>ARTICLE ON OPEC SUMMIT by Steve Ellner
>Part 1
>At OPEC's Second Summit on September 27-28, member nations >blamed high oil
prices on taxes, middlemen and bottlenecks, in that
>order. What they did not say was that changes within OPEC itself also
>have much to do with the price increases. As in the past, the militant
>Moslem nations -- Iran, Iraq and Lybia - which favor keeping
>production down and prices higher, are pitted against the pro-U.S.
>Saudi Arabia. Venezuela represents the big change. When President
>Hugo Ch�vez took office in February 1999, Venezuela went from
>being OPEC's most notorious violator of the organization's
assigned >quotas to its most disciplined member, after which other oil
exporters >followed suit.
Snip
Many frequent crash list rightly link the impending environmental crisis
with neo-Marxist analysis of the failures of capitalism. Whether Marx
foresaw the environmental limitations of capitalist growth is open to
reasonable debate, as is the validity of a neo-Malthusian approach to
carrying capacity.
However, list comrades tend to ignore the signficance of power struggles in
the Middle East, Balkans, former African colonies or US plans to destabilise
Europe. Some recycle mainstream propaganda about rogue regimes and demonised
leaders who fail to comply with IMF/WB diktats.
The last straw for me was reading a Socialist Worker (British trotskyist
rag) that urged workers to get rid of the African Milosevic, Robert Mugabe,
hailing the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) as trade union oriented
opposition to corruption and plundering. Both Milosevic and Mugabe have been
demonised by British press. When Ian Smith declared UDI back in 1965, it was
hard for the anti-imperialist left to accuse the black majority of
intolerance towards the dwindling white minority. Not surprisingly the press
uses newly coined terms like ethnic cleansing to denounce occupation of
white-owned farms. Former anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Hain can suggest
without the whites the Zimbabwean economy will go down the drain and
Zimbabweans should welcome World Bank policies and a massive concentration
of wealth and resources in a 0.2%, i.e. 20,000, white farmers and business
people alongside an equally miniscule minority of wealthy blacks.
While it is undeniable 60% of Zimbabweans of working age are jobless,
hundreds of thousands are starving, food prices soaring as the Zim $ hits
new lows, caving into World Bank diktats is not the answer, but the stark
choices available highlight the failings of international capitalism rather
than Mugabe's belated attempts to redistribute wealth. Sadly the MDC will
not deliver and exploits Shona-Ndebele clashes to accuse Mugabe of ethnic
cleansing.
The missing link is the economics behind the destabilisation of governments
that have lost favour with the New World Order. Their message is simple:
Comply or Die! Sadly for many in Africa, compliance has a shockingly high
death toll, as skeleton social services are cut, transnational corps are
allowed to lay off and pollute, while new compliant leaders like Chiluba in
Zambia are hailed as great democrats.
All too often rather than challenging the plots of world's ruling class, the
left falls for its propaganda. As long as one can claim to be on the
progressive side and use nominally anti-racist rhetoric, any sellout seems
justifiable. We had leftists shouting "Victory to the KLA!" - i.e. victory
to CIA-funded militia and now leftists denounce Mugabe as a homophobic
dictator, while they ignore much more homophobic and ruthless dictators in
countries like Saudi Arabia that buy billions of pounds of British-made
military hardware.
Until we can link our undeniable environmental woes and the widening social
divide with the growing concentration of wealth, military might and media
control in a tiny �lite determined to control the world, our analysis will
be flawed. Can we let the Gores and Blairs of this world claim green
creditentials, while behind the scenes they're planning new wars to secure
control of key resources? Bush might favour oil wells in Alaskan national
parks, while the forces behind Gore are intent on absolute US control of oil
fields in Nagorno Karabakh and the Caspian Sea via a puppet regime in
Azerbaijan. I hate to think what I would do if forced at gun point to vote
either Bush or Gore.
Regards
Neil
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