Hopeless

If Richard Wolffe is to be believed, my intuition about Obama's less than proactive approach to the oil spill was accurate. There is no day to seize. There is NOTHING anyone can do.

Critics have bashed President Obama for being slow to seize the political initiative in combating the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, now widely believed to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The White House has battled back, releasing a timeline of events showing that Obama was briefed—and deploying the Coast Guard—within 24 hours of the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

What has not been previously disclosed: The president was not only briefed on the real-time events of the spill, but also on just how bad it would be—and how hard it would be to plug the hole.

Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, told Obama at one of the earliest briefings in late April that the blowout would likely lead to an unprecedented environmental disaster, senior White House aides told The Daily Beast. Browner warned that capping a well at such depths had never been done before, and that they ought to expect an oil spill that would continue until a relief well was drilled in August, the aide said.

That early briefing on the scope of the spill—and enormous technical challenges involved in fixing it—might help explain the sense of fatalism that has infused Obama's team from the start.

Thomas Friedman: We're In Iraq For Oil

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers' Alliance.

In an unusually lucid column, former Iraq War enthusiast Thomas Friedman makes a plea for a responsible policy for military disengagement from Iraq. I'll go straight to the punch line:

You can’t be serious about getting out of Iraq if you’re not serious about getting off oil.

In other words, it's the oil stupid.

Friedman has a long history of talking out of both sides of his mouth on Iraq. (On many things actually.) And this is not the first time he's let the well-oiled cat slip out of the bag.

In the face of the failure of the government/media campaign to build mass support for a US invasion of Iraq, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman has felt obliged to come to the aid of the Bush war cabal by proposing a shift in its propaganda. Hence Friedman’s January 5 column headlined “A War for Oil?”

In this thoroughly cynical piece, Friedman concedes what is obvious to anyone who has followed the US military buildup against Iraq with any objectivity: Bush’s plan to invade the country is driven, above all, by a determination to seize control of Iraqi oil....

He continues: “Let’s cut the nonsense. The primary reason the Bush team is more focused on Saddam [than on North Korea] is because if he were to acquire weapons of mass destruction, it might give him the leverage he has long sought—not to attack us, but to extend his influence over the world’s largest source of oil, the Persian Gulf.”

Thus, having acknowledged that the US government is lying to the American people and the world, Friedman seeks to fashion a new justification for war against Iraq. It is not a matter of self-defense, or even countering something Iraq has done. Rather, the country must be attacked and occupied because the regime might—in the future—extend its influence over the world’s largest oil reserves.

Yet, in his relentless cheer-leading for the war he has since soured on, he offered up gems like this one:

The war in Iraq is the most important liberal, revolutionary US democracy- building project since the Marshall Plan. It is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad.

Friedman is one of those mind-meltingly wrong pundits who has managed to fail spectacularly upward. In "The Iraq Gamble," Jebediah Reed gets to the heart of his infuriating duplicity.

Re-reading Friedman's columns from the six months or so prior to the invasion of Iraq can induce vertigo. Unlike many of his hawkish colleagues, he grokked all the vital details of the situation....

So even a Webelo-grade logician knows where to go from here, right? You connect the dots and conclude that while it would be very nice to get rid of Saddam, it would also be stupid and dangerous.

But somehow he still managed to come out in favor of the war. And if the whole thing weren't so tragically misguided, his reasoning would be worth a chuckle. Says Friedman: "something in Mr. Bush's audacious shake of the dice appeals to me." A nice ballsy gamble of a war. Sure, it could throw the region into chaos, bankrupt this country, and dye the fertile crescent red with the blood of civilians; yet an audacious war is like a red lollipop—who isn't powerless to resist it?

Red lollipop's aside, Friedman's pitch was always a sucker's bet. The author of "The Lexus and the Olive Branch," has always known full well what this war was really about and why his imperialistic self supported it. He has known from the beginning that it comes down that unctuous substance which drives the economic engine of the world.

As Alien Abductee reported a few days ago, the Bush Administration's naked oil grab is reaching a crucial moment. As discussed here everything rides on getting the Iraqi Parliament to pass legislation which will open Iraq's oil reserves for exploitation by Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell. But the Iraqi's have been infuriating Bushco by dragging their heels on selling their souls. Their recalcitrance has been serious enough that Cheney was flown to the Mideast -- I'm assuming in some sort of portable hyperbaric chamber -- so that he could scold those shiftless Iraqis for threatening to take a summer break.

For all the wrangling and veto threats, our own congress looks to be safely on board with a bid to railroad the Iraqis into giving over the bulk of their oil wealth to the conglomerates.

The supplemental appropriation package requires the Iraqi government to meet a series of “benchmarks” President Bush established in his speech to the nation on January 10 (in which he made his case for the “surge”). Most of Mr. Bush’s benchmarks are designed to blame the victim, forcing the Iraqis to solve the problems George Bush himself created.

One of the President’s benchmarks, however, stands apart. This is how the President described it: “To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.” A seemingly decent, even noble concession. That’s all Mr. Bush said about that benchmark, but his brevity was gravely misleading, and it had to be intentional.

The Iraqi Parliament has before it today, in fact, a bill called the hydrocarbon law, and it does call for revenue sharing among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. For President Bush, this is a must-have law, and it is the only “benchmark” that truly matters to his Administration.

Yes, revenue sharing is there-essentially in fine print, essentially trivial. The bill is long and complex, it has been years in the making, and its primary purpose is transformational in scope: a radical and wholesale reconstruction-virtual privatization-of the currently nationalized Iraqi oil industry.

If passed, the law will make available to Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell about 4/5’s of the stupendous petroleum reserves in Iraq. That is the wretched goal of the Bush Administration, and in his speech setting the revenue-sharing “benchmark” Mr. Bush consciously avoided any hint of it.

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist," (Keyser Soze) and the Bush Administration has as cleverly sustained the illusion that oil is not the underlying reason for pouring the American blood and treasure into the Iraqi sand. With prestidigitators like Thomas Friedman acting as front men, it wasn't too hard to pull off.

Once Again, It's the Oil Stupid

A tip of the hat to Chris Floyd for making my point and providing the proof. Anyone who thinks we are in Iraq for reasons other than oil isn't paying attention. While pundits scratch their heads; baffled by a President unconcerned with public opinion, rebellious generals, and defections in his own party, Bush and puppet-master Cheney just keep marching forward with their agenda. It's a kind of anti-politics, which must sound to seasoned politicos like a whistle only dogs can hear.

It looks like political suicide but it's simply the Bush Administration fulfilling the purpose for which it was installed, no matter what the peasantry thinks. Bush will have his "surge." Tony Snow has made very clear that no political process can prevent him.

Snow held out hope that the Democrats would come to their senses about opposing this but admitted it could even be a battle royal. But what about calls for the Democrats to halt the build up by denying funding? Snow admitted congress had funding control but also pointed out that the president could ultimately do what he wants. "You know, Congress has the power of the purse," Snow said, then added: "The President has the ability to exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way."

The reason is not mysterious. It's not just political tone-deafness, delusional thinking, or unbridled arrogance. It's that America's will is not invested in the ambitions of the oil barons at the helm. Floyd puts it into perspective.

The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and on-line. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reports.

As per the Independent, big oil, whose front men are still squatting in the White House, is about to achieve the objective for which this war was launched.

Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The Independent takes pains to point out that the warmongers have claimed from the beginning that this war was not being fought over oil.

Proposing the parliamentary motion for war in 2003, Tony Blair denied the "false claim" that "we want to seize" Iraq's oil revenues. He said the money should be put into a trust fund, run by the UN, for the Iraqis, but the idea came to nothing. The same year Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, said: "It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil."

Supporters say the provision allowing oil companies to take up to 75 per cent of the profits will last until they have recouped initial drilling costs. After that, they would collect about 20 per cent of all profits, according to industry sources in Iraq. But that is twice the industry average for such deals. [emphases added]

So now that the country lies prostrate -- war-torn, factionalized, economically crippled, with shattered infrastructure -- it's big oil to the rescue. They will help the fragile Iraqi government to harvest their oil, and for the favor they will take 3 quarters of the profit until they say they have recouped their costs. Such a deal!

I'm reminded of Tony Soprano explaining to his childhood friend why he's gutted his business in order to extract payment for gambling debts. Like the scorpion who's convinced the frog to take him across the river, he's stung him to death before ever reaching the shore. "It's my nature," he explains. The fictive version of the Ramsey Outdoor Store is lost and so it appears is the real-world Iraq. But not without providing enrichment for a criminal enterprise.

It's the Oil Stupid

Robert Scheer writes that Ike was right and the Iraq war is not about oil, but about the military-industrial complex. Ike was right but Scheer's logic is flawed. His premise explains the plan for endless war and would be more appropriately applied the deceptively named "war on terror." But why Iraq? We could be fighting anywhere on trumped up reasons just to keep lining the pockets of war profiteers. Afghanistan is perfect terrain for bankrupting a national treasury. Just ask the former Soviet Union. It makes a very decent sink hole for our tax dollars and could be far more easily justified to the American people. Yet Bushco moved heaven and earth to convince us that we needed to leave Afghanistan on the back burner and open yet another theater in Iraq. It has been argued by many that our efforts in Afghanistan are collapsing, largely unnoticed by television cameras, because we shifted our focus and our dollars to Iraq. I don't know that the fight in Afghanistan was winnable. Again, the former Soviet Union might be a good place to start looking for that answer.

Make no mistake. We are in Iraq for oil. Not that there aren't numerous, intertwining agendas at work, including the interests of those military contractors and the many Congresspeople who live in their pockets. But "Occam's razor" dictates that it comes down to oil. Put the money aside for a moment and follow the logic. Iraq is sitting on the second largest proven oil reserve in the world and it's sweet crude. Both President and Vice are oil whores. They and most of their cronies -- including the much abused James Baker who helped place the dauphin on the throne -- owe the bulk of their fortunes to the oil industry. Yet pundit after pundit acts as if it's somehow too obvious to be true that oil is the key motivator for an administration that has been hell bent on getting into Iraq on any dubious rationale it could sell, since before it was even elected. Scheer's is just the latest attempt at pretzel logic to dissuade the reader from the most simple and obvious deduction.

The Dumbening

Just when you thought it was safe to be an American again... You know I almost didn't write this entry; being as it is a rumination on the decline of American civilization. I've been so heady since the election. We have turned a corner as a nation and perhaps put the brakes on our steady slide towards cultural entropy. Tuesday night I felt relief... even optimism. Then I read this:

As gas prices have plunged since topping $3 a gallon this summer, a startling shift is taking place in the car market. Hybrid sales are slowing and SUV sales are speeding up.

Come again?

That’s right: the megawatt popularity of hybrids is dimming and Americans are rediscovering their favorite automotive guilty pleasure, gas-guzzling SUVs.

Yes. Like a coop of chickens slipping into blissful slumber when their heads have been forced under their wings, Americans giddy on an artificial, transparently political, dip in gas prices, jump behind the wheels of those hideous, resource gobbling, behemoths. SUVs exemplify everything that is wrong and stupid in this country; the gluttony, the ignorance of history, the lack of foresight, the love of style over substance, the persistent belief that perception is reality... For instance, ask the average SUV driver "why?!" and he will usually say "safety." But SUVs are not safer. They are more likely to roll over, they lack a number of the safety features of smaller vehicles, and they are far more dangerous to everyone else on the road. Could there be a more perfect symbol of the mentality that has pushed this country to the precipice? As long as I feel safe who cares if I actually am safe or if I pose a mortal threat to everyone else; how many little cars I crush or how many tiny nations are turned to rubble in my pursuit of an illusive sense of security.

I've been pondering "the dumbening" of America for some time, but particularly over the last couple of months. Throughout our search for a new home and a difficult move, it was glaringly apparent to me that we are a nation in decline. As the housing boom goes bust, the country is littered with prefab catastrophes waiting to be bought. We saw listing after listing of cosmetically adorable lemons. Not only are they made of particle board and spit, almost to house they are designed with air conditioning/forced air, gas heat units. Cheap for the builder, expensive and inefficient for the home owner. Heat Rises. Cold falls. Does anyone not know this? Having experienced the wonders of forced air in a couple of rentals -- that delicious combination of dry, baked air, and the total lack of actual warmth -- and paid the attendant energy bills, I turned my nose up at 99.9 percent of the listings. I explained to our baffled realtor that to buy a house with a forced air system, just as energy prices are going through the roof, is a little like saying, "Hey gas is $3 a gallon. Time to buy an SUV." The joke fell flat and after reading Newsweek, it's pretty clear why. People keep buying their cardboard dream houses with the heating vents in the ceiling, and they keep buying SUVs.

We found our smart, efficient little bi-level. We love the house, but the move was horrifying. Why? The dumbening. Before moving we hit all the wickets, including setting up our new phone service. But even after two emails confirming that our phone would be turned on the day we moved in, it was not to be. So I called Verizon (on my cell, obviously) and was told that they had been unable to process our order. It took over half an hour and 3 different customer service people to arrive at the reason. They didn't have our old phone number. Why they didn't have it I still don't know. Why they didn't contact us to get the necessary information I still don't know. I do know that even after providing it so they could process the order, they still could not turn on our phone for another 3 weeks. I received a number of mutually contradictory reasons for this, but my favorite was "the weather." I guess it's never rained in the North East before and they were just flummoxed by it.

When I rented my first solo apartment over 15 years ago, a single phone call had my account set up and my phone turned on the day I moved in. During those three weeks while I parceled out my anytime minutes like canteen water in a desert, I had plenty of time to contemplate how it could possibly be that in the "age of communication" getting phone service has gone from nearly effortless to an herculean feat. I had no phone, no internet... and no television. My Sony lies in pieces in our new garage. Why? The dumbening. How else to explain professional movers so idiotic that they piled my husband's weights on top of it. More remarkable, they apparently delivered it into storage as a crushed pile of rubble and left it there without comment, signing off on the shipment like everything was cool. The loss and damage of this move was the worst I've experienced, and thanks to the wonders of bureaucracy it will be years before I see even partial recompense, but that I guess is not a terribly new phenomenon.

What is new, and I why I think America is dumbening is that no one seems to notice or care anymore that everything works like crap. What amazed me more than anything about my laborious conversations with Verizon was the seeming astonishment of the customer service reps that I was, how say, dissatisfied, at being forced to wait for 3 weeks for phone service through no fault of my own. Gone are the days when the customer was always right and sales people cared about your business. Today's service industries are typified by a prevailing sense that they are entitled to your money and a customer's unhappiness with either product or service is his problem.

It almost doesn't surprise me that Verizon reps seemed shocked by my lack of complacency. Complacency has become the hallmark of American culture. Now, I'm as thrilled as anyone that Dems have taken back both houses of Congress and it truly gives me hope, but look at just how bad things had to get for the tide to turn. Torture scandals, the loss of habeas corpus, unauthorized wiretaps, open cronyism, an illegal war; this litany of criminal offenses goes on. But what finally turned public opinion en masse? The lesson for today is that if you want to create massive political shift in this country, a President publicly shredding the Constitution is not enough. What you really need are some good sex scandals. Not just any sex scandals either. They have to be GAY sex scandals.

We have pulled ourselves back from the precipice and I have hope again. Hope that the self-loathing-gay-Republican-led zeitgeist will translate into a broader reawakening of an American populace grown far too comfortable in an environment of utter wrongness. For against this backdrop of unprecedented government excess and criminality, what I see ambling about town is a people whose biggest concern is which $2,500, flat panel television to dig themselves deeper into debt with. Because as credit card interest surpasses usury rates, you surely cannot have enough debt. (I'm not kidding. Since that beacon of Democratic ethics Joe Biden green-lighted bankruptcy reform, I'm waiting for the revised customer agreement notice that tells me that they can break my legs if I'm a day late on payment.) It's worth it because every American home should have a Fahrenheit 451-style "wall." And if cable rates are rising several times the rate of inflation, so be it. What's important is that we all know what's happening on American Idol.

So, yes, I'm optimistic. But with a Democratic Party that seems hell bent on snatching defeat from the jaws of an historic victory, I still have... concerns. I worry that we are a nation grown fat and happy on a literal and metaphorical diet of empty calories. Couch potatoes staring dumbly at ever larger, more crisply defined, images of pundits telling us what we think and feel, until our critical thinking muscles have gone utterly flaccid. Last Tuesday was a reminder of what can happen when the public flexes. We have a choice now between continued vigilance and a consumer culture more intoxicating than the waters of Lethe.

Fineman and the Beginner's Mind

One almost has to admire the Zen-like simplicity of Howard Fineman's mind. Surely each moment is new for him. He seems blissfully unencumbered by the travails of history, or even, of recent months. Fineman lives completely in the "now" of each dawning news event.

If you want a date to mark the beginning of the end of the Bush era in American life, you may as well make it this one: May 25, 2006. The Enron jury in Houston didn't just put the wood to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. The jurors took a chainsaw to the moral claims of the Texas-based corporate culture that had helped fuel the rise to power of President George W. Bush.

Those of us more attached to the events of the last few years would be more likely to mark the decline of the presidency by things like a war of escalating tragedy three years after Bush declared "Mission Accomplished," the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, a speech on immigration that managed to offend Republicans and Democrats alike, the collapse of his grand vision for converting Social Security to private accounts, the squandering of international good will after 9/11 to the extent that America is now reviled around the world, the David Copperfield-like magic trick that turned an inherited surplus into the largest projected deficit in US history which continues to be fed by endless tax cuts for the wealthy, etc. etc. etc... Americans have retained knowledge of these occurrences even if Fineman hasn't and the demonstration of their impact is the death spiral of Bush's poll numbers, which have wallowed in the 30s for months.

Even though Fineman has chosen in the present moment to mark Bushco's demise by the happy event of Lay and Skilling's convictions, he wishes into the cornfield the enmeshment of this Administration with the machinations of Enron. Says Fineman:

First, caveats. There's no evidence that the president or anyone in his entourage knew about or benefited financially from the house of cards that Lay and Skilling built—and that a federal jury now has found to have been an edifice of fraud.

The Bush Crowd was old school in the energy bidness and viewed Lay & Co. as hustling parvenus who had no real interest in finding and pumping oil—what real men in Texas do.

Most of what Enron concocted was assembled in the go-go Clinton years. Bush's idea of an oilman was his old Bible-study buddy, the upright, clean-as-a-whistle Don Evans. As the Enron scam was falling apart, Lay frantically sought help from Evans—by then the Commerce secretary—among others (including Democrats such as former Clinton Treasury secretary Robert Rubin). He got nowhere, and had the chutzpah to be bitter about it.

It must be lovely to enjoy a mind so untroubled by facts. For a record more grounded in reality, Robert Parry has a memory span longer than the single beat of a hummingbird's wing.

Contrary to the official story, the Bush administration did almost whatever it could to help Enron as the company desperately sought cash to cover mounting losses from its off-the-books partnerships, a bookkeeping black hole that was sucking Enron toward bankruptcy and scandal.

As Enron's crisis worsened through the first nine months of Bush's presidency, Lay secured Bush's help in three key ways:

--Bush personally joined the fight against imposing caps on the soaring price of electricity in California at a time when Enron was artificially driving up the price of electricity by manipulating supply. Bush's resistance to price caps bought Enron extra time to gouge hundreds of millions of dollars from California's consumers.

--Bush granted Lay broad influence over the development of the administration's energy policies, including the choice of key regulators to oversee Enron's businesses. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was replaced in 2001 after he began to delve into Enron's complex derivative-financing schemes.

--Bush had his NSC staff organize that administration-wide task force to pressure India to accommodate Enron's interests in selling the Dabhol generating plant for as much as $2.3 billion.

That's just the overview. For an article rich in detail on an effort on Dabhol that reached all the way the Vice President's office, Bush's complicity in extorting California, and Lay's involvement in the shaping of Federal energy policy, read the entire article here.