The End of the World As We Know It?

By Jane Smiley, Huffington Post. Posted October 28, 2006.

In a week or so, the New York Review of Books is going to publish an article by James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis (in which the Earth is viewed as more than an ecosystem, closer to a living being, that can be healthy or diseased, and can change, through evolution, from one state to the other). Lovelock will declare that the Earth's temperature is about to rise five to eight degrees centigrade (depending on where you are -- more at the poles, less in the tropics), and that this temperature rise will have disasterous consequences for all life, eventually, for example, reducing the human population from six billion to two hundred million, mostly living in the far north, and, as another example, submerging the British Isles, creating out of the highest points of land an archipelago, where some, but not much, habitation will be possible. As for the western United States, done for, along with much of the rest of the world, and civilization as we know it, of course.

And then there's a report by the Global Policy Forum, which, I gather, is a UN watchdog organization, about what's going on with Iraqi oil. Yes, the war is a disaster, but, at least as of last year, the west was moving ahead nicely in its expropriation of Iraqi oil. The ownership of the oil reserves has been public, but now the oil industry plans to use "production sharing agreements" to gain for itself the profits that otherwise would go to Iraqis.

To quote from the Global Policy paper (written by Greg Muttitt):

"It is difficult to overstate how radical a departure PSAs would be from normal practice, both in Iraq and in other comparable countries of the region. Iraq's oil industry has been in public hands since 1972; prior to that the rights to develop oil in 99.5% of the country had also been publicly held since 1961. In Iraq's neighbours Kuwait, Iran and Saudi Arabia, foreign control over oil development is ruled out by constitution or by national law. These countries together with Iraq are the world's top four countries in terms of oil reserves, with 51% of the world total between them... Countries with reserves the size of Iraq's do not use PSAs because they do not need to and are able to run their oil industries on far more beneficial terms... Unfortunately the Iraqi people have not been informed of the pro-PSA oil development plans, let alone their implications, which have transformed so seamlessly from US State Department recommendations into Iraqi government policy."

According to Muttitt, if oil were selling at $40 per barrel (ha ha), Iraq would hand profits of between $74 billion and $194 billion over to the oil companies.

Bear with me here. In yesterday's New York Times' better-late- than-never editorial, about how possibly to get out of Iraq, it is suggested that Americans should renounce permanent bases there -- "The people in Iraq and across the Middle East need a strong sign that the troops are not there to further any American imperial agenda." Oh, yes -- war for oil. It all comes clear now.

Part Two

Once upon a time, there was a man named Dick Cheney. He was a contemptuous, selfish, snarling, secretive, bullying sort of man who thought he was very smart, and he had a bunch of cronies whom we shall call "Pnackers". Dick and the Pnackers sometimes liked money more than power and sometimes liked power more than money, but most of the time they liked both equally, and, more than that, they thought they were entitled to both power and money because they were white male Americans and because they were corporate capitalists and other people had been sucking up to them for as long as they could remember. Unfortunately, Dick and the Pnackers were themselves so abysmally unattractive that in order to get elected, and thereby get their hands on the biggest military and the biggest cache of weapons in the world, Dick had to find himself a useful but controllable idiot, preferably one who was entirely corrupt, and came from an entirely corrupt family. He didn't have far to seek.

Pretty soon, Dick, the Pnackers, and, sometimes, little George himself, came up with a plan. The steps of the plan were as follows:

1. Assure their own "election" by any means possible, including denying the vote to registered voters, announcing results early in the count, blocking recounts, and buying off cronies on the Supreme Court.

See more stories tagged with: jane smiley, dick cheney, bush, civilization, survival

Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

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