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Today's
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Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
December 12, 2003
Josh Frank
Halliburton,
Timber and Dean
Chris Floyd
The
Inhuman Stain
Dave Lindorff
Infanticide
as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies
Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?
Jean-Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al-Deeb on the Geneva
Accords
David Vest
Bush
Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton
December 11, 2003
Siegfried Sassoon
A
Soldier's Declaration Against War
Douglas Valentine
Preemptive
Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program
John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra
Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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Weekend
Edition
December 13 / 14, 2003
Saddam, Oil and Empire
Supply
versus Demand
By LARRY EVEREST
(An excerpt from Larry Everest's new
book Oil, Power and Empire.)
World oil markets have become increasingly tight
and volatile, and this has become a major potential problem.
Several trends are responsible: global supplies have not been
growing as fast as demand, key energy-producing regions are highly
unstable, and there is heated competition for control of oil
and natural gas sources.
The demand for energy has been rising
by some 2.5 percent a year as industrialization spreads around
the world. In 2003, global consumption stood at 77 million barrels
of oil a day; by 2010, if these trends continue, it could rise
to over 90 million barrels a day, a 17 percent increase.
However, petroleum output--and especially
production capacity--are not growing nearly as fast. (Of course,
immediate demand for petroleum oscillates with the ups and downs
of the global economy; here we are focusing on longer-term trends
in capacity and demand.)
An April 2001 report by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations
and the Baker Institute for Public Policy, two high profile establishment
think-tanks run by former government officials, was commissioned
by Vice President Dick Cheney to help shape a new U.S. energy
strategy. Their report, "Strategic Energy Policy Challenges
For The 21st Century" (hereafter the "Baker report"),
singled out the lack of spare production capacity as a key concern:
Perhaps the most significant difference
between now and a decade ago is the extraordinarily rapid erosion
of spare capacities at critical segments of energy chains. Today,
shortfalls appear to be endemic. Among the most extraordinary
of these losses in spare capacity is in the oil  arena.
The Baker Report noted that in 1985,
OPEC spare production capacity stood at 25 percent of global
demand, but in 1990 it had fallen to eight percent, and by 2001
was a mere two percent. Without an adequate cushion of spare
capacity, shortages could occur and prices could spike:
the world is currently precariously close
to utilizing all of its available global oil production capacity,
raising the chances of an oil supply crisis with more substantial
consequences than seen in three decades.
A related problem is that energy sources
are concentrated in some of the most tumultuous areas in the
world. According to energy forecasts, by 2050 the Persian Gulf/Caspian
Sea region will account for more than 80 percent of world oil
and natural gas production. The region's reserves are estimated
to be 800 billion barrels of oil and an energy equivalent amount
in natural gas. Meanwhile, total oil reserves in the Americas
and Europe are less than 160 billion barrels and will be exhausted
in the next 25 years.
Former Carter official Zbigniew Brzezinski
calls the Persian Gulf/Central Asian region "the global
zone of percolating violence" and warns that it will likely
be "a major battlefield, both for wars among nation-states
and, more likely, for protracted ethnic and religious violence."
In his book Jihad vs. McWorld, Benjamin Barber calculates
that 69 percent of the total world production of oil and 92 percent
of the world's proven oil reserves are "in nations that
are at a high and moderate risk for current or future ethnic
conflicts"--located mainly in this same region. Pentagon
officials talk of an "arc of instability" running from
the Andes in South America through North Africa, the Middle East,
into Southeast Asia.
This volatility, which results from many
factors including resistance to oppressive U.S.-backed regimes,
presents a number of challenges to U.S. power. First, America
faces difficulties maintaining its hold on the Middle East, which
remains the world's premiere oil-producing region. Second, another
center of world energy production has opened up in the former
Soviet Republics of Central Asia. The region's geopolitical
"tectonic plates" are in motion and its future economic
and political orientation is now being fought out. Third, these
and other developments have impeded investment in oil and natural
gas production and hindered their expansion. The Baker Report
points to political difficulties and under-investment in oil-producing
countries as prime culprits in a crisis of energy production
growth:
[T]he US government has operated under
the assumption that the national oil companies of these countries
would make the investments needed to maintain enough surplus
capacity to form a cushion against disruptions elsewhere. For
several years, these assumptions appeared justified.
But recently, things have changed. These
Gulf allies are finding their domestic and foreign policy interests
increasingly at odds with US strategic considerations, especially
as Arab-Israeli tensions flare. They have become less inclined
to lower oil prices in exchange for security of markets, and
evidence suggests that investment is not being made in a timely
enough manner to increase production capacity in line with growing
global needs. A trend toward anti-Americanism could affect regional
leaders' ability to cooperate with the United States in the energy
area.
The Baker report argued that these problems
"highlight the concentration of resources in the Middle
East Gulf region and the vulnerability of the global economy
to domestic conditions in the key producer countries."
The U.S. agenda includes reshaping these "domestic conditions"--by
force if need be.
The world's major energy multinationals
are blocked from investing in many of the world's richest producing
countries--mainly by nationally-owned oil companies which were
a product of the anti-colonial upsurges of the 1950s and 1960s.
In February 2003, the chairman of ExxonMobil stated that his
company's output was not keeping up with demand: "When
we consider, that as demand increases, our existing base production
declines, we come squarely to the magnitude of the task before
us. About half the oil and gas volume needed to meet demand 10
years from now is not in production today." The New
York Times concluded that ExxonMobil's problems stem from
"flat" production, the decline of its existing fields
in North America and the North Sea, and the fact that "more
than 90 percent of the world's proven oil reserves are owned
by countries, national oil companies and the Russian oil companies"--many
of which are closed to direct foreign investment. "As competition
in the oil industry gets tighter, the challenge is accessing
the reserves in the new areas, and every issue counts,"
one energy company executive commented.
In Iraq, non-Arab foreign investment
was outlawed by the Ba'ath regime, and in 2000, investment in
the Middle East accounted for only 70 cents of every $100 spent
by U.S. companies for oil and gas exploration and development.
Feeding America's Petro-Dependence
The U.S. government has made clear that
it is incapable of dealing with these mounting problems through
conservation, ending the petro-dependence of the U.S. economy,
or energy self-reliance. In May 2001, the Bush administration
issued a "National Energy Policy," often referred to
as the Cheney report, which emphatically declared that the U.S.
economy would continue to consume a grossly disproportionate
share of the planet's natural resources: "Our prosperity
and way of life are sustained by energy use."
A year later, the Environmental Protection
Agency reported that average fuel economy for U.S. cars and trucks
fell to its lowest level in 22 years.
The Cheney report made no bones about
the fact that domestic oil production won't come close to meeting
U.S. consumption, even if the Arctic wilderness was exploited.
The same will soon be true for natural gas, so the U.S. will
have to import more and more of each. "Over the next twenty
years, U.S. oil consumption will increase by 33 percent, natural
gas consumption by well over 50 percent, and demand for electricity
will rise by 45 percent. If America's energy production grows
at the same rate as it did in the 1990s, we will face an ever-increasing
gap," the report states, noting that the U.S. produces "39
percent less oil today than we did in 1970." It concludes
that if current trends continue, the U.S. will be importing two-thirds
of its oil within 20 years -- up from 37 percent in 1980.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration
(EIA) predicts that natural gas imports will more than double
between 2001 and 2025, and imports of liquefied natural gas,
much of it from Third World countries, will increase more than
10 fold. Shortly after the 2003 war, the director of Rice University's
energy program told The New York Times, "We're on
the verge of discovering that natural gas is almost as important
as oil for our energy supplies...Once we wake up to this, we'll
have to deal with the geopolitical implications of importing
natural gas from some of the more unsavory parts of the world."
The Cheney report's solution is to gain
access, leverage, and control of energy sources across the planet,
from Colombia and Venezuela -- where the U.S. has been maneuvering
against guerrilla insurgents and a nationalist-oriented government
-- to the Middle East, the Caspian Basin and east Asia. The
report argues that "energy security must be a priority of
U.S. trade and foreign policy."
The new National Security Strategy echoes
this orientation. It calls enhancing "energy security,"
a major goal and commits the U.S. to "expand the sources
and types of global energy supplied, especially in the Western
Hemisphere, Africa, Central Asia, and the Caspian region."
Oil, Power and Empire is now available at bookstores (distributed by
Consortium and Ingram) or through Common Courage Press: 800.497.3207
To purchase online or contact author Larry Everest: www.larryeverest.com
ISBN: 1-56751-246-1 paper $19.95
390 pages, appendix, chronology, index
Larry Everest will be discussing his
book on KPFA's Morning Show this Monday, Dec. 15 at 8:30 a.m.
(94.1 FM)
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
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