The Rag Blog

A dirty little secret of climate change is that somebody wants us to pay much higher taxes and higher energy bills. But it’s not the advocates of climate action. It’s the other guys.

Make no mistake: The costs of switching to clean energy and an energy-efficient economy are far less than the costs of doing nothing.

A study released by the University of Maryland last October helps bring the cost issue into clearer focus. It concludes that the economic costs of unabated climate change in the United States will be major and nationwide.

Climate change will damage or stress essential municipal infrastructure such as water treatment and supply; increase the size and intensity of forest fires; increase the frequency and severity of flooding and drought; cause billions of dollars in damages to crops and property; lead to higher insurance rates; and even increase shipping costs in the Great Lakes-St Lawrence seaway because of lower water levels. And that’s just a sampling.

“Climate change will affect every American economically in significant, dramatic ways, and the longer it takes to respond, the greater the damage and the higher the costs,” lead researcher Matthias Ruth told ScienceDaily.

How big are those costs?

Much more work is needed to quantify them, and the national Climate Change Science Program should give more emphasis to both the social and economic costs of local climate impacts. But recent experience gives an indication of how large the costs could be. The University of Maryland study puts the combined storm damages in the U.S. since 1980 at more than $560 billion, even though the impacts of climate change are far from fully felt. Various estimates project that the maintenance of Alaska’s infrastructure will cost $10 billion; property damage from rising sea levels will cost as much as $170 billion by 2100; and upgrading drinking and water treatment facilities will cost up to $2 billion over the next 20 years. Two federal insurance programs also are a harbinger of pain. Since 1980, taxpayer exposure under the Federal Crop Insurance Program has increased 26-fold to $44 billion (PDF). Several of the predicted consequences of climate change — drought, wildfires, extreme weather, new exposure to pests — will make that liability much worse.

Our liability under the National Flood Insurance Program will increase, too. Taxpayer exposure in that program has quadrupled since 1980 (PDF), approaching $1 trillion in 2005. The program had to borrow more than $17 billion from the Treasury to pay claims following Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, and it’s likely that taxpayers will have to foot the bill.

“The national debate is often framed in terms of how much it will cost to reduce greenhouse gases, with little or no consideration of the cost of no response or the cost of waiting,” the University of Maryland’s lead researcher, Matthias Ruth, told ScienceDaily.

We can expect the demagogues to continue stressing that carbon pricing will mean higher energy bills, while aggressive federal action will mean higher taxes. They will continue to argue that climate action will ruin the economy. We shouldn’t let them get away with it.

The truth is that spending money now to mitigate and adapt to climate change is an investment. Spending money later to cope with public health emergencies, drought, crop damage, and natural disasters is a waste.

In November 2006, California voters rejected Proposition 87, a ballot initiative to raise the oil industry’s taxes by $4 billion for research into renewable energy.

Four months before the ballot, a survey by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 61% of likely voters favored the idea, including 51% of Republicans.

What changed between the survey and the vote? The oil industry pumped more than $60 million into a campaign to defeat the measure. Proposition 87 contained a specific provision that would have forbidden oil companies from passing the tax along to consumers. Nevertheless, a central part of the industry’s message was that Proposition 87 would raise the price of gasoline.

On the Hill and in the voting booth, the specter of higher costs and taxes is the big weapon in fossil-fuel industry’s arsenal against climate action. The question is, what’s the defense.

It is important to acknowledge and to anticipate that putting a price on carbon will raise energy prices. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released an estimate last November that carbon pricing to achieve a modest 15% reduction in emissions would cost the poorest fifth of the population between $750 and $950 a year on average. That’s big money to a family living on $13,000 — and fossil-energy costs presumably would grow as carbon caps get stricter.

But we can mitigate those costs:

Among other measures, the federal government should dramatically increase funding for the Department of Energy’s program to weatherize the homes of low-income families. Part of the revenues from carbon taxes or a cap-and-auction regime should be returned to consumers in the form of a rebate or tax cut. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that energy price increases at the level it projects could be offset by 14% of auction revenues distributed to families in any of several ways.

Moreover, the price of oil and gas already is rising steeply through no fault of climate action. The average price of a barrel of crude oil was under $12 a decade ago; last week, it hit $100.

Ten years ago, the average price of residential natural gas was $7.45 per thousand cubic feet. In the first 10 months of 2007, the average price was $14.49.

Even without carbon pricing, fossil energy costs will continue rising because of growing world demand and diminishing supplies. We and the other world economies have a choice between two futures. In one, we continue depending on finite resources that are getting more expensive to produce and that are likely to bring resource conflicts as global competition for them increases. In the other future, we phase out fossils in favor of high efficiency and fuels that are abundant, clean and free.

Another important factor in our energy reality is that the true costs of fossil fuels are much higher than the price we pay at the pump or the electric meter. The true costs are hidden by federal subsidies and externalities such as health problems due to air pollution; environmental damages from producing and consuming the fuels; maintenance of the strategic petroleum reserve; and defending Persian Gulf shipping lanes. In other words, we pay not only at the pump, but at the doctor’s office and in our tax bills.

Our national strategy, it seems to me, should be to go aggressively after the domestic and global markets for wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass, and other renewable resources. It’s reasonable to expect that the capital costs of these technologies will go down as we make more of them and achieve economies of manufacturing scale. At some point, the full costs of fossil energy technologies — capital, fuel, carbon pricing and the many other costs that now are externalized — will be higher than costs of those renewable energy technologies that have no fuel charges and low externalities. In fact, if we totaled up the true costs of coal, oil and natural gas today, it would be clear that many of the clean energy technologies we regard as too expensive already are cheap by comparison.

It’s not easy to make these arguments in a first-cost immediate-gratification culture where consumers pay far more attention to the sticker price than to the true costs of their decisions. A Yale-Gallup poll last July found that 71% of respondents were opposed to higher electricity prices and 67% opposed higher prices for gasoline, even while more and more people are concerned about climate change.

In other words, told by Mother Nature, “You can pay me now or pay me later,” seven in 10 Americans would respond, “Do you take Master Card?”

With funding from the Presidential Climate Action Project University of Vermont ecologist Bob Costanza and his team at Earth Inc. are developing an Energy and Environmental Policy Full Cost Calculator to help policy makers estimate the true costs of different resources, technologies and policies. It’s a start.

But consumers need to be mindful of true costs, too. Maybe we should start showing true costs on auto efficiency stickers, fuel pumps and appliance labels. (Think of a gasoline pump that registers not only gallons and price as you fill up, but also per-gallon tax subsidies, carbon emissions, national defense taxes, lives lost in Iraq, and asthma cases.)

Consider the debate among four Democratic presidential candidates on ABC News last Saturday night. In the previous week, the price of a barrel of oil briefly touched $100, unemployment hit 5%, the stock market had the worst three-day start since the Great Depression, and the word “recession” was in the headlines and in the air. So when ABC debate moderator Charlie Gibson announced that the first fifteen-minute segment would be taken up with “what is generally agreed to be… the greatest threat to the United States today,” what did you expect?

As it happened, he was referring to “nuclear terrorism,” specifically “a nuclear attack on an American city” by al-Qaeda (as well as how the future president would “retaliate”). In other words, Gibson launched his version of a national debate by focusing on a fictional, futuristic scenario, at this point farfetched, in which a Pakistani loose nuke would fall into the hands of al-Qaeda, be transported to the United States, perhaps picked up by well-trained al-Qaedan minions off the docks of Newark, and set off in the Big Apple. In this, though he was surely channeling Rudy Giuliani, he managed to catch the essence of what may be George W. Bush’s major legacy to this country.

The Planet as a GWOT Free-Fire Zone

On September 11, 2001, in his first post-attack address to the nation, George W. Bush was already using the phrase, “the war on terror.” On September 13th, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz announced that the administration was planning to do a lot more than just take out those who had attacked the United States. It was going to go about “removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism.” We were, Bush told Americans that day, in a state of “war”; in fact, we were already in “the first war of the twenty-first century.”

That same day, R.W. Apple, Jr. of the New York Times reported that senior officials had “cast aside diplomatic niceties” and that “the Bush administration today gave the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism… or face the certain prospect of death and destruction.” Stand with us against terrorism (or else) — that would be the measure by which everything was assessed in the years to come. That very day, Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that the U.S. would “rip [the bin Laden] network up” and “when we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault on terrorism.”

A global assault on terrorism. How quickly the President’s Global War on Terror was on the scene. And no nation was to be immune. On September 14th, the news was leaked that “a senior State Department official” had met with “15 Arab representatives” and delivered a stiff “with us or against us” message: Join “an international coalition against terrorism” or pay the price. There would be no safe havens. The choice — as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage would reportedly inform Pakistan’s intelligence director after the 9/11 attacks — was simple: Join the fight against al-Qaeda or “be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.” The price of a barrel of crude oil was, then, still under $20.

From that day to this, from the edge of the $20 barrel of oil to the edge of the $100 one, the Global War on Terror would be the organizing principle for the Bush administration as it shook off “the constraints,” “took off the gloves,” loosed the CIA, and sent the U.S. military into action; as it went, in short, for the Stone Age jugular. The phrase, Global War on Terror, while never quite catching on with the public, would become so familiar in the corridors of Washington that it would soon morph into one of the least elegant acronyms around — GWOT — sometimes known among neocons as “World War IV,” or by military men and administration officials — after Iraq devolved from fantasy blitzkrieg into disaster — as “the Long War.”

In the administration’s eyes, the GWOT was to be the key to the magic kingdom, the lever with which the planet could be pried open for American dominion. It gave us an interest everywhere. After all, as Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke would say in January 2002 (and this was a typical comment of that moment): “The estimates are anywhere from 50 or 60 to 70 countries that have al Qaeda cells in them. The scope extends far beyond Afghanistan.” Administration officials, in other words, were already talking about a significant portion of existing states as potential targets. This was not surprising, since the GWOT was meant to create planetary free-fire zones. These al-Qaeda targets or breeding grounds, after all, had to be emptied. We were, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials were saying almost immediately after 9/11, going to “drain” the global “swamp” of terrorists. And any countries that got in the way had better watch out.

With us or against us, that was the sum of it, and terror was its measure. If any connection could be made — even, as in the case of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, a thoroughly bogus one — it immediately offered a compelling home-front explanation for possible intervention. The safety and security of Americans was, after all, at stake in every single place where those terrorist mosquitoes might be breeding. If you had the oil lands of the planet on your mind (as was true with Dick Cheney’s infamous Energy Task Force), then the threat of terrorism — especially nuclear terrorism — was a safe bet. If you wanted to fortify your position in new oil lands, then the ticket was to have the Pentagon move in — as in Africa — to help weak, possibly even failing, states prepare themselves against the forces of terror.

For us or against us in the GWOT, that was the way all things were to be judged, no matter the place or the complexities of the local situation — in Pakistan no less than the Gulf of Guinea or Central Asia. And that was to be true at home as well. There, too, you were for us or against us. Those few who opposed the Patriot Act, for instance, were obviously not patriots. The minority who claimed that you couldn’t be at “war” with “terror,” that what was needed in response to 9/11 was firm, ramped up police action were simply laughed out of the room. In the kindliest light, they were wusses; in the worst light, essentially traitors. They lacked not only American red-bloodedness, but a willingness to blood others and be bloody-minded. End of story.

In the wake of those endlessly replayed, apocalyptic-looking scenes of huge towers crumbling and near-mushroom-clouds of ash billowing upwards, a chill of end-time fear swept through the nation. War, whatever name you gave it, was quickly accepted as the obvious, commensurate answer to what had happened. In a nation in the grips of the politics of fear, it seemed reasonable enough that a restoration of “security” — American security — should be the be-all and end-all globally. Everything, then, was to be calibrated against the successes of the GWOT.

Domestically, a distinctly un-American word, “homeland,” entered our everyday world, was married to “security,” and then “department,” and suddenly you had a second defense department, whose goal was simply to make the American people “safe.” Alone on the planet, Americans would now be allowed a “safe haven” of which no one could rob us.

From Seattle to Tampa, Toledo to Dallas, fear of terrorism became a ruling passion — as well as a pure money-maker for the mini-homeland-industrial complex that grew up around the new Department of Homeland Security. A thriving industry of private security firms, surveillance outfits, and terror consultants was suddenly among us. With its help, the United States would be locked-down in an unprecedented way — and to do that, we would also have to lock down the planet by any means necessary. We would fight “them” everywhere else, as the President would say again and again, so as not to fight them here.

The Elephant and the GWOT

If the Global War on Terror initially seemed to be the royal road to the Bush administration’s cherished dream of a global Pax Americana and a local Pax Republicana, it was, it turned out, also a trap. As manipulatively as they might use their global war to stoke domestic fears and create rationales for what they wanted to do anyway, like so many ruling groups they also came to believe in their own formulations. The GWOT would, in fact, be a Presidential monomania. According to journalist Ron Suskind in his book The One Percent Doctrine, “The President himself designed a chart: the faces of the top al Qaeda leaders with short bios stared out. As a kill or capture was confirmed, he drew an ‘X’ over the face.” According to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, the President kept that “personal scorecard for the war” in a handy desk drawer in the Oval Office for the next hot piece of good news on terror.

In the universe of the GWOT and homeland security, everything would be obsessively U.S.-centric. In fact, the administration’s “war” brings to mind an old joke in which various nationalities are asked to write essays on “the elephant.” The Frenchman, for instance, writes on L’Éléphant et L’Amour. In an updated version of the joke, the American would, of course, write on “The Elephant and the Global War on Terror”. The media picked up this obsession. On some days you can still see this reflected clearly in news accounts — as in this typical first paragraph from a news piece in the January 2nd Wall Street Journal on the aftermath of fraudulent presidential elections in Kenya.

“Kenya’s marred presidential vote and the violence that has spiraled from it are threatening an island of stability in the otherwise volatile horn of Africa and endangering U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the region.”

Or, to return for a moment to Charlie Gibson’s loose-nuke terrorism scenario in that Democratic debate: It was a given that neither Gibson, nor any of the Democratic presidential hopefuls on stage would mention the single country for which such a scenario might have an element of realism — Pakistan’s neighbor, India. But that’s just par for the course, since other countries, other peoples, except as they relate to the American War on Terror, have neither purpose, nor reality. Without the GWOT, without the (narrowly defined) issue of American “insecurity,” they all qualify as just “the elephant.” And yet, as an obsession, as war policy as well as domestic policy, banking everything on the GWOT has proved about as foolish, as self-defeating, as — let’s say it — mad, as anyone could possibly have imagined.

To put this Bush legacy and its significance in perspective, here’s my own fantasy scenario for you to debate:

Imagine that, by some unknown process, the GWOT succeeds. Instantly. Al-Qaeda and other like-minded terrorist and wannabe terrorist groups are simply wiped off the face of the Earth. They cease to exist. Tomorrow. No al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. No original al-Qaeda (with its local admixtures) in the Pakistani tribal areas or Afghanistan. No al-Qaedan-style car bombers lurking in London. No more hijacked vehicles heading for American buildings or U.S. Navy vessels. No more trains blowing up in Madrid railway stations. No more al-Qaeda-labeled suicide car bombs going off in Algiers, or Istanbul, or anywhere else. The end. Finis.

This would mean, of course, that the American obsession of these last years, the Global War on Terror would be ended, too. There would then be no reason for the world to be with us or against us, no need for a Department of Homeland Security, or draconian laws, or major surveillance programs, and so on.

Now, we still have a few minutes left in this segment of our “debate,” so let’s just keep imagining. Take a glance around the world — theoretically made “secure” and “safe” for Americans — and ask yourself this: If the Global War on Terror were over, what would be left? What would we be rid of? What would be changed? Would oil be, say, $60 a barrel, or even $20 a barrel? Would Russia return to being an impoverished nearly Third World country, as it was before 2001, rather than a rising energy superpower? Would the Iraq War be over? Would the Arctic Sea re-ice? Would Afghans welcome our occupation with open arms and accept our permanent bases and jails on their territory? Would all those dollars in Chinese and Middle Eastern hands return to the U.S. treasury? Would Latin America once again be the “backyard” of the United States? Would we suddenly be hailed around the world for our “victory” and feared once again as the “sole superpower,” the planetary “hyperpower”? Would we no longer be in, or near, recession? Would hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs begin flowing back into the country? Would the housing market bounce back? Would unemployment drop?

The answer to all of the above, of course, is resoundingly and repeatedly “no.” Essential power relations in the world turn out to have next to nothing to do with the war on terror (which may someday be seen as the last great ideological gasp of American globalism). In this sense, terrorism, no matter how frightening, is an ephemeral phenomenon. The fact is, non-state groups wielding terror as their weapon of choice can cause terrible pain, harm, and localized mayhem, but they simply don’t take down societies like ours. The IRA did not take down England despite years of devastating terror bombings in central London; nor did al-Qaeda take down Spain, even with a devastating bombing of trains entering a Madrid railway station. And neither the British, nor the Spanish acted as though that might happen.

The Global War on Terror’s greatest achievement — for American rulers and ruled alike — may simply have been to block out the world as it was, to block out, that is, reality. When it came to al-Qaeda’s ability to cause death in the United States, any American faced more danger simply getting into a car and hitting an American highway, taking up smoking, or possibly even (these days) going to an American suburban high school.

A Nation of Cowards?

Most of the things that needed to be done to make us safer after 9/11 undoubtedly could have been done without much fuss, without a new, more bureaucratic, less efficient Department of Homeland Security, without a new, larger U.S. Intelligence Community, without pumping ever more money into the Pentagon, and certainly without invading and occupying Iraq. Most societies which have dealt with terror — often far worse campaigns than what we have experienced, despite the look of 9/11 — have faced the dangers involved without becoming obsessional over their safety and security, without locking down their countries, and then attempting to do the same with the planet, as the Bush administration did. In the process, we may have turned ourselves into the functional equivalent of a nation of cowards, ready to sacrifice so much of value on the altar of the God of “security.”

Think of it: nineteen fanatics with hijacked planes, backed and funded by a relatively small movement based in one of the most impoverished places on the planet, did all this; or, put more accurately, faced with the look of the apocalypse and the dominating urges of the Bush administration, we did what al-Qaeda’s crew never could have done. Blinding ourselves via the President’s GWOT, we released American hubris and fear upon the world, in the process making almost every situation we touched progressively worse for this country.

The fact is that those who run empires can sometimes turn the right levers in societies far away. Historically, they have sometimes been quite capable of seeing the world and actual power relations as they are, clearly enough to conquer, occupy, and pacify other countries. Sometimes, they were quite capable of dividing and ruling local peoples for long periods, or hiring native troops to do their dirty work. But here’s the dirty miracle of the Bush administration: Thinking GWOT all the way, its every move seemed to do more damage than the last — not just to the world, but to the fabric of the country they were officially protecting.

Among their many GWOT-ish achievements, top administration officials demarcated an area extending from the western border of China through the territories of the former Central Asian SSRs of the Soviet Union and deep into the Middle East, down through the Horn of Africa and across North Africa (all of this more or less coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet), and dubbed it “the arc of instability.” Then, from Somalia to Pakistan, they managed to set it aflame, transforming their own empty turn of phrase into a reality on the ground, even as the price of crude oil soared.

Opinion polls indicate that, in this electoral season, terrorism is no longer at, or even near, the top of the American agenda of worries. Right now, it tends to fall far down lists of “the most important issue to face this country” (though significantly higher among Republicans than Democrats or independents). Nonetheless, don’t for a second think that the subject isn’t lodged deep in national consciousness. When asked recently by the pollsters of CNN/Opinion Research Corporation: “How worried are you that you or someone in your family will become a victim of terrorism,” a striking 39% of Americans were either “very worried” or “somewhat worried”; another 33% registered as “not too worried.” These figures might seem reasonable in New York City, but nationally? As the Democratic debate Saturday indicated, the politics of security and fear have been deeply implanted in our midst, as well as in media and political consciousness. Even candidates who proclaim themselves against “the politics of fear” (and many don’t) are repeatedly forced to take care of fear’s rhetorical business.

Imagining how a new president and a new administration might begin to make their way out of this mindset, out of a preoccupation guaranteed to solve no problems and exacerbate many, is almost as hard as imagining a world without al-Qaeda. After all, this particular obsession has been built into our institutions, from Guantanamo to the Department of Homeland Security. It’s had the time to sink its roots into fertile soil; it now has its own industries, lobbying groups, profit centers. Unbuilding it will be a formidable task indeed. Here, then — a year early — is a Bush legacy that no new president is likely to reverse soon.

Ask yourself honestly: Can you imagine a future America without a Department of Homeland Security? Can you imagine a new administration ending the global lockdown that has become synonymous with Americanism?

The Bush administration will go, but the job it’s done on us won’t. That is the sad truth of our presidential campaign moment.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

I don’t know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, I asked him about his father.

It’s not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said: “My father was unemployed.”

He paused. Then added: “He took a little drugs to the States… This is called in Spanish a mule. He passed four years in the States – in a jail.”

He continued: “I’d never talked about my father before.”

Apparently, he hadn’t. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa’s dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original “banana republic” and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a 10th of the entire adult population, fled to the US any way that they could.

“My mother told us he was working in the States,” he says.

On his release from prison, Correa’s father was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor and broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note that he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

“We are writing to remind you that, in Ecuador, there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, he is one of the first from the streets. He’d won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Dr Correa, I should say, with a PhD in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called, a man who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character.

He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don’t shine.

He told the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which held Ecuador’s finances by the throat, to go to hell.

He ripped up the “agreements” which his predecessors had signed at financial gunpoint. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest to eat their bonds. “We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people.” Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.
It was a stunning performance.

I’d met his predecessor two years ago. President Alfredo Palacio was a man of good heart who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements that I showed him, “We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are dead. And if we are dead, how can we pay?”

Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, which was then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand.

They didn’t. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.

But Ecuador didn’t fall to the floor. Correa, who was then economics minister, went secretly to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived. And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Once elected president, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in the US to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity.

There were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country. But Correa still wasn’t done.

I’d returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon, where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners.

I met the Cofan’s chief. His three-year-old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water, then came out vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there, too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that had left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it’s not just any company that he was challenging. Chevron’s largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its board of directors, the Condoleezza. The US secretary of state.

The Cofan have sued Condi’s corporation demanding that the oil company clean up the crap that it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly £6 billion. Correa won’t comment on the suit itself, which is a private legal action. But, if the verdict goes in favour of Ecuador’s citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure that Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No-one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the US, the Exxon Valdez case is dragging on into its 18th year. Yet Correa is not deterred.

He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.

This is hard core. No-one has made such a threat to Bush and big oil and lived to carry it out.

And, in an office tower looking down on Ecuador’s capital Quito, Chevron’s lawyers were not amused. I met them.

“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?”

Rodrigo Perez, Texaco’s top lawyer in Ecuador, was chuckling over the legal difficulties that the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco had caused their kids’ deaths.

“If there is somebody with cancer there,” the parents must prove the deaths were “caused by crude or by the petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is our crude – which is absolutely impossible.” He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.

The oil company lawyer added: “No-one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil.” Really? You could swim in the stuff and you’d be just fine.

The Cofan had heard this before.

When Chevron’s Texaco unit came to their land, the the oil men said that they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now, Condi’s men had told me that crude oil doesn’t cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I’m no expert. So I called one.

Pace University environmental law professor Robert F Kennedy Jr told me that elements of crude oil production such as benzene, toluene and xylene “are well-known carcinogens.”

Kennedy told me that he’s seen Chevron-Texaco’s ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this kind of toxic dumping would mean jail time in the US.

But it wasn’t as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way that they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle

The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy called Jaime Varela with a blonde bouffant hairdo wearing in the kind of yellow chinos you’d see on country club golf course, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles that the Cofan would face.

Especially this one – Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn’t get a dime. “What about the chairs in this office?” I asked. Couldn’t the Cofan at least get those? “No,” they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.

Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa’s threat to use the power of his presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No-one could have expected that. And Correa, who is no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush administration. But to Ecuador’s president, it’s all about justice, fairness.

“You wouldn’t do this to your own people,” he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska’s Native Americans. Correa’s not unique. He’s the latest of a new breed in Latin America.

Brazilian President Lula, Evo Morales, who was the first Indian ever elected president of Bolivia, Chavez of Venezuela. All “leftists,” as the press tells us. But all have something else in common – they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blondes.

When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as “the monkey.” Chavez told me proudly: “I am negro e indio” – black and Indian, like most Venezuelans.

Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blonde-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of “monkey.” Now, all over Latin America, the “monkeys” are in charge.

And they are unlocking the economic cages.

Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blonde oil company executive.

He never made much in oil, but, every time that he lost his money or his investors’ money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.

I know that this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.

But maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is good and evil.

Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who’s been good and who’s been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up one Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan’s drinking water. Or maybe we’ll have to figure it out ourselves.

When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native American village of Chenega.

I was investigating the damage done by Exxon’s oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega’s beaches. It was March 1991 and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island’s shore watching CNN. We stared in silence as “smart” bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.

Then, Kompkoff said to me, in that slow, quiet way that he had, “Well, I guess we’re all Natives now.”

Well, maybe we are. But we don’t have to be, do we?

Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the centre of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn’t have to worry that her dad would forget about “the poor children who are cold” on the streets of Quito.

Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.

GENEVA (AP) — The U.N. refugee agency on Tuesday called for $261 million this year to help hundreds of thousands of Iraqis driven from their homes by violence.

The money is needed to provide health care, financial support and other assistance to the most vulnerable of the 2 million Iraqis who have fled the country, as well as to help some 400,000 of those who have left their homes but remain in Iraq, said a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

UNHCR estimates that a total of 2.2 million people are displaced in Iraq.

“Getting help to many of them is extremely difficult because of insecurity in much of the country,” said Ron Redmond.

Most of the Iraqis who fled to other countries live in urban areas in Syria and Jordan, Redmond said.

“Many of them are running out of money and finding it increasingly difficult to get by,” he told reporters.

Redmond said the agency was unable to confirm Iraqi government reports that at least 30,000 families returned in late 2007. He said the U.N. doesn’t encourage Iraqi refugees to return home because of the security situation but supports Iraqi government efforts to help those who return voluntarily.

The agency also helps neighboring nations strained by the influx of Iraqi refugees, he said. Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and several of Gulf states, in addition to Jordan and Syria, are hosting refugees from Iraq.

The money will enable another 100,000 Iraqi refugee children to go to school this year, twice as many as last year, Redmond said.

UNHCR also assists around 41,000 non-Iraqi refugees in the country, including Iranians and Turks, but is particularly concerned about 13,000 Palestinians targeted by armed groups and unable to enter neighboring countries, he said.

The Palestinian community in Iraq has become a target for persecution in recent years, largely because they are seen as having been favored under Saddam Hussein’s regime. Redmond said UNHCR hoped to resettle the most vulnerable Palestinians.

08/01/08 “ICH” — – In the runup to this year’s political circus, the buzzwords of hope and change are being bandied about like the cheap currency they are. Divested of any real meaning by their repetition and cynical misapplication, they quickly become the empty slogans that make “election” season all the more depressing. Newspeak, long the vernacular of a self-perpetuating media corporatocracy, has rendered the worst year in Iraq into proof that “the surge is working.” By continually culling the arguments, adjusting the lens, and narrowing the field of discussion and inquiry, the media run by a shrinking oligarchy has assured the US electorate that up is down: while creative if misleading permutations of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ clog the airwaves, there is virtually no chance at all that we will see anything but more regurgitations of the status quo.

The most recent and depressing, if predictable, variation on this insanity comes with the decisions to exclude Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul from various debates in the New Hampshire primary: Paul from a Fox-sponsored debate, and Kucinich from one hosted by ABC and Facebook. But you can see the point: for years the major parties and their allies in the media have worked hard to exclude “fringe” candidates from third parties or other wackos from foisting their dangerous opinions on unsuspecting voters. Consequently, voters have been well protected over the years from loony proposals such as the eight-hour day, abolition of slavery, and an end to whatever imperialist adventure we may have been involved in at the time.

Not only have malcontents like Paul and Kucinich managed to get elected under the tent of the major respective parties and hold these elective offices for years; they have the audacity to try to move up the chain and hold the parties to their core values. For shame!

While one may argue that, having poked their noses under the fumigation tent of their respective wings of the War Party, these men get what they deserve. Why shouldn’t they choke on the same poison used to sanitize the field of public debate to which all other politicians are subjected?

I can’t mount a defense that rises above simple logic, a kryptonite to which the system has obviously proved itself increasingly impervious. But why candidates who are obviously competing in the arena set out by the gatekeepers should be excluded in the very first contested primary is simply beyond the pale. Who the hell are they to restrict access to our airwaves in this way? It is wise to remember that: they are controlling our airwaves with the people’s permission. Yet emboldened by their successes in squelching debate in recent years, the media kingmakers have determined that they can go the extra mile. And the parties, co-conspirators in every crime against humanity wrought by this criminal administration despite their weak protests, are quick to tighten the noose. Liberals have had no real voice in the Democratic Party in a generation, so protests will be feeble. At least the New Hampshire Republicans had the integrity to withdraw their co-sponsorship of the Fox debate in protest.

So US voters have no need to hear the only candidate who embraces single-payer health care, a solution adopted to some degree by almost every developed nation on earth, and an answer to a crisis of enormous proportions. Likewise, we have no use for the only candidate who steadfastly opposes the expansion of US empire. All the other candidates will keep us in Iraq for a very long time. None will speak up for the Palestinians in any meaningful way, or challenge the unspoken ban on open discussion of issues in the Middle East. None will face up to the dragon in the room, which is the disastrous and resource-devouring war machine that is quickly sucking the life and spirit out of our democracy and society.

Leftists—or what passes for such in the US today—wrinkle their noses at Paul; I, for one, take him at his word that he has a lot in common with someone like Kucinich. And really, who is to say what society might be formed over the rotten carcass of the War Party? Paul himself has said that there is a lot of common work to be done before he gets to the parts of his program where left and right diverge—and that is a hell of a long way from where we are today. Who is to say what taxes we would want or need, what government programs we could afford, once the trillions in The Skim are redirected away from the bloated military and arms manufacturers. We in the US face an anomaly faced by no other polity on earth, spending as much on war as all other nations combined. There is simply no discussion either possible or necessary before this monster is tamed, and true distinctions of left and right seem almost impossible.

And as for the welfare state, Libertarian Paul agrees with the left argument that much of it is consumed by the corporate welfare state: handouts to corporations dwarf any money spent on humans, and always have. In addition, this cozy relationship between business and government is quickly leading to a proto-fascist restriction of civil liberties that all conscientious revolutionaries predict and abhor. And the next president had better be prepared to lead a post-imperial America, whether advocates of dismantling that empire are excluded from debate or not. The whole world already knows what US politicians can’t seem to grasp. Reality around the world will catch up to us while candy-coated sound bites about This Great Nation, Our Destiny, and all the other triumphalist crap is still ringing in our ears.

I don’t endorse Ron Paul, or Dennis Kucinich, or anyone else involved in this farce. Neither will have much effect on a system so rotten and rigged as to make real change anathema to the system, and therefore out of bounds for polite discussion. And before the cynics call me cynical, I believe firmly that hope springs eternal, and that true and lasting change is the only real hope for our country and our world. It is the peddling of false hope that constitutes a war crime. Both the Japanese and Nazi empires peddled such hope to the end, and had their people firmly convinced that victory was around the corner. So perhaps I’m still a bit naïve after all. Still, and contrary to experience, I continue to be shocked at how brazen the agents of the system will be in their attempt to drive citizens toward the cattle chute of ideological pablum. And until Americans shake off their political rufinol and realize that the excluded candidates speak for them more often than the approved ones, we can forget any improvements to a system driving us into bankruptcy and financial slavery: the only real change we can count on is the dwindling few coins that jingle in our pockets.

Writer, singer, linguist and activist Daniel Patrick Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde. Together they run The Greenhouse School ( http://www.greenhouseschool.org ). Translations of articles are available in over two dozen languages.

08/01/08 “ICH” — — I seem to have been demonstrating against American racism, imperialism, wars and mass murder all my adult life from the Vietnam era of the 1960s and 1970s onwards. Back in the 1960s decent people chanted “Hay, hay LBJ, how many kids will you kill today?” (LBJ being US President Lyndon Baines Johnson who presided over the Indochina War – 13 million excess deaths in total – from the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) in 1963 to the accession of President Richard Nixon in 1969.

These days we have been chanting “Bush, Blair, CIA, how many kids did you kill today?” or the more general “Hay, hay USA, how many kids did you kill today?” This article by a senior biological scientist attempts to answer this question QUANTITATIVELY using the best available data from UNICEF (see: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html ) and the UN Population Division (see: http://esa.un.org/unpp/ ).

We can get an UPPER LIMIT estimate from determining the number of children who die avoidably on Spaceship Earth with George Bush in charge of the flight deck. I have published a huge book recently called “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”. (G.M. Polya, Melbourne; copies in some major libraries; see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ). Careful research over several years and involving every country in the world ultimately obtained the estimate that 16 million people die avoidably each year (2003 data) of whom 9.6 million are under-5 year old infants.

We can accordingly estimate that Bush US is COMPLICIT in about 9.6 million avoidable infant deaths on Spaceship Earth each year (26,000 daily). However complicity is not the same as actual, actionable RESPONSIBILITY.

However while Bush America cannot be held responsible for every country in the world, under International Law it is certainly responsible for all countries actually violently occupied by the US (Occupied Iraq, Occupied Afghanistan, Occupied Diego Garcia) or by its war criminal surrogates Ethiopia and Racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel (Occupied Haiti, Occupied Palestine, Occupied Somalia).

This culpability is clearly set out in Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (see: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm ), QUOTE:

Article 55
To the fullest extent of the means available to it the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.

The Occupying Power may not requisition foodstuffs, articles or medical supplies available in the occupied territory, except for use by the occupation forces and administration personnel, and then only if the requirements of the civilian population have been taken into account. Subject to the provisions of other international Conventions, the Occupying Power shall make arrangements to ensure that fair value is paid for any requisitioned goods.

The Protecting Power shall, at any time, be at liberty to verify the state of the food and medical supplies in occupied territories, except where temporary restrictions are made necessary by imperative military requirements.

Article 56

To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the cooperation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties.

If new hospitals are set up in occupied territory and if the competent organs of the occupied State are not operating there, the occupying authorities shall, if necessary, grant them the recognition provided for in Article 18. In similar circumstances, the occupying authorities shall also grant recognition to hospital personnel and transport vehicles under the provisions of Articles 20 and 21.

In adopting measures of health and hygiene and in their implementation, the Occupying Power shall take into consideration the moral and ethical susceptibilities of the population of the occupied territory. END QUOTE.

Using data from UNICEF it can be estimated that 608,000 under-5 year old infants die ANNUALLY in the US- or US surrogate-occupied Occupied Territories listed above, 90% avoidably – i.e. 550,000 – and due to Occupier war crimes in violation of the Geneva Convention.

A quick inspection of the WHO (World Health Organization) website (see: http://www.who.int/countries/en/ ) reveals that total annual medical expenditure in US dollars permitted by the war criminal Occupiers is only $19 (Occupied Afghanistan), $82 (Occupied Haiti), $135 (Occupied Iraq), ? (Occupied Somalia) and ? (Occupied Palestinian Territory) as compared to the following hugely greater values for the racist, war-criminal, mass pedocidal US Alliance Occupier Countries: $3,123 (Australia), $3,173 (Canada), $3,040 (France), $3,171 (Germany), $2,560 (the UK) and $6.096 (the US).

Accordingly Bush, Dr Rice (aka Dr Death), Bush America and indeed ALL Bush-supporting Americans are responsible for the 550,000 avoidable under-5 infant deaths EACH YEAR in the above Occupied countries. For detailed data and analysis see “US Occupation & Terror & Occupation. War crimes & huge infant deaths”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11968/42/ , from which one obtains the following summary data:

Year 2005 under-5 infant deaths” / “year 2005 population” is 370,000 / 29.9 million (Occupied Afghanistan); 122,000 / 28.8 million (Occupied Iraq); 82,000 / 8.2 million (Occupied Somalia); 31,000 / 8.5 million (Occupied Haiti); and 3,000 / 3.7 million (Occupied Palestinian Territory) – as compared to 1,500 / 20.2 million (Occupi-er Australia) and 800 / 6.4 million (Occupi-er Israel).

Year 2005 annual under-5 infant death rate” (i.e. as a percentage: deaths for every 100 under-5 year old infants in 2005 in a particular country) was 6.7% (Occupied Afghanistan); 2.8% (Occupied Iraq); 5.5% (Occupied Somalia); 2.7% (Occupied Haiti); and 0.47% (Occupied Palestinian Territory) – as compared to 0.12% (Occupi-er Australia) and 0.12% (Occupi-er Israel).

Total excess deaths for impoverished developing countries is about 1.4 times the total under-5 infant deaths (see “Layperson’s Guide to Counting Iraq deaths”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26/ (for detailed analysis see my book “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (copies in major libraries): http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ). Accordingly annual excess deaths in the above Occupied Countries = 608,000 x 1.4 = 850,000.

THE ANSWERS to the questions posed above are that Bush America will be responsible for (a) 850,000 excess deaths in US- or US surrogate-occupied Territories in 2008 (of whom well over 50% will be kids) and (b) 550,000 avoidable under-5 infant deaths in these Occupied Territories in 2008 or 550,000/365 = 1,500 avoidable under-5 year old infant deaths DAILY.

Terrorism whether state terrorism or non-state terrorism is evil and repugnant.

Muslim-origin non-state terrorists have murdered 7,000 Western civilians in the last 40 (FORTY) years (including Israelis and assuming no US or Israeli complicity in 9/11 – ignoring the fact that in November 2007 former President and intelligence-intimate Francesco Cossiga of Italy announced unequivocally that 9/11 was due to the US CIA and Israeli Mossad) (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/18569/26/ ).

However the 21st century Bush Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been associated (SO FAR) with post-invasion excess deaths of 1.5-2 million and 3-6 million, respectively; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths of 0.6 million and 2.2 million, respectively; and refugees totalling 4.5 million and 4 million, respectively (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/19121/42/ and http://www.countercurrents.org/polya071007.htm ).

From these UN agency- and medical literature-derived figures Bush US is clearly the world’s #1 terrorist state and the current world’s #1 for mass murder and mass pedocide (mass murder of children).

What sort of human beings can be complicit in such mass murder? What sort of Americans are complicit in this mass murder? What sort of American WOMEN are complicit in this horrendous mass murder of BORN INFANTS? Well, George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice (aka Wicked Witch of the West, Dr Death), Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Hilary Clinton for starters.

Of course ugly, racist Americans such as the Racist Religious Right Republican (R4) Bush-ites might argue that Muslim, Arab, Asian, South Asian, African, or non-European infants “don’t count” (that, of course, having been continuous, sustained American policy since the time of the racist, genocidal, God-fearing first European settlers of America 500 years ago) but what about the 20,000 AMERICAN INFANTS who die avoidably EACH YEAR because of Bush policies (see “How Bush killed 100,000 American infants”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/7102/26/ ).

Bush America is undoubtedly well ahead of the rest as the world’s #1 climate criminal state, and the #1 for terrorism, and mass pedocide. US state terrorism (USST), US climate criminality, and US nuclear terrorism are the #1 threats facing the world today.

Those who KNOWINGLY deny, ignore, excuse, minimize, obfuscate, support, advocate or are otherwise complicit in the mass murder of CHILDREN have crossed the line separating decent humanity from proto-Nazi barbarism, from the unthinkable but real, barbaric actuality of Bush America.

Small wonder therefore that outstanding Jewish American investor, philanthropist, author, activist, Holocaust hero and Holocaust survivor George Soros has demanded the “de-Nazification” of Bush America (see: “George Soros: Bush America needs de-Nazification”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/12714/26/ ).

What can decent people do to counter this horrendous Bush American barbarism in 2008? Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Decent folk must (a) inform others and (b) act ethically by applying Sanctions and Boycotts in relation to all their avoidable dealings with individuals, corporations and countries complicit in this continuing mass pedocide, this continuing, remorseless Bush-ite mass murder of innocent children.