Oil for the taking.

Maybe human history boils down to something pretty simple: 

Humans are a selfish territorial species that goes to war with others of their species to control valuable resources.

We may remember our high school history on the fights that shaped the U.S. and Western Hemisphere. The Spanish search for gold and silver. The British and French fight for beaver pelts. Everyone's fight to control New Orleans and passage on the Mississippi. 

And for the last 150 years, the fight for access to oil at a favorable price. That fight forced the hand of Japan, which led to their attack on Pearl Harbor. That fight was what made Stalingrad so important to the Germans and Soviets in World War II. I have written this week about our struggle to get Iran's oil. We got a recent lesson on Venezuelan oil -- ours now. We may get a lesson soon on how stopping Venezuelan oil exports to Cuba will allow the U.S. to "take," as President Trump puts it, Cuba.

Less known is our history with Mexican oil. College classmate and Mexican expat Erich Almasy reminds us. Will we go to war with Mexico again? I suspect not. Trump doesn't want Mexico, which is filled with the wrong sort of people, i.e., Mexicans, not as long as we can get what we really want and need, which is its oil, reliably and a price we like.

Erich Almasy and his wife Cynthia Blanton

Guest Post by Erich Almasy 

Today, the price of gasoline in México went up 15 centavos or about six American cents. This may not sound like a lot, but it is the first time in over two years that the price has changed. The Mexican government prefers to keep prices steady, absorbing higher oil prices and profiting when the world price falls. The present doubling of the international oil price apparently left them no choice. At just over 24 pesos per liter, we currently pay the equivalent of US$5.16 per gallon. While México has many “international” brands of gasoline (BP, Shell, Mobil, and Total), the government sets the wholesale price because the national oil company, Pemex, owns all six of the country’s refineries.

Early Mexican Indigenous peoples used tar that seeped from the ground to seal their canoes. Mexican oil has been a part of its political positioning since the first wells were drilled in 1869 by American wildcatters. Throughout the rest of the 19th century, Americans dominated exploration and production, with more than 400 companies holding oil rights. The Californian Edward Doheny and the Texan William F. Buckley, Sr., brought modern technology and production methods to México, along with their skill in subverting the political system to their benefit; first under President Porfirio Díaz and then under the military dictator Victoriano Huerta. During World War I, México tripled its oil exports to the United States, reaching 100 million barrels in 1920; 73 percent of production was from American interests and 21 percent by British ones. Foreigners were taking the vast majority of profits, and despite oil taxes that accounted for 20 percent of México’s GDP, an anti-American government led by President Álvaro Obregón passed legislation declaring that all subsoil resources belonged to the Mexican people.

More oil was discovered during the 1930s, eventually leading to the expropriation of lands in 1938 under President Lázaro Cárdenas del Rio. American oil interests had shifted their attention to developing the Venezuelan oil industry, and Mexican oil wells and working conditions had deteriorated. In retaliation, the foreign oil companies boycotted México, denying it the critical chemicals needed to refine. The American government ceased buying over US$30 million of silver annually from México, raised tariffs on Mexican oil, and threatened to seize Mexican oilfields in 1939. That’s when, in a masterstroke, Cárdenas offered to sell Mexican oil to Germany, which had just begun World War II. Faced with a possible Axis ally on its southern border, the United States permitted the expropriation to continue, more interested in a strategic alliance than a disgruntled neighbor. México declared war on Japan and Germany in 1942, and eventually, US$29 million was paid in compensation for the expropriation. Last week, on March 18, the anniversary of the expropriation was quietly celebrated at the Capitol in México City. It remains a key date in México’s sense of itself.

Today, México is the eleventh-largest oil producer in the world and the fourth-largest in the Western Hemisphere (after the United States, Canada, and Brazil). Current volume is about 1.7 million barrels per day, down by over 50 percent over the past 20 years. Proven oil reserves of over 6 billion barrels should imply a healthy industry, but most of them are offshore, requiring more expensive drilling technology. Even as production declined, oil taxes remained at over 20 percent of total government revenues. The presidency of Pemex has, to some extent, become a symbol of Mexican corruption. Since 2000, five major bribery, embezzlement, and money laundering scandals have plagued the company and its leaders. The funneling of Pemex operating funds to political parties became so widespread that the company came to be known as Hucha, or “piggy bank.”

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Real life on the campaign trail: An event de-brief

Congressional candidate Rebecca Mueller did fine at the event on Saturday.

She did it her way.

I have done about a hundred campaign events at our house over the past 30 years, so I have points of comparison. She accomplished the most important thing in a campaign, which is to give voters an honest look at who she is.

She is appealing. She is nuanced and moderate. She doesn't want to be a "regular," hyper-partisan politician.

About 40 people attended, a good turnout for a new candidate meet-and-greet. I set up chairs to hold it indoors, in the room behind her, where it would have been crowded, but -- incredibly for an event on March 21 -- the day turned bright and warm. I moved the event to the patio around the still-winterized pool, where most of the audience chose to sit in the shade. She stepped off the elevation of the doorstep and its bright light, where politicians normally stand to speak, and into shade at the level of the audience. I realize I am overthinking this, but I consider this a tell, and an honest one. She was talking with us, not to us.

She began by telling the audience with a smile that she was going to ignore my campaign advice, and she did. My advice was to give audiences about three or four very clear "mentally sticky" themes. These would be ones that attendees could later repeat to a spouse or friend: "Mueller wants to _____." Candidates are tempted to say mealy-mouthed platitudes no one remembers. I advised her to organize a speech saying that the Republican incumbent, Cliff Bentz, is part of the GOP congressional enablers of Donald Trump, who consent to whatever Trump demands. I suggested she list those areas where Bentz fails us: He hurts Medicaid users, hurts us with tariffs, hurts us by deporting the people who do the agricultural work of the district, and hurts us by going to war with Iran. Then say what you would do instead. Be short and punchy, with clear declarative sentences.

Mueller did something else. For over 15 minutes she drew from her 15 years as a physician to describe the nuances of pregnancy, miscarriage, stillborns, and the sometimes-heartbreaking choices and situations families experience. She then said that the abortion issue, like many others, requires political leaders who understand problems from many sides. She said this introduction gives us an understanding of her approach to politics.

She did it her way. My concern, sitting in the audience, was that she was proving to the audience that she was a good physician, a good and fair-minded person, but not a good politician able to articulate a political agenda. We have a runaway president and a comatose Congress, and voters are looking for a candidate who will give a firm NO to the current spiral. But I try to have some humility. Maybe Rebecca Mueller is exactly what voters want. 

Over the course of the hour that she spoke and answered questions, the audience saw that she is a political moderate with nuanced ideas. Her speech was congruent with statements on her website. Her website condemns "false dichotomies" and "hyperpolarization." There was a single moment that got spontaneous applause from the audience: "I'm against this war with Iran." I consider that another tell; voters want clarity and certitude from politicians. 

As in any event like this, after the candidate finishes someone does "the ask," the appeal for campaign donations. Ashland's mayor, Tonya Graham, did that. Graham is a high-status endorser and a good catch for Mueller. Graham's persuasive polish was a contrast to Mueller. Mueller is a candidate with high potential, but she is new and under development.

Six candidates filed to be the Democratic nominee. None of them come as the marquee contender, someone already holding high office, celebrity name-recognition, or a fortune. Any of them could win. Bentz likely thinks this will be another 60-40 general election cakewalk in a bright red district. His political risk would come if he ever deviated in the slightest from the demands of President Trump. That is his potential vulnerability. Trump's positions, if well exposed by a Democratic challenger, are not well-suited to the 2nd District. A  Democrat with moderate policies on timber harvests and immigrant agricultural workers would better suit the district than does Bentz.

If Mueller wins the primary she will have time to sharpen her positions, get comfortable standing on a raised platform to talk to voters, raise serious money, tell her story, and give Bentz a scare and voters a choice.

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Bombs are the wrong tool

"If I had a hammer

I'd hammer in the morning. . .

I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters

All over the land.

     Original song by Pete Seeger, 1949, with these revised lyrics by Peter, Paul, and Mary, 1962

The United States has a hammer. 

I was in junior high school when I sang along with Peter, Paul, and Mary in my parents' Chrysler Newport with its AM radio. I never thought about whether a hammer generated love. In adulthood I learned that we often have the wrong tool for the job at hand.

As a financial advisor I learned everyone has problems, even prosperous people. The frustration for prosperous old people is that their money, wonderful as it is, rarely fixes their most pressing problems: their own declining health and the mistakes their children and grandchildren make. 

This comes to mind because of our war with Iran. The U.S. faces a real problem, exacerbated by our ally Israel and the tribal and religious schisms of the Abrahamic religions. The U.S. has a legitimate wish, that the countries of the Middle East all get along with each other, with Israel, and with the West, and that Iran in particular not be a hostile power. Ideally, it would be a region of Switzerland-style countries. That is impossible, alas. The countries' national consciousnesses are centered around their own particular form of tribe and religion, and each is sure God is on their side. 

The U.S. is stuck in this insolvable mess because we and the world need the oil that comes out of the region; because the U.S. has political and emotional ties to Israel; and because the U.S. has a guilty history with Iran. Many Americans have forgotten that we organized a coup to overturn Iran's democratic government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and installed a pro-West dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in its place; Iranians have not forgotten. In 1979 they staged a revolution against that dictator, energized by revenge against the U.S. We are still dealing with the aftermath of this history.

President Trump has a tool: the U.S. military. The U.S. can destroy nearly anything we want anywhere in the world, a extraordinary tool. We have bombed military sites and oil facilities in Iran. Trump announced that he planned to destroy the civilian electric and water infrastructure of Iran, which might well result in millions of civilian deaths if water-borne diseases spread in the absence of clean water and sanitation. That action may be popular in Israel and among many in the U.S. After all, they are Muslim, believers in the wrong prophet, and they vow revenge against us. 

Bombing Iran is almost certainly the wrong tool to get what the U.S. wants: a friendly Iran, or failing that, a perpetually harmless Iran. Either would require an Iran with government legitimacy formed around something other than anger with the U.S. and Israel. Bombing Iran and eliminating its leaders, including ones with the potential of forming a government dedicated to anything but revenge, is the least likely way to get the Iran government we want. 

The potential new government dangled by the West is a return of the dictatorship we established in 1953, in the form of Pahlavi's son. How likely would it have been in the U.S., 50 years after our revolution, to welcome back a British monarch to replace James Madison? The answer, if we remember our own history, is that we went back to war against the British, the war of 1812. They burned down our White House, but they did not get regime change. 

Israel squandered much of the goodwill Americans felt toward it in the decades after WWII. Israel appears to be yet another intransigent belligerent in a region of tribal zealots, in an endless cycle of vengeance for past vengeance. Scorched-earth bombing may be in Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's political interest. I expect it is. Trump let the U.S. be the impetuous hammer for Israel's foreign policy. We confirm to Iran and the Muslim world that we are indeed the "Great Satan" being led by the "Little Satan." Our bombs won't hammer out love, peace, and justice. The war we are waging isn't a move toward reconciliation, or a lasting anything, except more war.

Good goal. Wrong tool. 

President Biden got played by Netanyahu. Trump is getting played even worse.

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Easy Sunday: the SAVE Act backfires on Trump..

Trump's SAVE Act will result in Democrats winning elections.

Official White House website

Democrats are standing up for democracy as they defend broad access to the vote.  

The more-is-better mindset comes out of the civil rights battles to end Jim Crow suppression of Black voters. Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in Mississippi only 6.7 percent of Blacks voted. After the act, in 1967, 59.8 percent did. Democrats had a mission: Let the people vote.

It is time for Democrats to rethink this. In low-turnout elections, Democrats win. Even in conservative Kansas, in a special election voters chose to retain abortion rights. In the last three presidential elections infrequent, disengaged voters chose  Republicans when they voted. The Trump GOP is a populist party of the less-educated, the rural, and the people most tuned into conservative media. 

Democrats won a majority of votes of people with an income of $100,000-plus. The SAVE Act will not cause problems for core Democratic voters: educated, middle and upper-middle class. These are the 50 percent of Americans with passports, people with the income to travel and the motivation to find their birth certificate, to dig out their naturalization paperwork, to find marriage licenses, then get these to a registration office. 

Republicans do far better with married women than with single women. The SAVE Act has a step that gives single women (those "cat ladies" JD Vance mocks) and married women who retained their birth name an advantage over traditional married women. The SAVE Act requires that the birth certificate name match the current legal name, forcing women who took their husband's surname to prove the birth person and the voter are the same person.

The result of the SAVE Act passing would be a dramatic decrease in the number of eligible voters. The ones that remain are likely to elect Democrats.

The SAVE Act would kill vote by mail. That isn't a catastrophe. Originally, mailed voting was a GOP get-out-the-vote idea. Republicans switched positions on this only because Trump needed to blame something for his 2020 loss. Mail voting is convenient, and I like it, but there is nothing unique about it. Both ballot box voting and mail voting have vulnerabilities. Trump could cause election day disruptions in Democratic cities and create long wait times that discourage voters. But he could disrupt mail votes, too.Trump is in court now arguing that ballots that mysteriously aren't delivered by election day should not be counted.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board understands that the SAVE Act is a pyrrhic victory for Republicans, but Republicans officeholders aren't afraid of the WSJ; they are afraid of Trump.

Once the new electorate is in place and Democrats win the White House, House, and Senate, Democrats can do some things that need fixing: statehood for Washington, D.C, statehood for Puerto Rico, four new Supreme Court justices, and repeal of the Big Beautiful Bill. With that and other important work done, they can repeal the SAVE Act and restore democracy. 

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Meet a Democratic candidate for Congress in a bright red district

Again, I am inviting local voters to come to my house to meet a candidate today at 2 p.m.  

Hosting an event for a Democratic candidate in this district is not a waste of time. Nor is attending.

I recognize that this is a red district. That is on purpose. A Democratic majority in the state legislature arranged the congressional districts to pack Republicans into one district, District 2.

Their reach for partisan advantage is evident, but the districts are not crazy or cynical. Look closely and you'll see that four districts all have arms that reach up into the Portland metro area and its Democratic voters. All of these districts have logic and coherence. There is a west Portland to the coast district (1); an east Portland along the Columbia River district (3); and a south suburban and wine-country district (6). District 5 looks artificial, but it is Portland metro Clackamas County connecting to the upscale vacation-oriented Bend where Portlanders go to get sun. District 4 is a longstanding district that combines timberland and liberal college-town Eugene where that timber was milled and marketed. My district, the 2nd, is the rural one, except for my own Medford-Ashland Rogue Valley. Some city needed to supply the population to get the 2nd district up to the required numbers. Did this configuration "pack" Republicans? Yes. But it gave rural Oregon voters what they wanted, their own district.

This vote map reveals that my county is pink rather than red. In 2008 Jackson County narrowly voted for Barack Obama, but we are mostly a Republican county.

So, if the 2nd district is the sacrificial lamb packing Republicans, why bother trying to elect a Democrat? And why Rebecca Mueller?

My own view is that the Democratic brand need not be toxic in rural America. It has become so recently. Think back to only a few decades ago when Democrats were the back-to-the-land people. Now the Democratic brand archetype is an urban office worker, thoroughly secular, fussing over pronouns. JD Vance mocked Democrats as unmarried cat ladies. This can change as people who are visible as Democrats change. 

The Republican incumbent, Cliff Bentz, is in his 70s, a water rights attorney. He doesn't parade around wearing a cowboy hat while carrying a rifle to shoot varmints to try to look "country," but he makes sense as a representative for a rural, agricultural area. Or he did up until he voted with Trump to destroy the affordability of health insurance bought through ACA exchanges. The 2nd district, with a high concentration of small farms, ranches, and independent businesses, has the nation's third highest number of people using those exchanges. He knuckled to Trump and hurt his district. He endangers our fragile rural hospitals which needed those reimbursements for care they must provide.

Who is a plausible replacement for Bentz?  A married woman with children, with a traditional Christian background, who chose a career in the hardest-working, least-paid medical specialty, a pediatrician, who chose to work in a rural setting, strikes me as a pretty good start. The profile isn't as directly "agriculture" as it would be were she a well-driller or a farm-kill butcher, but people tend to like and trust their doctors, pediatricians especially. And there is something else. She is young. The public is ready for Boomers of both parties to get out of the way. She "fits" the district and the moment.

Everybody, urban or rural, cares about taxes, about whether we are at war, about jobs, about houseing costs, and about prices. The immigration issue should break in a Democrat's favor in this district because farmers understand the reality that much of the work is done by immigrants. Send them back and farms die.

On potentially divisive natural resource issues such as what is a reasonable amount of timber to harvest on federal forests, I would not be surprised if her position is different from that of urban party leaders like Chuck Schumer or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, some of whom may never have seen a loaded log truck. But there can be room in the Democratic Party for people who see the forests as a jobs resource. Beef producers want a "good" price for cattle, i.e., a high one, if they can get their product processed, which is another issue. Food shoppers want low prices. There are some tricky issues to negotiate, but that is the work of politics. A Democrat should be just as good as a Republican in representing farmers and forest workers. We will see what Rebecca has to say in the question/answer part of today's event.

Political change happens when political entrepreneurs (i.e. candidates) expose themselves to the political marketplace and sell themselves. They move the brand as they develop their own identity and their positions on issues. We know what a Democrat looks like when we see what Democratic candidates and officeholders think and say as they try to meet the political moment.

This afternoon's event is part of that process. 

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Meet and Greet event for Rebeca Mueller, Democratic candidate for Congress.

I am inviting local readers of my blog to come by my house this Saturday at 2:00 p.m. to meet a candidate for Congress, Rebecca Mueller.

She is a pediatrician, and lives in Medford.

If meet-and-greet events are new to you, let me tell you what happens.

--  Rebecca has casual conversations with people as she circulates the room.

--  After greeting guests, she will give a short talk about herself and the issues facing the country. It is her "stump speech."

--  Then the question and answer period. People ask hard questions.  

--  She will describe why she can win the primary, and why in this blue wave year she can win the general election.

There will be ample food and beverages.

You will be invited to donate to her campaign. Some will, Some won't. (I have.) Donating isn't required. This is a meet-and-greet, not a fundraiser:

The question Republicans must dodge.

Question: "Who won the 2020 election?"

Answer: "Ma'am, we know that President Joe Biden was sworn into office."

The scene was the Senate confirmation hearing of Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), nominee for secretary of homeland security. The question came from Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI).

 
Republicans have a dilemma. There is a question they must not answer directly. The Biden-was-inaugurated response tries to make irrelevant the issue of Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Trump is adamant that Republicans not contradict his assertion that he won the 2020 election. If the Republicans answer to the question acknowledges reality, he becomes a RINO, a Republican in name only. RINOs are traitors to Trump.

It is the classic "The Emperor has no clothes!" problem. Republicans are forced to deny their own eyes. Republicans might be watching to see who is non-compliant. 

To be a Republican in good standing, one needs to ignore evidence that would normally be dispositive. The 2020 votes came in just as predicted by a variety of polling firms, including the Republican-oriented Fox and Rasmussen polls. Votes for representatives and senators, for governors, for down-ballot races, all conformed to a pattern of a 2020 blue wave in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, red states, blue states, states with Republican election officials, states with Democratic election officials. Counts and recounts, many done by Republicans, confirmed the votes. Joe Biden received some 81 million votes to Trump's 74 million. 

The Biden-was-inaugurated line is a way to assert that the issue is past and gone. It isn't past. It is a litmus test of political loyalty and character. It exposes people who cannot be trusted to do their duty regarding democratic elections. It shows that the Republican is willing to tread the party line if he is put under political pressure by his party. He would suspend belief in audited and recounted ballots not to acknowledge the election of a Democrat. 

Trump is already supplying the excuses for Republicans to use to deny the midterm election results: There may be mailed ballots, the wrong people may have voted, machines may have switched votes, or the votes may be reported inaccurately by election officials. A Republican who uses the Biden-was-inaugurated line demonstrates that he cannot openly acknowledge an election victory by a Democrat, if that is demanded by his party.

There are multiple choke points and veto spots in our election machinery. Legislators will be put on the hot seat and urged to refuse to do routine ministerial acts. I have observed Oregon's state Senate races in my district, District Three, a seat currently held by Democrat Jeff Golden (yet another college classmate). It is a light blue district, but one that elected a strong Republican candidate in the past, Alan DeBoer. Recent Republican candidates have lost elections to Golden because he was a well-respected candidate and because his Republican opponents sabotaged their own campaigns. They could not resist the million-dollar-plus campaign help from the state Republican Party, which served up red-meat Republican orthodoxy.  

This cycle's Republican candidate for this district, Brad Hicks, was a career Chamber of Commerce executive director. He is well connected to the local business establishment -- a mixed blessing. (Forty-five years ago I won election as a Democratic county commissioner because I advertised that I was NOT part of that good ol' boy network of businesses getting government contracts from the very people whose campaigns they fund. I was the "drain the swamp" candidate.) Hicks could be a plausible candidate, but he is stuck with being neck-deep in the swamp and a member of a party that cannot admit that their leader lost an election. If elected, Republicans in the state Senate would be under enormous pressure to deny certification of any election victory by Democrats if Trump demands it. They have a ready-made excuse for mischief: We have mail-in ballots in Oregon. 

It is not easy to be a Republican in this era of Trump. They cannot escape Trump being Trump, with all his strangeness, and all his MAGA supporters. Trump and the GOP demand compliance and they are harsh on heretics.

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