For eight hellish years, Bush and Cheney ruled America by fear. Images of Osama Bin Laden were drawn on us like weapons. Terror. Terrorism. Terrorists. War. Fear. Warfare. This was the Bush/Cheney mantra that kept Americans in despair.
Today, because of their tactics, our nation is in tatters, with wars not jobs, bombs not books, and warfare not health care. America lacks the resources to confront immediate dangers that have nothing to do with bin Laden: hurricanes, oil spills, floods, tornadoes, unfunded education, decaying infrastructure, exorbitant health costs, corporate greed, and more. Because of partisan politics and hawks like California Congresswoman Harman, more dollars are spent on unending wars than are spent on education. Perhaps you’ve seen this expenditure chart based on our 2009 tax allocation:
Sad, isn’t it, that over 44% of our money is spent on the military and wars. Most painful for me is our inferior education and how young people can’t go to college. Again we can thank the war-supporters like Harman for getting us in this debacle.
One would have hoped Bush and Cheney’s terror-filled tack would have ended with their regime – but it didn’t. It continues on with Jane Harman. Witness for yourselves her fear-based ad, replete with Osama bin Laden, directed at Marcy Winograd, Harman’s progressive opponent, and the voters of California’s 36th Congressional District:
How could this video possibly represent Harman’s district? Is bin Ladin foreclosing on homes? Is he taking the jobs? Is he firing teachers? Why is bin Ladin in this video, or Israel, or discussion of nuclear weapons?
Harman is out of touch. She’s the richest woman in Congress. Every two years she re-buys her seat and indulges her personal passions: war, war-technology and war-intelligence. She was briefed on Bush’s warrantless wiretap program and urged the New York Times not to report it. She even got herself ensnared in it, getting wiretapped by the NSA, accused of colluding with an Israeli agent. Think I’m kidding? Read here, then be sure to read the comments. They’re blistering. Americans don’t like Jane Harman’s hubris or her shady dealings.
Back to the bin Laden Bush/Cheney/Harman tactic of fear:
Terrorism may be intrinsic to Harman’s world but not so for her constituents. Jobs, health care, education, housing, the environment are some of their priorities. Harman’s claim in her political ad that Winograd would “kill the defense budget, putting thousands of people out of work,” is unfounded. Winograd would like to cut back a portion on defense to transition to green jobs – not to fire people, but to hire people. She has substantial support from the aerospace industry to take on that task. Here are the words of Matthew McKinnon, Legislative Director for The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers AFL-CIO (IAMAW), which has endorsed both Winograd and Harman.
“Marcy Winograd has consistently demonstrated a strong understanding of the need to advocate for working families. For too long poorly-conceived trade agreements have been negotiated without consideration of the needs of the men and women who do the work here in the US and abroad. As the country we all love turns toward green energy, we have confidence Marcy Winograd will fight for American manufacturing workers to share in this critical change.”
It doesn’t sound to me like McKinnon believes jobs will be lost with Winograd. It sounds to me like he supports her – strongly.
But what’s with Israel – the image and message in Harman’s second bubble? With our nation (that’s the USA, Mrs. Harman) sliding steadily into decline, why is Israel Harman’s priority? She’s not serving in the Knesset. She’s serving in the Congress of the United States.
More specifically, how does the country of Israel relate to the 36th CD? The answer is, except for some constituents, it likely doesn’t. But it is a huge part of who Harman is and it has defined her foreign policy. AIPAC, the Israel Lobby, influences American politics, and Harman’s an AIPAC darling, as is her friend, Henry Waxman, also mentioned in her video.
Harman and Waxman need to understand that times are changing, and because of Israel’s own actions and widely believed human rights abuses, Americans are learning the truth and becoming increasingly skeptical – even angry – over the hysterical Israel-bias of American legislators who’ve been elected to serve the U.S. This bias hurts America, and before long, Americans will vote against those whose loyalties are called into question, as Harman’s loyalties have, as a result of the NSA wiretap; a serious accusation. Even if there are no legal repercussions, the stigma will remain. Perhaps not in the vehemently pro-Israel population, but certainly outside it.
Today this article appeared on Politico, describing how pro-Israel groups are raising money in support of Harman – already the richest woman in Congress. Yes, special interest groups for a foreign nation are raising money for a candidate to support that foreign nation – always and under all circumstances, which is required for Congress, according to Henry Waxman.
Several months back, Henry Waxman wrote a letter to Jane Harman’s financial supporters, attacking Marcy Winograd for her position on Israel and her desire for equal rights in the middle east. He explained his prerequisite to hold a seat in Congress. Waxman believes “rock solid support for our only democratic ally [Israel] in the middle east” is the unconditional prerequisite for Congress.
“Rock solid support” means immutable. “Rock solid support” means devoid of criticism or disagreement. The Gaza blockade? The separation wall? The settlement expansions into the West Bank that nullify a two-state solution? “Rock solid support” means total acceptance. I ask WHY?? I don’t fully accept all my own government’s actions. Why should I fully accept the actions of another?
To me, Waxman’s prerequisite of “rock solid support” is a clear and present danger. It gives me something to fear. As an American, I find this despicable, and I believe Harman and Waxman, and all electeds who share this view, are a potential danger to my country. I’m an American and I want America’s interests served first, before those of a foreign land.
I doubt it would be acceptable to Harman and Waxman for a Lebanese American Congress member, although born in the United States, to have a first-nation bias toward Lebanon, or for a Chinese American Congress member, though born in the United States, to have a first-nation bias toward China, an Italian American member toward Italy, a Mexican American member toward Mexico, and so on. Why should it be different with Israel?
I’m the granddaughter of Austrian Jewish immigrants to the United States, but my first allegiance is to America – as it should also be for Harman and Waxman, although I don’t believe theirs is. Their legislative decisions, personal statements, and strong AIPAC affiliation make their Israel-first bias clear.
Moving on to Harman’s third bubble – the “nuclear narcissism” bubble. Here’s the article with Winograd’s interview in which she discusses “nuclear narcissism.” I ask you to read this article. I find nothing inappropriate with Winograd’s interview. I understand the danger of nuclear proliferation. All that Winograd said was true. I wish ALL nations and law makers had Winograd’s view.
In the end, what I find most striking about Harman’s anti-Winograd video, is her naivete in choosing the word bubble with which to attack Marcy Winograd. Harman’s been so out of touch with the world outside D.C. that she doesn’t realize it’s Washington insiders who live in the bubble. It’s politicians like Harman and Waxman, who dwell in caverns on the Hill, that the bubble has always defined. It’s laughable – truly laughable – that a longtime Washington incumbent would be so ignorant not to know that the realbubble is where she lives.
Finally, Mrs. Harman began her political ad with a video of Winograd introducing herself. I think it only fair to allow Winograd’s full video to play through. It’s not charged with fear like Harman’s, or with devotion to a foreign land.
Winograd’s video is about health care. It’s not meant to instill fear. It hopes to relieve it. Fear’s not a tactic for Winograd. Contrary to Jane Harman, Winograd’s nothing like Cheney and Bush:
This post originally appeared on Think Progress.
The latest attempt by BP to shut down its apocalyptic oil gusher — the “top kill” maneuver — has failed, despite BP CEO Tony Hayward’s assurance yesterday that it had a 70 percent chance of success. There’s no question that the federal government, if the president so decides, can take over the challenge of mitigating the damage of BP’s oil to the shores and waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But can President Obama take charge of stopping the wellhead gusher from the foreign oil giant? The administration argues it’s keeping BP in charge of the attempts to shut down the blown out well because government doesn’t have the equipment or expertise to solve this engineering problem without BP:
How far out are the candidates the GOP is fielding in the 2010 election ? Well, a few weeks ago I covered Rand Paul’s ties to the Constitution Party that’s heavily influenced by Christian Reconstructionism – whose leaders want to stone, bash to death with rocks that is, gays, overly rebellious children, and women who have sex before marriage.
Then there’s Tim D’Annunzio, a Tea-Partying congressional candidate vying to be the GOP’s nominee in North Carolina’s 8th District, who according to his ex-wife (who, admittedly, may bear a bit of a grudge) “had claimed to be the Messiah, had traveled to New Jersey to raise his stepfather from the dead, [and] believed God would drop a 1,000-mile high pyramid as the New Jerusalem on Greenland and found the Ark of the Covenant in Arizona.”
Moving along, on a more serious note, consider Arthur Robinson.
Running on the GOP ticket for Congress in Oregon’s 4th District, Art Robinson, who in 2004 wrote that the world’s ocean life was “starved” for crude oil, might want to consider adopting, as a campaign mascot, a dolphin.
Not just any dolphin but this one, which died an obviously traumatic and extremely painful death from being immersed in the toxic soup of oil spewing from from British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout, and chemical dispersants BP has dumped in a bid to keep the oil from reaching fragile coastal shorelines.
Last week, on May 24th I posted my story “Dump Oil and Nuclear Waste at Sea, Proposed Oregon GOP Congressional Candidate”, at Alternet and the Huffington Post, and it referenced a column, titled “OCEAN DUMPING? YES!” that was printed in a 2004 issue of Arthur Robinson’s Access To Energy newsletter. A few days later, an editor at the Huffington Post informed me that Robinson was disputing the factual accuracy of my piece – he claimed he wasn’t editing Access To Energy at the time and didn’t write the column.
It’s not surprising Robinson wanted to distance himself from the 2004 column given its claims:
“Wastes dumped into the deep ocean will soon reach the bottom, where they are less hazardous than nearly any other place on Earth. Most materials will remain there: marine organisms are rare in the deep ocean, food chains are long, and few materials will be carried back to mankind. And that is what waste disposal is all about…
…The oil companies’ reckless greed, we are told, has devastated the oceans with their oil spills.
Baloney.”
The column then went even further, claiming that the Earth’s oceans are “starved for” crude oil,
“As for oil spills in the open and deep ocean, they amount to far less than natural seeps and river runoff, and any unbiased oceanographer will confirm that they are a boon to marine life, inflicting damage mainly on the oil and shipping companies. For crude oil is a natural, organic, biodegradable product of the earth’s ancient plant and animal life, and it is this type of hydrocarbon that marine life in the open and deep ocean is starved for.”
Further, explained another article in the same 2004 Access to Energy newsletter, the free market and the profit motive are absolutely the best guarantors of a clean environment:
“The environment, then, has no better protector than its owner, and no worse enemy than a system where everything belongs to “the people.” Species are endangered when they belong to everybody and nobody; and nothing short of the profit motive will protect them.”
What I found satisfied the Huffington Post. As it turned out, in numerous highly favorable right-wing media stories on Arthur Robinson over the years, Robinson’s the only person who has ever been credited as writing and editing the Access to Energy newsletter. Indeed, according to The American Spectator, he prints Access To Energy in his garage. From all indications it’s a one-man operation. When Robinson won the OR 4th District GOP primary in early May, some readers of Access to Energy even wrote on their blogs about how thrilled they were that the author of the publication was running for Congress.
But the most direct evidence I found establishing that Robinson did indeed edit and publish Access to Energy in 2004 was an article he co-wrote, for the John Birch Society’s masthead publication, The New American, which identified Robinson as “editor of the newsletter Access to Energy.”
Titled Science, Politics and Death and co-authored by Arthur B. Robinson & Jane M. Orient, the article suggested that global warming, an elaborate hoax according to Robinson and Orient, and bans on the use of DDT, were part of a vast plot by environmentalists, a genocidal depopulation scheme designed to kill hundreds of millions of the world’s poor.
In a section of the article titled “Enemies of Humanity,” Robinson and Orient wrote,
“some hard-core environmentalists believe their own propaganda… But there are others who know better and who are trying to create widespread fear through overblown or manufactured environmental “crises” to justify global, authoritarian controls. Their largest and most ambitious manufactured “crisis” thus far is the myth of human-caused global warming.
If this myth becomes entrenched in world agreements to diminish hydrocarbon fuel use, the cost will be not just hundreds of billions of dollars but countless numbers of human lives… If world economic conditions deteriorate, hundreds of millions of these people are going to die…
These deaths and this suffering would not be unintended consequences of supposedly well-intentioned proposals. They are the true objectives of many environmental extremists who want to radically reduce the world’s population, and they are means to an end for a global power elite.”
Other “enemies of humanity” in the vast plot were “unprincipled businessmen”, “political hacks”, and “government bureaucrats” who were scaring the masses “into supporting a deadly, coercive agenda they do not understand.”
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, British Petroleum, in collusion with government officials, is barring citizens and media from oil-stained beaches on the freakish pretext that the oil belongs to BP.
Art Robinson has a rational side too, and was not dealt the easiest of lots in life – in 1988 his wife died suddenly, leaving Robinson with six children to raise. A brilliant chemist, Robinson found himself on the right side of an acrimonious dispute with his former teacher and colleague Linus Pauling who claimed megadoses of Vitamin C could cure cancer. The clash escalated into a protracted and extremely expensive legal fight. Robinson eventually won. And, Arthur Robinson and his Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) conduct what appears to be quite legitimate research into the biological mechanisms behind aging and disease.
On the other side of the equation, Art Robinson and OISM have played a major, early role in the Global Warming denialism industry, especially through the so-called 1998 “Petition Project.” As the Union of Concerned Scientists describes,
“The Marshall Institute co-sponsored with the OISM a deceptive campaign — known as the Petition Project — to undermine and discredit the scientific authority of the IPCC and to oppose the Kyoto Protocol. Early in the spring of 1998, thousands of scientists around the country received a mass mailing urging them to sign a petition calling on the government to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The petition was accompanied by other pieces including an article formatted to mimic the journal of the National Academy of Sciences. Subsequent research revealed that the article had not been peer-reviewed, nor published, nor even accepted for publication in that journal and the Academy released a strong statement disclaiming any connection to this effort and reaffirming the reality of climate change. The Petition resurfaced in 2001.
Spin: There is no scientific basis for claims about global warming. IPCC is a hoax. Kyoto is flawed.”
Despite the now overwhelming scientific consensus that curbing Global Warming is the challenge of our age, if we’re lucky and it hasn’t already become an unstoppable process, Robinson’s views haven’t softened. In a 2008 World Net Daily column Art Robinson wrote,
“No less than 31,000 American physical scientists, including 9,000 Ph.D.s, have… declared the [Global Warming] hypothesis false and have pointed out that atmospheric carbon dioxide is required for all life on Earth and that the modest increases of recent years have fertilized plant growth and actually much enhanced our natural environment.”
As with oil and nuclear waste, it would seem Carbon Dioxide is a bonanza for life.
Arthur Robinson may well lose his Congressional bid, especially if mainstream and Oregon media notice his copious writing, in Access to Energy and elsewhere, not to mention his extremely successful efforts that have helped block efforts to curb Global Warming.
But the very fact that his candidacy has so far received so little scrutiny is a shocking indictment of media in our age, especially given who Robinson beat in the GOP primary to win the Republican nomination as candidate for Oregon’s 4th District – Jaynee Germond, who two years ago openly ran for the same seat as a Constitution Party candidate.
In 1992, Christian Reconstructionism founder R.J. Rushdoony gave the keynote address at the inaugural founding event of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, later to become the Constitution Party.
Rushdoony believed the Sun rotated around the Earth. This is what the Republican Party has come to.
As Military Religious Freedom Foundation head Mikey Weinstein, who served in the first Reagan Administration told me a few days ago, “the [Republican] party left me, I didn’t leave it.” There are still some old-school Republicans such as Weinstein around, no doubt. But no doubt they are fewer by the day.
It’s a tragedy. On one side, we have Democrats in thrall to corporate interests, and the other we have Republicans in thrall to corporate interests who believe life thrives on industrial waste and claim environmentalists, who for years have warned of the sort of apocalyptic environmental disaster we’re now seeing in the Gulf, are actually part of a genocidal plot to rule the world when, by all indications, multinational corporations such as BP nearly rule the world already.
Have a nice day.
$1,000,000,000,000.00
As of today, that’s how much we’ve spent just in direct costs so far on the stupid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One trillion dollars, gone. And we’re just getting warmed up…there are trillions more in future direct and indirect costs coming.
These two wars mutilated our economy. There’s no other way to say it. We’ve taken huge sums of wealth out of the economy and done things with it that further damaged the economy. People are out of work and hurting today because we chose to launch two wars that aren’t worth the cost.
The most glaring example of this dynamic is the use of hundreds of billions of taxpayer money to invade and occupy Iraq, which led to higher oil prices, which hit taxpayers again in their pocketbooks.
Many other examples exist: We pay to train American kids to kill in Afghanistan. We pay to ship them overseas where they die or get injured. We pay for medical care for the survivors. Their families lose both the wounded’s income and often lose additional income when loved ones reduce work hours to stay home and care for the wounded.
The list of these vicious cycles goes on and on. In all cases, our government actually charges us for the privilege of having an even harder time making it in this tough economy.
Actually, it’s worse than that. The government charges us for the privilege of having a tough economy in the first place.
According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s (CEPR) Dean Baker:
“In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs. …[S]tandard economic models…project that the increase in defense spending since 2000 will cost the economy close to two million jobs in the long run.”
Baker’s point in his article was that groups that scream about potential “job loss” from government “interference” never put that “loss” in any context. Government spending does stimulate economic activity during a downturn. The question is, how stimulative is one type of spending versus another? So let’s make sure we’re playing fair and put this in some perspective in terms of job creation.
It turns out that, excluding tax cuts for consumption, war spending is the least stimulative type of government spending.
- Defense: 8,555 jobs
- Construction for home weatherization/infrastructure: 12,804 jobs
- Health care: 12,883 jobs
- Education: 17,687 jobs
- Mass transit: 19,795 jobs
So if you take $1 billion in taxpayer dollars and spend it on war versus on building energy efficient homes and other infrastructure, the opportunity cost for that spending is 4,249 potential jobs. Spending it on war versus mass transit costs you 11,240 potential jobs.
Now consider that $1 trillion is one thousand billion. Because we’re spending so many billions–now trillions–of dollars on these two wars, we’re losing hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of potential jobs.
PERI concludes that:
…[B]y addressing social needs in the areas of health care, education, education, mass transit, home weatherization and infrastructure repairs, we would also create more jobs and, depending on the specifics of how such a reallocation is pursued, both an overall higher level of compensation for working people in the U.S. and a better average quality of jobs.
These lost potential jobs aren’t even the whole picture. We also lose the fruits of spending that money in more productive ways, which, according to the National Priorities Project, include:
- 188,536,667 Students receiving Pell Grants of $5550 OR
- 8,139,680 Affordable Housing Units OR
- 461,193,337 Children with Health Care for One Year
But hey, at least these wars are working out well for BP, right?
By Eli Zaretsky. Crossposted from Tikkun Daily.
What do Obama’s three greatest failures — health care, Afghanistan and the oil spill — all have in common? Each one was preceded by an elaborate attempt on Obama’s part to portray his decisions in non-partisan, quasi-scientific and technical terms. Each one was presented as seizing a middle-ground between unreasonable partisans on the two extremes. Of all of the masks worn by this carefully constructed persona, that of the man of reason is the most prominent. Let us look at how it works. READ FULL POST
We’re a big website, so naturally we get our share of unhinged wannabe demagogues and barking, semi-literate lunatics in the comments. But, thankfully, we also have a lot of very sharp and insightful readers who contribute so much to our little community here at AlterNet.
Darklady is one such commenter. And, by the power vested in me as the only staffer whose book deadline requires him to work this holiday weekend, I hereby declare this Darklady comment to be AlterNet’s Reader Comment of the Day*:
Rand Paul believes that the government should allow all private business owners to deny food, lodging, clothing, employment, etc. to members of whatever groups they don’t like.
He claims that this is because it’s not fair for the government to force private businesses to do things they don’t want to do.
Meanwhile — Rand Paul also believes that the government has a *responsibility* to force private citizens to feed, house, care for and potentially be placed at great personal risk by a fertilized egg, zygote, embryo, etc.
What if the woman could declare herself to be a private business? Could she then abort based on the fact that she doesn’t want to provide services?
As a writer, I find this kinda brilliant because it says so much about Paul’s worldview in so few words. I bow.
*Update: This is a reader’s response to an earlier post, yet the comments on this one are closed. It’s due to a technical glitch. Ironic! I asked the nerds to open them up.
What we have here is a tale of two empathy studies. The first story has gotten much more attention in the mainstream media. The second story has been more of an inside baseball piece circulated among specialists in their respective fields. I wonder why?
Study number one finds that both black and white test subjects have a strong level of empathy when shown images of individuals from their respective racial groups whom are in pain. In fact, these test subjects have such a strong level of empathy for “one of their own”–what is also a measure of inter-group distance–that both blacks and whites empathize more with a member of an imagined 3rd racial group, than across the colorline with each other.
Question: Is this frightening or comforting? What does this suggest about post-racial America in the best and worst of cases?
Study number two came to a set of slightly different, yet quite distinct and quite important findings. In this experiment, white and black test subjects were shown pictures of fellow members of their respective racial groups in the midst of a natural disaster or in a neutral setting, i.e. a picnic. African Americans showed much more empathy for black people suffering in a hurricane (presumably because of the still lingering, proverbial hangover from Hurricane Katrina) than did white respondents. Moreover, white respondents showed less empathy for suffering members of their own group than did African Americans for other black folk in distress.
Why would the first experiment receive much more coverage than the second? I would hypothesize that this divergence is a rich example of media framing wherein the first study (featured on CNN’s front page) confirms the popular, colorblind, post-racial meme that all groups are equally capable of “racism” or “prejudice.” Thus, efforts to claim responsibility (and to ameliorate injustice) are examples of “playing the race card.” What ultimately leads to either the “all of our hands are dirty so please stop complaining” meme that is popular in some Conservative circles, or the equally specious and intellectually empty claim that “all oppressions are created equal” among some on the Left and in academia.
The second study also highlights a dimension of race and racial identity in the U.S. that some may find quite troubling. Could it be that black people (and I would hypothesize that an experiment with any “out-group” would show similar results) have a particular historical experience with white supremacy that has engendered a more radically humanistic approach to politics, justice, and society than for white folk at large in this society?
My claim is not one of blood and character per se, but rather of an understanding of how suffering under power informs our sense of linked fate, identity, and kinship. The history of black folks in this country speaks well to this point: the fictive kin relationships born in slavery and that continue to the present; our leadership in a range of freedom struggles; and the richness of our cultural and political vision–the Blues sensibility so often spoken of–which gives Black and Brown folk such a prescient insight into both the contradictions and hopeful possibilities of American democracy.
You tell me. How do you explain these findings? What do they tell us about the best and worst of our souls? Why will the first story be put on proverbial blast in the next few weeks, while the second has received comparatively little coverage? Is our ability to empathize (or not) with members of a different racial group a type of hard-wiring that cannot be undone, or is this just more evidence of nurture versus nature?
We fell off an ugly cliff this Sunday. At 10 a.m. on May 30, all of those little cost of war counters that have been furiously spinning away on countless websites crossed the $1 trillion mark. No alarm sounded. No bell rang. But, on the day before Memorial Day, the cost of the wars in cold, hard cash followed the human cost of the Afghanistan war into a new order of magnitude.
Just how much is $1 trillion? Let’s put it into real-world terms. For that amount of money, you could do fantastic, life-changing things like:
- Provide jobs for 1 million music/arts teachers for a year, and
- Provide health care for 1 million children for one year.
And then, just for fun, you could also:
- Buy Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
If you did all three of these things, you’d still have $925 billion to spare.
These wars aren’t making us safer. They aren’t worth the cost, and we don’t need them. What people do need are jobs and help when they don’t have enough work or any work at all. But instead of leading on the jobs issue, they’re delaying and dissembling about the cost–while spending trillions on war! For example, the Senate just skipped town instead of staying in session long enough to pass an unemployment insurance extension. HuffPost Hill spells out what that means:
On June 1, several programs, including extended unemployment benefits, will expire. By the end of the week, 19,400 people will prematurely stop receiving checks, according to data from the Department of Labor. …By the end of the following week, the number of premature unemployment exhaustions will climb to 323,400. The week after that, 903,000. By the end of the month, 1.2 million.
HuffPo’s Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney put that in even more context:
It will be the third time this year that lawmakers have allowed extended unemployment benefits to lapse, and the second time they’ve decided to leave town for recess fully knowing the lapse would cause panic and confusion among blameless layoff victims — not to mention what Katz calls a “huge” administrative burden on state workforce agencies.
This is a disaster. People are losing jobs or have already been unemployed long-term. And while Congress is “nickel-and-diming” people who are suffering, those cost of war counters keep spinning.
Help us get the word out: check out our new Facebook app and show us how you’d spend the $1 trillion wasted on war, and share it with your friends.
Then, if you haven’t yet, join Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook.
At about this time last year, the folks at Gallup informed us that more Americans identified themselves as “pro-life” than “pro-choice” for the first time (at least since they began tracking the question in 1995).
If you can frame the terms of a debate, you’ve gone a long way towards winning it, even if your position is weak. And I, at age 40, distinctly remember a time when the mainstream, “objective” media refused to call people who want the state to compel women to bear children against their will “pro-life.” They were referred to, accurately and neutrally, as “anti-abortion activists.” I’m not sure when the change occurred — I believe it was gradual — but I now see the term “pro-life” used frequently in mainstream reporting. READ FULL POST
President Barack Obama is in Louisiana today, and BP is saying it will know in 48 hours if its attempt to “top kill” the leaking oil well in the Gulf Coast by pouring mud and cement over it has worked.
If the scramble to stop the leak has ended, the slog to clean up is just beginning. Thousands of fisherman are still out of work, as ColorLines notes. But there are new jobs in Louisiana. This week Mother Jones’ Mac McClelland visited workers raking oil off a beach in Louisiana. One man, she writes, “can’t count how many times he’s raked this same spot in the 33 hours he’s worked it since Thursday, but one thing he’s sure of, he says, is that he’ll be standing right here tomorrow and the next day, too.”
Next moves
Although the regulatory infrastructure that was supposed to oversee companies like BP failed in this case, the administration is stepping up to ensure that the spill is stopped and the clean-up begun. “I take responsibility,” the president told reporters yesterday. “It is my job to make sure everything is done to shut this down.”
Kevin Drum calls this performance and the media affirmation that came after it “the kabuki of our times”—a show that only pretends that the government has the wherewithal to stop the leak without the resources of private industry.
“The president has to be In Charge whether he can actually do anything or not,” Drum writes. “What everyone should be asking is not what the feds are going to do about capping the leak, but what they’re going to do to make sure all the oil is cleaned up afterward.”
Going forward, the government needs to make sure that BP fulfills its clean-up promises. Without strong oversight, the company could slip out of paying its debts. That’s what happened last time an energy company left a lake of oil in American waters, as Riki Ott’s Not One Drop documents. The book “describes firsthand the impacts of oil companies’ broken promises when the Exxon Valdez spills most of its cargo and despoils thousands of miles of shore,” according to Chelsea Green.
BP’s behavior
BP has little incentive to clean up its operations or to take responsibility for the damage it has already incurred. As Care2 reports, another BP rig had to shut down this week when a power outage caused crude oil to spill from its storage tank to “secondary containment.” And on the Hill, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) charged that the company was deliberately low-balling its estimates of the Gulf spill’s size to avoid additional fines.
At The American Prospect, Monica Potts delves into the logic behind BP’s operations. Even when using one of the highest estimates of the spill’s volume—70,000 barrels a day, or more than 2 million barrels overall—she writes, “Americans burn about 10 times that, 21 million barrels, each day. It would only take us a couple of hours to use up everything in the Gulf. This is despite everything we know about how bad burning oil is. Given that, it’s not surprising that an oil company might rank our desire for oil more highly than our undemonstrated desire to avoid ecological disaster.”
Environmental obscenities
In Texas, activists tried this week to demonstrate to BP that consumers do desire to avoid such disasters, AlterNet reports. A group of women traveled to the company’s headquarters and, wearing little more than sandwich boards, tried to expose “the naked truth about drill, baby, drill.”
AlterNet reports that Diane Wilson, who organized the protest “doesn’t take nudity lightly.” Growing up in rural Texas, “I was taught that flesh is sinful, it’s the devil,” she said. “So for me, using nudity to expose the truth about BP was WAY outside my comfort zone. But I realized that it’s the destruction of our ecosystem by corporate greed that’s obscene, not a woman’s body.”
Real responsibility
It’s important to realize that such destruction is not limited to this one catastrophe in the Gulf. As David Roberts writes at Grist:
“We don’t get back the land we destroy by mining. We don’t get back the species lost from deforestation and development. We don’t get back islands lost to rising seas. We don’t get back the coral lost to bleaching or the marine food chains lost to nitrogen runoff. Once we lose the climatic conditions in which our species evolved, we won’t get them back either.”
Fixing the system
If Obama is ready to take responsibility for the oil spill, he might want to focus on strengthening the government regulators who oversee these dangerous industry. The lack of oversight from the Minerals Management Service—which was rotting from the inside-out long before Obama came into office, TPM reports—played a huge role in this spill. Across the country, the government bodies that are supposed to be guarding the environment have stepped away from that responsibility.
Consider, for instance, Forrest Whittaker’s report in The Texas Observer about his state’s environmental oversight agency. “In decision after decision, the Texas agency that’s supposed to protect the public and the environment has sided with polluters,” Whittaker writes.
President Obama may not be able to fix Texas’ problems, but he can provide leadership by correctly regulating corporations that pollute. In that way, the president can take responsibility not just for cleaning up this spill, but for preventing the next one.
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