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Return of the Anti-Muslim Bigots |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=14516"><span class="small">David Sirota, Salon</span></a>
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Friday, 10 May 2013 14:32 |
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Sirota writes: "As the GOP coalition gets frayed, Islamophobia is one of the few things that can unify the party."
Rush Limbaugh. (photo: The Reid Report)
Return of the Anti-Muslim Bigots
By David Sirota, Salon
10 May 13
As the GOP coalition gets frayed, Islamophobia is one of the few things that can unify the party
  hese are not the droids you're looking for" - one reason that Obi Wan Kenobi quote is so well known and so often invoked with a wink is because it succinctly captures American politics' most favorite bait and switch: the tactic whereby partisans deny the existence of a phenomenon that's there for everyone to see, all so that the phenomenon can continue unabated. This Star Wars-ism, indeed, is a perfect way to understand the way Islamophobia works in America - and not because of Tatooine's arabian aesthetic (it was filmed in Tunisia), but because the way so many seem intent on pretending anti-Muslim sentiment doesn't exist, all to make sure it continues to flourish.
The aftermath of 9/11 is, of course, the best example. In the years following the attack, conservatives from Rush Limbaugh to Commentary magazine's Jonathan Tobin have insisted with straight faces that there was never any evidence that many Americans blamed all Muslims for the act of a small group of terrorists. Willfully ignored in such analyses was the fact that after 9/11 violent anti-Muslim hate crimes increased by 1,600 percent; Muslim communities have being subjected to mass surveillance in New York (even though, as CUNY's Diala Shamas notes, "the NYPD still cannot point to a single lead or prosecution that has resulted from this strategy"); mosques have been targeted for attack; polls documented a spike in open prejudice against Muslims (including one showing almost half of the country supportive of curtailing the constitutional rights of Muslim citizens); and Muslims now face a disproportionately high rates of job discrimination. Meanwhile, after 9/11, conservative media outlets became megaphones for Islamophobic rhetoric.
Now, unfortunately, the same thing is playing out after the Boston bombing. Limbaugh has insisted that innocent Muslims "will be in no way associated with" the attack and pundits like the Telegraph's Brendan O'Neill claim that anti-Muslim bigotry is just "a figment of liberals' imaginations." Yet, here is but a taste of what's happened in just the three weeks since the Boston attack:
The Boston Globe reports that a Palestinian woman who walking with her baby daughter was assaulted in the Boston suburb of Malden by an assailant blaming her for the bombing.
The New York Post reports that a Bangladeshi man was beaten nearly unconscious by New Yorkers as retribution for the Boston bombing.
The Washington Post reports that a Muslim cab driver, who was also a U.S. Army reservist Iraq War veteran, was assaulted by a passenger who "compared him to the men accused of carrying out the Boston Marathon."
U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-NY), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, called for Muslims to be subjected to more intensive mass surveillance.
Former U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) appeared on national television to declare that America's "enemy" are all "young Muslim men."
Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League (an organization whose mission is to combat rather than foment bigotry), publicly justified proposals for mass surveillance of all Muslims.
On national television, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade called for installing listening devices in mosques.
Ann Coulter appeared on syndicated radio to declare that all mosques be put under police surveillance.
On national television, Fox News host Bob Beckel not only called for barring Muslim students from visiting the United States, but also said that young Muslims already in America on visas "should be sent back home or sent to prison."
Conservative comedian Erik Rush said the Boston bombing proves Muslims "are evil - let's kill them all."
As evidenced by the pattern after the Boston bombing - and by how the pattern follows pre-Boston bombing trends - these are not isolated incidents. On the contrary, they are part of an unsurprising pattern. As conservative media outlets at once pretend there is no Islamophobia in America but then use the horrible actions of a handful of Muslim extremists as an excuse to vilify all Muslims, Islamophobic bigotry and the threat of hate crimes follow. It is as predictable as it is lamentable.
To know that this is specifically Islamophobia and not just generalized anger following an inexcusable act of violence, just remember that, as Tim Wise notes, America saw no similar rhetorical or physical assaults targeted at specific demographic groups after the violence of:
Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph and Joe Stack and George Metesky and Byron De La Beckwith and Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton and Herman Frank Cash and Robert Chambliss and James von Brunn and Lawrence Michael Lombardi and Robert Mathews and David Lane and Chevie Kehoe and Michael F. Griffin and Paul Hill and John Salvi and Justin Carl Moose and Bruce and Joshua Turnidge and James Kopp and Luke Helder and James David Adkisson and Scott Roeder and Shelley Shannon and Dennis Mahon and Wade Michael Page and Jeffery Harbin and Byron Williams and Charles Ray Polk and Willie Ray Lampley and Cecilia Lampley and John Dare Baird and Joseph Martin Bailie and Ray Hamblin and Robert Edward Starr III and William James McCranie Jr. and John Pitner and Charles Barbee and Robert Berry and Jay Merrell and Brendon Blasz and Carl Jay Waskom Jr. and Shawn and Catherine Adams and Edward Taylor Jr. and Todd Vanbiber and William Robert Goehler and James Cleaver and Jack Dowell and Bradley Playford Glover and Ken Carter and Randy Graham and Bradford Metcalf and Chris Scott Gilliam and Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder and Buford Furrow and Benjamin Smith and Donald Rudolph and Kevin Ray Patterson and Charles Dennis Kiles and Donald Beauregard and Troy Diver and Mark Wayne McCool and Leo Felton and Erica Chase and Clayton Lee Wagner and Michael Edward Smith and David Burgert and Robert Barefoot Jr. and Sean Gillespie and Ivan Duane Braden and Kevin Harpham and William Krar and Judith Bruey and Edward Feltus and Raymond Kirk Dillard and Adam Lynn Cunningham and Bonnell Hughes and Randall Garrett Cole and James Ray McElroy and Michael Gorbey and Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman and Frederick Thomas and Paul Ross Evans and Matt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons and Kathy Simmons and Kaye Wiggins and Patricia Hughes and Jeremy Dunahoe and David McMenemy and Bobby Joe Rogers and Francis Grady and Cody Seth Crawford and Ralph Lang and Demetrius Van Crocker and Floyd Raymond Looker and Derek Mathew Shrout and Randolph Linn.
Noting the disparity in how we react to different acts of terrorism is not to argue that other demographic groups should be treated the way American Muslims are too often treated. Quite the opposite, in fact - it is to argue that there are unfortunately violent extremists who hail from most demographic groups, and we should focus our anti-terrorism actions intensely on those individuals. However, we shouldn't blame whole groups of innocent people for the acts of those individuals.
That ideal is the kind of principle our country may not always live up to, but that we do at least conceptually value to the point of teaching it to kids in kindergarten. Indeed, it's hard to be publicly against the notion of not blaming groups for the actions of individuals because the principle is basically a version of the Golden Rule - that is, it is how everyone wants to be treated in their own lives. Thus, why we so often hear conservatives' laughable "not the droids you're looking for" denials from Limbaugh et. al about anti-Muslim bigotry - all while they turn around and stoke such bigotry.
Why the bait and switch? More specifically, why are conservative media outlets and politicians obsessed with stoking anti-Muslim animus? That's subject for a whole other article (or, better yet, book) involving everything from the right's notions of a religious war to neoconservative ideas about foreign policy to just straight up bigotry. But there's also undoubtedly a shrewd political calculation at work.
Right now, the Republican Party is tearing apart at the seams. Simply put, for various (obvious) reasons, the GOP's unholy alliance of super-wealthy country clubbers and working-class cultural conservatives is now fraying. Ratings-hungry conservative media outlets and desperate politicians are therefore grasping for any issue or cause that unifies the conservative audience across increasingly wide economic, cultural and class lines. According to polling data, Islamophobia is sadly one of the few things that can achieve that among Republicans. So it has become a central organizing principle on the right.
Conservative leaders cannot openly admit to that poltiical calculation, of course. Thus, the "these are not the droids you're looking for" denials. But that's clearly what's at work - and if it isn't routinely called out, it will continue, and probably get worse.
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Benghazi and the Conservative Scandal-Creation Apparatus |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23807"><span class="small">Alex Pareene, Salon</span></a>
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Friday, 10 May 2013 14:31 |
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Pareene writes: "Yesterday, Republicans finally got their #BENGHAZI hearing. After months of nonstop screaming, everyone finally paid attention to the conservative movement's favorite scandal since Fast and Furious."
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AP)
Benghazi and the Conservative Scandal-Creation Apparatus
By Alex Pareene, Salon
10 May 13
The conservative scandal-creation apparatus still has juice, but it's not as effective as it was against Clinton
 esterday, Republicans finally got their #BENGHAZI hearing. After months of nonstop screaming, everyone finally paid attention to the conservative movement's favorite scandal since Fast and Furious. Darrell Issa's House Oversight Committee heard explosive testimony from three #BENGHAZI whistle-blowers, who blew the lid off the Obama administration's conspiracy to win reelection by allowing Americans to die in a terrorist attack and then having an administration official most Americans had never heard of pointedly not blame al-Qaida on Sunday news shows that only people in Washington care about.
Those are the accusations the #BENGHAZI coalition has been making since shortly after the attack: that the Obama administration intentionally allowed the attack on the U.S. consulate to happen, or did not do as much as it could have to stop the attack once it started, because it did not want to admit that it did not successfully destroy terrorism itself in its first term; and that after the attack, the administration intentionally and repeatedly lied about the attackers and their motivation (the "they didn't say ‘terrorism'" argument), and then engaged in a Watergate-style cover-up of the fact that the attack had been terrorism.
One of the reasons why Americans aren't outraged about Benghazi is that the event is a series of tragedies in search of a unifying explanation, and one that "Obama is evil" doesn't cover. Because really, to suggest that the Pentagon or the White House would deliberately - and yes, this is EXACTLY what Republicans are suggesting - prevent special operations forces from rescuing American diplomats BECAUSE they worried about the potential political blowback because they KNEW exactly who was behind it (al Qaeda) is - well, it is to suggest that Barack Obama is simply and utterly evil.
This is the "STAND DOWN" thing, by the way. The notion that the military could've saved the day, but the administration ordered them not to because … politics?
Once the attack commenced, there was little, militarily, the United States could do that it did not do. This one paragraph from an L.A. Times story is basically everything you need to know about #BENGHAZI. Not everything you need to know about the actual attack and our State Department's preparedness and response - that is all covered in the State Department's Accountability Review Board report, which came out in December - but this paragraph just about sums up the Republican Party's attempted Whitewater-ification of the deadly attack:
"There were military assets, there was military personnel, they were told to stand down," Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said Monday on the Fox program "Fox and Friends." Chaffetz acknowledged in an interview published Monday with the Washington Post that they would have arrived after the attack on the CIA annex was over. He said they could have provided first aid.
Why didn't the president order the Special Forces to provide first aid to the victims hours after Stevens had disappeared, and been taken to a hospital?
If you start from the assumption, as Issa and Chaffetz do, that the Obama administration is evil and corrupt, then the only explanation for the actual real failures in preparedness leading up to the consulate attack is obviously evilness and corruption.
What's interesting, though, is that Americans aren't, so far, eating up the #BENGHAZI scandal. There is some proof that months of conspiratorial coverage have made people aware that #BENGHAZI is a thing. There was a Fox poll with some very leading questions that found that 46 percent of registered voters think the Obama administration is "covering up" what happened in Benghazi. In December, a less leadingly worded CNN poll found that 56 percent of Americans think the administration didn't deliberately mislead the public after the attacks. But on the whole, the majority of the public that doesn't consume right-wing media hasn't been hugely concerned. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both still broadly popular. In the Clinton era, I can't help but feel, this would've been much huger, with the help of the non-partisan press.
The high-profile hearing might've changed things. More people probably believe in some form of the #BENGHAZI conspiracy today than did on Tuesday. But the mainstream press is basically aware of what the right is trying to do. Mike Huckabee gave the game away when he predicted that #BENGHAZI would lead to Obama's impeachment. When Clinton was president, the right screamed and threw tantrums until he was impeached. They are not quite certain why that has not yet happened with Obama, but they are working on it.
In part the right-wing media is a victim of its own success. It successfully browbeats the liberal media into covering a million bullshit, trumped-up scandals, and those scandals usually end up going nowhere. The lessons the media failed to learn from Whitewater, it eventually picked up after Tony Rezko, Shirley Sherrod, Solyndra and Fast and Furious.
The conservative movement is so detached from reality that they can't come up with a coherent or convincing narrative. It was easy (too easy) for non-partisan journalists to imagine the Clintons as conniving and corrupt, but the conservative fantasy version of Obama is so bizarre that stories relying on that interpretation don't get traction beyond Fox. Which makes more sense to you, that the State Department ignored requests for more security because the Obama campaign was running on the message that the administration had crippled al-Qaida, and additional security at diplomatic posts in unstable areas would contradict the message? Or that the requests were denied because a culture of excessive thriftiness has taken hold in Washington since the 2010 Republican wave election and the subsequent endless debt showdowns?
The deaths of Chris Stevens and the others who died last September were probably avoidable. An opposition party made up of sane people would be very useful, right now, in determining how to prevent future tragedies like this. Alas, our existing opposition party is made up of numskulls and charlatans who take WorldNetDaily seriously. The most depressing thing about #BENGHAZI is that it's completely supplanted all efforts to learn from Benghazi.
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FOCUS | Clinton Shorts Krugman |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Friday, 10 May 2013 13:00 |
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Weissman writes: "Having declared Paul Krugman and his mentor John Maynard Keynes intellectual victors in the war over austerity a few weeks back, I cannot avoid mixed feelings about all the people who now seem to agree, especially former president Bill Clinton."
Former President Bill Clinton speaks at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. (photo: unknown)
Clinton Shorts Krugman
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
10 May 13
 aving declared Paul Krugman and his mentor John Maynard Keynes intellectual victors in the war over austerity a few weeks back, I cannot avoid mixed feelings about all the people who now seem to agree, especially former president Bill Clinton. His acceptance of the obvious looks like a major step forward, though he has previously backed Krugman's thinking. But, no surprise to those who remember Slick Willie, the multi-millionaire ex-president is now hedging his bet.
Clinton spoke out this week at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation's 2013 Fiscal Summit, the annual orgy of establishment ideology on deficits and debt. "I think Paul Krugman's right in the short run," said Clinton, sending a shiver down the back of all the assembled austerians. "And," he added, "Pete Peterson and Simpson-Bowles and all those guys, everybody's right in the long run."
In his blog, Krugman called Clinton's skillful balancing "half-right," which is far too generous. Peterson, the octogenarian billionaire whom the Big Dog celebrated as right in the long run, remains one of unoccupied Wall Street's most prominent elders. He was chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers long before the crash, co-founder of Blackstone, the private equity giant, and for many years chairman of the power-packed Council on Foreign Relations. He knows all the big movers and shakers and gets them to turn out whenever he convenes one of his well-publicized summits to set the national agenda.
A Rockefeller Republican who publicly criticizes his party's lurch toward the religious right, he has favored a carbon tax, cuts in defense spending, and an end to nuclear proliferation. He has also joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in pledging to donate half his wealth to charity. His wife Joan Cooley Ganz, a creator of Sesame Street, burnishes his image. "My husband is a born moderate," she insists, "and actually a liberal on social issues" – more Big Bird than the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
Yet, since the early days of the Reagan administration, Peterson has led a crusade to slash America's social safety net. He has funded, headed, and inspired almost every national group pushing "fiscal constraint," from the Concord Coalition to today's Campaign to Fix the Debt. And he was an official partner, promoter, and funder of President Obama's 2010 National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, headed by retired Republican senator Alan Simpson and Clinton's White House chief of staff, the Wall Street banker Erskine Bowles. More than anyone else, Peterson manufactured "the debt crisis," aided by his "amen chorus" in the media, eager to report that the end is nigh.
"Social Security's troubles are fundamental," he proclaimed in the December 2, 1982 issue of the New York Review of Books. "Its financial problems are not minor and temporary, as most politicians, at least in election years, feel compelled to insist. Unless the system is reorganized, these problems will become overwhelming. To put the matter bluntly, Social Security is heading for a crash." The following year, President Reagan and House Speaker Tip O'Neill reached a compromise to fix funding shortfalls, and similar reforms will no doubt happen again. But Peterson demands a more radical change – less Social Security, less Medicare, less Medicaid.
In brief, Peterson is what an earlier generation called a corporate liberal, an establishment species that sits astride conventional left-right divisions. Like many of his CEO colleagues in Fix the Debt, Peterson appeared magnanimous during the fiscal cliff fight when he said he was willing to pay marginally higher income tax rates on his personal income, not that the math gave him much choice. "Any package will have to include tax increases," he told the New York Times.
He also stood tall when, in 2010, he broke with fellow fund managers and came out against the 15% rate on their professional income, which is preferentially taxed as " carried interest." Peterson had previously backed the largesse, on which he had built his earlier fortune.
He did, however, defend the 15% capital gains rate he paid when he sold his Blackstone shares, which earned him some $1.85 billion. He poured much of his net into his tax-exempt Peter G. Peterson Foundation to wage his class warfare in the name of sweet charity. And, despite his announced opposition to George W. Bush's failed attempt to privatize Social Security, many of Peterson's critics believe he favors some form of privatization as a gift to his colleagues on Wall Street.
The final piece in Peterson's playbook is less well-known. Peterson backs the Simpson-Bowles recommendation for "a territorial tax system," which would exempt US corporations from paying any tax at all on their overseas income. Corporate lobbyists began pushing for this "reform" long before Peterson convinced them to make debts and deficits their rallying cry. In the current system, they owe Uncle Sam the difference between the taxes they pay overseas and what they would pay under US tax rates, but they pay only if and when they bring the money home. US corporations now hold trillions of dollars overseas, which the proposed reform would let them bring back tax free. According to the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies, this would give an immediate windfall of $134 billion to the 63 publicly-held companies in Peterson's Fix the Debt.
The CEOs claim they would invest the money to create jobs in America. But American multi-nationals already sit on huge piles of cash in the US and most are not using them to create jobs. Their argument previously fell flat when in 2004 they convinced Congress to pass the so-called American Jobs Creation Act, which allowed the multi-nationals to bring their overseas money back at a bargain basement tax rate of 5.25%. "Instead of creating jobs, the biggest beneficiaries downsized," IPS reports. "Pfizer, for example, cut more than 10,000 US jobs in the six years after it repatriated $40 billion." The same would almost certainly happen again under a full-blown territorial tax system, which would give the US multinationals a yearly cash flow in the billions of dollars with which to strengthen their hold on the corporate state.
Would this be the long-run on which Bill Clinton thinks Peterson & Co. right?
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: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS | How Big Oil Uses the Republican Party |
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Friday, 10 May 2013 11:45 |
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Kennedy writes: "Big Oil's Orwellian skill at employing the rhetoric of patriotism and emblazoning its enterprises with stars and stripes, has stitched the notion that conservation is synonymous with 'anti-American' into the fabric of GOP talking points."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (photo: unknown)
How Big Oil Uses the Republican Party
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Reader Supported News
10 May 13
 n a surprise move, the eight Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday blocked a floor vote on President Obama's nominee, Gina McCarthy, as EPA Administrator. In doing so the Republican senators broke their earlier promisadditione to move McCarthy's nomination if she answered an unprecedented 1079 written questions, a quest she completed. Political observers assume the Republican roadblock is meant to derail or delay the implementation of a new EPA rule, promised by President Obama to finally regulate carbon pollution. The Republican ranking member, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, orchestrated the double cross. Vitter is an unabashed mouthpiece for the petroleum industry and record breaking receptacle for petrodollars having received $1.2 million in oil company largesse during his public service career. With cash gushers of oily money cascading down their open gullets, the Republican leadership's mercenary devotion to Big Oil shouldn't shock us. However, the boldness of the party's most recent assault on the public interest might cause us to ponder how GOP's honchos' knee jerk slavishness to petroleum interest has infected its rank and file.
The perversity of the modern conservative mind is displayed in two studies published last week. Those studies illustrate the extent to which the right wing has become the ideological sock puppet of Big Oil and the GOP's army of right wing Christian fundamentalists oil industry foot soldiers. A peer reviewed National Academy of Sciences report shows that the label "energy efficient" on a product actually makes it less likely that self-identified conservatives will purchase that product. Why? Because morally twisted right wing orthodoxy has taken the "conserve" out of conservatism. Craven hatred of all things environmental has made the labels "clean," "green" or "efficient" pariah among GOP acolytes. Conversely, dirty energy is patriotic and even "blessed."
Big Oil's Orwellian skill at employing the rhetoric of patriotism and emblazoning its enterprises with stars and stripes, has stitched the notion that conservation is synonymous with "anti-American" into the fabric of GOP talking points. In 2006, President George W. Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer answered a press query about whether President Bush believed in fuel efficiency standards for automobiles saying, "That's a big 'No.'" The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country... Conservation alone is not the answer."
After a decade of this brand of oily claptrap from the industry's political toadies and its talking heads on Fox News and hate radio, many conservative Americans now embrace the farcical presumption that buying and burning gas is a patriotic act. In 2008, as the oil industry raked in record profits by raking Americans with record prices at the pump, the party of the petro plutocrats proudly adopted Big Oil's rallying cry as its mantra "Drill, Baby, Drill."
By the way, Fleischer's use of the term "blessed" to describe unconscionable profligacy and immoral waste reflect another GOP orthodoxy -- the notion that God wants us to burn oil. A second study published this week by University of Pittsburgh Professor David Barker and Professor David Bearce of the University of Colorado found that a fundamentalist Christian belief in biblical End Times is a significant motivating factor behind Republican voter resistance to curbing climate change. According to Bearce and Barker, 76 percent of self-identified Republicans say they believe in the End Times. "Since the world is going to end at a predestined time anyhow," their logic goes, "it would be heretical to curb our destructive appetites under the delusion that we can do anything about pushing back God's ordained date."
Anointing rapacious behavior with religious gloss is an old strategy for both right wing conservatives and the extraction industry. When a House Oversight Committee summoned Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of Interior, James Watt, to explain his caper to sell off American's public lands, waters and mineral rights to oil, mining and timber companies at what the General Accounting Office called "fire sale prices," Watt, a former mining and oil company lawyer, retorted, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns." Embracing his party line, along with its hook and sinker, Watt explained that environmentalism was a plot to "weaken America" and dismissed environmentalists as a "left wing cult which seeks to bring down the kind of government I believe in."
Watt was an early proponent of Dominion Theology, the authoritarian Christian heresy that cites cherry-picked phrases from the book of Genesis to advocate man's duty to subdue nature. His carbon industry alliances and Apocalyptical Christianity inspired Secretary Watt to set about dismantling his department and distributing its assets to his pals. His disciple and former employee, Gale Norton, another energy industry lawyer and lobbyists, would continue the chicanery when she succeeded Watt as Interior Secretary during George W. Bush's administration. As Shakespeare observed, "The devil can quote Scripture to serve his own purposes."
In reality, there is nothing patriotic, moral or religious about Big Oil. A storied history of perfidy and greed has distinguished these companies among the most treasonous and piratical of all American business enterprises. Halliburton's decision to relocate to the Cayman Islands after fattening itself on $9 billion worth of inherently crooked no-bid, cost-plus contracts during the Iraq War is only one of many examples of their shaky loyalty to our country. Before it vaulted onto the bandwagon of patriotism, Texaco flew not "Old Glory" but the "Jolly Roger" over its Houston headquarters, proudly adopting the pirate flag as the emblem of a pirate industry.
The threats from global climate change and ocean acidification are only the tip of a melting iceberg. Not satiated with simply destroying the planet, the oil industry's relentless greed has eroded American's economic independence, imperiled our national security, and ruined our global economic leadership and moral authority.
America's national security is rooted in a strong economy at home. As Republican oilman T. Boone Pickens has acknowledged, our deadly addiction to oil is the principal drag on American capitalism. Our nation is borrowing a billion dollars a day to purchase a billion dollars of foreign oil, much of it from nations that don't share our values or that are outright hostile to our interests.
Our oil jones has us funding both sides of the war against terror! Big Oil has embroiled us in foreign wars supporting petty dictators who despise democracy and who are hated by their own people. The export of $700 billion dollars annually of American wealth has beggared our nation, which, a few short decades ago, owned half the wealth on Earth.
Add to these cataclysmic numbers, the $100 billion annual military cost of protecting oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, trillions spent on various oil wars over the past decade, billions more in economic injury from oil spills in Valdez, the Gulf of Mexico and in American rivers from the Hudson to the Kalamazoo to the Yellowstone, the massive damage done to the coast of Louisiana from local drilling companies which aggravated New Orleans' destruction by Katrina, not to mention the hundreds of billions annually in externalized health care costs from illnesses caused by the oil industry.
If the oil industry had to pay the true costs of bringing its product to market, gas prices would be upwards of $12 per gallon at the pump, according to economist Amory Lovins, and most Americans would be running to buy electric cars.
With low cost disruptive technologies like cheap, fast and efficient electric vehicles, and solar and wind technologies poised to displace Big Oil, the industry is using its hold on the Republican Party to permanently embed itself in our economy while subverting science, American democracy, free market capitalism and our sacred belief in an ethical God.
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few weeks ago, we did 
