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A Late Day DrumBeat, just for ha-has...
Posted by Prof. Goose on October 17, 2006 - 11:46am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Tags: george w. bush, iraq, oil, oil prices, peak oil, war [list all tags]
Check out John Robb's latest, The Changing Face of War: Into the 5th Generation (5GW)...
...and from Alternet:
Even as Iraq verges on splintering into a sectarian civil war, four big oil companies are on the verge of locking up its massive, profitable reserves, known to everyone in the petroleum industry as "the prize."Discuss.
In many nations, the elites rule openly without any pretense of democracy or public interest - their subjects know the score.
In a few other places, mainly small developed nations, there is a representational government with honest elections where the office holders have real power. Their citizens are right to be engaged by electoral politics.
But Americans are hypnotized by the media passion play of (fake) left vs (fake) right politics. (Ok, maybe the local school board elections are honest.) But people who believe that national US elections decide anything in the modern era are the real nut jobs.
PS: The current US Treasurer is from Goldman Sachs. Clinton's US Treasurer was from Goldman Sachs. Catch the drift?
There always has and always will be a pull towards big money in decisionmaking, but how leaders resist or give in to that pull varies immensely. The current leadership does things like cutting taxes for the rich repeatedly and heavily, and when they encounter enough political opposition to that to force them to stop, firing the IRS tax attorneys devoted to investigating super-high income tax fraud - the ones who bring in $70 billion a year that would otherwise be fraudulently deducted, so that we won't have to pay their ten or twenty million in salary.
If Goldman Sachs et al control things completely, why were these lawyers ever put in place? Why have the rich ever paid taxes? I have more than enough cynicism to go around, but the rich are not yet all-powerful. They are not yet invincible. A determined, skilled populist leader COULD still reinstitute a sense of liberal democracy we've had for at least significant portions of the 20th century.
Americans are beginning to wake up, and he-said-she-said journalism is slowly unravelling. Blogs are taking up the slack, and they have an inherently more accessible range of viewpoints than network TV. Network TV is shifting the confrontational model to personality-driven shows that perform the core responsibility of the Fourth Estate that's been ignored - analysis. And in-depth analysis is harder to do when your job is nonsensical hypnosis (you can actually teach the entire breadth of a logic and semantics course on fallacies using a half hour of O'reilly).
Clinton waged war on Yugoslavia with depleted uranium. Clinton also passed NAFTA and some pre-Patriot Act type laws after OKC. Now Bill Clinton vacations with his good buddy G.H.W.Bush.
Zbig Brzezenski (Carter's national security advisor) called for a New Pearl Harbor to galvanize the US populace into supporting an imperial resource war in Asia. The book is called "The Grand Chessboard" and is available on Amazon.
Hillary Clinton does lunch with Rupert Murdoch every week.
As for Al Gore, his daughter Karenna married Andrew Schiff.
As for Kerry, he is a cousin of G.W.Bush and fellow bonesman.
There are style differences between the red and blue squads, but they are all one team at the end of the day and serve the same masters.
Seriously. Assume democrats (none of them populist) control congress and the presidency in 2009. Do you believe they would repeal HR6166 (The Military Commissions Act)? Do you believe they would repeal the Patriot Act? Do you believe they would withdraw from the middle east? I don't believe any of those things.
Assuming that a real populist candidate got some traction, I would recall the fates of Huey Long, JFK, RFK, MLK, George Wallace, and the death threat to Ross Perot's family in 1992 when he briefly led in the polls before dropping out for the summer
http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh10142006.html
peace
Do it...all his interviews are on foxnews....
cut paste teach
The frequent and blatant attempts to smear anyone who offers the slightest dissent against the far left party line have to stop. This is a large part of the reason why althopugh the vast majority of Americans hate Bush, the fear the foaming anti-Bush lunatics even more.
When I lived in Northern Utah they had the crazy ant-government
people running for office. I think they claimed to be libertarian cant remember. In any case they had a lot of support so I decided to vote for them. A few actually won and it was comic seeing how they acted in office. Sort of like Hamas now. It just shows that the elected officials have little control over the machines they inherit. And ruling a country is about first controlling the machine, compromise with with your neighbors machine and finally move your political agenda forward. Today neither Bush not Hamas is willing to play the game and look at the consequences.
Exactly. If the commenter had said that you were "just like your hero Michael Moore", I would reacted exactly the same way, but substituted the word right for left.
I do think the "hero" commenter provided us with a great exaple of the argue by insult methodology utilized by ideologues on both sides of the sectrum.
I am equally dismissive of the far right and far left ideologues who see any position more than one degree away from them as Satanic.
I see the far left and the right right as equally complicit in scare mongering, enemy-building and demonizing those who don't agree with them. To me George Bush building up the "Axis of Evil" as some scary puppet to wave in front of people is no different that the left trying to continually build up bush as a scary puppet to wave in front of everyone.
Does anyone reading this really think that SAT gave any indication that he sees George Busgh as a hero? No, that was completely made up and is typical of the thinking of the Bush-obsessive.
BrianT is amomg the worst of them. No matter how many times I said that I deplore Bush and think he may be the worst president the US will ever have BrianT relishes every opportunity to compare me to Bush or Cheney. I understand that this is because BrianT and others are incapable of discussing issues based on facts and analysis and so need to support their points with insults and falsehoods.
Were members of the far right commenting on TOD, or if the far right had surrendered any credibility among voters in the way that the far left has, I would have noted that too.
I would like to see a stronger opposition to Bush and a platform that provides Americans with options that they will vote for.
I think the far left has abdicated responsibility by abandoning discourse and falling in to a hysterical fit of insult making that is pitiful and highly damaging to the US.
When the vast majority of the US has indicated that they disapprove of Bush and the collapse of his regime is imminent, it is a trgaedy that the greatest contribution from those that should be providing an alternative is list of silly nicknames and websites that expound any idea, no matter how speculative to eager fans who consume it without thinking.
What are you going to do with your life in two years when Bush is gone? Invent another enemy?
You want to argue? Argue with me. Arguing against the far left crazies is a straw man.
Re: I would like to see a stronger opposition to Bush and a platform that provides Americans with options that they will vote for
Fine, provide me with the source code -- I am a software engineer, or at least I was, now retired -- for the software in the Diebold voting machines. Then, get back to me. If it checks out, OK.
What a crock of shit.
I am trying to argue with you, but you want me to try to find source code for Diebold and can't say anything about this point:
Other than it is a crock of shit? Why bother?
The late Diebold was a heavy supporter of and contributor to the Republican party, a huge Bush supporter. I want to see the source code, which nobody has yet seen.
Where, exactly, does your confusion lay here? I am saying there is a strong possible conflict of interest and subsequent corruption & malfeasance regarding the electoral process. Florida, 2000? Katherine Harris? Supreme Court -- 5 to 4, decided the election. Does any of this ring a bell?
So, where's your confusion? What, do you think the world just works in some rational, orderly fashion which disregards human nature as manifested in politics altogether????
You're not that naive, right? Please tell me it's not so, OK?
Actually, the same applies to allowing a defendant to examine the software in radar guns, except in those cases, we aren't talking about such major issue - and the judge threw out the cases when the manufacturer refused to comply.
Sadly, the same just doesn't work with elections.
But to add a note of realism - vote stealing is one of the oldest American political realities, and thinking it is somehow new or modern is just silly. Heck, even the Jim Crow laws were modern compared to how the Constitution classified voters - you know, no women, no Indians, and in the slave states, no slaves. Or the fact that direct election of senators is also a modern innovation.
Just because they teach you in school that America is a shining beacon of democracy doesn't actually mean that what you were taught is reality. And yes, there are a number of systems worse than America's - just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean that its flaws are all that remains.
Oh, by the way - for the first time, I received an absentee ballot sent to my address. Previously, the rules had required me to apply for a ballot every election cycle - yes, I actually have to spend time and money to vote (postage for requesting ballot, postage returning ballot to be exact - trivial), but coming from a former Jim Crow state, that is not exactly a surprise. But this time, without ever having provided any proof of identity, I can vote. I found it quite interesting, seeing how there seems to be a debate about ID standards for citizens living in the U.S. to prevent vote fraud. Personally, it would seem like the chance to pick up a few hundred votes with absentee ballots would be hard for any self-respecting partisan to resist. Or maybe that is the explanation why I received a ballot instead of having to put some effort into voting as in the past, considering the typical demographics of overseas voters? And notice, there is no fraud or illegal manipulation involved at all - just 'voter outreach,' which is always a good thing, right?
Politics is a nasty sport, and anyone thinking otherwise is very naive.
My point is that George Bush is highly unpopular in the US, and his presidency appears on the edge of collapsing under the weight of incompetence and malice.
Yet, the most vocal opposition is dedicted to building and anti-personality cult which does little more than demonize Bush.
I expect that 70% of Americans want to dump Bush, but 80% think that the core anti-Bush crowd is an obsessive fringe group. So "far left" in political spectrum terms may not be the right waty to categorize this "movement", extreme Bushophobes might.
The fact that the Bushophobes will set upon anyone who disagrees with them like a school of ravenous piranas without even realizing that they agree on more than they disagree on benefits Bush more than anyone else.
I have taken the liberty of correcting the English in your quote, Jack.
The far left party are whackos, but we have far more to fear from the far right whackos who are actually in power at this time in history. The notion that "the vast majority of Americans [they, your words] fear the "foaming anti-Bush lunatics" even more than they fear a governing whack-job neocon oligarchy in what is supposed to be a functioning democracy is patently ridiculous. Iraq being a very large case in point.
The problem, of course, is that even if we toss out the neocons, the whole situation is so fucked up beyond repair that it probably doesn't even matter who ends up running the show. See what I mean????
And -- excuse some of us for being really, really, really pissed off about this Iraq thing, all the DEAD PEOPLE and the phony "War on Terrorism". In order to have a "war", you need a country. So, to have his war, Cheney (I won't say W) needed to have a country. Conveniently, this was a country with the 2nd biggest untapped oil reserves in the world.
Are you, maybe, starting to get my drift?
I said that the foaming anti-Bush lunatics are hurting the cause of getting Americans to see that there is a better option than the governing whack job neocon oligarchy.
Are you, maybe, starting to get my drift?
(Actually you obviously are because your point isn't much different than mine)
Foaming? Who do you think you are dealing with? I know you have read my posts.
As I said earlier today on the Drumbeat with Darwinian, I must ask you the same question: perhaps I do not understand the English language? Do I need lessons?
However, it describes what Cheney was trying to do; it's just that it immediately fell apart.
During the Bremer viceroyalty, they brought in a retired oil ceo to sound out privatization, and he essentially told the Repubs that it was illegal under international law, and would be disinherited once the Americans pulled out, so no oil company would touch it.
Things now are only worse. I wouldn't want their oil fields if you gave them to me; what good are they if taking possession will get your employees killed, and whatever you invest will disappear or be blown up?
What have you been smoking SAT?
I understand that the original idea was to conquer Iraq, be welcomed as heroes, put Chalabi in charge, and sign the oil over to Exxon, but this plan failed. Later the idea was to get Allawi elected and have him sign the oil over to Exxon. This plan failed too. Later they wanted to establish an entirely new form of government in Iraq, with outrageous powers given to minority groups, but the Shiites (led by their religious leaders) insisted on Democracy. The U.S. had to give in and grudginly accept Democracy in Iraq. The current PM hates the U.S.. He can barely hold his tongue when talking about America. He openly admits that he sided with Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, against Sadams American-backed army. He has nothing but warm feelings toward the Iranian people and their government, and that's why he has made deepening ties with Iran his number one priority.
What is gained by insisting that Iraq is a puppet regime? If, "liberals" think admitting that Iraq has established an independent government somehow legitimizes the Iraq war, they're just going to have to learn to deal with it. This government is fiercly independent and does a great job representing the views of the Iraqi people. The reality is more complex than an all-powerful George Bush colonizing Iraq. If that was his original intention, and I think it was, he failed.
I'm not sure I agree with everything you say here, but do think it is an example of critical thinking.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6060544.stm
As Franz Kafka said about, "The Castle" as he lay dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna, "I'm having trouble following the thread."