Petro-authoritarianism
Now there is a fine word for the types of leadership regimes we are currently experiencing on a global scale! And it ain’t on wikipedia yet!
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Fill ‘Er Up With Dictators
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Today’s most infectious geopolitical disease is petro-authoritarianism.
NY Times pay for article so…
Here is a great audio piece of an Interview with Thomas Friedman and Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.
Thomas Friedman on "Petropolitics", Iraq, Israel-Palestine and the "Excuse Makers"
He defines petro-authoritarianism as:
authoritarian regimes, some of them elected authoritarians, like in Venezuela, who are using their huge oil windfalls to ensconce their authoritarianism and power. So what are we seeing in the world today? The wave of free markets and free people that was unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall is now meeting a counter-wave of petro-authoritarianism, by petrol estates called Russia, Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Equatorial Guinea, you can do gown the list. And they’re creating a very poisonous geo-politics.
…we’ve got a part of the world over there [Iraq] that is basically entrenched in a whole set of pathologies, pathologies that produce the kind of characters that produce 9/11, who I think in the long term pose a real fundamental threat to open societies all over the world, including ours.
