[PEN-L] Empire of Oil

[Louis Proyect]

Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa
by Michael Watts
Michael Watts directs the Center for African 
Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker than both.
—Perry Anderson, “Scurrying Towards Bethlehem,” 
New Left Review, July–August 2001

In his 2006 State of the Union address, George 
Bush finally put into words what all previous 
presidents could not bring themselves to utter in 
public: addiction. The United States, he 
conceded, is “addicted” to oil—which is to say 
addicted to the car—and as a consequence 
unhealthily dependent upon Middle Eastern 
suppliers. What he neglected to mention was that 
the post–Second World War U.S. global oil 
acquisition strategy—a central plank of U.S. 
foreign policy since President Roosevelt met King 
Saud of Saudi Arabia and cobbled together their 
“special relationship” aboard the USS Quincy in 
February 1945—is in a total shambles. The pillars 
of that policy—Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf oil 
states, and Venezuela—are hardly supplicant sheep 
within the U.S. imperial fold.

With surplus capacity in OPEC at an all-time low 
and speculation running rampant in the commodity 
exchanges, Big Oil is awash with money. Corporate 
profits are historically unprecedented. Chevron 
netted a cool $14 billion in 2005, and first 
quarter earnings in 2006 are 50 percent higher 
than the previous year, a historic high obscene 
enough to have Congress muttering about a 
windfall profits tax. So-called supply risks in 
Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria coupled with the 
speculative impulses of the oil traders have 
driven up the price of oil to around $70 a 
barrel, and a former oilman (surrounded by a 
posse of former oilmen) stalks the halls of the 
White House. As if that were not enough, the New 
York Times (March 27, 2006) reported that through 
a “vague law” the U.S. government will waive, for 
the oil supermajors, about $7 billion in state 
royalties over the next seven years. All of this 
takes us back to the 1973 oil embargo and 
President Nixon’s Project Independence, designed 
to achieve U.S. self-sufficiency by 1980. The 
policy failed miserably (U.S. dependency upon 
imported oil in the late 1960s was 20 percent and 
is expected to be about 66 percent by 2025) and 
Nixon resorted to maximizing domestic supply and 
turning to reliable foreign suppliers at minimal 
cost—just as George Bush intends to do.

full: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0906watts.htm