Bulletin N°453

 

Object: ON THE CULT OF EFFICIENCY AND TOP-DOWN STATE CORPORATISM.


24 June 2010
Grenoble, France

Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The American sociologist Gordon Zahn in his book, German Catholics and Hitler's Wars, A Study in Social Control, analyzes the mechanisms of social control which were employed in Nazi Germany to assure conformity and maximum efficiency in support of state policies, domestic and foreign. At the beginning of this work he observes that the subject of social control creates defensive reactions and denials that serve to discourage deeper investigation. But Zahn insists that by examining "the social-control dimension" in a given society --by differentiating the "formal and the informal social controls" which trigger what he identifies as "external and internal pressures"-- one can develop an approach capable of revealing the machinations that influence the "value-selection dimension" of people in everyday life. His subject is life in Nazi Germany before and during the war, but the same method of social analysis, the author suggests, can and should be applied to all nations at war.

The sociologist must always be prepared to encounter some resistance when he begins to talk in terms of a "social control" dimension to human behavior. There is a tendency to regard such a concept as somehow deflating or demeaning human dignity by making man a less "free" or "deliberate" or "responsible" being, that he has the power to deliberate and to make responsible decisions concerning alternative possibilities of action --or choose not to act at all-- if we nevertheless recognize that the decision he does make will involve a rational assessment of the total situation and thereby reflect the direct and indirect social pressures to which he is subjected as a member of society. The everyday experiences of each of us offers evidence enough. Many a time we do something we would prefer not doing, or avoid doing something we should like to do, simply in response to social controls.

Our problem here is to identify and describe the means that were employed to influence and direct the individual German Catholic. Most immediately obvious , of course, are the formal controls exercised by the totalitarian regime; and here much of the work has already been done, there being a wealth of literature available describing the laws, edicts, and administrative directives which were used to control the behavior of the German citizen (or, failing this, to populate the prisons and concentration camps of the Third Reich). Thus, full compliance with the laws and directives aimed at waging the war and bringing it to a successful conclusion was a universal requirement in Nazi Germany. Refusal to comply --or even failure to show sufficient enthusiasm-- carried the severest of sanctions, culminating in the death penalty. The fact that one Catholic who did openly refuse to serve in what he believed to be an unjust war did escape the executioner's axe certainly does not disprove the general effectiveness of these social controls.

The informal social controls were similarly mobilized to induce full participation in all phases of the war and may well have been even more effective an influence upon the individual's behavior. In times of national emergency, the full force of public opinion is employed to reward the man who does his part (or, preferably, even more than his part) and to punish the man who would seek to evade or refuse to bear what is socially defined as his share of the common burdens. The man who would have refused to take part in Nazi Germany's military undertakings not only risked certain death but also knew that, except for those nearest and dearest to him (and often enough even this exception might not hold), such a death would earn him only public dishonor and disgrace in the eyes of all who chanced to take note of it. 

. . .  men who might otherwise have made such a refusal to serve were deterred by the knowledge that the true grounds for their execution might never be known, that hey would most probably be tried, convicted, and executed under some general charge of "treason" or "defeatism" --or, worse still, under a fabricated charge of homosexuality or some similar morals offense. The utter hopelessness of the situation, the complete inability to make one's protest known, accounted in great part . . . for the collapse of the German peace movement and the total absence of any effective pacifist opposition to Hitler's wars.(pp.12-13)

But, continues the author, one may go beyond this . . . .

For even if the actual grounds for the execution were made known, the man who refused to do his "duty" would have still been viewed as an object of public scorn and disapproval.
 
The unwillingness to suffer shame that would live on after one's death, or the emotional state of despair arising from a sense of the utter hopelessness of making an effective individual stand against the totally mobilized Nazi state, shows the operation of internal controls. Other psychological states acting as internal controls would include fear (for oneself or for those dependent upon oneself, or both), anger (provoked by the enemy air raids against Germany or the enemy's insistence upon unconditional surrender), pride (in the past greatness of Germany and her military accomplishments) together with some resentment arising from the memory of defeat and its consequences. Involved in the latter three are what might be termed "the myths men kill by." In this context the word "myth" is not used in the customary literary sense but rather in the sociological sense; . . .  it refers to "the by or for." Among such myths would be included the following: Volk, Vaterland, Heimat, Heldentod, and a great number of other terms, the mere mention of which would provoke an emotional response in the individual. These myths form major components of the total complex of patriotic and nationalistic values underlying the commitment to the war . . . in connection with the value-selection frame of reference. Here it is enough to note that they would constitute powerful internal controls upon the individual for whom they held such value-impregnated meaning.
 
The major function of the external controls is to trigger the internal controls into effective operation. For this purpose all the media of communication, education, and entertainment are put to the service of the war-making authority. There is, therefore, no doubt that the Nazi rulers were able to exploit their highly organized and thoroughly effective propaganda machine in such as way as to surround the German citizen with constant and inescapable reminders of the part he had to play in the war. The posters, the massed flags, the military songs and parades --even so effective a tough as Hitler's melodramatic appearance in his old army coat and his vow not to cease wearing it until the war was won-- in short, every mechanism and appeal suited to the task were brought to bear upon the German citizen in such as way that they were certain to stimulate the intended patterns of response which he would then experience as the manifestation of an inner imperative.  . . .
 
The present study focuses its attention upon the social controls which produced conformity to the demands of the Hitler war effort in Germany, but he same analytical framework could be employed with respect to American participation in World War II and to that of all the nations involved in that conflict.(pp. 13-16)

Zahn concludes his discussion of the Nazi system of social control by explaining how many Germans freed themselves for the "horns of a terrible moral dilemma" of having to choose between the conflicting value systems of traditional German humanism and the Fascist crusade for a "new world order". They simply did not face the choice: instead of fighting for Hitler, his aims and his evil regime, they saw themselves fighting for Volk and Vaterland; they willingly accepted their duty to defend their Heimat against advancing enemy troops. In short, they convinced themselves that it was a "just war" for which they were being asked to sacrifice their lives. These feelings were entirely compatible with nationalism, that state of mind in which "the supreme loyalty of the individual is felt to be due the national state."  The internal controls represented a hierarchy of values by which individuals gave supreme value to the nation, not as a group inhabiting a definable territory and sharing "common recognitions and aspirations," but rather as a model of chauvinistic extremism: "my country, right or wrong." This tendency to place "a particularly excessive, exaggerated and exclusive emphasis on the value of the nation at the expense of other values" was the product of ubiquitous external controls that all but eliminated any alternative system of values. As a result, self-delusion prevailed and ultimately self-destruction came in the form of militarism and not resistance.

In his final analysis, the author returns to the question of nationalism and its effect upon moral judgement. On the question of access to facts which might influence "value selection," he acknowledges that the Nazi control of propaganda and information channels restricted the availability of facts which enhanced the social control of the Party. Ordinary Germans were effectively manipulated by very efficient censorship. The lack of information, however, was not the only means of control.

[N]ationalism limits the access to fact in still another way by blocking the individuals's receptivity to facts which might otherwise cause him to question the justice of his nation's cause. This takes the form of a selective perception in which one sees the atrocities perpetrated by the enemy but is blind to the same acts performed by the military forces of his won nation. It is manifested, too, in a refusal to accept purported facts which reflect adversely upon the nation and its cause.

It is the essence of a totalitarian sociopolitical order that all lesser groups and institutions, as well as the individual citizen, be reduced so far as is possible to mere agencies or tools of the monolithic nation-state. Family, school, youth groups, trade associations, labor unions --all find their responsibilities and their privileges spelled out for them entirely in terms of the part they can play in producing and forming the members of society according to whatever pattern may best suit the current needs of objectives of the ruling authority. Total regimentation of thought and action is made possible by the nation-state's mastery over the channels of information and communication to such degree that even the innermost sanctity and integrity of the human personality is denied and contravened. The totalitarian state brooks no competition; it admits of no limits to its own prerogatives.

This means that in such a sociopolitical order all the lesser organizations and institutions are forced to become channels through which the state can control their members in such a way as to assure hegemony. The family, the school, the youth group, the trade association, the labor union, and all similar agencies continue to exercise discipline and control over their members-- but only to the extent that such discipline and control are permitted or delegated to it by the nation-state in furthering what it defines as its own paramount interests. In this formulation, the religious institution, too, finds itself forced to act as a agency of social control exerted on behalf of the totalitarian secular power.(pp.200-202)

Professor Gordon Zahn allows that real material relationships are more complex than the above theoretical abstractions capture. There were ambiguities and "imperfections" even in Nazi Germany. The totalitarian ideal was not 100% efficient. Nevertheless, he insists, many people "inadvertently served the purposes of the Nazi regime" while posturing with superficial oppositions which had no consequences other than to legitimize the political power of the Fascist oligarchy.


In the 6 items below CEIMSA readers may discover their own insights into the "psychology of indifference" and the "politics of Silence" that it perpetuates, until some outside force intervenes and sends political culture into motion.

Item A. is a discussion of Noam Chomsky's warning of a "elite power" and a dysfunctional ruling class (a literary déjà vu?), by the author and political activist Fred Branfman.

Item B. is an article by Naomi Klein, first published in the UK Guardian, on the "hole in the world" that keeps spewing toxic substances into the Gulf of Mexico.

Item C. is an article sent to us by NYU professor Mark Miller on oil spills and oil geysers from the waters of the Earth.

Item D. is an article from Truth Out, on the recent US Supreme Court ruling in the interests of Monsanto, by Mike Ludwig.

Item E. is a Democracy Now! broadcast on Grace Lee Boggs and the annual US Social Forum now meeting in Detroit, Michigan.

Item F. is an article by Scott Peterson from The Christian Science Monitor on Israeli warmongering against Iran.


And finally, we invite CEIMSA readers to view with us the interviews with Academy Award-winning filmaker Oliver Stone and author Tariq Ali on their new documentary film :

Latin America's Political Upheaval in "South of the Border"

Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Director of Research
Universit Stendhal Grenoble 3
http://www.ceimsa.org/


____________________
A.
from Fred Branfman :
Date: 23 June 2010
Subject: Chomsky and Orwell revisited.
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet

A Warning From Noam Chomsky on the Threat of Elites

by Fred Branfman

 

It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that
you carried on the human heritage. ... [Doublethink is] to hold
simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them
to be contradictory and believing in both, to repudiate morality
while laying claim to it. ... [Continuous] war involves very small
numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists. The fighting
takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average
man can only guess at
.
--George Orwell, "1984"

The treatment of the] hapless race of native Americans, which we
are exterminating with such merciless and perfidiouscruelty, [is]
among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will
one day bring [it] to judgment.

--John Quincy Adams
(Both cited in Noam Chomsky's new book, "Hopes and Prospects")

Noam Chomsky's description of the dangers posed by U.S. elites' "Imperial Mentality" was recently given a boost in credibility by a surprising source-Bill Clinton. As America's economy, foreign policy and politics continue to unravel, it is clear that this mentality and the system it has created will produce an increasing number of victims in the years to come. Clinton startlingly testified to that effect on March 10 to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

Since 1981 the United States has followed a policy until the last year or so, when we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food so thank goodness they can lead directly into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did, nobody else.

Clinton is to be praised for being the first U.S. president to take personal responsibility for impoverishing an entire nation rather than ignoring his misdeeds or falsely blaming local U.S.-imposed regimes. But his confession also means that his embrace of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and NAFTA "neo-liberalization" destroyed the lives of many more millions well beyond Haiti, as U.S. support for heavily subsidized U.S. agribusiness damaged local agricultural economies throughout Latin America and beyond. This led to mass migration into urban slums and destitution, as well as increased emigration to the U.S.-which then led Clinton to militarize the border in 1994-and thus accelerated the "illegal immigration" issue that so poisons U.S. politics today.

Clinton might also have added that he and other U.S. leaders imposed such policies by force, installing military dictators and vicious police and paramilitary forces. Chomsky reports in "Hopes and Prospects" that in Haiti, semiofficial thugs empowered by a U.S.-supported coup murdered 8,000 people and raped 35,000 women in 2004 and 2005 alone, while a tiny local elite reaps most of the benefits from U.S. policies.

Clinton's testimony reminded me of one of my visits with Chomsky, back in 1988, when, after talking for an hour or so, he smiled and said he had to stop to get back to writing about the children of Haiti.

I was struck both by his concern for forgotten Haitians and because his comment so recalled my experience with him in 1970 as he spent a week researching U.S. war-making in Laos. I had taken dozens of journalists, peace activists, diplomats, experts and others out to camps of refugees who had fled U.S. saturation bombing. Chomsky was one of only two who wept openly upon learning how these innocent villagers had seen their beloved grandmothers burned alive, their children slowly suffocated, their spouses cut to ribbons, during five years of merciless, pitiless and illegal U.S. bombing for which U.S. leaders would have been executed had international law protecting civilians in wartime been applied to their actions. It was obvious that he was above all driven by a deep feeling for the world's victims, those he calls the "unpeople" in his new book. No U.S. policymakers I knew in Laos, nor the many I have met since, have shared such concerns.

Bill Clinton's testimony also reminded me of the accuracy of Chomsky writings on Haiti-before, during and after Clinton's reign-as summed up in "Hopes and Prospects":

The Clinton doctrine, presented to Congress, was that the US is entitled to resort to "unilateral use of military power" to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources." In Haiti, Clinton [imposed] harsh neoliberal rules that were guaranteed to crush what remained of the economy, as they did.

Clinton would have a cleaner conscience today had he listened to Chomsky then. Many more Americans may also benefit by heeding Chomsky today, as U.S. elites' callousness toward unpeople abroad is now affecting increasing numbers of their fellow citizens back home. Nothing symbolizes this more than investment bankers tricking countless Americans out of their life savings by luring them into buying homes they could not afford that were then foreclosed on.

In doing so, Wall Streeters exhibited what Chomsky describes as a Western elite imperial mentality, dating back to 1491 (his first chapter is entitled "Year 514: Globalization for Whom?"). Only this time instead of impoverishing Haitians or Chileans, it was Americans who were afflicted by a "system" of "fuck the poor" (in the words of successful Wall Street trader Steve Eisman). [See <http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/fred_branfman_on_the_big_short_20100507/>Branfman's review of "The Big Short" in Truthdig.]

The many Americans whose lives have been damaged by financiers' single-minded focus on short-term profits at the expense of everyone else are only a harbinger of what is to come. Financial elites remain in charge, as evidenced by recent "financial reform" legislation that does not even reinstate the Glass-Steagall law separating investment and commercial banking. New York magazine has described how Obama officials blocked even inadequate reforms, let alone the stronger proposals from Nouriel Roubini, one of the few major economists to foresee the economic crash. Former International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson tells us "our banking structure remains-and the incentive and belief system that lies behind reckless risk-taking has only become more dangerous," thus setting the stage for an even worse crash than that of 2008. And, as U.S. competitiveness continues to decline and it cannot afford its endless wars without drastically cutting social spending, countless more Americans will find themselves paying the price for U.S. elites' imperial mentality.

This mentality described by Chomsky includes the following elements: (1) a single-minded focus on maximizing short-term elite economic and military interests; (2) a refusal to let other societies follow their own paths if perceived to conflict with these interests; (3) continual and massive violations of international law; (4) indifference to human life, particularly in the Third World; (5) massive violation of the U.S. Constitution, especially through the executive branch's seizure of the power to wage unilateral and unaccountable war in every corner of the globe; (6) indifference to U.S. and international public opinion, which is often more progressive and humane than that of the elites; (7) a remarkable ability to "manufacture consent," aided by the mass media and intellectuals, that has blinded most Americans to the truth of what their leaders actually do in their names.

To pick but one example of the dozens Chomsky provides: U.S. elite opinion unanimously celebrated the 1990 Nicaraguan election defeating the Sandinistas as a "victory for fair play," to quote a March 10 New York Times Op-Ed article. But Chomsky reminds us of Time Magazine's March 12 report on just what this "fair play" meant:

In Nicaragua, Washington stumbled on an arm's-length policy: wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves. The past ten years have savaged the country's civilians, not its comandantes. The impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua was a harrowing way to give the National Opposition Union (U.N.O.) a winning issue.

Wrecking a Third World country's economy and savaging its civilians are such standard U.S. elite behavior that it is barely noticed, let alone criticized in the mass media or halls of Congress. Perhaps the most dramatic example of America's imperial mentality, however, is the answer to the following question: Which nation's leaders since 1945 have murdered, maimed, made homeless, tortured, assassinated and impoverished the largest number of civilians who were not its own citizens?

I have asked this question of Americans in every walk of life since I discovered the bombing of Laos in 1969. It's a simple matter of fact, not involving judgments of right and wrong, and I remain astonished at how most answer "the Russians," "the Chinese," or just have no idea that their leaders have killed more noncitizen civilians than the rest of the world's leaders combined since 1945.

The bodies of Indochinese and Iraqi civilians for which U.S. leaders bear responsibility would, if laid end to end, stretch from New York to California. These would include the huge proportion of civilians among the 3.4 million Vietnamese that Robert McNamara estimated were killed in Vietnam (over 90 percent by U.S. firepower), Laotian and Cambodian civilians felled by the largest per capita and most indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in history, the 1 million to 1.5 million Iraqis estimated by the U.N.'s Denis Halliday to have died from Clinton's sanctions "designed," in Halliday's words, "to kill civilians, particularly children," and the hundreds of thousands killed as a result of the Bush invasion. The total number of civilians killed, wounded, made homeless and impoverished by U.S. leaders or local regimes owing their power to U.S. guns and aid-in not only Indochina and Iraq but Mexico, El Salvador, Israel/Palestine, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Egypt, Iran, South Africa, Chile, East Timor, Haiti, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Jamaica, the Philippines and Indonesia-is in the tens of millions.

One can debate whether U.S. military action against Vietnamese communists, Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Saddam Hussein or the Taliban were or are warranted. But there can be no possible justification for waging war that winds up killing and impoverishing much of the civilian population, on whose behalf U.S. leaders claim to fight, in violation of the laws of war and elemental human decency. Nor can anyone who truly believes in democracy support allowing a handful of U.S. leaders to savage civilians abroad without even informing, let alone seeking permission of, Congress and the American people.

The incredible fact that U.S. leaders could inflict such carnage without their citizenry knowing is the single most dramatic example of another of Chomsky's major themes: "manufactured consent," produced by (1) constant iterations of U.S leaders' idealism and desire to promote freedom, supported by the mass media (e.g. when Washington Post columnist David Ignatius called Paul Wolfowitz Bush's "idealist-in-chief," even as their invasion was laying waste to Iraq), (2) massive media coverage of the misdeeds of the latest U.S. opponents, and (3) ignoring our own, often far greater, crimes.

Most Americans were fully and appropriately made aware of Taliban assassinations of their opponents, for example. But there was no public discussion of guilt, let alone punishment for those responsible, when Gen. Stanley McChrystal implicitly admitted in the summer of 2009 that the U.S. military had been killing countless Afghan civilians for the previous eight years as a result of air and artillery fire aimed at population centers. Nor are most Americans aware that McChrystal was rewarded with his present post, being in charge of the Afghanistan war, for conducting five years of assassination and torture as head of the top-secret Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq.

Chomsky is especially concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general, and U.S.-Israel treatment of the people of Gaza in particular. He notes that Hamas is regularly attacked in the U.S. press, but there has not been comparable attention given to the U.S./Israeli decision to inflict daily collective punishment on the people of Gaza since they democratically elected Hamas in January 2006. He quotes Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1950, which states that "no protected person may be punished for an offence he or she had not personally committed" and reports how Israel, fully supported by U.S. leaders, continues to inflict precisely such punishment on the people of Gaza by destroying their economy, limiting their access to food and water, denying them health care, restricting their movement, and engaging in kidnapping, assassination and bombing-a program he calls "imposing massive suffering on the animals in the Gaza prison."

Perhaps the most basic reason Americans should read Chomsky's work today, therefore, is simply to understand the real world in which they live, that which is obscured by their leaders and the U.S. mass media. The purpose of "Newspeak" in the novel "1984" was to eliminate whole categories of thought. In our time, one such category is the fact that "U.S. leaders regularly and illegally kill enormous numbers of foreign innocent civilians." The elimination of this thought-category in our cognitive framework understandably led President George W. Bush to explain 9/11 by saying "they hate our freedom"-a logical conclusion to someone ignorant of the trail of blood left by his predecessors. As Chomsky notes, however, "historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon ... because it lays the groundwork for crimes ahead" and, it should be noted, increased dangers of terrorism against Americans.

This increased threat of terrorism, which, Chomsky reports, citing the New American Foundation, has increased sevenfold because of the invasion of Iraq, is a second area in which Americans are today increasingly threatened by their leaders' imperial mentality. As many experts noted in the wake of the Times Square bombing attempt, Barack Obama's vast increase in drone strikes in Pakistan-and <http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6450KT20100506> relaxing targeting rules to include "low-level fighters whose identities may not be known"-has further increased the danger of terrorist attacks in the U.S.

As the elites' imperial mentality comes home, Americans are also increasingly threatened by climate change-produced by a system that statutorily requires elites to pursue short-term profit for their firms, even at the cost of destroying the biosphere their own children and grandchildren will depend on for life itself.

In today's system, Chomsky explains, to "stay in the game," CEOs must maximize their own short-term profits while treating the costs of doing so as "externalities" to be paid by the taxpayer. In the case of climate change, however, "externalities happen to be the fate of the species." An imperial mentality which has primarily threatened the Third World in the past, in other words, has now become a threat to the survival of not only America but all civilization as we know it.

Chomsky thus argues that human survival requires changing the system, not merely periodically replacing those running it. His "Hopes and Prospects" covers President Obama's first year in office and the many "hopes" that he has so profoundly disappointed because of a system that virtually requires "doublethink" of its leaders. Obama was undoubtedly as sincere when he spoke of "our fidelity to the rule of law and our Constitution" at West Point on May 22 as he was six months earlier when he secretly approved <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/world/25military.html> Gen. David Petraeus' proposal for a "broad expansion of clandestine military activity" worldwide that "does not require the president's approval or regular reports to Congress."

Obama also presumably holds two contradictory opinions when, as Chomsky reports, he continues Bush policies he so recently criticized and promised to change: extending executive power to indefinitely imprison people without trial, torture (though by allied rather than U.S. torturers), indiscriminate killing (particularly by escalating in northern Pakistan, as described in Truthdig, <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091009_unintended_consequences_in_nuclear_pakistan/> "Unintended Consequences in Nuclear Pakistan"), and supporting Israeli policies precluding a two-state solution. Chomsky also observes that Obama could not have been elected in the first place, given his greater need for campaign funds from above than fidelity to his voters below, had he not been prepared to continue these imperial policies.

Chomsky's explanation of the American system's imperial mentality also illuminates a seeming mystery: How could decent people like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama commit so much evil? Our concept of evil is shaped by such paranoid psychotics as Hitler, Stalin and Mao, who all hated their victims and openly lusted for power. We do not yet understand that in today's American system the problem we face is not so much inhumanity from the mad and evil as "ahumanity" from the sane and decent.

U.S. leaders have nothing against those they regularly kill and impoverish. On the contrary, they often exhibit compassion for them, as when Jimmy Carter supported human rights. But they are products of a system that is indifferent to the fate of the unpeople, whether in the shah's Iran, Somoza's Nicaragua, Suharto's Indonesia or the many other dictatorial regimes that enjoyed President Carter's support.

Chomsky denies the oft-heard charge that he is "anti-American," noting his criticism of the crimes of many other nations' leaders, and saying he focuses on U.S. leaders because, as a U.S. citizen, it is the government he can most affect; because it is the government that has done more harm than any other since 1945; and because the United States' behavior today poses so much danger to human survival. He might also add that there are so many others eager to catalog the crimes of America's enemies, yet relatively few Americans willing to document their own leaders' misdeeds.

At the moment, Chomsky's proposed solutions are politically unthinkable. As the American economy and polity continues to unravel and suffering mounts at home and abroad, however, a mass movement may arise that is capable of saving America and the world. If so, such a movement is likely to attempt solutions of the sort Chomsky proposes. Here are two out of a far larger number:

State capitalism for the many: The American Enterprise Institute's chief declared in a May 23 Washington Post Op-Ed that "America faces a new culture war," between "free enterprise" offering "rewards determined by market forces" and "European-style statism." "Hopes and Prospects" explains at some length, however, why this formulation is absurd. America's "free enterprise" system has always been based on massive government aid, from the Army building 19th century railroads, to the Pentagon's post-World War II role in building the Internet and Silicon Valley, to today's "rewards" to Wall Street and oil companies determined not by market forces, but those companies' political clout. America has been practicing "state capitalism" since the founding of the Republic, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future no matter which party is in office.

The real choice, Chomsky makes clear, is not free enterprise versus statism, but state capitalism for (A) the few or (B) the many. The latter would include breaking up the banks, a focus on job creation and safety net expansion where needed, single-payer health insurance, higher taxes on the wealthy, far lower military spending, public members on corporate boards, greater employee workplace control and, above all, a new public-private partnership to see America become a leader in a clean energy economic revolution.

A Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone and Two-State Solution in the Middle East: Chomsky proposes that rather than continuing to engage in senseless fighting and confronting Iran over nuclear weapons, U.S., Israeli, Arab and Iranian interests would be far better served by the U.S. using its enormous military and economic clout to create a Mideast nuclear weapons-free zone that Iran says it is willing to accept, and a comprehensive and fair Israeli-Palestinian settlement including Hamas' promised recognition of Israel and cessation of rocket attacks. A major benefit to the U.S. would be to reduce the threat of domestic terrorism. For only a comprehensive new policy that addresses the source of anti-U.S. hatred-U.S. war-making on civilians and support of corrupt and vicious local regimes-can reduce it.

Fifty years ago, Americans were told that the North Vietnamese communists were so evil that 55,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese had to die, and much of Vietnam had to be destroyed, in order to keep it "free." But for 20 years now, despite the triumph of the communists, Vietnam has been a normal trading partner of the United States and poses no threat to its neighbors. Could the Middle East also be normalized were U.S. leaders to use their enormous power to promote peace rather than war? Maybe, maybe not. But it is obvious that the risks of trying to do so are far less than the present dangers of nuclear proliferation, chaos in nuclear-armed Pakistan, Israel-Iran military confrontation and increasing support for anti-American terrorism within the 1.2 billion-strong Muslim world.

That Chomsky's sensible proposals are not seriously discussed is a measure of the ubiquity of U.S. elites' imperial mentality in mid-2010. Chomsky suggests that John Quincy Adams' fear of divine retribution to America for its cruelty to Native Americans is unfounded, and that "earthly judgment is nowhere in sight." Much of his work, however, suggests otherwise. A U.S. elite imperial mentality that once threatened mainly unpeople is today threatening America itself.

The fundamental tension throughout Chomsky's work is between his belief that organizing and popular movements offer hope of change and the overwhelming evidence he presents of elite power precluding such change. On the one hand, he writes that "Latin America, today, is the scene of some of the most exciting developments in the endless struggle for freedom and justice" as its nations improve their citizens' lives by extricating themselves from the neoliberal regime and elect leaders responsible to mass movements from below rather than financing from wealthy minorities above.

But on the other hand, his description of the stranglehold elites hold over both domestic and foreign policy offers little near-term hope for the kind of systemic changes he believes are needed to save the species. It is true that postwar America has not before faced the kind of economic and imperial decline that now awaits it, and this may produce possibilities for systemic change. But they are nowhere yet in sight.

I recently sat with Chomsky, an intellectually uncompromising but personally kind, gentle and mild-mannered man, in his kitchen discussing such new U.S. elite horrors as the trend toward "1984"-like automated warfare, when it suddenly hit me.

What is it like, I found myself thinking, to know more than any other human being on Earth about the state-sponsored lies to which Americans are so constantly subjected? What is it like to so feel in your bones, hour after hour, day after day, the pain of millions of "unpeople" suffering hunger, poverty and death caused by U.S. elites who today also threaten both their own nation and all humanity? And what is it like, even though your writings are published, to have their lessons ignored by society at large, as the killing continues and U.S. war-making "on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at" has now become permanent?

"Noam," I said, "I've just realized who you really represent to me. Do you remember how Winston Smith [the "1984" character] realized that his highest obligation to humanity and himself was just to try and remain sane, to somehow commit the truth to paper, and to hope against rational hope that somewhere, some time, future humans might come to understand and act on it? To me, at this point in time, you're Winston Smith."

I will never forget his reaction.

He just looked back at me.

And smiled sadly.

________________________

Fred Branfman, the editor of "Voices From the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War" (Harper & Row, 1972), exposed the U.S. secret air war in Laos while living there from 1967 to 1971 and went on to develop solar, educational and Information Age initiatives for California Gov. Jerry Brown and national policymakers.


___________
B.
from ZMag :
Date: 10 June 2010
Subject: Ecological disasters.
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet

Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world

by Naomi Klein

Everyone gathered for the town hall meeting had been repeatedly instructed to show civility to the gentlemen from BP and the federal government. These fine folks had made time in their busy schedules to come to a high school gymnasium on a Tuesday night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one of many coastal communities where brown poison was slithering through the marshes, part of what has come to be described as the largest environmental disaster in US history.

"Speak to others the way you would want to be spoken to," the chair of the meeting pleaded one last time before opening the floor for questions.

And for a while the crowd, mostly made up of fishing families, showed remarkable restraint. They listened patiently to Larry Thomas, a genial BP public relations flack, as he told them that he was committed to "doing better" to process their claims for lost revenue then passed all the details off to a markedly less friendly subcontractor. They heard out the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency as he informed them that, contrary to what they have read about the lack of testing and the product being banned in Britain, the chemical dispersant being sprayed on the oil in massive quantities was really perfectly safe.

But patience started running out by the third time Ed Stanton, a coast guard captain, took to the podium to reassure them that "the coast guard intends to make sure that BP cleans it up".

"Put it in writing!" someone shouted out. By now the air conditioning had shut itself off and the coolers of Budweiser were running low. A shrimper named Matt O'Brien approached the mic. "We don't need to hear this anymore," he declared, hands on hips. It didn't matter what assurances they were offered because, he explained, "we just don't trust you guys!" And with that, such a loud cheer rose up from the floor you'd have thought the Oilers (the unfortunately named school football team) had scored a touchdown.

The showdown was cathartic, if nothing else. For weeks residents had been subjected to a barrage of pep talks and extravagant promises coming from Washington, Houston and London. Every time they turned on their TVs, there was the BP boss, Tony Hayward, offering his solemn word that he would "make it right". Or else it was President Barack Obama expressing his absolute confidence that his administration would "leave the Gulf coast in better shape than it was before", that he was "making sure" it "comes back even stronger than it was before this crisis".

It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put them in intimate contact with the delicate chemistry of the wetlands, it also sounded completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once the oil coats the base of the marsh grass, as it had already done just a few miles from here, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off the surface of open water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for which the marsh is a spawning ground shrimp, crab, oysters and fin fish will be poisoned.

It was already happening. Earlier that day, I travelled through nearby marshes in a shallow water boat. Fish were jumping in waters encircled by white boom, the strips of thick cotton and mesh BP is using to soak up the oil. The circle of fouled material seemed to be tightening around the fish like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched atop a 2 metre (7ft) blade of oil-contaminated marsh grass. Death was creeping up the cane; the small bird may as well have been standing on a lit stick of dynamite.

And then there is the grass itself, or the Roseau cane, as the tall sharp blades are called. If oil seeps deeply enough into the marsh, it will not only kill the grass above ground but also the roots. Those roots are what hold the marsh together, keeping bright green land from collapsing into the Mississippi River delta and the Gulf of Mexico. So not only do places like Plaquemines Parish stand to lose their fisheries, but also much of the physical barrier that lessens the intensity of fierce storms like hurricane Katrina. Which could mean losing everything.

How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be "restored and made whole" as Obama's interior secretary has pledged to do? It's not at all clear that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that as much as a Valdez-worth of oil may be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis emerges from the 1991 Gulf war spill, when an estimated 11m barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf the largest spill ever. That oil entered the marshland and stayed there, burrowing deeper and deeper thanks to holes dug by crabs. It's not a perfect comparison, since so little clean-up was done, but according to a study conducted 12 years after the disaster, nearly 90% of the impacted muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still profoundly damaged.

 We do know this. Far from being "made whole," the Gulf coast, more than likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will be less alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy on the map will also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast's legendary culture will contract and wither. The fishing families up and down the coast do not just gather food, after all. They hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art and endangered languages much like the roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, the very ground on which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well aware of the limits of recovery. The company's Gulf of Mexico regional oil spill response plan specifically instructs officials not to make "promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal". Which is no doubt why its officials consistently favour folksy terms like "make it right".)

If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount of money not BP's recently pledged $20bn (13.5bn), not $100bn can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.

"Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don't know."

This Gulf coast crisis is about many things corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday's congressional testimony, Hayward said: "The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear" on the crisis, and that, "with the possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime." And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as "Pandora's well", they are like the men at the front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don't know.


BP's mission statement

In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans like indigenous people the world over believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate "the mother", including mining.

The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature's mysteries during the scientific revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in the 1623 De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum that nature is to be "put in constraint, moulded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man".

Those words may as well have been BP's corporate mission statement. Boldly inhabiting what the company called "the energy frontier", it dabbled in synthesising methane-producing microbes and announced that "a new area of investigation" would be geoengineering. And of course it bragged that, at its Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, it now had "the deepest well ever drilled by the oil and gas industry" as deep under the ocean floor as jets fly overhead.

Imagining and preparing for what would happen if these experiments in altering the building blocks of life and geology went wrong occupied precious little space in the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April, the company had no systems in place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not have even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to be activated on shore, a BP spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said: "I don't think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we're faced with now." Apparently, it "seemed inconceivable" that the blowout preventer would ever fail so why prepare?

This refusal to contemplate failure clearly came straight from the top. A year ago, Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University that he has a plaque on his desk that reads: "If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?" Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this was actually an accurate description of how BP and its competitors behaved in the real world. In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts grilled representatives from the top oil and gas companies on the revealing ways in which they had allocated resources. Over three years, they had spent "$39bn to explore for new oil and gas. Yet, the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention and spill response was a paltry $20m a year."

These priorities go a long way towards explaining why the initial exploration plan that BP submitted to the federal government for the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris. The phrase "little risk" appears five times. Even if there is a spill, BP confidently predicts that, thanks to "proven equipment and technology", adverse affects will be minimal. Presenting nature as a predictable and agreeable junior partner (or perhaps subcontractor), the report cheerfully explains that should a spill occur, "Currents and microbial degradation would remove the oil from the water column or dilute the constituents to background levels". The effects on fish, meanwhile, "would likely be sublethal" because of "the capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill [and] to metabolise hydrocarbons". (In BP's telling, rather than a dire threat, a spill emerges as an all-you-can-eat buffet for aquatic life.)

Best of all, should a major spill occur, there is, apparently, "little risk of contact or impact to the coastline" because of the company's projected speedy response (!) and "due to the distance [of the rig] to shore" about 48 miles (77km). This is the most astonishing claim of all. In a gulf that often sees winds of more than 70km an hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for the ocean's capacity to ebb and flow, surge and heave, that it did not think oil could make a paltry 77km trip. (Last week, a shard of the exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up on a beach in Florida, 306km away.)

None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awe-struck by the industry's four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. "It's better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way," she told the Senate energy committee just seven months ago.

Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, "in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty". By the time the infamous "Drill Baby Drill" Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.

Obama, eventually, gave in, as he invariably does. With cosmic bad timing, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, the president announced he would open up previously protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained. "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced." That wasn't enough for Sarah Palin, however, who sneered at the Obama administration's plans to conduct more studies before drilling in some areas. "My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death," she told the Southern Republican leadership conference in New Orleans, now just 11 days before the blowout. "Let's drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!" And there was much rejoicing.

In his congressional testimony, Hayward said: "We and the entire industry will learn from this terrible event." And one might well imagine that a catastrophe of this magnitude would indeed instil BP executives and the "Drill Now" crowd with a new sense of humility. There are, however, no signs that this is the case. The response to the disaster at the corporate and governmental levels has been rife with the precise brand of arrogance and overly sunny predictions that created the disaster in the first place.

The ocean is big, she can take it, we heard from Hayward in the early days. While spokesman John Curry insisted that hungry microbes would consume whatever oil was in the water system, because "nature has a way of helping the situation". But nature has not been playing along. The deep-sea gusher has bust out of all BP's top hats, containment domes, and junk shots. The ocean's winds and currents have made a mockery of the lightweight booms BP has laid out to absorb the oil. "We told them," said Byron Encalade, the president of the Louisiana Oysters Association. "The oil's gonna go over the booms or underneath the bottom." Indeed it did. The marine biologist Rick Steiner, who has been following the clean up closely, estimates that "70% or 80% of the booms are doing absolutely nothing at all".

And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants: more than 1.3m gallons dumped with the company's trademark "what could go wrong?" attitude. As the angry residents at the Plaquemines Parish town hall rightly point out, few tests had been conducted, and there is scant research about what this unprecedented amount of dispersed oil will do to marine life. Nor is there a way to clean up the toxic mixture of oil and chemicals below the surface. Yes, fast multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil but in the process they also absorb the water's oxygen, creating a whole new threat to marine life.

BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of oil-covered beaches and birds from escaping the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat whose captain asked, ""Y'all work for BP?" When we said no, the response in the open ocean was "You can't be here then". But of course these heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There is simply too much oil in too many places. "You cannot tell God's air where to flow and go, and you can't tell water where to flow and go," I was told by Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson she had learned from living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by 14 emission-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness spread from neighbour to neighbour.

Human limitation has been the one constant of this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing, nor when it will stop. The company's claim that it will complete relief wells by the end of August repeated by Obama in his Oval Office address is seen by many scientists as a bluff. The procedure is risky and could fail, and there is a real possibility that the oil could continue to leak for years.

The flow of denial shows no sign of abating either. Louisiana politicians indignantly oppose Obama's temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him of killing the one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism are in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that "no human endeavour is ever without risk", while Texas Republican congressman John Culberson described the disaster as a "statistical anomaly". By far the most sociopathic reaction, however, comes from veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks, we should pause in "wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld".


Make the bleeding stop

Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity's power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us. And thanks to BP's live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth's guts gush forth, in real time, 24 hours a day.

John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard politely refers to as "rainbow sheen", he observed what many had felt: "The Gulf seems to be bleeding." This imagery comes up again and again in conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an "oil spill" and instead says, "we are haemorrhaging". Others speak of the need to "make the bleeding stop". And I was personally struck, flying over the stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank with the US Coast Guard, that the swirling shapes the oil made in the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for air, eyes staring upwards, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.

And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.

The experience of following the oil's progress through the ecosystem is a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually radiates out in ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba then Europe. Next we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the Bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub everyone seems to have a stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75% of all migratory US waterfowl.

It's one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It's another to watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts the lesson like this: "The problem as BP has tragically and belatedly discovered is that nature as an active force cannot be so confined." Predictable outcomes are unusual within ecological systems, while "unpredictable, chaotic events [are] usual". And just in case we still didn't get it, a few days ago, a bolt of lightning struck a BP ship like an exclamation mark, forcing it to suspend its containment efforts. And don't even mention what a hurricane would do to BP's toxic soup.

There is, it must be stressed, something uniquely twisted about this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature's circulatory systems by poisoning them.

 In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U'wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, "the blood of Mother Earth". They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn't as much oil as it had previously thought.)

Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth "sacred" is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.

If we are absorbing this lesson at long last, the implications could be profound. Public support for increased offshore drilling is dropping precipitously, down 22% from the peak of the "Drill Now" frenzy. The issue is not dead, however. It is only a matter of time before the Obama administration announces that, thanks to ingenious new technology and tough new regulations, it is now perfectly safe to drill in the deep sea, even in the Arctic, where an under-ice clean up would be infinitely more complex than the one underway in the Gulf. But perhaps this time we won't be so easily reassured, so quick to gamble with the few remaining protected havens.

Same goes for geoengineering. As climate change negotiations wear on, we should be ready to hear more from Dr Steven Koonin, Obama's undersecretary of energy for science. He is one of the leading proponents of the idea that climate change can be combated with techno tricks like releasing sulphate and aluminium particles into the atmosphere and of course it's all perfectly safe, just like Disneyland! He also happens to be BP's former chief scientist, the man who just 15 months ago was still overseeing the technology behind BP's supposedly safe charge into deepwater drilling. Maybe this time we will opt not to let the good doctor experiment with the physics and chemistry of the Earth, and choose instead to reduce our consumption and shift to renewable energies that have the virtue that, when they fail, they fail small. As US comedian Bill Maher put it, "You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.

The most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward's "If you knew you could not fail" credo, the precautionary principle holds that "when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health" we tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can even get Hayward a new desk plaque to contemplate as he signs compensation cheques. "You act like you know, but you don't know."

_________________
Naomi Klein visited the Gulf coast with a film-crew from Fault Lines, a documentary programme hosted by Avi Lewis on al-Jazeera English Television. She was a consultant on the film.


__________________
C.
from Mark Crispin Miller :
Date: 18 June 2010
Subject: We are Nigeria.
http://markcrispinmiller.com

Big Oil - First Nigeria Then the World
http://agonist.org/firstnigeria
by Michael Collins

The big oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is not the first to threaten a people's way of life. Just ask the Ogoni people from Nigeria's oil rich central Niger Delta. Their experience over decades offers a model of things to come without serious changes in consumption and regulation.

Since the early 1960's, oil spilled from Shell pipelines has fouled their region. Food and fresh water sources vanished. Their economy collapsed. While Shell and the Nigerian elite reap their rewards, the people in the polluted oil regions live with steadily declining jobs, incomes, and living standards.
The amount of oil spilled in just this region during the 1970's far exceeds that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. The problem has been continuous since then. Most of it is still sitting there.

In some critical ways, oil exploration, pollution, and the reaction of Shell and the Nigerian government parallel the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe.
There is virtually no regulation of oil exploration and operations in Nigeria. Similarly, new deep water drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico were granted without environmental impact studies.

The government of Nigeria abandoned its sovereign obligations to protect the people by failing to take charge of clean up operations. In the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe, BP took the lead in repair efforts while the United States government accepted an oversight role.
The Nigerian oil industry ignores locals in hiring and contracting. BP uses locals as public relations props for its cleanup operations.
The Nigerian government makes blames oil companies for turning the country into 'World Oil Pollution Capitol', yet does little to stop the situation. The U.S. government is investigating criminal charges against BP while it allows BP control of the crime scene.
Nigerian and international press are chased off of the scene by Shell and the other oil giants just as BP chases away the media and citizens who try to document and report on the Gulf catastrophe.

The Nigerian government blames "rebels" for the oil spills.

The government tried and hanged those who resisted what economists call the Dutch Disease, Shell's ruinous impact in Nigeria's economy. There have been few demonstrations in the U.S. and no trials of protesters. However, federal whistleblowers who tried to warn the world of what we're seeing today were ignored.
They can't do that here. Can they?

It's happening here right now. Why think the BP catastrophe is the first and last of its kind. There are 4,000 active drilling platforms in the Gulf. BP isn't the only oil giant to make major mistakes.

Think of it as a lottery. This year it's BP. Next year it could be Exxon, Shell, or one of the smaller companies.
This deep water drilling foul-up threatens to turn large sections of the Gulf of Mexico into dead zones for decades. It will happen again.

How many dead zones can we tolerate?


Oil at Any Cost

The U.S. consumes 25% of the world's oil supplies. The breakneck pace of exploration and extraction
activity worldwide is a direct outcome of that consumption. The Nigerian oil spills, the deaths, the suffering, and the long term pollution are an outcome of the voracious consumption of oil led by the oil dependent G-20 nations.

New G-20 club members are ready to join the first world's oil orgy. China consumes 10% of the global oil supply currently. That figure will soar over the next few years. India represents another rapidly expanding market for oil. The two combined will soon shove the U.S. into third place among the major nations reliant this toxic substance.
Drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico is directly tied to the demands of U.S. consumers. The public must quickly make the links between oil dependence, human suffering, and the destruction of the habitat.


Solutions Offered

The American Power Act was hailed as the grand effort that would change the face of U.S. energy consumption and dependence. Analysis of the act shows that it maintains oil as a key pillar of the economy. Assumed oil use in 2030 is about the same as it is today and today we've got BP ruining the Gulf of Mexico with other disasters pending.

Doesn't it occur to our so-called leaders that we're in a crisis situation?

We can't maintain our society, as it stands now, without maintaining big oil. That means more major catastrophes that will foul large segments of the earth; the places where we live and earn our living.

Industry friendly analysts say there's no way to get rid of oil it as they deride alternative fuels. The rulers assent by accepting this false premise. This is their excuse to issue more drilling permits in ever riskier locations.

And no one in the power structure has the courage to call out the G-20 governments and oil concerns (many of which are government run).
We're in a death spiral of industrial calamities that are all for the sake of producing petroleum products that will, in turn, create another set of appalling calamities called man made climate change.

Major regions of the world stand in peril from looming Gulf of Mexico class catastrophes. And all the oil companies and their friends can say is: You're stuck with us. Give us more drilling permits now.

Where's the leadership, the innovation, the mobilization like that seen for the fateful project that created an entirely new form of energy, the Manhattan Project?
How about a Manhattan Project to save the planet?

ooo0ooo


Oil Spills Are a Grim Routine in the Niger Delta
http://www.undispatch.com/node/9971
by Alanna Shaikh

The New York Times reminded us today that while the oil spill in the Gulf is an acute shock to Americans, oil spills have become a way of life in the Niger delta. The area has "has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless." Much of the Niger delta is dead as a result.

Once, the Niger delta fed the entire coast. It was rich with shellfish, mollusks, and fish. Now, most of that is gone. Fisherman can no longer make a living, and children swim in oily swamps. Nearly 11 million gallons of oil a year have spilled into the delta's wetlands; in comparison, the Exxon Valdez spilled 10.8 million gallons of oil.

According to The Independent in 2006, "7,000sq km of the continent's remaining 9,000sq km of mangrove and scientists believe some 60 per cent of West Africa's fish stocks breed in the rivers and swamps along the coast." Think about that, and then consider that over 6,800 spills were recorded between 1976 aInd 2001.

It's a gruesome lesson in the risks of unbridled oil exploration and weak government regulations. Amnesty International has a report on the Niger Delta, and they say that "Nigeria has laws and regulations that require companies to comply with internationally recognized standards of "good oil field practice", and laws and regulations to protect the environment but these laws and regulations are poorly enforced. The government agencies responsible for enforcement are ineffective and, in some cases, compromised by conflicts of interest." They go on to point out that oil exploration has brought little to no income to the delta region itself.

As existing oil wells age and run dry, we are going to need to drill in more and more ecologically sensitive places. The Niger delta and the Mississippi delta could just be the beginning. The world needs clean energy. As soon as humanly possible.

_____________
For more News From Underground, visit http://markcrispinmiller.com


_______________
D.
from Truth Out :
Date: 22 June 2010
Subject: Monsanto and social control.


In a landmark case on genetically modified (GM) crops, The US Supreme Court ruled  7-1 on Monday in favor of agribusiness giant Monsanto and overturned a lower court's decision to ban the company's GM alfalfa until the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) fully analyzed the crop's potential dangers. Monsanto applauded the decision and assured farmers that the alfalfa seeds, which are engineered to be resistant to Monsanto's glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide, could be available for planting as early as this fall.

Monsanto, Opponents Both Claim Victory in Historic Genetically Modified Crop Case

by Mike Ludwig

__________________
E.
from Democracy Now! :
Date: 22 June 2010
Subject: Grace Lee Boggs and the US Social Forum in Detroit.
http://www.democracynow.org/

Democracy Now! broadcasts from Detroit on the opening day of the US Social Forum, where thousands of people have gathered for one of the largest gatherings of grassroots activists and community organizers in the country. We begin our coverage with the legendary Detroit-based radical organizer and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs, whos been involved with the civil rights, Black Power, labor, environmental justice, and feminist movements over the past seven decades. Lee Boggs is marking her ninety-fifth birthday this week by speaking at several events at the US Social Forum.

"The Answers Are Coming from the Bottom": Legendary Detroit Activist Grace Lee Boggs on the US Social Forum and her 95th Birthday

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http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/22/legendary_detroit_activist_grace_lee_boggs  


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From The Christian Science Monitor :
Date: 22 June 2010
Subject: The Next War?
http://www.csmonitor.com/

Iran and Israel traded verbal barbs this week, with a former Israeli intelligence chief calling for a preemptive military strike against Iran. Analysts worry that both sides could get carried away and find themselves at war.