The value of oil

It is often claimed that physical control of oil supplies lies behind geo-political moves by western nations, especially the United States, but there is an argument that the interest in oil is subservient to the interest in controlling the international monetary system and that the OPEC oil-price shock of the 1970s was actually engineered by western interests to that purpose.

"...Such is not the case in the United States, whose number one export product is the dollar itself. This unique arrangement is largely due to the dollar’s World Reserve currency role, which is underpinned by its petrodollar role. Every nation needs to get dollars to purchase oil, some more than others. This means their trade targets are countries that utilize the dollar, with the U.S. consumer as the main target for export products of the nation seeking to build dollar reserves."

We may be seeing the beginning of the end of that form of economic dominance through the unexpected but fatal consequence of the spiralling growth of unregulated financial trading as a cancer within our western material prosperity.

See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=114x14286

This line or argument possibly places in a new light the United States' reluctance to move away from oil energy dependence in response to concerns about global warming.

There is a further irony in that what made such a ploy necessary, according to this line of reasoning, was the cost of the Vietnam War (just as the cost of consequent US military ventures may be accelerating their economic decline), and so the west's engineering or accelerating the collapse of the Soviet empire is overshadowed by the potential collapse of the west as a final consequence of its armed struggle against communism.

It's all about central banks?

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD14Ak02.html

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2012/01/a-new-reserve-currency-to-challenge-the-dollar-whats-really-going-on-in-the-straits-of-hormuz/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-new-reserve-currency-to-challenge-the-dollar-whats-really-going-on-in-the-straits-of-hormuz

Cometh the hour; cometh the Thatcher?

There is an interesting account, with a historical perspective, of the current impasse of Western capitalism and it's loss of democratic consent in the Financial Times by John Plender.

He concludes with the thought that the way forward could be indicated by the work of the late Mancur Olson, who argued that national decline was brought about by effective political dominance by social/economic interest groups, acting alone or in combination, which serves to undermine the broader efficiency of the economy and society. In Olson's time the dominant interest groups were seen to be trades unions and corporate cartels, but in our time they have been replaced by financial elites and allied professional groups (in accountancy, law etc.) which have escaped accountability and achieved an extractive hold upon national and international wealth and resouces.

The full article is available here and well worth reading.

Comments

Something has to be done about Comments. Simply not allowing them, following my own practice here (although I don't delude myself that anyone would, even if allowed), is not the answer. The Guardian appears to follow a fairly pragmatic practice in whether or not it allows comments, to avoid the actionable or tedious, but an interesting article, such as this on reason and faith, will still rack up hundreds of comments. Entering there is like starting to wander across Morecambe Bay sands at low tide.


The only answer is for us all to be intellectually and culturally ranked. Perhaps Moody's, Standard and Poor's and the other ratings agencies - they must be looking for a new line of business the way things have been going - could do the job (or is it something for Experian?). Then we could sort all the comments by ranking them through a handy drop-down list by intellect or culture, just as we can do it on internet commerce sites by price or most popular or whatever.

A job well done

The misty crystal glitter

The dam site before construction

Now the world holds seven wonders
That the travellers always tell
Some gardens and some towers,
I guess you know them well
But now the greatest wonder
Is in Uncle Sam's fair land
It's the big Columbia River
And the big Grand Coulee Dam

She heads up the Canadian Rockies
Where the rippling waters glide
Comes a-roaring down the canyon
For to meet that salty tide
Of the big Pacific Ocean
Where the sun sinks in the west
In the big Grand Coulee country
In the land I love the best

In the misty crystal glitter
Of the wild and windward spray
Men have fought the pounding waters
And met a watery grave
Why, she tore their boats to splinters
But she gave men dreams to dream
Of the day the Coulee Dam
Would cross that wild and wasted stream

During construction

Now Uncle Sam took up the challenge
In the year of thirty three
For the farmer and the factory
And all of you and me
He said, "Roll along Columbia,
You can roll down to the sea
But river, while you're rambling
You can do some work for me."



A year's worth of logs from one camp heads down river in 1906

In the misty crystal glitter
Of the wild and windward spray
Men have fought the pounding waters
And met a watery grave
Why, she tore their boats to splinters
But she gave men dreams to dream
Of the day the Coulee Dam
Would cross that wild and wasted stream

Now from Washington and Oregon
You can hear the factories hum
Making chrome and making manganese
And white aluminum
Now the roar of the Flying Fortress
For to fight for Uncle Sam
On the howling King Columbia
By the big Grand Coulee Dam

In the misty crystal glitter
Of the wild and windward spray
Men have fought the pounding waters
And met a watery grave
Why, she tore their boats to splinters
But she gave men dreams to dream
Of the day the Coulee Dam
Would cross that wild and wasted stream

Now the world holds seven wonders
That the travellers always tell
Some gardens and some towers,
Why, I guess you know them well
But now the greatest wonder
Is in Uncle Sam's fair land
It's the big Columbia River
And the big Grand Coulee Dam.

Woodie Guthrie 1941

The dam now

"Replication and accommodation drove Western Hemisphere expansion and settlement. Individuals who came to new land brought ideas about how to use it based on the place or places they left behind. They aimed to establish New England, New France, New Spain, or New Amsterdam. They wanted a fresh start but, plagued by the twin diseases of culture shock and homesickness, also worked to recreate familiar surroundings. None of the participants lost their desire to replicate what was familiar to them. Those in the West have always wanted to make it as much like the East as possible, while at the same time keeping it vigorous and untainted. The result is a West that is both a continuation and a place unique. Look at the people who came, the ideas they carried with them, and the changes the new environment and association with different peoples forced them to make, and you can understand American history."

Grand Coulee: harnessing a dream, by Paul C. Pitzer, Pullman, Wash.: Washington State University Press, 1994.




See http://content.lib.washington.edu/grandcouleeweb/book-excerpt.html

The categorical truth

In celebration of Professor Stephen Hawkin's seventieth birthday, The BBC has organised a programme in which a wide range of 'ordinary' people put their questions to him. One example given in this morning's announcement of the programme asked what happened before the big bang.

Stephen Hawkin's reply was to the effect that nothing happened, or rather that the question was a category error. Using an analogy to explain (surely a technique close to a category error itself), he said it was like asking what was south of the South Pole.

I don't think it will entirely satisfy (though perhaps there was more in the full answer) most 'ordinary' people - or at least will not prevent the question recurring. Were we to stand at the South Pole we would have a sense of something further 'south', although strictly speaking we had reached the ultimate. Yet above our heads, still in the direction we falsely though understandably label 'south', we perceive, not more land, but other matter in sky and space beyond. I think Profesor Hawkin's questioner was probably asking the nature of that otherness 'before' 'time'. I suppose the answer is that we cannot know, or perhaps, signalled by the increasing need to put 'ordinary' words here into inverted commas, we can know only in abstruse mathematical notation. 'Ordinary' people may find a requirement to accept that time has a beginning as problematic as the requirement to accept that space has no end, and wonder whether any image they can summon up of the boundary of time would be less fanciful than the image of the finite universe as a saucer balanced on the back of an elephant.

Progress

In the film Padre Padrone, based on an autobiographical book by Gavino Ledda, who participates in the film, Gavino's father, as he removes his young son from primary school to tend the family flock alone on the mountainside, observes to the young school-mistress, "It is not education that is compulsory, it is poverty."

To modern English eyes it is shocking to realise some way through the film, when the father has to accept a reduced price for the produce from his newly acquired olive grove (which is intended to be the family's passport to a new and much yearned for prosperity, because of new European Community regulations, how recent is the film. A few years later the prized olive trees are killed by a late frost and "this little brain", on which the peasant father proudly relies, leads him to sell almost all the family land and aim at that elusive prosperity and security by investing the money in the bank at ten per cent interest, whilst sending out his children as day-labourers.

The book was completed in 1974 and the film made in 1977, but the near inescapable poverty of rural Sardinian society and the attendant brutality and bestiality seem a world away from our lives. Yet the 'compulsory' primary education was in fact introduced in 1859, and had, it would appear from the film, at least brought about a general and basic level of literacy, and an awareness of a world beyond local horizons, if not a generosity of spirit. Perhaps, as Italian banks and governments now collapse and the international financial technocrats take over, thirty years and more of international tourism have changed the picture.

It is military call-up, and some of those whom he meets there, another manifestation of the grinding administration of the state, rather than any globalising prosperity, that eventually enables Gavino to break free. For those of us so distant from the kind of rural society which the film depicts, and out of which one would indeed be grateful to be 'lifted', it is almost impossible to judge whether the almost complete depression of spirit shown is a universal feature of such a life - although still lingering narrowness and resentments in relatively affluent rural societies might persuade one that it is.