by Greg Palast
In 1927, the Democratic Party had died and was awaiting burial. As depression approached, the coma-Dems, like Franklin Roosevelt, called for, of all things, balancing the budget.
Then, as the Mississippi waters rose, one politician, the state’s electricity regulator, stood up on the back of a flatbed truck rigged with loudspeakers, and said, roughly, “Listen up! They’re lying! The President’s lying! The rich fat jackals that are drowning you will do it again and again and again. They lead you into imperialist wars for profit, they take away your schools and your hope, and when you complain, they blame Blacks and Jews and immigrants. Then they drown your kids. I say, Kick’m in the ass and take your share of the wealth you created.”
Huey Long was our Hugo Chávez, and he laid out a plan: a progressive income tax, real money for education, public works to rebuild Louisiana and America, Social Security old age pensions, veterans’ benefits, regulation of the big utility holding companies, an end to what he called, “rich men’s wars,” and an end to the financial royalism of the One Percent. He even had the audacity to suggest that the poor’s votes should count, calling for the end to the poll tax four decades before Martin Luther King succeeded in ending it. Long recorded his motto as a musical anthem: “Every man a King.” The waters receded, the anger did not, and, in 1928, Huey “Kingfish” Long was elected Governor of Louisiana.
At the time, Louisiana schools were free, but not the textbooks. The elite liked it that way, but Long didn’t. To pay for the books, the Kingfish levied a special tax on Big Oil. But the oil companies refused to pay for the textbooks. Governor Long then ordered the National Guard to seize the oil fields in the Delta.
It was Huey Long who established the principle that a government of the people must protect the people, school them, build the infrastructure, regulate industry and share the nation’s wealth—and that meant facing down “the concentrations of monopoly power” of the corporate aristocracy—“the thieves of Wall Street,” as he called them.
In other words, Huey Long founded the modern Democratic Party. FDR and the party establishment, scared witless of Long’s ineluctable march to the White House, adopted his program, albeit diluted, called it the New Deal and later the New Frontier and the Great Society.
America and the party prospered.
What happened to the Kingfish? As with Chávez, the oil industry and local oligarchs had few options for responding to Governor Long’s populist appeal and the success of his egalitarian economic program. On September 8, 1935, Huey Long, by then a U.S. Senator, was shot dead. He was 42.
And now is the moment, as it was in ’27.
* * *
Huey P. Long
“Share the Wealth” Sign-up Form
To: Huey P. Long
United States Senator, Washington, D.C.:
This is to inform you that a share-our-wealth society has been organized here with ________ members. Address and officers are as follows:
Post office ______ State ______
Street address ______________
President ___________________
Secretary ___________________
I will go to people who know me and who personally know of the work I have done for the money that it will take for the expenses I will have to bear in this work, because, if any such thing as dues were collected from members for such expenses, the thieves of Wall Street and their newspapers and radio liars would immediately say that I had a scheme to get money.
—Huey P. Long.
* * *
THE END
The House I Live In
America is a nation of losers. It’s the best thing about us. We’re the dregs, what the rest of the world barfed up and threw on our shores.
John Kennedy said we are “a nation of immigrants.” That’s the sanitized phrase. We are, in fact, a nation of refugees, who, despite the bastards in white sheets and the know-nothings in Congress, have held open the Golden Door to a dark planet. We are not imperialists and that’s why Bush lies and Cheney lies and, yes, the Clintons lie.
Winston Churchill didn’t lie to the Brits about their empire: He said, These lands belong to the Crown, we own’m and we’ll squeeze the value from them. “Imperialism,” as Karl Marx complained, was a good word in Britain, a word that got you elected in Europe until too recently.
Ignore the fey university hideouts of Europe. Go to Vietnam or to Brazil or to Morocco or to Tibet and you’ll find the same thing: America’s music, America’s freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of spirit and the heartfelt friendship of Americans for others have made the USA truly “the light unto the nations.” Americans are not liked worldwide, but loved—sometimes I find that weird, but it’s true—and that drives Osama to bombs and madness.
We are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the cause that all men and women are created equal. It’s silly and precious to point out that these ideals have been mangled, abused, ignored and monstered by those with plans to make us an empire. We know that. Now, what are you going to do about it?
America is indeed exceptional. That’s not a boast, that’s a job we have to do. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson burdened us with that exceptionalism in crafting the most important international law signed up until the Geneva Convention: The Alien Torts Act, in which the USA takes onto itself the right to bring civil penalties against any act of torture, political murder and piracy that occurs anywhere in the world. It is now being used in suits brought against Chevron Oil in Ecuador and against IBM for the death of slave laborers in Nazi Germany.
Damn right America is exceptional. It is America that defiantly walked out of the first “world trade organization,” known as the British Empire, announcing, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are ENDOWED BY THE CREATOR with INALIENABLE rights, and AMONG THESE are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Now, think about that. These rights don’t come from Congress or Kings or Soviets, they come from The Creator, that is, we are born free—and “we” are Sri Lankans as much as Minnesotans. Our rights are “INALIENABLE”: no one, NO ONE, may take them away, not the Ayatollahs of Tehran or Generalissimo Negroponte at the Department of Homeland Security or the kill-o-crats in Baghdad pre-or post-Saddam.
Will the snarling closet imperialists try to turn America from its cause and soul? Damn right they will. That’s why two U.S. military lawyers resigned from their posts at the Guantánamo prison camp. They wouldn’t put up with Bush-niks tearing up their Constitution. (“We the people” own it, not “them the Republicans.”) In Iran, these two guys would have been shot, in Britain arrested. In America, Bush fears them—that their story would come out—as it did. Only in America could that happen. No question, the USA holds itself exempt from the legal standards of this world—which are execrable. Whose standard should we adopt? China’s torture standard? Britain’s Secrecy Act as a standard? Switzerland’s Nazi-money-protection standard?
Only in America would a Lyndon Johnson order federal troops to protect Black school kids’ right to attend class. You don’t have to tell me that Johnson then ordered the slaughter of three million Vietnamese—I know, I went to jail to oppose it. But go to Vietnam today and ask what people they most admire? Mention Russians, they laugh; mention Chinese, they may hit you; mention Americans and they say (to my astonishment, I’ll admit), “We love Americans.”
They don’t love Bush. That’s because George Bush is not an American. Look, I didn’t think much of Bill Clinton, and he dropped into some of the worst quasi-imperial habits of the New World Trade Order. But Clinton is also more popular worldwide than the pope and pizza combined because he represents that American sense of giving-a-shit, empathy and sincere friendship which are hallmark’s of America’s Manifest Destiny.
Yes, America does have a Manifest Destiny—to Let Freedom Ring—which the evil and greedy and pernicious would twist into a grab for land and resources and ethnic cleansing. And so the Manife
st Destiny of the journalists in our shitty little offices in New York and London is to expose these motherfuckers.
Ronald Reagan said, “America is the shining city on the hill.” And he hated it, doing his best to turn it into a dark Calcutta of the helpless. And when that didn’t work, George II tried to drown us in the Mississippi.
Go back to Taos Precinct 13. What you’ll find there is Pueblo Native war veterans who raise the flag every day and will fight and die for it knowing full well that the fight must also be taken to the pueblo’s racially biased voting booths.
Howard Zinn, a shining historian on our hill, reminds us,
It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children.
Damn right, they do. That’s what Jefferson meant by “inalienable.” And they won’t get their rights to life and liberty from Osama’s Caliphate of oil states or China’s money-crazed “Communism” nor half of Africa’s neo-colonial presidential Draculas or the puppet princes installed today in Iraq by George Bush.
Bush is so far away from his refugee loser roots that he just doesn’t get what it is to be American. So he steals the one thing that every American is handed off the boat: a chance. When they take away your Social Security and overtime and tell you sleeper cells are sleeping under your staircase, you don’t take a chance, you lose your chance, and the land of opportunity becomes a landscape of fear and suspicion, an armed madhouse.
You want to say that George Bush is an evil sonovabitch? I’d go further: he’s UN-AMERICAN.
And that’s why he lost the election. TWICE.
So, I’m asking you again. What are you going to do about it?
Do not fight for a dying regime. It is not worth your life.
—President George W. Bush
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First thing is, sign up at www.GregPalast.com for video, audio and print updates of our team’s investigations and reports on the Armed Madhouse.
APPENDIX
RETURN TO HUBBERT’S PEAK
Why Palast Is Wrong
Now that I’ve convinced you that the Peak Oil crowd is crackers, let me disagree with myself. We can’t understand the new class war unless we understand why oil, a certain kind at least, has in fact “peaked.”
We’ve long jumped over Hubbert’s predicted peak and, in 2006, rolled our SUVs right through the “culmination”—that is, used the last drops of the one-and-a-quarter-trillion barrels of liquid crude the good Earth can provide according to the Hubbert jeremiad. Furthermore, “The rise in the production of power from nuclear energy for the United States” ran out long before uranium’s five-thousand-year reign, despite Hubbert’s hope and prediction. Except for a couple of unhappy decades’ experimental folly with “reactors for peace,” nuclear power is pretty much an irradiated corpse. The Shell/Hubbert predictions were dead wrong. Those are the facts.
But Hubbert was also deadly right. We are indeed running out of oil. There’s no contradiction here. We have to distinguish between an economist’s concept of “running out” and a scientist’s.28
To an economist, every commodity is finite. We are running out of oil and we are running out of copper, aluminum foil, birdbaths, pickles, lumber, clean air, Frappucinos, chocolate, tongue rings, lollipops, silver, cow-shaped milk dispensers, Dylan retrospectives and sand. That is why economics is called “the dismal science.” Limits and scarcity are economists’ bread and butter. There’s a limited supply of every commodity. (And that is why love is not a commodity, as John Lennon noted, because the more you consume, the more you create.)
On the other hand, unlike geologists and evangelical ministers, economists believe all commodities can be created as needed. There is an unlimited abundance of anything—oil, copper, hemorrhoid ointment, nose jobs or pornographic balloons. We can even manufacture real estate. (Think of the creation of Holland by landfill or the artificial habitation known as Los Angeles created by draining most of the Colorado River into the desert.)
The number one theorem of economics is that we are running out of everything and yet we can have as much as we want of anything. Again, there’s no contradiction. All commodities are scarce and abundant at the same time. The difference between scarcity and abundance is price. You can get anything, in any amount, if you are willing to pay any price. (See Los Angeles, above.)
Back to Hubbert. His report was used in the cynical Shell Oil game to scare us into Middle Eastern conflicts, drilling tax subsidies and nuclear power. On its face, it was stone cold manipulative nonsense, measurably so. But we are running out of a certain kind of oil nevertheless: cheap oil. That is, we are coming to the end of the stuff we can pump at a low cost, the easy oil that practically jumps out of the ground. When we bring price into the equation, Hubbert was correct—technically. Oil production did peak in the 1970s—for a certain type of oil. Reread Hubbert. When he wrote his analysis, oil was selling below $3 a barrel, just over $20 in today’s dollars, and falling. Therefore, as prices declined further, we’d run out. We did. We’ve pretty much run out of new oil fields we can “lift” for $20 a barrel. Even the cheapest untapped fields in the world—not coincidentally in Iraq—will cost more than the “Hubbert price” to suck up and pipe out.
At low prices, there’s not much oil. As prices rise, so does supply. It’s not magic. At $30 a barrel, Oklahoma stripper wells are worth reopening, drilling in the Gulf of Mexico becomes profitable in 3,000 feet of water, Kazakhstan’s crude is worth piping out even with the high cost of transportation and bribes.
To simplify: World oil reserves, officially measured at 1.189 trillion barrels, are probably, as one of Mr. Hubbert’s protégés stated a few years back, grossly overstated—if you assume oil selling at $10 a barrel. But kick the price up to a post-invasion $50 a barrel, and the world reserves are wildly understated.
Reserves are the measure of oil recoverable at a certain price. Raise the price, raise the reserve. Cut the price and the amount of oil in the ground drops. In other words, it’s a fool’s errand to measure the “amount of oil we have left.” It depends on the price. At $9 a barrel (the price in 1998), we’ve peaked. It’s over. All gone. But at $70 a barrel (reached in the third year of the Iraq occupation), miracles happen. Oil gushes forth like manna. How much more?
If you are willing to pay $70 a barrel—and apparently you are—it’s worth it to melt sand and drain out the petroleum. Indeed, the “tar sands” of Alberta, Canada, hold 280 billion barrels of oil—for enough high octane to run our Humvees for a century. Canada’s tar oil reserves are, notably, about 15% higher than the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. It’s not pie-in-the-sky stuff. America is dependent on foreign oil—but not from Arabia. Our biggest source of oil is Canada and half of the Canadian supply today comes from tar sands. And that will grow.
How could Hubbert have missed all this oil? Answer: He didn’t. On page 20 of his famous “Peak Oil” study, he accepts that the planet can yield up 800 billion barrels of oil from tar sands equal to all the “crude” (i.e., liquid) oil we are using up.
Hubbert’s Wars
So where did Hubbert get the idea that we are running out of oil? He didn’t. He made no such prediction. Quite the opposite, he said, after predicting “the culmination of world production” by 2006, he noted,
This does not necessarily imply that the United States or other parts of the industrial world will soon become destitute of liquid and gaseous fuels….
So what’s going on here? This is where Hubbert brings in Canadian tar sands and heavy oils, which he correctly predicts could more than replace the cheap, easily obtainable “liquid crude” (as he calls the light stuff). And he doesn’t fail to note the location of the giant supplies of the heavy oil: “Mesopotamia” (as Iraq was then known), Brazil and Venezuela.
So what was bugging Hubbert? We have plenty of oil, it just gets hea
vier. He warns against drilling for it, preferring a uranium-powered future. Why? Hubbert was writing in the hottest moments of the Cold War. The U.S. overthrow of Iran’s government and the looming tension over the Suez Canal pushed America and the Soviet Union toward nuclear war—and underneath it all was the tussle over oil. Hubbert’s peak did not identify dates we’d “run out of oil” but predicted the shift in the location of oil’s main sources—to Iraq and Venezuela by the beginning of the twenty-first century, which had serious implications, he said, for “domestic purposes and national defense.” To avoid conflicts between the U.S. and Russia, he hoped the superpowers in conflict would turn inward, to uranium, a resource abundant in both nations. The value of Hubbert’s seminal “peak” paper was not in predicting the end of the oil era but in naming, with chilling accuracy, the date and location of our future wars.
Selling the Peak
So who’s selling us Peak Oil today? The operator of the supertanker Condoleezza has been running an extravagant advertising blitzkrieg to tell us: We’ve peaked! “The world consumes two barrels of oil for every barrel discovered!” That’s just the billboard. Their double-page spread in Harper’s is even more hysterical: “The fact is, the world has been finding less oil than it’s been using for twenty years now.”