The case against conspiracy

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Wed Jan 16 19:23:06 PST 2002


Roosevelt...hmmmm...wasn't it really Rosenfeld?

Sigh...

- -Chip Berlet

"The Roosevelt Red Record, " by Elizabeth Dilling, a classic of far right conspiranoia. If Harold Ickes signed a letter in 1928 with Norman Thomas and William Zig Zag Foster, it's in that book.Glen Jeansonne has a good book on Dilling and her "anti-war" Mother's Movement against WWII.

A song by The Almanac Singers, "The Wreck of the Ruben James, I think, by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, released just before the Nazis invaded the fSU on June 22, 1941, called FDR, "Franklin Demogogue Roosevelt." This was during the period that the CPUSA was calling WWII the Second Imperialist War and, "The Yanks Aren't Coming..."

On the FSU and Nazi Germany quoting from the review of, "Feeding The German Eagle, " by John Ericcson, in vol. 2, #1, of http://www.workersliberty.org "As Ericson concludes, 'Without Soviet deliveries of...four major items (oil, manganese, grain and rubber)...Germany could have barely attacked the Soviet Union, let alone come close to victory. German stockpiles of oil, manganese, and grain would haver been completely exhausted by the summer of 1941. And Germany's rubber supply would have run out half a year later.

Stalin thought he could buy off Hitler by providing all that he asked for: in [June 1941]...the Soviets were were doing everything they could to meet German demands. Warehouses...were filling up faster than German and Soviet transportation systems could handle. The pace continued until the eve of battle with a Soviet express train carrying 2,100 tons of desperately needed rubbercrossing the border only hours before the invasion began!"

Fast forward to this I found in an article, "Afghan Resources and Soviet Resources, " by John F. Shroder, Jr. and Abdul Tawab Assifi, in, "The Great Game Revisited, " edited by Rosanne Klass. Pg. 112, "In fact, on the basis of their own figures, the Soviet Union never paid Afghanistan more than a fraction of the going world market price for natural gas. The original price from the 1960's to 1974 was 17 cents per thousand cubic feet (tcf), (which was doubled to 34 cents tcf) in spite of the supposed annual fixing of the price specified in the agreement quoted above. (1968 agreement, previous pg. which I did not copy but can go back to the library to get, M.P.) By 1976, the scheduled revision and redetermination of the price schedule for Afghan natural gas was already two years overdue, and the Russians showed no incination to work on it. Even assuming that they were providing an accurate report of the gas they were receiving, (previous paragraph sez no Afghan monitoring at the border was allowed. Quoting, "Despite Afghan protests the gas had always been metered by Soviet personnel for accounting and crediting purposes on the Soviet side of the border and by Soviet personnel) the price they were paying (i.e. crediting against Afghanistan's debt) was only about 46 cents tcf. At the same time the Soviets were paying three times as much for Iranian natural gas. (The Iranians were instructed to keep secret the price they were getting from the USSR for their gas, but Iranian officials privately informed the Afghan gov't.) Pressed on this price differential the Soviets said that Iranian gas had a higher caloric content, which is true, but the difference is 15-20%, not 200 percent!

Skipping forward a bit...."As of 1982...Moscow was reportedly pricing Afghan gas at $2.35 tcf---which was still well below world market prices: a year earlier Soviet gas was being sold to Europe at $5.10 tcf.

By way of comparison, in 1980 bargaining Iran was offered $3.11-$3.97 tcf which they refused, holding out for $4.81-$4.53 lowest, rougly the price the US pays Mexico and Canada, and when the Russians refused, Iran cut off supplies to Russia.

Bla to be bla further on, "Reports from 1979 on indicate that 70 to 105 billion cubic feet have been going to the Soviet Union to pay for the occupation..."

"The policy and mentality of colonialism are alien to us. We do not covet the lands or wealth of others. It is the colonialists who are attracted by the smell of oil" Comrade Brezhnev, 1980, pg. 97, of this piece.

Michael Pugliese



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