Today's Stories

June 9, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
McCain & the Republican Insitute: Promoting Iraqi Occupation for "a Million Years"

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

Ishmael Reed
How Miles Davis Changed My Life

Jeffrey St. Clair
What a Miner's Life is Worth

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet the King the Beers: John McCain and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
The High Cost of a Single War-Like Remark: Oil Prices, Israel, Iran and the U.S.

Robert Fantina
When Truth is the Casualty

Conn Hallinan
Iran and Rumors of War

Neve Gordon
The Occupation and the Politics of Death

Tom Barry
The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security

Patrick Irelan
Raiding the Packing House

Tim Wise
Your Whiteness is Showing

David Ker Thomson
The Hard Question

Joshua Frank
"Socialist" Wins Republican Nomination in Montana

David Yearsley
Disaster Music

James T. Phillips
1968: Year of the Rat

Joe Allen
The Real Bobby Kennedy

P. Sainath
Making Life Brighter in Kondapur

David Macaray
Should Unions be More Democratic?

B.R. Gowani
Experience and the Two-for-One

Fred Gardner
What Happened (at the DA's Office)

Peter Harley
Technology to the Rescue? Kurzweil and the Human Machines

Michael Dickinson
Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!

Jen Roesch
Where are the Real Women in Sex and the City?

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Landau, and Buknatski

Website of the Day
Partying with the Waltons

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

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U. S. Bid to Hike Iran's Gas Prices Seems Doomed

By C. HAND

On Iran’s gas via the estimable Laura Rozen, a report on another effort to put paid to the Axis of Evil by cutting off Iran’s imports of gasoline, this time via a nonbinding bipartisan Congressional resolution proposed by Democrat Gary Ackerman of New York and Republican Mike Pence of Indiana.

It’s being floated at the AIPAC conference.

As we sweat through a summer of $4 gas, it certainly is infuriating to see Iran sucking up seven million gallons per day of the precious juice from the international market—and selling it for less than a buck a gallon at the pump in downtown Tehran.

But it appears likely that futility and frustration will continue to stalk the United States in our gas war with Iran.

There was a spasm of hope in the US foreign policy community last year when Iran tried a free market solution to dealing with its citizenry’s overconsumption of subsidized gas. It raised prices. Some gas stations were burned down, conjuring up the specter of a righteous petrocarbon revolution.

However, the government backed down, guaranteeing a monthly ration of gas at the ridiculously low price. The mollified protesters duly returned to their gas guzzlers.

The issue returns whenever the United States casts around for another way to pressure Tehran.

Previous efforts to cut off the flow through something I would characterize as “moral suasion plus” -- the threat of US Treasury sanctions against banks that handle gasoline letters of credit -- led to one of those irritating free market reactions: the Iranians shifted their purchases to cash at slightly higher prices on the Singapore market early this year.

The Ackerman-Pence resolution specifically excludes military action. That means the only additional measure open to the Bush administration would be to explicitly threaten financial reprisals, which are not so easy.

It’s a good bet that the second-tier banks that Iran has turned to for cash transactions have minimal U.S. presence and therefore are relatively impervious to the big stick in Treasury’s arsenal -- the threat that an offending bank will be cut off from the U.S. financial system.

If the bank isn’t intimidated enough to self-enforce the ban on Iranian transactions, then the U.S. has to detect and trace murky cash transactions in violation of national bank secrecy laws, threaten multiple jurisdictions and institutions with punitive sanctions, and basically risk the danger of appearing like Elmer Fudd shooting  the global financial house to pieces while he’s chasing Ahmadinejad’s Bugs Bunny.

The classic story of sanctions is Action: Meet Reaction.

Even as the U.S. government labors to exploit Iran’s gasoline import vulnerability, Iran is preparing its riposte. And that means we have to prepare a riposte to their riposte.

An outfit called the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security provides an interesting insight into where a single-minded commitment to escalation can take one.

In a December 2006 report entitled Ahmadinejad’s Gas Revolution: A Plan to Defeat Economic Sanctions, IAGS authors Anne Korin and Gal Luft take aim at Tehran’s diabolical plan to reduce its dependence on imported gasoline, decrease its energy costs, and improve the environment... by converting automobiles to liquefied natural gas.

In its conclusions, the report warns darkly:

“If Ahmadinejad’s plan for energy independence is implemented, within five years Iran could be virtually immune to international sanctions.”

The solution, in Korin and Luft’s view: more sanctions, sabotage, economic warfare, and punitive US actions to strangle the Iranian LNG demon in its cradle. If the Iranians switch to bicycles, I suppose the next step will be a war on gravity.

But for the time being, I suppose we can take solace in the fact that the Iranians are so stupid they don’t build sufficient domestic refining capacity to turn their own crude into mogas.

Well, maybe not. Iran is aware of the problem.

Maintenance and expansion of their Shah-era refineries have been crippled by US sanctions -- sanctions whose likely purpose in part is to prolong Iran's vulnerability to the "gasoline weapon". As a result, the product mix includes only 17 per cent  gasoline, about half of what a reasonably well-run refinery can achieve. If Iran could get those existing refineries up to capacity, they might not have to import any gasoline at all.

The government has bitten the bullet and decided to drop Euros 2.2 billion on a contract with China’s Sinopec to expand triple the gasoline output of two of its key refineries.

But there’s a good reason why the Iranian government has been reluctant to pull the trigger on these large, vulnerable, delicate, and ridiculously expensive facilities.

According to my back-of-the-envelope calculation, not building refineries makes perfect sense for Iran—at least in the context of socialist fiscal policy.

Currently, Iran pumps crude at a cost of let’s say $20/barrel and sells it for north—way north, today-- of $120 a barrel. Let’s assume a profit of about $100/barrel. Gasoline costs about $140/barrel wholesale. To make things simple, let’s say that Iran has to export 1.4 barrels of crude to net enough money to import one barrel of gasoline. Cost to Iran of that barrel of gasoline: $28 dollars in crude production costs. 42 gallons per barrel. Divide $28 by 42 and . . .you get a cost of 67 cents a gallon, about the price it’s selling for at the pump in Tehran.

In other words, by the mathematics of a crude-based planned economy, Iranian motorists are getting gasoline roughly at cost.

Of course, from the a centrally-planned economy point of view, there should be better ways to spend Iran’s oil wealth than creating a thick brown haze over Tehran—and generating that ineffable sense of car-fueled freedom that is supposed to be the exclusive birthright of secular, capitalist free market economies.

As to the no-brainer of building a refinery inside Iran to meet its gasoline needs, refineries are supposed to be built in major consumption centers, not production centers.

With a population of 50 million, Iran can stake a claim to be the Middle East’s major consumption center. However, there is a 25 million ton surplus of gasoline production capacity in the Middle East already.

In Saudi Arabia they already have 8 refineries with a throughput of 2.1 million barrels per day. They are expanding local capacity by 25 per cdnt to 2.5 million barrels per day at a cost of $12 billion.

Looking at the local glut, the Saudis have recognized that further refinery growth has to be near consumption centers, and they are putting another 800,000 barrels worth of capacity in China.

Long story short, there’s extra gasoline in the Middle East, and the Saudis are leading a charge to put in even more capacity. So extra Iranian refining capacity is not really needed. In refined products, they’ve lost the regional race to Saudi Arabia, and if Iran puts a refinery anywhere, it should be in Asia.

From a comparative advantage point of view, the Iranian government should be concentrating on pumping crude and using the proceeds to import gasoline and buy other nice things...like infrastructure and technology that will be useful to Iran after the crude is gone.

The only reason for Iran to expand its refining capacity is the political factor, not the economic factor.

In other words, U.S. sanctions are distorting the free market in trade and investment in the Iranian petroleum industry. On the whole, we’re the ones fighting the invisible hand of market economics, not Iran.

And maybe that’s why it seems the U.S. is  losing the sanctions fight.

C. Hand runs the interesting website China Matters.

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