South Sudan’s Independence, Oil and Economic Self-Determination

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Feature Writer

On July 9, in keeping with the referendum vote that took place in January, The Republic of South Sudan became the world’s 195th sovereign state. South Sudan’s brand new news journal, The South Sudan News Agency, captured citizens’ great joy at achieving political independence and what they hoped signaled an end to the decades long struggle with the racist and corrupt regime in the north. Because what is now South Sudan has long been known for its vast oil reserves, the regime has been pillaging the region—and undermining its basic infrastructure and political institutions—almost since Sudan won independence from England in 1953.

The unified Sudan’s original borders were drawn in 1898, when England took formal control of the region awarded to it for economic expansion at the Berlin Conference of 1884. European leaders met that and divided the continent’s natural resources among European empires who hoped to prevent future inter-European wars. Like other African states, Sudan’s borders were drawn in piecemeal fashion by European leaders who had no concern for the natural boundaries separating, for example, different linguistic groups—and very little knowledge about the people who lived in the regions they hacked apart. In Sudan, as elsewhere, the borders made little cultural sense, containing both the predominantly-Arab descendents of colonizers in the North and diverse groups of black Africans in the South.

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Disaster averted in the Gulf? Not so fast.

Posted on September 4, 2010 by Feature Writer

Thursday afternoon, for a brief second, it seemed like there was to be yet another disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Five months after the Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing 11 people and causing the largest oil spill in the history of the US, there was another accident on an oil rig. A Mariner Energy platform 100 miles off the coast of Louisiana had an explosion, sending 13 workers into the ocean and causing one to be injured. Luckily, the platform’s seven wells had been shut down shortly before the fire for maintenance, so no open well was leaked into the Gulf. Even with reports circulating of a mile-long oil slick around the platform, in a post-Deepwater Horizon context there is a distinct feeling of catastrophe averted.

Still, the incident has raised serious questions about the safety procedures of the oil industry in the Gulf. Think Progress reports that Mariner Energy has been fined twice this year already, totaling $55,000, and a further $30,000 back in 2007. Mariner’s new owner has been cited for $1.74 million in fines since 1998, including a $435,000 fine this year for removing a piece of a sump system which “could not automatically maintain oil at a level sufficient to prevent discharge into the Gulf of Mexico.” Continue reading →

Katrina 5 Years After: Loving New Orleans from afar

Posted on August 28, 2010 by Sarah Jaffe

I’ve written so often that New Orleans is like a lost love I can’t bear to see again that it’s become a cliche, party of one. I haven’t been back since 2002, you see, and this year once again I couldn’t do it.

But that’s not really true. I visit my exes all the time (and not just because the Internet has made drive-bys a lot easier; you can do them on Facebook instead of having to have a car and be in the same town). I have to see for myself that they’re OK.If they aren’t, I just can’t handle it.

I had made tentative plans to go to New Orleans this year, though, and then the Deepwater Horizon well blew and oil saturated my beloved Gulf and I thought about a New Orleans with another haze of depression, tragedy, pain hovering over it, the threat of hurricane season not just possibly breaching levees that still, five years on, are not up to snuff, but pouring crude oil all over the city, coating still-devastated areas in toxic sludge far worse than the swampy cocktail that soaked into the city in August and September, 2005. Continue reading →

Oil in the Gulf: Beyond politics, bigger problems

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Feature Writer

I can think of great political reasons why President Obama wants to create a six-month drilling ban on new deep-water oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. There are millions of gallons of oily black good reasons pouring into the water right now: reasons that are washing up in tar balls on the shores of Louisiana and Florida, toxic blobs of reason covering seabirds and killing fish.

Dan Shapely at Think Green debunks the myth that we should call the situation at Deepwater Horizon a “spill,” along with other harmful misconceptions about the scale of BP’s folly. Spills do not gush thousands of gallons of oil a day into the ocean. Simply cutting off the source and cleaning up the mess can rectify spills. Deepwater Horizon’s underwater oil geyser is on a greater scale than any spill. The president’s drilling ban is weak. Shady politics are distorting the fact we need a permanent ban on all new drilling. And on top of that, we need the government to invest in alternative energy research and reform our environmental regulations now. Continue reading →

Criticism of Obama misplaced–but deserved.

Posted on June 5, 2010 by Erik Loomis

President Obama has received significant criticism over his handling of the BP oil spill. Some of the criticism lacks much legitimacy; after all, Obama can’t personally go stop the oil spill. Obama has to rely on the oil industry to fix the leak because no one else has the ability to complete the task.

However, a good portion of the criticism strikes home because it addresses problems with Obama’s leadership. James Carville, the long-time Democratic political consultant and Louisiana native, lambasted Obama last week. Carville said on Good Morning America, “You got to get down and take control of this, put somebody in charge of this and get this thing moving. We’re about to die down here.” He continued, “These people are crying, they’re begging for something down here. It just looks like he’s not involved in this.”

People might expect too much of Obama. A new Quinnipiac University poll shows 42% of Americans disapproving of Obama’s handling of the oil crisis, with only 39% approving. However, Obama has an odd unwillingness to create political capital for himself outside of elections. Why not go to Louisiana and show empathy? Why even allow critics to compare him to Bush’s actions after Hurricane Katrina? Continue reading →

Oil spills and economic crises: once more, with feeling

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Feature Writer

A clip on Rachel Maddow’s show Thursday showed that the oil leak still pouring into the Gulf of Mexico bears an uncanny resemblance to one from 1979. Each one of the failed containment plans (top hat, top kill and junk shot) was tried unsuccessfully in 1979; indeed, both platforms were owned by the same company–Transocean Ltd. Maddow points out that only relief wells eventually plugged the 1979 leak.

Yet the oil spill also obliquely recalls in form the global financial crisis of 2008. In particular, it demonstrates the inability of lawmakers to learn from the mistakes that lead to the crisis.

The first repetition is the unwillingness of American lawmakers and regulatory bodies to regulate private industry. The beginnings of the economic crisis undoubtedly lie in the easing of banking restrictions by Congress in 1999, and the subsequent failure to regulate the arcane and risky derivatives market. Similarly, the Deepwater Horizon was given a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act. Continue reading →

Homa Katouzian: how the West should deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions

Posted on November 29, 2009 by Jonathan Mok

Professor Homa Katouzian is an specialist on Iran, teaching at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. Trained as an economist, Dr. Katouzian has a broad range of interests including Iranian history and literature. His latest book is The Persians: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Iran (Yale University Press, 2009).

Jonathan Mok: Your book surveys the politics, economics and culture of Iran. You first studied economics. Why and when did you extend your interest to history and literature?

Homa Katouzian: I taught economics for eighteen years and dropped it in favor of history, politics and literature, partly because I became disillusioned with economics once I discovered that economists did not adhere to the scientific methods which they proclaim in the abstract, but more importantly because there were no further issues in economics that I wanted to study, whereas there was plenty in Iranian history, comparative history, Persian literature and Iranian studies in general. I had kept up with these subjects all the while, and I did all the necessary research for my literary biography of Sadeq Hedayat and my political biography of Mosaddeq while I was still teaching economics.

Iran is an oil-rich state. It has remained a developing country, however. What are some of the reasons for its relative underdevelopment?
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The Oil and the Glory: A Review

Posted on December 26, 2007 by Jonathan Mok

This is a review of Steve LeVine’s The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea. Random House. 2007.

Steve LeVine has worked as a freelance journalist for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, and Newsweek – in places such as the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Drawing on his considerable journalistic experience, he sets out to chronicle the history of the Caspian Sea.

Different characters intersect in the book: Nobel family of Sweden, American middlemen acting on behalf of the Soviet Union to make deals with American and British petroleum companies, oil executives begging their government to pressure Soviet leaders to allow drilling, and Central Asian leaders resisting pressure from Moscow to allow Moscow-supported companies to open the oil fields.

However, the central character of the book is oil. It is, perhaps, the only thing (after changes in regimes in ex-Soviet Union republics) that makes Moscow so determined to reclaim its influence in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, even threatening the destructions of oil drilling sites in these countries if they do not seek the opinion of Moscow before signing deals with Western companies.

LeVine describes Russia as a troublemaker, which has tried to use pipelines built in the Soviet era as leverage to force its former colonies to submit to the former master. However, the Russian attempt to rebuild influence is contained by the Clinton administration, whose policy on Caspian Sea and oil in Central Asia was shaped by Rosemarie Forsythe – who served as the Director of Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs of the National Security Council, and Bill White- the Deputy Secretary of Energy.

The struggle between Russia and the United States for more influence in Central Asia is familiarized by the invocation of the struggle between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century, when both sides were lobbying Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan to consolidate the supply of oil to the West or to the Russian empire. The competition between two superpowers is a re-play of an old game. It is only natural for Russia to struggle to secure its backyards against the ex-colonies, who are full of hatred on Moscow due to forced abandonment of nomadic lives and migration imposed by Stalin and subsequent leaders and are therefore siding with another major power in the world, LeVine argues.

LeVine questions whether the United States is genuinely interested in bringing freedom and democracy to the region, and whether it is interested in actually monitoring the business practices of American oil firms in Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. He believes that the United States helped mobilize support for pro-Western politicians to launch the “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia to overthrow pro-Russia governments. However, when it comes to pro-America allies in Central Asia, the commitment to expanding freedom and democracy becomes secondary to strategic interests, LeVine argues. The book exposes the common practice of paying bribes to despotic leaders in the newly independent republics. Yet the book also urges readers to re-examine what constitutes corruption: Should lobbying of American oil companies such as Chevron and Exxon and Mobil in the Congress and Senate on behalf of Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan be considered as offering bribes to Baku and Almaty?

The book relies on several hundred interviews conducted between 1992 and 2007, as well as autobiographical writings of key political players from the United States, the Soviet Union and ex-Soviet republics. The combination of these primary sources provides first-hand views of officials and businessmen going about their deals, and offering their opinions of the future of the Caspian Sea. However, the lack of sources originating in Russian and Central Asian languages greatly limits LeVine’s scope.

On the whole, the book illustrates the history and importance of Caspian Sea through a series of dramas whose character include oilmen, dictatorial leaders of ex-Soviet republics, Russian politicians who have tried to maintain their influence among their neighbors, and government officials of the United States who have worked to expand their influence in the region since the collapse of the communist party in Moscow. The result is the fascinating account of the region, a region which will continue to become increasingly crucial when it comes to the global supply of oil.