Energy

Does Anybody Else Think Getting America Shopping Again is Crazy Talk?

dlindorff — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:48:05 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

I was listening to Robert Reich, once the left end of the spectrum
in the Clinton cabinet, talking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer a few days ago,
and Reich, who has in the past sometimes made sense, was talking about
how Americans’ incomes had fallen over the last eight years of the
Bush/Cheney administration and that it was necessary to get their
incomes back on an upward trend, so that they could “start shopping
again.”

Now I understand Reich was trying to make the case that the bailout
so far has been focused on the banks and the insurance industry, and
that none of this will help unless ordinary people start getting some
relief, but still, there’s something completely twisted and out of
whack when the best we can come up with is that we need to get
Americans back into the malls.

In fact, that is a good part of what’s wrong with the US economy: Fully 75 percent of GDP in America is consumer spending.

The problem facing America, and to a great extent the broader world economy, is that we’ve pretty much met basic human needs long ago, and now it’s about creating human wants and then convincing people that they need to buy more stuff and more services.

This is wrong in so many ways and on so many levels.

First of all, we don’t need all this stuff. Is my life any better
if I go from a 18-inch TV screen to a 60-inch TV screen? Is it, for
that matter, any better if I go from an old cathode-ray tube to a flat
screen digital display, or from no TV to a TV?

Is my life any better if I buy a high-performance $50,000 BMW than
if I drive a $20,000 Honda Civic, or even a $5000 used Toyota Corolla
with extended warranty?

Is my life any better if I live with my wife and my teenage son in
a 4000-square-foot house than if I live in a 1800-square-foot or a
1200-square-foot house?

The answer is no. The benefits, if there are any at all, are minuscule, and usually short-lived.

The costs of these trying to satisfy these wants, however, are
enormous. When I buy the large flat screen TV, I am contributing to the
production of gases, used in the flat screen, that are hundreds of
times more potent greenhouse factors than carbon dioxide, and of
course, from a balance-of-trade perspective, I’m sending dollars
overseas to wherever the product is made (none are made in America). If
I buy the $50,000 BMW, I contribute to massive waste of resources in
building the vehicle and having it shipped from Germany, as well as
driving it, not to mention to balance-of-trade issue again. If I buy
the Honda, it may at least be made in America, but again there is all
the energy waste and pollution that goes into its construction. The
used car, on the other hand, gets good mileage and already exists. As
for the house, no family, except perhaps one that eschews family
planning and has a baby every year and a half, needs a 4000-square-foot
house, and any family with 12 kids that might occupy such a palace
would never be able to afford one.

So all this buying doesn’t make us happier. In fact, by saddling us
with massive amounts of debt, it simply enslaves us to jobs that polls
tell us most people are simply desperate to get away from. Why,
otherwise, do polls show that so many people want to retire early in an
era when life expectancies are extending, and when people are staying
healthy much longer into old age? Why, otherwise, do polls consistently
show that over 60 percent of Americans say they would like to have a
labor union represent them at work if they could get one? The reality
is that most jobs, where we spend the majority of our waking hours five
or six days a week, simply suck, and in many ways they suck because
people are so desperate to hang on to them so they can pay their bills
that they don’t dare speak up or, god forbid, sign a union card.

Secondly, these artificial wants which so dominate our daily lives
and that are instilled in us via slick marketing campaigns, are a
disaster for the environment and for the chances of human survival. The
earth is a finite resource, while humanity, growing at a prodigious
rate, is gobbling up those resources—water, oil, trees, the oceans, and
the very atmosphere itself--much faster than even the renewable
resources can replace themselves. This situation cannot go on, and yet
we’re told that the goal is to get us back on that rapacious and
self-destructive path as quickly as possible. Economic growth, we are
always told, is an unambiguous good and is the primary goal of economic
policy, though clearly it cannot go on.

Finally, thinking of ourselves as consumers, instead of as citizens
and as people, is destructive of our social nature. Instead of learning
to build community, and to relate to one another as neighbors and
fellow citizens and human beings, as mere “consumers,” we compete to
have more or better stuff, compete to get the best deals on the things
we buy, and compete to get jobs that will help us buy those things. The
one thing we do not do in a consumer-based model of society is
cooperate.

This is not condition we need to go back to.

Nor can we.

The consumer society as we have known it since the 1950s is dead,
at least here in America. We have bought so much that now the country
is a gigantic economic basket case. Our debts as individuals and
especially as a nation (of which we all own a piece), are
incomprehensibly great. According to a new report by Bloomberg, just
the debts that the government has promised to back up in the banking
and insurance industry in the current bailout have reached $7.5
trillion, which is half the nation’s annual gross domestic product for
the past year! The national public debt now totals $59.1 trillion,
which represents over half a million dollars for every man, woman and
child in America. External debt—the amount of money owed by the US to
foreign nations—was, before the bailout, $13.7 billion, or about the
total of a year’s economic activity in the US. Let’s be honest here:
There’s no way all, or even a significant portion, of this can ever be
repaid.

So what should we do? Well, for starters we need to start to
rethink what constitutes a good society. It’s clearly not a bunch of
crazed consumers, all struggling to pay their monthly bills, because
we’ve seen where that has gotten us. Far better would be a society that
valued education, the arts, scientific and philosophical inquiry, and
natural beauty. Instead of encouraging kids to go to business school or
law school, we should be encouraging them to go into the sciences, into
medicine, into the arts. Bailout funds should not be going to Citicorp
or AIG. They should be going to the hellholes that are called schools
in our decayed inner cities. They should be going into environmental
clean up projects and tree planting projects across the land. They
should be going into solar and wind energy programs, and geothermal
heating installation subsidies for every home in America.

Meanwhile, Americans should be waking up and recognizing how
consumerism has reduced us all to little more than serfs of the
corporations that sell us the things they convince us we need. Then we
should all sign up for unions, and start demanding that the Bill of
Rights be extended to the workplace. Why on earth should a boss be able
to fire someone for expressing an opinion that is constitutionally
protected outside the building? Why should a boss be able to tell me to
either do a dangerous job or quit? Why, for that matter, should the
boss be insulated from personal liability if I am injured at work
because of decisions that were made by management about working
conditions? These may seem to be remote issues from the matter of a
consumer-based economy, but they are not. It is because we are all
consumer-serfs that we have surrendered so much to our corporate
masters.

The very idea that someone as supposedly liberal as Robert Reich
could speak in terms of getting the consumer debt treadmill back up and
running as a goal shows how impoverished our politics has become.

A scant few months ago, people were finally waking up to the fact
that human life on this planet, indeed all life on this planet, is in
grave danger because of the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere that is
being caused by human development and economic activity. Even then,
with clear evidence that the North Polar ice cap is vanishing, that the
oceans are acidifying and that species are dying off at an alarming
rate, there were those who grumbled at the cost when candidate Barack
Obama spoke of spending $15 billion over the next few years to combat
some of that warming by investing in clean energy program research and
development. Now, however, no one is talking about that sorely needed
investment, and meanwhile nobody bats an eye as the government, Obama
included, talks about blowing as much as a trillion dollars to get the
economy moving again!

There’s plenty of money to get people out to the mall, but no money
to save the earth, no money to save our children from ignorance, no
money for healthcare reform, no money for the arts.

And of course there’s war—two really. Since the US has ceased to be
a productive power in the world, and has become the world’s biggest
debtor nation, its sole claim to importance and power is now military,
and so there is not a word said, even as the country sinks into a
depression, of cutting the bloated and out-of-control $1-trillion
annual military and intelligence budget, perhaps 90 percent of which
serves no function but to frighten and oppress and kill mostly poor,
third world people around the globe. The propaganda machine tells us
that those poor saps in uniform dodging roadside bombs in Iraq and
Afghanistan, or dropping shells and bombs on villages made of mud
bricks and killing innocent women and children, are “defending our
freedom.”

Nonsense. They are destroying our freedom by helping to bankrupt this nation, while stirring up deep hatreds of America everywhere they set foot.

The good news is that this particular economic downturn in the US
may prove to be more than just another turn of the business cycle, but
rather, the beginning of the inexorable spiral of decline of the US as
a global economic power. The corporations (along with the schools,
churches and politicians) that have lured and tricked us all into this
mad consumer scramble for more and more useless crap and momentary
gratification have driven the country into a debt hole from which it
will clearly be impossible to climb out. That may not sound like good
news, but viewed from the perspective of the wider world it certainly
is—especially if it bankrupts the American military machine, and slows
the production of greenhouse gases. It could also be good news if it
leads us, the American people, to rethink what our lives are really all
about—if it leads us to start thinking of ourselves as part of a
society, again, instead of just that incredibly insulting and
derogatory term: “consumers.”

People recognized how inane and wrong it was when, immediately after the 9-11 attacks, President Bush told us it was important for Americans to pick themselves up and then go out and shop. But Robert Reich has it just as wrong. The challenge we face as a nation is not
to get people’s income growing and consumers back to buying stuff. It
is to get people to rethink what is important, to downsize our
appetites, to think as citizens of a community, and to focus our
politics and government on the important issues, like protecting the
environment and enhancing the quality of life not just for all
Americans, but for all the people who inhabit this globe.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Idiots and Bailouts

dlindorff — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:54:55 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

It’s a safe bet that within the next several months, Congress will
vote to bail out General Motors. It will be a colossal boondoggle
involving, probably, upwards of $50 billion when it’s through, and it
will fail in the end.

The reason is before our eyes. This bloated megacorporation is being run by idiots.

For years, as it became evident to everyone that oil prices were
going to soar because demand has been exceeding both production and
supply and will continue to do so, it has been obvious that to succeed,
a car company had to offer well-made cars that could demonstrate high
gas mileage. GM, perhaps more than any other company, ignored that
reality and has been paying the price, watching its share of the car
market wither.

Now the company, worth about what Starbucks used to be worth, its
stock now down to where it was in the depths of the Great Depression,
has bet the farm on a new car, the Volt, which it promises will, two
years from now, be able to go all of 40 miles purely on electric power.
It will have a motor too, and not a small one, but rather one the size
of what you get in a typical conventional Honda Civic—1.4 ltr. That
motor wouldn’t drive the car; rather it would keep charging the Volt’s
huge lithium-ion battery so the car could keep going for a few hundred
miles.

Wow.

The management wizards at GM obviously don’t do much driving. If
they did, and found themselves in typical commuter traffic, they’d see
that maybe 90% of the cars, or more, have only one person in them.
Occasionally, they’d see a passenger. On a typical 45-minute trip from
the burbs into Philadelphia at rush hour, I can count the number of
cars I see with three or more people in them on my fingers.

So why is GM making the Volt as a full-sized four or five-passenger
car? That’s not where the market for an electric car is. What is needed
is a two-seater little car.

Because GM is trying to make an electric family car, they’ve made
something so big that, if they are lucky, they’ll be able to get it to
40 miles on electric drive only, but at a cost in excess of $40,000 and
perhaps much higher, which will put it out of almost everyone’s reach.
The car is destined to be a bust.

And yet, because President-elect Obama will want to win Michigan
next election, and because Congressional Democrats don’t want to be
seen as ignoring the fate of GM’s workers, GM will be bailed out and
the Volt will be funded right through to its introduction and
subsequent disaster in the market.

I’m not opposed to the idea of government support of industry, but
that support has to involve government input or even control over
decision-making.

Maybe GM wouldn’t make much profit on a little electric commuter
car, but a little two-seater electric commuter car would have a huge
impact on reducing the output of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere,
particularly if efforts were made to increase solar and wind-generated
electricity. A small electric commuter car would also massively reduce
the amount of oil the US imports, making a major contribution to
reducing the nation’s trade deficit. Those are results that justify a
bailout.

Making an overpriced electric family car is not.

At this point, since the Democrats in Congress and the White House
are congenitally incapable of imagining a state-owned or partially
state-owned enterprise, it would be better to just let GM go under, and
maybe Ford too, if it comes to that (another stupid company). The
pieces could be sold off, and allowed to sink and swim on their own.
Maybe one of those smaller, more entrepreneurial fragments would see
the wisdom of developing what the public really needs.

The truth is that the entrepreneurs over at Tesla, a star-up in
California, have already made that car—a high-performance two-seater
commuter car that can go 200 miles on a charge and that doesn’t need an
auxiliary engine. Their problem is that small size and too little
capital have forced them to pimp it up into a high-priced luxury
show-off item for rich people costing $100,000. If they were to team up
with a GM spin-off—say Saturn—they could make a stripped-down version
of that baby and crank out 100,000 of them to start at a price ordinary
people could afford.

Meanwhile, regarding those poor autoworkers, they have a legitimate
complaint. While Republicans like to blame the auto industry’s problems
on them, saying they have demanded too much pay, and too much in
healthcare benefits, it’s not their fault that GM and Ford executives
have been stupid and greedy and short-sighted (besides, the high wages
and benefits that the United Auto Workers won over decades of bitter
struggle helped to set standards that raised the wages of all workers
across the nation). But let’s do the math. There are about 125,000
unionized hourly workers at the two companies. For a lousy $8.7
billion, every one of those people could receive a $70,000 buyout from
Congress. Double that if you want to give them two years to adjust and
find new work at an electric car plant or something else. That would
cost $17 billion, or less than half of what the doomed bailout of GM is
going to end up costing.

And of course, with the rest of us suffering from the massive
mismanagement of the nation’s economy by its corporate leaders and
their puppets in Washington, there’s no reason why our tax dollars
should be subsidizing those particular workers tat that high a level.
After all, companies are failing and will be failing all over the
place, without such largesse. Besides, if the bailout goes ahead, all
it will do is delay the time these workers will be out on the street
anyhow.

The point is, however, there are more cost-effective ways to help
out workers in failing businesses than to have the government simply
subsidize the continued operation of enterprises that have been
destroyed by management. In truth, all the talk in congress and in the
Obama camp about rescuing jobs is just a cover for bailouts that are
really aimed at rescuing managers and investors, not workers.

___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Auto Industry Bailout

music8200 — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:54:07 -0500

Congress will take up the Auto Industry Bailout when they re-convene this week. There is no better time than this moment to PUSH for concessions from the Auto Industry. Time is short. Democrat.com, can you help us act NOW? Here's a copy of a letter I just mailed to Speaker Pelosi: Dear Madam Speaker,

Please make the FLEXFUEL component a MANDATORY requirement for any Auto Industry bailout.
IT ONLY COSTS $100 to install this component on a vehicle during the manufacturing process. The only EPA approved retrofit costs $1300. All cars sold in Brazil are flexfuel ready. All cars that GM sells in Brazil are flexfuel compatible. There is no excuse and there should be no delay in making all cars sold in America flexfuel capable.
THIS IS THE QUICKEST CHEAPEST EASIEST WAY to make rapid reductions in our foreign oil imports.
If ALL cars sold in the US were Flexfuel compatible, alternative fuel manufacturers would gear up without the need for incentives because they would know they have a market for their fuel products.
THEN please help remove the $0.54 a gallon tariff on imported ethanol. That would allow foreign ethanol products to compete in the American market. The American consumer would benefit. We could even lift the economies of Third World Countries by contracting them to grow switchgrass or sugarcane for ethanol fuel.
Ultimately, let's provide incentives for the production of flexfuel plug-in hybrids. These cars would get 500 MILES ON A GALLON OF GASOLINE! We would never need OPEC oil ever again! Perhaps no imported oil at all.
PLEASE PLEASE make the flexfuel component a MANDATORY part of any Automobile Industry Bailout.
If you want good references on this topic, read the testimony of Anne Korin (of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security) before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of May 22, 2008:http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/kor052208.htm(see in particular the section entitled "17x17")
read R. James Woolsey (former director of the CIA) and Anne Korin's article in the National Review:http://energy.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTlmMjFjYWRjOWI3ZGI0MzUxZDJjYTBlMmUzOTc2Mzc=
or watch Anne Korin's lecture on CSPAN:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MVwL2PcCG8(highly recommended)
watch Robert Zubrin's FEW Keynote Address:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0O2YZwSkgM
Thank you and your staff for your time and attention,Scott Lawrence

We're a Nation of Lemmings

dlindorff — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:27:20 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Listening to the endless stream of cars passing my house every day,
and knowing, from watching them from my mailbox, that they are almost
all carrying just one person, either commuting to work or running some
kind of errand, I know we are headed for disaster.

Two days ago, there was a report by Agence France Presse
about the ongoing destruction of the world’s remaining wetlands (60
percent have already been destroyed by man over the past century), and
how they contain within them an amount of stored carbon equal to all
the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Global warming and property
development are drying out those remaining wetlands, causing the
release of that carbon, which will more than negate even the most
radical efforts at reducing carbon emissions from power plants,
factories and automobiles.

There are also credible, well-researched reports
that even a few more degrees of temperature rise in the arctic regions
of Siberia and northern North America will melt the permafrost and
release as much 400 gigatons of methane gas trapped in frozen
clathrates for millennia—the release of which would cause global
temperatures to soar to levels not seen in 250 million years (methane
is 20 times as potent a global warming gas as CO2). Vast regions of
Siberia are already bubbling with releasing methane as the permafrost
line moves north.

Now I grant that our corporate media, ever focused laser-like on
important stories like Britney Spears’ return to the stage and on the
latest gaffe of one or the other presidential candidate, have not been
very interested in alerting the masses to these disasters now in
progress that could end humanity’s run on the planet (along with
exterminating most of the rest of the life on the planet too). But that
said, at this point everyone has surely heard enough, and witnessed
enough in person of the dramatic changes taking place in the earth’s
climate, to know that something scary is going on.

And yet, people are not just going about their business as
usual—they are actually, for the most part, complaining not about the
lack of highly energy-efficient transportation, the lack of alternative
and less energy-wasting public transit, and the lack of government
funding for a crash program into researching carbon-free energy
solutions, but rather about the high price for carbon fuels. People are
clamoring for solutions to make gasoline cheaper!

Years ago, back in the 1970s during an Arab-led oil embargo, when
gas prices soared, there were mass campaigns to organize car pools. No
such campaigns are being organized today, and if any are they don’t get
any media attention. Instead we read that geologists are saying that
massive quantities of untapped oil reserves exist in the far north.

Now the last thing we should be wanting to do is take that nicely
sequestered carbon out of the ground and burn it into CO2! But that’s
what many Americans want done. Screw the climate! We want our cheap gas!

There are so many things we could be doing right now to reduce
carbon emissions—as individuals and as a nation. Turning off
air-conditioners would be one. Why should entire houses be cooled by
central air? Cool one room and use it for the hottest part of the day
if need be. Live downstairs during the hottest months and close off the
upstairs when it gets too hot. Ditto in the winter. There’s no need to
occupy and heat an entire house when it gets really cold. Most
Americans’ homes are way too large anyhow, but if you need that much
room, use it when it doesn’t require all that extra energy to heat and
cool. (When I lived in Cambridge, England as a kid, we used to sleep in
unheated bedrooms under cozy comforters, and then in the morning, I’d
go down and light a fire in the living room where we’d be during the
day. It would be cold as hell until the fire started, but not for
long.) Share rides. Plan errands so that many things get taken care of
on one outing, instead of in multiple run-outs. Use bicycles. I have
yet to see, on my own bike rides in town or when driving anywhere,
someone who is actually riding a bike on some errand—carrying a load in
a basket or in a backpack. The only bikers I see are people dressed
like Tour de France racers out for some exercise. What’s the matter
with using bikes for a purpose, instead of the family car?

I’m not trying to criticize, or to say I’m more ecologically
virtuous. I’m looking at this as an unprecedented disaster that is
dooming my kids, or their future children, to a life of strife, misery
and maybe even catastrophe. If I don’t take serious action—and I don’t
just mean individual life changes, but political action—to try and save
their world, I am guilty of a serious crime. And so are we all.

What the hell happened to any sense of shared responsibility, not just for society, but for our own offspring?

Most decent parents are ready to sacrifice in their lifestyles in
order to send their kids to college, or to help them out financially
when they are starting out as young adults. But for some strange reason
nobody seems ready to sacrifice at all when it comes to rescuing their
collective future. This makes no sense.

And yet, this is what our mass culture has done to us. As a nation,
as a people, we cannot think beyond our own noses. We cannot even think
about the need to act in our own and our children’s interest.

Seventeen years ago, I had occasion while living in Shanghai,
China, to visit a rural area in Anhui Province that the year before had
been devastated by a flood so huge that the entire region had been not
just flooded, but put deep underwater. As I neared a county seat town
that was my intended destination, the bus I was on passed a
dike-building project. Thousands of peasants were laboring by hand,
with shovels and wheelbarrows, to erect a 50-foot wall of earth to keep
the river in its banks in the event of another such flood. I got off
the bus and, with my travel companion, started walking towards the
project. When we were spotted, thousands of those workers dropped their
shovels and ran towards us. It was a terrifying moment to have so many
people heading towards and surrounding us, but they were very
friendly—just curious because none of them had ever met a westerner. We
began talking with them, and learned that they were all peasants who
had left their fields to build this colossal new Great Wall of dirt.
They brought us to the worksite and showed us how they would bring
their wheelbarrows to the base of the dike, and then attach a cable,
which was connected to a winch operated by those ubiquitous
one-cylinder, two-stroke kerosene tractors used across rural China. The
winch would whip the barrow up the steep hillside, with a peasant
running up behind keeping it upright. At the last minute, the peasant
would flip the barrow, dumping the dirt and releasing the hook. Then
he’d be off down the hill to collect more dirt.

What struck me, besides their ingenuity, was how all these
thousands of people had left their own fields to labor for the
collective good that year.

I tried at the time to contemplate my fellow Americans doing the same thing, and couldn’t for the life of me imagine it.

Now we’re in that moment. We know the flood is coming, but no one is willing to join the brigade to take preventive action.

No. Buying a Prius is not taking action. Neither is upgrading the
insulation on your house or buying carbon offsets when you fly. We
need, as a nation, to commit to seriously ending our addiction to
fossil fuels, to rapacious development and the concomitant destruction
of forests and wetlands. We need to end our nation’s imperialist
policies and to instead devote the trillion dollars a year spent on war
to saving the planet from ourselves.

A good start would be seeing that people “get it.” That would mean
communities starting to organize around improving mass transit,
arranging for carpooling, and demanding climate-saving action from our
political leaders.

I’m not optimistic.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Paul Krugman and Blindness About the War and the Economy

dlindorff — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:36:00 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In a New York Times column on Monday (“Behind the Bush
Bust”), economics columnist Paul Krugman mused on whether President
George Bush could be blamed for the nation’s economic crisis. His
conclusion was that, yes, to some extent the crisis was Bush’s fault,
but he largely lets the current administration off the hook, instead
blaming Republican policies dating back 10-15 years.

Oddly, Krugman does say that a key cause of economic problems has
been rising energy prices, but he then attributes these to “growing
demand from China and other emerging economies,” and suggests that
prices might have been at least a bit lower had the US, after 9/11,
adopted “higher gas taxes and fuel efficiency standards,” a failing he
attributes to Bush.

The gaping hole in Krugman’s logic is the Iraq War, which the
columnist, incredibly, doesn’t even mention. Yet clearly, the invasion
and subsequent war and occupation of Iraq which was purely the result
of Bush/Cheney machinations, has been a major, if not the major cause
of oil price increases.

By destroying Iraq’s oil production, and by hindering much of
Iran’s production (Iran, seen as an enemy by the US, has been frozen
out of capital markets, blocking it from being able to modernize and
even maintain its own huge oil infrastructure), and putting even
Kuwait’s and Saudi Arabia’s production at risk, the US war in Iraq has
jeopardized about one-third of the world’s oil capacity—a fact not lost
on oil speculators. Every rumor of a longer occupation or a wider war
in the Middle East—especially a possible attack by the US on Iran--has
pushed up oil prices further, as has every attack on a pipeline.

It is no secret why crude oil, over the course of five years, has
soared four or five times in price. Demand has certainly not gone up by
that amount. It hasn’t even doubled. What has happened is that the
Middle East has been thoroughly destabilized by American military
action.

The rise in oil prices has been the major cause of the US dollar’s
stunning collapse, which in turn has limited the hand of the Federal
Reserve, which cannot risk lowering interest rates as much as it would
like to stimulate economic growth, for fear of further undermining the
dollar. This in turn has allowed the mortgage crisis to fester and grow
worse.

At the same time, the massive amount of industrial production that
has gone into the war effort—the building of planes, tanks, armored
cars, etc.—while perhaps producing some jobs, has been wholly
inflationary in its effect, since this is production that cannot add to
available goods and services in the civilian economy. That means that
there are more people with wages and salaries, chasing the same number
of things to buy—a sure-fire recipe for higher prices. Add to that the
huge war budget, all funded by debt, and you have even more downward
pressure on the dollar.

Bush’s and Cheney’s war in Iraq has been, it should be clear, a
huge catastrophe for the US economy, and yet somehow Prof. Krugman
managed to miss it completely. You could read his column and not even
know that the country is and has been, for the past seven years, at war.

I’m not sure what to make of this oversight on Krugman’s part. Is
he trying to downplay the war, figuring it’s soon to become a
Democratic venture? Is he unfamiliar with the argument that war is bad
for economies?

One thing is clear: You cannot look at a nation at war and analyze
its economy without considering the impact of the war, which is what
the usually astute Krugman has done here.

But let’s make the point crystal clear, even if Krugman doesn’t see
it or doesn’t want to see it: The slumping US economy, and the crashing
US dollar, which is heading towards Peso status as a trash currency,
are clearly the direct result of Bush/Cheney policies, aided and
abetted by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who have bought
the story line that war is good.

We will all be paying for this imperialist misadventure for years to come.
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

News of Rapid Glacial Melting Raises a Big Question for Presidential Candidates

dlindorff — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:21:24 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Okay. Enough about race.

We've got a bigger problem here than how to get along with each other, as important as that may be, and that's how to make sure that any of us--or our children and grandchildren--are around in another hundred years.

Fast on the heels of reports about the increasingly, and unexpectedly rapid melting of Greenland's giant ice sheet, come even more scary reports about accelerated glacial melting in Antarctica, where there is a whole lot more ice.

Taken together, if these trends, which are based upon extensive photographic and on-the-ice observations, continue, not only could we see the oceans rise not just a few feet, but perhaps 15 feet within most of our lifetimes, with devastating results for coastal cities and regions around the world, but we could see runaway global warming ignited that could put the earth on a one-way trip to a mass extinction event worse, perhaps, than what hit the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

In a remarkable book titled Six Degrees, author Mark Lynas, a science writer with National Geographic Magazine, documents in chilling detail what will happen to life on earth, and to the earth itself, with each degree celsius that the earth's average temperature rises.

Chapters 1-3, which document temperature rises of 1-3 degrees celsius (about 2-6 degrees fahrenheit) are pretty disturbing, but the later chapters documenting temperature rises of 4, 5 and 6 degrees celsius, are truly nightmarish. And the scariest part is that once you get to the 3 degree celsius level, the stage gets set for the higher temperatures, making it difficult if not impossible to avoid the increasingly worsening scenarios. This is because once the temperature gets a few degrees out of whack, crucial forests die off, whole swaths of temperate zone landmasses become desert, and worst of all, the permafrost in the Siberian and North American tundra disappears, freeing massive amounts of trapped methane gas from the rotting swamps and peat bogs that cover that region. And methane, remember, is 23 times as potent a global warming gas as is carbon dioxide.

Worse yet, as melting polar regions lead to a slowdown in the oceanic currents and as the stagnating seas begin to warm, an even greater danger--the release of even vaster quantities of methane trapped as icy hydrates under the sea floor--is posed. If these hydrates pop to the surface in massive "burps," they could, Lynas reports, mimic several such events in the Earth's past, causing global temperatures to soar, and the oceans to become stagnant, anoxic (devoid of oxygen), lifeless pools, which would then begin emitting vast amounts of toxic sulfur dioxide gas. On several occasions, Lynas notes, life itself was threatened on Earth when just such a thing happened, and if such a scenario played out again, life would be threatened again. The difference is that now the sun itself is hotter than it was 55 or 150 million years ago, making a return to "normal" that much more problematic.

Scientists can debate the risks of such a disaster's occurring, and certainly there is (thank goodness!) a minority view that we are not headed towards climate catastrophe.

Hope, as candidate Barak Obama is wont to say, is a fine thing, and I'm all for hope.

But here's the rub: If the majority scientific view is correct, and there is even a small chance that the Earth is headed towards a historically unprecedented rapid heating event that would bring temperatures into the range where methane will start to be the main threat, then doesn't prudence and sanity require that we embark ASAP on efforts to prevent that happening?

The cost of seriously combating climate change now--and I'm not talking about switching from cars that get 25 mpg to cars that get 60 mpg, and switching from coal-powered generating plants to LNG-powered plants; I'm talking about eliminating the internal combustion engine as a mode of transportation, and eliminating carbon-fueled generating plants altogether--would be enormous. That is clear. To actually cut global carbon emissions by 80 percent from current levels over the next decade, we would, economists say, have to forego a couple percentage points of global economic growth every year, cut consumption dramatically, embark on major campaigns to save rainforests, and halt and even reverse population growth. We would, ultimately, have to change our entire economic model from one of growth to one of sustainability.

But how do we compare that kind of hardship with extinction?

Let's say, hypothetically, that there is a 10-percent chance that we are headed down a road that leads to extinction of the human race in a scant 1-200 years, if we do nothing dramatic to change course. And let's say there's a 90 percent chance that nothing bad is going to happen. Should we take that gamble and carry on as we are?

If you say yes, let me change the odds. Suppose there's a 30-percent chance we're headed the way of the dinosaur if we don't change our ways dramatically? Still think we should just carry on?

Personally, I think the evidence before my eyes, in the earlier budding of the trees that I have witnessed just over the last five or six years, and the evidence of the melting away of the Arctic ice cap, not to mention the above-mentioned galloping melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, suggests that the odds of disaster are much, much greater than 50 percent (in fact, I think they're closer to 90 percent!).

In any event, whatever odds you may assign to climate disaster, isn't it the wise thing to do to take steps to minimize that risk? What do you do about car insurance? Sure the law requires you to buy it, but what are the odds of your ever being stopped by a cop and being ordered to show an insurance card? What are the odds of your having an accident, and needing coverage? Heck, I drove 10 years without an accident or a stop (and the one minor accident I did have was so small I was able to pay for the damage and avoid having to report it). And yet each year, I was paying out over a grand for coverage. It would have been far cheaper to skip all those premiums and to pay a fine if I got caught. But, I have prudently calculated that if I ever had a serious accident, unlikely as that may be, it would be better to have the insurance, so I buy it and give up $1000 a year worth of income I could have enjoyed spending. And how much more serious is extinction than the consequences of driving without insurance?

And here is where our politics and our media are failing us abysmally. With such a huge issue facing not just our nation, but the world, none of the three candidates running for the presidency of the nation that accounts for 25 percent of the world's total carbon emissions has been asked, or has offered, an opinion on this issue.

All three, to the extent that they've been asked about climate change at all, have been allowed to make vague feel-good statements about their support for carbon trading, or for increased gas mileage requirements (Hillary Clinton actually answered a question about global warming by saying she would install thermal windows on all government buildings!).

None has been asked whether he or she thinks that humanity is heading for catastrophe, or whether we can continue with an economic system that makes economic growth a key goal. None has been asked what he or she would do as president if convinced by science advisors that the danger of runaway global warming and imminent mass extinction were real.

How pathetic and irresponsible is that? Reporters will regularly ask candidates what they would do if Iran got the bomb, or if there were another 9-11 type of attack on the US, but no one is asking what they would do if it became evident that our children, or grandchildren, might not survive the century.

It is time to make these would-be leaders all face up to this most serious of all crises. We as voters need to know: What do each of these candidates think about the threat of global warming, and how do they plan to attack it? If they believe the government's own scientists at NASA and NOAA, what are they going to do, both nationally and globally, to save the planet?

_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia based journalist whose house is slated to be inundated if Greenland melts. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martins Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

No Tax Rebate's Going to Fix This Mess

dlindorff — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:34:44 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

When you hear a number like $100 billion (the amount Bush is proposing to give back to people in the form of tax rebates, at about $800 per adult family member) or $145 billion (that $100 billion, plus another $45 billion in business tax breaks—mostly accelerated deductions for capital investment) bounced around, it sounds like a lot of dough, and you might think it would be a good shot in the arm for an economy that is falling into a dead faint.

But let’s think about it on a micro level.

What would my wife and I do with an extra $1600?

Well, to be honest, that’s not quite one month’s mortgage payment.

If we were smart, we’d probably use it to pay down some principle on our credit line, which would over time get us out from under on that dreaded monthly bill a lot sooner. But if we did what most people are likely to do--pay off some bills with it, or one month's mortgage, chances are, given how hard we're all working just to keep going, that we'd then slack off somewhere else just to catch a little break--maybe turn down one assignment, or if we're on an hourly job, turn down some overtime and catch a little more shuteye--and in the end, we wouldn't be adding anything to the economy at all.

But then there are the cars. They both need servicing. The Volvo, a 1993, is suffering from a case of electronic lock collapse syndrome: the right rear door can no longer be opened. It’s frozen in the locked position. The lock button on the driver’s door came unconnected from the latch mechanism inside the door too, so that door has to be locked and unlocked from the outside with the key. And I figure it’s only a matter of time before some of the other doors get frozen in locked position, which could get really ugly when I need to drive with more than one passenger. So I could use probably $1000 of that rebate to get that mess fixed. That would leave $600 for two alignments, two tune-ups and some new tires.

If I were to do all that, I suppose that would be a little boost to the economy, but not much. It certainly would be nice for the auto electric shop guy, but it’s not going to do much for Detroit. Trust me—that extra $1600 is not enough to tempt me to go out and buy a new car. Heck, it’s only about a down payment and two monthly payments on some piece of junk from the bottom of the Chevy or Ford line-up, and after that I’m stuck with payments for four more years. No, I’ll be staying with my old Volvo and the 2001 Honda Civic.

I suspect most Americans are in the same boat. If you have to worry about the future of your job—in my case a continued flow of assignments from various magazines that keep me afloat—you’re not going to go out and buy some big-ticket consumer item just because you got an unexpected $1600 check from Uncle George in Washington.

Economic theory, regarding the "velocity of money" and all that, says that if I do get the Volvo door problem fixed, and if I do buy those new tires and get the cars tuned up and aligned, that money I spend will flow through the economy, making everything hum a little better (not the tires though, since they're probably made overseas so the extra dollars just get lost to the US economy). That’s probably true to a point. The auto electric guy is likely to get a little pick-up in business—mine and other people with door and light problems they’ve been living with for a while. But will it be enough to convince him to go out and hire another employee? I doubt it. Will he invest in new equipment? Nah. I doubt he’d do that, and even if he did, it most likely would be imported too, meaning an end to the stimulus chain. More likely, he’d take his extra dough and go get his pick-up repaired. It’s belching a bit of smoke these days, and looks like it could use some engine work. But again, I doubt that he’ll be ordering a new F-150. And any parts he buys for his vehicle are likely to be imported too, thanks to globalization. That’ll be good for Mexico’s or China’s economy, but not for ours.

Besides, the thing is, we all know that those IRS rebates are a one-off thing. It’s not like they’re going to make this a regular yearly surprise. So you’d have to be an idiot to take the money and pump up your life-style.

And then there’s another problem. By adding another $145 billion to the budget deficit, the government is contributing significantly to inflationary pressures, and when those gnomes in Zurich, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong see that, they’ll bid down the value of the dollar even more. Our once mighty currency, now worth only half a pound Sterling in Britain, or just over 100 Yen in Japan, is shrinking faster than the polar icecap. And that means that all the products we depend on—our tools, our dishware, our clothes, much of the food we eat, and of course our oil—will get more expensive.

I don’t know about you, but my wife and I spend basically every penny we earn each year, in order to make ends meet. Now some of that is for stuff like mortgage payments, tuition payments, etc., but I’d guess that, counting oil and energy bills, probably half our income goes to buy things that are imported, and that’s probably roughly true for most American families. After all, almost nothing is actually made in the US anymore, and we even buy a lot of raw materials—iron, oil, etc.—from overseas. So if for sake of argument and easy math, we’re making $100,000, that’s $50,000 being spent on imported stuff. Now here’s where things get a little speculative. But suppose that having the government add another $145 billion in red ink to the federal budget leads to an extra 3 percent decline in the value of the dollar against foreign currencies—a not unreasonable scenario. Why, that would mean that the $50,000 I spend on foreign goods in a year would cost me an extra $1500—just about the same amount as that $1600 Bush is proposing to lay on me.

But…that weakened dollar will continue into next year and beyond, while the $1600 rebate is a one-time thing.

So what do we get out of this rebate thing?

Worse than nothing.

There is, unfortunately, no free lunch.
]
In fact, it’s worse than that. To the extent that the extra decline in the dollar puts pressure on the Federal Reserve to take some action to prop the Greenback up, we will see interest rates rise. Now at the moment, we’re in hock to the tune of about $25,000 on a home equity credit line—a result of living beyond our means that is the typical American family’s response to incomes that have failed to keep pace with inflation. While my mortgage is fixed-rate, my credit line is not. So if the fed raises interest rates by .25 percent to prop up the dollar from the effects of that one-off tax rebate, I’m going to be paying an extra $650 annually in interest on my credit line balance.

In other words, this rebate is putting me into the hole right from the get-go!

Thanks a lot George!

So how about we just forget this whole stinking rebate idea. It ain’t gonna work, folks. It might sound good in an election year, but if you look at it closely, you can see it’s really just smoke and mirrors.

There is a solution, though. How about if they end the war in Iraq and bring all the troops home. The government will save several hundred billion dollars a year that’s being spent overseas blowing things up—and that is helping to depress the dollar and raise our tax bills. Some of that saved money can help reduce the deficit. Other chunks of it could be invested in America’s badly decaying infrastructure—repairing bridges, building new schools, etc., maybe building some major levees to protect our coastal cities from the next Katrina or from the global warming flood that we know is coming. And all that will mean jobs for people who need them.

We might also try to do something about reducing that massive outflow of dollars that’s making our currency do a disappearing act. An easy way to do that would be to slap higher taxes on gasoline and to tax cars based on how bad their gas mileage is. Before long, most Americans would be driving less and buying smaller, fuel-efficient cars, and we could significantly reduce the single biggest item on our import bill: oil.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll be happy to get that $1600 check George Bush is calling for. I’m certainly not going to return it to the Treasury! But let’s not be pretending that it’s going to jump-start the sick economy.

It might even end up making things worse.

_________________________________________
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Cast for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Rep. Mark Udall says save the Roan Plateau!

mike@mikeditto.com — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:30:33 -0400

I have some great news to share and a request to make for your help. I just passed through the House of Representatives with broad Democratic and Republican support, a package of common-sense proposals to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and to increase our usage of clean, renewable energy. For the first time ever, national energy policy will require all electric utilities to acquire 15% of their power from wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources by the year 2020. I sponsored or cosponsored important provisions in the energy bill that will provide funding for climate change research, surface owner protection, funding for research into carbon capture and storage, and protection of the Roan Plateau. But the fight's only begun, and I need your help right away. The bill still needs to pass the U.S. Senate and be signed by President Bush. But not everyone supports this important bill, and some in the oil and gas industry are organizing to prevent passage. According to theRocky Mountain News, "a newly formed nonprofit in Denver, Americans for American Energy, has raised tens of thousands of dollars to launch a campaign in the coming weeks to push for drilling on the Roan." What the News did not report is that this organization is not new, and they have raised a lot more money than that. Though it is based in Golden, this advocacy group for the oil and gas lobby has been around since 2005, has raised millions of dollars, and has run TV ads in several states promoting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This group has now pledged to pull out all the stops in order force Western Slope communities to give up on protections they have sought for the top of the Roan Plateau. You can show your support for John Salazar's and my efforts to protect the Roan and passage of needed legislation to secure America's energy future today by signing this petition and sending it around to your friends. I'll share the results with my colleagues in the Congress to show that we have broad support for protecting the Roan. www.markudall.com/SaveTheRoan Lets show the oil and gas lobby what the grass roots really looks like. While they prepare to spend "tens of thousands" as documented by the Rocky (or millions of corporate dollars if history repeats itself), we prepare to fight for what's right our way--the Colorado way. Sportsmen, anglers, conservationists, the Garfield County Commissioners, and the town councils of Silt, Rifle, New Castle, Carbondale, Parachute, and Glenwood Springs have voiced their support. These are fellow Coloradans trying to protect the West Slope. Sign the petition. Pass it on. Time is short, as this bill will be voted on in the Senate when Congress reconvenes in two weeks, and then it's on to President Bush's desk. www.markudall.com/SaveTheRoan Over the next few weeks, I'd like to tell you the story behind my twelve-year fight for energy independence that also protects our natural resources and the air that we breath. But this issue is pressing, and I really need your help today. Please--sign the petition and spread this far and wide. Warm Regards, Congressman Mark Udall

The Eve Of War

Chris Elliott — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:45:23 -0500

US / Iranian rhetoric is at fever pitch. Both sides are claiming to have “evidence” of military foul play. Both sides are holding military exercises in each others faces and the Gulf is so full of warships it must be highly dangerous to navigate. Both sides are threatening a massive military response to any use of force. Both presidents have backed themselves into political corners and neither shows the slightest sign of backing down.

A second US carrier strike group has just arrived in the Gulf bringing the total number of US (and allied) warships there to about 50 and a third group, headed by USS Reagan has just been ordered to rendezvous in the Western Pacific with destroyers from Pearl Harbour before sailing to the Gulf.

This is in addition to the large US and allied navies operating in the Eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Syria, purportedly to “keep the peace in Lebanon”, and the numerous military airbases that surround both Iran and Syria on multiple fronts. Not to mention the massive military base that is otherwise known as Israel.

In just a few hours from now the 60-day deadline that the US forced through the United Nations in December, demanding Iran cease all nuclear enrichment and research will expire. The question is what will follow? Threats of yet more economic sanctions are unlikely to achieve anything. China has no reason to cut off their oil supply and Russia has nothing but contempt for Bush’s foreign policy. Even European countries are signing long term energy contracts with Iran.

These dubious reports about Iranian weapons being used in Iraq (the ones conveniently labelled in English and dated using the Western calendar no less) seem to indicate that only a military solution is being considered and Bush is now desperate for his casus belli. If Iran tells the UN to shove it’s 60 day deadline and proceeds with nuclear enrichment then Bush will either have to back down and face international ridicule or force Iran to stop via military means.

Today the Iranian president rejected the Western demands to cease nuclear enrichment unless the West also ceases nuclear enrichment, a reply that was laughingly dismissed in Washington.

Even if the Bush administration lacks the nerve to launch an attack on Iran, the close proximity of so many ships, subs, aircraft and missiles all flexing their muscle is the perfect environment for accidents to happen, staged or otherwise. All the ingredients for a major conflict are in place, only a spark is required to set the whole region ablaze.

Congress does have the power to block a new war with Iran. But congress has already given permission to the armed forces to bring stability to Iraq by any means (the so called ‘surge’) and now suddenly we have all this ‘evidence’ of Iranian activity in Iraq. A possible reason we are seeing this now is that they intend to exploit this congressional loophole and make Iran the reason for the disaster in Iraq and consequently deal with the Iranian 'problem' by any means necessary. The media seem to be pushing this idea already.

Additional related articles:

US Warships to Persian Gulf

The March to War: Naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.

U.S. diplomat tells Iran to back off in Gulf

Syria's terror networks

Venezuela Preparing for 'Asymmetrical' Showdown With U.S.

International Media In Overdrive At Prospect Of War With Iran

Chris Elliott — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:07:28 -0500

First I invite you to watch this excellent 10 minute speech by George Galloway to the British Parliament on January 27, 2007 in which he delivers a stark warning that Britain is sleepwalking into a catastrophic war with Iran along with the US and Israel. George Galloway was the man who you may remember lambasting the US Senate over false accusations of oil bribes with Saddam.

George Galloway's speech to the British Parliament, January 2007

Now, if that very sobering speech has got your attention, the following should also be noted.

In the last few days international media have gone into war overdrive, in exactly the same way they did prior to the Iraq invasion in 2003. I was going to write that later this week the Bush Administration will make public it has evidence that Iran is involved in the Iraq insurgency and attacks on US troops, but in fact this is already being touted by CNN.

I include here a sample of the hundreds of international media reports pointing towards a war with Iran, thought to take place in the next few weeks. I have highlighted some significant sentences in the reports.

It should also be noted that Iran has a defensive alliance with Syria and close economic and to some extent military ties to Russia, China and other SCO members (see my blog on Chinese anti-satellite weapons for more on this relationship). Venezuala has also pledged to support Iran in the event of war with the US.

Iran involvement suspected in Karbala compound attack
POSTED: 9:50 p.m. EST, January 30, 2007
NEW: U.S. probing possible Iranian involvement in brazen compound raid

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The Pentagon is investigating whether a recent attack on a military compound in Karbala was carried out by Iranians or Iranian-trained operatives, two officials from separate U.S. government agencies said.

"People are looking at it seriously," one of the officials said.

That official added the Iranian connection was a leading theory in the investigation into the January 20 attack that killed five soldiers.

The second official said: "We believe it's possible the executors of the attack were Iranian or Iranian-trained."

Five U.S. soldiers were killed in the sophisticated attack by men wearing U.S.-style uniforms, according to U.S. military reports.

Both officials stressed the Iranian-involvement theory is a preliminary view, and there is no final conclusion. They agreed this possibility is being looked at because of the sophistication of the attack and the level of coordination.

Bush 'spoiling for a fight' with Iran

Simon Tisdall
Wednesday January 31, 2007
The Guardian

US officials in Baghdad and Washington are expected to unveil a secret intelligence "dossier" this week detailing evidence of Iran's alleged complicity in attacks on American troops in Iraq. The move, uncomfortably echoing Downing Street's dossier debacle in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, is one more sign that the Bush administration is building a case for war.

Nicholas Burns, the senior US diplomat in charge of Iran policy, says Washington "is not looking for a fight" with Tehran. The official line is that Washington has made a conscious decision to "push back" against Iran on a range of fronts where the two countries' interests clash. Primarily that means Tehran's perceived meddling in Iraq, where its influence with the Shia-led government and Shia majority population appears to be increasing as Washington's weakens.

State department spokesman Sean McCormack claimed this week the administration has a body of evidence implicating Iran in sectarian attacks against Iraq's Sunni minority. "There is a high degree of confidence in the information that we already have and we are constantly accumulating more," he told the New York Times.

CIA and Pentagon officials are also touting intelligence that "Iranians are smuggling into Iraq sophisticated explosive devices, mortars, and detailed plans to wipe out Sunni Arab neighbourhoods," the paper said. Officials would make a "comprehensive case" this week. But President George Bush has already acted on information received. He confirmed yesterday that he has ordered US forces in effect to kill or capture Iranian "agents" targeting Americans in Iraq - as happened earlier this month when five Iranian officials were detained in Irbil.

Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2007 11:00 a.m. EST
Sen. Robert Byrd: Bush Wants War with Iran

Top Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd is warning that the Bush administration is preparing to go to war with Iran.

In a e-mail message sent to activist Democrats, the West Virginia lawmaker – who is now President pro tempore of the Senate and third in line for the presidency after Dick Cheney and Nancy Pelosi – rails against President Bush’s plans for a troop surge in Iraq and declares:

"Not only does Mr. Bush intend to plunge us deeper into what is now clearly a civil war in Iraq, but he is now increasing his belligerence towards Iran and Syria. In his State of the Union address, Mr. Bush called out Iran no less than seven times.

"I fear that what we are seeing now is an administration intent on laying the groundwork for a wider war in the Middle East.

Europeans fear US attack on Iran as nuclear row intensifies
Ian Traynor in Brussels and Jonathan Steele
Wednesday January 31, 2007
The Guardian

"There's anxiety everywhere you turn," said a diplomat familiar with the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. "The Europeans are very concerned the shit could hit the fan."

A US navy battle group of seven vessels was steaming towards the Gulf yesterday from the Red Sea, part of a deployment of 50 US ships, including two aircraft carriers, expected in the area in weeks.

"No path is envisaged by the EU other than the UN path," the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, told the Guardian yesterday. "The priority for all of us is that Iran complies with UN security council resolutions."

The IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, called at the weekend for a "timeout" in the worsening confrontation in an attempt to enable both sides to save face and climb down. But the Americans rejected the proposal and European officials involved in the dispute also believe the Iranians cannot be trusted to stick to a deal.

Russia queries US military build-up
Published: Sunday, 28 January, 2007, 08:18 AM Doha Time

MOSCOW: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday said he would demand an explanation from the US over its military build-up in the Middle East and criticised Washington for “hardline” policies against Iran.

Lavrov said he would discuss Moscow’s concerns during a meeting of the international Quartet group, which meets in Washington next week to try to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

“I have not seen any change in the rather aggressive rhetoric from Washington. It continues, as does the growing military presence in the region. This will be one of the questions that we want to clear up in Washington,” he was quoted as saying by state-run news agency RIA Novosti.

Lavrov also criticised what he said were US threats to bypass the UN in taking new measures against Iran’s controversial nuclear power programme.

Washington believes the programme, in which Russia is building the first civilian power station at Bushehr, secretly aims to build an atomic weapon.

“Washington’s hardline policy concerning Iran foresees... much tougher sanctions than those called for in the last UN Security Council resolution,” he was quoted as saying by Itar-Tass. “We would like to get an explanation on what stands behinds this.”

Iran’s strategic proposal to Russia

Tehran Times Political Desk
TEHRAN -- The Islamic Republic of Iran welcomes the development of ties with Russia in all areas and believes that there is great potential for their expansion, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said here on Sunday.

“The two countries can be two complementary partners in the political, economic, regional and international arenas,” Ayatollah Khamenei told Russian Security Council chief Igor Ivanov on Sunday.

The Leader said that both Iran and Russia would benefit from enhanced ties.

He also thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for sending him a written message, which was delivered by Ivanov. Pointing to the fact that Iran and Russia control about half of the world’s gas reserves, the Leader proposed that “the two countries can jointly establish an organization like OPEC for dealing with gas cooperation.”

Iran and Russia can block Washington’s hegemonistic plans

U.S. Freezes Sales of F-14 Fighter Parts

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

The Pentagon has frozen the sale of all spare parts for F-14 “Tomcat” fighters because of concerns about their transfer to Iran, a Defense Department spokeswoman said Jan. 30.
The sales of all F-14 parts were suspended on January 26 pending a review, the Defense Logistics Agency said in a statement.

Dawn Dearden, a spokewoman for the agency, told AFP the sales were frozen “given the current situation in Iran.”
Iran bought 79 F-14s from the United States before the fall of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979.
The move comes amid growing U.S.-Iranian tensions over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program and what Washington sees as Iranian subversion of U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq.

US must abandon Iraqi cities or face nightmare scenario, say experts

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 30 January 2007

The US must draw up plans to deal with an all-out Iraqi civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands, create millions of refugees, and could spill over into a regional catastrophe, disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran.

This is the central recommendation of a study by the Brookings Institution here, based on the assumption that President Bush's last-ditch troop increase fails to stabilise the country - but also on the reality that Washington cannot simply walk away from the growing disaster unleashed by the 2003 invasion.

Even the US staying to try to contain the fighting, said Kenneth Pollack, one of the report's authors, "would consign Iraqis to a terrible fate. Even if it works, we will have failed to provide the Iraqis with the better future we promised." But it was the "least bad option" open to the US to protect its national interests in the event of full-scale civil war.

US troops, says the study, should withdraw from Iraqi cities. This was "the only rational course of action, horrific though it will be", as America refocused its efforts from preventing civil war to containing its effects.

The unremittingly bleak document, drawing on the experience of civil wars in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Congo and Afghanistan, also offers a remarkably stark assessment of Iraq's "spill-over" potential across the Persian Gulf region.

'US poised to attack,' claims Bulgarian agency
Tuesday, January 30, 2007

ISTANBUL - Turkish Daily News

The United States “could be using its two air force bases in Bulgaria and one at Romania's Black Sea coast to launch an attack on Iran in April," the Bulgarian news agency Novinite claimed. Commenting on the report, The Sunday Herald wrote that the U.S. build-up along the Black Sea, coupled with the recent positioning of two U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups off the Straits of Hormuz “appears to indicate that U.S. President Bush has run out of patience with Tehran's nuclear misrepresentation and non-compliance with the U.N. Security Council's resolution.”

“Whether the Bulgarian news report is a tactical feint or a strategic event is hard to gauge at this stage. But, in conjunction with the beefing up of the America's Italian bases and the acquisition of anti-missile defense bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, the Balkan developments seem to indicate a new phase in Bush's global war on terror,” wrote the Scottish paper.

The Bulgarian agency named Colonel Sam Gardiner, "a U.S. secret service officer stationed in Bulgaria," as the source its story.

Before the end of March, 3,000 U.S. military personnel are scheduled to arrive "on a rotating basis" at the United States' Bulgarian bases. Under the U.S.-Bulgarian military cooperation accord, signed in April, 2006, an airbase at Bezmer, a second airfield at Graf Ignitievo and a shooting range at Novo Selo were leased to the U.S. Army.

Resource Wars
by William K. Tabb

Ted Koppel, writing in the New York Times (February 24, 2006), responded to what he described as the Bush administration’s “touchiness” about the charge that we are in Iraq because of oil by stating the obvious, though often unsaid, truth, “Now that’s curious. Keeping oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz has been bedrock American foreign policy for more than half a century.” Today control over the world’s oil supply is at the forefront of Washington policy makers’ thinking, even if the president and his team deny any such intent and talk publically of reducing dependence on Middle East oil by three-quarters of present levels, an absurdly impossible goal. Two-thirds of the oil in the world is in the Middle East, much of it under Iraq and Iran, the axis of oil, the current targets of the U.S. war on terrorism. Control of oil is integral to Washington’s official goal of world domination, a goal stated this baldly in national security documents.

During the administration of the first President Bush, the Pentagon under then defense secretary Dick Cheney produced a strategy paper stating the mission of “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.” The United States would defend their interests for them and so the policy was to “discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.”6 Control of the world is facilitated through control of essential resources. By controlling the world’s energy, and in the presence of its overwhelming military superiority, the United States is potentially able to deny the lifeblood of any society and intimidate and coerce the world more effectively, a design going back easily to Henry Kissinger, and earlier to the emergence of U.S. global power at the end of the Second World War, but now carried to new heights by the neoconservatives.

Hegemony has always been a bipartisan consensus. With regard specifically to the Middle East we have the Carter Doctrine: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Since Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force with this intervention in mind the United States has moved to forward positioning, the establishment of a huge permanent military presence in the region, including a number of multi-billion dollar bases in Iraq, huge fortified cities with all the comforts of home, fast food places, video stores, and car rental agencies for the soldiers who garrison the empire along “the arc of instability.” All of this takes place in territories which coincide with the parts of the Global South where oil is found. That the official rationale is now the war on terrorism in place of anticommunism is secondary to the continuation of the basic policy of world domination.