Page 4 of 4 Oil, war, lies and bulls**t'
By Cyrus Bina
utilized merely as a deterrent in order to calm the jittery market in Wall
Street - a weapon that, god forbid, he wouldn't have to use.
This speaks clearly to the irony of market ideology that rather idealistically
hangs on to the so-called market perceptions without much inkling about the
material conditions that are to be inevitably the cause of such perceptions.
The US national debt has now jumped to upwards of $11.3 trillion - a figure for
the combined annual GDP of China, France, Germany, Norway, Russia, and Sweden
in 2007.
On Monday, September 22, the first day after the weekend's proposed massive
bailout, the NYMEX October crude oil (nominal price) surged by $25, from
$104.55 to $130, before settling at
$120.92 a barrel, with a $16.37 increase. This was the largest one-day spike in
the price of oil in history of the industry, a rather expected response to
bailout's inflationary repercussion and further fall in the value of the US
dollar.
Today, the US economy is sneezing in cold sweat - notwithstanding the present
financial contagion - but the world economy is not even uttering: "bless you".
Here lies the belated distinction between the so-called Americanization and
globalization - and, by implication, the loss of American hegemony. This crisis
provides us with a vivid distinction between neo-liberalism (as an ideology and
policy) and the epochal context of globalization, beyond the conventional
notion of imperialism and/or nationalism.
At the last meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, even
sympathetic liberals and social democrats realized, rather belatedly, that the
American economy is no longer functioning as the engine of world economy. Their
lexicon was "decoupling" of world economy from the US economy, thus signaling
rather aptly what I have already foreseen well over two decades ago,
notwithstanding the pageantry of Reaganomics and pomposity of "the only
superpower".
In the meantime, the Republican ticket for the November US presidential
election is hanging to the reactionary ideology of the tripartite
neoconservative/cold-war militarist/Christian Zionist alliance - the same
coalition that catapulted George W Bush for two consecutive terms to the Oval
Office. Here, militarist John McCain, who is now surrounded by an army of
neoconservative lobbyists, had to logically "balance" the Republican ticket by
nominating Christian (fundamentalist) Zionist Sarah Palin, as his vice
president, in order to obtain seamless identity with George W Bush's social and
ideological base.
McCain is now frequently seen with Senator Joseph Lieberman (the patron saint
of the Israel lobby in Washington) on the campaign trail; he is rather
shamelessly manufacturing the facts about Iraq and audaciously promoting
another war - this time with Iran. Again, as I have pointed out elsewhere, this
alone speaks to the temporal, as opposed to epochal, feature of today's
America. Consequently, in reality, McCain-Palin presidential show provides a
thin disguise for the Bush-Cheney's potential third term in the office. And in
the present era of post-Pax Americana, post-hegemony, and post-Reagan
Republican Party, the lesser-known face of fascism is possibly lurking on the
horizon in the United States.
In sum, to understand the connection between oil prices, the falling US dollar,
the status of US economy, and the loss of American hegemony we need to
appreciate the dialectical relation between the globalization of oil,
globalization of world economy (beyond the defunct Pax Americana), and the fact
that material, ideological, and social conditions for American exceptionalism
have readily ceased to exist.
On the epochal (global) trajectory and quite contrary to Antonio Negri and
Michael Hardt's Empire (2000), the emperor is nothing but the cloth!
Even a nostalgic allusion to such binaries as hard power/soft power is but
reminiscent of the bad cop/good cop stratagem, albeit on a wider scale, which
is nonetheless a far cry from hegemony and exceptionalism.
Likewise, on the temporal plane and in respect to US foreign policy, the Bush
doctrine of preemption is not only reactionary but also a self-destructive and
desperate agenda on the road to perdition. And, by extension, "the war on
terror" is but a bizarre phrase that predictably is at the service of promoting
further unprovoked US military invasion in the world. Thus, "bull in the china
shop" is not an unbefitting label for the existing US foreign policy today.
The world is more than the sum of its globalized parts and the United States
has yet to come to grips with the necessity of its circumscribed power and its
fast-shrinking place in this century, and behave accordingly for its own sake
in this post-colonial, post-Pax Americana, and post-hegemonic world.
Note
This paper is prepared for an invited keynote presentation at an international
conference, entitled Globalization and Fluid Politics, in November 1-2, 2008,
to be held at Gothenberg University, Sweden. For more information, go to
www.kurrents.org/conf or www.kurrents.org/sessions/oil.html. The author wishes
to express his sincere thanks to Dr Daruis Moaven Doust of Gothenberg
University, the organizer of the conference.
Cyrus Bina, distinguished research professor of economics at the
University of Minnesota, is a member of Economists for Peace and Security. He
is currently a visiting scholar at UCLA.
Sources
Robert B Barsky and Lutz Kilian, "Oil and the Macroeconomy Since the 1970s",
Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18 (4), Fall 2004.
Cyrus Bina, The Economics of the Oil Crisis, New York: St. Martin's,
1985.
Bina, "Some Controversies in the Development of Rent Theory: The Nature of Oil
Rent," Capital & Class, No. 39, Winter 1989.
Bina, "Competition, Control, and Price Formation in the International Energy
Industry," Energy Economics, 11 (3)
Bina, "Limits to OPEC Pricing: OPEC Profits and the Nature of Global Oil
Accumulation," OPEC Review, 17 (1), Spring 1990.
Bina, "The Rhetoric of Oil and the Dilemma of War and American Hegemony," Arab
Studies Quarterly, 15 (3), Summer 1993.
Bina, "Oil, Japan, and Globalization," Challenge: A Magazine of Economic
Affairs, 37 (3), May/June 1994.
Bina, "Towards a New World Order," in Islam, Muslims, and the Modern State,
H Mutalib and T Hashmi (Eds.) London: Macmillan, 1994.
Bina, "On Sand Castles and Sand-Castle Conjectures: A Rejoinder," Arab Studies
Quarterly, 17 (1-2), Winter/Spring 1995.
Bina, "Globalization: The Epochal Imperatives and Developmental Tendencies,"
The Political Economy of Globalization D. Gupta (Ed.), Boston: Kluwer, 1997.
Bina, "Is It the Oil, Stupid?" URPE Newsletter 35 (3), Spring 2004.
Bina, "The American Tragedy: The Quagmire of War, Rhetoric of Oil, and the
Conundrum of Hegemony," Journal of Iranian Research and Analysis 20 (2),
November 2004.
Bina, "The globalization of Oil: A Prelude to a critical Political Economy,"
International Journal of Political Economy 35 (2), Summer 2006.
Bina, "America's Bleeding �Cakewalk'," EPS Quarterly, March 2007.
Cyrus Bina and Behzad Yaghmaian, "Postwar Global Accumulation and the
Transnationalization of Capital," Capital & Class, No. 43, 1991.
Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo, "OPEC in the Epoch of Globalization: An Event Study of
Global Oil Prices," Global Economy Journal 7 (1), March 2007.
Cyrus Bina and Sam Gardiner, "OP-Ed: Talk to Iran," The Washington Times, July
5, 2008.
Simon Bromley, American Hegemony and World Oil, Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1991. Paul Cummings, "The Global Oil Market," Dollars and
Sense, July-August 2008.
Paul Davidson, "Crude Oil Prices: 'Market Fundamentals' or Speculation?" Online
Political Economy (Reflections on the Oil Price Controversy), July 24, 2008;
http://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope.
Harry G Frankfurt, On Bullshit, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2005.
Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, New York: International
Publishers, 1971.
Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,
New York: Free Press, 2006.
Michael Hudson, "How Bush has Pushed Up Oil Prices," Counterpunch, 15 (12),
June 2008.
Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001.
Klare, "It's the Oil, Stupid," The Nation, May 12, 2003.
Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing
Dependency on Imported Petroleum, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.
Michael Mackenzie and David Oakley, "Overview: Sliding Dollar Sparks Fresh
Surge in Oil Price," September 22, 2008; retrieved on September 22, 2008 at:
http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=ft092220081636271900.
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side, New York: Doubleday, 2008.
John J Mearsheimer and Stephan M Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007.
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000.
Richard Perle et al, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,"
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, July 8, 1996; retrieved
on September 4, 2007 at: http:// www.freerepublics.com/focus/posts.
Philippe Sands, Torture Team, New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008.
James Schlesinger, "Interview: Will War Yield Security?" Challenge: A Magazine
of Economic Affairs, March/April, 1991.
Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008,
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
