LeVine’s aim in reviewing my book seems to be to defend Big Oil against any criticism. It is very interesting, therefore, that LeVine reserves his desperately critical analysis of my book almost exclusively to the two chapters on history, while virtually ignoring the book’s remaining seven chapters investigating the current state of the U.S. refining and marketing sectors, the world and domestic crude oil markets, the costs associated with the production of oil from tar, shale or offshore, the development and undoing of U.S. antitrust policy, the role of the oil industry within and on the Bush administration, the industry’s influence over policy decision-making in local, state, national, and international arenas, the growing use of the U.S. military as an oil protective force, and the numerous other policy prescriptions I make in the book in addition to my call for breaking up the nation’s oil companies.
My goal in writing The Tyranny of Oil was to offer an analysis that has been sorely missing in U.S. literature since the 1975 publication of Anthony Sampson’s classic book, The Seven Sisters: an unapologetically and vitally necessary in-depth and serious critique of the current state of the U.S. oil industry which also raises the voices of those not regularly heard on nightly news programs, television commercials, and in books. It was also to make the case that, just as in the time of Standard Oil, only another people’s movement can effectively counter this great challenge to American democracy.
- Antonia Juhasz, author, The Tyranny of Oil: the World's Most Powerful Industry-And What We Must Do To Stop It (HarperCollins, October 2008). http://www.TheTyrannyofOil.org
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