by PAUL L. ATWOOD
The Great Recession is the worst
economic crisis since the Great Depression and, like the aftermath of
Katrina, or the BP calamity, or the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan,
is a man-made disaster. Many signs point to worse tidings. Many of us
who live in this the most advanced capitalist country are indoctrinated
at an early age to believe our system is by far the most efficient and
best ever created, especially if we are affluent and live well. We tend
to believe it obeyed the laws of evolution toward ever higher form, more
or less as we imagine the human species itself. We go to lengths to
ignore the fact that our system began as the brainchild of a minority
that imposed its will by brute force against others who had good reason
to oppose it. It is impossible to separate our republican form of
government from our economic system. As former Secretary of State John
Hay put matters as far back as the 19th Century: “This is a
government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer.
It is government of corporations by corporations.” It has been the case
since the American Revolution, and remains the case, that the American
government has been owned and operated by the financial and corporate
elites and government policies, and most definitely foreign policy, are
largely their agendas set out for their interests. Bankers and immense
industrial corporations largely run the global show, backed by the
Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court, America’s gargantuan military
power and the connivance of corporate media.
As a culture we deliberately ignore the brutal genesis of American
capitalism, feeding ourselves Disney fantasies about religious freedom
etc. The origin of the modern American corporation is to be found in the
Plymouth and Virginia companies. Childish mythologies aside, these were
established as profit-making entities and to make their claim upon the
so-called New World these new enterprises required systematic plunder of
lands and resources from natives, and their virtual annihilation in the
original colonies, ethnic cleansing, cheap white labor in the form of
indentured servitude, and ultimately the importation of African slaves.
The American capitalist system was therefore premised at its outset by
murder and de facto aggression, and human bondage, the very sins for
which we condemn others today. Many of our early American heroes were
slaveholders and war mongers par excellence.
Some of us are old enough to remember when we condemned the
communists for their “slave societies,” believing that our own slavery
was somehow an aberration instead of the absolute prerequisite to
establish today’s American way of life. Our system’s continued success
still requires these critical factors. We still have slaves but now we
don’t have to see them. They toil on plantations, mines and factories
hidden away in far continents, victims of centuries of western plunder,
today camouflaged as “globalism.” We employ terms like
“neo-colonialism” but pretend this term does not apply to us. What else
was Cuba before Castro but an American satrapy? What else South Vietnam,
South Korea, Dominican Republic, Iran before 1979, Philippines,
Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and many others? Why else has the US
invaded Iraq and Afghanistan but to try to secure the world’s remaining
second largest deposit of oil and to acquire oil and natural gas from
Central Asia in the very backyards of our rivals China and Russia? As
Edward Said asked, “if the principal product of Iraq were broccoli would
the U.S. be in Iraq?”
Victims of our wars are dismissed under the Orwellian rubric of
“collateral damage” committed accidently in the “fog of war.” While our
government now goes to some lengths to ensure that the worst of such
crimes are committed by proxies wherever possible, when all else fails
we send in our own armed forces. As reports from Iraq and now
Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia show daily, our pilotless
predators wreak a terrible slaughter on civilians. Our Army and Marine
Corps do not exist to protect and defend our shores but to enter other
nations and force them to our will.
We Americans hide from such uncomfortable facts largely by ignoring
them, believing the lies we are told, or by fantasizing that we are a
new chosen people, or the redeemers of a benighted world. We have
constructed a mass delusion that our way of life represents the most
advanced civilization in human existence despite the fact that its
perpetuation has required the deaths quite literally of many millions as
it took shape, the wholesale violation of the very values we claim, and
the destruction of the very resources and environment that made the
“American way of life” possible in the first place.
Any trust in this system is really a kind of fundamentalism; many
want to believe that all of this was ordered on high, perhaps encoded in
our genes at the very dawn of humanity, its inevitability impressed in
the Book of Time.
As in all fundamentalist faiths we have created a set of myths about
why we go to war and these myths center on the falsehood that we do so
to protect and defend noble values, and principles, and our superior way
of life; never for the reasons others wage war, such as
lebensraum,
or to seize resources, or to prevent others from exercising their
‘right’ to self-determination should that impede our “interests.”
In American public culture enemies have always been presented as
aggressors against an intrinsically peace loving people who take up the
sword only, ONLY, because our antagonists have left us no alternative.
Thus, it is always the other who bears the opprobrium for anything the
US has done in the name of national “defense.” Think, say, of the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the carpet bombing of South
Vietnam, or the more recent destruction of Fallujah where white
phosphorus, a chemical banned under international law, and depleted
uranium was used on civilians to awful effect causing a plague of
cancers. All of these were brought on by the iniquities of our enemies,
or so we claim…
Yet not a single war in American history has at bottom NOT been one
of choice. And we never go to war against any nation capable of wreaking
havoc on us. No, we ravage only those who lie helpless before us. The
American way of war has been hailed culturally as “exceptional” and
humane and just and necessary for the defense of profound human values
and ideals, and thus a model for the rest of humanity…but the truth
stands naked in the neo-colonies.
This has been especially true since the US assumed ownership of the
Western capitalist system in 1945 and has used armed violence against
many nations, either overtly or covertly, to expand it to the entire
world, thereby building new roads so to speak, all leading to our New
Rome.
In these almost innumerable wars, interventions, covert ops,
assassinations etc. since the end of World War II the US has killed
millions in places too numerous to list here, all of course in the name
of progress and humanity.
The American empire that most Americans are persuaded does NOT exist
began as an outpost of British imperialism, and now occupies the
dominant position among the nations of our planet. One of the American
goals of WWII was to knock Britain from its perch… to play Rome to
Britain’s Athens as it were. Today American armed forces are in at least
170 of the 192 nations comprising the United Nations, and American
ships, aircraft and satellites are deployed to every corner of the
terrasphere, stratosphere,
ionosphere, and outer space. The reach of American empire is a quantum
leap in power beyond anything ever seen on planet earth.
Empire by definition is one core nation living at the expense of many
others. Clearly, in terms of the distribution of wealth and resources,
mal-distributed as they are domestically, most roads today lead to the
United States. Yet a “perfect storm” of merging crises is gathering
force that has every possibility to undo the American imperial project
and, indeed, prove catastrophic for human civilization across the globe.
Empire, and the American neo-empire today, has always relied at
bottom on armed force and that in turn has always been dependent on
advantages in the technology of war. Since at least the turn of the 19
th
Century, when the emergence of modern capitalism fostered the
Industrial Revolution, military and economic advantage has required
access to ever greater quantities of energy. To a significant extent
both World Wars were global imperial competitions for the control of
oil. Until 1945 the US was self-sufficient in energy but used so much
petroleum supplying its war machine and those of the United Kingdom and
Soviet Union, that in order to maintain our enormously bloated way of
life we became dependent on oil in other nations.
Since then the
American armed juggernaut has been deployed often, if not primarily, to
protect access to petroleum in other people’s countries, to fuel our
army, navy and air force, to safeguard the trading routes and shipping
lanes to transport the black gold, all for the benefit of American
living standards.
Our swollen way life is inconceivable without oil, and other
hydrocarbons. Yet, the absolute reliance on the substances is slowly but
indisputably poisoning and suffocating the very systems they enabled to
arise, and the day draws near when the Age of Oil will end because of
declining reserves and increasing costs.
Consider Peak Oil. A concerned geologist at Columbia named Hubbert
began to worry about how long oil would last and he predicted that
American production would peak about 1973. He was correct. Since 1859
the US has used half of its oil and now the other half will be consumed
in the next 50 years, though it will undoubtedly be so expensive well
before that many will have to choose between heat and food. He also
predicted global oil production to peak about now and most analysts
agree that his prediction is correct.
Americans have always relied upon ingenuity and technological fixes
to solve problems but in this case the likelihood that hydrogen,
biofuels, solar or cold fusion will ever replace petroleum and natural
gas is slim. The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal but reverting to that
fuel will entail other collateral damage. Some, like James Lovelock,
argue that nuclear power could save the advanced nations from total
collapse but opposition to that is widespread especially after the
events in Japan last spring.
Thus, intensifying competition for access to fossil energy reserves
is inexorably leading to increasing armed conflict, and, ironically, the
armies in conflict will not be capable of combat without the very
energy they are fighting to protect, thereby hastening the disappearance
of this energy source, and therefore exacerbating the very problems
that in truth cannot be resolved by war. A case in point is the fact
that American and NATO forces in Afghanistan now consume a million
gallons of fuel per day!
The release of carbon and other byproducts of burning coal, oil, and
gas has altered the world’s ocean and atmospheric systems, while the
industrial processes have also ravaged landscapes, rivers, overturned
settled ways of life, and polluted cities. The net result is
increasingly catastrophic climate change, just as climate scientists
have predicted, leading to intensifying social problems like drought,
floods, famine, increased disease, and the mass migration of
populations. All of these are sure to lead, in turn, to more armed
violence globally, and will unless a massive shift in consciousness
takes place with an equal commitment to change.
While there are numerous Cassandra voices prophesying these outcomes
the real issue before us is whether we have the will to see and take the
necessary action before it is too late.
President Obama was elected primarily on the basis of his promise to
end the war in Iraq. Is anyone fooled by his withdrawal that is not a
withdrawal? And what of the uncounted but very numerous cohorts of
“contractors,” like Blackwater/Xe, many of whom are highly paid former
Special Forces operatives with “trigger time” who will employ their
martial skills while remaining in Iraq? These privatized troops cost far
more than the pay scale for regular troops.
For what other purpose will
these mercenaries remain than to ensure that this long coveted, yet
incipient neo-colony remains in the American orbit and provides its only
natural resource?
One of the first measures undertaken by the Bush Administration was
to create a National Energy Policy Development Group headed by the chief
spokesman of the oil industry, one Richard Cheney. No access to their
records or discussions has ever been allowed but their actions surely
indicate that the energy chief executives are mightily aware of Peak
Oil. Their policy? Not conservation; no crash program of alternative
energy sources, no commitment to work with the international community
for peaceful solution. NO! The policy is clearly to invade other
countries and seize their energy reserves and/or the means to transport
them. For all President Obama’s rhetoric there really is no Plan B.
The U.S.-NATO induced civil war in Libya has been won by rebels
opposed to the ousted and now departed Gaddaffi. The rationale provided
by the United Nations and Obama was that a “no fly zone’ was necessary
to prevent the slaughter of Libyan civilians and that would be the limit
of American intervention. The 7-month long bombardment of Libya’s
cities resulted in a massive humanitarian catastrophe, the very outcome
the intervention was supposed to prevent.
It is clear that even before this intervention was announced to the
public the U.S already had CIA and Special Forces operatives on the
ground in Eastern Libya. The intelligence analysis institute
STRATFOR published
a map of foreign oil concessions in Libya. The vast bulk are in Eastern
Libya, now liberated from Gaddaffi’s grasp and soon to be made more
profitably available to Western energy conglomerates. As South Carolina
Senator Lindsay Graham put it nakedly
“Let’s get in on the ground.
There is a lot of money to be made in the future in Libya.
Lot of oil to
be produced. Let’s get on the ground and help the Libyan people
establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market
principles.” The “humanitarian” pretext stands naked in its
hypocrisy. No such intervention has been deemed necessary in Bahrain or
Yemen, or conspicuously, Saudi Arabia where repressive governments have
killed numerous civilians demonstrating against those governments for
the obvious reasons that these countries’ dictatorships cooperate with
the American agenda in the region.
President Obama was elected on the strength of his opposition to the
War in Iraq and his promise to end it. Yet in his recent speech
declaring the Iraq War at an end he asserted that the original purpose
was to disarm terrorists, the false claim made by his predecessor. Thus
Obama has adopted the very narrative of the Bush deceptions. Bear in
mind that Obama has always been in the camp of that section of the elite
who saw the invasion as a blow to a very specific international order
that would weaken the American position and overall agenda in the world.
Read his speeches made as a senator before his candidacy. He feared the
real American agenda to keep consuming the lion’s share of vital global
resources was endangered by Bush’s cowboy tactics, and could lead to
conflict with people who could do real damage, like Russia and China.
His actions as president show he is not morally opposed to bombing and
killing barefoot civilians who employ donkeys or camels as their mode of
transport. That has continued unabated at his command. He claims to
lose sleep over the deaths of American troops. At first he said that he
was serious about withdrawing from Afghanistan in July of 2011. Then the
date has been moved up to 2014, now it is 2024. At best Obama seems the
captive of the real government behind the scenes.
If you’ve never heard of Col. Fletcher Prouty that would not be an
accident. He testified before the United States Senate Select Committee
to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence
Activities, otherwise known as the Church Committee during the mid-1970s
that revealed, among other things, the CIA’s assassination squads and
its secret alliance with the Mafia. He blew minds with his description
of the Secret Government behind the scenes. Prouty was a distinguished
career military officer who in the last third of his career was deeply
involved in the so-called intelligence community. He was go-between for
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA,
and he reminds us that the CIA emerged directly from Wall Street at its
birth in 1947. Prouty was a consummate insider who spilled the beans.
At the time his remarkable book
The Secret Team was deep-sixed
by the very secret team he revealed. It has recently been re-published
by a small press and is available. Read it and learn how our
government’s foreign policy is really shaped and by whom and for what.
As Prouty shows, this intelligence, military, and “national security”
network is really a combine of those entities known popularly as High
Finance, the Military Industrial Complex, and Big Media.
Prouty emphasizes that this secret government behind the scenes is
not
a tiny cabal comprised of the Illuminati or Tri-lateral Commission or
Bilderbergers, or Council on Foreign Relations though they do play
roles. Rather, each faction of the Financial-Military-Industrial-
Intelligence-Congressional-Media Complex has self-interests, large-scale
benefits, and its future existence to protect. No one is initiated into
these agencies unless vetted very carefully, and that would be
especially true of party nominations for president. While disputes arise
between factions and can be intense, on rock bottom interests, like
access to energy reserves and control of resources and markets, and on
maintaining the dollar as the world reserve currency, each collaborates
with the others in symbiotic and synergistic relationships. The clearest
example is the war (Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Iran, Somalia,
Yemen, Libya and Venezuela are essentially the same war!). Virtually all
factions of the Secret Government support it, if for somewhat different
reasons.
An example is the recent revelation that the Federal Reserve Bank
printed
40 billion dollars and sent it to Iraq in 2003 where most of it
promptly disappeared. This action clearly indicates that the nation’s
chief bankers were part of the broad conspiracy among the
behind-the-scene elites to invade Iraq, for conspiracy it was since Iraq
had nothing to do with the events of 9-11, as the Bush Administration
claimed. Masquerading as a government agency the Fed is really the nerve
center of a consortium of the nation’s largest and most important
banks. Fed officials acted in secrecy as always. Why they acted as they
did should be thoroughly analyzed and revealed.
This Secret Team has certainly never served the people, though it
claims to do so as our national defense team (against enemies it
creates!). For at least the last century its members have come to
believe the president is its servant and most definitely not the other
way around. As even ultra-conservative spokesman George Will said
publically on a Sunday talk show: America has always been ruled by its
aristocracy. It has never been about democracy but about which section
of the elite will rule at any given time. Or as Noam Chomsky avers:
There is only one political party, the Corporate party, with two
separate wings.
Of course this Secret Government’s chieftains, no matter their past
history, believe themselves to be omniscient and infallible. To take
just the current crisis, the CIA itself fostered the rise of Islamic
extremism during the Cold War because it believed this force would
obstruct communism and prevent Arab and Muslim nationalism from
achieving independence of western control, especially over oil. The CIA
actually fostered Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran as the strategic answer to
Iranian communists; as well as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to thwart
Nasserism, or Arab nationalism; and the mujahideen in Afghanistan who
morphed into the Taliban and al Qaeda. As the CIA itself said the
eruption of Islamic militancy in opposition to the hand that fed it was
“Blowback” of the first magnitude. When the Carter Administration
national security chief, and current background adviser to Obama,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, armed the Mujahideen in 1988 in order precisely to
draw in Soviet troops, Brzezinski infamously declared:
“That secret
operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the
Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?… I wrote to
President Carter: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its
Vietnam War’…What is more important to the history of the world? The
Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred up Moslems or
the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Stirred up Moslems indeed!
President Obama said clearly during his campaign that he would focus
on Afghanistan in order to prevent the return of the Taliban and al
Qaeda, thereby enhance American national security, and ensure that
another 9-11 could never be planned and orchestrated from that country.
We know now of a serious split between al Qaeda and the Taliban prior to
9-11 because of the latter’s fear of American retaliation. We know,
also, that the Taliban have no desire to attack the United States
itself, only those Americans on Afghan soil. American actions are
clearly destabilizing Pakistan, thereby portending a far greater threat
in terms of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. So what is the United States
REALLY seeking to accomplish in Afghanistan? Again, the claim of a
“humane” intent is preposterous. American actions in both Afghanistan
and Pakistan, especially attacks by pilotless drones that kill numerous
civilian by-standers, do more for Al Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s
recruiting than anything done by themselves.
If Bob Woodward’s recent book,
Obama’s War, is to be
believed the president desires to withdraw from Afghanistan but is being
thwarted at every turn by the military, the CIA and even Hillary
Clinton. I’m sure that Obama, having been cultivated and financed by
major financial corporations still wishes to gain American access to the
energy reserves of central Asia but the issue is whether that goal will
be utterly compromised by policies based on raw force. It appears that
the devotees of military solution are winning that argument but it is a
doomed prospect and one that is fraught with danger.
When the Red Army finally left Afghanistan in the early 90s that
tragic place descended into civil war while the US washed its bloody
hands and walked away. Even so, as the Taliban came to dominate and as
it committed terrible atrocities like public beheadings, and stonings of
women, the CIA, Enron, and Unocal continued to negotiate with these
extremists for a pipeline to carry oil and natural gas through
Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean. If the Taliban were to
regain power over all of Afghanistan and offer a guarantee for the
pipeline, I’m quite sure the US would crawl right back into bed with
them no matter their brutality with no shame and excuses aplenty for
public consumption, just as was the case in the 1990s. But given the
damage wrought by US armed intervention today a deal with the Taliban is
probably all but impossible, and the US will never be able to impose
its own puppet able to guarantee the original US goal.
The real issue facing the so-called “advanced” nations and now China,
India and the Asian tigers is that cheap oil is running out. Extracting
oil will become ever more difficult and expensive and at some future
point will be so costly that it will cause essentially a collapse
of globalism with real depression here in the US. The fact that oil
commerce is denominated in dollars while the value of the dollar
steadily declines also presages a future in which the dollar may be
toppled as the world currency, thus leading to widespread inflation and
certain critical shortages of basics.
Widespread suffering will be endemic, unless an alternative source of
energy is found able to sustain our way of life. But that is extremely
unlikely. Coal and natural gas can compensate to some degree but since
our luxurious and wasteful way of life is based on oil and since we see
our many profligate luxuries as necessities, the industries that support
them will fail, and that will lead to mass unemployment, cold winters
indoors and the absence of air-conditioning in summer, not to mention
starvation in what we like to think of as the “backward” nations, and
hunger here since our supermarket cornucopia requires hydrocarbon for
fertilizers and pesticides. Miracle cures like bio-fuels and hydrogen
are wishful thinking. Nuclear power could maintain the electrical grid
but the recent meltdown in Japan may make that hope insurmountable
despite Obama’s continuing support for a nuclear renaissance. Green
technologies are unlikely to fill the void on time to avert the falling
economic and political dominoes, if ever.
The US government’s real energy policy up to now has been to support
energy corporations to exploit oil as usual and gain control over such
reservoirs still existing. Congress is the creature of oil and other
hydrocarbon corporations and their financiers…largely to protect their
profit margins, and there is no plan for the day when the Age of Oil
ends with a crash. Again natural gas and coal can maintain some of the
richer nations at a much lower standard of living but this will result
in widespread social upheaval leading to more international tension…not
to mention an intensification of global warming
American foreign policy is premised today on garnering as much
control over shrinking energy resources as possible…and to protect this
access strategically. The various military commands are deployed
primarily for this reason. Note that a new military command with
responsibility for Africa has been created. The opportunity to create
new military bases for AFRICOM is one of the prime reasons the U.S. is
now in Libya. Note the recent incursion of American “advisors’ into
Uganda and Sudan. Nigeria now provides a third of American needs, and
Angola and other smaller nations have reservoirs that are targets for
U.S. control. Obviously our attempt to gain control of the lion’s share
of Middle East oil and especially of oil and natural gas in the Caspian
and Central Asian regions will bring us into serious conflict with those
nations that see these as their back yard – namely China and Russia and
India and Pakistan. Imagine our response if China were to inject
150,000 troops into Mexico, the number two supplier of our domestic
needs, or Venezuela, with the clear intention of siphoning these
reserves to themselves?
Al Qaeda does not constitute an “existential threat” to the US and
most real terrorist threats can be dealt with by police methods as the
last decade has shown. It is well known in Washington but not among the
public that the Taliban told al Qaeda not to attack the US from
Afghanistan before 9-11. The fact that al Qaeda did so created a break
between the two groups. The Afghan Taliban itself cannot threaten the
US, and has never declared any intention to do so. But when Americans
kill Muslims in Muslim lands we do far more to create terrorists than
anything al Qaeda could do on its own. Meanwhile, attacks on Pakistan
have promoted a separate Pakistani Taliban, and that faction has vowed
to wreak vengeance on America, though its capacity to do so remains
limited. The Pakistani Taliban, coupled with American air assaults,
could destabilize Pakistan, and perhaps foster a takeover by Islamic
fundamentalist junior officers. Recall that Pakistan possesses nuclear
weapons.
Meanwhile, the public is frightened and off balance and paying
through the nose for endless deployments. None of this four trillion
dollar war (as Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, and Harvard professor
Linda Bilmes now estimate) has been paid. Our children, and
grandchildren, if they are lucky to have a future worthy of the name,
will spend their working lives paying off these debts at jobs that won’t
reflect degrees in higher education. Meanwhile, the various elements
of the secret team are currently reaping the benefits of deficit
spending and the national debt and they feel sure that eventually the
real price will be paid by those who sacrifice their lives and by
taxpayers forced ever more into bankruptcy, foreclosure and
unemployment.
The current wars will fail to achieve their goals. Premised as they
are on lies they are in fact crimes against the peoples of the region,
crimes intended to take advantage of their weaknesses and
reward American energy and financial corporations and secondarily we
citizens of the empire who insist on maintaining a failing way of life.
It is the same ancient game of beggar our neighbors to advantage
ourselves. In neither Iraq nor Afghanistan will the US achieve control
of shrinking energy reserves for essentially the same reason it could
not control Vietnam, the very war waged upon their peoples ostensibly to
“liberate” them recruits more opponents. Moreover, the attempt to do so
will result ever more tensions with the Muslim world and the other
nations that need energy too.
In other words, the global climate is heating up in more ways than
one. The conditions for another global war are present, and let us not
ignore the fact that the last one was waged with toys compared to the
present.
President Obama has said that he wants to see a “nuclear free Middle
East. That would require the nuclear disarmament of Israel. Yet Obama
goes along with the pretense of all his predecessors and refuses to
acknowledge that Israel has these Weapons of Mass Destruction. If,
indeed Iran is building nuclear weapons why wouldn’t it given the fear
of Israel’s, or of America’s in the Persian Gulf, of Russia’s to the
north, of Pakistan’s to the east? A world in which some nations declare
their entitlement to such horrific weapons is a world in which many
others tremble and come to reason that their only protection lies in
possessing such themselves.
As international tensions rise over
shrinking resources, and the ravages of climate change, the more likely a
hair trigger mentality will arise. Hiroshima was the handwriting on the
wall. As these demonic weapons increase sooner or later they will be
used.
That is, unless the American people force our policies toward sanity,
and come to focus on what our rhetoric has claimed we stand for all
along.
Congressman Barney Frank has stated that the current economic crisis
could be resolved by simply reducing the size and mission of the
military. To be sure, the U.S. could defend itself against any
existential threat with a tenth of our current military budget,. But the
real threats perceived by elites are to their control of resources and
markets. Such a redirection of resources could ameliorate economic
crisis significantly but only for a time. The issue still remains the
energy future, especially depletion and the effects of discharging
hydrocarbon effluents into the atmosphere in the first place, and the
growing likelihood of spreading violence. By all measures the American
government and the public appear intent to hang on to our way of life no
matter the consequences. That way of life is inherently profligate and
unsustainable. We have altered the climate to the extent that ravaging
events like the recent floods in Pakistan, vast forest fires in Russia,
Hurricane Katrina, water shortages, and desertification are mere
warnings. The worse all such conditions become the more social and
political instability with severe danger of armed violence.
Our policies in the future must center on a crash program of
conservation of energy, even if this means draconian limits imposed by
law such as smaller more fuel efficient vehicles, and heating devices,
and restrictions on air-conditioning and banning plastic containers etc.
Both the nuclear power and coal industries are ramping up pressure
since they know that natural gas, which at present provides most
electricity, is also depleting and we need to educate people to be aware
of what will happen without secure electricity. Simultaneously we need a
Manhattan Project “cubed” and focused on alternative energy. Above all
the crying need is for international cooperation in conservation, for
cooperation into research into alternative energy sources, and mutual
disarmament treaties and agreements to avoid conflict over shrinking
resources. The alternative is the worsening probability of a third
global war. Yet at present we have only Plan A: Armed intervention.
Alternatives can occur ONLY if the public awakens to the coming
storm. We cannot depend on the corporate media to educate us; they are
allied with their major clients, not the public, and they are
deliberately withholding bad news for fear of stampeding the stock
markets into panic. We must get the word out ourselves and make it clear
that we will not accept or cooperate with business as usual from
Congress or the presidency. That will have to mean more militancy
throughout this nation than seen since the 1960s, or really even the
1930s. Unfortunately I fear this will require even deeper crisis before
we begin to awaken to the danger ahead.
Bibliography
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society Publishers, 2003) Following
the U.S. declaration of a “war on terror,” Washington hawks were quick
to label Iraq part of an “axis of evil.” After a tense build-up, in
March 2003 the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, purportedly to
protect Western publics from weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But was
this the real reason, or simply a convenient pretext to veil a covert
agenda? Ahmed shows that economic considerations prompted US-UK to
invade Iraq. The US has become vulnerable to energy shocks with domestic
production unable to cope with increasing demand. This has led to
occasional blackouts in places like California. Prior to Iraq war
America’s oil inventories fell to the lowest level since 1975 with the
country on the verge of drawing oil from ‘Strategic Petroleum Reserve.’
Iraq under Saddam Hussein was becoming what author says a ‘ swing
producer.’ In other words he was turning oil tap on and off whenever
Baghdad felt that such a policy was suiting its interests. Hussein even
contemplated removing Iraqi oil from the market for extended periods of
time which would have sent crude oil prices soaring.
Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (NY, Metropolitan Books, 2006) In
an effort to thwart the spread of communism, the U.S. has
supported–even organized and funded–Islamic fundamentalist groups, a
policy that has come back to haunt post-cold war geopolitics. Drawing on
archival sources and interviews with policymakers and foreign-service
officials, Dreyfuss traces this ultimately misguided approach from
support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s, the Ayatollah
Khomeini in Iran, the ultra-orthodox Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and
Hamas and Hezbollah to jihads in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden.
Fearful of the appeal of communism, the U.S. saw the rise of a religious
Right as a counterbalance. Despite the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the
declared U.S. war on terrorism in Iraq, Dreyfuss notes continued U.S.
support for Iraq’s Islamic Right. He cites parallels between the
cultural forces that have promoted the religious Right in the U.S and
the Middle East and notes that support from wealthy donors, the
emergence of powerful figures, and politically convenient alliances have
contributed to Middle Eastern hostilities toward the U.S.
William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (London, Pluto Press, 2004) This
book is a gripping account of the murky world of the international oil
industry and its role in world politics. Scandals about oil are familiar
to most of us. From George W. Bush’s election victory to the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, US politics and oil enjoy a controversially close
relationship. The US economy relies upon the cheap and unlimited supply
of this single fuel. William Engdahl takes the reader through a history
of the oil industry’s grip on the world economy. His revelations are
startling.
Zbigniew Brzezinski The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives (NY, Basic Books, 1998) President
Carter’s former National Security Adviser, and now an informal adviser
to President Obama, bragged that he had drawn the Soviets into their
debacle in Afghanistan: ”What is most important to the
history of the world? Some stirred up Moslems or the liberation of
Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” As his title
indicates the fate of nations and their peoples are relegated to game
theory. If America is to play the game of geo-strategic chess who are
the pawns?
Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society Publishers, 2005) The
world is about to run out of cheap oil and change dramatically. Within
the next few years, global production will peak. Thereafter, even if
industrial societies begin to switch to alternative energy sources, they
will have less net energy each year to do all the work essential to the
survival of complex societies. We are entering a new era, as different
from the industrial era as the latter was from medieval times… Heinberg
places this momentous transition in historical context, showing how
industrialism arose from the harnessing of fossil fuels, how competition
to control access to oil shaped the geopolitics of the twentieth
century and how contention for dwindling energy resources in the
twenty-first century will lead to resource wars in the Middle East,
Central Asia and South America…he also recommends a “managed collapse”
that might make way for a slower-paced, low-energy, sustainable society
in the future.
Michael Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet (NY, Holt, 2009) Looking at the “new international energy order,” author and journalist Klare (Resource Wars)
finds America’s “sole superpower” status falling to the increasing
influence of “petro-superpowers” like Russia and “Chindia.” Klare
identifies and analyzes the major players as well as the playing field,
positing armed conflict and environmental disaster in the balance.
Currently in the lead is emerging energy superpower Russia, which has
gained “immense geopolitical influence” selling oil and natural gas to
Europe and Asia; the rapidly-developing economies of China and India
follow. Klare also warns of the danger of a new cold-war environment.
James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil etc. (NY, Grove Press, 2005) It
used to be thought that only environmentalists and paranoids warned
about the world running out of oil and the future it could bring:
crashing economies, resource wars, social breakdown, agony at the
pump…Americas dependence on oil is too pervasive to undo
quickly…meanwhile we’ll have our hands full dealing with soaring
temperatures, rising sea levels and mega-droughts brought on by global
climate change. (The Washington Post).
James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (New York, Basic Books, 2010) Presents
evidence of a dire future for our planet. The controversial originator
of Gaia theory (which views Earth as a self-regulating, evolving system
made of organisms, the surface, the ocean and the atmosphere with the
goal always to be as favorable for contemporary life as possible)
proposes an even more inconvenient truth than Al Gore’s. The eminent
91-year-old British scientist challenges the scientific consensus of the
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is too
late to reverse global warming, he says, and we must accept that Earth
is moving inexorably into a long-term “hot state.” Most humans will die
off, and we must prepare havens. He points out that sea levels are
rising significantly faster than models predicted. Lovelock advocates
solar thermal and nuclear power as the best substitutes for burning
fossil fuels, and he suggests emergency global geo-engineering projects
that might cool the planet. But Lovelock also avows today’s ecological
efforts are futile. This is a somber prophecy written with an authority
that cannot be dismissed.
L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Skyhorse Publishing 2008) A
retired colonel of the U.S. Air Force, served as the chief of special
operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years. He
was directly in charge of the global system designed to provide military
support for the clandestine activities of the CIA. Prouty’s CIA exposé,
was first published in the 1970s, but virtually all copies of the book
disappeared upon distribution, purchased en masse by shady “private
buyers.” Certainly Prouty’s amazing allegations—that the U-2 Crisis of
1960 was fixed to sabotage Eisenhower-Khrushchev talks, and that
President Kennedy was assassinated to keep the U.S., and its defense
budget, in Vietnam—cannot have pleased the CIA.
Michael Ruppert, Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009) Ruppert
confronts the stark realities of a world of declining oil production,
poses vital questions of our complex oil-dependent supply chains and
challenges us-people and politician alike-to build a sustainable world
with what remains of our resources.–
Julian Darley, Author, High Noon for Natural Gas, Founder of Post Carbon Institute
Michael J. Sullivan, American Adventurism Abroad: Invasions, Interventions, and Regime Changes Since 1945 (Wiley Blackwell, 2007).
Traces US foreign policy from the late 1940s through the past six
years of America’s ‘war on terror,’ and examines the impact of its
repeated militaristic meddling into developing nations. Intended as a
reference tool for undergraduates the author estimates that at least 7.1
million human beings have died as a direct result of these U.S.
operations, most of them civilians.
