Who sets gas prices?

There's a little white lie going around about gas and oil prices -- the lie says that international commodities markets, and the traders who work for them, set these prices and that the oil companies just have to make due with whatever price is set.

It's a good lie because it's just a little bit true. Yes, international commodities traders do set prices.

But international oil companies are part of that market. All of them have their own trading desks. They also place many of the orders that brokers at other trading desks execute. Oil companies don't just simply extract oil and ship it to end markets. Once they have the oil, they'll often trade it by selling it to other companies. They're as much into the commodities trading game as they are into turning the commodities into end products. At the moment, the oil companies would love for people to believe that they're just selling their products at a price set by an independent market. But don't believe it. m ExxonMobil is not operating on the whims of traders at Goldman Sachs. Not even for a second.

Yay new World Trade Center!

As I understand it, the pre-9/11 World Trade Center was pretty much a money-losing deal for both private and public interests, from the very start. No fears of attacks caused that, it was just too much concentrated office space with too little demand. So, I wasn't surprised about what's happened in the years since 9/11, which have seen public and private interests struggle to figure out how to build something cool and ambitious on that land without heading into bankpruptcy.

Seems now that a deal's been reached.

That is some good news. I'd never claim to have had a truly harrowing 9/11 experience, given that so many really did, but I do remember seeing the still-smoking ruins from the window of a plane and feeling that something needed to be replaced. Current plans call for a Freedom Tower that will rival our own twins in height, along with a major complex of other buildings, by 2012. Trust me, they'll finish it late. My guess is at least 3 years late.

But I'm glad to see some progress. Our country has made, at every level, far too many bad decisions in reaction to 9/11. I don't care if it takes until 2012, or 2015 or 2020... we need something built there that will help us get beyond the event, at least symbollically. Because we need to get beyond it. Without insulting anyone lost or hurt, we really need to do that. For over five years now, we've had policies that have been either 9/11-centric or justified by that day and those policies haven't served us well.

Can some good architecture and some progress by construction workers help us move on? I really hope so. That was a bad day. An evil day. But we can't make a good country if every decision made is made in the light of it.

Tony Snow! Freaking Tony Snow!

I know, I know, "White House Spokesperson" isn't exactly the job for a guy who'll challenge the administration. In a lot of ways, the White House hiring a truly public partisan for the job is kind of refreshing. We all know what to expect now, don't we?

Still, it's a bit unprecedented. Think back to the administration of Bush's Dad -- if I'd told you that he'd hire Rush Limbaugh as press secretary, you'd have dismissed the very notion as unworthy of a substantive reason why not.

So, my feelings are a tad mixed on this. On one hand... it's no big deal that Bush hires an obvious partisan for one of the most obviously partisan jobs in the administration. On the other hand... it's never been quite so blatant before, has it? And it certainly lends credence to the notion that this White House prefers Fox News above all other outlets.

The Press Secretary is always, no matter who's in charge, "The Shill in Chief." Look at poor Scott McLellan, who had to back Scooter Libby with blunt words, and then had to eat those words when it'd turned out he'd been lied to. That's the job. Snow will do it well.

But... really... it's like there's nothing truly wrong with this except for the fact that it's such an unapologetic and blatant example of what the job really is. I guess, without much complaint, I view the Bush Administration hiring Tony Snow as its mouthpiece not as anything horrible, but as something horribly revealing. It's as if an unspoken truth that we all knew has been screamed by the loudest voice from the highest perch.

Oh, this is rich...

One of the reasons we've got such high oil prices at the moment is that, aside from shortages of supply, there's more competition among customers. We now have to bid against China and India and other emerging markets for our oil. Today, US officials complained that China is cheating by locking in long-term contracts to buy oil from evil governments like Sudan and Iran. We don't buy oil from either country, see. We're just so principled, after all.

Here's an ex-government guy, quoted in the New York Times today: "They are buying long-term supplies wherever they find them, including in unsavory places like Sudan, Iran and Burma, where we won't buy," said Michael J. Green, a Georgetown University professor who directed policy on China at the National Security Council until late last year. "They say it is benign, because they don't interfere with the internal affairs of other nations. And we say it is anything but benign, because it finances these regimes' bad behavior."

It's really nice to see some one take a principled stand on trade issues.

But, I can think of at least one trading partner that we have, that is run by a tyrannical government that oppresses its own people and has even invaded neighboring countries... oh yeah, that'd be... China.

Oh, this is rich...

One of the reasons we've got such high oil prices at the moment is that, aside from shortages of supply, there's more competition among customers. We now have to bid against China and India and other emerging markets for our oil. Today, US officials complained that China is cheating by locking in long-term contracts to buy oil from evil governments like Sudan and Iran. We don't buy oil from either country, see. We're just so principled, after all.

Here's an ex-government guy, quoted in the New York Times today: "They are buying long-term supplies wherever they find them, including in unsavory places like Sudan, Iran and Burma, where we won't buy," said Michael J. Green, a Georgetown University professor who directed policy on China at the National Security Council until late last year. "They say it is benign, because they don't interfere with the internal affairs of other nations. And we say it is anything but benign, because it finances these regimes' bad behavior."

It's really nice to see some one take a principled stand on trade issues.

But, I can think of at least one trading partner that we have, that is run by a tyrannical government that oppresses its own people and has even invaded neighboring countries... oh yeah, that'd be... China.

Hang Your Come Rag High!

Fascinating post on AlterNet by John Gorenfeld about the sexual theology of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, sushi magnate, publisher of The Washington Times, and self-appointed Messiah.

Why Are We There, When Can We Leave?

I'd like to share with you Mark Twain's thoughts on the Iraq war:

You ask me about what is called imperialism. Well, I have formed views about that question..... There is the case of Iraq. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess.... We were to relieve them from Hussein's tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Iraqis, a government according to Iraqi ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now -- why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.

Okay, obviously Mark Twain didn't say that about America's occupation of Iraq. But he did say it--with the nations' names changed of course--about America's occupation of the Philippines, a nation that which came under US control in 1898 as part of the terms the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War (the Philippines had long been Spanish colonies). We promised the Filipinos that we were freeing them from oppressive monarchic and colonial rule, but they decided they'd rather free themselves. In 1899, the Filipinos declared independence. We fought their independence movement until 1913, and we won. The islands didn't leave American control until WW II (when Japan occupied them) and didn't get independence until 1946. (We got Puerto Rico and Guam in the same treaty and kept 'em.)

I'm fascinated that Twain's sense of the problems of the problem with America's occupation of the Philippines in 1900 applies so well to America's occupation of Iraq in 2006. And I don't think it's a fluke. I think it tells us something about the dangers of pursuing a foreign policy based on military force.

Twain wasn't alone in criticizing America's occupation of the Philippines. It made a lot of Americans uncomfortable--if not at first, then certainly after a few years. At the turn of the previous century just as at the turn of this one, Americans generally congratulated themselves on being different from other countries and, then as now, that sense of distinction generally came from their sense that they were profoundly democratic, profoundly committed to liberty, and therefore profoundly hostile to tyranny and imperialism. Fighting an independence movement didn't really seem to fit with that self-concept.

So what's the parallel to Iraq? Am I saying we have imperial ambitions there despite all the elections and provisional governments and training of local military? No. I don't think we do, anyway. For me, the more interesting parallel to Iraq lies in the reasons for the Spanish-American war and the way its humanitarian justifications fell by the wayside.

The Spanish-American War was an unjustified and largely pointless war generated by militarism and bad journalism. (Sound familiar?) The explosion in the boiler room of the USS Maine is now generally thought to be an accident rather than Spanish sabotage (and would have been seen that way at the time if anyone had taken a deep breath and allowed a serious investigation). So there was never any real justification in terms of US national interests (in Iraq: no WMDs, no al-Qaeda).

And whatever justification there was in terms of humanitarian decency (freeing the Filipinos from Spanish imperialism) soon turned ugly when Filipinos' independence demands turned out to be incompatible with American desire to project power abroad. As Twain points out, this plunged us into a war with the Filipinos that we hadn't really been seeking and did so for reasons that had nothing to do with democratic ideals.

And I'm afraid that could happen in Iraq or even that it is happening in Iraq. We've already been there longer than envisioned by the neocon architects of the war (many of whom are now agitating for military action against Iran), and we're close to finding ourselves in the same sort of quagmire there that Twain saw in the Philippines in 1900. Right now, I'm not convinced we're fighting nationalists in search of independence (rather than jihadis in search of Islamic empire), but I am afraid that if we stay there much longer most Iraqis will start seeing the jihadis' fight as their fight. And then we will be fighting an independence movement, and we might not be able to stop fighting. Not for decades, anyway.

Even more worrisomely, a closer parallel between Iraq and an island nation that fell under our control after the Spanish-American War is Cuba. We got Cuba in the same treaty that we got the Philippines. President McKinley was pleased to have Cuba under his control, and he declared that America would have a twenty-year trusteeship over it. Pres. Roosevelt was more sympathetic to Cuban desires for independence, so he granted independence in 1902. But that independence had a big catch. Not only did the conditions of independence require that Cuba lease of Guantanamo Bay in perpetuity, they also granted--explicitly in the Cuban constitution--the US the right to intervene in Cuba's domestic affairs when it saw fit.

In 1906, the US exercised that right when it wasn't satisfied that Cuba's fragile (and elitist) government would survive the death of Pres. Estrada Palmer. The US was directly and indirectly involved with appointing or deposing governments in Cuba until 1944.

The factional and racial violence that helped keep Cuba politically unstable over that period seems unnervingly analogous to the regional and ethnic tensions in today's Iraq. Of course, the new Iraqi constitution doesn't allow us the right to intervene at will in Iraqi affairs, but Iraqis' inability to establish a new government, the ongoing guerilla violence, and our having a hundred and fifty thousand troops on the ground makes that constitution more a piece of paper than a compelling reality.

And I'm afraid that the temptation to intervene militarily in Iraqi politics will be enormously strong for this and future Presidents. We now know that Bush entered this war excited not so much by supposed WMDs as by the neocon aspiration of "regional transformation," of deposing Saddam and putting a democratic, pro-US government in his place. A lot of those people are still in various important positions in the US government and a lot of them will be reluctant to see the US leave Iraq before a strong, pro-US government is in place. The problem is, it seems less likely every day that left to its own devices Iraq will have either a strong government or a pro-US government any time soon, much less have both.

And you don't have to be a neocon to be tempted to stay in Iraq until we somehow "get it right." We've lost thousands of soldiers, killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, spend hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spend on education, or health care, or a night on the town. People want those lives and that money to mean something. And Iraq is hugely important--as a source of oil, as a check on Iran, as a potential ally. If things go badly there, all that could go down the drain.

It took only a few years for thoughtful people to realize that they couldn't understand why we were in the Philippines or Cuba, but it took the US forty-eight years to get out of the Philippines and forty-six years to get out of Cuba. We've been in Iraq three. When will we get out? When can we get out? And, at least as important, how can we stop getting into these situations?

Double-Plus Bad

It's April 2006. Do you know where your liberties are?

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez is now telling Congress that he doesn't necessarily think it's illegal for the President to order warrantless wiretaps on calls that take place entirely within the United States.

Frankly, I think it's scary enough that Gonzalez, Bush, et al are okay saying that violating FISA (a law) isn't, you know, illegal. You see, they promise they have good intentions: "We're fighting terrorism!" And its even scarier that so many Congressfolk are bending over backwards to be okay with the President saying that he doesn't have to obey the law.

But this? To say that, despite FISA, despite centuries of judicial precedent, it might just be okay for the President to authorize warrantless individual wiretaps or wiretapping programs for calls that originate AND terminate inside the US, that's terrifying. That means that, theoretically, the President could issue a standing authorization for the NSA, CIA, FBI, local cops to tap your phone if they kinda maybe thought you might be up to something terroristic but you didn't have enough evidence to convince a judge to issue a warrant. That's carte blanche to eavesdrop on you at any time for any reason and then say, "Well, we thought she was a terrorist. Turns out she's just a pothead. Off to jail with her."

This is beyond scary.

And whenever Congressfolk ask questions about this, Gonzalez clams up and says, "Confidential information." I think it's time to start busting out some contempt of Congress citations. But I'd never say so on the phone.

President, Fire Thyself

If Bush were running for reelection in 2008 (rather than just declaring himself Emperor), he could always run on this slogan: "He voted against the leak after he voted for it." It has a ring to it.

It's now widely reported that Dick Cheney's former chief of staff Scooter Libby has told investigators that Pres. Bush authorized him to tell NY Times reporter Judith Miller about Iraq's alleged efforts to procure yellowcake uranium with which to build a nuclear bomb. (A bogus and now disproven claim, of course.)

Scott McClellan and Bush's ever-shrinking band of supporters are saying that if Bush authorized the disclosure of what was then classified information doing so couldn't have been a leak--after all, the President has the power to declassify information.

But at the time, Bush said, "If there's a leak out of this administration, I want to know who it is." That pretty clearly implied that he had nothing to do with disclosing the information. Otherwise, he would have said, "Yeah, I told Scooter to tell Judy that. Next question."

And, this is the part I think is weird, if the President declassified the yellowcake "evidence" (and didn't tell anybody about doing so) in the interests of what Scott McClellan is now calling "the public good," why did he have the Vice President's chief of staff tell it to a reporter anonymously? Why not just hold a press conference and tell everybody himself? If it was important, why go through channels and the funnel of a single newspaper? I mean, it's not like it was a leak, right?


-------------
[This post is a correction of last night's post, in which I said that the BBC was saying that Libby had also told the court that Bush authorized leaking Valerie Plame's name. I'm pretty sure that the BBC did in fact report that, but the original article has been updated, and I haven't seen any news organization reporting that claim since then.]

An Invetible Consequence of World Trade?

Those of you who know me know that, despite my far left leanings, I remain hopeful and supportive of the notion of free global trade. To me, it comes down to the basics -- if I want to buy an artifact from Africa, from an honest and cognizant merchant, I should be able to. I like the idea of people and companies in the US spreading the wealth around the world and I also think that such actions can, if properly watched and regulated, improve the lots of people who were not fortunate enough to have been born in the wealthier rest.

But, as this TPMcafe post shows, there are other consequences of a global economy. Though the issue is dealt with as almost an aside, the key part of the post, I think, is the revelation that Wal-Mart, among other US-based but international businesses, would love to see international trade rules trump the decisions made by local governments in the US (and by local, I mean not only states but cities and towns).

To pick on Wal-Mart for a moment, the retail goliath faces very few federal regulations that could slow or halt its growth. On the local level, though, it faces formidable opposition. Local zoning boards have proven able to impede and stop the construction of new stores, and they've been able to use economic, social, and environmental means to do so.

This presents Wal-Mart with a difficult problem. The company can't appeal to the feds, especially in its current conservative incarnation, because the conservatives currently in charge would have to blatantly set anti-federalist precedents in order to let the federal government over-rule local zoning restrictions. As soon as the feds say that a town can't say no to Wal-Mart, after all, they invite the Supreme Court to decide that the feds can't let a town say no to an all-fetish gift shop either.

So... lobbying has gone international. Wal-Mart, and others, have decided that they really want to influence international trade agreements in order to render local regulation of the operation of international business moot in the face of federally-backed treaties.

Like I said, I am, at my core, a free trade liberal. I rather like the idea that entrepeneurs in the U.S. can operate not only here, but around the globe, and I like that entrepeneurs from the rest of the world can operate here. I think that global trade has manyu virtues, for all involved.

But, we need to, especially at this moment where global trade is already a reality but is, in the context of modern history, still new, find some way to keep international trade from becoming as corrupt as the trade between the states has become. Remember, when the US was formed, trade between the states within the union was such a major issue that it almost scuttled the formation of our country on numerous occasions. These days, trade between states is considered tantamount to a right of anyone who does business in the U.S. But, we're still working out the rules that should govern international trade. I don't want to restrict that. But I can't help but worry that, with companies like Wal-Mart starting to lobby on the international (rather than federally domestic) level, that the rules might be set, and enforced, in a manner that will give people living locally very little voice, if they're given a voice at all.

Yeah, I'm raising a problem here and I'm not suggesting an answer, but this IS a problem. Big-money lobbying is already too influential at all levels of government in the US, so just imagine the consequences of what's happening now -- international lobbying by multinational corporations.

In my admittedly scant experience, I've found that dystopian scenarios don't tend to play out (with one exception, and I'm sorry for bringing this up in a parenthical, which is the Holocaust from the last century) so I don't mean to predict that large corporations will dominate global politics, however... it seems like such a prediction is worth worrying about right now.

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff is heading to jail for pushing our national rules abbout lobbying a bit too far (and, though I abhor the man and his politics, that's really the extent of what he did -- he pushed the rules, or at least the "accepted practices" of his profession too far) but what are we going to do about individuals and companies who lobby on the international stage?

As I am with trade, I am on the issue of lobbying -- as an idealogical libertarian, I'm fine with, say, the retards of the Ku Klux Klan holding parades and, by extension, that means I have to be fine with billionaires using their money to express their points of view. But, on the international scale (because governance of our economy and all economy is truly becoming international in ways that we still don't see now but will be written, in basic terms, in the textbooks that children read 2 or 3 generations from now) we had better start setting some rules that provide not only transparency but the right of local residents and their governments to have some say about what international corporations can and can't do.

At the moment, we're not really at the point where the United Nations or the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund or the G-8 Nations would dare order a town council in the United States to "stand down," when they're trying to stop Wal-Mart from opening a Supercenter in the town square. But, we've been at the point, for a long time, where those bodies have felt free to say such things to local governments outside of the influential United States. The IMF and World Bank, as just a couple of examples, have already required countries that need their support to privatize state-owned industries and to even modify the curriculums taught in states owned universities -- outside of the US, of course. We have to wonder how long it will be before such institutions starts dictating terms to governments within the US. They will... it's inevitable. But, who will be pulling the strings of those institutions when that happens? Wal-Mart? It just might be. Some company like it? A bunch of companies? Probably, it'll be a bunch of companies and not all of them will even be headquartered in the US.

So... I can't offer much by way of a solution. But we need rules about international lobbying right now. Heck, we've needed them before now. Wal-Mart entering the global political arena (so soon after it got involved in Washington politics despite decades of neglect) isn't a wake-up call so much as it is a final warning.