theodoros Karyotis from Greece and Simona Levi from Barcelona, both active in the social movements in their countries and often blogging about them in English. Their main message was clear: do not be deluded that the change you want to see will come from the rise of the anti-austerity political parties.

As I write this article, I wonder, if in the current hype for Corbyn’s win, the UK anti-austerity movement is prepared to listen to the advice of our European allies, or if we prefer to remain blinded by the hope finally given to us by a ‘long awaited’ leader.

I fear this hope. A hope based on the idea that change only happens from above, through existing political institutions, as that is where power lies. A hope based on fear and desperation for someone to protect us from above from the evil forces we are facing today.

– See more at: http://commonstransition.org/hope-power-and-delusion/#sthash.hCeqkNAv.dpuf

Yahoo Finance Drops in From Mars to Explain Big Money Hasn’t Bought U.S. Politics

September 22, 2015

Yahoo Finance Drops in From Mars to Explain Big Money Hasn’t Bought U.S. Politics

A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 84 percent of Americans think money has too much influence in U.S. politics, and 85 percent want the campaign financing system completely rebuilt or at least fundamentally changed. Even politicians themselves will tell you that big money controls most of what they do.

Yahoo Finance, however, has done a study on money in politics, and determined that everyone else in America is wrong:

With so much concern about democracy for sale, Yahoo Finance set out to ask a basic question: Are rich donors buying election results? We scrutinized thousands of federal records on campaign donations in presidential and congressional campaigns in 2012 and 2014, and came up with this simple answer: no.

What Yahoo did was simple and straightforward: Look at the top 10 individual donors to campaigns and Super PACs, as well as the top 10 biggest Super PACs, and then check to see how often the candidates the donors and Super PACs supported won.

And it turned out that big money’s candidates didn’t win every time! For instance, the candidates of the top individual donor, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, won only 56 percent of the time. The candidates of the biggest-spending Super PAC, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, only won 51 percent of their races.

So case closed, according to Yahoo: “The return on investment to big donors appears to be less than the fretting over the health of democracy suggests.”

Of course, the flaws in Yahoo’s study are as painfully glaring as the lens flare in a J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot. Here are the top four, from least important to most:

• Yahoo doesn’t know who the top individual donors were and how much they gave — because nobody does. When you look at Yahoo’s list of the top 10 donors for the 2012 and 2014 elections, you’ll notice something odd: Charles Koch is last, at No. 10, and only contributed a scant $5 million total.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The War Against Change

August 13, 2015

The War Against Change

Last week’s post explored the way that the Democratic party over the last four decades has abandoned any claim to offer voters a better future, and has settled for offering them a future that’s not quite as bad as the one the Republicans have in mind. That momentous shift can be described in many ways, but the most useful of them, to my mind, is one that I didn’t bring up last week: the Democrats have become America’s conservative party.

Yes, I know. That’s not something you’re supposed to say in today’s America, where “conservative” and “liberal” have become meaningless vocal sounds linked with the greedy demands of each party’s assortment of pressure groups and the plaintive cries of its own flotilla of captive constituencies. Still, back in the day when those words still meant something, “conservative” meant exactly what the word sounds like: a political stance that focuses on conserving some existing state of affairs, which liberals and radicals want to replace with some different state of affairs. Conservative politicians and parties—again, back when the word meant something—used to defend existing political arrangements against attempts to change them.

That’s exactly what the Democratic Party has been doing for decades now. What it’s trying to preserve, of course, is the welfare-state system of the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society programs of the 1960s—or, more precisely, the fragments of that system that still survive. That’s the status quo that the Democrats are attempting to hold in place. The consequences of that conservative mission are unfolding around us in any number of ways, but the one that comes to mind just now is the current status of presidential candidate Bernard Sanders as a lightning rod for an all too familiar delusion of the wing of the Democratic party that still considers itself to be on the left.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canadian ‘Totalitarianism’? Hope Can Win, Says Author Thomas King

July 8, 2015

Canadian ‘Totalitarianism’? Hope Can Win, Says Author Thomas King

Governor General award winner talks election politics and the power of words

Cherished author and former New Democrat candidate Thomas King insists he’ll stay out of politics this pivotal election season.

But on the heels of his Governor General award-winning novelThe Back of the Turtle — set in a coastal B.C. village devastated by a toxic spill — neither is the 72-year-old Order of Canada recipient shying away from controversy.

He’s incensed by the sweep of Conservative legislation under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in particular last month’s wide-reaching anti-terrorism bill, and earlier the slashing of waterway and environmental protections, muzzling of scientists on climate change, and gutting of Canada’s research libraries.

“The pieces of legislation they brought in, to my way of thinking, have been very close to a kind of totalitarianism,” he told The Tyee in a phone interview from his home in Peterborough, Ontario. “That doesn’t make me feel good, and I don’t think it’s very — if I dare say it — Canadian, particularly.”

Last year, The Back of the Turtle secured him the Governor General’s top literary prize. The book follows Dr. Gabriel Quinn, an aboriginal scientist who works for a multinational company whose chemical spill has decimated a small coastal B.C. town. The protagonist disappears and resurfaces in his fictitious hometown, Smoke River Indian Reserve, where he confronts his complicity in the cataclysm.

Despite energy companies’ safety assurances, it’s a feared outcome increasingly familiar across the country as a raft of bitumen and gas pipeline proposals advance.

For King, who is of mixed Cherokee, German and Greek descent, the novel’s clash of worldviews reflects many of the ethical tensions with which many Canadians grapple. But in that clash, he believes, also lies the potential for changing citizens’ hearts and minds.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Meet Canada’s Latest Liberal Man-Boy

July 2, 2015

Meet Canada’s Latest Liberal Man-Boy

Can You Really Trust Justin Trudeau?

Here we go again — the Red Book 3.0. Yet another build-up of Liberal election promises just like the ones we’ve seen before (though I admit the one about changing the voting system might be hard to dodge).

The most infamous, of course, was Jean Chretien’s, which he held high and waved at every opportunity in the 1993 election. Co-authored by Paul Martin, it promised the world as we would like it: strong communities, enhanced Medicare, equality, increased funding for education, an end to child poverty. You could almost hear the violins playing. But what turned out to be the most remarkable thing about the book of promises was the record number that were ultimately broken: all of them.

The only time you can trust the federal Liberal Party is when they don’t have a majority — and even with a minority government they have to dragged kicking and screaming to do anything that does not please Bay Street. This fact needs to be repeated over and over again in the next few months leading up to the election as political amnesia is a dangerous condition to take with you into the voting booth.

It’s been 10 years since we had a Liberal government and even longer since we had a majority Liberal regime. A trip down memory lane might serve as a curative.

The effect of amnesia as it relates to the Chretien regime (actually the Martin regime) leaves most Canadians recalling Martin as the deficit dragon-slayer, saving us from our profligate, self-indulgent, entitlement culture and getting us back on the road to solvency. A few will actually recall that Martin chopped 40 per cent off the federal contribution to social programs — but even that memory is diluted by another one: the legendary “debt wall” built exclusively of hyperbole and hysteria over the three years preceding the 1993 election.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Missing from Canada’s Political Debate: Natural Security

June 3, 2015

Missing from Canada’s Political Debate: Natural Security

25-year review of Canada’s eco-stewardship reveals neglect across party stripes.

Canada’s prime minister is pre-campaigning with a strong-on-security message. His government is taking measures designed, among other goals, to protect energy infrastructure from what the RCMP has called “violent environmental extremists.”

As I write, enormous forest fires burning out of control across northern Alberta have done what no activist has accomplished: forced the suspension of oilsands operations.

These events capture a dimension missing from Canada’s security debate: our natural security.

Our natural security is physical. It provides the stable, productive environment that has allowed Canada to prosper. In the form of fields and lakes and forests, and in global exchanges of water and energy, natural security underwrites our economy, our health and our ability to maintain the institutions that serve and protect us.

Every one of Canada’s governments since 1989, including the present one, has expressed strong environmental principles and enacted impressive legislation to protect vulnerable species, defend Canadians against pollution and prevent development from devastating critical ecosystems.

Despite those laws, audits and independent assessments persistently warn us that our natural security is degraded, failing and increasingly undefended. And that should concern Canadians of all political stripes.

The wide gap between our aspirations and actions confronted me again and again as I sought an answer to an apparently straightforward question: “How well has Canada cared for our environment — really?”

The year-long search was commissioned by Tyee Solutions Society, an independent journalism production centre started by the founders of this publication and donor-supported. It collated events, laws, international developments and a wide range of public audits and independent assessments over a period in which five prime ministers from three parties occupied 24 Sussex Drive. All of that information is now available and searchable online.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Online partisan trolls a new fact of elections, international politics

May 4, 2015

Online partisan trolls a new fact of elections, international politics

Some foreign governments are paying trollers to provide internet propaganda. Are political parties?

It was the kind of story that was almost guaranteed to bring out the internet trolls.

On April 15, Margaret Trudeau, wife of the late prime minister and mother of the current Liberal leader, was interviewed by CBC Radio’sOttawa Morning. She was promoting her new memoir, The Time of Your Life, but she also took the opportunity to opine on the current state of federal politics in the run-up to the coming election.

“I’m not looking forward to the attack ads,” she told host Robyn Bresnahan. “I think it’s straight out bullying, and I’m ashamed of Canadians for doing this.”

Although she didn’t mention the Conservatives by name, it was clear she was referring to the negative ads targeting her son that the governing party has been running ever since Justin Trudeau became Liberal leader.

And when his mother’s opinions appeared online in an article published on cbc.ca, readers were ready to rumble. Within 24 hours, the story had attracted 2,698 comments.

The number of comments is not surprising considering that the people involved — Margaret and Justin Trudeau, and the current prime minister, Stephen Harper — are all polarizing figures who attract very loyal and vocal supporters, and detractors.

Nor was the nasty and combative tone of the comments surprising, because that’s what we have come to expect from the partisans who troll the web looking to pounce at every opportunity.

“Will Mommy be participating in the debates to make sure those big meanies don’t say anything bad to Wonderboy?” asked LarryRight, in one of his several comments about the article.

“Economy is in the toilet. Senators on trial. Deficit after deficit. But yup Justin is the problem lol,” responded Skippy, who then went on to observe, “it’s unfortunate that paid Conservative Posters are so nasty.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The 2014 Elections by the Numbers – Who are the 1% of 1% Driving American Politics?

May 4, 2015

The 2014 Elections by the Numbers – Who are the 1% of 1% Driving American Politics?

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

The innocent working families of all backgrounds whose lives and dreams have been cut short by excessive violence, surveillance, and other abuses of the Bill of Rights by government pay the true price, and ultimate price, and one that far exceeds the importances of any kids’ game played tonight, or ever, at Camden Yards. We need to keep in mind people are suffering and dying around the U.S., and while we are thankful no one was injured at Camden Yards, there is a far bigger picture for poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don’t have jobs and are losing economic civil and legal rights, and this makes inconvenience at a ballgame irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans.

– Commentary by Baltimore Orioles COO, John Angelos, on the root causes of the unrest

Earlier this week, I published a post titled, Charting the American Oligarchy – How 0.01% of the Population Contributes 42% of All Campaign Cash, which I think is one of the most important articles I’ve written all year. The key point of the piece is that demonizing the 1%, or 3.2 million American citizens, is divisive and counterproductive. Strategically it’s stupid because there will be many decent, intelligent, motivated people within this class who should be recruited as allies rather than demonized with superficial slogans. Moreover, you should never judge anyone based on their wealth and status alone, you should judge each person by their individual actions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How America Became an Oligarchy

April 7, 2015

How America Became an Oligarchy

The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. . . . You have owners. — George Carlin, The American Dream

According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.

“Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?

The Magna Carta, considered the first Bill of Rights in the Western world, established the rights of nobles as against the king. But the doctrine that “all men are created equal” – that all people have “certain inalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – is an American original. And those rights, supposedly insured by the Bill of Rights, have the right to vote at their core. We have the right to vote but the voters’ collective will no longer prevails.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country?

March 23, 2015

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country?

Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.

Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of “we the people.”

Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway, and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Global Conflict Intensity Spikes To 7-Year High

February 7, 2015

Global Conflict Intensity Spikes To 7-Year High

If it’s not one geopolitical concern these days it’s invariably another. If today’s story isn’t weak-handed Greece escalating the rhetoric in its hopeless game of chicken with eurozone creditors, it’s ISIS ratcheting up the shock factor in a campaign to scare U.S. coalition partners away from an increasingly ineffectual bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq. If it’s not an escalation of tensions between Russia and Ukraine, it’s logrollingbetween the U.S. and Saudi Arabia with the fate of the Assad regime, Gazprom, and the Russian economy at stake. As we’ve seen over the past several months (e.g. crude in a veritable tailspin) and over the past several days (e.g. hourly news out of Greece raining on the BLS’s non-farm revision parade), markets are becoming increasingly tethered to the vagaries of geopolitics — and don’t expect that trend to abate any time soon.

Fortunately, BBVA is on the case, noting that “geopolitical analysis is becoming a key element on the agenda for 2015.” Indeed. That’s why the bank has just launched their first ever “BBVA Research conflict & social unrest monthly update.”

From BBVA, on conflict:

During January, the presence of ISIS in the Middle East continued to be a threat while the Russian-Ukrainian crisis escalated, increasing geopolitical worries in the region. In contrast, territorial disputes and geopolitical tensions eased in South-Eastern Asia. Social unrest related to demands for democracy (North Africa), together with terrorism and economic demands (Europe), have also increased…

…key hot spots continued to be the Russia-Ukraine and ISIS conflict. The Russian-Ukraine crisis escalated again in January (see our previous hot topic) after a relatively calmer period during October-November. This triggered a new meeting in the EU level to discuss new sanctions. The situation in neighbouring countries (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia…) also remained tense. In the Middle East, the International coalition forces regained some ground in Northern Syria (Kobane) and were able to stop the advance of ISIS in Iraq. However, it will take more time to secure peace in the region. Tensions also increased in Western Europe after the attacks in Paris and in Belgium.

And on protests:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

So How Do We Ever Reach Political Reform?

January 10, 2015

So How Do We Ever Reach Political Reform?

QUESTION: okay Martin,

So assuming Capitalism (property rights) and (direct) Democracy is the Promised Land, how the Hell do we get there? How do we break the Oligarchy?

Cheers,

ANSWER: No matter what system we do create, it will be gamed eventually. If you look at Athens, pay attention closely to its history. Despite the Democratic movement, there were constant attempts by the Oligarchy to overthrow Democracy. Eventually they did. So all we can do is try to put as many checks and balances in place as possible. That will not prevent the system from reverting to an Oligarchy because people always want to tell others how to live by force.

We will be given that opportunity to overthrow the Oligarchy in our system ONLY when we crash and burn. The career politicians protect the Oligarchy as we just witnessed with overthrowing Dodd-Frank. Career politicians left or right are simply always for sale. That is why ONLY a form of Direct Democracy stands a change.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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