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Author and noted scholar Mike Davis suggests that, 10 years ago, Lower Manhattan became the “Sarajevo of the War on Terrorism.” As with the assassination of the Archduke and his wife in 1914, a “small network of peripheral but well-connected conspirators, ennobled in their own eyes by the bitter grievances of their region, attacked a major symbol of the responsible empire.” In both cases the outrages were designed to detonate “larger, cataclysmic conflicts,” and they were “successful beyond the all imagining.”

Keystone XL: A Pipeline to Big Oil Profits

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog /

On July 25, 2010, a pipeline linking Sarnia, Ontario to an oil refinery at Griffith, Indiana, spilled more than 800,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil into the Kalamazoo River near Marshall, Michigan. According to environmental reporter Kari Lydersen, this spill was ranked by the EPA as the single largest ever in the Midwestern U.S.

Tar sands crude, composed of tar, silica, clay, and other earthen materials, must be diluted with a natural gas-based solvent so it will become sufficiently viscous to flow through a pipe. In this way, natural gas produced by the environmentally-damaging process known as “hydrofracking” may be linked with tar sands development. As reported by Lydersen, when the Kalamazoo River spill occurred, this “diluted bitumen” or “dilbit” released benzene into the atmosphere, requiring nearby homes to be evacuated, some permanently. Because the “dilbit” resembles a light form of tar more than crude oil, it is nowhere near as responsive to traditional mitigation and restoration measures. Having missed an EPA deadline, clean-up efforts by pipeline owner Enbridge, Inc., on 200 acres near Marshall continue more than a year after the spill.

This sort of scenario may be in store for a much larger swath of the Central Plains states and Texas if the Keystone Extra Large (XL) 36″ diameter pipeline with a capacity of 500,000 gallons per day is approved later this year by President Barack Obama. Snaking its way from Hardisty, Alberta, through a corner of Saskatchewan Province into Montana, the pipeline would pass through South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas before arriving at terminals in Port Arthur, on the Texas Gulf Coast. Nebraska’s Republican Governor Dave Heineman is among those who have asked President Obama to veto the pipeline, as it would be built over the Ogallala Aquifer, a major plains water source.

Historically known as tar sands, industry now prefers the comparatively sanitized term oil sands. Huge deposits of this naturally-occurring bituminous material are located in the northeastern boreal forest and peat bogs of Canada’s Alberta Province. Most are found along the Athabasca River and in the nearby Peace River and Cold Lake deposits. Estimates of the potential oil reserves range from equal to eight times those of Saudi Arabia.

Unlike conventional Saudi-style petroleum that can be pumped to the surface through wells, tar sands must be extracted through strip mining. Since these deposits are found underneath about 54,000 square miles of Alberta, this process potentially exposes a huge amount of land and water to substantial and lasting environmental damage. As with mountain-top removal, “remediation” in the best post-mining scenario is only an approximation of the original topography and ground cover. Covering some 120 square miles, Syncrude Corp. operates the single largest mine of any sort in the world. This mine and others have already turned sizable chunks of Alberta into toxic, oily moonscapes.

Through the various phases of mining and processing, tar sands production releases considerably more greenhouses gases than does conventional petroleum. Due to operations presently under way, Canada has already raised its gas emissions substantially, and is consequently out of compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, to which it is signatory. Under the conservative Stephen Harper government, this may help explain why Canada refused to support an extension of the protocol in June of this year. Petroleum exports are not only important to Canadian corporate interests. U.S. Energy Information Administration data shows that in terms of either crude or total petroleum, Canada has become the single largest supplier of oil to the U.S., ahead of Saudi Arabia and Mexico.

Demand for tar sands oil is not driven exclusively by market forces, but is actively promoted by those who have a self-interest in keeping western society on the “hard energy path” for as long as it remains profitable. Tar sands producers include Albian Sands, composed of Shell Canada, Chevron, and Marathon Oil, and Suncor, which involves Shell, ConocoPhillips, Petro-Canada, and Husky. Another major player is Syncrude, Corp., a seven-partner consortium that includes Suncor, Canadian Oil Sands, Ltd., Nippon Oil, Japan’s major oil firm, Sinopec, representing Chinese interests, Imperial Oil, which is a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, and Murphy Oil, which is associated with Wal-Mart.

Involvement of Japanese and Chinese interests with tar sands mining may tie directly into the Keystone XL pipeline. Whereas most of the tar sands crude refined in the Midwest are destined for the U.S. market, according to Texans Against Tar Sands, much of the crude flowing through the Keystone XL pipeline will go to foreign-owned refineries on the Gulf Coast for export.

Others involved include the Koch Brothers. Environmental writer David Sassoon has pointed out that Koch Industries, through its subsidiary Flint Hills Resources Canada, Ltd., imports about 250,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day to the Pine Bend Refinery it owns near St. Paul, Minnesota. Pine Bend processes approximately 25% of the tar sands crude the U.S. currently receives from Alberta. According to Sassoon, Koch Industries is poised to become a major beneficiary of the Keystone XL pipeline if it is completed.

ConocoPhillips and TransCanada are partners in the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Estimates for the construction cost of the pipeline range from 7 to 13 billion dollars. Political observor Joe Jordan, and others, have pointed out the influential role Paul Elliott, TransCanada’s main Washington, DC, lobbyist, played in Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid. In December 2009 Elliott was named as a director of the Canadian American Business Council, which also included ExxonMobil and Shell. On August 26, 2011, under now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.S. State Department found that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would have a “minimal” environmental impact.

Former NASA scientist Jim Hansen has argued that if tar sands development continues and the pipeline is built, it is essentially “game over” for climate change and efforts to slow global warming. Reflecting the choice between “hard” vs. “soft” energy paths first described by Amory Lovins in the 1970s, Hansen remarked that “…if the United States is buying the dirtiest stuff [tar sands], it also surely will be going after oil in the deepest ocean, the Arctic, and shale deposits; and harvesting coal via mountaintop removal and long-wall mining.”

Construction of the Keystone XL pipeline would more firmly place the U.S on the “hard” path. Not only would this keep consumers enslaved to Big Oil, but in the long run a dependence on conventional fuels, including tar sands, is unsustainable. Rag Blog contributor Roger Baker has frequently warned of the crisis posed by “peak oil,” whereby continued dependence on a dwindling resource is a recipe for economic and environmental disaster. Funding and support would be diminished for the “soft” path of renewable energy, green economy expansion, mass public transportation, and urban redesign.

Most readers of The Rag Blog are doubtless aware of the civil disobedience organized by the environmental group 350.org in front of the White House. At the end of two weeks of protest, 1252 people had been arrested in opposition to the pipeline and over 600,000 had signed a petition against pipeline construction. It is anticipated there will be further protests as the proposal continues to work its way through the approval process.

Coupled with the insistence that tar sands mining and the pipeline be halted and the “soft” path taken, a campaign for the entire energy sector to be placed under public ownership and democratic control must be launched and aggressively waged. In the U.S. today there are abundant examples of successful energy production and distribution in the form of “municipal power.” These public utilities offer a relevant model for energy policy as a whole, though decentralization and democratic control need to be enhanced.

Our shared resources and the future of the planet are far too vital for the private market to irresponsibly squander for the sake of short-term profits.

This article is dedicated to Ted Gleichman, a friend from Portland, Oregon, among those arrested, and to all the “Keystone 1252.”

Sources: “Athabasca Oil Sands” entry, Wikipedia; Enbridge.com; Energy Information Administration, “Crude Oil and Total Petroleum Imports Top 15 Countries,” U.S. Department of Energy, August 30, 2011; Ted Glick, “The Tar Sands Action (smile),” Portside.com, September 5, 2011; Joe Jordan, “The Pipeline, Hillary Clinton, and Nebraska Politics,” Nebraska.watchdog.org, December 15, 2010; David Ljunggren, “Canada Reveals It Expects U.S. Will Back Pipeline,” Reuters, September 1, 2011; Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace, NY: Harper Colophon, 1977; Kari Lydersen, “A Year After Pipeline Spill, Tar Sands Oil Still Plagues a Michigan Community,” Oneearth.org, July 25, 2011; Elizabeth McGowan, “NASA’s Hansen Explains Decision to Join Keystone Pipeline Protests,” Solveclimatenews.com, August 29, 2011; “Oil Sands” entry, Wikipedia; David Sassoon, “Koch Brothers Positioned to Be Big Winners if Keystone XL Pipeline is Approved, Solveclimatenews.com, February 10, 2011; Suncor.com; Texans Against Tar Sands, Facebook group; 350.org; TransCanada.com; Eve Troeh, “Keystone or Bust,” Marketplace, Publicradio.org, July 26, 2011.

[Jay D. Jurie was a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a member of SDS, and one of the “Boulder 18” arrested as a result of the ROTC demonstrations. Jay now teaches public administration and urban planning and lives near Orlando, Florida. Read more articles by Jay D. Jurie on The Rag Blog.]

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The Embers of September

By Mike Davis / The Rag Blog /

Ten years ago, Lower Manhattan became the Sarajevo of the War on Terrorism. Although conscience recoils against making an equation between the assassination of a single Archduke and his wife (28 June 1914) and the slaughter of almost 3,000 New Yorkers, the analogy otherwise is eerily apt.

In both cases, a small network of peripheral but well-connected conspirators, ennobled in their own eyes by the bitter grievances of their region, attacked a major symbol of the responsible empire. The outrages were deliberately aimed to detonate larger, cataclysmic conflicts, and in this respect, were successful beyond the all imagining.

However the magnitudes of the resulting explosions were not simple functions of the events that detonated them. For example, in Europe between 1890 and 1940, more than two dozen heads of state were assassinated, including the kings of Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, an empress of Austria, two presidents of France, two Spanish prime ministers, and so on. Apart from the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo none of these events instigated a war.

Likewise, a single suicide bomber in a truck killed 241 U.S. marines and sailors at their barracks at the Beirut Airport in 1983. (Fifty eight French paratroopers were killed by another bomb the same day.) A Democratic president might have been pressured to go to war against the Shiite and Druze militias, but President Reagan distracted the public with an invasion of tiny Grenada, and then quietly withdrew the rest of his Marines.

If Sarajevo and the World Trade Center, by contrast, unleashed global carnage and chaos, it was because of the de facto collusion between the attackers and the attacked.

I’m not referring to mythical British plots in Balkans or CIA agents blowing up the Twin Towers, but simply to the well-known facts that the Imperial German General Staff had already decided in 1912 to exploit the first opportunity to make war, and that powerful neoliberals in Bush’s White House were lobbying for the overthrow of the regimes in Baghdad and Tehran even before the last hanging chad had been counted in Florida.

Both regimes were in search of a casus belli that would legitimate military intervention and silence domestic opposition. Prussian militarism, of course, was punctually accommodated by the Black Hand (an anarcho-nationalist group secretly supported by the Serbian Army), while Al Qaeda ‘s sublime horror show in lower Manhattan consecrated the divine right of the White House to torture, secretly imprison, or kill by remote control.

At the time, it seemed almost as if the Republicans had staged a coup d’etat against the Constitution. Yet the Bush administration could point to a whole catalogue of precedents. To put it bluntly, every single chapter in the history of U.S. global power has opened with the same sentence: “innocent Americans were treacherously attacked…”

Remember the Maine? Or the Lusitania (1198 dead)? Or the Panay, Pearl Harbor, the crossing of the Yalu, and the Gulf of Tonkin? The besieged legation in Peking, Aguilnaldo’s alleged attack on U.S. sentries outside Manila; Al Raisuli’s brazen kidnappings; Pancho Villa’s raid on sleepy Columbus, New Mexico; the rapine of National City Bank in Port-au-Prince; the storming of the Pueblo and the Mayaquez, the humiliated hostages in Tehran; the imperiled students in Grenada…

This list barely scratches the surface: the synchronization of outrage and intervention in U.S. history is relentless.

In the name of “innocent Americans,” the USA annexed Hawaii and Puerto Rico; colonized the Philippines; punished nationalism in North Africa and China; invaded Mexico (twice), sent a generation to the killing fields of France (and imprisoned dissent at home); massacred patriots in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua; annihilated Japanese cities; committed genocide in Korea and Indochina; buttressed military dictatorship in Latin America; and became Israel’s partner in the mass murder of Arab civilians.

Someday — perhaps sooner than we think — a new Edward Gibbon in China or India will surely sit down to write The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire. (Hopefully it will be but one volume in a larger, more progressive oeuvre — The Renaissance of the Asia, perhaps — and not an obituary for a human future sucked into America’s sinking void.)

I think she’ll probably catalogue self-righteous American “innocence” as a particularly toxic tributary of national decline, with President Obama as its highest incarnation.

Indeed, from the perspective of the future what will be deemed the greater crime: to have created the Guantanamo nightmare in the first place, or to have preserved it in contempt of global popular opinion and one’s own campaign promises?

Obama, who was elected to bring the troops home, close the gulags, and restore the Bill of Rights, has in fact become the chief curator of the Bush legacy: a born-again convert to special ops, killer drones, immense intelligence budgets, Orwellian surveillance technology, secret jails, and the super-hero cult of General Petraeus

Our “anti-war” president, in fact, may be taking U.S. power deeper into the darkness than any of us dare to imagine. And the more fervently Obama embraces his role as commander in chief of the Delta Force and Navy Seals, the less likely it becomes that future Democrats will dare to reform the Patriot Act or challenge the presidential prerogative to murder and incarcerate America’s enemies in secret.

Enmired in wars with phantoms, Washington has been blindsided by every major trend of the last decade. It has completely misread the real yearnings of the Arab street and the significance of mainstream Islamic populism, ignored the emergence of Turkey and Brazil as independent powers, forgotten Africa, and lost much of its leverage with Germany as well with Israel’s increasingly arrogant reactionaries. Most important, Washington has failed to develop any coherent policy framework for its relationship to the PRC, its main creditor and most important rival.

From a Chinese standpoint (assumedly the perspective of our future Gibbon), the United States is showing incipient symptoms of being a failed state. When Xinhua scolds the U.S. Congress for being “dangerously irresponsible” in debt negotiations, or when senior leaders openly worry about the stability of American political and economic institutions, the shoe is truly on the other foot. Especially when standing in the wings, bibles in hand, are the mad spawn of 9/11 — the Republican presidential candidates.

[Mike Davis is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. An urban theorist and a social activist, Davis is the author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Read more articles by Mike Davis on The Rag Blog.]

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Shredding the envelope:
Healthcare on the Ground – Part II

[Shredding the Envelope (“Ruminations on news, taboos, and space beyond time.”) is Sarito Carol Neiman’s (occasionally) regular column for The Rag Blog. This is part one of three. Read Part I here.]

My brother called them “angels” in his email dispatches from the surgery waiting room. By this, I know now that he meant the ones who look you in the eye, who respond to your questions directly and without evasion. Without hollow boilerplate responses, meant to reassure those anxiously awaiting some news or a verdict that nobody yet has.

The angels are the ones who are doing more than just their jobs.

Being a guy, and more specifically a guy who loves understanding the workings of things, my brother was also impressed by the airport-like, huge computer display on the wall of the waiting room that showed which operating room was occupied by which surgeon, how much longer it was expected to be in use… it functioned as a reassurance in itself, like the clock displays on the crosstown Manhattan L line that tell you how many minutes away a train is from where you’re standing.

He and my sister… and whoever else might have been there from the family (who will no doubt forgive me for not remembering just now)… could watch, as the slot representing Dad kept getting extended. From the initial four to a total of seven hours, by the time it was all said and done.

Scott & White has a reputation for being one of the best in Texas. High-tech, computerized in all its dimensions, there is a mini-version of air traffic control opposite each nursing station, where selected vital signs of each patient in each room are on live display, broadcast from a little monitor each of them wears (or not, as needed, I assume) in a pocket sewn into their gowns, with its wires and sensors silently attached to their bodies and capturing heartbeat, respirations, temperature.

When a nurse comes into the room, tasks completed and supplementary notes are entered via keyboard and screen attached to the wall next to the door, not on the iconic hospital “clipboard.”

All very reassuring, even laudable. But for the patients themselves, and their families, it’s the angels who count.

I have met many, so far, in the course of this journey. I’d say the majority of them have been “new”… interns, nurses in training, residents. (Maybe “the system” tends to beat angelhood out of people who are in it too long. I sense I should camouflage their names to protect their innocence.)

R, whose extraordinary sensitivity and respect toward Dad, on what had started as a really difficult day, seemed to help him tap into a new reservoir of strength within himself to turn things around by the end of the day.

B, whose eagerness to learn and clear enthusiasm for finding out what was broken and fixing it was so infectious, it earned him immediate forgivenesss for stepping on Dad’s toe the first time he approached his chair. When he came in the next day, clearly with an “assignment” to ask the patient a couple of questions, I saw B’s future as a great among angels reflected in my Dad’s honest, simple responses.

Dad is generally the sort of guy who will say “I’m fine” while bleeding to death from a gunshot wound. He’s also very perceptive. If he figures you don’t REALLY want to know, he will say, “I’m fine.”

B. stood exactly in front of Dad, looked him in the eye, and said:

B: “Do you have any questions at all about your treatment that haven’t been answered?”

Dad: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

B: [Clear, simple response to describe Dad’s condition, and the surgery he had just undergone, and why. A nod from Dad. Understood, at last, beyond whatever descriptions he had been given, and had only abstractly/theoretically comprehended, before he went under the knife.] Is there anything else you want to know?

Dad: Why am I not getting better?

To which B responded that it takes time, it had been a huge ordeal, and actually Dad was doing remarkably well under the circumstances, better even than might be expected. Other people had said the same words, but B. really knew those words were true. For the first time, Dad had been told the reality as certainly as it could be known, by a person so transparently honest and sincere that he could take a deep breath and move on to crossing the next river.

There are angels among the oldtimers, as well. Notably “Ida sweet as apple cidah” as Dad introduced her to me (referencing an old song he knows), an ageless woman with a huge presence that just lights up the room when she walks in.

I don’t feel the need to protect her innocence, because her face tells you she’s seen it all — and I’m pretty sure the gods of the nursing angels have her under their fiercest protection, or she wouldn’t still be around. Just as she has all “her” patients under her protection, to the extent she’s able.

Or T, who hasn’t yet seen it all but has seen a lot for someone as young as she is, and who doesn’t have such a big sunny presence as Ida but is more the silent and subtle breeze who comes and goes without creating a disturbance, and whose eye never misses the smallest detail of expression on a face indicating that something might be amiss. She catches things even before they happen, an invaluable gift.

Most angels seem to live toward the middle of the healthcare food chain — they are the nurses, or the interns and residents who haven’t yet been professionalized into wearing the straightjacket of “lawsuit aversion” so many doctors seem to have around them, like an invisible shield against genuine human contact.

On the bottom of the food chain are those who are just passing through a minimum-wage job until they can find something better. There are notable, and wonderful exceptions to the “check it off the list” insensitivity of many aides in the modern, large-hospital system. Those exceptions, in my experience of them, are very special angels indeed. Just really, really good folks who love taking care of people and their environments, and making both the person and the environment as comfortable as possible. We should pay them what they deserve, so they can keep doing that priceless work without having to take a second job to support their families.

I feel a third part to this series coming on. And that is to take a look at what are the “anti-angel” forces at work in the system. What they are made of, both on a “systemic” and a human level. It’s going to need a bit of research on the system level (nothing fancy) and maybe a bit more distance on the human level than I can manage right now.

Right now, I need to get back to my Dad’s room in the hospital, and make sure he has something to eat that he enjoys for “dinner” (in real life outside the hospital, dinner for my Dad is usually a light snack. Hospital “nutrition departments” don’t operate in that mode.) And that he’s settled in comfortably for the night.

I’ll be back.

[Sarito Carol Neiman (then just “Carol”) was a founding editor of The Rag in 1966 Austin, and later edited New Left Notes, the national newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). With then-husband Greg Calvert, Neiman co-authored one of the seminal books of the New Left era, A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism and later compiled and edited the contemporary Buddhist mystic Osho’s posthumous Authobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic. Neiman, also an actress and stage director, currently lives in Junction, Texas. Read more articles by Sarito Carol Neiman on The Rag Blog]

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Are Corporations Patriotic – Or Just Greedy?

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2011

Are corporations patriotic? It’s an intriguing question. It seems to be the Republican point of view that it is patriotic to support America’s giant corporations and their need for ever greater percentages of profit. They would tell you that whatever is good for the giant corporations is good for America, because corporations produce jobs and a rising tide of wealth for all Americans.

It’s not true, of course. Most of the jobs in this country are produced by small businesses, not corporations. And most of the jobs created by corporations in the last few years were not even in this country. They were outsourced to countries where workers could be abused by paying almost starvation wages with no benefits. As for that rising tide of wealth, that has been restricted to only the top 1%-5% of the wealthiest people.

But even if it were true (a huge and false assumption), it really doesn’t answer the question of corporate patriotism. Supporting corporations as a patriotic effort and corporations acting in a patriotic way are two separate things, and whether the former is true or false has no bearing on the truth of the latter. The patriotism of a corporation can only be judged through the actions of the corporation. And I believe there are three corporate actions at least that tends to place doubt on their patriotism.

The first of these is tax avoidance (and the accepting of unneeded government subsidies). There are three unavoidable facts in today’s economy. The average American citizen is hurting. The government deficit and debt are growing. And the giant corporations are making huge and many times record-breaking profits. And contributing to all three of these factors is the refusal of giant corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, by using loopholes, subsidies they don’t need, and hiding corporate money in tax-haven countries.

The corporations and their cohorts, Republicans in Congress, would have us believe that the U.S. corporations couldn’t compete with foreign corporations if they were required to pay their full burden of taxes. That is utter horse manure. Income taxes are not a business expense that might prevent a company from posting a profit (like the cost of materials, labor, insurance, etc.). They are a percentage of net profits (after expenses have been accounted for), and if there are little or no net profits then there would be little or no income taxes owed. By their very nature, being a percentage of net profit, income taxes could never keep a company from posting and keeping most of a profit.

Since income taxes would never keep a corporation from turning a profit, is it patriotic for a corporation to hide money in other countries and then use loopholes in tax law and subsidies they no longer need to avoid paying taxes — while the average American pays his/her taxes? I submit it is not. This corporate tax avoidance not only increases government deficit and debt, it places a larger burden on others (real people who must take up the slack). How patriotic is that?

Second, American corporations have a long history of enriching themselves through warfare while ordinary Americans die fighting those wars and civilians sacrifice for those doing the fighting. Whether it’s for the fruit companies wanting cheap produce from Central America or the oil companies wanting cheap crude from Kuwait, this has been going on for a long time. And it’s still happening. Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, and many others have made exorbitant profits in Iraq and Afghanistan — while American soldiers die, the national debt is ballooned, and nothing seems to have been accomplished outside the establishment of a puppet government.

Now we are simply fighting to keep those corrupt puppet governments in place, especially in Afghanistan where huge untapped mineral resources have been discovered (and a Western-friendly government is necessary for corporate access to that untapped mineral wealth). Is it patriotic to increase corporate wealth on the dead bodies of American soldiers and the sacrifices of American families? I submit it is not.

The third reason for doubting corporate patriotism is the huge and continual outsourcing of American jobs to low-wage no-benefit countries where workers can still be abused. The corporations and their Republican lackeys want us to believe that the cost of American labor is prohibitive, and they could not make a decent profit if they didn’t send the work to a low-wage foreign country.

Let’s look at one of these companies that is outsourcing labor — Apple. I don’t pick this corporation because I have anything against it. I actually like Apple products, and in fact, this post is being typed on an Apple MacBook. But they are a good example of what is happening. For instance, the iPhone is assembled in China, where workers are lucky to get paid $1 an hour for the task. Using that figure, the labor cost of an iPhone is about $6.50. When that is added to the materials cost of %172.46, we find that Apple must pay out $178.96 to build an iPhone. Since the product sells for about $500.00, the company makes a profit of 64.2% on each sale.

But what would happen to their profit if the iPhone was made in the United States? Assuming it would cost 10 times as much to assemble the product in the United States (a reasonable assumption), the labor cost would then be $65.00 per unit. Adding that to the materials cost of $172.46 (which would remain the same) we get a product cost to the company of $237.46. Assuming the phone would still sell for $500.00, the company would now make a 52.5% profit on each sale. Is that a bad profit margin?

As can be easily seen, the company did not outsource those jobs to help them squeeze out a small profit (as most corporations would have us believe). They did it to turn a more than respectable 52.5% profit into a 64.2% profit. I can understand the desire of a corporation to make a good profit, but is it patriotic to outsource labor so an already good profit can be made even better? I submit it is not.

And I’ll bet the same is true of all or at least nearly all of the American corporations that have outsourced jobs (and continue to do so). They are not doing it to make a profit — but to turn a good profit into an exorbitant profit. And in doing so they are acting against the best interests of the country they claim as their own. This is not patriotism — it is greed.

Are the giant American corporations patriotic? No, it takes more than some flag-waving and fancy talk from a CEO to be truly patriotic. Corporations are not people, regardless of what the Supreme Court thinks. They are legal entities dedicated to only one thing — making ever larger profits. They will be patriotic only as long as it benefits their bottom line. When it doesn’t they will abandon doing what is best for America (although they will probably continue to mouth patriotic platitudes). Don’t buy into it — it’s greed, pure and simple.

[Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger. Read more articles by Ted McLaughlin on The Rag Blog.]

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United States and Chile:
The impacts of two 9/11’s

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2011

9/11 in Chile

On the bright and sunny morning of September 11, 1973, aircraft bombed targets in Valparaiso, Chile, and moved on to the capital, Santiago. Following a well-orchestrated plan, tanks rolled into the capital city, occupied the central square, and fired on the presidential palace. Inside that building, President Salvador Allende broadcast a final address to his people and fatally shot himself as soldiers entered his quarters.

Thousands of Allende supporters were rounded up and held in the city’s soccer stadium and many, including renowned folk singer Victor Jara, were tortured and killed. For the next 15 years, Chilean workers were stripped of their right to form unions, political parties and elections were eliminated, and the junta led by General Augusto Pinochet ruled with an iron fist all but ignored outside the country until Chileans began to mobilize to protest his scheme to become president-for-life.

9/11 in the United States

Of course, 9/11/01 was different. The United States was attacked by foreign terrorists, approximately 3,000 citizens and residents were killed at the World Trade Center, over a rural area in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon. People all over the world expressed their sorrow and sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks as the American people experienced shock and dismay.

But then everything began to change. Within days of the terrorist attacks, members of President Bush’s cabinet began to advocate a military assault on Iraq, a longstanding target of the Washington militarists of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Now is the time, they said, to take out Saddam Hussein, seize control of Iraqi oil fields, and reestablish United States control over the largest share of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf region.

Cooler heads prevailed for a time, however. We cannot attack Iraq, critics said, because Iraq had nothing to do with the crimes in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

So it was decided that a war would be waged on Afghanistan, because the headquarters of the shadowy organization Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, was said to be in that country. On October 6, 2001, that war was initiated and still goes on although Bin Laden has been killed.

Shortly after launching the war on Afghanistan, the neocons in the Bush administration began a campaign to convince the American people that we needed to make war on Iraq. Lies were articulated that the Iraqi dictator was really behind the global terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. He had weapons of mass destruction. He was part of a global Islamic fundamentalist cabal.

At last, despite evidence to the contrary, the mobilization of millions of Americans against war, and growing global resentment against the Bush Doctrine justifying preemptive wars, the United States attacked Iraq in March, 2003. That war too still goes on.

Over the last decade, U.S. military budgets have tripled, thousands of U.S. soldiers have died or sustained irreparable injuries, and an estimated one million Afghan and Iraqi people, mostly civilians, have died.

Meanwhile the United States has maintained over 700 military installations around the world, declared the great land and sea area around the globe at the equator the “arc of instability,” and engaged in direct violence or encouraged others to do so, from Colombia to Honduras in the Western Hemisphere, to Ethiopia and Somalia in the Horn of Africa, to Israel, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Libya in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, to Pakistan and Afghanistan in East Asia.

Presidents Bush and Obama have declared that United States military overreach to be in the national interest of the country and to serve the humanitarian interest of the world. Now the U.S. program includes the use of computer-operated aircraft, drones, that can target and kill anywhere based on decisions from command headquarters half way around the globe.

Meanwhile at home, the Patriot Act has extended the prerogatives of government to launch a program claiming to be essential to protect the people from domestic terrorists: spying on Americans; incarcerating people from virtually anywhere deemed to be a security threat; and establishing a political climate that intimidates critics of United States foreign policy.

Domestically, the decade since 9/11 has been characterized by sustained assaults on the basic living standards of the bottom 90 percent of the population in terms of wealth and income. Unemployment has risen dramatically. Job growth has ground to a halt. Health care benefits have declined while costs skyrocket.

Virtually every public institution in America, except the military, is being threatened by budget cuts: education, libraries, public health facilities, highways and bridges, fire and police protection, environmental quality.

Support for war overseas and at home is stoked by a so-called “war on terrorism” and an anti-government ideology, made popular earlier by the Reagan administration that lionizes Adam Smith’s claims that only the market can satisfy human needs. Following 9/11, the “beast,” government, has been starved even more resulting in increased demand on workers and institutions with reduced resources, offering “proof” that government never works.

Not all have had to sacrifice during this 10-year “war on terror” and its attendant domestic programs. The rich have gotten richer while the income and wealth of 90 percent of the population have experienced economic stagnation or decline.

Media monopolization has facilitated the rise of a strata of pundits who simplify and distort the meaning of events since 9/11 by claiming that war is necessary; the terrorist threat is a growing global threat; as a nation and individually we need to arm ourselves; and subliminally it is people of color who constitute the threat to security and well-being.

Where do we go from here?

So the United States’ 9/11 event was not the first. The Chilean 9/11 preceded the U.S. one by 28 years. Its people experienced a brutal military coup. And in the United States mass murder was committed by 19 terrorists.

But in both cases the 9/11 event was followed by violence, threats to democracy, and economic shifts from the vast majority of the population to the wealthy and political/military elites. In both cases, draconian economic policies and constraints of civil and political rights were defined as required by threats to the “homeland.”

As the 10-year anniversary of the U.S. 9/11 is remembered, it is critical to reflect upon how the murder of 3,000 citizens and residents was defined as an opening salvo in a perpetual “war on terrorism”: how this war trumps traditional civil liberties afforded by the constitution; how this war must be waged at whatever cost to the lives and economic resources of the country; and, as with the Cold War, military spending must take priority over every other activity for which the government has a role.

9/11/73 caused the Chilean people pain and suffering that they are still working to overcome 28 years later. Unless the American people mobilize to challenge the policies, foreign and domestic, that were justified by the tragedy of 9/11, the United States will continue to move down a similar path the Chilean people traveled after their 9/11.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical — and that’s also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

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