A Well of Hypocrisy  

At the risk of getting repetitive, another short post tonight as I just can't shake this cold (thankfully I don't think its Morgellon's disease, but if I do turn into The Fly you'll be sure to see pictures here soon after).

The link bucket has plenty of fodder for those in search of news.

George Monbiot poses the question - "One man uses gas and oil money to help the poor. The other uses it to buy guns. Guess who gets vilified ?".

Civilisation has a new enemy. He is a former coca grower called Evo Morales, who is currently the president of Bolivia. Yesterday he stood before the European parliament to explain why he had sent troops to regain control of his country’s gas and oil fields. Bolivia’s resources, he says, have been “looted by foreign companies”, and he is reclaiming them for the benefit of his people. Last week he told the summit of Latin American and European leaders in Vienna that the corporations which have been extracting the country’s fossil fuels would not be compensated for these seizures.

You can probably guess how this has gone down. Tony Blair urged him to use his power responsibly, which is like Mark Oaten lecturing the Pope on sexual continence. Condoleezza Rice accused him of “demagoguery”. The Economist announced that Bolivia was “moving backwards”. The Times, in a marvellously haughty leader, called Morales “petulant”, “xenophobic” and “capricious” and labelled his seizure of the gas fields “a gesture as childish as it eye-catching”.

Never mind that the privatisation of Bolivia’s gas and oil in the 1990s was almost certainly illegal, as it took place without the consent of Congress. Never mind that – until now – its natural wealth has only impoverished its people. Never mind that Morales had promised to regain national control of Bolivia’s natural resources before he became president, and that the policy has massive support among Bolivians. It can’t be long before Donald Rumsfeld calls him the new Hitler and Bush makes another speech about freedom and democracy being threatened by freedom and democracy.

This huffing and puffing is dressed up as concern for the people of Bolivia. The Financial Times fretted about the potential for “mismanagement and corruption”. The Economist warned that while the government “may get richer, its people are likely to grow even poorer.” The Times lamented that Morales had “set back Bolivia’s development by ten years or so. ... the most vulnerable groups will find that an economic lifeline is soon removed from their reach.” All this is humbug.

Four days before Evo Morales seized the gas fields – on May 1st – an even bigger expropriation took place in an even poorer country: the African republic of Chad. When the Chadian government reasserted control over its oil revenues, not only did it ensure that an intended lifeline for the poor really was removed from their reach, but it also brought the World Bank’s claims to be using oil as a social welfare programme crashing down in flames. So how did all those bold critics of Evo Morales respond? They didn’t. The whole hypocritical horde of them looked the other way.

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The World Bank’s attempts to save face are almost funny. Last year it said that the scheme was “a pioneering and collaborative effort … to demonstrate that large-scale crude oil projects can significantly improve prospects for sustainable long-term development”(23). In other words, it was a model for oil-producing countries to follow. Now it tells us that the project in Chad was “less a model for all oil-producing countries than a unique solution to a unique challenge”(24). But however much it wriggles, it cannot disguise the fact that the government’s reassertion of control is a disaster both for the Bank and for the impoverished people it claimed to be helping. Since the project began, Chad has fallen from 167th to 173rd on the UN’s Human Development Index, and life expectancy there has dropped from 44.7 to 43.6 years(25). If, by contrast, Morales does as he has promised and uses the extra revenues from Bolivia’s gas fields in the same way as Hugo Chavez has used the money from Venezuela’s oil, the result is likely to be a major improvement in his people’s welfare.

So on the one hand you have a man who has kept his promises by regaining control over the money from the hydrocarbon industry, in order to use it to help the poor. On the other you have a man who has broken his promises by regaining control over the money from the hydrocarbon industry, in order to buy guns. The first man is vilified as irresponsible, childish and capricious. The second man is left to get on with it. Why? Well Deby’s actions don’t hurt the oil companies. Morales’s do. When Blair and Rice and the Times and all the other apologists for undemocratic power say “the people”, they mean the corporations. The reason they hate Morales is that when he says “the people” he means the people.

Energy Bulletin has a round up of some new (or restarted) resource wars in Africa - Ethiopia has followed Somalia's lead with a flare up of fighting over potential gas reserves.

Jeff Vail has a post on developments in the latest round of the great game (following on from Engdahl's latest article last week - Chomsky also looked at this in recent interviews about his book "Failed States").

The global struggle for geopolitical domination never really stops, but it certainly has its periods of storm and calm. Historically, the storm never seems to develop quite where people are focused. Right now all eyes are turned towards a potential US confrontation with Iran—and as a result, virtually no one is watching the recent moves made by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Founded (out of the Shanghai Five Mechanism) in 2001 between China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, the organization’s stated goal was to facilitate “cooperation in political affairs, economy and trade, scientific-technical, cultural, and educational spheres as well as in energy, transportation, tourism, and environment protection fields.” Recently, however, the SCO is beginning to look more like a modern-day Warsaw Pact, an energy-financial bloc in central Asia consciously constructed to serve as an anti-pole to US hegemony.

While no such intention is explicitly stated by the group, recent actions speak for themselves. So far in 2006, the SCO has extended de-facto offers of membership to India, Mongolia, Pakistan, and most importantly to Iran (who will officially be invited to become a full member at the SCO June 15th meeting). Beyond their expansion, the SCO member states are also taking steps to separate themselves from US-petrodollar imperialism: Russia has announced that it will open a Ruble-denominated oil and gas bourse in late 2006; China recently announced the intention to move its reserves away from the dollar and that it will use $40 billion in US dollars to purchase gold reserves; Russia’s state-owned, Vladimir Putin-controlled natural gas transport monopoly Transneft has further consolidated its pipeline control to become the sole exporter of Russian natural gas (by far the largest reserves in the world). With Iran, the SCO will control the vast majority of the world's natural gas reserves, as well as a significant portion of its oil reserves, not to mention potential control of the Strait of Hormuz.

And I'll close with Billmon, examining the curious case of a Briton turned American wingnut who is now lusting after the comforting bosom of authoritarian China. The key passage is the wingnut final solution to the immigration issue I think - makes you wonder if Jay Hanson's horrible cautionary tale of "This Way To The Gas Chambers" isn't so far fetched in the event the doomer brigade turn out to be right about post peak economic collapse...

Derbyshire isn't the first right winger to express recent admiration for the ability of totalitarian regimes to deal with undesirable populations. Crooks and Liars and Digby have both hopped on this World Net Daily commentary, which cites the impressive expertise of Adolph Eichmann and the German railway system to counter Shrub's argument that mass deportation simply isn't feasible:

If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

It's hard to believe the tribunes of nativism (including the non-native ones) don't realize how repulsive and offensive this sort of talk sounds to those who don't share their pet obsession. It doesn't do their cause any good, which suggests they keep saying these things because they simply can't help themselves. They're waxing hysterical about the immigrant "threat" for the same reason they've been waxing hysterical about the "Islamofascists" for the past five years: because it legitimizes their paranoid, authoritarian world view -- which in turn justifies the kind of paranoid, authoritarian state they want to see established in this country.

It's almost as if they need to sell totalitarianism to themselves -- to make it OK to ditch the libertarian legacy of old-fashioned small-government conservatism. But that takes perpetual crisis. The war on Al Qaeda wasn't sweeping enough, so it had to become the clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. Iraq was a great emotional ride while it lasted (i.e. back in the days of mission accomplished) but now that it's degenerated into the dry heat version of Vietnam, it's no help at all -- not just because America is losing, not just because the war is unpopular, but because it's no longer dramatic enough to justify the kind of emotional mobilization that feeds the totalitarian impulse.

So the brown invaders crossing "our" border and daring to demonstrate in "our" streets have become the new Islamofascists -- the necessary enemy of the moment. It reminds me of the closing lines from Constantine Cavafy's poem, Waiting for the Barbarians, in which the citizens of his imperial capital finally realize that there are no marauding hordes coming to end the pointless routine of daily life:

And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?

They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Not that you'd ever get John Derbyshire or Michelle Malkin or Hugh Hewitt to admit that there are no barbarians, just the same old immigration problem that America has been wrestling with, and mouthing hypocritical pieties about, and failing to solve, for the last 30 years or so. That's not the kind of material serious police states are made of -- much less good excuses for moving to China.