|
FOCUS | Fight Climate Change? Or Oil the Wheels of War? |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 24 September 2014 09:30 |
|
Weissman writes: "Does anyone really believe that Bill Clinton repeatedly bombed Saddam Hussein's Iraq to defend democracy? Or that George W. Bush waged war in Afghanistan to protect the rights of that country's terribly oppressed women?"
U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Robert Dominguez, of Mathis, Texas, stands guard next to a burning oil well at the Rumayla oil fields March 27, 2003, in Rumayla, Iraq. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Fight Climate Change? Or Oil the Wheels of War?
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
24 September 14
 oes anyone really believe that Bill Clinton repeatedly bombed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to defend democracy? Or that George W. Bush waged war in Afghanistan to protect the rights of that country’s terribly oppressed women? Or that Barack Obama reopened the American war in Iraq to stop the militants of Islamic State from raping Yazidi women?
Cynical, skeptical, or merely realistic, most sensible people have learned to doubt the humanitarian justifications that accompany cross-border military intervention, whether by Washington, its European allies, or its Russian and Chinese adversaries. The New Yorker’s Steve Cole, dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, gave substance to these doubts back in August with his candid explanation of why Obama was dropping bombs to defend Erbil.
“The capital of the oil-endowed Kurdish Regional Government,” Coll wrote, “Erbil is an oil-rush town.” Thousands of Americans live in Erbil, working for ExxonMobil and Chevron, the oilfield service companies, accountants, construction firms, trucking firms, and “at the bottom of the economic chain, diverse entrepreneurs digging for a score.” This explains why the American consulate has so many people, including an untold number of intelligence operatives.
In others words, the bombing was and is largely about oil, like so much else in America’s wars in Iraq, from George Herbert Walker Bush’s defense of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia’s oilfields against Saddam Hussein to what, in a later article, Coll calls Obama’s “Whack-a-Mole against jihadists.”
“Obama’s defense of Erbil,” he concluded, “is effectively the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal – as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example – are best not spoken of in polite or naďve company.” To back up his argument, Coll cited Rachel Maddow’s documentary on MSNBC, “Why We Did It,” in which he played a prominent role. Since we now know that Saddam had no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), the documentary seeks to find out why Bush, Cheney, and Blair took us to war in Iraq.
Oil, says Maddow. But not simply to grab it, privatize it, or line the pockets of friends and supporters in the oil industry, or of Cheney himself. That kind of analysis is far too shallow and simplistic, much like what those on the Left used to call “vulgar Marxism.” Nor does Maddow tell us what motivated Bush personally, which could have been to avenge Saddam’s contract on the elder Bush or “a mission from God,” as he told Palestinian peace negotiator Nabil Shaath and French president Jacques Chirac.
But, based on internal documents and interviews with decision-makers, Maddow shows convincingly that the National Security Council, Cheney’s industry-dominated Energy Task Force, and the Pentagon wanted to increase the supply of oil, bring down its price, and ensure Western control of access to it.
No surprise. Control of global reserves – and the ability to reward or punish rivals who need the oil and natural gas – has been a central theme of American policy for over a century. As Maddow shows, President Jimmy Carter even made it a fighting matter in his State of the Union Address in January 1980.
“Let our position be absolutely clear,” he told the world. “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
Carter was threatening the Soviet Union, who had sent troops into Afghanistan at least in part as a response to his arming the mujahideen. He was warning them not to move south toward the Persian Gulf. George W. Bush invaded Iraq to take control of its oil. And Barack Obama bombed Erbil primarily to maintain control of Kurdish oil.
As the bombing extends into Syria, we will see other motives, humanitarian instincts, desires to protect Israel and local Christians, or counter-productive ideas about how to fight terrorists. But little that America and its European allies do in that part of the world will ever be far removed from controlling the region’s energy resources.
All of which makes Obama’s new war a major foe of global efforts to address climate change. Now is the time to move away from fossil fuels, not to put them at the top of the national agenda, locking us into an ever deeper, more militarized involvement with Big Oil and its threat to Planet Earth.
We can’t go both ways, so which will it be? Do we fight to cut back carbon emissions? Or, do we oil the wheels of war throughout the Middle East?
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
 |
|
Largest Climate-Change March in History Unlikely to Convince Idiots |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 24 September 2014 07:15 |
|
Borowitz writes: "A climate-change march that organizers claim was the largest on record is nevertheless unlikely to change the minds of idiots, a survey of America's idiots reveals."
Andy Borowitz doesn’t think there’s hope for the “idiots” who deny climate change is happening. (photo: Emma Cassidy)
Largest Climate-Change March in History Unlikely to Convince Idiots
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
24 September 14
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 climate-change march that organizers claim was the largest on record is nevertheless unlikely to change the minds of idiots, a survey of America’s idiots reveals.
Despite bringing attention to a position that is embraced by more than ninety per cent of the world’s scientists, the People’s Climate March, which took place on Sunday in New York City, left a broad majority of the nation’s idiots unconvinced.
“Look, if hundreds of thousands of people want to march about something, it’s a free country,” said Carol Foyler, an idiot from Kenosha, Wisconsin. “But let me ask them something: if the climate is really getting warmer, why was it so cold up here last winter?”
Harland Dorrinson, an idiot from Hollywood, Florida, was also unmoved by the message of Sunday’s march. “What these marchers don’t realize is that the planet goes through natural cycles of heating and cooling,” he said. “Blaming people for global warming is like blaming dinosaurs for the ice age.”
Skepticism about scientists characterized many of the idiots’ remarks, including those of Tracy Klugian, of Albuquerque, New Mexico. “Those marchers are holding signs that say ‘Scientists this, scientists that,’ ” he said. “Well, how can scientists be sure that the Earth was colder thousands of years ago, when no one had invented a thermometer?”
Klugian said he was confident that, despite the impressive numbers for Sunday’s march, idiots would prevail in the ongoing climate-change debate. “At the end of the day, there are more people like us in Congress,” he said.
|
|
|
The Coming Climate Revolt |
|
|
Tuesday, 23 September 2014 13:08 |
|
Hedges writes: "We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades - what John Ralston Saul calls a corporate coup d'etat in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible."
An estimated 400,000 people joined the People’s Climate March on Sunday, September 21st, in Manhattan. (photo: Scott Galindez/RSN)
The Coming Climate Revolt
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
23 September 14
 e have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. Liberals in the old Democratic Party such as the senators Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh and George McGovern—who worked with Ralph Nader to make the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Mine Safety and Health Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the OSHA law, who made common cause with labor unions to protect workers, who stood up to the arms industry and a bloated military—no longer exist within the Democratic Party, as Nader has been lamenting for several years. They were pushed out as corporate donors began to transform the political landscape with the election of Ronald Reagan. And this is why the Democrats have not, as Bill Curry points out, enacted any major social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early ’70s.
We are governed, rather, by a species of corporate totalitarianism, or what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as “inverted totalitarianism.” By this Wolin means a system where corporate power, while it purports to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, the three branches of government and a free press, along with the iconography and language of American patriotism, has in fact seized all the important levers of power to render the citizen impotent.
The old liberal class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in times of economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are self-identified liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak in the old language of liberalism but serve corporate power. This has been true since the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton found that by doing corporate bidding he could get corporate money—thus NAFTA, the destruction of our welfare system, the explosion of mass incarceration under the [1994] omnibus bill, the deregulation of the FCC, turning the airwaves over to a half dozen corporations, and the revoking of FDR’s 1933 Glass-Steagall reform that had protected our banking system from speculators. Clinton, in exchange for corporate money, transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. This was diabolically brilliant. It forced the Republican Party to shift so far to the right it became insane.
READ MORE
|
|
Gun Nuts Meet Their Match: Why Gabby Giffords Isn't Playing Nice Anymore |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=30217"><span class="small">Jim Newell, Salon</span></a>
|
|
Tuesday, 23 September 2014 12:54 |
|
Newell writes: "Somehow, politicians who support the lax gun policies that inevitably lead to such episodes, and won't even consider the slightest tweaks toward restricting gun ownership, feel that they don't deserve to be subjects of these sort of attack ads. They feel they can proselytize about the glories of gun culture all they want."
Gabby Giffords is standing up to the gun lobby. (photo: Getty Images)
Gun Nuts Meet Their Match: Why Gabby Giffords Isn't Playing Nice Anymore
By Jim Newell, Salon
23 September 14
Ex-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is facing criticism for her "mean" gun control ads. There's a very good reason for that
few years back someone walked up to then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords outside a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, and shot her in the head. The shooter, Jared Loughner, killed six and injured a dozen or so others. In 2012, another nut shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Later that year, a shooter walked into a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school and murdered 20 children. These are only a few high-profile examples of the dozens of mass shootings that have taken place in the last several years.
After Newtown, President Obama and many members of Congress finally felt compelled to make the first serious push for gun control legislation in decades. Their demands were eventually whittled down to some modest measures, such as expanding background checks for gun buyers. But even that effort, pushed hard by then-former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and backed by vast majorities of the American people, failed to overcome a Republican Senate filibuster.
Oddly enough, it strains certain imaginations that the above sequence of events is something that people could get really, really angry about it. That masses of people, including members of Congress, movie-theater patrons, and children could get shot, and that members of Congress — mostly Republicans, with a handful of conservative Democrats — wouldn’t even accede a minimal piece of legislation shoring up the country’s porous background check laws. It’s horrifying and enraging, and those public figures who work to maintain or even loosen what we might generously called the “loopholed” status quo of American gun law should expect to be treated as accomplices to this farce.
As Giffords herself recovered, retired from Congress and became an ardent advocate for stricter background checks, she first tried to play nice. She implored members of both parties to work together to pass common-sense gun regulations, like those closing background check loopholes for private sales on the Internet and at gun shows. The advocacy commercials she and/or her husband appeared in were mostly to urge action, not to attack. As we know, that didn’t work very well.
So this cycle, Giffords’ super PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions, is getting “mean.” That’s how Politico describes the group’s tactics this cycle.
Some of the toughest spots from Giffords’ newly formed pro-gun-control super PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions, hammer Republican Martha McSally, a retired Air Force pilot who is running for the Arizona seat Giffords once held. One features a wrenching testimonial from a woman named Vicki who weeps and stumbles over her words as she recounts how her 19-year-old daughter was hunted down and murdered by an enraged ex-boyfriend.
“He had threatened her before. I knew. I just knew,” Vicki says. A narrator then declares that McSally “opposes making it harder for stalkers to get a gun.”
So mean! You can watch the ad below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zf3IdKEawY
You bet it’s a “tough” ad, as other handicappers have described it. It’s “emotional.” That’s because when, say, a vengeful ex-boyfriend, or anyone, walks up to another person and shoots them, it’s a very “tough,” “emotional” thing. It’s a bloody violent awful tragedy. Yet somehow, politicians who support the lax gun policies that inevitably lead to such episodes, and won’t even consider the slightest tweaks toward restricting gun ownership, feel that they don’t deserve to be subjects of these sort of attack ads. They feel they can proselytize about the glories of gun culture all they want, and that’s fine, but if the dirty gun-grabbers then connect them and their preferred policies to instances of gun violence … well, that’s impolite and Over the Line, the arbiters of civility tell us.
The editorial board of the Arizona Republic is disgusted with this Vicki ad. “It is base and vile. It exploits a family’s tragedy to score cheap political points. And when the ad makes news because it goes too far, Gabrielle Giffords makes news with it. Because it’s her group.” The editorialists, see, couldn’t imagine that Giffords herself would condone these sort of tactics, and warns the management at Americans for Responsible Solutions that they’re sullying the reputation of Giffords, the Magical Cuddly Sparkle Bear of American politics.
So we ask again, Americans for Responsible Solutions, do you know what you’re doing?
Do the people who control your messaging know they are marring the legacy of a congresswoman known for her decency and good judgment, who practiced civility in office with such consistency she did not just reach across the aisle but found cherished friends there? [...]
Perhaps the Tucson shooting changed Gabby Giffords. Perhaps she is the one who controls the message. But we doubt it.
That’s not who she is.
Maybe the writers of this are being cheeky, to add yet another layer of condescension to an editorial that’s already dripping with it. Perhaps they know that Giffords is A-OK with this strategy and are giving her a tut-tutting pat on the head as a fatherly warning against breaching the standards of “civility” to which they’d prefer she adhere. As if Giffords’ legacy is theirs to write, her priorities theirs to determine.
But Giffords is under no contract to serve as mascot for superficial “civility” standards. She tried to approach her policy priorities the friendly way, by using her celebrity to unite Democrats and Republicans behind new gun legislation, and it didn’t work. So now she’s approaching them the other way: by tying politicians who resist things like expanded background checks to the outcomes of that. Politico reports that Giffords is indeed “deeply involved in the making of the ads.”
Gabrielle Giffords is not, and is under no obligation to be, a Civility Unicorn. She got shot in the head and is furious about other people getting shot, too. She wants to change gun laws in the United States — even if that means disrupting an atmosphere of good cheer with insertions of grisly reality.
|
|
oday we are launching a campaign called HeForShe.
