GranolaBox

After a very depressing week or so of reading, I’ve finally finished American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Philips. It was a tough book, but someone had to read it, and I think everyone who’s not aware of how messed up should read it too. By exploring the issues listed in the title, Philips lays out in painstaking detail how ruinous all these elements are and how they make up the constituency and shape the course for the strange bedfellows that make up today’s Republican coalition.

Here’s some of the gruesome details the book brought to light for me.

Peak Oil
My Queen of the Universe has been reading a lot of books very recently written about peak oil which all points in the same direction Philips did when he wrote this book in 2006. They all come to the same conclusion – that peak oil is upon us. Most of the world’s oil fields have reached peak production and are quickly on their way down because of record amounts of consumption from the United States and our rival colossuses China and Russia. Oil prices are going nowhere but up and supply is going nowhere but down. The most pessimistic forecasts predict 2010 as the year real scarcity starts, some of the more optimistic outlooks are between 2025 and 2035.

This has many interesting implications for the war in Iraq. Iraq has the least tapped oil fields in the world because of so much civil strife and so much of the world’s oil attention being focused on Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Persian Gulf. Some of the United Nations sanctions against Iraq selling oil concessions to other countries were due to lift in 2003, and the countries offering the most lucrative deals for these concessions were Russia, China and other countries that WEREN’T the United States. Our conveniently timed invasion headed those concessions off at the pass and put the oil securely under our control.

Religion
Philips lays bare the chummy relationship between Bush and the religious right to a more frightening extent than I ever dreamed possible. There are and/or were a frightening number of evangelicals in the Bush administration. Every branch of the Christian right getting most of their needs met in the Bush camp, and he plays to them every chance he gets. While most Americans realized that Bush had been driving the country to ruin in his first four years in office, he secured their support in that time, and they’re mostly responsible for his re-election in 2004.

The tie-in with Oil is that that many of the right wing wackos are convinced that we’re headed for the rapture. Therefore, any talk of messy issues like running out of oil or burning up the earth with Global Warming doesn’t really matter.

Others believe that Saddam Hussein and/or Osama Bin Laden are the biblically predicted anti-christs who will lay waste to the earth and Jesus will then come back to straighten everything out. Maybe those are the rapture people. I’m not sure.

Still others simply believe that war in the Middle East is a holy crusade and that the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim. If you listen to Bush’s not-so-veiled references to his carrying out God’s will, and then his Middle East policy all of this makes sense.

Debt
The influence of “Big Oil” on beltway politics was nothing new to me, but I had no idea how much control the financial barons had over Republican, and to a lesser extent Democratic administrations. Philips illustrates the gradual deregulation of big money that began in earnest under the Reagan administration and culminated with the Bush administration.

This laissez faire attitude has brought out the worst in the financial barons and has allowed them to exploit Americans at every turn, with the most tangible result being the burst of the housing bubble that we’re experiencing now. But the reckless amount of personal debt is nothing compared to the national debt being racked up at the national level. The financial sector, which just involves moving funds both existent and non-existent around from one disgustingly wealthy entity to another is completely unproductive and only sustains the most wealthy in American society.

Throughout the book, Philips also illustrates how these three factors have led to the decline of previous world powers, most notably Holland in the 1600’s and Britain in the 1800’s. In terms of energy dominance, the Dutch lost their edge in wind and whale oil power to British coal, who in turn lost their edge to the United States oil after World War One, with the death knell for coal coming in World War II.

In terms of religion, one clear sign of the decline of many empires has been the increased influence of religion on politics and eventually science. Sound political philosophy gives way to theocracy, and societies become more and more intolerant. Sound scientific researched is also discouraged. Consider the eerie parallels between the church silencing Galileo and the Bush administration shutting out talk of Global Warming and stem cell research despite voluminous and otherwise incontrovertible evidence.

Finally, a major reason for the decline of major empires has been their economic reliance on finance and the moving around of money rather than the actual production of things. Why is China on its way to being the world’s strongest economy? Why are most other industrial countries so much better off than we are? The answer, quite simply, is that they produce stuff and we don’t.

For all this doom and gloom however, Philips conclusion is not entirely pessimistic. He points out that most Americans aren’t the evil, gluttonous, religiously intolerant debt-addicted monsters that the Republican coalition wants us to be. It’s just that the constituencies represented in the Republican have their collective political shit together, and the rest of us don’t.

In so many words, the fate of our country depends on the rest of us getting organized, getting our political shit together, and WAKING THE FUCK UP.

Technorati Tags: American Theocracy, Republican coalition, peak oil, Oil prices, Persian Gulf, United Nations sanctions, evangelicals, Christian right, Global Warming, deregulation, housing bubble, stem cell research

Filed under: Politics, Reviews on January 21st, 2008