Under globalization, Baghdad and New Orleans really are interchangeable. It's not just the American worker, but the American citizen, who is being brought down to the same level as a citizen of the Third World. Apparently, human rights are only for those with the money to buy them""and the price is going up, up, up, right along with oil.
In the future, I believe September 11, 2001 will become identified with peak oil. While oil production did not actually peak on that particular day, it's close enough for government work. Our entire civilization, with its quaint middle classes and obsolete Geneva Conventions and Bill of Rights, is based on the false assumption of unlimited access to cheap oil.
"Peak oil" means that we have used half of all the available, non-renewable oil deposits in the world. It means that production will drop from this point on. But it's also more than that. It means we've already used all the oil that is easily extracted and pure. From here on out, the going gets rough. http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/462
This is occurring in conjunction with global warming, the direct result of our use of these vanishing hydrocarbons. Everything points to the need for conservation and research into new forms of energy. We've known this for thirty years. But because of our religious devotion to the capitalist system, and capitalists' use of wealth and power to stave off this "economic" shift,
http://www.faireconomy.org/press/2005/ee2005_pr.html we are knee-deep in consequences with precious few choices left. International thugs are grabbing the last of the world's assets. Water's next.
That's right, all this stupidity and destruction, all of it foreseeable, including peak oil and global warming, is brought to us courtesy of the American Dream, and its nightmare inverse, the Culture War.
That's why Bush had to trot out the finally, thoroughly disgraced Bill Clinton. What Ken Starr and Paula Jones combined could not do, W has done, making work-hard-and-play-by-the-rules, good-government god William Jefferson Clinton an apologist for the treasonous abomination of banking on human disaster. http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20050903/cm_huffpost/006716
Tony Blair and George Bush can commit crimes against humanity, because the definition of who is human and who is not is being rewritten by their masters. Rest assured, the men running our corporate global government, unlike 64 percent of the poor deluded fools out there, do believe in evolution and in survival of the fittest.
That's why it is encouraging that the left has at last found stunningly effective leadership, in the person of Cindy Sheehan. She has been able to perform a miracle and address the people outside the confines of the state media.
It's also hopeful that the movement is essentially non-partisan, or Democratic only by default, since the Democrats' function seems to be to insure that we never have a real choice. At the forefront of the peace movement are military mothers and wives who no longer give a sh*t about anything but making the cold-blooded assassins running our government pay for what they have done.
Above all, this movement is class-based.
Lila Lipscomb is having trouble living with the fact that she encouraged her kids, her son and her daughter, to go into the military to get an education and see the world. People who joined the Guard and the Reserve to make a little extra money to make ends meet and serve their local communities are dying in Iraq. People who are being struck from the Medicaid rolls are dying, too. If Social Security is privatized in the next Congress, I guarantee you, people will die because of it. The old, the young, the poor, the infirm: just like the New Orleans Super Dome, only less visible.
Because this nucleus of peace activists is rooted in the military, there is an awareness of international issues, including globalization, that is uncharacteristic of Americans in general. For example, Cindy Sheehan constantly references the Downing Street Minutes. Tony Blair's anticipated entry into the ex-president's club, the Carlyle Group, completes the story.
"One thing I have noticed," says former Goldwater Republican and current member of Veterans For Peace, Dick Underhill, "If you are in a group that is predominately pro-peace, ask how many have lived or worked outside the US. . . . My experience is that 70 percent will identify themselves as having lived abroad." http://www.dissidentvoice.org/aug05/moses0810.htm
When you live abroad, Underhill explains, you begin to understand that many of the myths blasted by our media are blatant lies. A movie about Senior Bush's invasion of Panama was a turning point for Underhill. Like most Americans, he believed that Daddy Bush's pre-emptive strike was a mostly bloodless action in which an evil drug lord was painlessly extracted from a grateful foreign land and delivered to justice. Not quite.
Like Iraq, Panama possesses a strategic asset the US requires: in this case, control of the Canal. In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (pg. 65), John Perkins describes "the Zone":
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