Back in 2003 and 2004 over 70% of American’s polled were telling pollsters not only that they believed Saddam Hussein had WMDs but that he was personally involved in the attack on the World Trade Centre.
Now they’re at it again, with over 70% telling pollsters that they think Iran has nuclear weapons.
Should this country really be allowed to deal in international politics?
There’s a campaign under way in the U.S. to “restore the First Amendment to its original purpose: to protect people, not corporations.” They need to hurry. The U.S. has long taken the road to corporatocracy. The longer this goes on the less likely they’ll ever be able to turn back.
In 1886 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations had the same constitutional rights as a person. This was the beginning of the end of any meaningful form of democracy in the U.S.
David Korten alludes to the reason:
The private-benefit corporation is an institution granted a legally protected right — some would claim obligation — to pursue a narrow private interest without regard to broader social and environmental consequences. If it were a real person, it would fit the clinical profile of a sociopath.
The basic design of the private-benefit corporation was created in 1600 when the British crown chartered the British East India Company as what is best described as a legalized criminal syndicate to colonize the resources and economies of distant lands to benefit wealthy investors far removed from the social and environmental consequences. That design has ever since proven highly effective in advancing the private interests of the world’s wealthiest people at enormous cost to the rest.
The private-benefit corporation uses its economic power to privatize (internalize) gains and socialize (externalize) cost.
The power afforded to corporations in the U.S. has, until now, been slightly curtailed by limits imposed on corporate spending in political campaigns. In a sweeping decision a right-wing majority U.S. Supreme Court has ruled to lift these limits.
Corporations, and the rich behind them, finally own America. Democracy for the rich.
The 20th century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
—Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy
U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates on the 15th Jan:
It seems to me that without having any structure on the ground in terms of distribution, that an airdrop is simply going to lead to riots as people try and go after that stuff … It seems to me that’s a formula for contributing to chaos rather than preventing it.
People are dying of starvation and disease but they’re not allowed any supplies because the head of the armed services of America, now the controller of Haitian airspace, thinks they can’t be trusted.
This is what happens when you leave authoritarians in control of a humanitarian mission.
The lack of airdrops in these critical few days has also helped to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of disorder, to be “fixed” by outsiders. They’ve already militarised this relief effort and based on their history in Haiti I don’t think the the Americans can be trusted one bit. Unfortunately Haitians don’t have much choice at the moment.
Limited airdrops finally began yesterday but it will be too little too late for many.
This might sound a strange thing to say but let’s not delude ourselves, the disaster in Haiti is largely a man-made one. And it’s down to the usual suspects:
Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere”. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
Decades of neoliberal “adjustment” and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti’s agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums.
As one commenter notes:
Now is exactly the time to inject some realism into the discourse. I’ve been reading/listening to reports from the Western media, and they are full of revisions and distortions concerning our historical role there. ‘Haiti is a failed state,’ ‘Aristide ‘fled,’ was ‘forced out by a rebellion,’ etc., ignoring the deliberate campaign of destabilisation and coup d’etat against the democratically elected government in 2004.
To donate to the relief effort in a religion-free way and help counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans you can donate at SHARE or Non-Believers Giving Aid.
Obama accepting his Nobel prize:
… perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek …
Except that America did seek armed conflict with Afghanistan.
In October of 2001 the Taliban publicly offered to hand Osama bin Laden over to a third country, provided the U.S. halted the illegal bombing of Afghanistan and produced the necessary evidence about involvement of bin Laden or any of his associates in the 11 September attacks. Bush rejected this, putting an end to any possibility of a potentially peaceful, legal resolution to the events of 11 September 2001, and opened up the way for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq and the threat of invasion of Iran, along with the millions who have lost their lives or had them destroyed as a result.
A friend just forwarded this article from 2007 on militarism and global warming. Consider this:
US militarism has to be considered under three headings: First, the US military is the largest single consumer of fossil fuel in the world. Second, the US economy, the largest national consumer of fossil fuel in the world, has shown that its primary mode of maintaining a supply of fossil fuel for itself is through military action (assault, intervention, occupation of other oil producing nations). Third, the US military operates in the interest of a corporate economy of which it (the military) is the foremost sector in the US.
Sounds like the U.S. has been playing silly buggers with oil production forecasts.
From a senior figure at the International Energy Agency, who has now left but is unwilling to give his name:
We have [already] entered the ‘peak oil’ zone. I think that the situation is really bad.
It’s worth listening to the audio in the above linked […]
Jacqui Janes believes her son is dead because the war in Afghanistan is under-resourced.
He’s not. He’s dead because he was fighting an unjust war.
The stated aim of the invasion of Afghanistan was to find Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking Al-Qaeda members. On 14 October, 2001, the Taliban publicly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden […]
As part of negotiations with Iran over nuclear fuel Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency recently proposed that Iran transfer about 70 percent of its low-enriched uranium to Russia for further enrichment by the end of this year, then to France for conversion into fuel plates for medical use, effectively negating its use in alleged […]