Thursday, May 17, 2012

G-Comm™: What’s NATO Ever Done?

Wondering why anyone would confront NATO’s summit in Chicago this month? A look at some of its more well-known crimes might spark some indignation.

Desecration of corpses, indiscriminate attacks, bombing of allied troops, torture of prisoners and unaccountable drone war are a few of NATO’s outrages in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere. On March 20, 2012 Pakistani lawmakers demanded an end to all NATO/CIA drone strikes against their territory. As reported in The New York Times, Pakistan’s foreign secretary Jalil Jilani said April 26, 2012, “We consider drones illegal, counter-productive and accordingly, unacceptable.” On May 31 last year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai gave what he called his “last” warning against NATO’s bombing of Afghani homes, saying “If they continue their attacks on our houses … history shows what Afghans do with trespassers and with occupiers.”

While bombing Libya last March, NATO refused to aid a group of 72 migrants adrift in the Mediterranean. Only nine people on board survived. The refusal was condemned as criminal by the Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog.

NATO jets bombed and rocketed a Pakistani military base for two hours November 26, 2011—the Salala Incident— killing 26 Pakistani soldiers and wounding dozens more. NATO refuses to apologize, so the Pakistani regime has kept military supply routes into Afghanistan closed since November.

The British medical journal Lancet reported that the US-led unprovoked 2003 bombing, invasion and military take-over of Iraq—which NATO officially joined in 2004 in a ‘training’ capacity—had resulted in over 665,000 civilian deaths by 2006, and 200,000 in the UN-authorized, 1991 Desert Storm massacre led primarily by the US with several NATO allies.

On April 12, 1999, NATO attacked the railway bridge over the Grdelica Gorge and Juzna Morava River with two laser-guided bombs. At the time, a five-car civilian passenger train was crossing the bridge and was hit by both bombs. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch accused NATO of violating binding laws that require distinction, discrimination and proportionality.

NATO rocketed the central studio of Radio Televisija Srbije (TRS) in Belgrade, the state-owned broadcasting corporation, on April 23, 1999 during the Kosovo war. Sixteen civilian employees of RTS were killed and 16 wounded when NATO destroyed the building. Amnesty Int’l reported that the building could not be considered military, that NATO had violated the prohibition on attacking civilian objects and had therefore committed a war crime.

Headlines chronicle NATO’s crime spree

“U.S. troops posed with body parts of Afghan bombers.” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 2012

“Drones At Issue…: Raids Disrupt Militants, but Civilian Deaths Stir Outrage.” New York Times, March 18, 2012

“G.I. Kills 16 Afghans, Including 9 Children In Attacks on Homes.” New York Times, March 12, 2012

“NATO Admits Airstrike Killed 8 Young Afghans, but Contends They Were Armed.” New York Times, February 16, 2012

“Informer Misled NATO in Airstrike That Killed 8 Civilians, Afghans Say.” (Seven shepherd boys under 14.) New York Times, February 10, 2012

“Video [of U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters] Inflames a Delicate Moment for U.S. in Afghanistan.” New York Times, January 12, 2012

“Commission alleges U.S. detainee abuse.” Minneapolis StarTribune, January 08, 2012

“Six Children Are Killed by NATO Airstrike in Afghanistan.” New York Times, November 25, 2011

“American Soldier Is Convicted of Killing Afghan Civilians for Sport.” New York Times, November 11, 2011

“Pakistan: U.S. Drone Strike Kills Brother of a Taliban Commander.” New York Times, October 28, 2011

“Afghanistan officials ‘systematically tortured’ detainees, UN report says.” Guardian, & BBC Oct. 10; Washington Post, October 11, 2011

“G.I. Killed Afghan Journalist, NATO Says.” New York Times, September 09, 2011

“Cable Implicates Americans in Deaths of Iraqi Civilians.” New York Times, September 02, 2011

“Civilians Die in a Raid by Americans and Iraqis.” New York Times, August 07, 2011

“NATO Strikes Libyan State TV Transmitters.” New York Times, July 31, 2011

“NATO admits raid probably killed nine in Tripoli.” St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 20, 2011

“U.S. Expands Its Drone War to Take On Somali Militants.” New York Times, July 02, 2011

“NATO airstrike blamed in 14 civilian deaths.” St. Paul Pioneer Press, May 30, 2011

“Libya Effort Is Called Violation of War Act.” New York Times, May 26, 2011

“Raid on Wrong House Kills Afghan Girl, 12.” New York Times, May 12, 2011

“Yemen: 2 Killed in Missile Strike.” Associated Press, May 05, 2011

“NATO Accused of Going Too Far With Libya Strikes.” New York Times, May 02, 2011

“Disposal of Bin Laden’s remains violated Islamic principles, clerics say.” Associated Press, May 02, 2011

“Photos of atrocities seen as threat to Afghan relations.” St. Paul Pioneer Press, March 22, 2011

“Missiles Kill 26 in Pakistan” (“most of them civilians”) New York Times, March 18, 2011

“Afgans Say NATO Troops Killed 8 Civilians in Raid.” New York Times, August 24, 2010

“A dozen or more” Afghan civilians were killed during a nighttime raid August 05, 2010 in eastern Afghanistan, NATO’s officers said. Chicago Tribune, August 06, 2010

“Afghans Say Attack Killed 52 Civilians; NATO Differs.” New York Times, July 27, 2010

In June 2008, NATO bombers attacked a Pakistani paramilitary force called the Frontier Corps killing 11 of its soldiers. New York Times, November 27, 2011

“Afghans Die in Bombing, As Toll Rises for Civilians.” New York Times, May 03, 2010

~~  John LaForge ~~

Friday, May 11, 2012

OddlyEnough™: German Man Has Last Laugh With “New Home” Obituary

A man who announced his change of address in a local newspaper sparked national media attention on Thursday due to the unusual location of his “new home” - six feet under the ground.

Karl Albrecht, who died last month at the age of 88, penned the obituary himself in the style of a moving notice, inviting friends to a “lively” celebration at his new lodgings in a cemetery in Hamburg, northern Germany.

“I have moved house. My new address: Olhsdorf-Ruhewald cemetery, plot Bx 65/28C,“ the announcement in the Hamburger Abendblatt paper said.

“I’ll be pleased to have a lively attendance,“ it read.

Albrecht had left instructions for his family to place the notice in the paper, the national daily Bild reported.

The former insurance salesman had been a joker all his life and loved to laugh, his widow Anastasia told the newspaper.

“At the grave there’ll be schnapps for all the guests. He would have wanted that,“ she said, adding he wanted the women to wear bright floral dresses.

“Nobody should turn up in black. My Karl could never stand gloominess,“ she said.

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Ron Paul: Enduring Commitments Abroad

Last week President Obama made a surprise pre-dawn trip to Afghanistan to mark the one year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden and to sign a document further extending the US presence in that country. The president said, “we’re building an enduring partnership…As you stand up, you will not stand alone.“ What that means in practice is that the US will continue its efforts to prop up the government in Afghanistan for another ten years beyond the promised withdrawal date of 2014.

To those of us who believe the US should leave Afghanistan immediately, the president retorted, “We must give Afghanistan the opportunity to stabilize.“ But how long will that take, when we have already fought the longest war in our nation’s history at incredible human and economic cost to the nation and no end is in sight?

There is little evidence of any sustained increase in stability in Afghanistan and, in fact, April saw the loss of 34 more American troops and an escalation of violence and upheaval. Within 90 minutes of the president’s departure, seven more people were killed in Kabul by a suicide bomber. It is clear that our presence in that country is not creating any real stability. With Osama bin Laden dead and the al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan virtually non-existent, we are reduced to nation-building in a nation where there is no real nation to build.

We should ask ourselves why Obama’s trip was a “surprise” visit rather than a normal state visit. The reason is that after ten years it is still far too dangerous to travel in or out of that country. Does that not speak much more loudly than the president’s optimistic words about the amazing progress we have made in Afghanistan?

What does our enduring commitment mean? Ask the South Koreans, where the United States has maintained an “enduring commitment” of US troops more than fifty years after hostilities ended. By some estimates the United States taxpayer is saddled with a 40 billion dollar annual price tag for our “enduring commitment” to maintaining a US military presence in Korea. Polls suggest that particularly younger Koreans are tired of the US military presence in their country and would prefer us to leave. The same is true for the residents of Okinawa, who have argued strongly and with some recent success for American troops to leave their island.

The Soviets believed the road to their goal for a universal form of government ran through Afghanistan. They were also wrong and paid an enormous price. However, after nine years and 15,000 Soviet lives lost, the communist regime in Moscow realized its mistake and withdrew from that country. The Soviet withdrawal was complete in early 1989. The Soviet Union by that time had further plunged into economic crisis, fueled in great part by its commitment to maintain a global empire of client states. Later that year, the Soviet world began crashing down, with first the collapse of Eastern European regimes and then the Soviet Union itself. That collapse produced an economic calamity for the successor states from which most have not yet fully recovered. It is not too late for the United States to learn what the Soviets discovered too late, back in 1989. Mr. President: the time to leave Afghanistan is today, not in 2024.

G-Comm™: Bracing for Demographic Winter: The “Overpopulation Crisis”

A new round of calls for punishing austerity and depopulation strategies have sprung up in the wake of a Royal Society report ringing the alarm on the so-called overpopulation crisis. The report, entitled “People and the Planet” was published on April 26th and followed up by a flurry of articles by the usual suspects dutifully parroting the society’s dire warnings about the future of humanity in a crowding world. Paul Ehrlich was even trotted out to chastise the Society for not going far enough in their report, instead intimating that 5 billion people would have to disappear from the face of the earth for the population to be at a “sustainable” level.

       
The irony is that this is the same Paul Ehrlich who was crying wolf about the “Population Bomb” 45 years ago and was proven wrong on almost every prediction he made at the time. In 1968 Ehrlich predicted that “hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death” in the 1970s, but he was wrong. In 1969 he predicted that “smog disasters” were going be killing 200,000 people per year in cities like New York and L.A. by the mid-70s, but he was wrong. Also in 1969 he actually claimed he “would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.“ Last we checked, England is still here. In 1975 he envisioned that “food riots” in America in the 1980s would lead to the dissolution of Congress, another prediction that failed to come to pass. The next year he argued that “Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.“ Wrong again.

       
By 1980, economist Julian Simon had grown weary of listening to the doom and gloom of those who, like Ehrlich, continued to predict one disaster scenario after another in the name of this supposed overpopulation crisis. He offered a wager to anyone who was willing to take him up on it that the price of any given raw material would be lower on any given future date than it was at the time. Paul Ehrlich took him up on the wager, and the two drafted a futures contract obligating Ehrlich to buy $1000 worth of copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten from Simon in 1990 at 1980 prices. By the time the contract matured, the prices had fallen and Ehrlich was forced to cut Simon a check for $576.07. Simon offered a further $20,000 wager with the added incentive that Ehrlich could pick whatever resources and whatever time frame he wished, but Ehrlich had learned the valuable lesson not to put his money where his mouth was.

       
Despite a career of failed arguments and predictions that never came true, Ehrlich won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant and is still treated as a venerated, knowledgeable figure on the subject of population. The problem, of course, is that adherents of his particular brand of doomsaying are inclined to believe these predictions of doom because it affirms their Malthusian worldview. Thomas Malthus was an employee of the British East India Company who hit upon the idea that food production increases arithmetically while population increases exponentially. Thus, argued Malthus in his infamous 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population,“ it was a mathematical certainty that the world was on a crash course for demographic disaster. The problem for Malthus and his acolytes, however, is that they have in each and every generation failed to understand that the question of population and resources is not a zero-sum game. In each and every generation since Malthus first wrote his treatise, human ingenuity has developed technologies and techniques that have helped to expand the arable land for farming and agriculture and increased the number of crops that can be grown in each acre, even as the number of people required to work that land has fallen. Every generation a new crop of Malthusians emerge to argue that this time the expansion of the food supply will fail and the world will be plunged into chaos, and in each and every generation the predicted apocalypse has failed to arrive. Worse yet for those who argue so strenuously for the Here we are over 200 years later and the Malthusians of our own time continue to argue that the same disaster that has failed to arrive for two centuries is now just around the corner.

       
Unfortunately we don’t have to dig very deep to see the dark side of this Malthusian bent.  In 1969, Ehrlich stated that if voluntary birth control methods did not curb population growth fast enough for his liking, governments might have to consider “the addition of a temporary sterilant to staple food or to the water supply.“ In 1972 UN climate guru Maurice Strong argued that governments should license couples to have children. In 1977, Obama “science czar” John Holdren co-authored with Ehrlich a tome called “Ecoscience” that mused once again about the possibility of forced abortions and sterilants in the water supply as a way of curbing population growth. In 2002, the editor of the Earth Island Institute’s online magazine lamented the introduction of electricity to Africa. The Malthusian philosophy is the perfect false front for an ideology that bemoans economic development and technological progress.

       
Interestingly, even the UN’s own population and fertility estimates show that overpopulation is not the real problem. The UN is projecting a world population of 9 billion by 2050 and a leveling off after that point. The global fertility rate (children per couple) was 4.95 in 1950-1955. It was 2.79 in 2000-2005. It is expected to be 1.63 in 2095-2100. To put that in perspective, the replacement fertility rate that would be required to maintain the population at current levels is projected to be 2.1 in developed countries and as high as 3.4 in developing countries due to higher child mortality rates. With a global fertility rate of 1.63 by the end of the century, the human race will be essentially breeding itself out of existence.

       
Quite contrary to the projections of the Malthusians, the very real danger to the economy and the species itself is the very real demographic shift that happens in a shrinking population. This phenomenon is referred to as demographic winter and has been understood by demographers for decades. Population is still growing because of high fertility rates in previous generations and longer life spans, but declining fertility rates will turn into population decline in a number of nations within the century should these trends hold. The countries of the developed world, with their fertility rates already in decline, will be the first to experience the effects of this transition. Countries like Greece, Russia, Taiwan, Lithuania, South Korea and others that already have a fertility rate below 1.5 and little influx of immigrants are either already declining in population or are expected to within a decade.

       
Japan is one of the countries on the forefront of this decline. Having some of the longest-lived people on the planet and ranking 202 out of 220 countries and regions for fertility rates, Japan is already starting to cope with the effects of a rapidly aging population. The Japanese government is increasingly turning to politically painful measures just to try to keep the country’s massive social security program going. Accounting for 29 percent of its $1.12 trillion dollar 2012 budget, the cost of taking care of Japan’s pensioners is only going to increase as more and more of the post-war boomer generation begin to come up for retirement. The workers per retiree ratio is falling across the majority of the globe, with Japan falling from 9.1 workers per retiree in 1965 to a projected worker/retiree parity in 2050. In effect, by the middle of the century each Japanese worker will be asked to pay for the retirement of one of their elders. This is of course completely untenable, but the political will to make changes to the system is utterly lacking, especially since the majority of the population is retired or retiring in the near future and is unlikely to vote themselves out of an entitlement system they have spent their life paying into. Instead, the Japanese Prime Minister du jour, Yoshihiko Noda, is trying to rally the country around tax hikes that are explicitly aimed at making up social security shortfalls.

       
The situation, while perhaps more acute in Japan, is common to countries across the developed world, including the United States. No one entering the work force today expects there to be a social security system of the kind that exists today by the time they reach retirement, but there is no way to put the brakes on a system of unfunded liabilities that today’s retirees spent their life “paying into.“ Reforming the system seems a politically quixotic quest, and is the ultimate Catch-22 inherent in the program itself since the moment of its inception under FDR in the 1930s. A population suffering from the effects of the Great Depression was promised a program that would take care of them in old age. Now during our current ongoing depression, what little social security payouts that the boomers have inherited after a lifetime of paying in is being inflated away into nothing by Helicopter Ben and the quantitative easing crew. Europe is even worse, with retirees and pensioners committing public suicide in places like Greece rather than subject themselves to a life of picking through garbage in the wake of Eurocrat-dictated austerity measures.

       
Other economic effects of the greying population will begin to make themselves felt in the coming years, as well. Real estate and stock market declines are inevitable in a society with an increasing number of aging retirees cinching up the purse strings and fewer young couples buying houses or investing in the markets.  Declines in saving rates, outputs per capita and living standards are all likewise projected as inevitable in a world of shrinking population. Given the immensity of the problems generated by this demographic transition, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Malthusians have placed the problem of the “population bomb” on its head: the real “Population Bomb” of the 21st century is not the problem of too many people, but too few.

       
The Malthusians tend to argue that their end goal is that imagined state of “sustainability” by which the economy of the future will not be predicated on growth, but instead will be a static system that will maintain itself via renewability. Whatever one thinks of the viability or desirability of such a system, the stark fact is that such a system is impossible in the paradigm of declining fertility rates. In fact, in order to achieve sustainability, the human race would have to find a way to reverse the fertility decline. It’s an irony that aging doomsayers like Ehrlich and Holdren may not live long enough to behold come to fruition in their lifetime, but to achieve the very goals they claim to be aiming toward, there may be only one hope for the human species: Bring on the babies.

~~  James Corbett ~~

Saturday, May 05, 2012

G-Comm™: Difficult Days Ahead in Afghanistan and at Home

On May 01, 2012 in a televised address from Afghanistan, President Obama said, “There will be difficult days ahead. The enormous sacrifices of our men and women are not over.”

That’s an understatement.

In fact the current US policy in the region demands of the Afghan people a massive sacrifice as well.

Without a new strategy — not the slow downsizing of the Afghanistan war over the next decade — there will indeed be difficult days ahead.

Instead of helping, the continued US presence jeopardizes the Afghan people’s future, as it does our future here at home.

The future of the Afghan economy and its people’s aspirations is stalled by the unwillingness to leave sooner rather than later. Corruption and graft are bred by US funding and the occupation.

Furthermore, the US has no clear strategy for a negotiated peace or a framework for sustainable economic development in Afghanistan.

Today, two-thirds of the US people across the political spectrum want the war to end now. In poll after poll they readily connect the government’s ability to deal with the economic crisis in our communities to ending the war.

The longer the troops stay in Afghanistan, the more desperately needed resources will be withheld from our cities, schools, libraries and hospitals.

The projected 2013 price-tag for the war will be $88 billion dollars, while unemployment hovers at 10 percent and triple that among young people of color. The current Pentagon budget is $800 billion a year without a real cut in sight.

As long as the troops stay in Afghanistan, and the US pursues a militarized foreign policy, the possibility of US sustainable economic development and a stronger democracy is as impossible here as it is in Afghanistan.

The White House fact sheet issued along with Obama’s speech emphasized that the Strategic Partnership Agreement itself “does not commit the United States to any specific troop levels or levels of funding in the future, as those are decisions will be made in consultation with the U.S. Congress.” And funding from Congress will be requested on an annual basis to support the training, equipping, advising and sustaining of Afghan National Security Forces.”

The agreement just signed leaves us with the yearly Congressional fight over funding the war. A full-throated, massive pressure campaign is needed.

That’s where we have to draw the line and make the fight in the next few weeks to cut the Pentagon budget and for a negotiated peace, not a prolonged downsized war.

The Congressional elections will be the battleground for exerting the popular opinion of ending a war that is not only unwinnable but in fact is a roadblock to both the US and Afghan people from achieving a decent life, schools, healthcare and jobs.

President Obama said in his speech to the nation, “Others will ask why we don’t leave immediately. The answer is also clear: we must give Afghanistan the opportunity to stabilize.”

But the underlying problems in Afghanistan are little served by foreign armies and military “solutions.” The reality is that until the US and NATO forces leave Afghanistan both the Afghan and US peoples will have more than a few difficult days ahead. We’ll have difficult years ahead.

~~  Judith Le Blanc - The Field Director for Peace Action ~~

Thursday, May 03, 2012

G-Comm™: The Empire Strikes Back: Attack of the Drones

Drones—unmanned aerial vehicles—come in all shapes and sizes, from nano-sized drones as small as a grain of sand that can do everything from conducting surveillance to detonating explosive charges, to massive “hunter/killer” Predator warships that unleash firepower from on high. Once used exclusively by the military to carry out aerial surveillance and attacks on enemy insurgents abroad, these remotely piloted, semi-autonomous robots have now been authorized by Congress and President Obama for widespread use in American airspace. The military empire is coming home to roost.

While there are at least 63 active drone sites around the U.S., the Obama administration is calling for drone technology to be integrated into the national air space by 2015. By 2020, just eight short years from now, it is estimated that at least 30,000 of these drones will be crisscrossing the nation’s skies, serving a wide range of functions, both public and private, governmental and corporate. The end result, however, will be the same: we will find ourselves operating under a new paradigm marked by round-the-clock surveillance and with little hope of real privacy, a paradigm foisted upon us and from which there will be no escape, short of living in a cave, far removed from the reach of modern technology. Caves, by the way, are rather scarce.

While the legislative vehicle for this rapid transition into a surveillance state came in the guise of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization bill, passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama in February 2012, it was steamrollered into place after intense corporate lobbying by drone makers and potential customers hoping to capitalize on the $12 - 30 billion per year industry.

As with every egregious government policy, there are politicians who stand to make money off the implementation of drones in America. Fifty-three members of the House of Representatives are part of the drone caucus which works to expand the use of drones domestically. So far this election season, 15 members of the caucus have received a total of $68,500 from General Atomics PAC, the political action committee of the drone manufacturer General Atomics. There is also a lobbying group with 507 corporate members spread across 55 countries, the Association for Unmanned Vehicles International, which is responsible for the language in the FAA bill which mandates the accelerated implementation of drone technology. Thus, our so-called representatives and the corporations which support them will make a great deal of money off of the decimation of Americans’ privacy rights.

While the threat these drones pose to privacy is unprecedented, they are being unleashed on the American populace before any real protocols to protect our privacy rights have been put in place and in such a way as to completely alter the landscape of our lives and our freedoms. We are truly entering a new era. Once the realm of science fiction and dystopian literature, the all-seeing surveillance state, powered by the latest and greatest in robot technology, is the reality with which we must now contend.

Drones are outfitted with infrared cameras and radar which will pierce through the darkness, allowing the police to keep track of anyone walking around, regardless of the nature of their business. Police drones are equipped with thermal imaging devices to see through walls. There is absolutely nowhere to hide from these machines—even in your home.

As Congressmen Edward Markey and Joe Barton pointed out in a recent letter to the FAA:

While drones will undoubtedly be put to a host of legitimate uses, such as helping to spot wildfires, monitoring illegal border crossings, and carrying out search-and-rescue missions, their “beneficence” is a double-edged sword. Indeed, in the name of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, law enforcement agencies will find a whole host of clever and innovative ways to use drones to invade our daily lives, not the least of which will be traffic enforcement and crowd control.

In fact, the drones will be outfitted with crowd control weapons. Vanguard Defense Industries has confirmed that its Shadowhawk drone, which is already being sold to law enforcement agencies throughout the country, will be outfitted with lethal weapons, including a grenade launcher or a shotgun, and weapons of compliance, such as tear gas and rubber buckshot. Such aerial police weapons send a clear and chilling message to those attempting to exercise their First Amendment rights by taking to the streets and protesting government policies—the message: stay home.

American scientists have created blueprints for nuclear powered drones which would increase air time from days to months. Potential problems are dire, such as a crashed drone becoming a dirty bomb or a source of nuclear propulsion for any terrorist groups that get their hands on it. However, while the lethal capabilities of these drones are troubling, especially when one factors in the possibility of them getting into the wrong hands or malfunctioning, the more pressing concern has to do with the drones’ surveillance capabilities. With the help of nanotechnology, scientists have been able to create ever-smaller drones that mimic the behavior of birds and insects and are almost undetectable. Despite their diminutive size, these drones are capable of capturing and relaying vast amounts of data and high-definition video footage. It’s inevitable that as more local police agencies acquire these spy flies, their surveillance efforts will expand to include not only those suspected of criminal activity but anyone within range of the cameras. In such a surveillance state, we shall all be treated as suspects.

There are many constitutional concerns presented by drones recording Americans’ daily activities, with the most obvious being what it means for the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents. While it will certainly give rise to a whole new dialogue about where to draw the line when it comes to the government’s ability to monitor one’s public versus private lives, the courts have been notorious for their inability to keep pace with rapid advances in technology and its impact on our freedoms.

Unfortunately, it is too late to do anything about drones coming home to roost. Indeed, as drone technology expert Peter W. Singer recognizes in remarks to the New York Times, “the debate over drones is like debating the merits of computers in 1979: They are here to stay, and the boom has barely begun. ‘We are at the Wright Brothers Flier stage of this,’ he said.” The point is that with 56 government agencies now authorized to use drones, including 22 law enforcement agencies and 24 universities, the drones are not going away. Included among the institutions authorized to fly drones are police departments in Arkansas, Utah and Florida as well as Virginia Tech and the University of North Dakota. The University of North Dakota even has a degree program in unmanned vehicle flight with 78 majors.

As with just about every freedom-leeching, technology-driven government policy inflicted on us by Congress and the White House in recent years, from whole-body scanners in airports to RFID chips in our passports and drivers licenses, the mass introduction of drones into domestic airspace has one main goal: to empower the corporate state by controlling the populace and enriching the military industrial complex. In the meantime, all you can do is keep your eyes on the skies. As Singer noted, “There’s no stopping this technology. Anybody who thinks they can put this genie back in the box—that’s silliness.”

~~  John Whitehead ~~

Sunday, April 29, 2012

G-Comm™: The Shame of Nations: A New Record is Set for Spending on War

On April 17, 2012, as millions of Americans were filing their income tax returns, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. In case Americans were wondering where most of their tax money — and the tax money of other nations — went in the previous year, the answer from SIPRI was clear: to war and preparations for war.

World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011 — an increase of $138 billion over the previous year. The United States accounted for 41% of that, or $711 billion.
Some news reports have emphasized that, from the standpoint of reducing reliance on armed might, this actually represents progress. After all, the increase in “real” global military spending — that is, expenditures after corrections for inflation and exchange rates — was only 0.3%. And this contrasts with substantially larger increases in the preceding thirteen years.

But why are military expenditures continuing to increase — indeed, why aren’t they substantially decreasing — given the governmental austerity measures of recent years? Amid the economic crisis that began in late 2008 (and which continues to the present day), most governments have been cutting back their spending dramatically on education, health care, housing, parks, and other vital social services. However, there have not been corresponding cuts in their military budgets.

Americans, particularly, might seek to understand why in this context U.S. military spending has not been significantly decreased, instead of being raised by $13 billion — admittedly a “real dollar” decrease of 1.2%, but hardly one commensurate with Washington’s wholesale slashing of social spending. Yes, military expenditures by China and Russia increased in 2011. And in “real” terms, too. But, even so, their military strength hardly rivals that of the United States. Indeed, the United States spent about five times as much as China (the world’s #2 military power) and ten times as much as Russia (the world’s #3 military power) on its military forces during 2011. Furthermore, when U.S. allies like Britain, France, Germany, and Japan are factored in, it is clear that the vast bulk of world military expenditures are made by the United States and its military allies.

This might account for the fact that the government of China, which accounts for only 8.2% of world military spending, believes that increasing its outlay on armaments is reasonable and desirable. Apparently, officials of many nations share that competitive feeling.

Unfortunately, the military rivalry among nations — one that has endured for centuries — results in a great squandering of national resources. Many nations, in fact, devote most of their available income to funding their armed forces and their weaponry. In the United States, an estimated 58% of the U.S. government’s discretionary tax dollars go to war and preparations for war. “Almost every country with a military is on an insane path, spending more and more on missiles, aircraft, and guns,” remarked John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus. “These countries should be confronting the real threats of climate change, hunger, disease, and oppression, not wasting taxpayers’ money on their military.”

Of course, defenders of military expenditures reply that military force actually protects people from war. But does it? If so, how does one explain the fact that the major military powers of the past century — the United States, Russia, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and China — have been almost constantly at war during that time? What is the explanation for the fact that the United States — today’s military giant — is currently engaged in at least two wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and appears to be on the verge of a third (with Iran)? Perhaps the maintenance of a vast military machine does not prevent war but, instead, encourages it.

In short, huge military establishments can be quite counterproductive. Little wonder that they have been condemned repeatedly by great religious and ethical leaders. Even many government officials have decried war and preparations for war — although usually by nations other than their own.

Thus, the release of the new study by SIPRI should not be a cause for celebration. Rather, it provides an appropriate occasion to contemplate the fact that, this past year, nations spent more money on the military than at any time in human history. Although this situation might still inspire joy in the hearts of government officials, top military officers, and defense contractors, people farther from the levers of military power might well conclude that it’s a hell of a way to run a world.

~~  Lawrence S. Wittner - Professor of history emeritus at SUNY/Albany ~~

Monday, April 23, 2012

G-Biz™: Wal-Mart Hushed Up Bribe Network in Mexico

Wal-Mart hushed up a vast bribery campaign that top executives of its Mexican subsidiary carried out to build stores across that country, according to a published report.

The New York Times reported Saturday that Wal-Mart failed to notify law enforcement officials even after its own investigators found evidence of millions of dollars in bribes. The newspaper said the company shut down its internal probe despite a report by its lead investigator that Mexican and U.S. laws likely were violated.

The bribery campaign was reported to have first come to the attention of senior executives at Wal-Mart in 2005, when a former executive of its largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico, provided extensive details of a bribery campaign it had orchestrated to win market dominance.

The Mexican executive, previously the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits, said in emails and follow-up conversations that Wal-Mart de Mexico paid bribes to obtain permits throughout the country in its rush to build stores nationwide, the Times reported.

Wal-Mart’s growth in Mexico has been so rapid that one of every five Wal-Mart stores now is in that country. It is Mexico’s largest private employer, with 209,000 employees there.

The newspaper said that only after learning of its investigation did Wal-Mart inform the U.S. Justice Department in December 2011 that it had begun an internal investigation into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Under that law, it is illegal for U.S. corporations and their subsidiaries to bribe foreign officials.

Wal-Mart, which is based in Bentonville, Ark., said Saturday that it takes compliance with that law very seriously. It also noted that many of the “alleged activities” in the Times article occurred more than six years ago.

“If these allegations are true, it is not a reflection of who we are or what we stand for,“ spokesman David Tovar said. “We are deeply concerned by these allegations and are working aggressively to determine what happened.“

The Times said its investigation uncovered a lengthy struggle at the highest levels of Wal-Mart, pitting the company’s commitment to high moral and ethical standards against its relentless pursuit of growth.

Wal-Mart had sent investigators to Mexico City, where the newspaper report said they quickly discovered evidence that included a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million.

But according to the Times, top Wal-Mart executives kept quiet about the campaign and were more focused on damage control than on exposing the corruption.

Then-CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. reportedly rebuked internal investigators at one meeting for being overly aggressive.

Shortly thereafter, the newspaper said, the investigation was turned over to the general counsel for Wal-Mart de Mexico, who himself was alleged to have authorized bribes. He swiftly exonerated his fellow executives.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Two Years After the BP Oil Spill: IS THE GULF ECOSYSTEM COLLAPSING?

If you still don’t have a sense of the devastation to the Gulf, American reporter Dahr Jamail lays it out pretty clearly:

“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”

Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.

Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.

Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.

Eyeless shrimp

Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.

“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.

According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”

Eyeless shrimp, from a catch of 400 pounds of eyeless shrimp, said to be caught September 22, 2011, in Barataria Bay, Louisiana [Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera]

“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”

On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded, and began the release of at least 4.9 million barrels of oil. BP then used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants to sink the oil.
Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.

“I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”

While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and “their shells missing around their gills and head”.

“We’ve fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this,” he added.

Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws.

Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.

Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.

“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”

Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was “ten per cent what it normally is”.

“I’ve never seen this,” he said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities.

Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.

***

“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic – able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus – and carcinogenic.

Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP’s submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from “a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor”.

Marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia published results of her submarine dives around the source area of BP’s oil disaster in the Nature Geoscience journal.

Her evidence showed massive swathes of oil covering the seafloor, including photos of oil-covered bottom dwelling sea creatures.

While showing slides at an American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington, Joye said: “This is Macondo oil on the bottom. These are dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads.”
Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has conducted tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP’s crude oil and toxic dispersants.

“Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline,” Subra told Al Jazeera. “We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation.”

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, PAHs “are a group of semi-volatile organic compounds that are present in crude oil that has spent time in the ocean and eventually reaches shore, and can be formed when oil is burned”.

“The fish are being exposed to PAHs, and I was able to find several references that list the same symptoms in fish after the Exxon Valdez spill, as well as other lab experiments,” explained Cowan.

“There was also a paper published by some LSU scientists that PAH exposure has effects on the genome.”

The University of South Florida released the results of a survey whose findings corresponded with Cowan’s: a two to five per cent infection rate in the same oil impact areas, and not just with red snapper, but with more than 20 species of fish with lesions. In many locations, 20 per cent of the fish had lesions, and later sampling expeditions found areas where, alarmingly, 50 per cent of the fish had them.

“I asked a NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] sampler what percentage of fish they find with sores prior to 2010, and it’s one tenth of one percent,” Cowan said. “Which is what we found prior to 2010 as well. But nothing like we’ve seen with these secondary infections and at this high of rate since the spill.”

“What we think is that it’s attributable to chronic exposure to PAHs released in the process of weathering of oil on the seafloor,” Cowan said. “There’s no other thing we can use to explain this phenomenon. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”

***

Crustacean biologist Darryl Felder, in the Department of Biology with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is in a unique position.

Felder has been monitoring the vicinity of BP’s blowout Macondo well both before and after the oil disaster began, because, as he told Al Jazeera, “the National Science Foundation was interested in these areas that are vulnerable due to all the drilling”.

“So we have before and after samples to compare to,” he added. “We have found seafood with lesions, missing appendages, and other abnormalities.”

Felder also has samples of inshore crabs with lesions. “Right here in Grand Isle we see lesions that are eroding down through their shell. We just got these samples last Thursday and are studying them now, because we have no idea what else to link this to as far as a natural event.”

According to Felder, there is an even higher incidence of shell disease with crabs in deeper waters.

“My fear is that these prior incidents of lesions might be traceable to microbes, and my questions are, did we alter microbial populations in the vicinity of the well by introducing this massive amount of petroleum and in so doing cause microbes to attack things other than oil?”

One hypothesis he has is that the waxy coatings around crab shells are being impaired by anthropogenic chemicals or microbes resulting from such chemicals.

“You create a site where a lesion can occur, and microbes attack. We see them with big black lesions, around where their appendages fall off, and all that is left is a big black ring.”

Felder added that his team is continuing to document the incidents: “And from what we can tell, there is a far higher incidence we’re finding after the spill.”

“We are also seeing much lower diversity of crustaceans,” he said. “We don’t have the same number of species as we did before [the spill].”

***

Felder is also finding “odd staining” of animals that burrow into the mud that cause stain rings, and said: “It is consistently mineral deposits, possibly from microbial populations in [overly] high concentrations.”

***

Dr Andrew Whitehead, an associate professor of biology at Louisiana State University, co-authored the report Genomic and physiological footprint of the Deep-water Horizon oil spill on resident marsh fishes that was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2011.

Whitehead’s work is of critical importance, as it shows a direct link between BP’s oil and the negative impacts on the Gulf’s food web evidenced by studies on killifish before, during and after the oil disaster.

“What we found is a very clear, genome-wide signal, a very clear signal of exposure to the toxic components of oil that coincided with the timing and the locations of the oil,” Whitehead told Al Jazeera during an interview in his lab.

According to Whitehead, the killifish is an important indicator species because they are the most abundant fish in the marshes, and are known to be the most important forage animal in their communities.

“That means that most of the large fish that we like to eat and that these are important fisheries for, actually feed on the killifish,” he explained. “So if there were to be a big impact on those animals, then there would probably be a cascading effect throughout the food web. I can’t think of a worse animal to knock out of the food chain than the killifish.”
But we may well be witnessing the beginnings of this worst-case scenario.

Whitehead is predicting that there could be reproductive impacts on the fish, and since the killifish is a “keystone” species in the food web of the marsh, “Impacts on those species are more than likely going to propagate out and effect other species. What this shows is a very direct link from exposure to DWH oil and a clear biological effect. And a clear biological effect that could translate to population level long-term consequences.”

***

Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer, as well as a marine and oyster biologist, has “great concern” about the hundreds of dolphin deaths he has seen in the region since BP’s disaster began, which he feels are likely directly related to the BP oil disaster.

“Adult dolphins’ systems are picking up whatever is in the system out there, and we know the oil is out there and working its way up the food chain through the food web – and dolphins are at the top of that food chain.”

Cake explained: “The chemicals then move into their lipids, fat, and then when they are pregnant, their young rely on this fat, and so it’s no wonder dolphins are having developmental issues and still births.”

Cake, who lives in Mississippi, added: “It has been more than 33 years since the 1979 Ixtoc-1 oil disaster in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche, and the oysters, clams, and mangrove forests have still not recovered in their oiled habitats in seaside estuaries of the Yucatan Peninsula. It has been 23 years since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska, and the herring fishery that failed in the wake of that disaster has still not returned.”

Cake believes we are still in the short-term impact stage of BP’s oil disaster.

“I will not be alive to see the Gulf of Mexico recover,” said Cake, who is 72 years old. “Without funding and serious commitment, these things will not come back to pre-April 2010 levels for decades.”

***

“We’re continuing to pull up oil in our nets,” Rooks said. “Think about losing everything that makes you happy, because that is exactly what happens when someone spills oil and sprays dispersants on it. People who live here know better than to swim in or eat what comes out of our waters.”

Khuns and her husband told Al Jazeera that fishermen continue to regularly find tar balls in their crab traps, and hundreds of pounds of tar balls continue to be found on beaches across the region on a daily basis.

Meanwhile Cowan continues his work, and remains concerned about what he is finding.

“We’ve also seen a decrease in biodiversity in fisheries in certain areas. We believe we are now seeing another outbreak of incidence increasing, and this makes sense, since waters are starting to warm again, so bacterial infections are really starting to take off again. We think this is a problem that will persist for as long as the oil is stored on the seafloor.”

Did the BP Spill Ever Really Stop?

We’ve repeatedly documented that BP’s gulf Mocando well is still leaking.

Stuart Smith – a successful trial lawyer who won a billion dollar verdict against Exxon Mobil – noted recently:

New sampling data from the nonprofit Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN) provide confirmation that not only is BP’s oil still very much present in the water in Bayou La Batre, but that it still exists in a highly toxic state nearly two years after the spill.

Water samples were taken by Dennis and Lori Bosarge, LEAN members from Coden, Alabama. The lab-certified test results are in (see full lab report at bottom), and they are startling in that they suggest that oil is still leaking from the Macondo reservoir – most likely from cracks and fissures in the seafloor around the plugged wellhead. Scientists believe the cracks were caused by BP’s heavy-handed “kill” efforts.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

G-Comm™: WHAT MUST BE SAID

~~  Günter Grass ~~

The English translation was published by the Guardian.

You can read the poem in the original German H E R E.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

G-Comm™: Washington Leads the World into Lawlessness

The US government pretends to live under the rule of law, to respect human rights, and to provide freedom and democracy to citizens. Washington’s pretense and the stark reality are diametrically opposed.

US government officials routinely criticize other governments for being undemocratic and for violating human rights. Yet, no other country except Israel sends bombs, missiles, and drones into sovereign countries to murder civilian populations. The torture prisons of Abu Gahraib, Guantanamo, and CIA secret rendition sites are the contributions of the Bush/Obama regimes to human rights. 

Washington violates the human rights of its own citizens. Washington has suspended the civil liberties guaranteed in the US Constitution and declared its intention to detain US citizens indefinitely without due process of law.  President Obama has announced that he, at his discretion, can murder US citizens whom he regards as a threat to the US.

Congress did not respond to these extraordinary announcements with impeachment proceedings. There was no uproar from the federal courts, law schools, or bar associations. Glenn Greenwald reports that the Department of Homeland Security harasses journalists who refuse to be “presstitutes”,  and we have seen videos of the brutal police oppression of peaceful OWS protestors.  Chris Floyd describes the torture-perverts who rule the US.

Now Washington is forcing as much of the world as it can to overthrow international treaties and international law.  Washington has issued a ukase that its word alone is international law. Any country, except those who receive Washington’s dispensation, that engages in trade with Iran or purchases Iran’s oil will be sanctioned by the US. These countries will be cut off from US markets, and their banking systems will not be able to use banks that process international payments.  In other words, Washington’s “sanctions against Iran” apply not to Iran but to countries that defy Washington and meet their energy needs with Iranian oil.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, so far Washington has granted special privileges to Japan and 10 European Union countries to continue purchasing Iranian oil. Requiring countries to shutdown their economies in order to comply with Washington’s vendetta against Iran, a vendetta that has been ongoing ever since the Iranians overthrew the Washington-installed puppet, the Shah of Iran, more than three decades ago, was more than Washington could get away with. Washington has permitted Japan to keep importing between 78-85% of its normal oil imports from Iran.

Washington’s dispensations, however, are arbitrary. Dispensations have not been granted to China, India, Turkey, and South Korea.  India and China are the largest importers of Iranian oil, and Turkey and South Korea are among the top ten importers. Before looking at possible unintended consequences of Washington’s vendetta against Iran, what is Washington’s case against Iran?

Frankly, Washington has no case.  It is the hoax of “weapons of mass destruction” all over again. Iran, unlike Israel, signed the non-proliferation treaty. All countries that sign the treaty have the right to nuclear energy. Washington claims that Iran is violating the treaty by developing a nuclear weapon.  There is no evidence whatsoever for Washington’s assertion.  Washington’s own 16 intelligence agencies are unanimous that Iran has had no nuclear weapon’s program since 2003.  Moreover, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s weapons inspectors are in Iran and have reported consistently that there is no diversion of nuclear material from the energy program to a weapons program.

On the rare occasion when Washington is reminded of the facts, Washington makes a different case. Washington asserts that Iran’s rights under the non-proliferation treaty notwithstanding, Iran cannot have a nuclear energy program, because Iran would then have learned enough to be able at some future time to make a bomb.  The world’s hegemon has unilaterally decided that the possibility that Iran might one day decide to make a nuke is too great a risk to take. It is better, Washington says, to drive up the oil price, disrupt the world economy, violate international law, and risk a major war than to have to worry that a future Iranian government will make a nuclear weapon. This is the Jeremy Bentham tyrannical approach to law that was repudiated by the Anglo-American legal system.

It is difficult to characterize Washington’s position as one of good judgment.  Moreover, Washington has never explained the huge risk Washington sees in the possibility of an Iranian nuke.  Why is this risk so much greater than the risk associated with Soviet nukes or with the nukes of the US, Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea today?  Iran is a relatively small country.  It does not have Washington’s world hegemonic ambitions. Unlike Washington, Iran is not at war with a half dozen countries. Why is Washington destroying America’s reputation as a country that respects law and risking a major war and economic dislocation over some possible future development, the probability of which is unknown?

There is no good answer to this question. Lacking evidence for a case against Iran, Washington and Israel have substituted demonization. The lie has been established as truth that the current president of Iran intends to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

This lie has succeeded as propaganda even though numerous language experts have proven that the intention attributed to the Iranian president by American-Israeli propaganda is a gross mistranslation of what the president of Iran said. Once again, for Washington and its presstitutes, facts do not count. The agenda is all that counts, and any lie will be used to advance the agenda.

Washington’s sanctions could end up biting Washington harder than they bite Iran.

What will Washington do if India, China, Turkey and South Korea do not succumb to Washington’s threats?

According to recent news reports, India and China are not inclined to inconvenience themselves and to harm their economic development in order to support Washington’s vendetta against Iran. Having watched China’s rapid rise and having observed North Korea’s immunity to American attack, South Korea might be wondering how much longer it intends to remain Washington’s puppet state.  Turkey, where the civilian and somewhat Islamist government has managed to become independent of the US-controlled Turkish military, appears to be slowly coming to the realization that Washington and NATO have Turkey in a “service role” in which Turkey is Washington’s agent against its own kind. The Turkish government appears to be reassessing the benefits of being Washington’s pawn.

What Turkey and South Korea decide is basically a decision whether the countries will be independent countries or be subsumed within Washington’s empire.

The success of the American-Israeli assault on Iran’s independence depends on India and China.

If India and China give the bird to Washington, what can Washington do?  Absolutely nothing.  What if Washington, drowning in its gigantic hubris, announced sanctions against India and China?

Wal-Mart’s shelves would be empty, and America’s largest retailer would be hammering on the White House door. 

Apple Computer and innumerable powerful US corporations, which have offshored their production for the American market to China, would see their profits evaporate. Together with their Wall Street allies, these powerful corporations would assault the fool in the White House with more force than the Red Army.  The Chinese trade surplus would cease to flow into US Treasury debt. The offshored-to-India back office operations of banks, credit card companies, and customer service departments of utilities throughout the US would cease to function.

In America, chaos would reign. Such are the rewards to the Empire of the globalism that the empire has fostered.

The White House moron and the neoconservative and Israeli warmongers who urge him on to more wars do not understand that the US is no longer an independent country. America is owned by offshoring corporations and the foreign countries in which the corporations have located their production for US markets. Sanctions on China and India (and South Korea) mean sanctions on US corporations. Sanctions on Turkey mean sanctions on a NATO ally.

Do China, India, South Korea and Turkey realize that they hold the winning cards? Do they understand that they can give the bird to the American Empire and bring it down in collapse, or are they brainwashed like Europe and the rest of the world that the powerful Americans cannot be resisted?

Will China and India exercise their power over the US, or will the two countries fudge the issue and adopt a pose that saves face for Washington while they continue to purchase Iranian oil?

The answer to this question is:  how much will Washington pay China and India in secret concessions, such as eviction of the US from the South China Sea, for their pretense that China and India acknowledge Washington’s dictatorial powers over the rest of the world?

Without concession to China and India, Washington is likely to be ignored while it watches its power evaporate. A country that cannot produce industrial and manufactured goods, but can only print debt instruments and money is not a powerful country. It is a washed-up two-bit punk that can continue to struct around until the proverbial boy says:  “the Emperor has no clothes”.

~~  Dr. Paul Craig Roberts ~~

Sunday, April 08, 2012

G-Comm™: An African Solution to An African Problem

Occasionally, the world turns its attention towards Africa. A viral video about Africa broke all records for viewership, and George Clooney challenged an African Government for its abuse of human rights and was arrested. In Northern Uganda, at a showing of the viral video, Africans threw stones at the screen.

I first visited Northern Uganda in 2003, the same year that Jason Russell and his friends Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole arrived in Gulu and began their sojourn as the Invisible Children nongovernmental organization. I saw with my own eyes what was depicted in their first video. I saw the commuter children coming into town at night to escape being kidnapped by Joseph Kony’s army. I also visited an internally displaced person’s camp. Close to two million people lived in such camps due to the war.

After two more visits to Gulu during the war, I was moved to do more. I gathered some friends and started a project to bring Internet by way of solar power to the remote displacement camps outside of Gulu. The project was named BOSCO (Battery Operated Systems for Community Outreach.) The project was originally conceived during wartime as a communication safety measure for those in the camps. While we were planning the project, a truce was negotiated, and we rushed the first deployment because I knew I would not be able to get American technical help in if war were to break out again.

Because of the efforts of a few great men, the truce became a peace. It has been my privilege to know the main player who has made a difference. His name is John the Baptist Odama, the Catholic Archbishop of Gulu. During those dark days of terrible hostilities in Northern Uganda, he went unarmed into the bush and confronted the rebels. He said to them, “Kill me if you must, but if you do kill me you will be killing your father.” With these words and the bold action of being willing to lay down his life for peace, a painstaking peace process began. He came to the peace process without weapons, and his patience, humility, and long-suffering virtue enabled him to forge relationships of reconciliation among Christians, Muslims, and Animists in the cause of peace. His work with the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative. ARLPI is recognized the world over as a model of peacebuilding.

I fear those who come to Africa with weapons, but without the wisdom of this man. It causes us to question the group of young people in America chanting for “justice” for Kony. They will have in mind a completely different narrative and outcome than an African peace negotiator who comes out of a traditional African religious and communal narrative of justice. The peace negotiator in Africa attempts to get warring communities to come together and celebrate their reconciliation by having the elders “bend their spears,” and drink the “bitter root” together, to join in common acknowledgment of the pain which war has cause both parties.

Archbishop Odama tells of a young man who escaped from the rebels –but watched from afar as the group from which he had escaped murdered his mother. Hours later, the Uganda Army arrived and placed all the child soldiers in repatriation camps. This young man was placed in the same repatriation camp as the young man who murdered his mother. When this fact was recognized, he was about to be placed in a different camp. But the young man spoke up and said, “I forgive, and know my Father will give me the power to reconcile. Vengeance will get us nowhere. We have all suffered enough. How can there be peace if we are not willing to live together?” And so they lived together.

I readily admit that Archbishop Odama’s call to radical reconciliation puts my own tepid American Christianity to shame. My American individualistic approach to “justice” fails when placed next to his willingness to lay down his life for his friends, for his enemies, for all people.

During happier days, when I first met Jason Russell at the Invisible Children’s home in Gulu, I coined a phrase about the experience of going to Africa. At this critical moment in Uganda, I ask Jason to remember my words: “After 9-11, we all live in Gulu whether we know it or not. Let us learn from Gulu how to live.” After some healing and reconciliation, after drinking together the bitter root, let’s learn from John the Baptist Odama how to bring peace with wisdom to my beloved Acholi (I am an honorary Acholi tribesman), to all Africa, and, please God, to the world.

~~  Gus A. Zuehlke, President of BOSCO USA ~~

Saturday, April 07, 2012

THE F-35 STEALTH FIGHTER PROGRAM: How the War Economy Contributes to Exacerbating the Social Crisis

There is mounting controversy regarding the purchase of the F-35 stealth fighter jet from US defence giant Lockheed Martin. The Pentagon has commissioned the purchase of 2,443 aircraft “to provide the bulk of its tactical airpower for the US Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy over the coming decades”. This massive procurement of advanced weapons systems is part of America’s “Global War”, largely directed against China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

The overall cost of the program to the US military is estimated at a staggering $1.51 trillion over the so called life cycle of the program, namely $618 million per plane. (Shalal-Esa, Andrea. Government sees lifetime cost of F-35 fighter at $1.51 trillion., Chicago Tribune,  April 02, 2012).

Several of America’s close allies including the UK, Australia, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, Israel, and Japan are slated to purchase the F-35 stealth fighter plane. 

The economic and social implications of this program are potentially devastating. Apart from the fact that the fighter planes will be used in upcoming US-NATO wars, resulting in inevitable civilian deaths, their procurement—at tax payers expense—will contribute to exacerbating the ongoing fiscal crisis. Unless they are solely funded by an increase in the public debt (which is highly unlikely), these massive expenditures on advanced weapons systems will require the adoption of concurrent austerity measures over a period of up to thirty years, at the expense of an entire generation.

The costs of military procurement are always at the expense of social programs, public investment in infrastructure and employment creation in the civilian economy. Conversely, very few jobs will be created by the defence contractors. The cost of creating one job in America’s weapons industry (2001) varies between 25 and 66 million dollars per job. (Michel Chossudovsky, War is Good for Business, Global Research, September 2001)

In the US and NATO member countries, drastic budgetary measures are currently being applied with a view to financing the “war economy”. These economic measures—adopted at the crossroads of a Worldwide economic depression—are also contributing to spearheading entire national economies into bankruptcy, with devastating social consequences.

Canada’s F-35 Program

In Canada, the Conservative government had initially committed itself to an overall cost of the F-35 stealth fighter program of 9 billion dollars involving the purchase of 65 aircraft. This figure of 9 billion dollars was a political cover-up. Known and documented, the real cost of the program was much larger. Auditor-General Michael Ferguson’s report presented to the House of Commons (April 2), confirmed that the cost of Canada’s F-35 programme “could reach $30 billion over three decades”, namely $461 million per plane: 

“In March 2011, the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) provided Parliament with a report on the estimated acquisition and sustainment [sic] costs associated with Canada’s planned purchase of 65 F-35 fighter jets. Shortly thereafter, the Department of National Defence (DND) responded to the PBO report. In that response, DND claimed that the total costs associated with the F-35 program would be approximately $15 billion. However, the recent auditor general’s report reveals that, in June 2010, DND’s true cost estimate was approximately $25 billion—representing a difference of $10 billion. The inclusion of this difference would bring DND’s cost estimate in line with that of the PBO,“

It is worth noting that the estimated unit cost in Canada’s program ($461 million per aircraft) which has been the object of political controversy is substantially lower than that of the US (estimated at $661 million) and Norway (estimated to be of the order of $769 million over the “operational lifetime” of the F-35 aircraft). (Testimony of Rear Admiral Arne Røksund,  “41st Parliament, 1st Session, Standing Committee on National Defense.“, House of Commons, Ottawa, November 24, 2011).

Ottawa’s 2012 Austerity Budget

Careful timing: The 30 billion dollar cost of the F-35 programme was known prior to the presentation of the budget. The report of  Canada’s Auditor General (April 3), however, regarding the cost overrun was only made public ex post facto, five days after the budget speech by Finance Minister Flaherty on March 29.  

The 2012 Canadian federal budget presented a gruesome scenario of austerity measures requiring massive layoffs of federal government employees, drastic cuts in spending including pension funds and the curtailment of federal provincial transfers. In contrast, the issue of spiralling defense spending resulting from the F-35 fighter program is not acknowledged, as if it has no bearing on the structure of public expenditure. 

The government had announced drastic austerity measures, but these budgetary measures apply largely to non-military spending. (The federal budget estimates indicate a modest cut in defence expenditure, which do not include predictable overruns in the cost of weapons procurement).

The crucial question: How does this multibillion dollar F-35 project affect the 2012 federal budget, which is largely predicated on a sizeable curtailment of “civilian” as opposed to “military” expenditures?

The issue of the budget deficit could be resolved overnight by reining in the war economy. But that “solution” would not be in the interest of  achieving “World peace” and “global security”.

“Guns versus Butter”: How does this spiralling defence expenditure allocated to the purchase of advanced weapons systems affect all other categories of civilian government expenditure?  How does it affect public investment in the civilian economy?

These questions are of crucial significance for the people of the United States, whose government is spending a staggering $1.5 trillion on the F-35 program. It has similar implications for the nine countries which decided to purchase these expensive fighter planes, while concurrently implementing “strong economic medicine” to finance the predictable cost overruns of military spending. 

“War is good for business” (for the defence contractors) yet at the same it spearheads the civilian economy into bankruptcy. 

Nowhere in the Canadian federal budget is the issue of the F-35 program and its staggering overall cost of 30 billion dollars mentioned. That’s an average cost of $461 million dollars per plane, including the “flyaway” purchase plus the so-called sustainment costs (maintenance, operating costs and related investments associated with the F-35 program). 

Canada’s Welfare State is collapsing, health care is in the process of being privatised, primary and secondary education is under-funded. Universities are in a state of crisis with rising tuition fees. Yet at no point in the debate on the 2012 federal budget has the issue of the war economy been raised.

How does the war economy backlash on people’s lives? How does it undermine and destabilize the civilian economy? How does it affect the funding of social programs? 

What should be understood is that the austerity measures are in part implemented with a view to financing the war economy.

The Protest Movement

The protest movement against the economic austerity measures must be integrated be with the antiwar movement.

The abolition of war—including the closing down of the weapons industry—is a precondition for scrapping the neoliberal economic agenda. War and Globalization are intimately related.  

University students in Quebec have recently been involved in mass demonstrations regarding the hike of tuition fees implemented by the provincial government. Yet at no time has the issue of  military spending and its impact on social programs been raised. 

The purchase of advanced weapons systems will inevitably be at the expense of federal provincial transfers which contribute to the financing of health and education.

Curtailing the F-35 stealth fighter program would immediately make more money available in support of Quebec’s university students. In fact the cost associated with one F-35 fighter plane (461 million dollars) would release more than enough resources to finance the hike in tuition fees for years to come. 

The protest movement against government austerity measures applied in the US, Canada  and the European Union must address the issue of the US-NATO led war.

The F-35 stealth aircraft are not weapons of peace. They are part of the killing machine. They are slated to be used against China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.  

They are “weapons of mass destruction” to be used in the Pentagon’s “long war”. 

The other side of the coin pertains to “Guns versus Butter”, namely the relationship between the “civilian economy” and the “war economy”.

War and the neoliberal economic policy agenda are part of an integrated process.

The staggering cost of these advanced weapons is contributing to the demise of what is left of the Welfare State, not to mention the impoverishment—in several NATO member countries—of an entire generation. ~~  Professor Michel Chossudovsky ~~

Friday, April 06, 2012

G-Comm™: The Drone and the Cross, a Good Friday Meditation

Were Jesus to preach today as he preached in Jerusalem two millennia ago, instead of a cross of wood the instrument of his passion might be a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone.

Over Holy Week, the days before celebrating the resurrection of Jesus on Easter, Christians are called to meditate on Jesus’ last days. On Good Friday, in churches and often in city streets, it is customary to retrace the “Way of the Cross,” symbolically following Jesus from his trial before the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate to his torture, crucifixion, death and burial. For American Christians in Holy Week, 2012, news headlines of wars in far-away places must not be seen as distractions from our meditations and liturgical observances but rather as a necessary means to realize the implications of Christ’s passion for us here and now.

The Roman Empire employed crucifixion as its preferred method of executing suspects deemed threatening to its imperial power and to the “Pax Romana” it imposed on the known world. The history of empires is banal and predictable even in its cruelty. The United States is more clearly than ever the successor of this imperial tradition. Empire will always be on the technological cutting edge, from bronze swords to nuclear missiles, with each advance extending the reach and the catastrophic potential of successive imperial powers, but the history of empires is really one single tragic story told over and over again with incidental variations.

Today those deemed threats to the U.S. Empire and its “Pax Americana” are increasingly targeted by Predator and Reaper drones armed with missiles and bombs. Just as Rome considered Jesus a “high value target” for execution, it is unlikely that today’s world empire would view Jesus’ life and teaching with any less suspicion. Were Jesus to preach today as he preached in Jerusalem two millennia ago, instead of a cross of wood the instrument of his passion might be a hellfire missile fired from a predator drone.

While the revolution Jesus preached was nonviolent, this did not matter to Rome and such distinctions are equally lost on the U.S. Empire, whose military, Homeland Security and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force are at least as zealous in persecuting unarmed advocates for economic and political justice as they are in pursuing terrorists. Jesus called for a jubilee abolition of debt, for redistribution of wealth and for freedom to those in prison. His nonviolent stance did not keep him from engaging in dialogue with the Zealots, who advocated violent revolution. This would be all the evidence the U.S. Empire needs to detain an “enemy combatant” indefinitely at Guantanamo or indeed, to put him on a CIA hit list.

Mouthpieces for the present empire defend assassination by drone citing the fact that arresting some suspected threats would be difficult to impossible- they travel the desolate reaches of the empire, passing in and out of porous borders. When they do enter populated areas, they are surrounded by crowds of supporters, which translates in U.S. parlance as despicably using civilians as human shields.

The military and law enforcement authorities of Rome and its colonial client states were likewise frustrated in their attempts to track and arrest Jesus. When things got hot in Judea, Jesus and his disciples were known to slip out of the Roman Province of Judea into Herod’s Tetrarchy of Galilee and from there, hop a boat to the jurisdiction of the Decapolis. The mightiest military force on the planet in the year 33 of the current era could not arrest Jesus in Jerusalem “for fear of the crowds,” the Gospels tell us.

In order to bring him to “justice,” Rome needed to recruit and bribe one of Jesus’ inner circle for inside information and then wait to find him alone in a dark garden. That empire required a sham trial before their governor could sentence Jesus to die. Today’s mightiest empire uses unmanned drones to find and kill threats to its power with no trial and from long distances. Victims are named by the military or the CIA on evidence that is kept secret from any court. Rather than being hounded by spies and dragged to a cross by mercenary boots on the ground, threats to the U.S. Empire are now hunted by drones high in the sky, scanning the cities and the wilderness, sending high-resolution video feed to their “pilots” thousands of miles away in Nevada, California or New York and it is from that safe distance that the trigger is pulled to launch the fatal missile.

While drones are touted as weapons of precision, their Hellfire missiles and 500 pound bombs are not surgical instruments. Weddings and funerals, when attended by “high value targets,” are fair game and hundreds of celebrants and mourners have been killed by drone strikes on these events in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Villages and urban neighborhoods where such “targets” are suspected to be residing or visiting are devastated along with their inhabitants. War is hell, it is admitted in moments of candor, and an empire cannot allow itself to be deterred by fear of “collateral damage” from pursuing its objectives.

With the flexibility that drones offer the present empire, Rome would not have needed to wait for Jesus to surface in Jerusalem at Passover, but could have killed him at its leisure along with anyone incidentally in his vicinity. If they had drones, the Romans might have taken out Jesus at Cana along with the other wedding guests. A hellfire missile might have found him welcoming the children or at the funeral of his friend, Lazarus. The hit might have come as a 500 pound bomb dropped on the upper room, annihilating all at the last supper.

U.S. drones, it is reported, hover over the aftermath of an attack and target rescue workers and those who attempt to give the dead dignified burial. Had Rome the technical capability and lack of compunction of the U.S., Joseph of Arimathaea might have paid with his life for his work of mercy, laying the tortured corpse of Jesus in his own tomb. Mary and the women who later brought ointments to bathe and anoint Jesus’ body might never had made it to the tomb; or they might have been burned beyond recognition themselves before they could deliver the good news that the tomb was empty.

Of course this meditation is the result of wild and perhaps irresponsible speculation. I wonder, though, if it is so far off as it seems even to me. More than this I wonder what it means for me as a privileged citizen of an empire, to venerate the holy cross and to worship the tortured messiah who died on it while my government unleashes hellish droves of machines into the sky to spy and to torture and kill in my name.

~~  Brian Terrell - Maloy, Iowa ~~

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

OddlyEnough™: Urine-Soaked Eggs A Spring Taste Treat in China City

It’s the end of a school day in the eastern Chinese city of Dongyang, and eager parents collect their children after a hectic day of primary school.

But that’s just the start of busy times for dozens of egg vendors across the city, deep in coastal Zhejiang province, who ready themselves to cook up a unique springtime snack favored by local residents.

Basins and buckets of boys’ urine are collected from primary school toilets. It is the key ingredient in “virgin boy eggs”, a local tradition of soaking and cooking eggs in the urine of young boys, preferably below the age of 10.

There is no good explanation for why it has to be boys’ urine, just that it has been so for centuries.

The scent of these eggs being cooked in pots of urine is unmistakable as people pass the many street vendors in Dongyang who sell it, claiming it has remarkable health properties.

“If you eat this, you will not get heat stroke. These eggs cooked in urine are fragrant,“ said Ge Yaohua, 51, who owns one of the more popular “virgin boy eggs” stalls.

“They are good for your health. Our family has them for every meal. In Dongyang, every family likes eating them.“

It takes nearly an entire day to make these unique eggs, starting off by soaking and then boiling raw eggs in a pot of urine. After that, the shells of the hard-boiled eggs are cracked and they continue to simmer in urine for hours.

Vendors have to keep pouring urine into the pot and controlling the fire to keep the eggs from being overheated and overcooked.

Ge said he has been making the snack, popular due to its fresh and salty taste, for more than 20 years. Each egg goes for 1.50 yuan ($0.24), a little more than twice the price of the regular eggs he also sells.

Many Dongyang residents, young and old, said they believed in the tradition passed on by their ancestors that the eggs decrease body heat, promote better blood circulation and just generally reinvigorate the body.

“By eating these eggs, we will not have any pain in our waists, legs and joints. Also, you will have more energy when you work,“ said Li Yangzhen, 59, who bought 20 eggs from Ge.

The eggs are not bought only at street stalls. Local residents are also known to personally collect boys’ urine from nearby schools to cook the delicacy in their homes.

The popularity of the treat has led the local government to list the “virgin boy eggs” as an intangible cultural heritage.

But not everyone is a fan. Chinese medical experts gave mixed reviews about the health benefits of the practice, with some warning about sanitary issues surrounding the use of urine to cook the eggs.

Some Dongyang residents also said they hated the eggs.

“We have this tradition in Dongyang that these eggs are good for our health and that it would help prevent things like getting a cold,“ said Wang Junxing, 38. “I don’t believe in all this, so I do not eat them.“

~~  Reuters ~~

Sunday, April 01, 2012

G-Comm™: From Israel, a Declaration of Interdependence

The fond foolishness—or was it?—of the Israeli graphic designer’s recent Youtube video declaring his love for the Iranian people and his pledge not to bomb Iran brought back the almost forgotten Christmas moment in the trenches of World War I, when soldiers on both the French and German sides put down their weapons and sang “Silent Night” together. Peace threatened to break out all up and down the lines until those pitiless realists on both sides, the generals, forced their minions to restart the interminable slaughter.

The Israeli’s video also brought back the memory of a powerful event thousands of us attended in 1984. To celebrate the achievements of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, my organization, Beyond War, had set up a live televised satellite “spacebridge” between Moscow and San Francisco. Large audiences in both places listened to the pleas of the two leaders of the IPPNW, Leonid Brezhnev’s personal physician Evgeny Chazov, and the distinguished Boston cardiologist Bernard Lown, for reconciliation between the Soviet and American nations. Chazov played a recording of a healthily pulsating heart to underscore the reality that human hearts beat identically everywhere. The Moscow Boy’s Choir and the San Francisco Boy’s Choir sang—together.

But the most extraordinary moment was unscripted. It came at the very end of the ceremony when the production credits were already rolling on giant screens in the two venues. Tentatively at first, people in the audience in Moscow began waving to people in the audience in San Francisco. Soon all of us at both ends of the “spacebridge” were standing and enthusiastically waving to each other.

Many on both sides began to weep at that moment, as if an emotional dam had burst. Was this merely a kind of delusion, a facile collectivist sentimentality? Not in the context of the 1980s, when, 20 years after the near-apocalypse of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the placement of short-range nuclear missiles in Europe and the U.S.S.R. had shortened to a few minutes the reaction-time military decision makers were permitted before they had to make a decision to retaliate. Looking back from this new century, it seems a kind of miracle that we made it through 50 years of cold war unscathed.

The understanding that thousands of peace activists, diplomats and leaders of non-aligned nations had worked to seed into the global culture, that we will survive together or die together on this planet, had borne fruit in a moment of human contact that leapfrogged over the pessimistic realism of the foreign policy establishment. One of these pessimists wrote a scathing analysis of the spacebridge in the Wall Street Journal, asserting that Beyond War had been duped by the Soviet government in a propaganda coup. But it was only a few years later that the optimistic realism of the spacebridge prevailed, the first nuclear disarmament treaty was signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987, and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

International relations today continue to run along a narrow track of competitive gloom: the “realistic” assumption, since it cannot be known for certain, of the adversary’s malign motivation. A prominent University of Chicago intellectual, Professor John Mearsheimer, a believer in “offensive realism,” warns us that just as the U.S. enjoys hegemonic control of the Western Hemisphere, the Chinese surely wish to achieve a similar hegemony in their sphere, and will need to be checked by U.S. power.

Leaving aside our questionable right to limit in another hemisphere the degree of domination we reserve for our own, what the distinguished professor’s probing analysis leaves out makes his “realism” offensive in the other sense. If the great powers continue to compete on the worst-case analysis of the unknowability of each other’s intentions, they will have completely ignored the largest, and perfectly knowable, threats to their mutual security: the possibility of sudden catastrophe by a nuclear war that no nation can possibly win, or gradual catastrophe by environmental degradation.

Neither of these challenges require more submarines and aircraft carriers checking power with power, but rather a spirit of cooperation based in common survival goals—the very spirit we saw when Soviets and Americans spontaneously waved to each other and wiped out the distance between them—the same spirit demonstrated by a lone Israeli citizen, now joined apparently by thousands of others, shouting “enough!” to the folly of mutual nuclear paranoia between Iran and Israel.

~~  Winslow Myers ~~

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Study: Electro-Acupuncture May Be Effective for Depression

Boosting the effect of acupuncture needles with small electric currents may be effective in treating depression, a study in Hong Kong has found.

Led by Zhang Zhang-jin at the School of Chinese Medicine, University of Hong Kong, the researchers used electro-acupuncture to stimulate seven spots on the heads of 73 participants, who had suffered several bouts of depression in the last 7 years.

The electro-acupuncture was given in addition to medication that the patients were already taking and meant to augment their treatment, Zhang told a news conference.

Half the patients received electro-acupuncture nine times over three weeks, while the other half - the placebo group - only had needles inserted superficially into their heads.

They were later assessed by experts for their depression levels and the group that received genuine electro-acupuncture was found to be a lot happier.

“The drop (in depression scores) among the group receiving active treatment was more significant than the placebo group,“ said Roger Ng, another researcher in the group, which published their findings in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) ONE.

“When the acupoints are stimulated, some brain centers responsible for producing serotonin are stimulated,“ explained Ng, a consultant at the department of psychiatry at the Kowloon Hospital in Hong Kong.

An imbalance in serotonin levels is believed to be linked to depression. Depression affects about 20% of people at some point in their lives.

The World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, depression will rival heart disease as the health disorder with the highest disease burden in the world.

Zhang said his group may consider moving into another trial using only electro-acupuncture on patients suffering milder depression.

Friday, March 30, 2012

G-Comm™: Why Do We Protest the NATO Summit?

After the end of World War II, a group of nations in the north Atlantic established NATO to impede Russian influence over the reconstruction of Europe. The result was that it facilitated the United States’ influence: according to a 2009 article by Georgetown professor David S. Painter in the journal Cold War History, the economic blueprint begun under the Marshall Plan and continued with NATO was a process where European member countries shifted their energy dependency from coal to oil. This came at a time when the U.S. was the world’s leading oil producer. A graph included in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s 2011 Transportation Energy Data Book shows that before 1960, the U.S. used to supply more than a third of worldwide crude oil production from within its own borders. In addition, U.S. oil companies enjoyed effective control over vast petroleum reserves in Venezuela, which they had wrested away from Britain a few decades earlier. The entire arrangement ensured that these companies would stand to make a fortune, setting a high price to fulfill Western Europe’s manufactured demand.

After the Cold War ended, the U.S. rebranded NATO and extended its mandate as the supposed defender of liberty in regions far beyond the north Atlantic. Seeing military action as a suitable solution to various global conflicts, it has had the effect of sowing discord and violence instead of alleviating these problems.

In Kosovo, NATO claimed that bombing the countryside would stop Yugoslav forces from invading homes and practicing summarily executing Kosovars. Instead, the New York Times reported on May 29, 1999 that Belgrade’s atrocities at ground level had “kicked into high gear,” as was widely predicted by international aid workers, described in the Washington Post on April 11 as “the only remaining brake on Yugoslav troops” and who were forced to leave their host villages when NATO commenced aerial bombing. Years later, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia would issue an indictment against Slobodan Milosevic on 17 Kosovo-related war crimes, 16 of which happened after NATO’s entry into the conflict.

In Libya, the scene following the NATO-enabled civil war has been a chaotic mix of factional battles with various anti-Gaddafi militias who refuse to disband. According to Reuters, on Jan. 21, 2012, Libyan veterans were attacked with tear gas while protesting outside the Benghazi headquarters of the ruling NTC party, the site of a near-attack on the country’s Vice President days earlier. They charged into the building and seized it while party officials fled. Widespread torture of alleged Gaddafi loyalists has caused a vicious humanitarian catastrophe, prompting the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders to tell The Canadian Press on Jan 26 that they would abandon the mission in Misrata because “detainees were brought for care only to make them fit for further interrogation.” NATO continues to insist that its actions have prevented political repression and have promoted freedom and democratic change, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

In Afghanistan, NATO has been the overseer, since 2003, of the criminal bombardment and invasion of a small nation, one which has not initiated hostilities, by a vast superpower employing devastating and overwhelming weaponry. This war began to exceed the death toll of 9-11, civilian life for civilian life, in only the first few months, and over the last decade, the death toll has continued to mount. A report released in February of this year by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan noted a sharp rise in the proportion of civilians killed that were women and children. The negligence of NATO was especially glaring from July-December of 2011, during which time aerial strikes killed triple the number of women and children who were killed over the corresponding period of the previous year. Chillingly, NATO has looked at the Colombian government’s devastating and prolonged war against the FARC as a model for staying the course in Afghanistan. This can’t fly. The scandals and crimes carried out by NATO troops and the detestable official apologies devoid of real solutions illustrate that each day the war continues will mean a continuing humanitarian disaster for Afghan people.

Those who participate in the May actions to shed light on this deranged historical trend will not just be protesting NATO, but will also be proposing a different agenda for the nations who convene under NATO’s banner. Instead of pursuing a partnership agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, which would authorize the war up until the year 2024 or beyond, the powerful nations of the world should be meeting to discuss ending drone strikes immediately, pulling combat forces out Afghanistan, and ending their manipulation of Afghan democracy— propping up Hamid Karzai and the warlords in the National Assembly. Secondly, they must take responsibility for their past criminality by providing reparations, to be dispersed by an independent body such as the UN general assembly. Reparations would fund projects decided on by local communities and might take the form of food aid, water filtration, housing construction, soil renewal, sanitation, mine disarmament medical brigades, etc. It is crucial that we walk, march, picket, and speak out to demand these real solutions.

~~  Buddy Bell   ~~

Thursday, March 29, 2012

G-Comm™: US WAR ON IRAN: “THE WORST MISTAKE IN AMERICAN HISTORY” - The Road to Disaster

This Reflection could be written today, tomorrow or any other day without the risk of being mistaken. Our species faces new problems. When 20 years ago I stated at the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro that a species was in danger of extinction, I had fewer reasons than today for warning about a danger that I was seeing perhaps 100 years away. At that time, a handful of leaders of the most powerful countries were in charge of the world. They applauded my words as a matter of mere courtesy and placidly continued to dig for the burial of our species.

It seemed that on our planet, common sense and order reigned. For a while, economic development, backed by technology and science appeared to be the Alpha and Omega of human society.

Today, everything is much clearer. Profound truths have been surfacing. Almost 200 States, supposedly independent, constitute the political organization which in theory has the job of governing the destiny of the world.

25, 000 nuclear weapons needed to defend the changing order ?

Approximately 25,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of allied or enemy forces ready to defend the changing World order, by interest or necessity, virtually reduce to zero the rights of billions of people.

I shall not commit the naïveté of assigning the blame to Russia or China for the development of that kind of weaponry, after the monstrous massacre at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ordered by Truman in August 1945 after Roosevelt’s death [April 1945].

Nor shall I fall prey to the error of denying the Holocaust that signified the deaths of millions of children and adults, men or women, mainly Jews, gypsies, Russians or other nationalities, who were victims of Nazism. For that reason the odious policy of those who deny the Palestinian people their right to exist is repugnant.

Does anyone by chance think that the United States will be capable of acting with the independence that will keep it from the inevitable disaster awaiting it?

In a few weeks, the 40 million dollars President Obama promised to collect for his electoral campaign will only serve to show that the currency of his country has lost its value, and that the US, with its unusual growing public debt drawing close to 20 quadrillion, is living on the money it prints up and not on the money it produces. The rest of the world pays for what they waste.

Nor does anyone believe that the Democratic candidate would be any better or worse than his Republican foes: whether they are called Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum. Light years separate these three characters from Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King.

It is really unheard-of to observe such a technologically powerful nation and a government so bereft of both ideas and moral values.

Iran has no nuclear weapons. It is being accused of producing enriched uranium that serves as fuel energy or components for medical uses. Whatever one can say, its possession or production is not equivalent to the production of nuclear weapons. Dozens of countries use enriched uranium as an energy source, but this cannot be used in the manufacture of a nuclear weapon without a prior complicated purification process.

However, Israel, with the aid and cooperation of the United States, has manufactured nuclear weaponry without informing or accounting for their actions to anybody. Not admitting their possession of these weapons, they have hundreds of them. To prevent the development of research in neighbouring Arab countries, they attacked and destroyed reactors in Iraq and Syria. They have also declared their objective of attacking and destroying the production centres for nuclear fuel in Iran.

International politics have been revolving around that crucial topic in that complex and dangerous part of the world, where most of the fuel that moves the world economy is produced and supplied.

The selective elimination of Iran’s most eminent scientists by Israel and their NATO allies has become a practice that motivates hatred and feelings of revenge.

The Israeli government has openly stated its objective to attack the plant manufacturing Iran’s enriched uranium, and the government of the United States has invested billions of dollars to manufacture a bomb for that purpose.

On March 16, 2012, Michel Chossudovsky and Finian Cunningham published an article revealing that “A top US Air Force General has described the largest conventional bomb – the re-invented bunkers of 13.6 tons – as ‘fantastic’ for a military attack on Iran.

  “Such an eloquent comment on the massive killer-artefact took place in the same week that President Barack Obama appeared to warn against ‘easy words’ on the Persian Gulf War.”

  “…Herbert Carlisle, deputy chief of staff for US Air Force operations […] added that probably the bomb would be used in any attack on Iran ordered by Washington.

  “The MOP, also referred to as ‘The Mother of All Bombs’, is designed to drill through 60 metres of concrete before it detonates its massive bomb. It is believed to be the largest conventional weapon, non-nuclear, in the US arsenal.”

  “The Pentagon is planning a process of wide destruction of Iran’s infrastructure and massive civilian victims through the combined use of tactical nuclear bombs and monstrous conventional bombs with mushroom-shaped clouds, including the MOABs and the larger GBU-57A/B or Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) that exceeds the MOAB in destructive capacity.

  “The MOP is described as ‘a powerful new bomb that aims straight at subterranean Iranian and North Korean nuclear facilities. The giant bomb –longer than 11 persons shoulder to shoulder, or more than 6 metres from end to end’.”

I ask the reader to excuse me for this complicated military jargon.

As one can see, such calculations arise from the hypothesis that the Iranian combatants, numbering millions of men and women well-known for their religious zeal and their fighting traditions, surrender without firing a shot.

In recent days, the Iranians have seen how US soldiers occupying Afghanistan, in just three weeks, urinated on the corpses of killed Afghans, burned copies of the Koran and murdered more than 15 defenceless citizens.

Let us imagine US forces launching monstrous bombs on industrial institutions, capable of penetrating through 60 metres of concrete. Never has such an undertaking ever been conceived [and carried out].

Not one word more is needed to understand the gravity of such a policy. In that way, our species will be inexorably led towards disaster.

If we do not learn how to understand, we shall never learn how to survive.

As for me, I harbour not the slightest doubt that the United States is about to commit and lead the world towards the greatest mistake in its history.

Fidel Castro Ruz

March 21, 2012

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

G-Comm™: Looking for Peace, with War at Your Door (A Soldier’s Search for Peace)

The year is 2001 and the world watched as we were scarred by those who believe that we are evil, wrong, infidels. The U.S. and its citizens have been called every name under the sun. The truth is we are just different; we are different from those in the Middle East, different from those even next door to us in Canada and Mexico. Differences don’t make something wrong; they simply offer diversity. It was these differences that were the impetus for a young man to join the Army, to do what he felt was right in support of his country. In February 2002, this young man joined the Army Infantry, and began the journey that would forever change his life.

After graduating basic training, I returned home just long enough to visit my family and prepare for war. In 2004 I volunteered and was deployed to Baghdad, Iraq to support my fellow soldiers and do what I felt was my part in defense of the country I loved. All my life, I was told that I was too kind, too passive, too gentle; these things were used as ways to criticize me and the idealistic hope and feelings I had that peace was possible. I felt I had to prove them wrong and fight for my country because that is what true patriots do. In my family, patriotism meant blindly following the government and its leaders. It meant to always support American ideals, to follow its military, and to follow its policies. My father raised me with the saying, “no matter how bad we are, we’re still better than everybody else.” These were the thoughts and ideals I carried with me during my journey and experiences in the Iraq war.

Recently, President Obama refused to blindly go to war with Iran. Not because he didn’t want to support our ally, Israel, but because he believes that peace is still possible without war first. President Obama knows the obvious; marching off to a new war would be a mistake from which this country could not recover. This concept is important to me because, having been to war, I know the effects on soldiers, their families, and the innocent people who simply happen to be in the way. I always believed that I was being a patriot, and that I was fighting for freedom because to fight against injustice is a road to peace. I believed that fighting could pave the way for peace to develop. Many of my experiences in Iraq shattered these beliefs. I saw things that can only be described as unjust, immoral, and even evil.

My experiences in Iraq were not completely negative. While stationed in Iraq, I had the chance to befriend some local citizens. These were men and women who worked on our post and with us as translators. I had the privilege of being “adopted” into the family of a local ING (Iraqi National Guardsmen; now known as Iraqi Army or Regulars). The father said that I reminded him of his son who was killed during Saddam’s reign. This meant a great deal to me. I learned a great deal from him and came to discover that he was not so different from my own father. He loved his country and believed in peace. One night, we discussed the war in Iraq and I asked him how he felt about the war and U.S. involvement in his country. He told me that he believed that they needed help but he felt that there was another option. He thought that peace was possible if only people could sit down long enough to talk out their differences instead of fighting against each other. This came from a man who served in Saddam’s royal guard, a man who never knew peace, and who grew up in a war-torn country. He felt that peace was possible and wanted it so bad he was willing to die for it. He told me one night that “I am tired of war, I am tired of violence, I want my children and grand children to grow up knowing peace. But how can they when all we know is war?” This really struck a nerve with me because I felt the same way. The US has been involved in so many wars during its recent history; WWI then WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Panama, The Gulf War, Afghanistan and now Iraq. Of the last 100 years of our nation’s history, we have been at war most years. How can we find peace?

Peace is possible by means of those who want to see it change. Gandhi, the Dali Llama and many others fight for peace not with a gun, but with words and love. This concept became clearer every day to me during my time in Iraq. In November of 2004, I lost a dear friend and his death haunts me still to this day. I learned that war solves nothing, it only creates sadness, sorrow, and ruin.
We ultimately fixed nothing for the people of Iraq, and certainly not for Americans. We mostly made things worse for both peoples, Iraqis and Americans. Financial deficits, broken families, and distrust of America by most of the world are the legacies of this war, which in fact (as far as Iraq is concerned) was not started on 09.11.01, but by Shock and Awe. I feel that instead of helping my country, I was actually party to its ruin.
Gandhi taught us that we can move mountains and win major struggles by fighting in a different way. We can change minds and create order by just sitting and talking and not cooperating with violence. He proved time and time again that negotiation and nonviolent protests can achieve more than violence. There is an old phrase, “the pen is mightier than the sword.” A word can start a war, end a war, and even feed a starving man. Words can create laws and make peace. Ahimsa, the Hindu philosophy of nonviolence, states that it’s because of the illusion of duality that we are separated from others and even from our ourselves. It’s not until we are whole within ourselves that we can know peace. I never thought about this until during my own recent struggle to find peace and acceptance from what occurred to me in Iraq and how many were lost. I was in such duality in my time in the Army, especially overseas. I felt that what I was doing was wrong and not helping, but yet I felt that I was doing the right thing. How could I ever be whole with such opposing feelings?

We are made of this duality, and fighting this inherent split in our souls is the only “war” worth fighting. I have been fighting that war ever since I came home and today feel that while the “war” isn’t over, I am closer today to being whole than I ever was before. My search for peace has led me on a road I never saw coming. I gave up the arts of violence and traded them in for a new and more creative approach. My soul is a canvas that I could paint and remake into anything I want. I have done things I never thought I would do, and regret much of the life I lived before. Today, I stand on top of the mountain and now I am reflecting on the journey. I feel that if a soldier who returned a broken shell of a man can find inner peace, then so can his country and the world.

To strive for peace is not “weak” as many in this country will have you believe. In fact, the real challenge worthy of a warrior is peace, both for himself and the world around him. In reality, war is the simple solution. Not for the survivors, but in that it is easier to kill a man who is different from you than it is to embrace him. Honor is worthy of those who choose to fight for peace by peaceful means. Real honor eludes those who use war to find it.

My journey for peace has led me to a place in my life that surprises even me. Eight years ago, I was in Iraq fighting for my life and doing what I thought was right in defense of my country. Today I am fighting for my country, but not with a gun. I am fighting with votes, ideas, discussion, and the hope of peace: Peace of mind, peace of soul and peace of heart. Love is more powerful than a gun; love is more powerful the hatred. All we need to do is love each and peace will find a way.

~~  William Lay, Hillsboro, Oregon - A Disabled Veteran US Army ~~

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Ron Paul: A Fistful of Euros

This week, my congressional committee will hold a hearing to examine how the Federal Reserve bails out European banks, propping up spendthrift European governments in the process.  Unfortunately this bailout comes at the expense of American citizens, in the form of higher prices and diminished savings down the road.

A good analysis of the Fed’s “swap” scheme first appeared in the Wall Street Journal back in December, in an article by Gerald O’Driscoll entitled, “The Federal Reserve’s Covert Bailout of Europe.”  Essentially, beginning late last year the Fed provided U.S. dollars to the European Central Bank in exchange for Euros—sometimes as much as $100 billion at a time.  The ECB then funneled those dollars to European banks to provide liquidity and prevent crises from bank insolvencies.  Since the currency swap was not technically a loan, the Fed did not have to embarrass itself by openly showing foreign bank debt on its balance sheet.  The ECB meanwhile did not have to print new Euros and expose the true fragility of big European banks.

The entire purpose of this unholy arrangement was to obscure the truth: namely that the Fed was bailing out Europe with U.S. dollars.

But why is it the business of the Federal Reserve to bail out European banks that find themselves short of dollars to pay their dollar-denominated contracts? After all, those

contracts often were hedges taken to protect banks against weakness of the Euro.  Hedges are supposed to reduce risk, but banks that miscalculate should suffer their own losses accordingly.  It’s not our business if the ECB chooses to create moral hazards by providing liquidity to European banks, but why should the Fed prop up Europe’s bad decisions!

The Fed has promised to provide unlimited amounts of dollars to the ECB, should circumstances require it.  It boggles the mind.  Of course when Fed officials first entered into these swap agreements with the ECB last September, they did so quietly.  The American public only found out via websites of the ECB, the Bank of England, or the Swiss Central Bank.

The Fed already has pumped trillions of dollars into the economy since 2008, and US banks currently hold $1.5 trillion of excess reserves.  So why don’t American banks lend those excess trillions to European banks if they really need dollars?  If US banks could earn 1 or 2 percent on those loans, they might just be interested. But they can’t compete with the ½ percent interest rate charged by the Fed to the ECB.  That’s one glaring example of the harm caused by the Fed’s ability to create money and loan it at below-market interest rates.

The Fed argues that these loans will be temporary, merely providing a little boost to get Europe over the hump.  But that’s what they thought a few years ago when such lines of credit to the ECB were set to expire, only to see the Fed reauthorize them. What happens if the European financial system collapses?  Will the Fed be left holding a bunch of worthless Euros?  Will the ECB simply shrug and turn over the collateral it received from European banks, maybe in the form of bonds from Ireland, Italy, or Greece?  Have the 17 individual central banks backing the ECB pledged their gold holdings as collateral?

The Fed has placed a hundred-billion dollar bet on the future of the Euro, with the strength of the dollar on the line.  This is absolutely irresponsible, and directly contrary to market discipline.  Let private banks, European or otherwise, take their own risks.  Let foreign central banks inflate their own currencies and suffer the consequences.  In other words, it’s time to apply market principles to banks and money.

Monday, March 26, 2012

G-Comm™: Try a Little Nuclear Sanity

On February 08, 2012, Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA) took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to introduce the Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures Act (H.R. 3974). This SANE Act would cut $100 billion from the U.S. nuclear weapons budget over the next ten years by reducing the current fleet of U.S. nuclear submarines, delaying the purchase of new nuclear submarines, reducing the number of ICBMs, delaying a new bomber program, and ending the nuclear mission of air bombers.

“America’s nuclear weapons budget is locked in a Cold War time machine,” noted Markey, the senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “It doesn’t reflect our twenty-first-century security needs. It makes no sense. It’s insane.” He went on to explain: “It’s insane to spend $10 billion building new plants to make uranium and plutonium for new nuclear bombs when we’re cutting our nuclear arsenal and the plants we have now work just fine.” Furthermore: “It’s insane that we’re going to spend $84 billion for up to fourteen new nuclear submarines when just one sub, with 96 nuclear bombs on board, can blow up every major city in Iran, China and North Korea.” Finally, “it is insane to spend hundreds of billions on new nuclear bombs and delivery systems . . . while . . . seeking to cut Medicare, Medicaid and social programs that millions of Americans depend on.”

Since its introduction, the SANE Act has picked up significant support. Not surprisingly, it is backed by major peace and disarmament organizations, such as Peace Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and the Ploughshares Foundation. But it has also attracted the support of the National Council of Churches, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Indeed, the SANE Act now has 45 Congressional co-sponsors.
In light of the vast and very costly nuclear weapons enterprise operated by the U.S. government, cutting the nuclear weapons budget makes a lot of sense. The U.S. government currently possesses over five thousand nuclear weapons and, as the New York Times noted in a caustic editorial late last October (“The Bloated Nuclear Weapons Budget”): “The Obama administration, in an attempt to mollify Congressional Republicans, has also committed to modernizing an already hugely expensive complex of nuclear labs and production facilities. Altogether, these and other nuclear-related programs could cost $600 billion or more over the next decade.”

Of course, if America’s vast nuclear arsenal were absolutely necessary to protect U.S. national security, the case for maintaining it would be strengthened. But, with the exception of Russia, no nuclear-armed nation has more than a few hundred nuclear weapons. It is not even clear what military or deterrent purpose is served by maintaining an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons. As Congressman Markey observed: The “U.S. nuclear arsenal could destroy the world five times over.” The New York Times concluded that the United States “does not need to maintain this large an arsenal,” and “it should not be spending so much to do it, especially when Congress is considering deep cuts in vital domestic programs.”

The real nuclear threat to the United States does not lie in the fact that it does not (or will not) possess enough nuclear weapons to deter a nuclear attack. Rather, it is that there is no guarantee that nuclear deterrence works. That is why the U.S. government is so worried about North Korea possessing a few nuclear weapons or Iran possibly obtaining a few. That is also why the U.S. government squanders billions of dollars every year on a “missile defense” shield that is probably ineffective. The grim reality is that, if governments are reckless or desperate, they will use nuclear weapons or perhaps give them to terrorists to attack their foes. While nuclear weapons exist, there is always a danger that they will be used.

Thus, what has made the United States safer in this dangerous world has not been piling up endless numbers of nuclear weapons but, rather, nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, for example — by trading promises of the nuclear powers to disarm for promises of the non-nuclear powers to forgo nuclear weapons development — has persuaded the vast majority of nations not to develop nuclear weapons. In this fashion, the willingness of the U.S. government to decrease its nuclear arsenal (something it has done, although reluctantly) has made Americans safer from nuclear attack by other nations.

As a result of patient U.S. diplomacy, even the leaders of North Korea, one of the worst-governed countries in the world, seem to have shown glimmers of sanity in recent weeks. In late February, they announced that, thanks to an agreement with the U.S. government, they would suspend nuclear tests and uranium enrichment, as well as allow international inspection of their nuclear facilities.
If even the government of North Korea can manage to display a measure of common sense, then is it too much to ask our own government to do the same? Our leaders in Washington could join Representative Markey and his Congressional allies in cutting back the U.S. government’s vast and expensive nuclear doomsday machine and using the savings to provide for the needs of the American people. Surely it’s time to try a little nuclear sanity.

~~  Lawrence S. Wittner - professor of history emeritus at SUNY/Albany ~~

Sunday, March 25, 2012

G-Comm™: No Justice Without Peace

Last night in New York City, by my unscientific estimate, two-thirds of the people on the streets had alcohol in them. A young man celebrating his wedding engagement was stabbed to death. A party in a third floor apartment collapsed into the second floor. And the NYPD was busy beating the only sober people in town, the nonviolent activists at Occupy Wall Street. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the Louisiana National Guard was busy killing people in Iraq. We’ve done something worse than get our priorities wrong when we’ve moved resources to harming people rather than helping people.
The Military Industrial Complex is a banker bailout every year.

It’s over a trillion dollars a year through various departments and as much as all other nations’ militaries combined. It’s over half of federal discretionary spending every year. And that’s not counting the sales to foreign democracies and dictatorships that make the United States the top weapons supplier to the globe and allow our military the odd distinction of fighting most of its wars against weapons produced in the Homeland formerly known as our own country. But it is counting the weapons we give to other countries. Yesterday even the Washington Post said we should stop arming Egypt. It made no mention of Israel. And it is counting the transformation of our local police forces into mini-militaries. With due respect to Mayor Bloomberg the NYPD is not the seventh largest military in the world, but it thinks it is. And we don’t get the trillion dollars a year back. In fact, we borrow it and pay interest on it, hollowing out our economy, creating a giant trade deficit with China, keeping interest rates super low, and periodically crashing Wall Street and bailing it out. And when we have big wars we borrow and spend more money on top of the standard budget. The trillion dollars is to make us ready in case we have a war, but then the war costs are extra.

And the money, for the war preparation and for the wars, goes in large part to a department free from effective oversight, a department that routinely misplaces, loses, or otherwise cannot explain the location of piles of cash larger than what we spend on most other functions of government. Whatever you think of the recent bombing of Libya, the key fact is not that the President never got Congressional approval but that he didn’t need to, financially speaking. The cost of bombing Libya was covered by spare change lying around in a drawer at the Pentagon. And when the Pentagon spends money, it spends a growing share of it on so-called private corporations through contracts that are increasingly awarded without any pretense of competition whatsoever. And the war profiteers, the 1% of the 1%, rake in that loot, but turn around and feed a little pinch of it (it doesn’t take much) to congress members and presidents by funding their campaigns (this is, in large part, who paid for all the TV ads that Marcy Kaptur could afford and Dennis Kucinich could not, in just one example of extirpating the voices of peace from Congress).

And then the profiteers do something else; they build their weapons in little pieces in as many separate congressional districts as possible before assembling them in yet another district. And our misrepresentatives in Washington defend those weapons, even the ones that won’t kill anybody, even the ones designed for 19th century wars, as jobs programs. A Bloomberg News columnist named Amity Shlaes goes so far as to claim that U.S. troops based in over 150 other countries are there as economic aid, and withdrawing them would hurt foreign economies because soldiers buy stuff.

But of course they also kill stuff. Their job is murder, and whether they give the corpses proper Muslim sea burials or urinate on them, the problem is that they’re producing corpses. Other forms of economic aid don’t do that. Other forms of government spending, in fact every other form of government spending, on green energy, on infrastructure, on education, even tax cuts for non-billionaires, produces more jobs than military spending. Military spending is worse than nothing economically. It ought to be the chief target of anyone opposed to poverty, wealth concentration, or economic instability. Yet how many labor unions or child-advocacy groups are taking on the war machine? Military spending also takes money that could have been spent on schools, health, transportation, housing, environmental catastrophe avoidance, and a social safety net and blows it on bombs, drones, aircraft carriers, and billionaires. It is not a series of coincidences that other wealthy nations lacking our level of military spending have a fairer distribution of wealth and have better schools, more sustainable energy systems, and longer life expectancies. Even if you believe the Pentagon is saving your life, it is indisputably shortening it. Military spending should be the top target of anyone who thinks free college would be an improvement over college at the cost of debt slavery.

And, as Eisenhower warned 51 years ago, investment in planning for war does not prevent war, but rather builds momentum in war’s favor. And with the wars, we lose our civil liberties. The ACLU is upset that Obama believes he can legally murder anyone anywhere. But the ACLU is not prepared to address military spending. Military spending should be the top target of anyone who’d like to see habeas corpus or the Bill of Rights restored or expanded. And unlike government spending on mass transit or windmills, military spending destroys our natural environment. The U.S. military is our top consumer of petroleum and itself consumes a large share of the oil it fights its wars over.

Our country is pockmarked with military superfund sites. The first question every mother giving birth in Fallujah asks the doctor is “Is it normal?” And if those pushing for a crisis with Iran manage to get the Straits of Hormuz mined, the Pentagon has plans to send through dolphins. Military spending ought to be the top target of those who want to maintain a habitable ecosystem. But it isn’t, is it? Have you ever heard of the Sierra Club opposing a war?

While fewer U.S. citizens die in war, huge numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, and others lose their lives or see their lives and homes ruined. Refugee crises are a result of war. Military spending ought to be the top target of those opposed to murder. We haven’t eliminated slavery or rape from the world, but we don’t invest our children’s unearned pay in promoting them on a massive scale. Why should war be different? Our own government’s experts know that our wars make us less safe, that if they do not destroy our natural environment they will produce deadly blowback of another form. And as nuclear weapons proliferate, the possibilities for accidental or deliberate Armageddon increase exponentially.

But here’s the good news. If everybody whose dreams and goals are being derailed by out-of-control military spending were to join together to nonviolently oppose it, it wouldn’t have a chance. And that mobilization has begun as part of the Occupy movement. The defunding of the military has not, however, yet begun in any serious way. Cuts made thus far have been either cuts to future dream budgets or cuts to one department that shuffles money to another. The cuts mandated by the failure of the Super Committee would be actual—if minimal—cuts, but there is a push coming from both Congress and the White House to undo them for the military and increase them for everything else.

What keeps this madness humming along and makes wars so hard to end once begun is a pack of twisted logic, fantasies about humanitarian war, and perverse partisanship that opposes wars selectively depending on who is president. In a spirit of sociopathic illness I’ve drafted a list of 10 reasons why the United States keeps troops in Afghanistan, and I’ll close with these 10 reasons. And here’s a warning: If you don’t like sarcasm, I’m really really sorry about that.

1. When you’re setting a record for the longest modern war, cutting it short just increases the chances of somebody breaking your record someday.

2. When Newt Gingrich and Cal Thomas and Donald Trump turn against a war, keeping it going will really confuse Republicans.

3. If we pull U.S. troops out after they have shot children from helicopters, kicked in doors at night, waved Nazi flags, urinated on corpses, massacred villages, and burned Korans it will look like we’re sorry they did those things.

4. U.S. tax dollars have been funding our troops, and through payments for safe passage on roads have also been the top source of income for the Taliban. Unilaterally withdrawing that funding from both sides of a war at the same time would be unprecedented and could devastate the booming Afghan economy.

5. The government we’ve installed in Afghanistan is making progress on its torture program and drug-running and now supports wife beating. But it has not yet mandated invasive ultrasounds. We cannot leave with a job half-finished.

6. We have an enormous prison full of prisoners in Afghanistan, and closing it down would distract us from our essential concentration on pretending to close Guantanamo.

7. Unless we keep “winning” in Afghanistan it will be very hard to generate enthusiasm for our wars in Syria and Iran. And with suicide the top killer of our troops, we cannot allow our men and women to be killing themselves in vain.

8. If we ended the war that created the 2001 authorization to use military force, how would we justify our special forces operations in more than 100 other countries, the elimination of habeas corpus, or the legalization of murdering U.S. citizens? Besides, if we stay a few more years we might find an al Qaeda member.

9. A few hundred billion dollars a year is a small price to pay for weapons bases, a gas pipeline, huge profits for generous campaign funders, and a perfect testing ground for weapons that will be absolutely essential in our next pointless war.

10. Terror hasn’t conceded defeat yet.

~~  David Swanson ~~

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Will Afghan Parliament, U.S. Public or UN Debate the U.S. Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement?

In Afghanistan, the tragic Kandahar killing spree has prompted renewed talk about the proposed U.S. Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement.

At stake in these discussions is the security of Afghanistan, the U.S. and the region.

Citizens in the U.S. and Afghanistan should be urgently exchanging their views or concerns about this partnership.

Many are not even aware of it.

Currently, citizens of Syria and the world can at least discuss Mr Kofi Annan’s warning that the situation in Syria should be handled “very, very carefully” to avoid an escalation that would de-stabilize the region, after an earlier warning against further militarization of the Syrian crisis. The crisis in Afghanistan is as severe as the one in Syria, and it is more chronic. 2 million Afghans have been killed in the wars of the past 4 decades. But not a single diplomat is warning against the further militarization of the Afghan crisis.

The previous UN Envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, did try. “The most important reason for my bitterness was my ever-growing disagreement with Washington’s strategy in Afghanistan,” Kai Eide writes, in his book Power Struggle over Afghanistan. “It had become increasingly dominated by military strategies, forces, and offensives. Urgent civilian and political requirements were treated as appendices to the military tasks. The UN had never been really involved or consulted by Washington on critical strategy-related questions, nor had even the closest NATO partners. More importantly, Afghan authorities had mostly been spectators to the formation of a strategy aimed at solving the conflict in their own country.”
It has taken the tragic killing-spree of 16 civilians in Kandahar for the world to notice the ANGER that the war has enflamed in the hearts of both U.S. soldiers and Afghan mothers.

Military and foreign policy elites in Washington have encouraged a conventional presumption that the ‘war on terror’ requires a long-term U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. Underlying that presumption is a deeper assumption that ‘terrorism’ can be resolved through war, that is, a supposition that humanity can somehow counter ‘terrorism’ by killing as many ‘terrorists’ as possible, regardless of the deadly ANGER these killings, so similar in themselves to terrorist acts, must necessarily fuel, not to mention the costly ‘collateral damage.’

Tax-payers from the 50 coalition countries involved in the Afghan war should be alarmed at how and where their money is spent. They should be considering how they would feel were they offered $2000 in compensation for the murder of a child, husband, father or mother, the compensation NATO handed out ‘ex-gratia’ (with no admission of its own wrongdoing) to the families of the 16 children, women and men slaughtered in their sleep on March 11, 2012.

Will the Afghan Parliament, the U.S. public or the UN debate the 10 year U.S. war strategy in Afghanistan?

Will the Afghan Parliament, the U.S. public or the UN debate the U.S. Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement?

The Afghan Parliament

A few Afghan Parliament lawmakers have already raised a protest following the Kandahar killings.

Following the U.S. decision to move the soldier who allegedly committed the massacre to Kuwait, a Kandahar lawmaker, Abdul Khaliq Balakarzai, said that President Hamid Karzai should respond to the U.S. by refusing to sign a strategic partnership agreement.

On 14th Nov 2011, the National Security Advisor to President Karzai, Dr. Rangin Spanta, had announced that the Strategic Partnership Agreement will be finalized by the Afghan Parliament. Will that be the case, or did Dr. Rangin Spanta lie to pacify public sentiment?

Note that last year, the parallel Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement was put to the Iraqi Parliament for approval and was rejected, denying the U.S. long-term, uniformed military presence in Iraq. Neither the Iraqi Parliament nor the Iraqi public wanted the Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement to be signed. They deemed that it was not in their interests. This could be the case as well in Afghanistan, if the Obama/Karzai administrations allowed democratic parliamentary processes.

The American Public

60% of the U.S. public believes that the war is not worth its cost in life and expense, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News Poll.

However, Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates have already insisted that low public approval of the Afghan war won’t change (U.S.) policy. “I think if you look at polling in almost all of our 49 coalition partners’ countries, public opinion is in doubt,” said Defence Secretary Robert Gates. “Public opinion would be majority, in terms of majority, against their participation. I would just say it’s obviously the responsibility of leaders to pay attention to public opinion, but at the end of the day, their responsibility is to look out for the public interest and look to the long term.”

So, whether led by the previous Republican, George Bush, or wanting-a-second term Democrat Barack Obama, there’s not much likelihood the U.S. government will value a poll showing that 60% of the U.S. people want the war to end.

The UN

An interesting article dated 11th July 2011 had this to say about possible UN silence over Afghan public sentiment on the U.S. Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement: “The Afghan public has outrightly rejected the U.S. plans as the results of a survey conducted by UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) suggest. UNAMA with its 23 offices in Afghanistan conducted the survey across the country some two months back and hasn’t published it. Although the survey’s findings are widely known, if published, the stark survey results will undermine the U.S.’ future strategic plans.”

If this remains true, global citizens should request that the UN disclose the wishes of the Afghan public as reflected in the survey, and demonstrate that it is still committed to diplomatic solutions and the interests of the people of Afghanistan.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a report on Thursday that the UN mission in Afghanistan should place a greater priority on protecting human rights, raising concern about widespread human rights violations by the Afghan Local Police, a U.S. funded paramilitary program that has been also questioned by Human Rights Watch. He made his statement in advance of a UN Security Council vote next week to renew the mandate of the political and development mission. Will the Security Council members hear him? Will the domestic constituencies of the Security Council nations?
Perhaps Kai Eide should be invited to play the same UN role that Mr Kofi Annan is playing in Syria today. Perhaps, through Kai Eide, the views of Afghan and global civilians could finally be heard.
Just as the Global Commission on Drug Policy, (comprising four ex-Presidents and prominent diplomats including Mr. Kofi Annan), concluded that the war against drugs had failed and recommended to break the taboo for a global debate, a Global Commission on Terrorism Policy should be established, and taboos on a healthy debate about the messy Afghan war and dire humanitarian situation should be broken.

In May 2011, Oxfam issued an urgent call to promote the accountability of the Afghan National Security Forces, entitling their report ‘No Time to Lose’. There is indeed no time for U.S. and Afghan citizens to lose in questioning the last 10 years of U.S. military strategy. Failure to debate the U.S. Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement could perpetuate killing sprees. There is too much to lose, too many more soldiers to be debased into monsters, too many more innocent lives to be lost.

~~  The Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers ~~

Thursday, March 22, 2012

G-Fin™: Fact Check » More Drilling Did Not Lower Gas Prices

It’s the political cure-all for high gas prices: Drill here, drill now. But more U.S. drilling has not changed how deeply the gas pump drills into your wallet, math and history show.

A statistical analysis of 36 years of monthly, inflation-adjusted gasoline prices and U.S. domestic oil production by The Associated Press shows no statistical correlation between how much oil comes out of U.S. wells and the price at the pump.

If more domestic oil drilling worked as politicians say, you’d now be paying about $2 a gallon for gasoline. Instead, you’re paying the highest prices ever for March.

Political rhetoric about the blame over gas prices and the power to change them - whether Republican claims now or Democrats’ charges four years ago - is not supported by cold, hard figures. And that’s especially true about oil drilling in the U.S. More oil production in the United States does not mean consistently lower prices at the pump.

Sometimes prices increase as American drilling ramps up. That’s what has happened in the past three years. Since February 2009, U.S. oil production has increased 15% when seasonally adjusted. Prices in those three years went from $2.07 per gallon to $3.58. It was a case of drilling more and paying much more.

U.S. oil production is back to the same level it was in March 2003, when gas cost $2.10 per gallon when adjusted for inflation. But that’s not what prices are now.

That’s because oil is a global commodity and U.S. production has only a tiny influence on supply. Factors far beyond the control of a nation or a president dictate the price of gasoline.

When you put the inflation-adjusted price of gas on the same chart as U.S. oil production since 1976, the numbers sometimes go in the same direction, sometimes in opposite directions. If drilling for more oil meant lower prices, the lines on the chart would consistently go in opposite directions. A basic statistical measure of correlation found no link between the two, and outside statistical experts confirmed those calculations.

“Drill, baby, drill has nothing to do with it,“ said Judith Dwarkin, chief energy economist at ITG investment research. Two other energy economists said the same thing and experts in the field have been making that observation for decades.

The statistics directly contradict the title of GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s 2008 book “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less,“ as well as the campaign-trail claims from the GOP presidential candidates.

Earlier this month, GOP front-runner Mitt Romney said of his solution to higher gas prices: “I can cut through the baloney ... and just tell him, ‘Mr. President, open up drilling in the Gulf, open up drilling in ANWR (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). Open up drilling in continental shelf, drill in North Dakota, drill in Oklahoma and Texas.‘“

Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said on the Senate floor last week, “With oil prices above $100 a barrel and gasoline soaring toward $4 a gallon, greater production is not a political opportunity, it is a legislative imperative.“

Supporters of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline say it would bring 25 million barrels of oil to the United States a month. That’s the same increase in U.S. production that occurred between February and November last year. Monthly gas prices went up a dime a gallon in that time.

The late 1980s and 1990s show exactly how domestic drilling is not related to gas prices.

Seasonally adjusted U.S. oil production dropped steadily from February 1986 until three years ago. But starting in March 1986, inflation-adjusted gas prices fell below the $2-a-gallon mark and stayed there for most of the rest of the 1980s and 1990s. Production between 1986 and 1999 dropped by nearly one-third. If the drill-now theory were correct, prices should have soared. Instead they went down by nearly a dollar.

The AP analysis used Energy Department figures for regular unleaded gas prices adjusted for inflation to 2012 dollars, oil production and oil demand. The figures go back to January 1976, the earliest the Energy Department keeps figures on unleaded gas prices. University of South Carolina statistics professor John Grego, New York University statistics professor Edward Melnick and David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor, looked at the analysis, ran their own calculations, including several complicated formulas, and came to the same conclusion.

When U.S. production goes up, the price of gas “is certainly not going down,“ Melnick said. “The data does not suggest that whatsoever.“

The calculations “help make the point that U.S. production and demand have little to do with the price of gasoline in the U.S., and lend support to the notion that there is not a great deal we in the U.S., acting alone, can do to affect the price of gasoline,“ Peterson wrote in an email. He pointed out that Energy Department figures show that gas prices in the U.S. seem to rise and fall similarly to gas prices in Europe, showing that it has little to do with American drilling.

And that’s the key. It’s a world market, economists say.

Unlike natural gas or electricity, the United States alone does not have the power to change the supply-and-demand equation in the world oil market, said Christopher Knittel, a professor of energy economics at MIT. American oil production is about 11% of the world’s output, so even if the U.S. were to increase its oil production by 50% - that is more than drilling in the Arctic, increased public-lands and offshore drilling, and the Canadian pipeline would provide - it would at most cut gas prices by 10%.

“There are not many markets where the United States can’t impose its will on market outcomes,“ Knittel said. “This is one we can’t, and it’s hard for the average American to understand that and it’s easy for politicians to feed off that.“

If drilling activity rises around the globe for a sustained period of time, gasoline prices can fall as that new supply eventually finds its way to market, but the U.S. can’t do it alone, oil analysts say.

Politicians - especially those in the party that’s not occupying the White House - have long harped on high gas prices when expedient. Then-Senator Barack Obama said in 2008, when he was running for president, that “here in Ohio, you’re paying nearly $3.70 a gallon for gas, 2-1/2 times what it cost when George Bush took office.“

But Obama, who has seen gas prices go up 73% since he took office, was singing a different tune last week in his weekly radio address: “The truth is: The price of gas depends on a lot of factors that are often beyond our control. Unrest in the Middle East can tighten global oil supply. Growing nations like China or India adding cars to the road increases demand. But one thing we should control is fraud and manipulation that can cause prices to spike even further.“

The political party of the president doesn’t seem to matter to the price at the pump either. Since 1976, the average monthly gas price, adjusted for inflation, during Democratic presidencies has been $2.25; under Republicans it’s been $2.34. Obama had the steepest monthly average at $3.05 and Bill Clinton the cheapest at $1.68.

When Bush and running mate Dick Cheney campaigned in 2000, they argued that as oil executives they could get oil prices down, with Bush saying, “I would work with our friends in OPEC to convince them to open up the spigot, to increase the supply.“

Yet it was during the last few months of Bush’s term in 2008 that gas prices hit their highest: $4.27 when adjusted for inflation.

~~  AP ~~

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

G-Comm™: Why The Huge Spike in Oil Prices? “Peak Oil” or Wall Street Speculation?

Since around October last year,  the price of crude oil on world futures markets has exploded. Different people have different explanations. The most common one is the belief in financial markets that a war between either Israel and Iran or the USA and Iran or all three is imminent. Another camp argues that the price is rising unavoidably because the world has passed what they call “Peak Oil”—the point on an imaginary Gaussian Bell Curve (see graph above) at which half of all world known oil reserves have been depleted and the remaining oil will decline in quantity at an accelerating pace with rising price.

Both the war danger and peak oil explanations are off base. As in the astronomic price run-up in the Summer of 2008 when oil in futures markets briefly hit $147 a barrel, oil today is rising because of the speculative pressure on oil futures markets from hedge funds and major banks such as Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and most notably, Goldman Sachs, the bank always present when there are big bucks to be won for little effort betting on a sure thing.  They’re getting a generous assist from the US Government agency entrusted with regulating financial derivatives, the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC).

Since the beginning of October 2011, some six months ago, the price of Brent Crude Oil Futures on the ICE Futures exchange has risen from just below $100 a barrel to over $126 per barrel, a rise of more than 25%. Back in 2009 oil was $30.

Yet demand for crude oil worldwide is not rising, but rather is declining in the same period.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that the world oil supply rose by 1.3 million barrels a day in the last three months of 2011 while world demand increased by just over half that during that same time period.Gasoline usage is down in the US by 8%, Europe by 22% and even in China. Recession across much of the European Union, a deepening recession/depression in the United States and slowdown in Japan have reduced global oil demand while new discoveries are coming online daily and countries like Iraq are increasing supply after years of war. A brief spike in China’s oil purchases in January and February had to do with a decision last December to build their Strategic Petroleum Reserve and is expected to return to more normal import levels by the end of this month.

Why then the huge spike in oil prices?

Playing with ‘Paper Oil’

A brief look at how today’s “paper oil” markets function is useful. Since Goldman Sachs bought J. Aron & Co., a savvy commodities trader in the 1980’s, trading in crude oil has gone from a domain of buyers and sellers of spot or physical oil to a market where unregulated speculation in oil futures, bets on a price of a given crude on a specific future date, usually in 30 or 60 or 90 days, and not actual supply-demand of physical oil determine daily oil prices.

In recent years, a Wall Street-friendly (and Wall Street financed) US Congress has passed several laws to help the banks that were interested in trading oil futures, among them one that allowed the bankrupt Enron to get away with a financial ponzi scheme worth billions in 2001 before it went bankrupt.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA) was drafted by the man who today is President Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. The CFMA in effect gave over-the-counter (between financial institutions) derivatives trading in energy futures free reign, absent any US Government supervision, as a result of the financially influential lobbying pressure of the Wall Street banks.  Oil and other energy products were exempt under what came to be called the “Enron Loophole.”

In 2008 during a popular outrage against Wall Street banks for causing the financial crisis, Congress finally passed a law over the veto of President George Bush to “close the Enron Loophole.” And as of January 2011, under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform act, the CFTC was given authority to impose position caps on oil traders beginning in January 2011.

Curiously, these limits have not yet been implemented by the CFTC. In a recent interview Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont stated that the CFTC doesn’t “have the will” to enact these limits and “needs to obey the law.” He adds, “What we need to do is…limit the amount of oil any one company can control on the oil futures market. The function of these speculators is not to use oil but to make profits from speculation, drive prices up and sell.“1 While he has made noises of trying to close the loopholes, CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler has yet to do so. Notably,Gensler is a former executive of, you guessed, Goldman Sachs. The enforcement by the CFTC remains non-existent.

The role of key banks along with oil majors such as BP in manipulating a new oil price bubble since last Autumn, one detached from the physical reality of supply-demand calculations of real oil barrels, is being noted by a number of sources.

A ‘Gambling Casino…’

Current estimates are that speculators, that is futures traders such as banks and hedge funds who have no intent of taking physical delivery but only of turning a paper profit, today control some 80% of the energy futures market, up from 30% a decade ago.  CFTC Chair Gary Gensler, perhaps to maintain a patina of credibility while his agency ignored the legal mandate of Congress,  declared last year in reference to oil markets that “huge inflows of speculative money create a self-fulfilling prophecy that drives up commodity prices.“ 2 In early March, Kuwaiti Oil Minister Minister Hani Hussein said in an interview broadcast on state television, “Under the supply and demand theory, oil prices today are not justified.“3

Michael Greenberger, professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and a former CFTC regulator who has tried to draw public attention to the consequences of the US Government’s decisions to allow unbridled speculation and manipulation of energy prices by big banks and funds, recently noted, “There are 50 studies showing that speculation adds an incredible premium to the price of oil, but somehow that hasn’t seeped into the conventional wisdom,“ Greenberger said. “Once you have the market dominated by speculators, what you really have is a gambling casino.“ 4

The result of a permissive US Government regulation of oil markets has created the ideal conditions whereby a handful of strategic banks and financial institutions, interestingly the same ones dominating world trade in oil derivatives and the same ones who own the shares of the major oil trading exchange in London, ICE Futures, are able to manipulate huge short-term swings in the price we pay for oil or gasoline or countless other petroleum-based products.

We are in the midst of one of those swings now, one made worse by the Israeli saber-rattling rhetoric over Iran’s nuclear program. Let me go on record stating categorically my firm conviction that Israel will not engage in a direct war against Iran nor will Washington. But the effect of the war rhetoric is to create the ideal backdrop for a massive speculative spike in oil. Some analysts speak of oil at $150 by summer.

Hillary Clinton just insured that the oil price will continue to ride high for months on fears of a war with Iran by delivering a new ultimatum to Iran on the nuclear issue in talks with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, “by year’s end or else…” 5

Curiously, one of the real drivers of the current oil price bubble is the Obama Administration’s economic sanctions recently imposed on oil transactions of the Central Bank of Iran. By pressuring Japan, South Korea and the EU not to import Iranian oil or face punitive actions, Washington has reportedly forced a huge drop in oil supply from Iran to the world market in recent weeks, giving a turbo boost to the Wall Street derivatives play on oil. In a recent OpEd in the London Financial Times, Ian Bremmer and David Gordon of the Eurasia Group wrote, “… removing too much Iranian oil from the world’s energy supply could cause an oil price spike that would halt the recovery even as it does some financial damage to Iran. For perhaps the first time, sanctions have the potential to be ‘too successful,‘ hurting the sanctioners as much as the sanctioned.”

Iran is shipping 300,000 to 400,000 a barrels a day less than its usual 2.5 million barrels a day, according to Bloomberg. Last week, the US Energy Information Administration said in a report that much of that Iranian oil isn’t being exported because insurers won’t issue policies for the shipments.6

The issue of unbridled and unregulated oil derivatives speculation by a handful of big banks is not a new issue. A June 2006 US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on “The Role of Market Speculation in rising oil and gas prices,” noted, “…there is substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices.”

The report pointed out that the Commodity Futures Trading Trading Commission had been mandated by Congress to ensure that prices on the futures market reflect the laws of supply and demand rather than manipulative practices or excessive speculation. The US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future delivery . . . causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.” Further, the CEA directs the CFTC to establish such trading limits “as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden.”7

Where is the CFTC now that we need such limits? As Senator Sanders correctly noted, the CFTC appears to ignore the law to the benefit of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street friends who dominate the trade in oil futures.

The moment that it becomes clear that the Obama Administration has acted to prevent any war with Iran by opening various diplomatic back-channels and that Netanyahu is merely trying to use the war threats to enhance his tactical position to horse trade with an Obama Administration he despises, the price of oil is poised to drop like a stone within days. Until then, the key oil derivatives insiders are laughing all the way to the bank. The effect of the soaring oil prices on fragile world economic growth, especially in countries like China is very negative as well.

1 Morgan Korn, Oil Speculators Must Be Stopped and the CFTC “Needs to Obey the Law”: Sen. Bernie Sanders, Daily Ticker, March 7, 2012

2 Ibid.

3 UpstreamOnline, Kuwait’s oil minister believes current world oil prices are not justified, adding that the Gulf state’s current production rate will not affect its level of strategic reserves, 12 March 2012

4 Peter S. Goodman, Behind Gas Price Increases, Obama’s Failure To Crack Down On Speculators,  The Huffington Post, March 15, 2012

5 Tom Parfitt,  US ‘tells Russia to warn Iran of last chance’ , The Telegraph, 14 March 2012

6 Steve Levine, Obama administration brushes off oil price impact of Iran sanctions, Foreign Policy, March 8, 2012

7 F. William Engdahl, ‘Perhaps 60% of today’s oil price is pure speculation’, Global Research, May 2, 2008

~~  F. William Engdahl ~~

G-Comm™: Murder in Afghanistan

After an American sergeant marauded through an Afghan village methodically shooting unarmed men, women and children, Secretary of State Clinton argued that “this is not who we are.” The president chimed in that we care about Afghan children as much as our own.

While high officials cannot avoid mouthing such mealy Orwellian pieties, that doesn’t mean that we citizens have to sleepily accept their mendacity.

Beg pardon, Madame Secretary and Mr. President, this is who we are. If we really cared about Afghan children as much as our own, surely we would not have so quickly turned to war as our habitual first resort.

No doubt Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama dearly want to wind down our feckless venture there. But the main reason war in Afghanistan has not worked is because official policy so closely resembles, especially from the perspective of the Afghans, the cool murderousness of the deranged sergeant.

It doesn’t have to be this way. But for it to change, we must look much more closely at ourselves and our militarism. It is hard to look at ourselves. We prefer the platitudes, the easy stereotypes of “us” as good guys and “them” as bad guys.

And so we lapse into the role of what one anthropologist has aptly called “technocratic colonialists.” Our first and most arrogant rationalization for invading Iraq or Afghanistan is that we know best. We know more about democracy. We know more about the judicious “investment” of military violence for a supposed long-term return in security. We know “our” oil somehow ended up under “their” sand and we have the right to control it.

But two things completely undercut and negate this “superior” knowledge. First, we remain abysmally ignorant about the culture, customs and languages of the countries we invade. The best and the brightest brought us Vietnam by way of the domino theory that communism would spread through the region if we did not draw the line. They seemed to have no idea that a thousand years of nationalistic fervor ensured that the North Vietnamese would no more tolerate the Chinese in their territory than they would the French or the Americans. We conveniently overlooked the fact that Ho Chi Minh admired Thomas Jefferson.

Second, in order to rationalize the subjection of distant peoples no different from ourselves to our campaigns of shock and awe, we have to think of them as subhuman—less real than ourselves. Inevitably and tragically, this means not valuing their children as much as our own.

The worst technocratic symptom in our condescending attitude toward the Muslim masses of Afghanistan and Pakistan is the malevolent use of robotic aircraft flown by remote control from bases on the American prairie. Is the impersonality of these dealers of death so different from the dissociation of the rampaging sergeant? In both cases damage is called collateral when it is pivotal, because it only gives a further spin to the wheel of revenge. The technological efficiency of our drones is altogether undercut by the loss of good will toward us. Meanwhile, as we remain bogged down in Afghanistan, Al Quaeda is said to have seeped into 60 other countries. Do we plan to invade them all?

General Petraeus wisely required his officers to read Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. Through building schools for girls in the outposts of the Afpak region, Mortenson provides an alternative model for turning adversaries of America into friends. But building schools and occupying a nation by force will never work in concert, however much our well-intentioned military leaders might wish. It is long past time to admit that war does not only drive isolated men insane, war itself is insane.

~~  Winslow Myers ~~

Saturday, March 17, 2012

G-comm™: Ireland: Can Nonviolence Prevail Through Generations of ‘Troubles’?

It’s hard to write about nonviolence in Northern Ireland when so much violence has happened and so much of it has been glorified, even sacralized. Growing up as a Catholic in Ireland, as I did, you are presented with one outlook and one outlook alone. Obey the word of God and love thy neighbor, unless he’s a Protestant.

For my generation and the ones before and ever after, the creation of a free Irish Nation and a unified island is a dream worth fighting for. Countless men, women and children fought and laid down their lives so that their children might have a chance at peace and freedom.

Some of the leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) are regarded as some of Ireland’s greatest heroes. Michael Collins, James Stephens and Charles Kickham are names that every school child knows. Heroes all!

The IRB staged the 1916 Easter rising which formed the Irish Free State and later became the IRA but in the infancy stage it was a much more ideological than military organization. My great grandfather has an IRB medal. It was awarded to him for bravery to the cause of Irish Freedom. It has pride of place in my Uncle’s farmhouse in Ireland. The medal was handed down to him from his father. His father’s father received it for being part of a guerilla style ‘flying column,’ in the late 1800’s. The actual recognized act was the physical dismantling of a stone bridge that was used to cross a river between a British Army garrison and a local town and regional center. Through many visits to the bridge under cover of darkness, my great grandfather and other members of his brigade chiseled and loosened the rocks and stones in the bridge until finally it was destroyed. A primitive terrorist-type act; is a terrorist act nonetheless, since civilians were likely to be hurt when it collapsed.

For me as an adult, the most striking thing has been the realization that my perspective on violence has been imbued with what I can only describe as a romanticized view. Terrorism is, of course, defined as a crime but by a Jihadist it’s a holy war. Depending on your viewpoint, everything is different. Isn’t war then, just as much a crime, depending on your viewpoint? As Kent D. Shifferd writes in his book From War to Peace: A Guide to the Next Hundred Years; sadly, the truth remains, “whatever your political stance, Bombs fall on people and objects, not on ideas.”

Ireland has a large and long history of violence, driven on by economic factors and under the banner of Religion. Many men served in both World Wars. Another relation of mine took “the King’s Shilling” and fought for the British. Risking public shame and ignominy, some Catholics fought for the crown for no better reason than a wage. The pay was more than any Irish peasant could make and it even afforded men enough to send money home to keep up their own families and farms. Irish fighters also fought in the Mexican-American war of 1846 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick_Battalion) so its clear to see that there is a history of war for many reasons in our Irish past.

Bobby Sands is one of the best-known Catholic martyrs; he died during a nonviolent hunger strike in a makeshift prison nine miles outside of Belfast. He was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. During his hunger strike he became a member of the United Kingdom Parliament but died 25 days after being elected. His nonviolent death caused a new wave of violent riots in Belfast and cemented his image in Republican lore. Every child knew who he was but none was told of why he was in prison first. He was an active member of a military campaign; he was a major suspect in both bombings and shootings. That’s not what you see in the streets though. You see children wearing Glasgow Celtic (the Catholic team in the Glasgow Old Firm) Jerseys with Sands’ name printed on the back. You still see young boys playing and fighting trying to get the ‘Brits out.’

Maggie Thatcher—then the British Prime Minister—made certain that her people all knew that Sands was not nonviolent and that they wouldn’t care if Sands lived or died, as he was no Gandhi. She famously told the House of Commons in 1981 “Mr. Sands was a convicted criminal. He chose to take his own life. It was a choice that his organization did not allow to many of its victims.” From our side of the fence it was political martyrdom of the highest degree. The crimes he was arrested for, he would not have committed if there were not a reason to. He was defending his own land.

I was raised to be a staunch Republican, to believe our side and be a good patriot. No one can ever question the cruel foreign rule Britain forced on the Irish people, but not until I became an adult and learned how to think for myself, did I ever question that the way to fight oppression was with violence. The idea behind democracy is to inform the electorate and it clearly works poorly in a pool of information and influence the size of whatever you’re handed down. Education is meant to increase your intellectual inheritance, and, for me, it has as I ponder the best way forward for my beloved homeland.

Loretta Napoleoni covers the point I am trying to make in her book Terrorism and the Economy: “What is the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist? It depends on the angle from which one is looking.” I can regard my Irish heroes from the past with reverence whilst knowing that there is a better path for our future.

~~  Stephen Quirke - studies at Portland State University in Oregon ~~

G-Comm™: Syria and the U.N.

Those who have systematically blocked structural reform at the United Nations indirectly have the blood of the Syrian opposition on their hands.

From its creation, the U.N. was set up to give power and special advantage to the victors of World War II, an event now almost seven decades behind us. Since then the growing family of nations has changed much in its geopolitical divisions, but infinitely more in the nature and number of its common security challenges. It is in the interest of the entire planet to prevent a descent into instability in the greater region of which Syria is a part. When China and Russia vetoed condemnation of the brutal Assad regime, they demonstrated the grotesque obsolescence of the way the U.N. is organized.

The politics of who gains from Assad’s momentary success (or from the collapse of his regime, which is inevitable in spite of the present agony) in exterminating brave Syrian dissidents are tribal, regional, and very complex, involving consequences for Alawites, Christians, Sunnis, Shia, Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, just to name a few.

Still, one can imagine a U.N. peacekeeping force that had real resources and real teeth, and the kind of backing that could allow a disinterested, independent U.N. commission to set it in rapid motion to prevent or mitigate conflicts like the horror unfolding in Syria.

It is also important to bear in mind that though the media is focusing on Syria at the moment, there are five shooting wars presently continuing in Africa, leaving aside the deeply questionable, hideously expensive and now inconclusive U.S. initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given how much the U.S. has risked in such unilateral campaigns, why do we refuse to risk ceding just a little power to international institutions that could end up serving our security needs better than we ourselves could? They could do this by helping to stabilize chaotic regions without prejudicing masses of people in other parts of the world against the perceived ham-handedness of the U.S. military.

They could also do it by addressing directly the implicit motivation behind the Chinese and Russian veto: the sale of arms. The shadowy world of the international arms trade does not necessarily cause all the violence of war, but surely it intensifies it by quantum leaps. Lo and behold, the top five countries profiting from the arms trade surprise the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the USA, UK, France, Russia, and China (the USA being number one by far). Conventional arms sales complement the much-discussed nuclear hypocrisy of the U.S. and Israel, who are hell-bent on denying to Iran the very weapons of mass destruction that they themselves are deeply reluctant to set aside for the common good.

Hard as it is to imagine it happening, one radical reform of the U.N. would be to give much more power and responsibility in the body to those countries that, by simple indices, are most free of totalitarianism, corruption, and trade in weapons. Were I in charge of the U.S., why would I be afraid of ceding some power to encourage international stability to the leaders of countries like Costa Rica, countries that are not in the crosshairs of terrorists, countries that would be motivated to act disinterestedly in the best interests of the entire family of nations large and small.

One reason the U.S. government may be so fearful of giving over to the U.N. any management of conflicts that bear on its professed interests is that these interests may ultimately be not the welfare of all, but rather the economic interests of a few gigantic multi-national energy corporations and weapons manufacturers and their representatives in the American Congress. But the same goes, surely, for the other permanent members of the Security Council. This may constitute one of the biggest bottlenecks to obvious reforms that would increase everyone’s security on this increasingly small planet. It is a choice between citizens demanding common-sense changes that strengthen the U.N., reduce the arms trade, and give new impetus to disinterested peacebuilding and peacekeeping or more helpless hand wringing and name calling over tragedies like Syria.

~~  Winslow Myers ~~

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

G-Comm™: The Rhetoric of Threat is Lethally Obsolete

When President Obama spoke to the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbying organization, he provided the required red meat America’s support for Israel remains drum tight, and war on Iran to prevent their acquisition of nuclear weapons continues to be a viable option. Mr. Obama’s pandering (mitigated, in fairness, by his continued commitment to diplomacy) ignored Israel’s own nuclear weapons, and its government’s obdurate support for the settlements that keep eroding Palestinian territory. No doubt it seemed inappropriate to examine the ongoing suffering of the Palestinians with that particular audience or even the potential suffering of people in Iran and Israel should the dogs of war let loose. He chose instead to use us against them language to strengthen his chances for election. Incumbents and candidates must do this in our polarized culture. Not only Jewish-American and Israeli conservatives but also Romney and friends will hold Obama’s feet to the fire.

Political leaders, democratic or autocratic, find it nearly impossible not to fall into the simplistic rhetoric of threat. It’s as old as the nation-state. What’s new is the destructive power of the weapons with which governments can back up their bluster. It raises the stakes in the war of words. The vicious circle of threat rhetoric becomes self-sustaining, fueled by the magnitude of the weapons and the fears they engender. Leaders of smaller countries take note of what happened to Kaddafi when he voluntarily renounced his weapons program. Proliferation continues, leading only in one possible direction over the waterfall. As Einstein asserted, we cannot solve a problem on the same level from which the problem arose. There is no fighting fire with fire in this case. Militant rhetoric is an escalation toward confrontations that will always have the Cuban Missile Crisis as their archetype.

In this cycle of escalation we deny aspects of ourselves that we find it difficult to accept greed, aggression, secret manipulation and project those denied attributes onto them, the other. We assume that our nuclear weapons are purely defensive, a deterrence against malign intent. Their nuclear weapons (or possible nuclear weapons program in the case of Iran) are the very shape of evil.

Even domestically we define ourselves more in terms of whom we are against than what we have in common with those we think of as outside our circle of belonging. This process has hollowed out the vital center in our politics, which Senator Olympia Snowe (ME) has protested by forgoing re-election. It fuels as well the unwarranted influence of media buffoons like Rush Limbaugh, some of whose advertising underwriters have finally begun to leave him as they ought to have long ago.

Failure to understand projection and enemy-imaging internationally could be fatal. Of course we should continue to call Iran’s leaders on their anti-Semitism. It might also help to acknowledge our own role in creating the unconstructive dynamic between Iran and the U.S., going back to our covert 1953 interference in their elections. Our stereotype of Iran as part of the axis of evil imploded in 2009 with the images of brave Iranian citizens risking their lives to demonstrate for more self-determination. Surely the aspirations of the Iranian people, 80 million of them, neither to be bombed nor ruled unjustly have not changed. The only change was our temporary realization that they were not enemies worthy of annihilation, but lovers of democracy like ourselves. Now in 2012 they are becoming demons again. Can we not see the arbitrary quality of this dynamic?

We need to base our dialogue with adversaries on the choice between mutual suicide and mutual survival, encouraging our leaders to use language that transforms vicious circles of alienation and threat into virtuous circles of cooperation and prevention. Robert Frost once wrote: Nature within her inmost self divides/To trouble men with having to take sides. True as far as it goes but now the fission-power of the stars, which our scientists unlocked in the New Mexican desert in 1945 and unleashed on Hiroshima, challenges our inmost selves to move beyond taking sides and end our dangerous rhetorical games of nuclear chicken.

~~  Winslow Myers ~~

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Ron Paul: An Administration Gone Rogue

Have certain parts of the Constitution become irrelevant, as a former Republican leader once told me at a Foreign Affairs Committee hearing? At the time, I was told that demanding a Congressional declaration of war before invading Iraq, as Article I Section 8 of the Constitution requires, was unnecessary and anachronistic. Congress and the president then proceeded without a Constitutional declaration and the disastrous Iraq invasion was the result.

Last week, Obama administration officials made it clear that even the fig leaf of Congressional participation provided by the 2003 “authorization” to use force in Iraq was to be ignored as well.  In a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stated clearly and repeatedly that the administration felt it was legally justified to use military force against Syria solely with “international permission”. Such “international permission” could come by way of the United Nations, NATO, or some other international body. Secretary Panetta then told Senator Sessions that depending on the situation, the administration would consider informing Congress of its decision and might even seek authorization after the fact.

While Senator Sessions expressed surprise at the casual audacity of Panetta in making this statement, in reality his was just a bluntly stated explanation of what has been, de facto, the case for many years. When President Obama committed the US military to a pre-emptive war against Libya last year, for example, Congress was kept completely out of the process. Likewise, military action in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and so on, proceed without a Congressional declaration. In fact, we haven’t had a proper, constitutional declaration of war since 1942, yet the US military has been engaged in Korea, Lebanon, Iraq, Bosnia, Liberia, Haiti, and Libya with only UN resolutions as the authority. Congress’s only role has been authorizing funds, which it always does without question, because one must “support the troops”.

Of course we should reserve our harshest criticism for Congress rather than the Administration. If the people’s branch of government abrogates its Constitutional authority to the Executive branch, who is to blame? Who is to blame that Congress as a body will not stand up and demand that the president treat the Constitution as more than an anachronistic piece of paper, or merely a set of aspirations and guidelines? The Constitution is the law of the land and for Congress to allow it to be flouted speaks as badly about Congress as it does about a president who seeks to do the flouting.

Just last week the administration announced that it would begin providing material support to the rebels who seek to overthrow the Syrian government. Was Congress involved in this decision to take sides in what may develop into a full-fledged civil war? And what of reports that US special forces may already be operating inside Syria? Still, Congress sits silently as its authority is undermined. Does anybody really wonder why approval numbers for Congress are so low?

Many of my colleagues who stood by as then-President Bush used the military as a kind of king’s army are now calling for Congress to act against this president for openly admitting that is his intent. I agree it is time for Congressional action in response to these attacks on our Constitution, but the solution is simple and Constitutional. The solution is simply voting to withhold funds, since Congress has the power of the purse. No money for undeclared wars!

Thursday, March 01, 2012

AAA: WV Gasoline Prices Jump Almost 16 Cents in a Week

The current average price for a gallon of regular, unleaded gasoline in West Virginia is $3.803, up 15.4 cents per gallon from a week ago.

The price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil fell by $1.21 per barrel today to settle at $108.70 at the close formal trading on the NYMEX.

Recent weeks have seen crude prices surge higher on geopolitical tension with Iran, signs of economic improvement in the U.S., and signs of progress toward addressing European sovereign debt concerns.

Last weekend saw little in the way of market-moving news, and strength in the U.S. dollar — supported by comments made by German Chancellor Angela Merkel regarding the danger to the European Union (EU) of failing to implement a Greek bailout — provided downward pressure on crude prices.

Crude oil futures are priced in U.S. dollars.

As the dollar strengthens relative to currencies abroad, the price of oil becomes more expensive for those holding foreign currencies.

Oil futures become a less attractive investment, which exerts downward pressure on prices.

While WTI price is a slight pullback from last Friday (a 298-day high) it is still the highest settlement price to begin a week since the beginning of May 2011.

Despite only four trading days due to the Presidents’ Day holiday, last week’s increase in crude prices was the third largest since the start of 2009 and the largest since the first week of March 2011, when prices surged above $100 per barrel for the first time since 2008.

The price increase last March was driven by violence in Libya, as rebel forces clashed with those loyal to then-leader Muammar Qaddafi, and concerns persisted that this unrest would spread to other countries in the region.

The recent price increase again has roots in unrest the Middle East and North Africa — current escalating tension with Iran and continuing violence in Syria — but has also been a result of positive economic reports in the U.S. and signs that the EU may be taking the necessary steps to address that region’s sovereign debt issues.

One other notable similarity between this recent surge and last year is the amount of speculation in the market.

Both last March and at present, prices are being driven higher largely by the possibility of a future impact on supply rather than an actual shortage.

As reported by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the first week of March last year ended with the largest net long position (contracts speculating that prices will go higher, minus those speculating they’ll go lower) in the history of WTI futures trading at 335,674 contracts. While last week’s net long position was below the record set last March, it was still a lofty 304,957 contracts.

On the other hand, while RBOB gasoline futures for the first week of March 2011 reflected a net long position of 56,686 contracts, last week’s report showed an all-time high of 88,204.

The ultimate result of this speculation is that the market prices for both crude oil and gasoline have been pressured higher by future uncertainty in the market rather than current supply and demand fundamentals.

Market historians note that the similar heavy long bias last March came just before a sharp move lower as traders became worried that the market was overbought.

Adding to concern by some traders that crude and wholesale gasoline prices may again be overbought is the continuing demand destruction evident in the market.

While weekly Department of Energy numbers last week may have appeared to show a slight rebound and a new high for 2012 at 8.628 million barrels of gasoline consumed per day, this number was still some 500,000 barrels below consumption for the same week in 2011, and a look at the more telling 4-week average shows a more than 6% year-over-year decline.

Despite these now weekly reports of anemic demand, gas prices at the pump continue to rise and have now increased for 32 consecutive days — from a national average of $3.38 on January 26 to $3.70.

Today’s price is 13 cents more expensive than one week ago, 29 cents more expensive than one month ago, and 35 cents more expensive than one year ago.

As gas prices have risen in 2012, it has not been an even increase across all regions.

Those in the center of the country continue to be supplied by refineries with access to cheaper, landlocked crude products, meaning that these areas have been relatively insulated from the increased prices seen in those areas near the coast that must pay prices set on the global market.

While Pacific Coast states have seen an average increase of 54 cents per gallon since the start of the year, prices in Mountain West states have increased by only 16 cents during the same period.

A full list of price increases by region is included below:

Motorists in three states currently pay an average of more than $4.00 per gallon: Hawaii - $4.32, California - $4.29, and Alaska - $4.09. Only two states currently pay less than $3.20: Wyoming - $3.12 and Colorado - $3.14.

This week’s average prices: West Virginia Average =  $3.803

Average price during the week of February 21, 2012 =  $3.649

Average price during the week of March 01, 2011 =  $3.398

Today’s National Average Price =  $3.716

Area Gasoline Prices on 02.29.12:

Arnoldsburg = $3.78

Buckhannon = $3.76 - $3.79

Burnsville = $3.79

Clarksburg = $3.79

Gassaway =  $3.79

Glenville = $3.79

Grantsville =  $3.??

Harrisville = $3.69

Jane Lew = $3.75

Parkersburg = $3.76 - $3.79

Pennsboro =  $3.69

Spencer = $3.75

Sutton =  $3.79

Weston =  $3.75

West Union =  $3.75

Monday, February 27, 2012

G-Comm™: Puppets, Lackeys And The Drums Of War

On RT (Russia Today) television the other night, it was reported that a recent poll indicated that over 50 % of the American people considered Iran to be a threat to the U.S. and felt it would be appropriate to invade them. It would not have been a surprise if Fox News, CNN or MSNBC had made such a preposterous suggestion. Intelligent viewers would assume that this was just another propaganda piece and not worth taking seriously. RT, however, ends to have honest reporting, and is not a mere mouthpiece for North America’s ruling class.

One could ponder the absurdity of believing that literally 50% of the American people are so bereft of the ability to think critically that such a poll could have any efficacy at all. A more fruitful inquiry, though, would not focus on the supposed results of the poll, but rather on the more obvious question of “Who did the poll?” Of course, one might expect that the poll was simply another example of manipulative governmental spokespeople pretending to have their bellicose agenda endorsed by public opinion. What the “poll” really points to, however, is the degree to which the American people are mislead on a daily basis by puppet institutions, mouthpieces and groups that are part of the oligarchy’s assaults on nations and people everywhere.

Rather than admitting our imperial objectives throughout the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa, the United States trots out supposedly neutral third parties to support and applaud our actions everywhere. Thus, it is NATO, and not the U.S. military that takes the lead in destroying Libya or Syria, or anywhere else we demand that it shows up. It is the Arab League that condemns Syria, and calls for the murder of Bashar al-Assad, not the Pentagon or our own government. It is Israel, and not assassins from the Navy Seals or some other clandestine Special Operations Forces from the U.S. that kills Iranian scientists…. The list is endless.

Is the ever-increasing violence perpetrated by our government on independent nations to be accomplished so facilely? Is it merely a matter of the oligarchy trotting out some supposedly neutral, non-puppet voice, to endorse whatever atrocity they propose at the moment?

Certainly these so-called international institutions and groups have some credibility and influence on a bewildered public. But, are we, as a nation, so naïve and shallow as to believe that NATO, the Arab League, or militarist fanatics from Israel are making decisions that are not directed and issued by the U.S. military-industrial complex? The onslaught brought about as a result of our aggression internationally is of monumental proportions. Missile systems strategically located on the borders of countries that refuse refuse to be vassals of the U.S., special operations assassins, drones, “contractors” who are little more than hired mercenaries are our stock and trade. The policies, practices and attitudes of those who have seized control of the U.S. go far beyond the Democrats or Republicans. The same repressive oligarchs that brought us NAFTA, the supposed “war on terrorism,” Homeland Security, and the mass incarceration of our own people feel so immune from retaliation that they need do nothing more than present us with puppets and lackeys to repeat their lies – a docile American public will do nothing to stop this madness.

We are supposedly withdrawing our troops from Iraq, after our stunning “victory” there, but nothing is said of the mercenaries, or “contractors” as our leaders would characterize them, who have replaced the troops at greater cost to the American people than our own military would incur. We are “leaving” Afghanistan, after wasting 10 years, countless lives, and billions of dollars of our taxpayer’s money, only to remain there with civilian soldiers, not directly beholden to the Pentagon. And now we are about to invade Iran, as if our involvement there is in support of Israeli aggression. Israel could not exist for 30 minutes without U.S. military support. What garbage and nonsense it is to suggest that we are not the ones making the ultimate decision regarding the invasion of Iran!

With Tea Party spokespeople, right-wing think tanks, like the Hoover Institute, with high-placed politicians and government employees such as Clarence Thomas’ wife, Virginia Thomas (who drew income from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank where she worked from 1998 to 2003 and from Liberty Central, a conservative political education group she co-founded in January 2009 in part to energize Tea Party activists), or AIPAC, or the other front groups for Israel, Zionism and American corporate militarism, the oligarchs and thieves who have robbed the American people blind can sit back and laugh themselves all the way to the bank.

The U.S does have its own apologists and spokespeople; i.e., those who are responsible for keeping the belligerent determined face on America. Susan Rice looked like a fool screaming her defiance toward Iran, Russia and China at the U.N., passing resolution after resolution, each more transparent than the next while trying to look credible and aggressive. Clinton continues her unbelievable tirades trying to pretend that we are outsourcing “American democracy” throughout the world. Both are as ridiculous as Khrushchev, pounding his shoe on the table at the U.N. General Assembly on October 12, 1960.

As the President travels throughout the country, seeking money from the unidentified rich, and carrying out the only campaign promise he will ever keep, namely, to raise a billion dollars to ensure his own reelection, the American people watch docilely, as the last vestiges of democracy in this country are torn asunder; yet, we need not feel isolated or abandoned — the rich have an alphabet soup full of “independent” thinkers and countries standing by, on call, to assure us that world opinion is on our side. Whatever their title, you can be sure these forces are loyal to, and on the payroll of, the U.S. ruling class.

Luke Hiken is an attorney who has engaged in the practice of criminal, military, immigration, and appellate law. Marti Hiken is the director of Progressive Avenues. She is the former associate director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and former chair of the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force. Read other articles by Marti Hiken and Luke Hiken, or visit Marti Hiken and Luke Hiken’s website.

~~  Marti Hiken and Luke Hiken ~~

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

G-Comm™: The 10 Most Excellent Reasons to Attack Iran

1. Iran has threatened to fight back if attacked, and that’s a war crime.

War crimes must be punished.

2. My television says Iran has nukes.

I’m sure it’s true this time.

Just like with North Korea.

I’m sure they’re next.

We only bomb places that really truly have nukes and are in the Axis of Evil.

Except Iraq, which was different.

3. Iraq didn’t go so badly.

Considering how lousy its government is, the place is better off with so many people having left or died.

Really, that one couldn’t have worked out better if we’d planned it.

4. When we threaten to cut off Iran’s oil, Iran threatens to cut off Iran’s oil, which is absolutely intolerable.

What would we do without that oil?

And what good is buying it if they want to sell it?

5. Iran was secretly behind 9-11.

I read it online.

And if it wasn’t, that’s worse.

Iran hasn’t attacked another nation in centuries, which means its next attack is guaranteed to be coming very soon.

6. Iranians are religious nuts, unlike Israelis and Americans.

Most Israelis don’t want to attack Iran, but the Holy Israeli government does.

To oppose that decision would be to sin against God.

7. Iranians are so stupid that when we murder their scientists they try to hire a car dealer in Texas to hire a drug gang in Mexico to murder a Saudi ambassador in Washington, and then they don’t do it—just to make us look bad for catching them.

7. b. Oh, and stupid people should be bombed.

They’re not civilized.

8. War is good for the U.S. economy, and the Iranian economy too.

Troops stationed in Iran would buy stuff.

And women who survived the war would have more rights.

Like in Virginia.

We owe Iranians this after that little mishap in 1953.

9. This is the only way to unite the region.

Either we bomb Iran and it swears its eternal love to us.

Or, if necessary, we occupy Iran to liberate it like its neighbors.

Which shouldn’t take long.

Look how well Afghanistan is going already.

10. They won’t give our drone back.

Enough said.

~~  by David Swanson ~~

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Daily G-Eye™: 02.09.12

Monday, February 06, 2012

G-Comm™: Currency Warfare: What are the Real Targets of the E.U. Oil Embargo against Iran?

Against whom is the European Union’s so-called “oil embargo on Iran” really aimed at?

This is an important geo-strategic question. Aside from rejecting the new E.U. measures against Iran as counter-productive, Tehran has warned the member states of the European Union that the E.U. oil embargo against Iran will hurt them and their economies far more than Iran.

Tehran has thus warned the leaders of the E.U. countries that the new sanctions are foolish and against their national and bloc interests. But is this correct? At the end of the day, who will benefit from the chain of events that are being set into motion?

Oil Embargos against Iran are Not New

In 1951, the Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh with the support of the Iranian Parliament nationalized the Iranian oil industry. As a result of Dr. Mossadegh’s nationalization program, the British militarily blockaded the territorial waters and national ports of Iran with the British Royal Navy and prevented Iran from exporting its oil. They also militarily prevented Iranian trade. London also froze Iranian assets and started a campaign to isolate Iran with sanctions. The government of Dr. Mossadegh was democratic and could not be vilified easily domestically by the British, so they began to portray Mossadegh as a pawn of the Soviet Union who would turn Iran into a communist country together with his Marxist political allies.

The illegal British naval embargo was followed by regime change in Tehran via a 1953 Anglo-American engineered coup d’état. The 1953 coup transformed the Shah of Iran from a constitutional figure head to an absolute monarch and dictator, like the monarchs of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. Iran was transformed overnight from a democratic constitutional monarchy into a dictatorship.

Today, a militarily imposed oil embargo against Iran is not possible like it was in the early 1950s. Instead London and Washington use the language of righteousness and hide behind false pretexts about Iranian nuclear weapons. Like in the 1950s, the oil embargo against Iran is tied to regime change. Yet, there are also broader objectives that go beyond the boundaries of Iran tied to Washington’s project to impose an oil embargo against the Iranians.

The European Union and Iranian Oil Sales

Iran’s largest customer for oil is the People’s Republic of China. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), which was created after the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo as the strategic wing of the Western Bloc’s Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Iran exports 543,000 oil barrels per day to China. Iran’s other large customers are India, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea. India imports 341,000 barrels per day from Iran, Turkey imports 370,000 barrels per day from Iran, Japan imports 251,000 barrels per day from Iran, and South Korea imports 239,000 barrels per day from Iran.

According to the Iranian Ministry of Petroleum the European Union only accounts for 18% of Iranian oil exports, which means less than one-fifth of Iranian oil sales. Only “collectively” is the European Union the second largest customer of Iran. All the E.U. countries together import 510,000 barrels per day from Iran. This collective rank that all Iranian oil importing E.U. countries have together is being highlighted by those that want to emphasize the effectiveness of the E.U. oil embargo against Iran.

Iran can replace oil sales to the European Union via new buyers or by increasing sales to existing customers like China and India. An Iranian agreement to work with China for stockpiling Chinese strategic reserves would fill a large portion of the vacuum left by the European Union. Thus, the oil embargo against Iran will have minimal direct effects on Iran. Rather, it is most likely that any of the effects that the Iranian economy feels will be tied to the global ramifications of the oil embargo against Iran.

Iran and Global Currency Warfare

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), both the U.S. dollar and the euro together constitute 84.4% of the world’s currency exchange reserves (end of 2011 date). The U.S. dollar alone, was the largest share of the world’s currency exchange reserves in 2011, namely 61.7%.

Energy sales are an important part of this equation, because the American dollar is tied to the oil trade.

Thus, oil trade, through what is called the petro-dollar, is helping sustain the American dollar’s international standing. Countries around the world have been virtually forced to use the U.S. dollar to maintain their energy and trade needs and transactions.

To highlight the importance of the international oil trade to the U.S., all the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates – have their national currencies pegged to the U.S. dollar and thereby sustain the petro-dollar by trading oil in American dollars. Moreover, the currencies of Lebanon, Jordan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Belize, and several tropical islands in the Caribbean Sea are also all pegged to the U.S. dollar. Aside from the overseas territories of the United States, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Panama also all officially use the U.S. dollar as their national currencies.

The euro on the other hand is both a rival of the U.S. dollar as well as an allied currency. Both currencies work in tandem against other currencies in many cases and seem to be controlled by increasingly merging centres of financial power.

Aside from the seventeen European Union members using the euro as their currency, the Principality of Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City have issuing rights and both Montenegro and the Albanian-majority Serbian province of Kosovo also use the euro as their national currencies. Outside of the euro area (Eurozone), the currencies of Bosnia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Latvia, and Lithuania in Europe; the currencies of Cape Verde, Comoros, Morocco, the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, and the two CFA zones in Africa; and the currencies of several Western European overseas dependencies, such as Greenland, are all pegged to the euro.

Several monetary zones are directly tied to the euro. In Oceania, the Comptoirs Français du Pacifique (CFP) franc, simply called the Pacific franc (franc pacifique), used in a monetary union of the French dependencies of French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and the Territory of the Wallis and Futuna Islands is pegged to the euro. As mentioned earlier, both the CFA zones in Africa are also pegged to the euro. Thus, both the Financial Community of Africa (Communauté financière d’Afrique, CFA) franc or West African CFA franc in West Africa – used by Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo – and the Financial Cooperation in Central Africa (Coopération financière en Afrique central, CFA) franc or Central African CFA franc – used by Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon – have their fates tied to the monetary value of the euro.

Iran is not looking for military confrontation in the rising hostilities with the United States and European Union. Despite the warped narrative being presented, Tehran has said that it will only close the Strait of Hormuz as a last resort. The Iranians have also said that they will not let U.S. or hostile ships go through Iranian territorial water, which is their legal right, and that hostile ships could navigate through Oman’s territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz instead. As a side note, among other things, the problem for the U.S. and Iran’s other adversaries is that the waters on the Omani side of the Strait of Hormuz are too shallow.

Instead of military confrontation, Tehran is fighting back economically in several ways. The first step, which started before 2012, was Iranian international oil sales and trade were diversified in regards to their currency transactions. This is part of a calculated move by Iran to move away from using the American dollar just like Saddam Hussein of Iraq did in 2000 as a means to fight back against the sanctions imposed on Iraq. In this context, Iran has created an international energy exchange or bourse competing with the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and London’s International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), which both operate using the American dollar for transactions. This energy exchange, called the Kish Oil Bourse, was officially opened in August 2011 on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf. Its first transactions were made using the euro and the Emirati dirhem.

In context of euro and U.S. dollar rivalries, the Iranians originally wanted to turn to the euro and a petro-euro system with the hope that the competition between the American dollar and the euro would make the European Union an ally of Iran and de-link the E.U. from the United States. As political tensions have mounted with the E.U., the petro-euro has become less attractive for Tehran. Iran has realized that the European Union is submissive to U.S. interests under corrupt leaders. Thus, to a lesser extent, Iran has also tried to move away from the euro.

Moreover, Iran has broadened its move away from the use of the U.S. dollar and the euro as policy in bilateral trade relations. Iran and India are talking about gold payments for Iranian oil. Iranian and Russian trade is conducted in Iranian rials and Russian roubles, while Iranian trade with China and other Asian countries is conducted using the Chinese renminbi, Iranian rial, Japanese yen, and other non-dollar and non-euro currencies.

While the euro could have been a big winner from a petro-euro system, the actions of the European Union have worked against this. The E.U. oil embargo against Iran is merely hammering the nails in the coffin. Globally, the emerging matrix of Eurasian and international trade and transaction outside of the umbrellas of the American dollar and the euro is weakening both currencies. The Iranian Parliament is now passing legislation to cut oil exports to the members of the European Union that will be part of the sanctions regime until they rescind the Iranian oil sanctions. The Iranian move will be a blow to the euro, especially since the European Union will not have time to prepare for the Iranian energy cuts.

There are several possibilities that could emerge. One of them is that this could be part of what Washington wants and it could be playing into its hands against the European Union. Another is that the U.S. and specific E.U. members are working together against strategic economic rivals and other markets.

Who Benefits? The Economic Targets are beyond Iran…

The end of Iranian oil exports to the European Union and the decline of the euro will directly benefit the United States and the U.S. dollar. What the European Union is doing is merely weakening itself and giving the U.S. dollar the upper hand in its currency rivalry against the euro. Moreover, should the euro collapse, the American dollar will quickly fill much of the void. Despite the fact that Russia will benefit from higher oil prices and greater leverage over E.U. energy security as a supplier, the Kremlin has also warned the European Union that it is working against its own interests and subordinating itself to Washington.

Many important questions are at play about the economic consequences of increased oil prices.

Will the European Union be able to weather the economic storm or a currency collapse?

What the E.U. oil embargo against Iran will do is destabilize the euro and snowball globally hurting non-E.U. economies. In this regard, Tehran has warned that the U.S. aims to hurt rival economies through the adoption of E.U. oil sanctions against Iran. Within this line of thinking, this is the reason why the U.S. is trying to force China, India, South Korea, and Japan in Asia to reduce or cut Iranian oil imports.

Within the European Union, it will be the most fragile and struggling economies, such as Greece and Spain, which will be hurt by the E.U. oil embargo against Iran.

The oil refineries in the European Union countries that import Iranian oil will have to find new sellers as sources and will also be forced to adjust their operations. Piero De Simone, one of the leaders of Italy’s Unione Petrolifera, has warned that approximately seventy oil refineries in the E.U. could be shutdown and that Asian countries could start selling refined Iranian oil to the European Union at the expense of the local refineries and the local petroleum industries.

Despite the political claims supporting an oil embargo against Iran, neither will Saudi Arabia be able to fill the void of Iranian oil exports to the European Union or other markets. A shortfall in oil supplies and the production changes could have spiralling effects in the European Union and on the costs of industrial production, transportation, and market prices. The prediction is that the E.U. will effectively be deepening the crisis in the euro area or Eurozone.

Moreover, the rise in everyday prices, ranging from food to transportation, will not be limited to the European Union, but will have global ramifications. As prices rise on a global scale, the economies in Latin American, Caribbean, African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Pacific countries will face new hardship, which the financial sector in the U.S. and several of its partners – including members of the European Union – could capitalize on by taking over certain sectors and markets. The IMF and World Bank, as the Bretton Woods proxies of Wall Street, could get into the mix and impose more privatization programs benefiting the financial sectors of the U.S. and its main partners. Furthermore, how Iran decides to sell the 18% of oil it will stop selling to E.U. members will also be a mediating factor.

The Ghosts of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo: Libya and the International Energy Agency

While countries in Africa or the Pacific have no strategic oil reserves and will be at the mercy of global price increases, the U.S. and the European Union have worked and tried to strategically insulate themselves from such scenarios. This is where the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) comes into the picture. Libyan oil reserves are also a factor to the hostilities and petro-politics involving Iran.

The IEA was created after the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. As mentioned earlier it is a “strategic wing of the Western Bloc’s Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).” The OECD is a club of countries that includes the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Turkey, Australia, Israel, and New Zealand. It is essentially based on the contours of the Western Bloc, which is comprised of America’s allies and satellites. Aside from Israel, Chile, Estonia, Iceland, Slovenia, and Mexico all the members of the OECD are members of the IEA.

Since its creation in 1974, one of the responsibilities of the IEA has been to stock strategic oil reserves for the OECD countries. During the NATO war against Libya the IEA actually opened its strategic oil reserves to compensate for the void left by a lack of Libyan oil exports. The only other two times this happened were in 1991, when Washington led a military coalition in its first war against Iraq, and in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the United States.

The war in Libya had many purposes:

(1) preventing African unity;

(2) driving China out of Africa;

(3) strategically controlling important energy reserves; and

(4) guarding oil supplies in the scenario of any American-led conflicts against Syria and Iran.

What the NATO war in Libya has done is secure oil output from Libya, because there was a chance that the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya under Colonial Muammar Qaddafi could have suspended oil sales to the European Union in support of Syria or Iran in possible conflicts with the U.S., NATO, and Israel. It is also interesting to note that one of the Libyan figures that helped enable the war against Libya in the United Nations was Sliman Bouchuiguir, the head of the Libyan League for Human Rights (LLHR) and the current Libyan ambassador to Switzerland, who worked on formulating a strategy against allowing oil from being used as a strategic weapon to insure that the 1973 oil crisis never repeat itself for the U.S. and its allies.

Aside from Iran, the Syrians have also been a source of oil imports for the European Union. Like Iran, the E.U. has also cut their bloc off from Syrian oil via a sanctions regime engineered by the U.S. government. With Iranian and Syrian oil cut off from the E.U., the strategic value of Libyan oil rises. In this regard, the reports about the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops to Libyan oil fields can also be analyzed as being coordinated or tied to the growing U.S. and E.U. hostilities with Syria and Iran. Rerouting Libyan oil shipments to the E.U. that were intended for China can also be part of such a strategy.

The Psychological War

In reality, the sanctions regime engineered by the U.S. government against Iran has gone as far as it can go. All the speeches about Iranian isolation are bravado and far from the reality of current international relations and trade. Brazil, Russia, China, India, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, and various countries in the post-Soviet space, Asia, Africa, and Latin America have all refused to join the sanctions against the Iranian economy.

The E.U. oil embargo, coupled with the broader sanctions against Iran, has broad psychological implications. Iran and its ally Syria both face a multi-dimensional war that has economic, covert, diplomatic, media, and psychological scopes.

The psychological war, which involves the mainstream media as a tool of foreign policy and war, constitutes an efficient propaganda instrument for the U.S. due to its lower costs. Yet, the psychological war can be fought on both sides.

Much of the power of the U.S. is psychological and tied to fear. Like the geography of the Persian Gulf, time is on Iran’s side and working against the United States.

If Iran continues on its present course and is undeterred by sanctions, this will help break a critical psychological threshold, which around the world tends to discourage countries from confronting and opposing the United States.

Should many countries continue to refuse to bow down to the Obama Administration pertaining to the impostion of sanctions against Iran, this will also be a blow to the prestige and power of the U.S., which would also have economic and financial implications.

Moreover, at the end of the day, the E.U. oil embargo will hurt the E.U. instead of Iran. In the long-term it could also hurt the United States.

Structurally, the effects of the E.U. oil embargo will further entrench the E.U. in the orbit of Washington, but these effects will catalyze growing social opposition to Washington, which will eventually manifest in the political and economic arenas.


~~  Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya  ~~

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

NATO/G8 In Chicago - At A Global Crossroads: Turn Against War

On January 25, the host committee for the G8/NATO summit in Chicago in May unveiled a new slogan for the event, “The Global Crossroads.” The mood of the organizers is upbeat and positive. This is a grand opportunity to market Chicago with an eye for the tourist dollar and the city is ready, the committee assures us, to deal with any “potential problems.”

One of the potential problems that the committee is confident that it can overcome, according to a report by WLS-TV in Chicago, is “the prospect of large-scale protests stealing the stage as the world watches.” The new slogan stresses the international character of the event and the prestige and economic benefit that hosting world economic and political leaders is expected to bring to Chicago. “We’re a world class city with world class potential,” declares Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “If you want to be a global city, you’ve got to act like a global city and do what global cities do,” says Lori Healey who heads the host committee and who previously led the city’s unsuccessful bid to host the 2016 Olympics.

All indications, unfortunately, are that Chicago is preparing to “act like a global city and do what global cities do” and it appears to want to follow the lead of other “global cities” in dealing with mass demonstrations threatening to “steal the stage;” think Tehran, Beijing, Cairo, Moscow and Seattle, to name a few.

One of the chilling developments the hosting committee announced was that the Illinois State Crime Commission is “urgently seeking Iraq-Afghanistan combat veterans to work security positions for the G8 summit.” The commission’s chairman clarifies that is for “private security” and not to work with the Chicago police. As in other “global cities,” these veterans will be used as private mercenaries without the legal protections and benefits of public employees. The Veterans Administration reports treating about 16% of the 1.3 million of veterans of these two wars for post-traumatic stress disorder and many more do not seek help. In answer to a potentially volatile situation in the streets of Chicago, the commission is not seeking workers trained in conflict resolution, but it has an urgent need for ex-soldiers trained in the violent chaos of Iraq and Afghanistan. These veterans urgently need treatment and meaningful employment, but at the “global crossroads,” they are offered only temp jobs as rent-a-cops protecting the interests of their exploiters.

Beyond touting the overblown promise of money that the summit is expected to bring (”To penetrate international markets takes time and money,” said Don Welsh, Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau) the city and its welcoming committee do not encourage education or reflection on what NATO and the G8 are and what they do. Despite its claims, NATO was never a defensive alliance. It is structured to wage “out of area” wars in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as to “contain” China. NATO’s creed is aggressive, expansionist, militarist and undemocratic. The G8 represents the economic interests of its member states. It is not a legal international entity established by treaty but acts outside the law, with NATO as its enforcer. Chicago law enforcement might better spend its resources on preparing to arrest and prosecute the war criminals, terrorists, torturers, and racketeers coming as invited constituents of G8 and NATO rather than getting ready for mass arrests of citizens coming to Chicago to exercise their right to protest these crimes.

The morning after the host committee unveiled its new slogan, some of us with the Chicago-based Voices for Creative Nonviolence met to discuss our part in the response to the city of Chicago “bringing the war home” by welcoming NATO and G8.

We at Voices found ourselves in agreement with the host committee that Chicago is indeed a global crossroads. This is true not for the world’s financial elite, war profiteers, military brass and heads of state officially welcomed there in May, but for those who come to Chicago from the all over the continent and around the globe to visit or to make their lives there without the criminal intent of NATO and the G8. In May, especially, Chicago will be a global crossroads for the thousands of good people who will gather in the city to lend a hand and take to the streets for justice and peace.

Chicago in May is also a crossroads in that it is a critical place and time for us all to take stock of where we have been and where we are going. We are at a crossroads- do we continue on the road of war and economic exploitation of the planet that NATO and the G8 are committed to, or do we abandon that road and turn a corner toward economic justice and a world at peace. We are at a crossroads and our choices are stark: global domination and the economic and ecological devastation that it makes inevitable or global community.

With this in mind, Voices for Creative Nonviolence decided to call our efforts leading up to the NATO and G8 summit, “At A Global Crossroads: Turn Against War.” We are starting the ground work for a walk starting on May 1 from Madison, Wisconsin, to arrive in Chicago in time for the summit on May 19.

~~  Brian Terrell - former mayor of Maloy, Iowa ~~