Mayday Message: Save the Earth from Man Induced Climate Change!
From: RobertMcA1@aol.com
Sent:Thu 9/27/07 11:24 AM
To: jbennet@uark.edu
Protesters Pushing the Envelope. By Kelpie Wilson, Truthout.org, September 26, 2007. "More than 80 heads of state met at the UN on Monday to discuss the launch of post-Kyoto climate negotiations. Although this was the most high-level UN meeting yet held on the global climate emergency, President Bush refused to attend. He did, however, assent to an invitation from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to attend a private dinner afterward... Ironically, who eats and who does not eat is very much what the climate crisis is about. Scientists with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict global warming is likely to cut African crop production by half in the next dozen years... On Tuesday, film stars and celebrities from Bollywood and Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry) rallied near the UN with a Mayday Message on behalf of Africans and Asians. They said: 'Please help save us from climate change. We are the ones who have done the least to cause it, but we are suffering from climate change now. If you don't come to our help today, tomorrow it will be all of you'. Bollywood actress Shabana Azmi said, 'There are 854 million hungry people in the world today - 54 million more than when the world leaders pledged to halve hunger 11 years ago.' As global warming saps food production in poor countries around the world, the Millennium Development Goals of halving hunger by 2015 recedes into impossibility. While Bush was eating his dinner with Ban ki-Moon, a half-dozen American climate change activists continued a weeks-long fast to protest American inaction on climate, 'so that others might eat.' The fast began with participation from more than 1,200 people on September 4, the day Congress came back in session... [Climate activists],Ted Glick and others, are doing their best to organize the grassroots revolution. On Thursday, Glick will join a non-violent civil blockade of the second climate meeting this week, President Bush's...'Major Emitters Meeting'... where Bush will try to steer the world away from any mandates or caps on emissions and substitute vague 'aspirations' (voluntary action for legal obligations)... In addition to the civil resistance planned on Thursday, the Climate Emergency Council is holding a rally protesting Bush's 'Major Emitters Meeting' at noon on Friday, September 28 near the State Department building where the meeting is being held. On October 22, peace, justice and climate activists are sponsoring a 'No War No Warming intervention' in Washington to pressure the government to stop the war in Iraq, shift funding to rebuild communities, and go green with new jobs in a clean energy economy. On November 3, Step It Up 2007 is organizing coast to coast actions to demand leadership on global warming... Glick endorses all these actions and more. 'When you have everything from letter writing to riskier actions that push the envelope, you have a powerful movement that can't be ignored'."
Robert McAfee
Climate Change Messenger
2610 W Hackett Rd, Hackett, AR 72937
[479]638-0035 [479]462-8834
Answering the Call -- theclimateproject.org
Program based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth
The truth about the climate crisis is an inconvenient one that means we are going to have to change the way we live our lives. Al Gore
. . . unless we advance beyond thinking only in terms of conservation and alternate sources and begin to think in terms of a carbon pie, we will have no chance to stop the rise in atmospheric CO2. Wallace S. Broecker
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Mayday Message: Save the Earth from Man Induced Climate Change!
From: RobertMcA1@aol.com
Sent:Thu 9/27/07 11:24 AM
To: jbennet@uark.edu; aubreyshepherd@hotmail.com
Protesters Pushing the Envelope. By Kelpie Wilson, Truthout.org, September 26, 2007. "More than 80 heads of state met at the UN on Monday to discuss the launch of post-Kyoto climate negotiations. Although this was the most high-level UN meeting yet held on the global climate emergency, President Bush refused to attend. He did, however, assent to an invitation from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to attend a private dinner afterward... Ironically, who eats and who does not eat is very much what the climate crisis is about. Scientists with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict global warming is likely to cut African crop production by half in the next dozen years... On Tuesday, film stars and celebrities from Bollywood and Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry) rallied near the UN with a Mayday Message on behalf of Africans and Asians. They said: 'Please help save us from climate change. We are the ones who have done the least to cause it, but we are suffering from climate change now. If you don't come to our help today, tomorrow it will be all of you'. Bollywood actress Shabana Azmi said, 'There are 854 million hungry people in the world today - 54 million more than when the world leaders pledged to halve hunger 11 years ago.' As global warming saps food production in poor countries around the world, the Millennium Development Goals of halving hunger by 2015 recedes into impossibility. While Bush was eating his dinner with Ban ki-Moon, a half-dozen American climate change activists continued a weeks-long fast to protest American inaction on climate, 'so that others might eat.' The fast began with participation from more than 1,200 people on September 4, the day Congress came back in session... [Climate activists],Ted Glick and others, are doing their best to organize the grassroots revolution. On Thursday, Glick will join a non-violent civil blockade of the second climate meeting this week, President Bush's...'Major Emitters Meeting'... where Bush will try to steer the world away from any mandates or caps on emissions and substitute vague 'aspirations' (voluntary action for legal obligations)... In addition to the civil resistance planned on Thursday, the Climate Emergency Council is holding a rally protesting Bush's 'Major Emitters Meeting' at noon on Friday, September 28 near the State Department building where the meeting is being held. On October 22, peace, justice and climate activists are sponsoring a 'No War No Warming intervention' in Washington to pressure the government to stop the war in Iraq, shift funding to rebuild communities, and go green with new jobs in a clean energy economy. On November 3, Step It Up 2007 is organizing coast to coast actions to demand leadership on global warming... Glick endorses all these actions and more. 'When you have everything from letter writing to riskier actions that push the envelope, you have a powerful movement that can't be ignored'."
Robert McAfee
Climate Change Messenger
2610 W Hackett Rd, Hackett, AR 72937
[479]638-0035 [479]462-8834
Answering the Call -- theclimateproject.org
Program based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth
The truth about the climate crisis is an inconvenient one that means we are going to have to change the way we live our lives. Al Gore
. . . unless we advance beyond thinking only in terms of conservation and alternate sources and begin to think in terms of a carbon pie, we will have no chance to stop the rise in atmospheric CO2. Wallace S. Broecker
From: RobertMcA1@aol.com
Sent:Thu 9/27/07 11:24 AM
To: jbennet@uark.edu; aubreyshepherd@hotmail.com
Protesters Pushing the Envelope. By Kelpie Wilson, Truthout.org, September 26, 2007. "More than 80 heads of state met at the UN on Monday to discuss the launch of post-Kyoto climate negotiations. Although this was the most high-level UN meeting yet held on the global climate emergency, President Bush refused to attend. He did, however, assent to an invitation from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to attend a private dinner afterward... Ironically, who eats and who does not eat is very much what the climate crisis is about. Scientists with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict global warming is likely to cut African crop production by half in the next dozen years... On Tuesday, film stars and celebrities from Bollywood and Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry) rallied near the UN with a Mayday Message on behalf of Africans and Asians. They said: 'Please help save us from climate change. We are the ones who have done the least to cause it, but we are suffering from climate change now. If you don't come to our help today, tomorrow it will be all of you'. Bollywood actress Shabana Azmi said, 'There are 854 million hungry people in the world today - 54 million more than when the world leaders pledged to halve hunger 11 years ago.' As global warming saps food production in poor countries around the world, the Millennium Development Goals of halving hunger by 2015 recedes into impossibility. While Bush was eating his dinner with Ban ki-Moon, a half-dozen American climate change activists continued a weeks-long fast to protest American inaction on climate, 'so that others might eat.' The fast began with participation from more than 1,200 people on September 4, the day Congress came back in session... [Climate activists],Ted Glick and others, are doing their best to organize the grassroots revolution. On Thursday, Glick will join a non-violent civil blockade of the second climate meeting this week, President Bush's...'Major Emitters Meeting'... where Bush will try to steer the world away from any mandates or caps on emissions and substitute vague 'aspirations' (voluntary action for legal obligations)... In addition to the civil resistance planned on Thursday, the Climate Emergency Council is holding a rally protesting Bush's 'Major Emitters Meeting' at noon on Friday, September 28 near the State Department building where the meeting is being held. On October 22, peace, justice and climate activists are sponsoring a 'No War No Warming intervention' in Washington to pressure the government to stop the war in Iraq, shift funding to rebuild communities, and go green with new jobs in a clean energy economy. On November 3, Step It Up 2007 is organizing coast to coast actions to demand leadership on global warming... Glick endorses all these actions and more. 'When you have everything from letter writing to riskier actions that push the envelope, you have a powerful movement that can't be ignored'."
Robert McAfee
Climate Change Messenger
2610 W Hackett Rd, Hackett, AR 72937
[479]638-0035 [479]462-8834
Answering the Call -- theclimateproject.org
Program based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth
The truth about the climate crisis is an inconvenient one that means we are going to have to change the way we live our lives. Al Gore
. . . unless we advance beyond thinking only in terms of conservation and alternate sources and begin to think in terms of a carbon pie, we will have no chance to stop the rise in atmospheric CO2. Wallace S. Broecker
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
New reactors in Texas a bad idea
NUCLEAR INFORMATION AND RESOURCE SERVICE
6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 340, Takoma Park, MD 20912
301-270-NIRS (301-270-6477); Fax: 301-270-4291, nirsnet@nirs.org; www.nirs.org
STATEMENT OF NIRS ON SOUTH TEXAS REACTOR APPLICATION
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Michael Mariotte, Executive Director
September 25, 2007 301-270-6477; 301-395-7463 (cell)
NEW REACTORS IN SOUTH TEXAS WOULD SET U.S. ENERGY POLICY ON MISGUIDED COURSE
Today, NRG Energy said it is submitting an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build two new reactors at its South Texas nuclear site. This is the first full application for a new reactor in the U.S. in more than 30 years.
This project is emblematic of the failures of U.S. energy policy to effectively meet the needs of our nation. Nuclear power is a 20th century technology in a new world of climate crisis and a future that demands a distributed, sustainable approach to energy. Nuclear power requires massive taxpayer subsidies and yet still cannot compete environmentally with the sustainable energy technologies that will power our future.
NRG Energy already has been quoted in the media (Washington Post, September 25, 2007) as saying that “the whole reason” the company is considering new nuclear reactors is taxpayer subsidies provided by Congress and the Bush Administration in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. These multi-billion dollar subsidies include taxpayer loan guarantees for new reactors, tax credits for the first six reactors built, the Price-Anderson Act limitation of utility liability for nuclear accidents, and “risk insurance” to cover possible delays in the licensing process.
Without taxpayer support, no utility would build a new atomic reactor, and no financial institution would invest in a new reactor.
Moreover, the NRG Energy application would repeat one of the fundamental mistakes of the first generation of nuclear power: the construction of nuclear reactors without a feasible facility or plan for storage of the lethal radioactive waste the reactor would produce. The Yucca Mountain, Nevada, radioactive waste dump is on its last legs, and appears increasingly unlikely to ever open. Even if it did, a new round of nuclear construction would necessitate construction of another radioactive waste dump as well—something no state in the country likely would accept. After 50 years, one would think the lesson would have been learned: building atomic reactors without a scientifically-sound waste plan is folly.
Texas is blessed with enormous potential for wind and solar power, while aggressive energy efficiency programs remain the cheapest, fastest and cleanest method of addressing both electricity demand and the need to quickly reduce carbon emissions. Construction of new reactors in Texas would divert the resources needed to implement those efficiency programs and help solar and wind reach their full potential—to the detriment of Texans and all Americans. A recent study from American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (summarized at http://www.nirs.org/alternatives/sestudy10.pdf) shows that Texas can meet all forecasted energy demand through energy efficiency and sustainable energy technologies.
Both Texas and the United States deserve better than a greedy utility feasting at the taxpayer trough to build another large polluting power plant. We expect Texans to oppose the NRG Energy project, and we expect to help Texans with their opposition.
6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 340, Takoma Park, MD 20912
301-270-NIRS (301-270-6477); Fax: 301-270-4291, nirsnet@nirs.org; www.nirs.org
STATEMENT OF NIRS ON SOUTH TEXAS REACTOR APPLICATION
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Michael Mariotte, Executive Director
September 25, 2007 301-270-6477; 301-395-7463 (cell)
NEW REACTORS IN SOUTH TEXAS WOULD SET U.S. ENERGY POLICY ON MISGUIDED COURSE
Today, NRG Energy said it is submitting an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build two new reactors at its South Texas nuclear site. This is the first full application for a new reactor in the U.S. in more than 30 years.
This project is emblematic of the failures of U.S. energy policy to effectively meet the needs of our nation. Nuclear power is a 20th century technology in a new world of climate crisis and a future that demands a distributed, sustainable approach to energy. Nuclear power requires massive taxpayer subsidies and yet still cannot compete environmentally with the sustainable energy technologies that will power our future.
NRG Energy already has been quoted in the media (Washington Post, September 25, 2007) as saying that “the whole reason” the company is considering new nuclear reactors is taxpayer subsidies provided by Congress and the Bush Administration in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. These multi-billion dollar subsidies include taxpayer loan guarantees for new reactors, tax credits for the first six reactors built, the Price-Anderson Act limitation of utility liability for nuclear accidents, and “risk insurance” to cover possible delays in the licensing process.
Without taxpayer support, no utility would build a new atomic reactor, and no financial institution would invest in a new reactor.
Moreover, the NRG Energy application would repeat one of the fundamental mistakes of the first generation of nuclear power: the construction of nuclear reactors without a feasible facility or plan for storage of the lethal radioactive waste the reactor would produce. The Yucca Mountain, Nevada, radioactive waste dump is on its last legs, and appears increasingly unlikely to ever open. Even if it did, a new round of nuclear construction would necessitate construction of another radioactive waste dump as well—something no state in the country likely would accept. After 50 years, one would think the lesson would have been learned: building atomic reactors without a scientifically-sound waste plan is folly.
Texas is blessed with enormous potential for wind and solar power, while aggressive energy efficiency programs remain the cheapest, fastest and cleanest method of addressing both electricity demand and the need to quickly reduce carbon emissions. Construction of new reactors in Texas would divert the resources needed to implement those efficiency programs and help solar and wind reach their full potential—to the detriment of Texans and all Americans. A recent study from American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (summarized at http://www.nirs.org/alternatives/sestudy10.pdf) shows that Texas can meet all forecasted energy demand through energy efficiency and sustainable energy technologies.
Both Texas and the United States deserve better than a greedy utility feasting at the taxpayer trough to build another large polluting power plant. We expect Texans to oppose the NRG Energy project, and we expect to help Texans with their opposition.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
New Zealand Leads Climate Protection Effort
New Zealand Leads by Example. Commentary Tim Watkin, The Guardian Ulimited, September 25, 2007.
"As the world's leaders gather in New York to discuss climate change at the United Nations, one of the world's smaller countries is showing just how much can be done. New Zealand has long had a reputation for being 'clean and green' and has a proud record of conservation, with around 30% of its total land area being protected from development. Last week it announced bold plans [PDF 32 pages] to tackle climate change, following up on a goal set by prime minister Helen Clark at the start of the year for New Zealand to become the world's first carbon neutral country. Among the stated targets, to be legislated within the next year, is generating 90% of the country's electricity from renewable sources by 2025. This leaves California's goal of 80% by 2050 and Britain's goal of 60% by 2050 in the shade. (We should note that New Zealand is well ahead of the game, with close to 70% of its power already coming from renewables). What's more it expects its electricity sector to be entirely carbon neutral by 2025, followed by the stationary energy sector (coal and gas) in 2030 and the transport sector in 2040. It laid out a range of ways to achieve those targets, such a net increase in forest area of 250,000 hectares by 2020 and the wide use of electric cars. Government departments are leading the way; all 47 have emission-cutting plans and six - including treasury and the tax department, funnily enough - will be carbon neutral by 2012."
Robert McAfee
Climate Change Messenger
2610 W Hackett Rd, Hackett, AR 72937
[479]638-0035 [479]462-8834
Answering the Call -- theclimateproject.org
"As the world's leaders gather in New York to discuss climate change at the United Nations, one of the world's smaller countries is showing just how much can be done. New Zealand has long had a reputation for being 'clean and green' and has a proud record of conservation, with around 30% of its total land area being protected from development. Last week it announced bold plans [PDF 32 pages] to tackle climate change, following up on a goal set by prime minister Helen Clark at the start of the year for New Zealand to become the world's first carbon neutral country. Among the stated targets, to be legislated within the next year, is generating 90% of the country's electricity from renewable sources by 2025. This leaves California's goal of 80% by 2050 and Britain's goal of 60% by 2050 in the shade. (We should note that New Zealand is well ahead of the game, with close to 70% of its power already coming from renewables). What's more it expects its electricity sector to be entirely carbon neutral by 2025, followed by the stationary energy sector (coal and gas) in 2030 and the transport sector in 2040. It laid out a range of ways to achieve those targets, such a net increase in forest area of 250,000 hectares by 2020 and the wide use of electric cars. Government departments are leading the way; all 47 have emission-cutting plans and six - including treasury and the tax department, funnily enough - will be carbon neutral by 2012."
Robert McAfee
Climate Change Messenger
2610 W Hackett Rd, Hackett, AR 72937
[479]638-0035 [479]462-8834
Answering the Call -- theclimateproject.org
Monday, September 24, 2007
We want real climate action now! Protest Bush Climate Summit
From: RobertMcA1@aol.com [mailto:RobertMcA1@aol.com]
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2007 5:15 PM
To: jbennet@uark.edu; aubreyshepherd@hotmail.com
Subject: Protest the Bush Climate Summit
Protest Planned for Bush Climate Summit. Call to action, Climate Emergency Council, September 22, 2000. "In a clearly manipulative move, George Bush is inviting top leaders from around the world to Washington, D.C. on Sept. 27th and 28th to officially convey his 'deep concern' about global warming. His proposed fix: more useless 'voluntary' measures and huge subsidies for 'clean coal' and nuclear energy. The event is clearly meant to undermine real international efforts now underway to achieve mandatory greenhouse gas cuts under the Kyoto process. Here's what you can do: Join other concerned Americans in protesting this cynical conference on September 28th from noon-1:00 p.m. We'll be holding a rally downtown next to the State Department, probably on Virginia Avenue between C and D Streets, NW (permit applied for). For now, simply save the date and register for the rally so we can keep you updated in the coming days. Top ministers and heads of state from around the world will be attending Bush's conference as well as a great concentration of national and international media. We need to show up and loudly proclaim our own message: George Bush doesn't speak for us! We want real climate action now!"
Robert McAfee
Climate Change Messenger
2610 W Hackett Rd, Hackett, AR 72937
[479]638-0035 [479]462-8834
Answering the Call -- theclimateproject.org
Program based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth
The truth about the climate crisis is an inconvenient one that means we are going to have to change the way we live our lives. Al Gore
. . . unless we advance beyond thinking only in terms of conservation and alternate sources and begin to think in terms of a carbon pie, we will have no chance to stop the rise in atmospheric CO2. Wallace S. Broecker
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2007 5:15 PM
To: jbennet@uark.edu; aubreyshepherd@hotmail.com
Subject: Protest the Bush Climate Summit
Protest Planned for Bush Climate Summit. Call to action, Climate Emergency Council, September 22, 2000. "In a clearly manipulative move, George Bush is inviting top leaders from around the world to Washington, D.C. on Sept. 27th and 28th to officially convey his 'deep concern' about global warming. His proposed fix: more useless 'voluntary' measures and huge subsidies for 'clean coal' and nuclear energy. The event is clearly meant to undermine real international efforts now underway to achieve mandatory greenhouse gas cuts under the Kyoto process. Here's what you can do: Join other concerned Americans in protesting this cynical conference on September 28th from noon-1:00 p.m. We'll be holding a rally downtown next to the State Department, probably on Virginia Avenue between C and D Streets, NW (permit applied for). For now, simply save the date and register for the rally so we can keep you updated in the coming days. Top ministers and heads of state from around the world will be attending Bush's conference as well as a great concentration of national and international media. We need to show up and loudly proclaim our own message: George Bush doesn't speak for us! We want real climate action now!"
Robert McAfee
Climate Change Messenger
2610 W Hackett Rd, Hackett, AR 72937
[479]638-0035 [479]462-8834
Answering the Call -- theclimateproject.org
Program based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth
The truth about the climate crisis is an inconvenient one that means we are going to have to change the way we live our lives. Al Gore
. . . unless we advance beyond thinking only in terms of conservation and alternate sources and begin to think in terms of a carbon pie, we will have no chance to stop the rise in atmospheric CO2. Wallace S. Broecker
Thursday, September 20, 2007
OMNI Newsletter on Nationalism, Imperialism, Militarism, Iraq Sept. 20, 2007
OMNI NEWSLETTER, SPECIAL NUMBER ON CHECKBOOK IMPERIALISM IN IRAQ
Building a Culture of Peace, SEPTEMBER 20, 2007
Compiled by Dick Bennett The last newsletter on these subjects appeared on July 3, 2007.
These writings are intended to assist in calling and writing letters to friends, to our Congressional delegates and other Cong. representatives, and to newspaper editors, to defend a government of, by, and for WE, THE PEOPLE.
CHECKBOOK IMPERIALISM http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070918_checkbook_imperialism_the_blackwater_fiasco/
“Checkbook Imperialism: The Blackwater Fiasco”
By Robert Scheer Truthdig: September 18, 2007
Please, please, I tell myself, leave Orwell out of it.
Find some other, fresher way to explain why "Operation
Iraqi Freedom" is dependent upon killer mercenaries.
Or why the "democratically elected government" of "liberated power to expel Blackwater USA from its land or hold any
of the 50,000 private contractor troops that the U.S.
government has brought to Iraq accountable for their
; deadly actions.
Were there even the faintest trace of Iraqi
independence rising from the ashes of this failed
> American imperialist venture, Blackwater would have to
> fold its tents and go, if only in the interest of
> keeping up appearances. After all, the Iraqi Interior
> Ministry claimed that the Blackwater thugs guarding a
> U.S. State Department convoy through the streets of
> Baghdad fired "randomly at citizens" in a crowded
> square on Sunday, killing 11 people and wounding 13
> others. So the Iraqi government has ordered Blackwater
> to leave the country after what a government spokesman
> called a "flagrant assault ... on Iraqi citizens."
>
> But who told those Iraqi officials that they have the
> power to control anything regarding the 182,000
> privately contracted personnel working for the U.S. in
> Iraq? Don't they know about Order 17, which former
> American proconsul Paul Bremer put in place to grant
> contractors, including his own Blackwater bodyguards,
> immunity from Iraqi prosecution? Nothing has changed
> since the supposed transfer of power from the Coalition
> Provisional Authority, which Bremer once headed, to the
> Iraqi government holed up in the Green Zone and guarded
> by Blackwater and other "private" soldiers.
>
> They are "private" in the same fictional sense that our
> uniformed military is a "volunteer" force, since both
> are lured by the dollars offered by the same paymaster,
> the U.S. government. Contractors earn substantially
> more, despite $20,000 to $150,000 signing bonuses and
> an all-time-high average annual cost of $100,000 per
> person for the uniformed military. All of this was
> designed by the neocon hawks in the Pentagon to pursue
> their dreams of empire while avoiding a conscripted
> army, which would have millions howling in the street
> by now in protest.
>
> Instead, we have checkbook imperialism. The U.S.
> government purchases whatever army it needs, which has
> led to the dependence upon private contract firms like
> Blackwater USA, with its $300-million-plus contract to
> protect U.S. State Department personnel in Iraq. That
> is why the latest Blackwater incident, which Prime
> Minister Nouri al-Maliki branded a "crime," is so
> difficult to deal with. Iraqis are clearly demanding
> to rid their country of Blackwater and other
> contractors, and on Tuesday the Iraqi government said
> it would be scrutinizing the status of all private
> security firms working in the country.
>
> But the White House hopes the outrage will once again
> blow over. As the Associated Press reported on Monday:
> "The U.S. clearly hoped the Iraqis would be satisfied
> with an investigation, a finding of responsibility and
> compensation to the victim's families-and not insist on
> expelling a company that the Americans cannot operate
> here without." Or, as Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified
> to the U.S. Senate last week: "There is simply no way
> at all that the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic
> Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to
> staff the security function in Iraq. There is no
> alternative except through contracts."
>
> Consider the irony of that last statement-that the U.S.
> experiment in building democracy in Iraq is dependent
> upon the same garrisons of foreign mercenaries that
> drove the founders of our own country to launch the
> American Revolution. As George Washington warned in
> his farewell address, once the American government
> enters into these "foreign entanglements," we lose the
> Republic, because public accountability is sacrificed
> to the necessities of war for empire.
>
> Despite the fact that Blackwater USA gets almost all of
> its revenue from the U.S. government-much of it in no-
> bid contracts aided, no doubt, by the lavish
> contributions to the Republican Party made by company
> founder Erik Prince and his billionaire parents-its
> operations remain largely beyond public scrutiny.
> Blackwater and others in this international security
> racket operate as independent states of their own,
> subject neither to the rules of Iraq nor the ones that
> the U.S. government applies to its own uniformed
> forces. "We are not simply a 'private security
> company,' " Blackwater boasts on its corporate website.
> "We are a professional military, law enforcement,
> security, peacekeeping, and stability operations firm.
> ... We have become the most responsive, cost-effective
> means of affecting the strategic balance in support of
> security and peace, and freedom and democracy
> everywhere."
>
> Yeah, so who elected you guys to run the world?
WILLIAM BLUM
Anti-Empire Report, September 11, 2007
http://killinghope.org/aer49.htm
Anti-Empire Report, August 10, 2007
http://killinghope.org/aer48.htm
“Anti-Empire Report,” July 9, 2007
http://killinghope.org/aer47.htm
Building a Culture of Peace, SEPTEMBER 20, 2007
Compiled by Dick Bennett The last newsletter on these subjects appeared on July 3, 2007.
These writings are intended to assist in calling and writing letters to friends, to our Congressional delegates and other Cong. representatives, and to newspaper editors, to defend a government of, by, and for WE, THE PEOPLE.
CHECKBOOK IMPERIALISM http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070918_checkbook_imperialism_the_blackwater_fiasco/
“Checkbook Imperialism: The Blackwater Fiasco”
By Robert Scheer Truthdig: September 18, 2007
Please, please, I tell myself, leave Orwell out of it.
Find some other, fresher way to explain why "Operation
Iraqi Freedom" is dependent upon killer mercenaries.
Or why the "democratically elected government" of "liberated power to expel Blackwater USA from its land or hold any
of the 50,000 private contractor troops that the U.S.
government has brought to Iraq accountable for their
; deadly actions.
Were there even the faintest trace of Iraqi
independence rising from the ashes of this failed
> American imperialist venture, Blackwater would have to
> fold its tents and go, if only in the interest of
> keeping up appearances. After all, the Iraqi Interior
> Ministry claimed that the Blackwater thugs guarding a
> U.S. State Department convoy through the streets of
> Baghdad fired "randomly at citizens" in a crowded
> square on Sunday, killing 11 people and wounding 13
> others. So the Iraqi government has ordered Blackwater
> to leave the country after what a government spokesman
> called a "flagrant assault ... on Iraqi citizens."
>
> But who told those Iraqi officials that they have the
> power to control anything regarding the 182,000
> privately contracted personnel working for the U.S. in
> Iraq? Don't they know about Order 17, which former
> American proconsul Paul Bremer put in place to grant
> contractors, including his own Blackwater bodyguards,
> immunity from Iraqi prosecution? Nothing has changed
> since the supposed transfer of power from the Coalition
> Provisional Authority, which Bremer once headed, to the
> Iraqi government holed up in the Green Zone and guarded
> by Blackwater and other "private" soldiers.
>
> They are "private" in the same fictional sense that our
> uniformed military is a "volunteer" force, since both
> are lured by the dollars offered by the same paymaster,
> the U.S. government. Contractors earn substantially
> more, despite $20,000 to $150,000 signing bonuses and
> an all-time-high average annual cost of $100,000 per
> person for the uniformed military. All of this was
> designed by the neocon hawks in the Pentagon to pursue
> their dreams of empire while avoiding a conscripted
> army, which would have millions howling in the street
> by now in protest.
>
> Instead, we have checkbook imperialism. The U.S.
> government purchases whatever army it needs, which has
> led to the dependence upon private contract firms like
> Blackwater USA, with its $300-million-plus contract to
> protect U.S. State Department personnel in Iraq. That
> is why the latest Blackwater incident, which Prime
> Minister Nouri al-Maliki branded a "crime," is so
> difficult to deal with. Iraqis are clearly demanding
> to rid their country of Blackwater and other
> contractors, and on Tuesday the Iraqi government said
> it would be scrutinizing the status of all private
> security firms working in the country.
>
> But the White House hopes the outrage will once again
> blow over. As the Associated Press reported on Monday:
> "The U.S. clearly hoped the Iraqis would be satisfied
> with an investigation, a finding of responsibility and
> compensation to the victim's families-and not insist on
> expelling a company that the Americans cannot operate
> here without." Or, as Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified
> to the U.S. Senate last week: "There is simply no way
> at all that the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic
> Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to
> staff the security function in Iraq. There is no
> alternative except through contracts."
>
> Consider the irony of that last statement-that the U.S.
> experiment in building democracy in Iraq is dependent
> upon the same garrisons of foreign mercenaries that
> drove the founders of our own country to launch the
> American Revolution. As George Washington warned in
> his farewell address, once the American government
> enters into these "foreign entanglements," we lose the
> Republic, because public accountability is sacrificed
> to the necessities of war for empire.
>
> Despite the fact that Blackwater USA gets almost all of
> its revenue from the U.S. government-much of it in no-
> bid contracts aided, no doubt, by the lavish
> contributions to the Republican Party made by company
> founder Erik Prince and his billionaire parents-its
> operations remain largely beyond public scrutiny.
> Blackwater and others in this international security
> racket operate as independent states of their own,
> subject neither to the rules of Iraq nor the ones that
> the U.S. government applies to its own uniformed
> forces. "We are not simply a 'private security
> company,' " Blackwater boasts on its corporate website.
> "We are a professional military, law enforcement,
> security, peacekeeping, and stability operations firm.
> ... We have become the most responsive, cost-effective
> means of affecting the strategic balance in support of
> security and peace, and freedom and democracy
> everywhere."
>
> Yeah, so who elected you guys to run the world?
WILLIAM BLUM
Anti-Empire Report, September 11, 2007
http://killinghope.org/aer49.htm
Anti-Empire Report, August 10, 2007
http://killinghope.org/aer48.htm
“Anti-Empire Report,” July 9, 2007
http://killinghope.org/aer47.htm
WERTHER ON "THE ARCHITECTURE OF PERPETUAL WAR
“The Architecture of Perpetual War”
by Werther
Of late, many of the nation’s literati have preoccupied themselves with a mendacious New York Times op-ed column by a couple of think tank hacks named Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, the burden of which is that, by golly, the glorious Surge really is working. Of course, the whole thing was a put-up job, sold on the man-bites-dog pretence that the two authors were longtime critics of the Bush administration who had gone to Iraq and seen the light. Their performance is deftly skewered here.
But as edifying as it might be for us to wallow in the discrediting of Messrs. O’Hanlon and Pollack, the piece is rather unimportant in itself – merely one of a thousand bits of semi-official war propaganda, essentially backward-looking as it attempts to vindicate the disastrous decision to invade and occupy Iraq. Our eyes alighted upon a more fruitful field for analysis in the form of a column by two other think tank hacks, Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution (not coincidentally, the place of employment for Mr. O’Hanlon as well), and Robert Kagan of the catastrophically misnamed Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The piece is ominously titled "The Next Intervention." Just when we thought two cloddishly mismanaged wars at the same time in Iraq and Afghanistan might chill the American appetite for military intervention, the authors rush to assure us that the dreadful prospect of a few years of peace can be safely ruled out. Why? "Despite the problems and setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, America remains the world's dominant military power, spends half a trillion dollars a year on defense and faces no peer strong enough to deter it if it chooses to act." Might makes right apparently. Rather than fighting on behalf of some morally unimpeachable cause, the principal reason the authors advance for going to war is because we can do it. This is, in fact, the opposite of "peace through strength," and suggests that critics of Pentagon spending were right all along in their assertion that more spending equals more war.
Mindful of the idiotic way in which the Bush administration handled diplomacy in the run-up to their Mesopotamian Blitzkrieg, the authors concede that getting other countries to sign off on our wars is a good thing. For one thing, it sells war to the Better Sort of People in America (the ones who shop at Whole Foods, watch PBS, can find foreign countries on a map, and are likely to be reading one’s op-ed in the Washington Post): "It matters to Americans, who want to believe they are acting justly and are troubled if others accuse them of selfish, immoral or otherwise illegitimate behavior." Horrors, the mortification of being accused, as a right-thinking American, of such low-class behavior! As well to receive a nasty letter from one's homeowner's association berating one for not cutting the lawn. After all, if the Frogs are on board as well as the Brits, it makes the war more Atlanticist and gives everyone a dose of righteous nostalgia for the Euro-American solidarity of the cold war.
But the problem, as Messrs. Daalder and Kagan see it, is that damned United Nations. We aren’t ever likely again to be in a situation like 1950, when the Russians boycotted the Security Council, so there will always be a permanent member able and willing to veto a U.S. military intervention. We need to overcome this problem because, as the authors pompously remind us, "Toppling Saddam Hussein was a just act and therefore was inherently legitimate." That is no doubt a great comfort to the next of kin of the 600,000 or so "excess mortalities" that the British medical journal Lancet estimates have occurred pursuant to the U.S. invasion.
The solution? – a "Concert of the Democracies" to replace the United Nations. One can almost hear the director cuing the inspirational music, Ã la the "Why We Fight" series. Nowhere, of course, do the authors define what a democracy is. If it means majoritarianism via one-man-one-vote, then the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College would have difficulty passing muster. If it means the rule of law maintained by such bedrock principles as habeas corpus, there will be a lot of embarrassed coughing behind the hand in Washington’s think tanks.
Even on more practical grounds, one can find insuperable problems with this scheme. One could point to any number of indubitable democracies in Latin America that, from bitter experience, would hesitate a long time before giving a blank check to Washington to intervene wherever it liked. In all likelihood, the authors’ vision, were it ever realized, would amount to no more that the same "coalition of the willing" we have in Iraq, i.e., a smallish group of subservient and/or well-bribed countries. It has, in fact, always been the administration’s preference to act as the capo among a group of clients, rather than as one sovereign country dealing with others of the same status. The op-ed piece so neatly fits the administration’s line, in fact, that it might as well have been drafted in the White House basement.
Much has been written about the military industrial complex: its obscene cost overruns; the corrupt relations between the uniformed military, the contractors, and Congress; the wild threat inflation. Too little studied has been the role of ostensibly non-partisan think tanks as the semi-official propaganda arm of the complex, and as the transmission belt of propaganda themes between the government and the prestige press. While the activity of the American Enterprise Institute as a propaganda organ is widely known because of its tub-thumping for the Iraq war and its championing of Iranian spy Achmed Chalibi, the same charge applies, to a greater or lesser degree, to most of the "prestige" think tanks: Brookings, Carnegie, CSIS, the Hudson Institute, etc.
They are an integral part of the government’s two-track propaganda machine for selling war. For the downscale end of the market, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Michael Savage will do nicely. Their braying voices and crude arguments are finely calibrated to reach every low-status white male out in satellite dish country. The notion that it’s even theoretically a good idea to have world opinion on America’s side before it embarks on war would be derided as sissy stuff in such precincts. One recalls the eve of the Iraq war, when the visceral hatred of the French in the Murdoch gutter press actually exceeded the vituperation against Saddam Hussein.
But to convince the professionals, the academics, the people who show up at the various world affairs councils which dot the provinces, it is critically useful to have mediators like Messrs. Daalder and Kagan. The Better Sort roughly corresponds to the National Bourgeoisie in Wilhelmine Germany or the outer Nomenklatura in the Soviet Union. They may not send their kids to war in any appreciable numbers, but their support for war is crucial to any administration. The more tender-minded of the Better Sort, in particular, lust in a most alarming way for some sort of "humanitarian" intervention they could support. It is the task of the Daalders and Kagans to toss around terms like "genocide" to provide a humanitarian gloss to whichever invasion advocacy project they are promoting at the moment.1
Note as well, that in the division of propaganda labor between the roughneck demagogues and the think tank chin-scratchers, the propaganda themes to promote a given policy are disparate or even contradictory. The Limbaughs and the O'Reillys sell a frank brand of gutter patriotism emphasizing the joys of killing foreigners. If there is any policy reason that appeals to the target audience, it is likely to be something direct and tangible, like the acquisition of valuable resources such as oil. On the flip side, the fear used to motivate Limbaugh Nation is some comic book level bugaboo, such as the notion that an Islamic army will physically invade and conquer America.2
That sort of thing won't sell with the Better Sort. Ideally, we are fighting, after a vigorous and probing national debate, and much searching of souls, for a better world, to prevent genocide, to stop female circumcision, or for credibility with our allies. If there is an overriding fear that motivates the Better Sort, it is that old nemesis of the MacNeil-Lehrer set, "regional instability." While the lumpenproles seethe with apocalyptic visions of hand-to-hand combat with the minions of the Caliphate in downtown Paducah, the Better Sort's fantasies parse like a graduate seminar from hell. Mr. Daalder and Mr. Kagan are only too happy to feed the conceits of the class that nurtured them on behalf of the government that employs them at one remove.
The day before yesterday it was Vietnam; yesterday it was Kosovo; today it is Iraq. Tomorrow it could be Iran, or Belarus, or Venezuela, or any one of a dozen prospects. The duty of the think tank hacks is to make war seem not only inevitable, but respectable in the eyes of the Better Sort.
One rather doubts a bunch of fuzzy-minded do-gooders was able to finance the recent campaign to intervene in Darfur that included full-page advertisements in the prestige papers and 60-second spots on television; there must have been more substantial interests involved. Although the "invade Sudan" lobby has thus far failed in its aim, it must be admitted that the target country of Sudan was a poor prospect: with a head of government not one person in ten thousand could name, it lacked an identifiable Hitler; and with a technology base more suited to the stone age than the space age, the fearmongers and threat inflators could hardly suggest WMD without eliciting laughter. When President Clinton dispatched cruise missiles against a Khartoum aspirin factory, the operation was not wildly popular, even among normally bellicose Republicans. One suspects the latter regarded it as an unwelcome distraction from their relentless drive to impeach him. If so, it was a rare case of domestic concerns trumping national security issues.
Lest the reader think we exaggerate here, internet columnist Glenn Greenwald has written about exactly how prevalent this fantasy is among the Right Wing.
August 15, 2007
Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.
Copyright © 2007 Werther
by Werther
Of late, many of the nation’s literati have preoccupied themselves with a mendacious New York Times op-ed column by a couple of think tank hacks named Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, the burden of which is that, by golly, the glorious Surge really is working. Of course, the whole thing was a put-up job, sold on the man-bites-dog pretence that the two authors were longtime critics of the Bush administration who had gone to Iraq and seen the light. Their performance is deftly skewered here.
But as edifying as it might be for us to wallow in the discrediting of Messrs. O’Hanlon and Pollack, the piece is rather unimportant in itself – merely one of a thousand bits of semi-official war propaganda, essentially backward-looking as it attempts to vindicate the disastrous decision to invade and occupy Iraq. Our eyes alighted upon a more fruitful field for analysis in the form of a column by two other think tank hacks, Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution (not coincidentally, the place of employment for Mr. O’Hanlon as well), and Robert Kagan of the catastrophically misnamed Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The piece is ominously titled "The Next Intervention." Just when we thought two cloddishly mismanaged wars at the same time in Iraq and Afghanistan might chill the American appetite for military intervention, the authors rush to assure us that the dreadful prospect of a few years of peace can be safely ruled out. Why? "Despite the problems and setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, America remains the world's dominant military power, spends half a trillion dollars a year on defense and faces no peer strong enough to deter it if it chooses to act." Might makes right apparently. Rather than fighting on behalf of some morally unimpeachable cause, the principal reason the authors advance for going to war is because we can do it. This is, in fact, the opposite of "peace through strength," and suggests that critics of Pentagon spending were right all along in their assertion that more spending equals more war.
Mindful of the idiotic way in which the Bush administration handled diplomacy in the run-up to their Mesopotamian Blitzkrieg, the authors concede that getting other countries to sign off on our wars is a good thing. For one thing, it sells war to the Better Sort of People in America (the ones who shop at Whole Foods, watch PBS, can find foreign countries on a map, and are likely to be reading one’s op-ed in the Washington Post): "It matters to Americans, who want to believe they are acting justly and are troubled if others accuse them of selfish, immoral or otherwise illegitimate behavior." Horrors, the mortification of being accused, as a right-thinking American, of such low-class behavior! As well to receive a nasty letter from one's homeowner's association berating one for not cutting the lawn. After all, if the Frogs are on board as well as the Brits, it makes the war more Atlanticist and gives everyone a dose of righteous nostalgia for the Euro-American solidarity of the cold war.
But the problem, as Messrs. Daalder and Kagan see it, is that damned United Nations. We aren’t ever likely again to be in a situation like 1950, when the Russians boycotted the Security Council, so there will always be a permanent member able and willing to veto a U.S. military intervention. We need to overcome this problem because, as the authors pompously remind us, "Toppling Saddam Hussein was a just act and therefore was inherently legitimate." That is no doubt a great comfort to the next of kin of the 600,000 or so "excess mortalities" that the British medical journal Lancet estimates have occurred pursuant to the U.S. invasion.
The solution? – a "Concert of the Democracies" to replace the United Nations. One can almost hear the director cuing the inspirational music, Ã la the "Why We Fight" series. Nowhere, of course, do the authors define what a democracy is. If it means majoritarianism via one-man-one-vote, then the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College would have difficulty passing muster. If it means the rule of law maintained by such bedrock principles as habeas corpus, there will be a lot of embarrassed coughing behind the hand in Washington’s think tanks.
Even on more practical grounds, one can find insuperable problems with this scheme. One could point to any number of indubitable democracies in Latin America that, from bitter experience, would hesitate a long time before giving a blank check to Washington to intervene wherever it liked. In all likelihood, the authors’ vision, were it ever realized, would amount to no more that the same "coalition of the willing" we have in Iraq, i.e., a smallish group of subservient and/or well-bribed countries. It has, in fact, always been the administration’s preference to act as the capo among a group of clients, rather than as one sovereign country dealing with others of the same status. The op-ed piece so neatly fits the administration’s line, in fact, that it might as well have been drafted in the White House basement.
Much has been written about the military industrial complex: its obscene cost overruns; the corrupt relations between the uniformed military, the contractors, and Congress; the wild threat inflation. Too little studied has been the role of ostensibly non-partisan think tanks as the semi-official propaganda arm of the complex, and as the transmission belt of propaganda themes between the government and the prestige press. While the activity of the American Enterprise Institute as a propaganda organ is widely known because of its tub-thumping for the Iraq war and its championing of Iranian spy Achmed Chalibi, the same charge applies, to a greater or lesser degree, to most of the "prestige" think tanks: Brookings, Carnegie, CSIS, the Hudson Institute, etc.
They are an integral part of the government’s two-track propaganda machine for selling war. For the downscale end of the market, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Michael Savage will do nicely. Their braying voices and crude arguments are finely calibrated to reach every low-status white male out in satellite dish country. The notion that it’s even theoretically a good idea to have world opinion on America’s side before it embarks on war would be derided as sissy stuff in such precincts. One recalls the eve of the Iraq war, when the visceral hatred of the French in the Murdoch gutter press actually exceeded the vituperation against Saddam Hussein.
But to convince the professionals, the academics, the people who show up at the various world affairs councils which dot the provinces, it is critically useful to have mediators like Messrs. Daalder and Kagan. The Better Sort roughly corresponds to the National Bourgeoisie in Wilhelmine Germany or the outer Nomenklatura in the Soviet Union. They may not send their kids to war in any appreciable numbers, but their support for war is crucial to any administration. The more tender-minded of the Better Sort, in particular, lust in a most alarming way for some sort of "humanitarian" intervention they could support. It is the task of the Daalders and Kagans to toss around terms like "genocide" to provide a humanitarian gloss to whichever invasion advocacy project they are promoting at the moment.1
Note as well, that in the division of propaganda labor between the roughneck demagogues and the think tank chin-scratchers, the propaganda themes to promote a given policy are disparate or even contradictory. The Limbaughs and the O'Reillys sell a frank brand of gutter patriotism emphasizing the joys of killing foreigners. If there is any policy reason that appeals to the target audience, it is likely to be something direct and tangible, like the acquisition of valuable resources such as oil. On the flip side, the fear used to motivate Limbaugh Nation is some comic book level bugaboo, such as the notion that an Islamic army will physically invade and conquer America.2
That sort of thing won't sell with the Better Sort. Ideally, we are fighting, after a vigorous and probing national debate, and much searching of souls, for a better world, to prevent genocide, to stop female circumcision, or for credibility with our allies. If there is an overriding fear that motivates the Better Sort, it is that old nemesis of the MacNeil-Lehrer set, "regional instability." While the lumpenproles seethe with apocalyptic visions of hand-to-hand combat with the minions of the Caliphate in downtown Paducah, the Better Sort's fantasies parse like a graduate seminar from hell. Mr. Daalder and Mr. Kagan are only too happy to feed the conceits of the class that nurtured them on behalf of the government that employs them at one remove.
The day before yesterday it was Vietnam; yesterday it was Kosovo; today it is Iraq. Tomorrow it could be Iran, or Belarus, or Venezuela, or any one of a dozen prospects. The duty of the think tank hacks is to make war seem not only inevitable, but respectable in the eyes of the Better Sort.
One rather doubts a bunch of fuzzy-minded do-gooders was able to finance the recent campaign to intervene in Darfur that included full-page advertisements in the prestige papers and 60-second spots on television; there must have been more substantial interests involved. Although the "invade Sudan" lobby has thus far failed in its aim, it must be admitted that the target country of Sudan was a poor prospect: with a head of government not one person in ten thousand could name, it lacked an identifiable Hitler; and with a technology base more suited to the stone age than the space age, the fearmongers and threat inflators could hardly suggest WMD without eliciting laughter. When President Clinton dispatched cruise missiles against a Khartoum aspirin factory, the operation was not wildly popular, even among normally bellicose Republicans. One suspects the latter regarded it as an unwelcome distraction from their relentless drive to impeach him. If so, it was a rare case of domestic concerns trumping national security issues.
Lest the reader think we exaggerate here, internet columnist Glenn Greenwald has written about exactly how prevalent this fantasy is among the Right Wing.
August 15, 2007
Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.
Copyright © 2007 Werther
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