The Rag Blog

The View from the Grass

I’ve been writing the year-end other-news summary for Tomdispatch since 2004; somewhere around 2017, however, the formula of digging up overlooked stories and grounds for hope grew weary. So for this year, we’ve decided instead to look back on the last 25 years of the twenty-first century — but it was creatures from sixty million years ago who reminded me how to do it.

The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world: age-of-dinosaur dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual dramatic clash between a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls soaring through the air, one with a small reptile in its toothy maw; and some oblivious grazing by what, when I was young in another millennium, we would have called a brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in all that drama was the shrew-like mammal perched on a reed or thick blade of grass, too small to serve even as an enticing pterodactyl snack. The next thing coming down the line always looks like that mammal at the beginning — that’s what I told the kids — inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the clash of the titans.

That’s exactly why mainstream journalists spent the first decade of this century debating the meaning of the obvious binaries — the Democrats versus the Republicans, McWorld versus Global Jihad — much as political debate of the early 1770s might have focused on whether the French or English monarch would have supremacy in North America, not long before the former was beheaded and the latter evicted. The monarchs in all their splashy scale were the dinosaurs of their day, and the eighteenth-century mammal no one noticed at first was named “revolution”; the early twenty-first century version might have been called “localism” or maybe “anarchism,” or even “civil society regnant.” In some strange way, it turned out that windmill-builders were more important than the U.S. Senate. They were certainly better at preparing for the future anyway.

That mammal clinging to the stalk had crawled up from the grassroots where the choices were so much more basic and significant than, for instance, the one between fundamentalism and consumerism that was on everyone’s lips in the years of the Younger George Bush. If the twentieth century was the age of dinosaurs — of General Motors and the Soviet Union, of McDonald’s, globalized entertainment networks, and information superhighways — the twenty-first has increasingly turned out to be the age of the small.

It’s no wonder the federal government did not want to release details for a year, because once again, it’s all handouts to Big Oil who set new records in profitability while sticking the middle class with the bill. Good grief, can we re-set priorities and worry about the middle class again and quit giving more welfare and handouts to the richest?

If Exxon can give half a billion dollars to the CEO, I see no reason why taxpayers should have to fund their business since they seem to be doing pretty well without taxpayer handouts. These are not small companies who need help to get started, but very mature companies who bathe their executives with lavish compensation packages and then pass on the bill to governments around the world, rich and poor alike. I don’t know what is worse between them asking or governments actually giving over the money.

The study, which the Interior Department refused to release for more than a year, estimates that current inducements could allow drilling companies in the Gulf of Mexico to escape tens of billions of dollars in royalties that they would otherwise pay the government for oil and gas produced in areas that belong to American taxpayers.

But the study predicts that the inducements would cause only a tiny increase in production even if they were offered without some of the limitations now in place. It also suggests that the cost of that additional oil could be as much as $80 a barrel, far more than the government would have to pay if it simply bought the oil on its own.

“They are giving up a lot of money and not getting much in return,” said Robert A. Speir, a former analyst at the Energy Department who worked on the report. “If they took that money, they could buy a whole lot more oil with it on the open market.”

Oil closed Thursday at $62.66 a barrel in regular trading.

Introduction: Escalation of Warfare

To understand US-Latin American relations this year and its likely trajectory in 2007 it is obligatory to consider three dimensions: 1) the global context of US-LA relations; 2) internal dynamics of the US and 3) the real practical political-economic consequences of the 2006 elections in Latin America.

US imperial policy continues to pursue military victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, to give unconditional support to Israel’s war against the elected Palestinian Government and to threaten a direct or Israeli attack on Iran. In other words, the prolonged, costly and inconclusive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine during 2006 will continue in 2007. Further military escalation, includes increased US troops and spending for wars in the Middle East; an extra $800 million USD in addition to the annual $3 billion USD for Israeli war plans against Lebanon, Palestine and especially Iran. Those commentators who interpreted US policy via public opinion polls, electoral processes (the victory of the Democrats), advisory reports (Baker’s Iraq Study Group) and casualty rates in Iraq, and predicted a ‘gradual’ withdrawal, failed to understand the logic of the White House’s political strategy. For the Bush regime, the military failures are a result of the application of insufficient power: what is necessary, they argue, is greater numbers of soldiers and bigger military budgets (BBC 12/16/06).

Polarization

Both in the United States, Latin America and in the world at large, profound and deepening divisions are driving policy and provoking increasing conflicts. The lines of division in the United States on the fundamental questions of confrontation or negotiation in the Middle East and Latin America cut across the two major parties, and the liberal-conservative spectrum. On the one side the White House, backed by pro-war Democrats, Republicans, the Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations, right-wing veteran groups and neo-conservative intellectuals and the majority of the corporate mass media. On the other side, minorities in the major parties and mass media, the majority of public opinion, sectors of the active and retired military officers, establishment intellectual and prominent political critics of the Zionist lobby and war policies like Brzezinski, James Carter, James Baker among others.

Similar divisions appear with regard to Latin American policy. The White House, backed by the Cuban (exile) lobby, the Pentagon and a minority of right-wing ideologues and business groups favor forceful pressure and intervention against Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia and support of illegitimate President Calderon, the Santa Cruz separatists in Bolivia and other authoritarian extremists in the region. In varying degrees of opposition, stand liberal and conservative congress-members backed by agro-business exporters, tourists agencies, a majority of public opinion and sectors of the State Department headed by Undersecretary for Latin American Affairs, Shannon, who support greater emphasis on diplomacy, negotiations and a ‘two-track’ approach.

Don’t let on that fruits & vegetables improve your health or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will throw you in the slammer. The FDA threatened 29 cherry growers with confiscation and prosecution for revealing on their websites that cherries contain chemicals that reduce arthritic inflammation. The FDA’s power-grab logic is: Health claims magically transform food into drugs, requiring FDA approval. So don’t say “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” or the FDA will put you away.

Yet, once the FDA blesses a toxic substance, as in the case of Aspartame/NutraSweet/Equal, the toxin can do no wrong and may saturate our food supply unhindered. In 2005, a peer-reviewed, three-year study on 1,800 rats by Dr. Morando Soffritti of the Cancer Research Center of the European Foundation of Oncology & Environmental Sciences confirmed that aspartame is a multi-potential carcinogen, just as the FDA knew and had itself declared some 25 years ago. Yet, the product continues to be sold today in the United States and many other countries.

The FDA Once Fought Aspartame

WASHINGTON (Dec. 22) – The Selective Service System is making plans to test its draft machinery in case Congress and President Bush need it, even though the White House says it doesn’t want to bring back the draft.

The agency is planning a comprehensive test – not run since 1998 – of its military draft systems, a Selective Service official said. The test itself would not likely occur until 2009.

Scott Campbell, the service’s director for operations and chief information officer, cautioned that the “readiness exercise” does not mean the agency is gearing up to resume the draft.

“We’re kind of like a fire extinguisher. We sit on a shelf,” Campbell told The Associated Press. “Unless the president and Congress get together and say, ‘Turn the machine on’ … we’re still on the shelf.”

Ladies and gentlemen, when I first went to the Middle East — on holiday from Belfast, of all places — 1972, I went to Egypt, and anxious to try and pick up a few first words of Arabic, I had the misfortune of purchasing a very old book produced by the British army in Egypt in the 19th century. I still recall the three principal clauses which you were advised to learn if you were an Englishman: “We shall board the steamship, for there is talk of war,” “Help,” and “Where is the British embassy?” And I can tell you, I never believed I would actually watch people say these things, as I had to in Lebanon this last summer. There were all the refugees, all the foreigners, boarding the steamships because there was a real war, all wanting help and all demanding to know the way to their national embassies. “So it has come to this,” I thought to myself.

You know, in the last 30 years that I have been in the Middle East, there has been one — no, two major changes. The first is that Muslims are no longer afraid. When I first went to Lebanon, if the Israelis crossed the border, for example, many, many, many Palestinians who were in the south would be rushing to Beirut. People would flee the south, run away. Whether it was the siege of Beirut in 1982 or not, I don’t know. But now, they do not run away. Muslims do not run away when they’re attacked, when they’re under air attack.

Do we in fact really understand the extent of injustice in the Middle East? When I finished writing my new book, I realized how amazed I was that after the past 90 years of injustice, betrayal, slaughter, terror, torture, secret policemen and dictators, how restrained Muslims had been, I realized, towards the West, because I don’t think we Westerners care about Muslims. I don’t think we care about Muslim Arabs. You only have to look at the reporting of Iraq. Every time an American or British soldier is killed, we know his name, his age, whether he was married, the names of his children. But 500,000-600,000 Iraqis, how many of their names have found their way onto our television programs, our radio shows, our newspapers? They are just numbers, and we don’t even know the statistic.

Do you remember the time when George Bush was pushed and pushed: what were the figures of the Iraqi dead? At that stage, it was less, and he said, “Oh, 30,000. More or less.” Can you imagine if he had been asked how many Americans had died, and he said “3,000, more or less”? Those words, “more or less,” somehow said it all.

Now, take this one. This is the Associated Press doing its job. It uses the Freedom of Information Act to get official documents out of Guantanamo Bay and managed in a long story, but buried deep within it, not at the top, to uncover the following. It’s the official account of a court case inside Guantanamo of Feroz Ali Abbasi. He’s actually a British citizen. He has since been released and is now at home.

It’s not yet the last days in Iraq, but it might as well be. A recent poll shows that 71% of Americans oppose the way Pres. Bush is handling the war, and only 9% believe we will win. No such consensus was ever reached over Vietnam. Nixon was elected twice against opponents who would have ended the war sooner.

A back-room agreement that could have been achieved with the North Vietnamese in 1969 was postponed for six bloody years while the Nixon administration finagled a way to save face.

They were permitted this delay because the public had been long persuaded that we were fighting the evil of Communism. The Iraq war has been painfully protracted already, since Pres. Bush has petulantly refused to admit that any course is right except his own, for the same reason. Terrorists represent absolute evil. This indisputable point, it seems, covers any wrong committed by the U.S. in terms of casualties and human rights violations.

If absolute evil looks so clear to us, why does the rest of the world disagree? Are we to assume that only America knows the truth? The reason we find ourselves so isolated and hated can be directly traced back to blinded moral certainty. The right wing promulgated the myth that Reagan brought down Communism by resisting “the evil empire” (no matter that the Soviet Union collapsed from its own internal corruption and decay), so now we get “the axis of evil,” warring against enemy countries that can’t be considered part of the civilized world.

Until this year, Parsons Corp. was about as quiet as a $3 billion engineering and construction firm with 12,000 employees could be. That’s the way the firm’s chief executive for the past decade — a soft-spoken, white-haired Army veteran named James F. McNulty — liked it.

But Iraq has changed everything.

Parsons has been reproved in recent federal audits for completing just a small fraction of the 150 primary health clinics originally planned to be built in Iraq and for building a police academy so flawed that human waste rained from the ceilings. For this, it has taken bipartisan hits on Capitol Hill, where its name is now whispered by war critics in the same breath as that perennial boogeyman, Halliburton.