UNCTAD XI

Martin Khor of the Third World Network tells us that the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's 11th session ended

in a rather good spirit with some useful results for developing countries.

The conference adopted a declaration called the Sao Paulo Consensus, which contains analyses of globalisation, trade and development issues, proposes policy responses and spells out the role of UNCTAD. Also adopted was a declaration, the Spirit of Sao Paulo.

Some prominent leaders, including Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva, >Thai Premier Thaksin, and UN Seceratary-General Kofi Annan, who spoke at the first part of the conference called on developing countries to rely more on themselves through South-South trade... UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, at the inaugural session, had announced that Ricupero would soon complete his term and paid tribute to his impact on global policy-making and advocacy against hypocricy and people in need.

UNCTAD XI's most important achievement was the inclusion in the declaration of a section on need for developing countries to have "policy space", which has been increasingly eroded by trade agreements and loan conditions. It was the first time a multilateral conference involving North and South had recognized this idea and it will be useful to developing countries' negotiators when they argue their case in the World Trade Organisation, at the International Monetary Fund and in regional and bilateral trade agreements.

As a compromise, the Sao Paulo Consensus (para 8) now states: "The increasing interdependence of national economies in a globalizing world and the emergence of rule-based regimes for international economic relations have meant that the space for national economic policy, i.e. the scope for domestic policies, especially in the areas of trade, investment and industrial development, is now often framed by international disciplines, commitments and global market considerations.

"It is for each Government to evaluate the trade-off between the benefits of accepting international rules and commitments and the constraints posed by the loss of policy space. It is particularly important for developing countries, bearing in mind their development goals and objectives, that all countries take into account the need for appropriate balance between national policy space and international disciplines and commitments." Developing country diplomats were also able to ward off attempts by the major developed countries to constrain UNCTAD's future activities through the on-going UN reform process, by placing some of UNCTAD's future work into the framework of other organizations and processes. The final language in the Sao Paulo Consensus retains UNCTAD's present independence.

So that's alright then. UNCTAD has retained its right to insist that its activities be within a framework of other organisations and processes. Rather like it has been over the past twenty years. That framework is one in which UNCTAD's role is to make third world heads of state feel like not all international organisations will impolitely discard their opinions. At the World Bank and IMF, the process is a little more brusque. But there's very little chance that anything that happens within UNCTAD will make a jot of difference outside its peeling lino'd halls. Especially when the policy space is occupied by ideas - third world elites should trade between themselves, and not allow whitey to muzzle in - that are so desperately crap. Witness:

Another "hot issue", governance, was resolved by reference in the final text (para 21) to both national and international aspects. But the issue of corporate responsibility and accountability, pushed by developing countries, was much watered down to only a recognition that existing voluntary international instruments could be improved, and that UNCTAD should carry out analytical work to enhance corporate contributions to development in host developing countries, and draw lessons as far as the trade and development dimension is concerned. A last-minute attempt by developing countries to include that national and international "innovative financial mechanisms" to supportive of developing countries should be supported in the end yielded a very much diluted text that "voluntary financial mechanisms" should be "explored." (para 20)....

We’re All Going to Die #4

The Guardian reported last week that Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, is “really very worried for the planet".

In an interview in today's Guardian Life section, Ron Oxburgh, chairman
of Shell, says we urgently need to capture emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which scientists think contribute to global warming, and store them underground - a technique called carbon sequestration.

"Sequestration is difficult, but if we don't have sequestration then I see very little hope for the world," said Lord Oxburgh. "No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present ... with consequences that we really can't predict but are probably not good."

You can read the full story at Petroleum World here. Lord Oxburgh's thoughts are a valuable addition to the annals of WAGTD, not least because they demonstrate rather well some now familiar features. We’ve got a reconstructed history. We’ve got the collapse of a complex problem into a simple solution. We’ve got Pangloss playing at Cassandra. And we’ve got yet another example of a now well-worn tactic.

Ron's company has spent so much money funding the climate change denialists that it’s hard for him to point to his company's role in it. Instead, he's concerned to paint the corporation for which, until recently, he was only a non-executive director, in glowing colours. And so he tells us that we're all going to die. But that Shell can save us.

The man’s science background comes in hand here. He knows all about the carbon cycle, and he's going to tell us about it. He knows that carbon is being pumped into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels, the carbon extracted from the ground and sold, inter alia, by Royal Dutch Shell. Luckily, he has diagnosed the problem. It’s not that there’s too much carbon dioxide being chucked out into the air – it’s that there’s not enough being pulled out of it. His solution then: take the carbon dioxide out of the air and stick it in the ground again. The leaders in carbon sequestration technology? Royal Dutch Shell.

I can’t check, but I remember a similar outpouring of troubled conscience in the 1980s by a couple of firms taking a battering at a time when their social responsibility rhetoric failed to match their actions. Rather like Shell at the moment. And the men who got on stage were usually the chairmen of a couple of blue chip companies. These frontmen seemed never to lose half as much sleep over these issues when they were chief executive officers of these corporations. And you’ll note that whenever corporations do the vision thing about the environment and social issues, the CEOs are never the ones to say the words. Chairmen, vice-presidents for social responsibility, or non-governmental organizations with whom the corporations have a cosy relationship – these are the PR mouthpieces. The CEOs clearly have other things on their mind.

Test

Things a bit buggered down this end. Not sure what's going on. Hence this test.

Update
Hurrah! Problems solved. An 'upgrade' at the Turtle's ISP brought the Turtle, this blog and my email to a grinding halt. Sorted now.

The Community We Want is Not the One We Have

Not all the recent campaigning around the European elections fell into the categories of "xenophobic dross" and "Europe for Capital". Two examples seen on the walls of Paris. Click here for one, and here for t'other.

Still the Man

The Comrades at Zvakwana have been hard at work.


Which reminds me - I missed having dinner with that Canaan Banana once. I only just found out that he died last year. At least his death will provide an African addition to The Virtual Stoa's Dead Socialist Watch.

Via Shereen.

Off

Blogging likely to be intermittent over the next couple of weeks. Many deadlines and a bunch of travel...

More World, Less Bank, says Bank.

Every time I'm surprised by the World Bank, it's not because it's an awful organization that's discovered a new way to do much more harm than good. This is, of course, normal for the Bank, and one oughtn't to be surprised by this. No, what always catches my breath is the chutzpah along the way. Today, the comrades over at the International Rivers Network have caught the World Bank at it again. It's the usual story of environmental standards more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Except this time it's slightly different.

The Bank isn't, as in so many past occasions, merely violating its own standards. It has learned a lesson or two. After being hounded over the course of a decade of constructive engagement with civil society, during which it has consistently been caught failing to live up to its own environmental and social protocols, the lesson the Bank has taken away is, er, to dispense with the protocols.

In its new Middle Income Country strategy, the Bank has realised that its own requirements might be substituted for the considerably more lenient requirements of aforementioned middle income countries, in an effort to "remove obstacles to timely quality lending". You'd think that such changes might at least summon a peep from the Bank's own, albeit cowed, independent Inspection Panel. But no. In fact, the Bank has a job for the Inspection Panel. Under this new regime, the role of the panel would shift from holding the Bank to account, to admonishing middle income country governments in the event that they fail to measure up to their puny requirements.

But of course. The Bank didn't set the standards, the middle income countries did. So why should the Bank be held responsible for the failings of its clients? They just give the money and set the terms.

Read more about the bureaucratic politics of the asylum here. And then rush out and read a magnificent history of responsibility, and how to dodge it. Nathalie Karagiannis' book is a wonderful study of the institutional amnesia that has been allowed to supplant Europe's erstwhile nagging conscience at having colonized everywhere that wasn't Europe. It's a great read, and a wonderful victory in the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Props

Time to celebrate good people. Protest Boy over at Ethically Abhorrent, who has also seen The Day After Tomorrow, joins Graham Sleight's Stet and Sarah's Just Another False Alarm on the blogroll.

While you're visiting fine places on the web, do drop in on SmartMeme - a postmodern grassroots direct action collective, while listening to Against the Grain - one of the finest things on US radio: the same savvy as This American Life, but more politically astute.

Props, too, to the tremendously good folk at the Level Playing Field Institute for letting me sit in their office, eat their food, and use their wireless all week.

Give me a ten dollars bill, green american.

Researchers have found a note from Fidel Castro to Franklin Roosevelt. He says

President of the United States

If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american in the letter because never I have not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them.

My address is:
Sr. Fidel Castro
Colegio de dolores
Oreinte, Santiago de Cuba

I don't know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you don't know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.

Thank you very much, good by, your friend
[Ornate signature]
Fidel Castro

If you want iron to make your sheaps ships I will show to you the bigest (minas) of iron of the land. They are in Mayarí, Oriente Cuba.

I can't decide whether this is rubbish, splendid or nonsense. A bit of all three, I reckon.

iPod iRaq

Via Retort.

We're All Going to Die #3

Time to opine on The Day After Tomorrow. I agree with Robot_Alarm_Clock that it’s it’s a lousy movie. But it’s a fascinating lousy movie. Spoilers ahead, for those who’ve not yet seen it.

Like Twister, and unlike The Perfect Storm, the climate is the star of this show. The havoc it wreaks on Los Angeles - in yet another Californian suicide fantasy - is a joy to behold. Manhattan also comes in for a memorable whupping. The actors are constantly overshadowed by the Big Chill and, wisely, Dennis Quaid allows himself to be upstaged by the various children, puppies and large weather systems against which he is paired. It is a movie designed for bit parts, and some of the bits are tremendous fun. The President of the United States is played as a dithering idiot with whom you could have beer with as you both freeze to death. The vice president is an evil nay-sayer to climate change who learns humility the hard way. The Royal Family is turned into blue blooded popsicles early on.

Unlike the really great disaster movies – and I'm thinking here of The Towering Inferno - The Day After Tomorrow doesn’t worry too much about character, and doesn’t fuss too much with the thorny question of responsibility. With every great advance in capitalism– as Paul Virilio has noted – comes its concomitant accident. And with every accident, responsibility. Except in this movie. It turns out, sitting in a US cinema surrounded by wastelands of parking lots, that no-one is responsible for climate change, other than the people who don’t believe it is happening. There’s a political fantasy of confession and redemption here. And, yes, the Vice President is redeemed. In his final soliloquy, he admits his past sins - hubris mainly - and he walks into the day after tomorrow. And in the salvation of this mock-Cheyney, we have the key to understanding TDAT. It is, ultimately, a snuff movie for Christian Democrats. It’s a film in which everyone dies, but no one suffers. In that sense, it has its political counterpart on the other end of the U.S. political spectrum in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, a movie in which one man suffers for everyone, but doesn’t really die.

And this is a general feature: Hollywood’s depictions of harm can’t to take chronic suffering, or responsibility, seriously. A fine example of this is to be found in one of the better jokes in the film – one that had the entire cinema giggling silly. As more and more of North America is frozen by the climatic shift, US citizens head south. Overwhelmed by an influx of parasitic, unwashed, and unwelcome immigrants, the Mexicans close the border. It is only the US government’s forgiveness of third world debt that reopens the border.

Now, much has been made of the science behind The Day After Tomorrow, and the consensus is that TDAT is to meteorology as Jurassic Park is to genetics. But the bet in disaster movies is that there’s going to be just enough in the film which you know to be true to purchase your suspension of disbelief. The Mexican border and third world debt jokes summoned roars of laughter from the audience precisely because these two political ideas, unlike the notion of climate change, are based on precisely nothing. The world may freeze tomorrow, but it’ll happen with the Global North owning the Global South.

Only last week, the G-8 met and agreed to continue with its ‘debt relief’ program –the heavily indebted poor countries initiative –HIPC – (pronounced “hip-ick”). By its own standards, HIPC has failed to reduce the debt of its beneficiaries, and has bound qualifying economies yet more firmly to the structural adjustment policies that got them in debt in the first place. In the obtuse words of the IMF last year– “Unless HIPCs improve their primary fiscal positions or grant financing is sustained at current, or possibly higher, levels, debt sustainability in HIPCs may prove elusive in the long term.” Of course they’re going to prove elusive – the multilateral agencies (IMF and World Bank) had no intention of funding HIPC adequately, and third world governments have learned well that their job is to yap for concessions.

Which brings me rather neatly to UNCTAD XI, the 11th convention of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development, which is currently running in Brazil. Last year, Rubens Ricupero, the head of UNCTAD, spat out some of the fiercest challenges to neoliberalism that the UN has dared mouth since the Oil Crisis in the 1970s. In the intervening year, it seems as if someone has had a word in his shell-like. This year, Cde Ricupero will be telling us that, actually, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with globalization – it’s just that, well, we should introduce the kinds of qualified generalized system of preferences that would let the very poorest countries benefit from trade. So that’s all right then. No mention of systemic inequalities or exploitation. No need to fuss about reparations for past shitty policy. And nary a care about contemporary debt relief other than, I predict, a call to widen HIPC so that everyone can join in. Sigh.

TDAT has it right: even without the spectacular cataclysms, the day after tomorrow looks pretty inhospitable for most of us.

Space race

I've been reading and watching a great deal of science fiction recently. It's an important genre, rarely accorded the respect it deserves. Octavia Butler's thoughts are a helpful primer:

So, then, I write science fiction and fantasy for a living. As far as I know I’m still the only Black woman who does this. When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was, “What good is science fiction to Black people?” I was usually asked this by a Black person. I gave bits and pieces of answers that didn’t satisfy me and that probably didn’t satisfy my questioners. I resented the question. Why should I have to justify my profession to anyone?

But the answer to that was obvious. There was exactly one other Black science-fiction writer working successfully when I sold my first novel: Samuel R Delany, Jr. Now there are four of us. Delany, Steven Barnes, Charles R Saunders and me. Why? Lack of interest? Lack of confidence? A young Black woman once said to me, “I always wanted to write science fiction, but I didn’t think there were any Black women doing it.” Doubts show themselves in all sorts of ways. But still I’m asked, what good is science fiction to Black people?

What good is any form of literature to Black people?

What good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, of the narrow, narrow footpath of what “everyone” is saying, doing, thinking – whoever “everyone” happens to be this year.

And what good is all this to Black people?

From Octavia Butler’s, Positive Obsession.

Update

I've just noticed that Norm has outed himself as a fan of science fiction. But he doesn’t seem to like the term “sci-fi”, and he doesn't seem to be alone. While I’m pleased that Norm's Family, I confess to not giving a toss about whether folk speak of "SF" or "sci-fi". Then again, I’ve no strong feelings about the other SF: I learned early that you’re not supposed to call San Francisco anything other than “San Francisco” or “The City”. Bollocks to that. On both fronts, I think, these linguistic foibles are nothing but snobbery.

Funerals

Of the two deaths on television this morning, that of Ray Charles was by far the more affecting. Reagan's rites consumed most of the airwaves, though. I've not seen such wailing and gnashing of teeth by white folk since Diana died.

Two fitting pictures in the mail today. Click here for the first, and admire the second.

More here. Via dym and Retort.

Indian Old Rope Trick

None is needed, but if any were, Thomas Friedman's latest thoughts on Indian voting patterns provides yet more evidence that he's less a journalist, more a transcriber of the opinion of powerful friends. Read his insights here. Below, my letter to the editor of the New York Times, which won't get published because it's late, ornery, and not quite elegant enough.

Thomas Friedman's thoughts on Indian farmers ("Think Global Act Local", June 6) are untroubled by economics, history, or a sensitive reading of Indian politics. India's previous government, the nationalist BJP, certainly increased India's economic exposure to the rest of the world. But the BJPs did not author this program - India's globalization strategy was installed in the early 1990s by a faction within the Congress (I) party, led by today's Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.

Central to this strategy of globalization was a reduced role for government and an increased role for the market. Crucially, the mechanisms of redistribution that would allow transfer of income from rich to poor states, from cities to rural areas, and from the wealthy to the impoverished, have been knocked away by Indian globalization. Rural development expenditures as a share of GDP declined from 14 percent in the late 1980s to less than 6 percent of total GDP in 2000, and today 233 million people are malnourished in India, at a time when the country has more wealth than ever before. [Sources and further data available at http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/policy/pb10.html]

India's rural millions understand this only too well, and their sophisticated voting behavior demonstrates this amply. The Indian population voted not only for the Congress party, but for a spectrum of parties to the left of Congress, parties that are keen to raise taxes in order to redistribute, increase state support for agriculture, and rebuild a strong welfare system for India's poorest. The votes were, in other words, votes for policies that reverse Congress's earlier globalization program. It's hard to think of a clearer signal that Congress should not treat its rural power base as casually as it did in the 1990s.

Perhaps Mr Friedman might have observed this had he followed his own advice and asked an Indian farmer, instead of spinning the tired rope dangled to him by his friends in Delhi.

Fighting Patrick Moore

At least one reader of this blog will remember that I once had a fight with Johnny Ball. For those who didn't grow up in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, Mr Ball was a BBC children's television presenter with a fondness for mathematics. He fostered a generation of geeks while their parents were out at work, and it widely considered a coup that the Balliol College Mathematics Society was able to invite him to be their keynote speaker one christmas. Mr Ball's thoughts were, sadly, not all I'd hoped them to be. He'd been correctly fingered as "a man of science trusted by the British people" by British Nuclear Fuels Plc, who had recently retained him as one of their key spokespeople. Ball - Johnny, he'll always be Johnny to me - decided to use the occassion to sing a song about prime numbers, to ecsatic applause, and then hymn the virtues of nuclear power. I took exception to this, and rather drunkenly and loudly told him so. This is why Johnny's inclusion in this who is mistakenly enrolled in list of heroes of the revolution is entirely undeserved.

Which is a rather long-winded way of introducing the fact that today, I had a fight with Patrick Moore.

Again, this is a British Thing; Patrick Moore is the monacled British eccentric who has been presenting the BBC astronomy series "The Sky At Night" since 1957. Apparently, the series still runs, even if all you can see from most of the British sky at night is the dull orange glow of streetlamps.

This isn't the Patrick Moore I had a fight with. But it's the reason I was thinking of Johnny Ball. In fact, today's Patrick Moore is a dull Canadian, a founder of Greenpeace who has since discovered that corporate environmental consulting is more lucrative.

No, wait, that's not fair. Patrick Moore genuinely believes that genetically modified food will save the world - someone purely avaricious would not have taken to the streets to defend their position against . He even told a story of his friend, the tweeded Swiss man who invented golden rice. Soon, golden rice will be given away free to everyone in South East Asia who earns less than $10,000. This is a lot of rice farmers. Of course, the reason that these people earn considerably less than $10,000 is because the price of rice is so low. What, we might ask Cde Moore, will happen when golden rice (of which several pounds per day need to be consumed in order to remedy the Vitamin A deficiency it is engineered to treat) is dumped in massive quantities, for free, into a subsistence rice economy?

Well, I'm not sure what Cde Moore would say, because he ran away before I had the chance to ask him. But I'm hoping the five o'clock news is a little kinder to me than I was to him...

Frustrating

Ah, the pain of it. Several good jokes and insights into the goings on at the Bio 2004 conference have just been blown away by a dysfunctional computer. Guess I'll be spending some time on the phone to Toshiba, but not before heading out to support the comrades at Reclaim the Commons. More from that protest over at the Turtle, later today.

On the streets again

The technology gods have decreed that I am to sacrifice blogging today in order to spend time kicking malfunctioning networking equipment. But not before I direct folk to the SF Indymedia site . The protest against the war yesterday was smaller than it ought to have been. The people of colour contingent, "Strength in Unity", was spirited, but the tenor was a little more resigned than I've seen at the protest. Many banners depicted the hooded, wired prisoner at Abu Ghraib. The disgust over prisoner abuse renders joyless the "another white, lesbian, biker, Berkeley mother for peace"-style placard.

Blogging

Call it the jouissance of initial self-discovery, liken it to the first happy fumblings after we've discovered how to masturbate, understand it by showing that this is the self-conscious exploration of the boundaries of new media, but the blogging community seems particularly fond of talking about, er, blogging. I don't mind it - I enjoy the thoughtful, reflective moments at fine members of the blogroll (column right) and, yes, I know, I am right now shuffling a self-referential handful into the pot.

But it's nice to see an increasing sophistication in blogging philology, away from "is this a sentence?" towards "is this a blog?". FreewayBlogger, for instance, does us a great service by materialising the world of blog, hauling us out of cyberspace and onto the streets, where we should probably be spending more time than we do.

I'm off to get a sharpie and some card. [Via Retort]

Victory on day 26!

A splendid development in the fight to save schools - Schwarzenegger signed a deal allowing highly concessional interest rates (1.7%) for "the poorest school districts" allowing them to survive the next two years. Obviously, there's still a long way to go, but this is nonetheless an important victory.

After the 70 mile march and 26 day fast the Governor has agreed to come to Richmond to meet with the students and everyone who marched at Downer Elementary in October. This time he has agreed to come meet with them in their home after shunning them in Sacramento after their march... “We have gotten the Governor to really crumble, they rarely give in to protest,” said Cesar Cruz on his 25th day of fasting.

More at Fast4Ed.

Killed to Impress America

Have the US government's policies in the Middle East condoned an open season on brown men? You bet. The Macedonian right killed seven 'mujahedeen' to show they were just as serious as anyone else in the war on terror. It's the limit case of the kinds of barbarism we've seen following the attacks of September 11, 2001. The New York Times had this note on the affair last month:

The migrants - six Pakistanis and one Indian - had hoped to make their way to Western Europe, when they were contacted by the traffickers, and offered the possibility of traveling to Greece, the Interior Ministry official said. The Pakistanis were later identified as Muhammed Riaz, Omar Farooq, Syed Bilal, Hussein Shah, Asif Javed, and Khalid Iqbal. The name of the Indian remains unknown.

They were brought across the border and housed in Delcevo for one night, after which they were driven to Skopje and taken to an apartment, where they were given food and clothing. The official could not say how long the men were kept in the apartment.

At the same time a special police unit, called the Lions, formed by and under the direct control of the interior minister, was instructed to train for an antiterrorist operation at their base in Katlanovo, a village close to Skopje.

"Only their general knew that they were not real terrorists," said the official.

...

At 2 a.m. on March 2, the official said, the seven Asian men were driven in a minivan to a vineyard on the outskirts of Skopje and left there. Once their driver left, four members of the Lions opened fire on the men with automatic weapons, killing all seven.

Within hours, Mr. Boskovski appeared outside the United States Embassy in Skopje accompanied by television camera crews, an armored personnel carrier and members of the Lions, where he announced the shooting and explained that the police had been monitoring the men, who were suspected of connections with Al Qaeda and ethnic Albanian rebels, to prevent them from carrying out attacks against the British, American and German Embassies.

In an apparently contradictory statement, he also said the shooting occurred when a routine police patrol had been ambushed.

Autopsies performed on the men as well as police photos suggested that all the shooting had come from the police side, and that the police had tried to stage the crime scene.

All seven bodies had multiple bullet wounds and in one case as many as 53, according to the Interior Ministry. Later, the police showed pictures of a Lada jeep with two bullet holes in it as proof that a gun battle had taken place."

Via Yasser.

Update
Of course, The Guardian got the story way before the Times.

The price of oil

A slow return to cyberspace today, from an internet cafe.

While offline, I've been keeping an eye on the price of oil debate. There is, of course, a great deal of fuss about the price of a barrel breaching $40, especially and predictably in the United States. It has been tremendously instructive to watch C"N"N's response to all this. C"N"N's parade of experts from the American Petroluem Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and other palaces of good sense has been the embodiment of Noam Chomsky's famous sentence: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". All the white men in suits wheeled out to opine on the price spike speak in well-formed English sentences, to be sure, but they make fuck-all sense. Among the idiocies proposed to solve the problem - drilling in the Arctic and tapping the strategic oil reserve. Elsewhere, proposals include lower fuel taxes, and invading Venezuela. This will, of course, do nothing to solve the underlying problem. While in the longer term, there's a big demand crunch, supply is more than able to keep up in the short term.

The reason for sky-high oil prices lies neither in the demand nor supply for oil-for-consumption. It lies in price speculation. Traders are betting, successfully, that given the various kinds of panic to which corporations are prone, they can charge pretty much what they like on a contract to guarantee a fixed future supply of oil. And the traders are winning every time. Of course, the consequences of price speculation are exactly like a genuine shortage - high prices, and idiots rushing to loosen the spiggots on any source of oil they can wrench their hands on. But there's no real shortage. Just a bunch of wankers making a pile of cash off this.

Am I being a little paranoid? Hardly. Yesterday, the Snohomish County Public Utilities District - and what a lovely name that is - released transcripts of conversations from Enron's Portland offices, in which traders were openly conspiring to raise the price of energy during California's energy crisis. It is not only reasonable to assume that the same thing is happening on a national level today, it is a certainty.

Slow down

Moving house. No DSL. Little blogging.