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The SDS News Bulletin Working Group is proud to bring you our fifth issue, the best yet. From front cover to articles to action reports to poetry to art, we loaded this issue up for maximum pleasure, and once again you made it all possible by sending in your work, thoughts, ideas and love.
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http://newsds.org/bulletinfiles/final_bulletin5.pdf
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-The SDS News Bulletin Working Group
The capitalists are beginning to realize their own mortality. How to take advantage?
Published by The Wall Street Journal.
July 1, 2008, 2:56 pm
Peak Oil: IEA Inches Toward the Pessimists’ Camp
Posted by Keith Johnson
What’s up with oil prices? Well, it’s not speculators, and there’s no relief in sight, meaning at least five more years of high prices with no easy fixes. The ugly truth? Peak oil isn’t fringe anymore—it’s going mainstream.
That’s the reading from the latest oil market report from the International Energy Agency, the rich-country energy watchdog. The IEA’s latest x-ray of the oil market includes plenty of disturbing nuggets.
The fact that there are no growing stockpiles of crude around the world, for example, suggests speculators aren’t behind crude’s dizzying rise this year (much to Paul Krugman’s satisfaction and Congress’ chagrin.)
And while U.S. drivers fret and worry over how to pay for the Prius, the sad truth is that it doesn’t matter: By 2015, developing country oil demand will outstrip the rich world’s. They’re already in the driver’s seat: 90% of the demand growth over the next five years will come from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, the IEA said.
But the juiciest nugget? The conservative IEA appears to be inching ever-closer to the “peak-oil” crowd. Supply simply can’t keep pace with demand—everybody with an oil well has the taps open, but there’s not much left in the keg. Oil fields are aging quicker than free-agent pitchers, and the global oil industry has to run faster just to stay in place. From the IEA:
Project delays averaging 12 months, coupled with global average decline of 5.2% – up from 4% last year – are the factors behind these revisions. Over 3.5 mb/d of new production will be needed each year just to hold global production steady. “Our findings highlight again the need for sustained, and indeed, increased investment both upstream and downstream — to assure that the market is adequately supplied,” stated [IEA Executive Director Nabuo] Tanaka.
So where’s that fresh supply going to come from? As the IEA noted, Saudi Arabia is the only country with a glimmer of spare production capacity—and the jury is still out on that. Increased domestic drilling, the U.S. energy agency already said, would be but a hiccup in the global market. Non-OPEC countries, from Norway to Mexico, are expected to chip in just 1.2 million barrels per day of new crude by 2013, IEA head of market analysis Lawrence Eagle said—or less than half the global shortfall.
Politicians can pick their bogeyman—be it speculators, OPEC, or Democrats. But more and more it seems like the oil connundrum boils down to an age-old truth: Finite supplies can’t meet infinite demands.
World Economy Would Collapse If Oil Hit $200, Deutsche Says
By Shigeru Sato and Yuji Okada
June 25 (Bloomberg) — The global economy would collapse if oil hit $200 a barrel, said the top energy analyst at Germany’s largest bank.
“Two-hundred dollar oil would break the back of the global economy,” Deutsche Bank AG’s Chief Energy Economist Adam Sieminski said in an interview today in Tokyo. “Next step after $200 would be global recession and bad news for everybody.”
Sieminski’s comments come after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. forecast oil may rise to between $150 and $200 within two years as supply growth, especially from producers outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, fails to keep pace with demand. Deutsche Bank is due to release its oil-price forecast on June 27.
Oil doubled in the past year, touching a record $139.89 a barrel on June 16. Read the rest of this entry »
“U.S.: Oil production has not met demand”
from CNN
June 21, 2008
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (CNN) — Oil prices are hitting record highs because production has not kept pace with increasing demands, U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told reporters Saturday.
“All nations must be better at conservation, and the U.S. is at the top of that list,” said Bodman, who is attending a international meeting of oil producing and consuming nations focusing on high oil prices in Saudi Arabia Sunday.
While some have blamed speculators for driving up oil prices, Bodman said he did not believe they are the cause.
Since 2003, he said, global demand for oil has increased because of industry in China, India and the Middle East. But from 2005 to 2007, there was very little increase in supply. Read the rest of this entry »
Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control
Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors
By Patrick Cockburn
Published by The Independent, Thursday, 5 June 2008
A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November. Read the rest of this entry »
“Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman”
by Cathy Wilkerson
2007 by Seven Stories
This is probably the most important book on the Weathermen written by one of its participants, tackling the many difficult inner complexities and questions that haunted the explosive project while remaining deeply committed to progressive social change and anti-racist organizing. In the end, this book taught me quite directly how and why the WUO went astray, and how a lack of open and participatory democracy can distort even the brightest of movements. Read the rest of this entry »
“Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement”
by Carl Oglesby
2008 by Scribner
Carl Oglesby, former top-security-clearance defense contractor stooge-turned SDS President, writes a personal view of SDS and the movement against the Vietnam War that is insightful, amusing, and cutting. However, Oglesby has a clear bias and it’s hard to know how much of his account (which is largely based on his memory of various heated conversations) is completely fair or accurate. Also, Oglesby’s account ends up being more depressing than inspiring, as he falls into some pessimism about the prospects for movement building in the US, largely based on his experience of SDS cannibalizing itself.
Worth reading though, mostly because it’s a quick and interesting read that cuts through a lot of bullshit about the romantic 60s, and attacks the reality of war and social change with simple and rough words like so many arrows. Read the rest of this entry »
The End of Capitalism 
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