All Posts Tagged With: "Empire"
2008 AWEA Wind energy financing conference
Well, I am in NYC attending annual 2008 AWEA wind financing conference and it has been an education. Not an education about financing techniques, research has already filled me in on that topic, but on the cultural view of Wall Street investors regarding renewable energy. Some very illustrious speakers have attended so far, a virtual who’s who of high finance and investment firms from all over the world.
What has stood out above all else is the concept that investor owned centralized power generation is the only game in town. These people are soooo formula driven. It is going to be fun to use there own model adapted to a local wide scale distributed energy plan and show them that it is possible to make money and save the planet too.
If they can get past the belief that the local farmer is too dumb to understand ‘high finance’ they might forgo some of that arrogance in favor of really promoting renewable energy and living in a truly free market. It is a totally different view here in New York on the financial bailout… these guys are essentially all for especially with the added extension of the Production Tax Credit.
My daughter and I hit the Gershwin Theatre to see Wicked tomorrow night, her first Broadway show.
White House pushed for war before intelligence findings
From George Washington University an analysis of newly released information from the National Security Archive affirm the conclusions of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report in June 2008 regarding the lead up to war.
Washington D.C., August 22, 2008 – The U.S. intelligence community buckled sooner in 2002 than previously reported to Bush administration pressure for data justifying an invasion of Iraq, according to a documents posting on the Web today by National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados.
The documents suggest that the public relations push for war came before the intelligence analysis, which then conformed to public positions taken by Pentagon and White House officials. For example, a July 2002 draft of the “White Paper” ultimately issued by the CIA in October 2002 actually pre-dated the National Intelligence Estimate that the paper purportedly summarized, but which Congress did not insist on until September 2002.
A similar comparison between a declassified draft and the final version of the British government’s “White Paper” on Iraq weapons of mass destruction adds to evidence that the two nations colluded in the effort to build public support for the invasion of Iraq. Dr. Prados concludes that the new evidence tends to support charges raised by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan and by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in its long-delayed June 2008 “Phase II” report on politicization of intelligence.
What does it take for America to get angry? How many of our military men and women have to die before the American people will get angry?
True Crimes: The Untold Story Behind the Devastation of Iraq
Today at 7:00 PM ET or 4:00 PM here on the left coast you can view a live feed of Town Hall in New York City. Panelists include four noted journalists, Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestselling Blackwater, and Laila Al-Arian and Chris Hedges, co-authors of Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians, the new title from Nation Books that reports the war from the soldiers’ point of view.
Watch it here -
Bush goes begging once again to no avail
Bush went begging again in the Middle East and came back red faced and empty handed. Neither the Saudi King or the Iranian Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari were moved by the plight of the American president when he asked OPEC to step up production.
The OPEC members are currently utilizing their full capacity and are supplying the market … With oil at US$126, it is not wise for those with oil not to supply it.” Nozari then added, “I believe it is not that oil is becoming more expensive, but the dollar is becoming cheaper.”
It would have been unthinkable five or six years ago that a visiting US president would receive such an open rebuff in the Middle East. Last weekend’s exchanges revealed the extent of decline in the US’s dominance of the Middle East through the present Bush administration. No doubt, oil lies at the very center of the decline of the American dominion. The cascading rise in oil prices has led to a massive transfer of resources to the energy exporting countries. Iran is one principal beneficiary.
Goldman Sachs is predicting that oil will reach $140 per barrel by July and Iran is using its bountiful wealth to exert influence on regional oil policies. Iran doesn’t need nuclear weapons to do the US in if that is really its aim, it just needs to keep the spigot on idle to bring down our oil dependent nation.
Howard Zinn on Empire
As always, Zinn weaves the threads of imperialism by noting the similarities to the Iraq occupation to Vietnam in this collection published at Asia Times.
When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National Security Council. Explaining the US interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country’s motives as a quest for “tin, rubber, oil”.
Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century, nor the strong opposition to World War I – indeed no anti-war movement in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was part of a grander imperial design.
Also read an interview of Zinn about Barack Obama here
Sunshine soldier and the winter patriot
A fellow peace activist wrote this and gave me permission to post it here. It is moving and thoughtful and attends to the too little attention given by the mainstream media upon these gut wrenching testimonies of our wounded warriors, our true winter patriots.
Editor:
As noted in The World (March 17, 2008), Sunshine Week is set aside “by media organizations and other groups to combat government secrecy and bring attention to the public’s right to know.” The World newspaper has been especially diligent over the years in trying to hold public officials to the requirements of open meeting laws, and they deserve kudos for that.
There is another kind of secrecy, however, that is rampant in our nation and that pertains to secrecy by omission and self-censorship by those same media organizations. Occasionally such actions are so blatant that they would cast shame and embarrassment on our media sources if they were at all serious about living up to their role of The Fourth Estate. Alas, they appear too often now to be “for the State.”
For instance, how many of us watched the Winter Soldier Hearings held on Palm Sunday weekend in Silver Springs, Maryland? How many even knew of their existence? Of course, you wouldn’t have if you depended on the mainstream media for relevant news, because there has been almost complete silence regarding this gathering. Our government did not want the light of day – sunshine – to illuminate the facts-on-the-ground in Iraq, and so there was near-blackout of this event. Was it censorship or self-censorship by the media?
How appropriate that these hearings should be held on the weekend before Easter when self-professed Christians have been engaged in a six-week season of penitence leading up to Easter. Let there be no misreading of the gut-wrenching sorrow and penitence displayed by these finest and bravest of our military who have been repulsed and broken by what they have seen and personally done. They are also the finest of our sons and daughters who have taken to heart and now tether their future lives to the beliefs and values set forth in our Constitution.
I wonder how many of our elected officials, local, state or federal, bothered to honor and support these soldiers by listening to their testimony?
Roberta Stewart
Bless them every one.
Peace be upon you…
Transcendent challenge of our time
One of our presidential candidates, whose name I shall not mention because it triggers google ads featuring him, asserts that the transcendent issue of our time is radical Islamic extremism. Somewhere in a cave connected to a dialysis machine is a tall thin Arab wringing his hands and avowing that the transcendent issue of our time is radical Christian fundamentalist extremism. Both would do well to really do some research, or better yet just be honest, and they would find that the transcendent issue of our time is energy.
Energy, power, oil, treasure, booty and plunder. Energy is the driving force behind every foreign policy in every country on every continent. Energy is the means and motivation by which wars are waged and battles fought. Energy is the mission, the target, the strategy and ultimately energy is the final casualty.
We must still fight for energy but we need to fight for energy independence. We need to rise up and fight for renewable energy. We need to stand down with arms and stand up with common sense. We have to ignore the failed foreign and energy policies of our present administration and take charge locally, at a community or neighborhood or district level by decentralizing energy generation now.
This is the transcendent challenge of our time.
Most likely threat down the road, China
Bush requested the largest one year Pentagon budget exclusive of Iraq and Afghanistan ever, $515.4B. On the ‘buy’ list are F-22 Raptors, a CVN-78 aircraft carrier and a Virginia class nuclear submarine. In order to pitch this to Congress and the American people guess who the ‘threat’ target is? As detailed by Michael Klare…
Against whom are these super-sophisticated ships and planes intended to be deployed? Not Iran, which is still largely equipped with aging US arms acquired in the 1970s during the reign of the Shah. Not Syria or North Korea, both still equipped with Korean- and Vietnam War-era Soviet castoffs. Not any of the other so-called rogue states against which Bush has railed so often. In fact, it is impossible to conceive of any adversary with the capacity to engage the United States on anything approaching major-power status except China.
The China threat
In their efforts to secure funding for all these costly new weapons, US military officials – and their allies in Congress and the corporate world – have begun highlighting the China threat.
The American people have been sold before and time will tell if they will be sold again.
Just as the Department of Defense and its corporate allies often touted the “Soviet threat” during the Cold War period to stampede Congress and the American public into supporting ever-increasing spending on advanced weapons, so a hypothetical “China threat” will now be conjured up to achieve the same purpose in the post-Cold War era.
With the US public concerned over the rising costs of the Iraq war and other national priorities – health care, education, alternative energy development, the mortgage crisis, and so on – such threat amplification will become indispensable to ensure adequate funding for the Pentagon’s favored weapons programs.
This level of defense spending is not sustainable and history is replete with fallen empires that can attribute their demise to an imbalance between military actions and providing for their people.
Is Iran the winner of the US GWOT?
The recent visit by Iranian president Ahmadinejad to Iraq indicates that the real benefactors of the occupation by US forces is Iran. I wrote about this more than two years ago. Now we are getting a taste of just how our foreign policy blunders have gone.
The Bush administration had been promoting a Turkey-Israel axis, then a Sunni Arab “axis of fear” (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates) and then a Saudi-Israeli axis, always trying to isolate Iran. None of these concoctions seems to have worked.
Hanif Ghaffari, writing in the Farsi-language, conservative Iranian daily Resalat, has pointed out how the recent, very successful Ahmadinejad trip to Iraq had to be considered in the context of “Iran after the Iraq war” and “Iraq after occupation by America”. The message could not be more graphic. When Bush went to Iraq he saw an ultra-fortified military base, and that was it. Ahmadinejad went everywhere in broad daylight, welcomed like a brother. This is how Tehran sees itself – as the ultimate victor of the US war on Iraq. And no “surge” or spin – not to mention Israeli paranoia – can or will make it go away.
Iraq now wants to boost oil production by 500,000 barrels per day and is courting Big Oil to do this. However, the lack of consensus in the Iraqi Parliament for a hydrocarbon law has made companies like Shell and BP squeamish. So Iraq is desperate to broker a deal to rescue its economy.
Iraq once had one of the region’s strongest agricultural and industrial economies. But United Nations sanctions and years of war with the United States and Iran have destroyed much of Iraq’s economic base, leaving the nation heavily dependent on oil revenue. And Iraq’s oil industry, hobbled by armed conflict, mismanagement and neglect, produces far less oil than Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The deal is more likely to be with Iran first, locking the US out of influencing any arrangements made with oil companies.
Big oil and Iraq
It has taken me two days to read this article from Asia Times. Every time I start I have to walk away because burrowed in between the details of political alliances, clever machinations and pipeline strategies lies the root of our problem in Congress
Big Oil deals in Iraq form the core of Bush’s strategy of creating a legacy for the US in the Middle East that may run for decades. Big Oil needs the assurance of a near-permanent US military presence in Iraq. And Bush is determined to provide that assurance. He is convinced that no serious American politician would defy the wishes of Big Oil. By logic, therefore, Bush is creating a historical legacy of an Iraq that will remain under American control for decades to come.
Apparently, Bush is not the only one acknowledges the control of Big Oil on Congress as country after country maneuvers to take advantage of the situation and plunder Iraq’s once nationalized but now privatized resources.
Indeed, the rest of the world has already decided that it is time to take the Bush legacy in Iraq seriously. The alacrity with which Moscow is hurrying to get onto Shahristani’s gravy train is the latest tell-tale sign. Moscow is highly unlikely to waste its time in rhetoric ridiculing the Bush administration by pointing out that the US needs assistance to save face and leave Iraq with dignity or that Russia could help stabilize the situation, and so on.
How do we the people fight this? We have to fight for energy independence. We have to end our dependence upon finite fossil fuels.
Global military complex
The fight for energy, the need to provide for and control the increasing population and the lust for power are driving the planet toward a massive military showdown.
Since the dawn of the 21st century, five of the six countries involved in the six-party talks have increased their military spending by 50% or more. The sixth, Japan, has maintained a steady, if sizeable military budget while nonetheless aspiring to keep pace. Every country in the region is now eagerly investing staggering amounts of money in new weapons systems and new offensive capabilities.
The arms race in Northeast Asia undercuts all talk of peace in the region. It also sustains a growing global military-industrial complex. Northeast Asia is where four of the world’s largest militaries – those of the United States, China, Russia, and Japan – confront each other. Together, the countries participating in the six-party talks account for approximately 65% of world military expenditures, with the US responsible for roughly half the global total.
Here is the real news that should hit the front pages of papers today: wars grip Iraq, Afghanistan and large swathes of Africa, but the heart of the global military-industrial complex lies in Northeast Asia. Any attempt to drive a stake through this potentially destabilizing monster must start with the militaries that face one another there.
Of course, sustaining military budgets of such grand proportions is not possible. Read The Rise and Fall of the Great Empires by Paul Kennedy to learn what history teaches us. Downfall, catastrophic downfall is inevitable.
Critics of the North Korean regime often point out that its military spending is ultimately a human-rights violation, because the government essentially takes food out of the mouths of its people to spend on armaments. North Korea is, however, just a particularly gross example of an expanding global problem. Each of the six countries in the new Pacific arms race has devised a wealth of rationales for its military spending – and each has ignored significant domestic needs in the process.
Given the sums that would be necessary to address the decommissioning of nuclear weapons, the looming crisis of climate change, and the destabilizing gap between rich and poor, such spending priorities are in themselves a threat to humanity.
The world put 37% more into military spending in 2006 than in 1997. If the “peace dividend” that was to follow the end of the Cold War never quite appeared, a decade later the world finds itself burdened with quite the opposite: a genuine peace deficit.
The same is true in the US
Rise and fall of the great military empire
Chalmers Johnson, noted political science scholar has described in great detail the full extent of the military industrial complex, its price on the American people and clearly lays out how our present course is unsustainable. Not only does our military spending exceed that of any other nation on the planet but so also does our trade deficit.
The world’s top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each country currently budgets for its military establishment are:
1. United States (FY08 budget), $623 billion
2. China (2004), $65 billion
3. Russia, $50 billion
4. France (2005), $45 billion
5. Japan (2007), $41.75 billion
6. Germany (2003), $35.1 billion
7. Italy (2003), $28.2 billion
8. South Korea (2003), $21.1 billion
9. India (2005 est.), $19 billion
10. Saudi Arabia (2005 est.), $18 billionWorld total military expenditures (2004 est.), $1,100 billion
World total (minus the United States), $500 billion.
What we have sacrificed to bring about this self destructive policy amongst other things is manufacturing jobs. What we now suffer is massive dependence upon foreign resources to maintain our exorbitant military budget.
On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research of Washington, DC, released a study prepared by the global forecasting company Global Insight on the long-term economic impact of increased military spending. Guided by economist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an initial demand stimulus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased military spending turns negative. Needless to say, the US economy has had to cope with growing defense spending for more than 60 years. He found that, after 10 years of higher defense spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a baseline scenario that involved lower defense spending.
Baker concluded:
It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment.
The US is crumbling as befitting a nation that invests in non productive enterprises such as defense as opposed to education, renewable energy and local manufacturing and resources management. Even Japan, which must import 100% of the raw materials required for manufacturing retains…
$88 billion per year trade surplus with the United States and enjoys the world’s second-highest current account balance.
Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, ( a book recommended to me by a handsome and brilliant young Air Force officer I met while protesting at the Pentagon ), describes how through history how each empire, once it begins to invest so heavily in defense is doomed to fall. We have to start working locally, toward correcting our own smaller, possibly more manageable trade imbalances before the empire crumbles into dust.
China dumps US dollars while world holds its breath
From the Existentialist Cowboy
Highly leveraged US expansion, growth and empire are about to be swept away like a bamboo hut. As China leads the world in dumping dollars, the US appears to have exhausted the means by which it can continue to leverage or finance expansion and imperialism.
Bush could not have picked a worse time to ratchet up his anti-Iran rhetoric. China’s disenchantment with US dollars is a reaction to Bush’s bellicose rhetoric. Iran’s strategic position was recognized by Alexander the Great, significantly the last “conqueror” to have successfully invaded from the west.
As this blog reported recently, Bush promised that the US would join an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran. It is impossible to tell if the US rhetoric is in response to Iranian threats to dump dollars or Iran’s response to Bush’s promise to join an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran. The GOP seems unconcerned as Bush’s big mouth continues to make the rest of world jittery.
Asia isn’t the only one skittish, Europe and the UK are trembling as well.
The stock market was in meltdown today as nearly £60billion was wiped off London shares.
A combination of poor economic figures and the worsening global credit crunch sent the FTSE 100 plunging.
At one stage the drop was the biggest since 9/11 in 2001, although the index of Britain’s biggest companies later clawed back some of the losses. At lunchtime the Footsie was down 250.1 points to 5647.8.
Yes, this is all in response to the failed financial strategies of the Bush administration
The fall came as Asian markets tumbled overnight following losses for the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday, when investors were left unimpressed by the US Government’s tax-relief plans to spur on the economy.
(hat tip/ Excuuuuuuse me!)
UPDATE:More panic from International Herald Tribune
http://iht.com/articles/2008/01/21/business/markets.3-208777.php
Did I just hear you say "little" Trinity? I think not ! She's half-grown !
Congratulations to you all ...
http://www.larryvanelsberg2010.com/index.html 
Thanks, Den, this is very useful 