OPEC’s decision to stand pat last week and maintain current crude production levels sent oil prices down to nearly five-year lows on Monday. It also prompted a couple of big related questions: Is OPEC deliberately trying to smother the U.S. oil boom, and will it be able to?

The heavy hitters inside the oil-exporting cartel certainly give that impression. By leaving the taps open and pushing prices down, the idea is to make it less economical to produce oil from fracking, which is more expensive than pumping oil in big, traditional Middle Eastern fields. OPEC’s secretary-general, Abdalla El-Badri, said after last week’s Nov. 27 meeting that the decision was OPEC’s way of answering the glut of light, tight oil unleashed by the U.S. energy revolution. And Iranian officials said that, in backroom meetings, Saudi officials were especially worried by the threat posed by rising U.S. oil production.

Granted, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is hardly monolithic. Its decision to keep oil production unchanged is probably less a concerted strategy to dent U.S. output than a reflection that the disparate group historically takes time to reach consensus. OPEC’s big producers, led by Saudi Arabia, also want to convince smaller producers to share any pain from output cuts — something that will be easier after a few more months of relatively low oil prices.

Regardless of whether it was OPEC’s intention or not, with U.S. oil prices trading in the high $60s per barrel for the first time since the summer of 2009, the economic climate for U.S. oil production is, on paper at least, more challenging than it has been in years.

But that doesn’t mean that sub-$70 oil will kneecap the U.S. boom anytime soon. For starters, prices will have to remain depressed before U.S. oil producers pack up their rigs for good. If oil prices stay steady through all of 2015 — a big if — energy analysts expect U.S. production growth to drop by 500,000 or 600,000 barrels. That wouldn’t be enough to cure the crude overhang that is weighing on markets today.

But most importantly, thanks to technological advances, it has gotten steadily cheaper to produce tight oil from blasting apart shale seams deep underground. That means that the “break-even” oil price for U.S. producers is getting lower all the time, making the industry more resilient to price dips.  If the United States needed $80 barrels a few years ago, it can comfortably manage today with prices close to $70, data from different shale plays show. Daniel Yergin, head of energy consultancy IHS, says that 80 percent of U.S. tight-oil production can survive with oil below $70 a barrel.

Norway’s Statoil, which has become a big player in North America, makes clear what’s driving the change: technological advances that lower the cost of drilling each well. Costs have fallen 50 percent in two years, the company said, and could keep falling another 15 percent by 2016. At the same time, producers are now squeezing out more oil than they used to. The upshot, Statoil says, is fewer wells, at lower cost, with greater overall production.

That isn’t to say that the industry can completely shrug off lower oil prices. Even if the wells themselves are still profitable, oil companies need a constant influx of cash to keep operating. Brown Brothers Harriman, the investment bank, said that lower oil prices could crimp the easy credit that many operators need to keep prospecting, which could curtail the expansion of U.S. oil output. That most shale plays can survive with lower prices underscores that some can’t; those more expensive projects will likely get curtailed if oil prices stay depressed through the first half of next year.

Could it also be that the US has induced its long term partner Saudi Arabia to cooperate in starving Putin?

The Iraqi army has been paying salaries to at least 50,000 soldiers who don’t exist, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said Sunday, an indication of the level of corruption that permeates an institution that the United States has spent billions equipping and arming.

A preliminary investigation into “ghost soldiers” — whose salaries are being drawn but who are not in military service — revealed the tens of thousands of false names on Defense Ministry rolls, Abadi told parliament Sunday. Follow-up investigations are expected to uncover “more and more,” he added.

Abadi, who took power in September, is under pressure to stamp out the graft that flourished in the armed forces under his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki. Widespread corruption has been blamed for contributing to the collapse of four of the army’s 14 divisions in June in the face of an offensive by Islamic State extremists.

With entry-level soldiers in Iraq drawing salaries of about $600 a month, the practice of “ghost soldiers” is likely to be costing Iraq at least $380 million a year — though officials say that’s probably only a fraction of the true expense.

The corrupt practice is often perpetrated by officers who pretend to have more soldiers on their books in order to pocket their salaries, experts say.

Abadi’s announcement was met with applause in parliament. He said that the perpetrators would be tracked down eventually but that his priority is to end the practice as soon as possible.

“The problems are wide, and it’s an extremely difficult task which is going to involve some strong will,” said Iraqi security analyst Saeed al-Jayashi. “Training is weak and unprofessional.”

The United States is focusing its efforts on three divisions in order to begin effective counteroffensive operations against the Islamic State, which controls around a third of the country’s territory.

Young African American men are not employed.  What is particularly sad in the US is that our President, who identifies as African American and looks African American has not stepped forward in the six years in office to take the bully pulpit on this issue.  Many who voted for him hoped that we could turn a corner on this most intractable issue.

Jude Wanniski boiled down the major problem of our time as balancing the tension between income growth and redistribution. During the 1992 riots, he identified a scarcity of capital relative to labor as a major problem for the black inner city and a major source of tension in race relations. He noted, “When there is no capital available, the price of labor must drop to uncivilized lows to clear competitive levels.” Certainly, until the scarcity of capital relative to labor is addressed, the American empire will remain vulnerable to the violent eruptions that have befallen Ferguson.

During the early 1990s, Jack Kemp’s pursuit of enterprise zones in the inner city was a clear attempt to bridge the gap between growth and redistribution. The promise of enterprise zones was that their tax exemption on capital gains could attract the investment capital necessary so surplus labor (largely African American) could be pulled out of the streets and into increasingly productive, legal uses.

Today, it is Senator Rand Paul, who has visited Ferguson, who sounds like Kemp with his outreach initiatives to the black community. Similar to Kemp, he champions enterprise zones in the inner city. But he has taken the script further.

As veteran political columnist Ronald Brownstein noted this summer, Paul “has moved beyond the economic arguments that anchored previous outreach efforts to embrace criminal-justice reform with a passion unprecedented in modern Republican politics. Few Democrats, in fact, have matched the fervor of Paul’s case against drug laws that have disproportionately incarcerated minority men.”

Jim Webb, a one-term Senator from VIrginia and Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, also addresses this issue.  He is putting out feelers for the democrats’nomination in the early part of 2015.

Nerdun Hacıoğlu writes from Moscow:  Turkey wants to renew the bilateral gas agreement with Russia rather than requesting a discount in the existing deals.  Gazprom and Turkey’s BOTAŞ have been discussing the deals.  Turkey wants to renew the existing gas deal with Russia on a new principle of price setting, rather than asking for a gas discount.  Gazprom will decide to accept or reject this idea.

Turkey has acted in the opposite direction of the western countries about Russia. And Turkey does not create any problems with the South Stream gas pipeline, noted Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak.