Killing Children & Innocents to Save "Civilians" in the Quest for Energy; Obama Says Bin Laden Dead, Fight Against Al Qaeda Will Continue Anyway

In this Edition:

- Killing Children & Innocents to Save "Civilians" in the Quest for Energy;

- Obama Says Bin Laden Dead, Fight Against Al Qaeda Will Continue Anyway
_____

Killing Children & Innocents to Save "Civilians" in the Quest for Energy

While the citizens (especially the wealthier ones) of Baker City were either off enjoying the first real spring days of the year at the Snake River or the foothills, and others were busy improving their yards after a long winter, and in some cases trying to bring their properties in line so as to keep the Council and realtor inspired Property Maintenance Ordinance gestapo from harassing them, America's European "defense' organization," NATO, was busy killing Muammar Gaddafi's family, including an attempt on Muammar Gaddafi himself. In the process, they killed 3 of Gaddafi's grand children and a son, while missing Muammar Gaddafi. From NATO's perspective, apparently even innocent children are fair game as the West violates the intent of the UN "resolution", a resolution that was intended to protect Libyan civilians, so as to prosecute their nefarious war.

The Western press, especially from those countries prosecuting the war for empire and Libyan oil, are awash with articles saying it is probably a fabrication (in the face of the bombed out home and dead bodies), while diverting attention to the trashing of their own embassies in reaction to the dastardly deed, but how would we know? The leaders of many countries believe the killings of innocent children is true, and given the previous aggressions of both the US and NATO, I do too. Haven't they done the same thing too many times before, in Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan? Do we remember that our government lied us into supporting the war on Iraq and so many before? It is another trumped up war after all, and the record is clear that neither the US nor NATO will let innocents get in the way of their aims for dominance over resource rich nations. To all of you supporters of America's and NATO's wars for energy and empire, why don't you just drop the bullshit, and say out loud, that you don't give a good god damn how many innocent children, women, and men get killed in your quest for dominance and cheap energy?

Two articles by Chris Floyd, full of the appropriate sarcasm, follow:

The Joker is Wild: Imperial Party Masks Murder Abroad

WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD
SUNDAY, 01 MAY 2011 23:58

It was one of those horrific juxtapositions that an imperial state breeds in abundance: the emperor joking at a luxurious banquet with fawning courtiers, while his agents are killing innocent children on a distant frontier.

Such was the scene this weekend, as President Barack Obama enjoyed his star turn at the White House Correspondents Dinner, that sick-making orgy of cuddly collusion between the media and political elites. In recent years, the sycophantic shindig has turned into a veritable Oscars Night for the political set. (And increasingly the Hollywood set as well; one of the major stories of the big night was that Dinner guests Sean Penn and Scarlett Johansson were seen holding hands as they left one of the many glittering "after-parties" attached with the event! I mean, OMG! No wonder it got screaming headlines at HuffPo -- that bastion of hard-hitting progressive journalism.)

Obama delivered the usual professionally scripted zingers to appreciative howls of laughter from the savvy Beltway crowd. (The same kind of laughter that the same crowd gave in the same craven way to Dubya Bush when he was the bossman.) These paeans of praise later rippled out across the progressive blogosphere, where stalwarts like Digby rushed to post up video clips of Obama's "very funny speech" at the Dinner. The progressosphere was absolutely aglow with giddy, giggly pride at the sight of Obama shooting fat dead fish in a barrel -- i.e., making fun of Donald Trump.

This was real leadership! This was the president striking back, taking it to his enemies at last, and, hey, having some fun with it too. Oh, what a tonic! What a hoot! What yocks! 2012? Bring it on!

But even as the media mavens and the glitterati and the fightin' progressive keyboarders were lapping up the imperial schtick, Libyans were digging the eviscerated bodies of three young children out of the ruins of the private home where they were killed by NATO missiles Saturday night. They were the grandchildren of Moamar Gadafy, who was the target of the attack, which also killed his youngest son. The dead children were all under the age of 12.

The missiles tore into a residential area of Tripoli, where the Gadafys were having a family gathering. NATO -- along with the nasty little upper class twit now in charge of the British government, David Cameron -- insisted that the Humanitarian Interventionists were not, repeat NOT, trying to kill Moamar Gadafy by sending three missiles into a house where they believed he was staying. No, no, no. That would be wrong; that would be totally outside the UN mandate governing the intervention. That would be attempted assassination and regime change. The good and godly lords of the West would never do anything like that.

So even though Cameron and Obama and that little French guy all wrote a column together declaring that Moamar Gadafy cannot be allowed to stay in power, they are not trying to change the regime. And even though they are sending missiles into his houses, they are not trying to kill him. And anyway, even if they were trying to kill him -- which they're not -- they would be within their rights to do so under the UN mandate which permits attacks on the regime's "command and control" sites. Or as Cameron -- a former PR flack - put it, he and Obama and the little guy can send missiles into private homes and kill small children because they are trying to prevent "a loss of civilian life by targeting Gadafy's war-making machine." And since Gadafy is at the heart of that machine, they are permitted to try to kill him. But they aren't targeting him. Is it all clear now?

It must be clear, for the murder of these children by NATO missiles has occasioned almost no protest -- indeed, hardly any mention -- across the political spectrum in the United States. The progressives are too busy yukking it up at their man's comic cool. The rightwing militarists are too busy applauding this attempt to "cut off the head of the snake." The "centrists" are too busy sleeping off their Correspondence Dinner hangovers.

And so the killing on the frontiers -- the ever-expanding line of imperial dominance -- will go on. But while the yuks and yocks of the courtiers' banquet keep ringing through the Beltway, you can be sure that the people being blown to bits on those imperial lines -- in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc. -- will not die laughing.

NOTE: After yesterday's post on the deadly incident, a reader kindly called to mind a previous piece -- originally written eight years ago -- that might have some relevance to these latest imperial juxtapositions:

See Rome

While you were dreaming
While you wrapped your mind in silks
Bronze Steel Stone
Did their work

While you breathed the fumes
Of the oracle's fissure
Deranged the senses
Settled in soft beds

Rome
Sent agents into the streets
Hard men pinched men
Bronze Steel Stone

To eliminate execute
Discredit and destroy

See Rome

While you stood in the forum
Declaimed high words
Filled temples with fragrant smoke
Scrawled millions of learned disquisitions

Rome marched
Somewhere, in your name
Fired the village
In your name
Put steel to the belly

While you were wrapped in silks
While you grubbed
While you drank degraded waters
Drank dark, brilliant wine
While you sang, while you dreamed

Rome was
Rome hammered the real

Your silks
Your songs
Are dreams

See Rome

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Annals of a Golden Age: Peace Laureate Surpasses Reagan in Killing Gadafy Kin OR http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27999.htm

WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD
SUNDAY, 01 MAY 2011 00:23

O how wonderful it is to live in such an enlightened age! Just think: not long ago, the U.S. government was seen as little more than a vast war machine -- brutal, murderous, inhumane, bent on global domination. Yet now, by some marvelous, miraculous twist of fate, that same government is being led by a Nobel Peace Prize laureate! It's as if Lyndon Johnson had been turfed out of office back in the day and replaced by Martin Luther King Jr.!

So what the modern-day MLK up to today? In what way was the Laureate in the White House advancing the vision and practice of peace? Why, he was murdering children in a "targeted assassination," of course! He was escalating an increasingly savage "regime change" operation in blatant contradiction to the UN mandate supposedly governing the latest of his escalations and surges around the world.

Yes, on Saturday -- just days after the Peace Laureate's administration announced it was sending unmanned drone bombers into the Libyan civil war, the residence of Libyan leader Moamar Gadafy was torn apart by a precision missile attack. The attack on a residential area of Tripoli missed Gadafy, but killed his youngest son, Saif al-Arab, and three of the leader's grandchildren.

With this great act of peace, Obama surpassed one of his favorite presidents, Ronald Reagan, who only managed to kill a single infant adopted daughter of Gadafy back when he was bombing Libya. The Laureate now has four Gadafy family members -- and blood members, too! -- notched on his gun belt.

This is surely an achievement in which all progressive lovers of peace can take enormous pride.

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Obama Says Bin Laden Dead, Fight Against Al Qaeda Will Continue Anyway

OK, after almost 10 years, and over a million deaths, we finally got him, says the tough guy puppet President, invoking fears of 911, but we're just going to have to continue killing around the globe anyway (because that's what we know how to do best?). Obama: "His death does not mark the end of our effort. . ."

Obama announces Osama bin Laden killed by U.S.
By Michael A. Memoli and Michael Muskal
May 1, 2011, 8:35 p.m.

Nichols & McChesney--The Money & Media Election Complex

In This Issue:

- The Money & Media Election Complex
- Comments on "IEA World Energy Outlook 2010"
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Friday, November 12, 2010
The Nation

The Money & Media Election Complex
by John Nichols & Robert McChesney

Like the wizard telling the people of Oz to "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain," Karl Rove used media appearances at the close of the 2010 midterm campaign to dismiss President Obama's complaints that Republican consultants, led by the former White House political czar, were distorting Senate and House races across the country with a flood of money-hundreds of millions of dollars-from multinational corporations and billionaire conservatives into Senate and House races. "Obama looks weirdly disconnected-and slightly obsessive-when he talks so much about the Chamber of Commerce, Ed Gillespie and me," Rove mused. "The president has already wasted one-quarter of the campaign's final four weeks on this sideshow."

The "sideshow" from which Rove sought to distract attention was, in fact, the most important story of the most expensive midterm election in American history: the radical transformation of our politics by a money-and-media election complex that is now more definitional than any candidate or party-and that poses every bit as much of a threat to democracy as the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower warned us a half-century ago. This is not the next chapter in the old money-and-politics debate. This is the redefinition of politics by a pair of new and equally important factors-the freeing of corporations to spend any amount on electioneering and the collapse of substantive print and broadcast reporting on campaigns. In combination they have created a "new normal," in which consultants dealing in dollar amounts unprecedented in American history use "independent" expenditures to tip the balance of elections in favor of their clients. Unchecked by even rudimentary campaign finance regulation, unchallenged by a journalism sufficient to identify and expose abuses of the electoral process and abetted by commercial broadcasters that this year pocketed $3 billion in political ad revenues, the money-and-media election complex was a nearly unbeatable force in 2010.

Of fifty-three competitive House districts where Rove and his compatriots backed Republicans with "independent" expenditures that exceeded those made on behalf of Democrats-often by more than $1 million per district, according to Public Citizen-the Republicans won fifty-one. Roughly three-quarters of all GOP House gains came in districts where independent expenditures by groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Rove's American Crossroads gave Republican candidates, some of them virtual unknowns until the outside money flowed in, the advantage. The money is powerful, of course, but that power is supercharged because of the decay, and in many cases disappearance, of independent and skeptical journalism at the state and regional levels, where elections are decided. Campaign narratives used to be created by reporters who, imperfectly but seriously, pulled together the multiple threads of an election season to give voters perspective. Now that narrative is driven by commercials-millions of them, most negative. The narrative for the most part still comes from broadcast and cable TV stations, as it has for some time, but it is now produced and paid for by economic elites that seek to define not just the results of an election but the scope and character of government itself. To neglect the money-and-media election complex or, worse yet, to imagine that progressive forces can compete within it will make the 2012 election season look like 2010 on steroids. Determined and dramatic responses are the only options if we hope to maintain anything more than the remnants of a functioning democracy.

The immediate cause of the crisis was the Supreme Court's January 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which wiped away a century of campaign finance regulations designed to prevent corporations and business alliances from using their immense resources to buy the results that best serve their interests. There was bipartisan shock at the ruling, with protest across the spectrum. National Voting Rights Institute founder John Bonifaz declared that the freeing of corporations to tap general treasury funds would allow them to spend so freely that they could "effectively own our democracy."

The critique was right, but even serious analysts tended to underestimate the speed with which corporate interests and wealthy conservatives would take advantage of the severe damage done to campaign finance laws. The corporate intervention was unapologetic. "The big three stepping into the batter's box are the financial services industry, the energy industry and the health insurance industry," chirped veteran GOP operative Scott Reed, whose Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity spent millions, perhaps tens of millions, this fall on thousands of commercials attacking Democratic lawmakers in battleground states all over the country. Reed's operation was identified by the Media Matters Action Network as a "small fry" player among the more than sixty nonparty groups that by late October had paid for nearly 150,000 commercials and an untold number of direct-mail attacks in a frenzy of spending that would make the 2010 cycle (price tag: $4 billion and counting) more expensive than either the 2006 midterms or the 2004 presidential race.

To be sure, Democrats tried to play the game and raise corporate money too, but the balance was off from the start; by one measure, that of the Center for Media and Democracy, "spending by outside interest groups [was] up at least 500 percent since the last midterm election, with pro-Republican groups outspending those favoring Democrats by seven-to-one."

* * *

To some extent, this is a story as old as the nation itself. Founding father John Jay thought "those who own the country ought to govern it." The battle to establish a credible system of "one person, one vote" instead of "one dollar, one vote" has been a running theme in American history. The stakes have always been the same: the less democratic our elections, the more corrupt our governance. But the current moment sees the country accelerating toward the edge of a cliff. "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both," observed Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. America is being put to the Brandeis test: democracy or plutocracy. The money-and-media election complex is creating a radically different electoral landscape than anything Americans have known since the Gilded Age. That landscape is characterized, pundits tell us, by an "enthusiasm gap." No kidding. Americans are not stupid. They knew their relatively paltry contributions, and even their votes, were unlikely to stop a $4 billion onslaught. To those bankrolling the system, voter cynicism and apathy are welcome. The more that the 2008 surge of youth participation in electoral politics dissipates, the better for them. Their interests are best served by narrowing the range of debate and participation, since that makes it easier to buy the government. As much as commentators like Jon Meacham might want to believe that "we are now living with a political class which has a financial and cultural interest in conflict rather than in governing," the hard truth is that we have a corporate class that funds electoral conflict for the purpose of forging a political class that will govern in its interest.

The emerging money-and-media election complex is perfectly designed to make participants conform or suffer the consequences. It should come as no surprise that some of the most troubling results of 2010 involved the defeats of independent players of both parties who had battled hardest for clean politics and ethical government-Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, the leading progressive Democratic reformer, was defeated, as was Representative Mike Castle, a moderate Republican beaten in Delaware's GOP Senate primary by Tea Party heroine Christine O'Donnell. Nor should it get better in 2012. "It's a bigger prize in 2012, and that's changing the White House," says Robert Duncan, chair of American Crossroads. "We've planted the flag for permanence, and we believe we will play a major role for 2012."

* * *

But it's not just corporations and consultants who are setting the new agenda. The most important yet least-recognized piece of the money-and-media election complex is the commercial broadcasting industry, which just had its best money-making election season ever. Political advertising has become an enormous cash cow for it-roughly two-thirds of the campaign spending this year flowed into the coffers of TV stations; the final figure is likely to be well above $2 billion. Whereas in the 1990s the average commercial TV station received about 3 percent of its revenues from campaign ads, this year campaign money could account for as much as 20 percent. And station owners are not missing a beat; thirty-second spots that went for $2,000 in 2008 were jacked up to $5,000 this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. Much of this money will go to stations owned by a handful of Fortune 500 firms. No wonder station owners oppose campaign finance reform; their lobby role in Washington is similar to the NRA's in battling bans on assault weapons.

Yet commercial broadcasters receive monopoly licenses for their scarce channels at no charge from the government under the condition that they serve the public interest. By any account, the most important role of our media is to make the electoral system serve the voters, who, as surveys continue to demonstrate, rely on local TV as their main source for news. However, local TV covers far less than it did two or three decades ago; according to the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, a thirty-minute newscast at election time has more political advertising than campaign news. Even when politics does get covered, the focus, increasingly, is on "analyzing" ads. And the cumulative effect of endless advertising overwhelms what little remains of independent on-air coverage. What incentive do commercial stations have to cover politics when they can force candidates and players to pay for it? Nice work if you can get it.

This contradiction is magnified by the aforementioned decline of political journalism across all media. If the United States had a vibrant and credible news media, the problem of the money-and-media election complex would be less pressing, as citizens could use news coverage and dismiss much of the brazen deception of ads. Instead, our news media, in decline for decades, is in free fall [see Nichols and McChesney, "The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers," April 6, 2009]. The shuttering of dozens of papers and the wholesale layoff of tens of thousands of journalists and support staffers, the shuttering of Washington and statehouse bureaus and the shift of radio and cable TV from traditional campaign coverage to one-sided talk formats that often reinforce rather than sort through the spin have allowed money to speak more loudly than ever before. New-media initiatives are encouraging, but they have not begun to fill the void, in large part because few have developed business models that can pay for serious independent journalism.

The changes taking place in how campaigns are paid for and covered provides the most meaningful explanation for otherwise incomprehensible shifts in our politics. We know and respect the multitude of theories being advanced for why 2010 went so horribly awry for Democrats and particularly for progressives, but we would argue that the key factor is the emergence of the money-and-media election complex. Recognizing how this system works is necessary if we are to recognize the absurdity of the suggestion-advanced by former Clinton administration aide and veteran Democratic fundraiser Harold Ickes, among others in the consultocracy-that Democrats can somehow buy their way back into the game by getting progressive donors to give as generously as Rove's billionaires and the wealthiest multinationals. Only an insider with no sense of history could willingly embrace this system. And if Democrats somehow "succeed" in the money-and-media election complex, it will be at the price of the party's soul and of any prospect that progressive ideas will get a hearing.

Democrats in anything more than name only cannot win the money race. As Michael Vachon, an adviser to George Soros, correctly notes with regard to the consultants who organize "independent" expenditures on behalf of Republicans (and perhaps of corporate-friendly Democrats), "Their resources will always be too great because the funds come from those who are acting in their economic self-interest." Fundamental reform is going to be necessary. And it will not be easy, as we are talking about changing our entire political process in a way that frightens economic elites. Opposition from entrenched, procorporate Republicans will be intense, as evidence suggests that their corrupt and unpopular policies can prevail at the polls only with the sort of depressed and selective turnout and lack of critical scrutiny that the money-and-media system encourages. How ironic that, just as demographic trends are moving in a decidedly progressive direction-as minorities begin to form majorities in our states, and as young people move increasingly to the left on social and economic issues-the electoral system is becoming a bastion of reaction.

Rove, Reed and their allies-including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner-would have us believe that more spending is good and that ads can be educational. This is an extension of the "money is speech" argument that has underpinned a series of Supreme Court rulings, beginning with Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and culminating in Citizens United, that initially undermined but have by now made a mockery of campaign finance reform. It's an absurd construct. But it is being reinforced by consultants-veteran Democrats as well as Republicans-and TV executives who are cogs in a permanent campaign apparatus.

The counsel of the self-interested "players" is always the same: raise money, more money and more money still-and don't do or say anything that makes it harder to raise money. This thinking has bled into what is left of our journalism, such that political reporters today spend more time covering the money that candidates, parties and interest groups raise and spend than examining their records and intentions. Whereas journalists once wrote stories about issues, and candidates cut commercials in response to them, now some journalists go through entire campaigns doing little more than fact-checking commercials. On many days, reviews of ads are all that appear in print and broadcast reports. And what do new-media outlets bring to the table? An opportunity to watch ads on YouTube!

As ads become the primary source of political information, we create a politics based on lies or, at best, decontextualized quarter-truths. Campaign ads are unregulated for truthfulness, unlike commercial advertising. Three decades ago Ogilvy and Mather executive Robert Spero determined that if political ads had to meet the same Federal Trade Commission criteria as commercial ads, all of them would be rejected as fraudulent. The regulation of commercial ads may be more lax today, but we doubt that any study of political ads in 2010 would regard them more favorably than Spero did.

The journalists who want to cut through the lies are having a harder time doing so. One of the truly unsettling developments of this election season was the decision by prominent candidates either to avoid the press, as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle did, or to refuse opportunities to debate. Once upon a time challengers hungered to debate incumbents; in 2010 incumbents like Florida Representative Alan Grayson found themselves chasing after well-funded challengers. Feingold offered to debate his millionaire opponent in forums across the state, but Republican Ron Johnson, who had no record in public life and who even avoided interviews with newspaper editorial boards, refused. Instead, Johnson let his advertisements and those paid for by the Chamber of Commerce, American Action Network and sundry organizations that flooded the state with anti-Feingold ads do his talking. Even when Johnson did debate in a handful of forums available for broadcast by the state's TV stations, many stations avoided airing them in prime time. Wisconsin lawyer Ed Garvey, a former Democratic nominee for governor, tried to tune in to a much-anticipated Feingold-Johnson debate, only to find it was not being aired. He called the station and was told he could track it down on a website. "As a citizen, I was left with no option but the ads. I got nothing of substance from television stations," griped Garvey. "I thought they were supposed to operate in the public interest."

That should be the starting point of any response to the money-and-media election complex. We have to stop thinking about the crisis of our politics merely in terms of reforming the campaign finance system (though of course it's important to fight for reforms). It's a media ownership and responsibility issue as well. It goes to the heart of why freedom of the press is enshrined in our Constitution. And regulatory agencies that are empowered to protect the public interest should be the first to intervene. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission have a duty to figure out exactly how much was spent, by whom and to what end. That examination should start with dollar amounts, but it shouldn't stop there. It should explore the issue of whether TV stations that made a fortune running campaign ads met even the most basic public-interest requirements of companies that obtain broadcast licenses. How much campaign journalism have these stations been doing, compared with a generation ago? How many debates are they airing in prime time? FCC member Michael Copps understands the crisis and intends to press ahead this fall with demands for stronger public-interest requirements for broadcasters. Copps is no fool; he knows this is the hardest of all fights. That's why he will need support from Congress as well as citizens.

House and Senate committees should hold hearings about the money-and-media election complex. How about calling Representative Pete DeFazio to testify? The Oregon maverick was one of many Democratic incumbents facing marginal challengers who suddenly found himself battered by attack ads paid for by a shadowy group no one had heard of. DeFazio pushed back, taking a camera crew to the Capitol Hill condo from which the group operated and exposing the source as a single New York-based hedge fund gazillionaire who was apparently angered by the Congressman's ardent advocacy for holding Wall Street speculators to account. That's the stuff of a good hearing. But don't stop with DeFazio; call the hedge fund manager who went after him. Then call Karl Rove. The 111th Congress has been lame when it comes to oversight; it should finish with a bang. And state legislative committees around the country should do the same.

Gathering the data and grilling the guilty players will make the case for fundamental reform, which must come at multiple levels. The FCC could require stations to grant equal advertising time to any candidate who is attacked in an ad paid for by corporations, with the free response ad to immediately follow the hit job. The FCC should consider requiring free TV ads for every candidate on the ballot if any candidate buys his or her own spots. This would allow wealthy candidates access but would prevent them from shouting everyone else down. Let the stations jack up rates to cover all the time, if they want. We suspect the appeal of TV ads will decline if the result is simply to open an equal debate rather than allow one side to dominate. And of course there is the long-overdue matter of providing free airtime to candidates and requiring debates to be broadcast.

Radical ideas? Hardly. Much of what we're talking about was outlined in the original version of the McCain-Feingold bill of the 1990s and in other proposals advanced over the years. It's time to renew them. At the same time, we need a public policy commitment to the rejuvenation of news media. A supercharged public and community broadcast system would be a good start. It's no accident that the corporate right is taking dead aim at public broadcasting, as it remains the one institutional force not under its direct control.

* * *

Ultimately, however, Americans have to get serious about addressing the Citizens United ruling. We have no problem with legislative remedies, especially if they embody proposals like those advanced by the Sunlight Foundation to establish online transparency at every level of influence, from independent expenditures to lobbying to bundled campaign contributions. We agree with Lisa Gilbert of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, who says Representative Grayson has proposed "pieces of good policy" with his Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act, which would impose a 500 percent excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees and on corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns; his Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act, which would require public companies to report what they spend to influence opinion on any matter other than the promotion of their goods and services; and his End Political Kickbacks Act, which would restrict contributions by government contractors. And we have no doubt that Grayson's advocacy for these reforms helps explain why "independent" groups spent more than $1.2 million on attack ads targeting him.

However, we don't see any way to avoid the requirement of a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling. Representative Donna Edwards has proposed a sound one, backed by the Free Speech for People campaign. Another approach, proposed by Move to Amend, would begin the process at the state level, where grassroots activists may have more of an opening to demand that legislatures call for an amendment. It's not necessary to choose a specific strategy at this point, but we do have to recognize that the money-and-media election complex defined the 2010 election, and that its reach is extending to 2012. Taking it on will require boldness, creativity and determination. We will be told it is impossible to beat, but we're with Lisa Graves, the former Justice Department lawyer who as executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy has become a leader in the fight for a constitutional amendment. She says, "If we don't seize it as an opportunity because it's so discouraging, they win."

Even if only out of self-interest, this is what Obama and his Democratic allies should have been talking about during the 2010 campaign and what they should be shouting about now-not with vague rumblings about contributions from foreign corporations but with shout-it-from-the-rooftops populist rage at a threat to democracy every bit as serious as the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower identified. His charge to Americans with regard to the machinery of military dominance-"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes"-translates with chilling precision to the new media and money machinery of political dominance.

Scholars of American history have acknowledged for a long time that the United States is far from a true democracy, or even an especially effective representative democracy. Most political decisions are made with precious little input by average citizens. What the government does with wealthy individuals and powerful corporate interests is largely removed from popular control. This is part of the reason voter turnout has for so long been among the lowest in the world. But two things give us confidence in our system. First, we have core civil liberties, especially the right to freedom of speech. And second, we have elections, as flawed as they may be, and that gives the citizenry the periodic capacity to replace whoever is in power with someone else. It is our ultimate and last remaining check.

The money-and-media election complex has transformed longstanding problems into an existential crisis: we are about to lose the democratic promise of elections. It is hard to see how our cherished freedoms can then survive, except to the extent that they are trivial and unthreatening to those in power. What hangs in the balance is democracy itself, along with the promise of the American experiment.

© 2010 The Nation
John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney were the founders, with Josh Silver, of Free Press, which has launched a campaign to save the news. Their latest book is The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again.

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. Nichols is co-author with McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols' latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

Robert McChesney is research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. He is the author many books including Rich Media, Poor Democracy, The Political Economy of the Media, and Problem with the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21st Century.
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From Jay Hanson--[America2Point0] FW: [roeoz] IEA World Energy Outlook 2010




On 11/11/10 8:34 PM, Alexander Carpenter wrote:

I noticed too. My interpretation is that they are somewhat responsibly making the real situation readily apparent to astute observers/readers, while not explicitly announcing doom. There's probably a schism within the IEA, and probably some genuine fear of contraverting their Lords and Masters web of illusion.

Most people, habituated to a pathological combination of denial and hope, will just gloss pver the implications. The rest of us, having been painfully and with great discipline de-conditioned from that perceptual paralysis, see the hole in space. Now what we have left is not knowing what to actually do about this hard-won insight.

Just subtract that light-blue wedge, and you've got the peak of a classic Hubbert curve.

At 3:36 PM -1000 11/11/10, Jay Hanson wrote:


DID anyone else notice how the IEA have BAU continuing by inserting a ginormous wedge of "fields yet to be found or developed" into the chart?

That wedge is equivalent [almost] to half of all the conventional oil left! I wonder if they're talking about the same planet as us...

Mike

I would have more confidence in optimism if the optimists lived wisely!
A pessimist is a well informed optimist!
http://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/
http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse

Afghanistan & Bolivia--two different situations, two different paths...

In This Issue:

- Obama's Decision: What About Afghanistan?

- Bolivia Re-invents Democratic Socialism

- Too Fearful to Publicise Peak Oil Reality

- Roots of Terrorism
_____________________

Obama's Decision: What About Afghanistan?
Monday 16 November 2009
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Columnist
http://www.truthout.org/1116094

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier. - Rudyard Kipling

All the presidents in my lifetime share one common characteristic: each one aged rapidly, visibly and dramatically over the course of their administrations. Nixon appeared to be melting by the time he boarded that last helicopter. Ford's stay was brief, but it left its stamp on his face. Carter quickly came to resemble the peanuts he was associated with. Reagan already looked like the eagle from "The Muppet Show" when he took office, but was positively wizened when he left. Bush Sr. became an old man before our very eyes, and Clinton ballooned at first before hardening, wrinkling and whitening. Even George W. Bush, who left a lot of the heavy lifting to the gremlins who staffed his administration, looked like a hickory stick before mercifully departing for the motivational-speaker circuit.

The trend is no different for President Obama. Seeing how they gray has overtaken his hair in less than a year has been like watching time-lapse photography of autumn leaves changing color. The lines have deepened around his eyes and mouth, and the furrows in his brow have deepened and spread. He is still a young and vital man, especially compared to the opponent he vanquished to become president, but there is no doubt that, as usual, the job is taking its toll.

There's no mystery behind the phenomenon, of course. It's the decisions a president has to make, the risk-versus-reward calculations, the body count considerations, the political geometry involved, and all too often, the Hobson's Choices where any decision is going to be wrong and dangerous and potentially calamitous. Every president gets their fair share, and Obama has already endured two full terms worth in ten months, thanks in no small part to the aged men who came before him. The Middle East, national security, civil liberties, international relations, economic catastrophe, environmental peril: These are but a few of the lines on Obama's daily crisis sheet.

The decision looming largest over president Obama at present does not concern health care reform or the economy. He has a call to make soon regarding our present and future role in Afghanistan. What to do about an eight-year war that has accomplished little? This is the largest, and worst, Hobson's Choice Obama has faced, for there are no bloodless and peril-free decisions in this one, no matter how many generals and advisers and pundits pitch in with their opinions.

It is going to be an anguished, agonizing and costly choice no matter what he decides. A family in Massachusetts mourning their son, who died in Afghanistan trying to save another soldier is the distilled essence of this truth. The mother of this fallen soldier, quoted by a local Boston news station, said, "It's time we do something. This has gone on too long. They either need to come home or we need to end it."

There it is. Come home or end it, period. Those are the choices, and either will come with a cost.

Some very pressing points in recent history, along with a number of present day concerns, illuminate the dangers involved in coming home. Beginning in 1978, the US invested itself into making Afghanistan into the USSR's own version of Vietnam by arming, funding and training Afghan "freedom fighters" to attack the Afghan government, which, at the time, was a puppet of the Soviet government. The idea was to trick the Soviets into invading Afghanistan in order to protect their satellite regime there, and it worked when the Soviets invaded in 1979.

Zbignew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser and author of the plan, said in a 1998 interview, "That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap. The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam war."

He has since come to regret the sentiment, as well as the operation, for the ones he helped to arm and train became the Taliban, and became al-Qaeda. After the Soviets withdrew in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989, the US did the same, having achieved our geo-strategic goal of undermining the USSR. Afghanistan collapsed into a state of civil war until 1996, after which the Taliban emerged as the dominant force, and the rest is, unfortunately, history. Our involvement and subsequent withdrawal precipitated the creation of the very opponent we face there today, and if we withdraw before having ended what we caused, Afghanistan could easily become a full-fledged narco-state fueled by heroin profits and hatred for the West.

This lesson from the past stands in combination with a serious concern for the present: Pakistan. Afghanistan's closest neighbor is in a state of turmoil, with mass murders and suicide bombings taking place on a daily basis. The government is barely hanging on to power, which puts the state of command and control over their nuclear weapons very much in play. If the US and NATO withdraw, and the chaos in Afghanistan finally overwhelms and topples the regime in Pakistan, we will be faced with the potential of loose nukes in a region that shares borders with nuclear-armed India and China, and the doomsday scenarios that spin off from this are too numerous and ghastly to contemplate.

In saying "end it," that mourning, Massachusetts mother meant "win it." The decision to stay and try to fight the war to some reasonable or meaningful conclusion is, however, fraught with peril. The region is already exploding with violence, which has been bleeding across the border into an unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan for some time. The Taliban has been making strong inroads in both countries, winning over large swaths of the populace, who have grown weary and furious with the occupying NATO/US forces that have been there for most of a decade now. This has been the bloodiest year for coalition troops in Afghanistan - 288 American soldiers killed out of 468 NATO soldiers killed, with more than 1,800 Americans wounded - a trend that will only continue and increase with the introduction of thousands of more troops.

Finally, there is little actual evidence to suggest an increase in troop presence will make any appreciable difference. We have been there for eight years, and matters have remained the same only in the areas where they have not gotten appreciably worse. Afghanistan is, and has always been, the eater of armies. No amount of technology or troop superiority can overcome the natural advantages held by those who know the ground, and who already know how to defeat a superpower, something many of those fighting us there have already done in their lifetime. We could stay there for another eight years and find ourselves in exactly the same position, or even worse off than before.

These are but a few of the issues the Obama administration must wrestle with in coming to a decision on Afghanistan. It is no wonder the president is aging before our eyes.
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Cost of War in Iraq
$700,690,174,401

Cost of War in Afghanistan
$231,718,938,280

Number Of International Occupation Force Troops Slaughtered In Afghanistan : 1,519
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Bolivia Re-invents Democratic Socialism

[Democratic Socialism is a political form that is perhaps most developed in Europe, but the systems vary in the degree of social benefit. This is the form now chosen by the developing country of Bolivia. It will not come without environmental costs, a problematic increase in population, and much oppositional pressure from the powers that be in the United States... Chris]

By Judy Rebick
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23986.htm

November 16, 2009 "Rabble" -- On December 6, Bolivia will hold a general election where Evo Morales, the first Indigenous President in South America will no doubt be re-elected. His party, the MAS, has recently released an election programme that Susan Harvie has kindly summarized and translated. Bolivia is reinventing democractic socialism. They are in the process of creating a plurinational state with equal rights for all nations and people, redistributing land, providing free health and education for everyone, creating what they call a pluri-economy that includes public, private, co-operative and communitarian. In four years of power they have eliminated illiteracy, reduced extreme poverty by 6%, insituted a senior's pension for the first time, nationalized hydrocarbons and achieved a 6.5% economic growth. They are showing that a government that acts in the interests of the majority really can succeed and that an alternative is truly possible. The full list of achievements and election platform for the next four years is below:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23986.htm
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Too Fearful to Publicise Peak Oil Reality

The economic establishment accepts the world soon won't be able to meet energy demands, but wants to keep quiet about it

[The "Peak Oil" warning has been heralded for many years now, and thanks to the Guardian of London (and Information Clearing House) for publishing a piece that asks serious questions about why mainstream media and government have avoided the issue.] - Chris

By Madeleine Bunting
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23982.htm

November 16, 2009 "The Guardian" --- It is very hard for the average person in the street to come to a sensible conclusion on peak oil. It's a subject that prompts a passionate polarisation of views. The peak oilists sometimes sound like those extraordinary Christians with sandwich boards proclaiming that the end of the world is nigh. In contrast, the the international economic establishment – including the International Energy Agency (IEA) – has one very clear purpose in mind at all times: don't panic. Their mission seems to be focused on keeping jittery markets calm.
Faced with these options the majority of people shrug their shoulders in confusion and ignore the trickle of whistleblowers, industry insiders and careful analysts who have been warning of the imminent decline in oil for over a decade now.

Remember the Queen's question – that uncannily accurate and strikingly obvious question she put to economists at the London School of Economics a year ago after the financial crisis: did no one see it coming? Apply that question to peak oil and the answer is that many people did see it coming but they were marginalised, bullied into silence and the evidence was buried in the small print.

Take the 2008 edition of World Energy Outlook, the annual report on which the entire energy industry and governments depend. It included the table also published by the Guardian today, and the version I saw had shorter intervals on the horizontal axis. What it made blindingly clear was that peak oil was somewhere in 2008/9 and that production from currently producing fields was about to drop off a cliff. Fields yet to be developed and yet to be found enabled a plateau of production and it was only "non-conventional oil" which enabled a small rise. Think tar sands of Canada, think some of the most climate polluting oil extraction methods available. Think catastrophe.

What made this little graph so devastating was that it estimated energy resources by 2030 that were woefully inadequate for the energy-hungry economies of India and China. Business as usual in oil production threatens massive conflict over sharing it.

Now, this all seemed pretty gigantic news to me but guess where the World Energy Outlook chose to put this graph? Was it in the front, was it prominently discussed in the foreword? Did it cause headlines around the world. No, no, no. It was buried deep into the report and no reference was made to it in the press conference a year ago.

The fear is that panicky markets can cause enormous damage – panic-buying that prompts fights over resources, which in turn could lead to power cuts in some places and other such mayhem. But so far in facing this huge challenge, our political/economic system seems unable to cope with reality. We are forced to carry on living in an illusion that we have so much time to adapt to post-oil that we don't even need to be talking or thinking much about what a world without plentiful oil would look like. Reality has become too dangerous.

So in reply to the Queen's question of a few years hence, we did see it coming but we chose to ignore it.
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Shining a Light on the Roots of Terrorism
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23979.htm
or
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/111509a.html
By Ray McGovern
Retired CIA Officer, Political Activist See: http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/ray_mcgovern.php

. . . .
Creative Editing
[FCM = Fawning Corporate Media]

If you’ve read down this far, you will not be surprised that the FCM ignored the Defense Science Board findings for two months. On Nov. 24, 2004, the New York Times, erstwhile "newspaper of record," finally published a story on the report – but only after some highly instructive surgery.

Thom Shanker of the Times quoted the paragraph beginning with “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom’” (see above), but he or his editors deliberately cut out the following sentence about what Muslims do object to, i.e., “what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights” and support for tyrannical regimes.

The Times did include the sentence that immediately followed the omitted one. In other words, it was not simply a matter of shortening the paragraph. Rather, the offending middle sentence fell victim to the "delete" key.

Similarly creative editing showed through the Times’ reporting in late October 2004 on a videotaped speech by Osama bin Laden. Almost six paragraphs of the story made it onto page one, but the Times saw to it that the key point bin Laden made at the beginning of his speech was relegated to paragraphs 23 to 25 at the very bottom of page nine.

Buried there was bin Laden’s assertion that the idea for 9/11 first germinated after “we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American-Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon.”

There is other evidence regarding the Israeli-Palestinian motive behind 9/11.

Though Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not allowed to talk to the attorneys in the 2006 trial of 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, the judge did allow into the official record a statement by Mohammed on the "Purpose of the 9/11 Attacks," which was drawn from "numerous written summaries of Sheikh Mohammed’s oral statements in response to extensive questioning."

The following statement from Sheikh Mohammed appears on page 11 of Defense Trial Exhibit 941 from United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Criminal No. 01-455-A:

"Sheikh Mohammed said that the purpose of the attack on the Twin Towers was to ‘wake the American people up.’ Sheikh Mohammed said that if the target would have been strictly military or government, the American people would not focus on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people and America’s self-serving foreign policy that corrupts Arab governments and leads to further exploitation of the Arab/Muslim peoples." . . . .
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