The Oil Curse Series, No. 1: Oil and the Suppression of Development and Human Rights
Every country that is "oil rich" -- by natural resource or oil-shares ownership by its oligarchs--has human rights and human development problems.
It’s an isolated and sparse place. Chukotka is the easternmost province of Russia, a sprawling 737,700-square-mile “autonomous Okrug” and federal possession of Vladimir Putin’s personal fiefdom. It has almost no roads and a population of only 50,526 people—about 0.1 people per square kilometer—or just one person every ten square kilometers. And its population is falling due to migration out of the area and low birth rates.
Alaska being long sold to the United States, it is the only part of Russia that still lies in the Western Hemisphere, and, in fact, it shares its eastern ocean with Alaska, which also borders the Bering Sea. Dotted with volcanic and stellar-impact craters, it is a place almost untouched by time. Its people are largely ethnic Russians, the Chukchi and other indigenous peoples. Their major sources of income are reindeer herding, whale hunting, and fishing.
So why the rusting oil drums on the Chukotkan shoreline of the Bering Sea? Chukotka has large reserves of oil, natural gas, coal, gold, and tungsten, and the oil is slowly being harvested by Russian interests. It is unlikely that any of this oil wealth will trickle down the people who live there. But even this far from major shipping ports or vast, erg-gulping industries, oil is the enforced source of energy.
The Oil Curse in Developing Countries
In 2013, Michael L. Ross gave us a book called The Oil Curse, published by Princeton University Press. It specifically addresses the phenomenon in the developing world where oil: nationalized oil results in depressed and uneven development. Princeton UP describes the book’s findings this way:
Countries that are rich in petroleum have less democracy, less economic stability, and more frequent civil wars than countries without oil. …
Ross traces the oil curse to the upheaval of the 1970s, when oil prices soared and governments across the developing world seized control of their countries’ oil industries. Before nationalization, the oil-rich countries looked much like the rest of the world; today, they are 50 percent more likely to be ruled by autocrats—and twice as likely to descend into civil war—than countries without oil.
The Oil Curse shows why oil wealth typically creates less economic growth than it should; why it produces jobs for men but not women; and why it creates more problems in poor states than in rich ones.
I encourage everyone to read this book, as The Oil Curse outlines many problems everyone needs to understand right now.
And now to a couple of deeper points in the most recent hideous head-rearing of oil wealth. And I write this series because what we are seeing is that everyone on this tiny, beautiful blue marble is breathlessly praying that Iran stops threats to the Strait of Hormuz and returns life to normal.
No! don’t JUST hope things return to “normal.” We need normal plus CHANGE.
We just saw the president of the United States lose his mind after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz for less than a month.
Now, Donald Trump—variously know as His Taco-ness and the Mango Mussolini—is the person most emotionally ill-suited to power that has likely ruled a country since Nero.
Here is a batch of resources we’ve gathered about Trump’s Mental Health. Read ‘em and weep.
PolitiSage Resources on Trump's Mental Health
In the last few weeks, PolitiSage has had hundreds of new sign-ups. So this week, we’re sending a few resource e-mails—on Trump, Hegseth, RFK Jr., Vance, the Manosphere, etc.
Donald Trump is a bully, a serial philanderer, a convicted rapist, a convicted fraudster, and, very likely, a pedophile. It is also likely he started this war to deflect attention from his hoarding the Epstein files that likely incriminate him and any number of other high-profile craven men. I give you as just one example the fact that Bill Gates will testify before Congress on this manner in a matter of days.
Having already overthrown the government (though not, apparently, duly elected) of Venezuela for oil—having also released a former president of Honduras doing time for drug trafficking in a U.S. jail so he can rig the next election and take Honduras’ vast cache of rare earth minerals ripe for the mining—he is likely also salivating over Iran’s oil stores as well as caving to ICC-indicted human rights violator and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, Trump so loves the Jews, probably just as much as he loves the Muslims—NOT! He just loves the people at AIPAC who write the checks.
So, off to war goeth Private Bonespurs.
In just a few weeks, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz drove the price of oil from $65 / barrel earlier this year to $111/barrel the last time I went to the pump, which was yesterday, the day the sticker shock caused me to go into hypertensive crisis at the pump.
The world is screaming for Trump’s head on a platter.
The simple fact is, the whole world went nuts the minute the Strait of Hormuz became a problem. It’s not that the U.S. gets most of its oil from the Gulf region: it doesn’t. But major refineries are there, and that heavily affects most of the people in this world. Last week, Europe’s oil supply started to dry up just weeks after the Iran crisis began with Israel’s mass murder of Iran’s ruling elite; this week, supplies start to dry up in Asia. And the reason it took even this long is that oil tankers were steaming through the seas towards their destinations, having passed through the Strait more than a month ago.
It is not, you see, just the fact that Trump threatened to blow up a civilization that has its origins in major Bronze Age civilizations from 5,000 years ago that’s driving the impetus to remove Trump from office with the 25th Amendment or impeachment because he is either too clinically insane or too vicious to be allowed the kind of power he has—or both. I’ll go with “both.”
Here's what to remember about Iran--and the Iranian people
As ICE beats people in the streets, drags 80-year-old men out of their houses in their underwear — in 10…
The world is enraged at him because in his completely narcissistic quest to avoid all responsibility for his hideous abuse of women and his completely self-centered attempt to glorify himself by putting his tawdry faux-gold Walmart trophies all over the Oval Office and build a similarly tacky ballroom and put his name on it he has just threatened the stability of every nation on this planet.
Already in India, 3,000 children die every day of starvation. When the price of oil goes up, the cost of delivering food to outlying areas rises significantly. It is the women and children who will die because in rural Indian families: they only get food when the men have eaten all they want to complete satisfaction. The women and children get what’s left over. What do you think happens when oil becomes, quite suddenly, 65% more expensive?
It’s coming: Crisis Dementia will hit again.
Crisis Dementia is what I call the human tendency to go right back to sleep after the crisis associated with a wake-up call stops hurting like hell.
You can already see this happening. Just one day after Trump threatened to obliterate a nation of 79.9 million people, the world is breathing a sigh of relief.
But this is madness. What got us into this is not just that America elected the man who is arguably one of the worst citizens the country ever produced but that Trump himself is not the real origin, source or ongoing threat of this crisis. The real problem is that we are being involuntarily forced to keep oil as our most prevalent and prominent source of energy. We are being chained to oil by the oil-producing countries and the ultra rich who own most of the oil wealth through stocks and buy governments because they enforce the destruction of alternative energy so they can stay rich. They block the way of escape while the climate collapses and greed plows under the people who are already destitute.
If you die, they don’t care.
If you can’t afford food, they don’t care.
If women’s rights get trashed, they don’t care.
If kids starve to death, they don’t care.
If the environment’s temperature rises, they don’t care.
If storms get worse, they don’t care.
After all, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you can just build yourself a bunker in Hawaii and live in the lap of luxury while water wars rage and people die because the electrical grids went down because we refused to tap the winds, the seas, and the sun for all the energy we could possibly ever have wanted.
We need to get this right this time.
We’ve had oil crises before. Anybody who remembers the mile-long (not kidding) lines at the pumps in the 1970s knows we’ve been here before. We have also been at the place of realizing the sands pouring through the hourglass towards a climate disaster are coming nearer and nearer the last grains that will drop.
But a week or so after the last Category 5 hurricane or the last flood that covers the entire state of Iowa or the last deluge that changes the course of rivers in California or the last drought season that lasts in the Southwest for 25 years, we go on as if nothing is going wrong.
It’s not all right. We’re not all right. It’s going wrong all the time. Plastic fills the oceans. The AMOC ocean circulation is slowing down, and when it stops, we get the Younger Dryas Period, an ice age that has an onset time of no more than 10 months and causes the mean temperature of the earth to drop 40 or more degrees in a single season.
And the social and economic ills that befall every one of us on this earth, but for a fraction of 1% of the people, are sourced largely in an economic crisis traced to the environmental impacts, the social privileging, and the uneven racial distribution of oil wealth, the ties of oil wealth to governments, and the enslavement of women to the male-privilege system that runs both. That’s where Islamic radical sharia law — and Christian radical Charia law — come in as the enforcing agencies of patriarchy. Oil wealth is, very near its core, an expression, intended or not, or patriarchal power.
The Patriarchy is up to his elbows in blood, only this time, it’s not red, it’s black.
This series will continue in a few days with a discussion of the history of Iran’s oil, the overthrow of Mossadeh, the Iranian Revolution, the nationalization of its oil, and the enslavement of its women by the religious hierarchy made rich by it.
Thanks for reading.