Mixed Media
Oil, the Dollar and the Media
By Sylvia L. Mayuga
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 03:18:00 08/03/2008
Filed Under: Diplomacy, Energy, history, Foreign Exchange Markets, Media, Oil & Gas - Downstream activities, War
“Probably the best advice you can give any government today is to be more transparent. That applies as much to my government as it does to yours,” was how former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani put it to Filipino officials and corporate VIPs at the Makati Shangri-La hotel last July 29.
But how transparent can a badly shaken American superpower be? And how much transparency can an equally shaken world expect from large chunks of the US media turning opaque in media conglomerates too deeply invested to rock a world-straddling ship of state?
I’d say about as much as sunless ocean depths on the trail back to Bretton Woods in 1945, when the US dollar replaced gold as global legal tender. In the half century after that postwar arrangement tantamount to an economic coup, the dollar grew in such strength that the US trade deficit and a matching national debt steadily added up to today’s hyperbolic trillions, now a major feature of the world economy.
Things had become even livelier for America after the first global oil shock in 1973, when it made an offer of military protection to the repressive Saudi Arabian government if it made the US dollar the sole currency for oil purchase, with the rest of OPEC following suit. Not only did that birth of the petrodollar progressively tie the world economy to America’s currency. It also began a new drama starring a glut of petrodollars hunting for investments in Third World countries.
A former World Bank loan officer close to Malacañang in the ‘70s once told me about a crisis of conscience that turned his life around, after his successful offers of long-term petrodollar loans to finance “development” under martial law. Indeed, those dollar loans would make countries like ours writhe in agonies of repayment in the succeeding decades. In that terrible tension of hegemonic, oil- and dollar-based pirate economics would be born the global outcry for “sustainable development” a.k.a. “development as if people mattered.”
The battle goes on today – as oil runs out and the US dollar steadily loses value, together driving the price of fuel, and survival itself, through the roof. Today a woebegone global economic system arrives at the point of asphyxiation. Where we do we go from here? There’s no helpful answer without the counsel of more history.
Middle Eastern oilfields and the institution of the petrodollar take us to the heart of British and American foreign policy in the region, as opaque to the world in the crisis-ridden ‘70s as it’s been in today’s “war on terror.” Last May an article in the Executive Intelligence Review recalled highlights of that decade that the author calls “hoax” oil shortages. The media did not even question those supposed “oil crises,” he adds, instead trumpeting the oil cartel line.
Here are some insider memories: “The Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973 led to an Arab boycott of Britain and the U.S.A., which, at least nominally, led to the suspension of Arab oil sales to those countries. As a flank on the boycott, a ‘spot market’ was set up in Rotterdam whereby Arabian oil could be sold to buyers from the blacklisted companies — at a substantial markup in price, of course. This spot market was the beginning of today's highly destructive and manipulated oil market. The price of oil jumped from $3.50 a barrel before the war to $10 a barrel at the beginning of the following year.
“…Like the 1973/74 event, the 1979 oil crisis was a hoax, designed to expand the role of the spot market as a way of jacking up the price of oil. In the US, we were inundated with the idea that oil was in short supply, creating serious shortages of gasoline. The TV broadcasts showed videos of long lines at the gas pumps, but it soon became apparent to careful viewers that the locations were changing every week, that the oil companies were putting on a traveling roadshow.
“This author, then in Houston and working for Shell, remembers how there were no shortages in Houston until the roadshow came to town—it was our week to be on the news—and then the show moved on, and things returned to normal. At about the same time, a local reporter interviewed the chief of the Shell refinery, who said that his refinery had all the oil it could process, and had tankers waiting in line to unload. The shortage was manipulated, a complete hoax.”
This article is worth reading whole as its author joins other sources of insufficiently known vital information. Their quotes in my previous column are from carefully footnoted articles – long but worth the time of those who prefer painful truth to blissful ignorance.
Here are links to the scholars Cóilín Nunan and Dr. Krassimir Petrov, jointly painting a big picture of a dying world order. Note how such insights and information are more easily available to far corners of the globe on the Web – evidence of a qualitative difference in transparency between traditional media and the Internet.
Things have come to such a pass that paying much closer attention to oil and the US dollar, war and American foreign policy is crucial, especially as truth comes under increasing threat in media-soaked America. Take note, Little Brown Brother Filipinos still swallowing the White House line on the “war on terror” purveyed by Fox News.
Can anyone still afford to live with lies? Our global oil-cum-dollar-cum food-cum environmental crisis defies solution without radical changes in how we live, starting with what and how we perceive, what and whom we choose to believe.
Rounding out a big picture alternative to Bush-Cheney geopolitics is the information security analyst William Clark, a modern patriot in the opposing stream of history that goes back to America’s Founding Fathers. Clark’s close-ups on media choices of what to tell – and not to tell – the world also redound to a warning about strategic “news” according to CNN, Fox News and Murdoch’s empire, and the rest of America‘s media conglomerates.
William Clark wrote “The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War with Iraq” as that war was gaining momentum in January 2003. Why it was that not enough Americans and members of the “coalition of the willing” were roused to protest then is now as much a political history of regret as a shameful chapter in American media annals.
Clark’s two main points update the story to today’s headlines: “Although completely unreported by the U.S. media and government, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking -- it is in large part an oil currency war. One of the core reasons for this upcoming war is this administration's goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard.
“However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. The second coalescing factor that is driving the Iraq war is the quiet acknowledgement by respected oil geologists and possibly this administration is the impending phenomenon known as Global ‘Peak Oil.’ This is projected to occur around 2010, with Iraq and Saudi Arabia being the final two nations to reach peak oil production.”
There’s more on Peak Oil in the whole article. William Clark is not alone. Another American, Robert Freeman, complements everyone’s hard facts with an appeal to truth and far older ideals in “Will the End of Oil Mean the End of America?” It’s even more eloquent four years after it was written. More, it has practical prescriptions for us all. Click here.
You think this is what Rudy Giuliani meant by “transparent”?
Respond to: slmayuga@yahoo.com
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