The Rag Blog

Mayan leaders announced that priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate “bad spirits” after US President George W. Bush visits next week.

“That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture,” Juan Tiney, the director of a national association of indigenous people and peasant farmers, said Thursday.

Bush’s seven-day tour of Latin America includes a stopover beginning late Sunday in Guatemala. On Monday morning he is scheduled to visit the archaeological site Iximche on the high western plateau in a region of the Central American country populated mostly by Mayans.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi children are haunted by dreams of bad guys wielding knives or kidnapping relatives. For some, like 13-year-old Zaman, the nightmares become reality. She was abducted, beaten and threatened with rape.

“Zaman suffers from shaking, nervousness, a stutter and sleep disorder,” said Haider Abdul-Muhsin, a psychiatrist at Baghdad’s Ibn Rushd hospital who treats children suffering the consequences of war, four years after the U.S. invasion.

Abdul-Muhsin said Zaman was abducted in Baghdad last month on her way home from school. Zaman was not at the hospital when Reuters visited, but Abdul-Muhsin said few children he had treated recently had affected him as much.

“An elderly woman asked her to help her carry some plastic bags across the road to find a taxi. While she was taking her bags back from Zaman, she grabbed her and forced her into the taxi. She anesthetized Zaman and tied her up,” he said.

The girl was held in a room with 15 other girls for seven hours before being released by police who raided the house.

“They beat her, they told her that they would send her to insurgents as a forced ‘bride’,” Abdul-Muhsin said.

Four years of war and now sectarian chaos that threatens to tear Iraq apart has had an enormous impact on children.

March 7, 2007 | As thousands of burned-out soldiers prepare to return to Iraq to fill President Bush’s unwelcome call for at least 20,000 more troops, I can’t help wondering what the women among those troops will have to face. And I don’t mean only the hardships of war, the killing of civilians, the bombs and mortars, the heat and sleeplessness and fear.

I mean from their own comrades — the men.

I have talked to more than 20 female veterans of the Iraq war in the past few months, interviewing them for up to 10 hours each for a book I am writing on the topic, and every one of them said the danger of rape by other soldiers is so widely recognized in Iraq that their officers routinely told them not to go to the latrines or showers without another woman for protection.

The female soldiers who were at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, for example, where U.S. troops go to demobilize, told me they were warned not to go out at night alone.

“They call Camp Arifjan ‘generator city’ because it’s so loud with generators that even if a woman screams she can’t be heard,” said Abbie Pickett, 24, a specialist with the 229th Combat Support Engineering Company who spent 15 months in Iraq from 2004-05. Yet, she points out, this is a base, where soldiers are supposed to be safe.

Spc. Mickiela Montoya, 21, who was in Iraq with the National Guard in 2005, took to carrying a knife with her at all times. “The knife wasn’t for the Iraqis,” she told me. “It was for the guys on my own side.”

Comprehensive statistics on the sexual assault of female soldiers in Iraq have not been collected, but early numbers revealed a problem so bad that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered a task force in 2004 to investigate. As a result, the Defense Department put up a Web site in 2005 designed to clarify that sexual assault is illegal and to help women report it. It also initiated required classes on sexual assault and harassment. The military’s definition of sexual assault includes “rape; nonconsensual sodomy; unwanted inappropriate sexual contact or fondling; or attempts to commit these acts.”

Unfortunately, with a greater number of women serving in Iraq than ever before, these measures are not keeping women safe. When you add in the high numbers of war-wrecked soldiers being redeployed, and the fact that the military is waiving criminal and violent records for more than one in 10 new Army recruits, the picture for women looks bleak indeed.

Last year, Col. Janis Karpinski caused a stir by publicly reporting that in 2003, three female soldiers had died of dehydration in Iraq, which can get up to 126 degrees in the summer, because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being raped by male soldiers if they walked to the latrines after dark. The Army has called her charges unsubstantiated, but Karpinski told me she sticks by them. (Karpinski has been a figure of controversy in the military ever since she was demoted from brigadier general for her role as commander of Abu Ghraib. As the highest-ranking official to lose her job over the torture scandal, she claims she was scapegoated, and has become an outspoken critic of the military’s treatment of women. In turn, the Army has accused her of sour grapes.)

Amidst the chaos and violence of US-occupied Iraq, the significance of widespread gender-based violence has been largely overlooked. Yet Iraqi women are enduring unprecedented levels of assault in the public sphere, “honor killings,” torture in detention, and other forms of gender-based violence.

In honor of International Women’s Day today, MADRE, a global women’s human rights organization, has released a new report on the incidence, causes, and legalization of gender-based violence in Iraq since the US-led invasion.

Houzan Mahmoud, representative of the Organisation for Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), said at a panel discussion at the UN launching the report:

“Women are not only being targeted because they are members of the civilian population, women–in particular those who are perceived to pose a challenge to the political aspirations of their attackers–have increasingly been targeted simply because they are women.”

WASHINGTON – The Republic of Georgia said Thursday it is raising the number of its soldiers serving with the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq to more than 2,000 from the current 850.

Georgia’s ambassador to Washington said one reason for more than doubling the country’s commitment to the fight was to send a signal to NATO, which the former Soviet republic is trying to join.

The announcement came in a statement the embassy sent to The Associated Press and attributed to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. It said the country was committing the troops for one year and Georgian officials were consulting with their U.S. and Iraqi counterparts about how the troops would be deployed.

Soon after John Kerry had sewed up the delegates needed to seize the Democratic nomination for president in the spring of 2004, he huddled for two hours with James Hoffa, Jr., the noxious boss of the Teamsters union. The topic was oil. The Teamsters wanted more of it at cheaper prices. They had suspicions about Kerry. After all, the senator had already won the backing of the Sierra Club, who touted him as the most environmentally enlightened member of the US senate.

Hoffa emerged from the meeting sporting a shark-like grin. Hoffa and the Teamsters have long pushed for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling and for the construction of a natural gas pipeline to cut across some of the wildest land in North America from the tundra of Alaska to Chicago. “Kerry says, look, I am against drilling in ANWR, but I am going to put that pipeline in, and we’re going to drill like never before,” Hoffa reported. “They are going to drill all over, according to him. And he says, we’re going to be drilling all over the United States.”

Kerry didn’t stop to comment. He slipped out the door and into a waiting SUV. Don’t worry, Kerry later assured worried greens, it’s not his gas-guzzling, hydro-carbon belching behemoth. It belongs to his…family. (Apparently, this means he can’t take out a loan on the vehicle for his campaign.) Still, the senator’s not a total hypocrite on this count. After all, Kerry voted against ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming.

The Bush administration has been aptly pegged as a petroarchy. It isn’t so-much under the sway of Big Oil as it is, well, infested top to bottom with oil operatives, starting with the president and vice president. Eight cabinet members and the National Security Advisor directly from executive jobs in the oil industry, as did 32 other Bush-appointed officials in the Office of Management and Budget, Pentagon, State Department, and the departments of Energy, Agriculture and, most crucially in terms of opening up what remains of the American wilderness to the drillers, Interior.

The point man in the Bush’s administration’s oil raid on the public estate was Steve J. Griles, Gale Norton’s top lieutenant at the Interior Department and an intimate of the super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. As Deputy Secretary of Interior, Griles was the man who held the keys to the nation’s oil and mineral reserves. Since he landed this prized position, he used those keys to unlock nearly every legal barrier to exploitation, opening the public lands to a carnival of corporate plunder. He became the toast of Texas. But now Griles is hiding out from reporters and congressional investigators after accounts of his ongoing sleazy relationships with his former associates in big oil have begun to ooze out into the open.

From the time he took his oath of office, Griles was a congressional investigation waiting to happen. The former coal industry flack was one of Bush’s most outrageous appointments, an arrogant booster of the very energy cartel he was meant to regulate. His track record could not be given even the slightest green gloss. A veteran of the Reagan administration, Griles schemed closely with disgraced Interior Secretary James Watt to open the public lands of the West to unfettered access by oil and mining companies, many of whom funded Watt’s strange outpost of divinely-inspired environmental exploitation, the Mountain States Legal Center.

As Deputy Director of Surface Mining, Griles gutted strip-mining regulations and was a relentless booster of the oil-shale scheme, one of the most outlandish giveaways and environmental blunders of the last century. He also pushed to overturn the popular moratorium on off shore oil drilling on the Pacific Coast, a move of such extreme zealotry in the service of big oil that it even caught Reagan off guard.

After leaving public office, Griles quickly cashed in on his iniquitous tenure in government by launching a DC lobbying firm called J. Stephen Griles and Associations. He soon drummed up a list of clients including Arch Coal, the American Gas Association, National Mining Association, Occidental Petroleum, Pittston Coal and more than 40 other gas, mining and energy concerns, big and small, foreign and domestic.

Then Griles was tapped as Gale Norton’s chief deputy at Interior. After contentious senate hearings that exposed his various and lucrative entanglements with the oil and gas industry, Griles was finally confirmed to office on July 7, 2001. He later signed two separate statements agreeing to recuse himself from direct involvement any Interior Deparment matters that might involve his former clients. He has since flouted both of those agreements, as disclosed by his own calendar of meetings, liberated through a Freedom of Information Act filing made by Friends of the Earth.

As the calendar and meeting notes reveal, Griles has used the cover of the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq to advance his wholesale looting of the public domain for the benefit of some of his former clients and business cronies. He has pushed for rollbacks in environmental standards for air and water; advocated increased oil and gas drilling on public lands; tried to exempt the oil industry from royalty payments; and sought to create new loopholes in regulations governing stripmining.

Griles wasted no time compiling a wish list from his pals. Within days of assuming office, Griles convened a series of parleys between his former clients and Interior Department officials to chart a gameplan for accelerating mining, oil leasing and coal-methane extraction from public lands. Between August of 2001 and January 2004, Griles met at least 7 times with former clients; 15 times with companies represented by his former client the National Mining Association; on at least 16 occasions he arranged meetings between himself, former clients, and other administration officials to discuss rollback of air pollution standards for power plants, oil refineries and industrial boilers; on 12 occasions he arranged similar meetings between regulators and former clients regarding coal mining.

But it now turns out that not only was Griles shilling for his former clients, he was also pushing policies that will also plump up his own pocketbook. Griles was an ownership partner in a DC lobbying firm called National Environmental Strategies, a polluter’s lobby founded in 1990 by Marc Himmelstein and Haley Barbour. Barbour soon left the firm to become head of the Republican National Committee. Griles moved in.

When he was nominated as deputy secretary of Interior, Griles was forced to sell his interest in the firm for $1.1 million , and he fixed up aq deal with Himmelstein, a friend and Republican powerbroker. Instead of paying Griles off in a lump sum, Himmelstein will pay the Bush official $284,000 each year over the next four years. Griles claimed he arranged this kind of payment plan so as not to leave NES “strapped for cash.”

But in effect Griles remained financially tied to the health of Himmelstein’s firm. And, in fact, Himmelstein has admitted that from 2002 to 2004 he and Griles had gotten together several times over beers and dinner.

Sameer Dossani: Let’s talk about the recently passed Iraqi oil law. It’s well known that the law was drafted in the U.S. and then consulted on by very few Iraqis all loyal to Prime Minister Noori al-Maliki, then finally pushed through the Iraqi parliament. This law paves the way for regionalization and privatization of Iraqi oil. What’s the U.S. economic agenda in Iraq and will it be able to carry that agenda out, given the disastrous nature of the occupation so far?

Noam Chomsky: It’s not very clear. What you said is correct. The law was not even seen by the Iraqi Parliament until it was finished, so it’s an inside job. Exactly what this entails is still kind of open. It allows for Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) which have traditionally been a way of gouging the producer and ensuring that foreign corporations have control and make huge profits. It’s quite different from other contractual arrangements in the region–it’s what they used to have but they’ve since nationalized their oil production and countries set terms more in their own interest with the corporations that are moving in. This law is vague on that so it leaves it open.

As far as the U.S. economic interests I think we have to make a distinction. The primary interest, and that’s true throughout the Middle East, even in Saudi Arabia, the major energy producer, has always been control, not access, and not profit. Profit is a secondary interest and access is a tertiary interest.

So in the years when the U.S. was not using Middle East oil at all, [the U.S.] was the largest producer and the largest exporter, it still had the same policies. It wanted to control the sources of oil and the reasons are understood. In the mid-1940s, the State Department made it clear that the oil resources of the region, primarily then Saudi Arabia, were a stupendous source of strategic power which made the Middle East the most strategically important area of the world. They also added that its one of the greatest material prizes in world history. But the basic point is that it’s a source of strategic power, meaning that if you control the energy resources, then you can control the world, because the world needs the energy resources.

This was made explicit by George Kennan when he was one of the Middle East planners [in the U.S. State Department]. [He said that] control over Middle East oil will give us veto power over our rivals. He was specifically talking about Japan, in case Japan industrialized, it was devastated by the war still, we’ll have veto power as long we control the oil. And that’s been understood through the years. So in the early stages of the Iraq war [former U.S. National Security Advisor] Zbigniew Brzezinski, who’s one of the more astute of the planners–he was not terribly enthusiastic about the war–said that if the U.S. wins the war, which means that it succeeds in imposing a client regime in Iraq, then the U.S. will have critical leverage over its industrial rivals in Europe and Asia because it will have its hand on the spigot.

And that is also understood very well at the highest level of the administration. So a few months ago, Dick Cheney said that control over [oil] pipelines can be “tools for intimidation and [blackmail]”. He was talking about control over pipelines in the hands of others, so if our enemies have it, it’s a tool of intimidation and coercion. But of course the same is true if it is in our hands. We’re not supposed to think that because we’re supposed to be noble, but the rest of the world certainly understands it. Yes, it’s a tool of intimidation and coercion, whether it’s the direction of pipelines or whether its control over the production or over the regimes in question, and control can take many forms.

So that’s the primary concern–control. A secondary concern is undoubtedly profit for U.S.-based corporations and British based corporations and several others of course. And yes [in the case of the Iraqi oil law] that’s a possibility. The Production Sharing Agreements and the other arrangements for long-term contracts at ridiculous rates, those are expected to be sources of immense profit as they have been in the past, so for example a couple of weeks ago Exxon-Mobil posted its profits for 2006 which are the highest for any corporation in U.S. history. That broke the record of the preceding year, which also happened to be Exxon-Mobil and the other energy corporations are doing just great–they have money pouring out of their ears. And the same with the corporations that link to them, like Haliburton, Bechtel and so on.

The material prize of oil production is not just from energy. It’s also from many other things. Take Saudi Arabia or the [United Arab] Emirates. They have huge constriction projects paid for by petro-dollars which recycle back to Bechtel and other major construction companies. A lot of it goes right back to U.S. military industry. So these are huge markets for U.S. military exports and the military industry in the United States is very closely linked to the high-tech economy generally. So it’s a sort of a cycle–high prices for oil, the petro-dollars pour back to the U.S. for major construction projects for high-tech industry, for development, for purchasing treasury securities which helps bolster the economy–it’s a major part of the economy and of course it’s not just the United States. Britain, France and others are trying very hard to sell them the same things and sometimes succeeding. There was a big bribery scandal in Britain recently because of efforts to bribe Saudi officials into buying jet aircraft and so on. So the basic idea of the energy system is that it should be under the control of loyal clients of the United States, and they’re allowed to enrich themselves, become super rich in fact, but the petro-dollars are basically to cycle back to the West, primarily the United States in various forms. So that’s a secondary concern.

A tertiary concern is access. That’s much less of a concern. One of the reasons is that the distribution systems are pretty much in the hands of big energy corporations anyway and once oil is on the high seas, it can go anywhere. So access is not considered a major problem. Political scientists, when they make fun of the idea that the U.S. invaded Iraq to gain its oil, they point out is that the U.S. can get Middle East oil in other ways so therefore that can’t be the reason. That’s true, but it’s irrelevant because the true issues are and always have been control and secondarily profit and in fact U.S. intelligence projections for the coming years have emphasized that while the U.S. should control Middle East energy for the traditional reasons, it should rely primarily on more stable Atlantic basin resources, namely West Africa and the Western hemisphere. They’re more secure, presumably and therefore we can use those, but we should control the Middle East oil because it is a stupendous source of strategic power.

SD: The difficulties surround the occupation Iraq has deflected the U.S.’s attention away from other parts of the world, including Latin America. Recently, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and others such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, have been talking about regional trade agreements such as ALBA and, in the case of Venezuela, aid packages that are supposedly designed to actually benefit local populations as opposed to transnational companies. Critics claim that these policies are a) unsustainable, because they depend on revenues from Venezuela’s oil wealth, and b) self serving for the government of Hugo Chavez. What is your response to these criticisms?

NC: It’s very odd criticism in the first place. Are U.S. aid programs sustainable? No, not if there’s a depression or even a recession. Furthermore, U.S. aid happens to be about the lowest relative to the economy of any advanced society so there isn’t much of it in the first place and it also can be withdrawn at any time and often is.

As for doing it for self interest, what do you think other countries provide aid for? They’re perfectly open about it. Sometimes, there’s something done for altruistic reasons maybe by Norway, but overwhelmingly, aid is openly presented as “in our interest”, not just by the U.S. but by Britain and France and others. It is part of general strategic policies of controlling whatever part of the world you can. So, if in fact Venezuela’s doing it for that reason, that just says, “yeah, they’re just like us”. So whatever that is, it’s not a criticism.

What are the reasons? Well, they’re complicated. First of all, there’s a background. For the first time in 500 years since the Spanish conquest Latin America–especially South America–is beginning to move towards some sort of integration. Actually it’s a dual type of integration. Part of it is international integration meaning the countries are becoming more integrated with one another. The traditional structure in LA has been that each of the countries is primarily oriented towards Western imperial powers. So [economies are oriented toward trade with] Spain, and in recent years mostly the United States, not with one another. That’s even true of the transportation systems. They’re designed for export of resources abroad and import of luxury goods for the rich within.

There’s a very clear contrast with East Asia. East Asia is resource poor, Latin America is resource rich. You would have expected Latin America to have rapid growth, not East Asia, but it didn’t. One of the reasons is that Latin America adhered very rigorously to the neo-liberal policies of the last 25 years, the IMF World Bank policies, and those are basically offshoots of the U.S. Treasury department. They adhered to the rules and they suffered severely–most of the population that is. The rich sectors did ok. East Asia just disregarded the rules and followed the same kinds of programs that the rich countries themselves, including the U.S., had followed to gain their wealth and power. So East Asia grew, but in addition to that, if you look at say imports and exports, Latin America exported raw materials, which is low income basically, and imported luxury goods for the wealthy. East Asia imported capital goods and moved up the ladder of industrial progress and ended up exporting high technology goods.

SD: What do you mean by “capital goods”?

NC: Machine tools, things that you can use for producing commodities, electronics, bio-technology and so on. I mean those are the high-value exports, not rice. I mean for the U.S., rice is such a low value export that agribusiness has to get about 40% of its profit from U.S. government subsidies, provided primarily since the Reagan administration, as part of their efforts to undermine markets–they love rhetoric about markets, but they greatly dislike the concept applied to us. And the terms of trade tend to decline for commodities, you know there’s variation, but they tend to decline for primary commodities as compared with high value goods like industrial exports. So [economists like to talk about] this notion called “comparative advantage”, you should produce what you’re good at, but the way countries develop is by rejecting that principle and acting in order to shift their comparative advantage.

So let’s take the United States. 200 years ago the comparative advantage of the United States was exporting fish and fur, and maybe cotton, thanks to slavery. If the U.S. had followed the principles that are dictated to the poor countries, we’d be a sparsely populated, pretty poor country, exporting primary resources. Instead, the United States violated all of the rules–the rules of the economists and the neo-liberal principles. It imposed extremely high tariffs on imports from Britain, textiles at first, later steel and others, and it had the highest tariffs in the world, the highest protection in the world in the 19th century. As a result, it was able to shift its comparative advantage from primary resource exports to manufacturing, finally high-tech technology and so on, and that goes on right until today. Only the poor countries are supposed to follow the principles that economists dictate. In the United States there’s a state sector of the economy, which is the core of high-technology advanced production. That’s where computers come from, and the Internet, and lasers, and containers for trade; civilian aircraft are mostly an offshoot of the military industry, right now moving on to genetic engineering, bio-technology, pharmaceuticals, and so on. Research and development–which are the risky, costly parts of development–those costs are imposed on the public by funding through the state sector and development in the state sector. When there are profits to be made it’s handed over to private corporations and that’s the basic structure of the advanced economy.

That’s one reason why the U.S. simply can’t enter into the free trade agreement–it just doesn’t accept market systems internally. So going back to East Asia and Latin America, Latin America followed the rules and became impoverished; East Asia ignored the rules, and was able to grow and develop pretty much the way the rich countries had themselves. So one form of integration in Latin America is integration of the societies with one another, although the alternative is the more far-reaching version of this, but there are others. And the second form of integration is internal. Latin America at last is beginning to do something, not much, but something about the internal fracturing of the societies, which is extreme. Each of those societies is characterized by a very wealthy small elite, and a huge impoverished mass. There’s also a pretty close correlation to race. The wealthy elite tends to be the white, Europeanized part of the society; the huge impoverished mass tends to be the Mestizo, Indian, Black part of the society. Not a perfect correlation, but it’s very noticeable. And that’s beginning to be addressed, in large part as a result of the pressure of mass popular movements, which are very significant in Latin America now more than any other part of the world.

It’s in this context that the Venezuelan phenomenon surfaces. Venezuela is indeed now, under Chavez, using its oil wealth to accelerate these processes–both the international integration and the internal integration. It’s helped countries of the region free themselves from U.S. controls, exercised in part through the traditional threat of violence, which has been much weakened, and in part through economic controls. That’s why country after country is kicking out the IMF, restructuring their debts, or refusing to pay them, often with the specific help of Venezuela. In Argentina particularly, Venezuela bought about a third of the debt and enabled Argentina to “rid herself of the IMF” as the President [Nestor Kirchner] put it. The international integration is also proceeding, not just through Venezuela. It doesn’t get reported here because it’s sort of not the right story, but a lot of things are happening. So in early December for example, there was a meeting of all South American leaders in Cochabamba, Bolivia–which is right at the heart of Morales territory, Indian territory–and they proposed, they had constructive ideas and suggestions which could lead towards sort of a European Union type structure for South America.

The more extreme version of this, advanced version of it is ALBA, which you mentioned, the Venezuelan initiative, but there are others. MERCOSUR, which is a regional trade alliance is stumbling, but it exists. There are great barriers to integration, it’s not an easy matter to dismantle 500 years of history, either internally or regionally, but there are steps towards it, and Venezuela is playing a significant role in them. In the U.S. there’s kind of a new party line on this matter. The party line is that, OK, we admit the subcontinent is drifting to the Left, but there are good Leftists and bad Leftists, and we have to distinguish between them. The bad Leftists are Chavez, of course, Morales, and probably Correa, not certain yet, and Kirschner’s also one of the bad ones. The good Leftists are Lula in Brazil, García in Peru, they don’t know about Bachelet in Chile, and so on.

In a political culture defined by a centrist-to-reactionary political spectrum, Paul Wellstone was a breath of fresh air when he brought his progressive politics to the U.S. Senate in 1991. His death in 2002 robbed the country of a humane voice on the national political stage.

I lived for a time in Minnesota and followed Wellstone’s career closely. The last time I saw him speak was December 1998 when I was part of a peace group that conducted a sit-in at his office to protest his support for a U.S. attack on Iraq and force a meeting to challenge the former anti-war activist’s hawkish turn. Yes, that’s right — a group sat in at Wellstone’s St. Paul office when he supported Bill Clinton’s illegal 1998 cruise missile attack on Iraq, which was the culmination of a brutal and belligerent U.S. policy during that Democratic administration.

It might seem odd to recall such a small part of contemporary history when the United States is mired in a full-scale occupation of Iraq, but there’s an important lesson in this little bit of history — one that’s is often difficult for many liberals and Democrats to face:

Illegal and immoral U.S. aggression is, and always has been, a bipartisan affair. Democrats and liberals are responsible for their share of the death, destruction, and misery caused by U.S. empire-building along with Republicans and conservatives. I mention the Wellstone incident not to suggest he and George W. Bush are equally culpable, but to make the point that even politicians with Wellstone’s progressive politics can be twisted by the pathology of power and privilege.

Precisely because we face such crucial policy choices in Iraq, the Middle East, and the world, we must remember that while W. and the neocons are a problem, they are not the problem. Sweep this particular gang of thugs and thieves out of office, and … what? A kindler-and-gentler imperial policy designed by Democrats is still an imperial policy, and imperial policies always have the same result: The suffering of millions — others that are too often invisible to us — in support of policies that protect the affluence of … us.

Name a politician at the national level today who has even come close to acknowledging that painful reality. Go ahead, think about it for a minute — I can wait.

I’m reminded of a meeting that a group of Austin activists had with our congressman, liberal Democrat Lloyd Doggett, as part of a national grassroots organizing effort in the late 1990s to end the punishing embargo on Iraq that the Clinton administration imposed for eight long years. Those economic sanctions were killing an estimated 5,000 Iraqi children a month, and it’s likely that as many as a million people died during the Clinton years as a result of this aspect of the U.S. policy of dominating the politics of the region. We asked Doggett — who had courageously spoken out against U.S. aggression in the past — to challenge this policy of his Democratic leadership, which he declined to do. One of us mentioned our opposition to this in the context of a larger critique of U.S. empire. Doggett’s response: “That was never my analysis.”

In other words, even though the United States has been pursuing imperial policies since it was founded — first on the continent it eventually conquered and later around the world — that wasn’t his analysis. In other words, his analysis was apparently to deny the reality of how the United States became the most powerful nation-state in the history of the world. In other words, his analysis required obscuring difficult truths, which might be called a … I’ll leave that sentence for you to complete.

Again, my purpose in pointing this out is not to suggest that there is no difference in the policies of Doggett and Bush, but rather to point out the disease at the heart of conventional politics in the United States: The willingness to lie about the history and contemporary policies that have made us the most affluent society in the history of the world.

Cans Seurat, 2007 – Digital C print, 72×110″
Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans
the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

CHANGING CLIMATE, CHANGING MINDS
Journal of a Futurist, 6 March 2007
16 reasons to be cheerful:

1. The public has long been ahead of politicians in recognising the danger of toxic emissions and will remain the driving force in rescuing the future. Everyone on Earth can play a role, irrespective of age, income or clout. Such a challenge can be strangely empowering, like the Blitz Spirit. (The wrecking of nature is more of a threat than the Luftwaffe). The outcome will redefine what it means to be human.

2. Shopping will cease to enthral. Buy Nothing Day has evolved to Buy Nothing Month. Recovering shopaholics are exchanging pledges to abstain. Some families refuse to buy anything new until something old is given away. But every so often a bright idea will win hearts, such as this 100% biodegradable, solar powered, I-Pod charging, naturally dyed hemp handbag.