Tom Friedman's Delusion or ?
Robert Cohen
b brilliance
c absurdism
d whistle by graveyard
e way of manipulation or motivation
f convoluted thinking
g pychosis, pathology, neurotic dream
h his way to say to opec, "up your wells"
i acknowledgment that jimmy carter's energy war scenario wasn't stupid
tho not effective enough
j truth, realism, the ideal american way
k diagnosis of disease and prescription
l attempt to save world civilization
m save the jews, whatt else matters?
n this space for lease
o. go green
p. save the polar bears
q. an excuse for writing another distorted column in order to payoff
f'ing mastercard leeches
all of the above, some of above, just laissez faire is the solution,
clampdown/totalitarian control, go to helle, i dunno, how is this
philosophy anyyhow ?
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/opinion/02friedman.html?hp
-Ed Columnist
The Oil-Addicted Ayatollahs
E-MailPrint Save By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: February 2, 2007
MOSCOW
Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas Friedman.
Related
Q. & A. With Thomas L. Friedman
The columnist answered readers' questions.
Columnist Page »
Podcasts
Audio Versions of Op-Ed Columns
TimesSelect subscribers can listen to a reading of the day's Op-Ed
columns.
There may be only one thing dumber than getting addicted to consuming
oil as a country - and that is getting addicted to selling it. Because
getting addicted to selling oil can make your country really stupid,
and if the price of oil suddenly drops, it can make your people really
revolutionary. That's the real story of the rise and fall of the
Soviet Union - it overdosed on oil - and it could end up being the
real story of Iran, if we're smart.
It is hard to come to Moscow and not notice what the last five years
of high oil prices have done for middle-class consumption here. Five
years ago, it took me 35 minutes to drive from the Kremlin to Moscow's
airport. On Monday, it took me two and half hours. There was one long
traffic jam from central Moscow to the airport, because a city built
for 30,000 cars, which 10 years ago had 300,000 cars, today has three
million cars and a ring of new suburbs.
How Russia deals with its oil and gas windfall is going to be a huge
issue. But today I'd like to focus on how the Soviet Union was killed,
in part, by its addiction to oil, and on how we might get leverage
with Iran, based on its own addiction.
Economists have long studied this phenomenon, but I got focused on it
here in Moscow after chatting with Vladimir Mau, the president of
Russia's Academy of National Economy. I mentioned to him that surely
the Soviet Union died because oil fell to $10 a barrel shortly after
Mikhail Gorbachev took office, not because of anything Ronald Reagan
did. Actually, Professor Mau said, it was "high oil prices" that
killed the Soviet Union. The sharp rise in oil prices in the 1970s
deluded the Kremlin into overextending subsidies at home and invading
Afghanistan abroad - and then the collapse in prices in the '80s
helped bring down the overextended empire.
Here's the story: The inefficient Soviet economy survived in its early
decades, Professor Mau explained, thanks to cheap agriculture, from
peasants forced into collective farms, and cheap prison labor, used to
erect state industries. Beginning in the 1960s, however, even these
cheap inputs weren't enough, and the Kremlin had to start importing,
rather than exporting, grain. Things could have come unstuck then. But
the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the sharp upsurge in oil prices - Russia
was the world's second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia - gave the
Soviet Union a 15-year lease on life from a third source of cheap
resources: "oil and gas," Professor Mau said.
The oil windfall gave the Brezhnev government "money to buy the
support of different interest groups, like the agrarians, import some
goods and buy off the military-industrial complex," Professor Mau
said. "The share of oil in total exports went from 10-to-15 percent to
40 percent." This made the Soviet Union only more sclerotic. "The more
oil you have, the less policy you need," he noted.
In the 1970s, Russia exported oil and gas and "used this money to
import food, consumer goods and machines for extracting oil and gas,"
Professor Mau said. By the early 1980s, though, oil prices had started
to sink - thanks in part to conservation efforts by the U.S. "One
alternative for the Soviets was to decrease consumption, but the
Kremlin couldn't do that - it had been buying off all these
constituencies," Professor Mau explained. So "it started borrowing
from abroad, using the money mostly for consumption and subsidies, to
maintain popularity and stability." Oil prices and production kept
falling as Mr. Gorbachev tried reforming communism, but by then it was
too late.
The parallel with Iran, Professor Mau said, is that the shah used
Iran's oil windfall after 1973 to push major modernization onto a
still traditional Iranian society. The social backlash produced the
ayatollahs of 1979. The ayatollahs used Iran's oil windfall to lock
themselves into power.
In 2005, Bloomberg.com reported, Iran's government earned $44.6
billion from oil and spent $25 billion on subsidies - for housing,
jobs, food and 34-cents-a-gallon gasoline - to buy off interest
groups. Iran's current populist president has further increased the
goods and services being subsidized.
So if oil prices fall sharply again, Iran's regime will have to take
away many benefits from many Iranians, as the Soviets had to do. For a
regime already unpopular with many of its people, that could cause all
kinds of problems and give rise to an Ayatollah Gorbachev. We know how
that ends. "Just look at the history of the Soviet Union," Professor
Mau said.
In short, the best tool we have for curbing Iran's influence is not
containment or engagement, but getting the price of oil down in the
long term with conservation and an alternative-energy strategy. Let's
exploit Iran's oil addiction by ending ours.
Robert Cohen
"a." could be "rationalization" too, since my implication is humor
along with of course truth, and since i have that
obnoxious tendency to mis-use/abuse and confuse words in this
particular n.g. in which the term or exact or appropriate word often
can be the essence of the argument
semantical arguments, petti-foggery and chicken-shite is not my
preferred way to claim-derive truths
Bret Cahill
DeTocqueville's on slavery. In the 2nd half of the 20th Century the
only evil of slavery ever considered was that of blacks as victims, or
at least this was the focus in Southern public schools.
DeTocqueville, however, claimed slavery was almost as bad for the
master as the slave. He used that analysis to predict the Civil War.
Coretta S. King said something similar about Southern attitudes
holding back whites as well as blacks.
I'm a lazy selfish person so altruism might not turn me into a civil
rights activist, but if I think _my_ interests are at stake . . .
A blue collar construction contractor who spent decades in mideast oil
rich countries would talk about the incredible waste, roads to
nowhere, etc. where they were just trying to keep their money in
circulation. They didn't work but brought in foreign labor and
intellectual talent.
I wondered what will happen when the oil runs out. Would they
suddenly get the work ethic? He said, no, they weren't going to
change.
He was 100% certain they had no future.
The only difference with living off slaves and oil is no one feels
that the oil is a victim.
Bret Cahill