Perhaps the greatest scientific discovery in the last 15 years has been the identification of planets revolving around stars outside our solar system. Over 500 extrasolar planets or exoplanets have been discovered orbiting nearby stars. Virtually everywhere astronomers look carefully at nearby stars, planets are observed. Some stars have only one planet while other stars harbor multiple planets. The evidence is now mounting that when a star forms a solar system also forms.
Astronomers have also discovered that almost any kind of star that forms out of the massive clouds of nebular gas scattered throughout the universe may also form with a planet. When Stars emerge from their nebular wombs they tend to come in seven types according to mass, surface temperature, color, and brightness. These seven types of stars are known as Main Sequence Stars. Star types O, B, and A are blue, blue-white, and white in color. Type O-B-A stars tend to be hot, bright, and much more massive than our sun. Star types O-B-A also have short life spans because they are so hot they burn up their nuclear fuel quickly and die away usually within a few hundred million years. Stars that are designated F, G, and K are about the same mass and surface temperature of our sun and come in yellow-white, yellow, and orange colors. Our sun is a G type star. Star types F-G-K burn their nuclear fuel slowly. The last type of stars are known as type M stars. Type M stars are cool in temperature, red in color, and much less massive than our sun but longer lived.
In the search for exoplanets, the holy grail for astronomers is to find an Earth-like planet. Every star has a “Habitable Zone” where it is possible for liquid water to exist. Venus, Earth, and Mars occupy the habitable zone for our sun but only Earth has liquid water flowing freely on it's surface .
Where liquid water can exist in the habitable zone, life can also evolve. Since it takes billions of years for life to evolve, to find an Earth-like planet where life may exist, intelligent or not, astronomers look toward F-G-K-M type stars because those stars have a 10 billion year and longer life spans. Plenty of time for evolution to do it’s thing.
Most of the exoplanets that have been discovered are Jupiter-like gas giants. A few of the newly discovered exoplanets are Earth-like rocky planets except that these rocky planets are two, three, four or more times more massive than Earth. Astronomers have dubbed these massive rocky exoplanets as "Super Earths!"
Four planets have been discovered orbiting the Type M star Gliese 581. The Super Earth exoplanet Gliese 581d is about seven times more massive than the Earth. Gliese 581d orbits within it’s star habitable zone and surprisingly 581d may be covered with an ocean!
With the discovery of exoplanets within our Milky Way Galaxy, is it possible that exoplanets orbit stars in other galaxies? Recently The European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile announced the discovery of a exoplanet orbiting a 10 billion year old star which migrated into our Milky Way Galaxy from another nearby galaxy. The ESO discovery is further evidence that planet formation is more common than once thought.
Serious scientist around the world agree the discovery of exoplanets is an astounding achievement. So why is the big corporate lame stream news media ignoring this story? Could big media be ignoring the discovery of exoplanets because of it's religious implications?....hmmmmmm?
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
America's March of Folly
Earlier this month my wife and I happened to be in Berlin on German Unity Day (Einheits Tag). The German Capitol City was in a party mood with tchotchke vendors and food booths and temporary beer and soft drink kiosks set up all along the Scheidemann Strasse. The autumn weather was perfect while we listened to the symphony orchestra practicing Beethoven’s Third and Ninth Symphonies. After munching on currywurst and fisch semmels and drinking a couple of half liters of locally brewed pils beer we headed off to explore more of the city. Because my wife and I are such typical American tourists we had to visit Check Point Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate.
That night we found a wonderful Italian restaurant near the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. We happened to notice another American couple sitting several tables behind us. A few minutes after we entered the restaurant a very old German couple sat down next to the other Americans. The German couple eventually finished their pasta and the wife left. The older German man went to pay for their meal and discovered he could not find his wallet. In a panic he looked in his coat pocket, searched under the table, and after a few minutes gave up in utter dejection apologizing profusely to the waiter. The waiter told him it was all right and he could come back and pay later. After the other American couple noticed the old man’s distress, they began in English to loudly ridicule the old man’s motives saying he was just an old con trying to get a free meal. This went on and on even after the old guy left the restaurant.
Over the last few years I have watched the economic crisis known as the Great Recession spread across the globe deepening in intensity. There are mass demonstrations and/or riots in Greece, Italy, Spain, and France. Protest movement are growing in Ireland, Britain, and surprisingly in Sweden. The failure of conservative and liberal economist to predict the crisis is never discussed. Instead there appears to be a growing consensus among the world’s great economic powers that the best approach to mitigating the crisis is to go all out and reduce the deficit by cutting government spending on all social programs. In the United States for the first time since the New Deal of the 1930‘s Democrats are seriously talking about cutting or eliminating Social Security and Medicare. Meanwhile those far right-wing Republicans who ideologically never made their peace with the New Deal are opportunistically chanting the mantra of cut taxes, cut government spending, protect the big banks, protect the big corporations. By pursuing this perverse logic, thereby compounding the economic devastation in society, these right-wingers finally see their chance to gut all the hated social programs designed to help people enacted over the last 80 years.
But what is motivating these right-wingers? Is it purely greed or is there something deeper, more fundamental behind their thinking? The conservative blogger and radio host Mike Adams provides some clues, “The conservative sees man as born in a broken state. This tragic view of human nature sees man as selfish and hedonistic by design....Given his selfish nature, man must internalize some reason to behave in pro-social ways. That fact that he falls short of these values does not mean he is a hypocrite. The one who does not even believe what he says is the hypocrite. The one who believes what he says and falls short is merely human." Adams goes on to say, "According to the conservative, effective punishment is that which produces fear of transgression. Fear of transgression occurs when the punishment is swift, certain, and severe....In sum, the conservative believes we should first try to love people into conformity. If that does not work, we should scare people into conformity.” So there you have it, people are selfish and hedonistic and broken by nature. Work for low wages or lose your job, then get thrown out of your house, that’s how the “Free Market” produces and enforces conformity. If the “Free Market” cannot force people to conform then that leaves the State. Forget about equality and due process, severe and swift punishment by the police and courts will also produce the conformity right-wingers are so bewitched with.
Back in my Berlin Italian restaurant I called the waiter over to my table and apologized for the other American’s atrocious behavior. I then offered to pay for the old couple’s meal. In German the waiter told me there was no need for me to pay because the old couple lived in the neighborhood and they came to the restaurant all the time. A few minutes later the Matre d’ came over and told my wife and I that our meal was on the house. He then popped open a bottle of wine and served us gratis.
Those Americans sitting near us in that Berlin Italian restaurant made some assumptions about the old German man’s motives. They had no evidence for their beliefs. They simply acted on their own miscreant world view of humanity.
There is an old expression that says, “What goes around comes around.” There is a much older expression, one which is at the core of all the world’s great religions, “Do for others as you would have them do for you.”
Next Tuesday will tell us how deeply buried within our individual and social psyche The Golden Rule seems to have become entombed. However the midterm elections turn out, one thing seems certain, fear and loathing and conformity will continue in America’s march of folly.
That night we found a wonderful Italian restaurant near the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. We happened to notice another American couple sitting several tables behind us. A few minutes after we entered the restaurant a very old German couple sat down next to the other Americans. The German couple eventually finished their pasta and the wife left. The older German man went to pay for their meal and discovered he could not find his wallet. In a panic he looked in his coat pocket, searched under the table, and after a few minutes gave up in utter dejection apologizing profusely to the waiter. The waiter told him it was all right and he could come back and pay later. After the other American couple noticed the old man’s distress, they began in English to loudly ridicule the old man’s motives saying he was just an old con trying to get a free meal. This went on and on even after the old guy left the restaurant.
Over the last few years I have watched the economic crisis known as the Great Recession spread across the globe deepening in intensity. There are mass demonstrations and/or riots in Greece, Italy, Spain, and France. Protest movement are growing in Ireland, Britain, and surprisingly in Sweden. The failure of conservative and liberal economist to predict the crisis is never discussed. Instead there appears to be a growing consensus among the world’s great economic powers that the best approach to mitigating the crisis is to go all out and reduce the deficit by cutting government spending on all social programs. In the United States for the first time since the New Deal of the 1930‘s Democrats are seriously talking about cutting or eliminating Social Security and Medicare. Meanwhile those far right-wing Republicans who ideologically never made their peace with the New Deal are opportunistically chanting the mantra of cut taxes, cut government spending, protect the big banks, protect the big corporations. By pursuing this perverse logic, thereby compounding the economic devastation in society, these right-wingers finally see their chance to gut all the hated social programs designed to help people enacted over the last 80 years.
But what is motivating these right-wingers? Is it purely greed or is there something deeper, more fundamental behind their thinking? The conservative blogger and radio host Mike Adams provides some clues, “The conservative sees man as born in a broken state. This tragic view of human nature sees man as selfish and hedonistic by design....Given his selfish nature, man must internalize some reason to behave in pro-social ways. That fact that he falls short of these values does not mean he is a hypocrite. The one who does not even believe what he says is the hypocrite. The one who believes what he says and falls short is merely human." Adams goes on to say, "According to the conservative, effective punishment is that which produces fear of transgression. Fear of transgression occurs when the punishment is swift, certain, and severe....In sum, the conservative believes we should first try to love people into conformity. If that does not work, we should scare people into conformity.” So there you have it, people are selfish and hedonistic and broken by nature. Work for low wages or lose your job, then get thrown out of your house, that’s how the “Free Market” produces and enforces conformity. If the “Free Market” cannot force people to conform then that leaves the State. Forget about equality and due process, severe and swift punishment by the police and courts will also produce the conformity right-wingers are so bewitched with.
Back in my Berlin Italian restaurant I called the waiter over to my table and apologized for the other American’s atrocious behavior. I then offered to pay for the old couple’s meal. In German the waiter told me there was no need for me to pay because the old couple lived in the neighborhood and they came to the restaurant all the time. A few minutes later the Matre d’ came over and told my wife and I that our meal was on the house. He then popped open a bottle of wine and served us gratis.
Those Americans sitting near us in that Berlin Italian restaurant made some assumptions about the old German man’s motives. They had no evidence for their beliefs. They simply acted on their own miscreant world view of humanity.
There is an old expression that says, “What goes around comes around.” There is a much older expression, one which is at the core of all the world’s great religions, “Do for others as you would have them do for you.”
Next Tuesday will tell us how deeply buried within our individual and social psyche The Golden Rule seems to have become entombed. However the midterm elections turn out, one thing seems certain, fear and loathing and conformity will continue in America’s march of folly.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
An Arts and Crafts Festival in the Redwoods
When I arrived here in Benbow Friday evening, I noticed a bunch of white tents along the Eel River bank. After setting up the rig with water, electricity and sewage, and hooking up the cable TV and WIFI, sliding out the push out (yeah, that's how I roll), I took a walk over to the Benbow Inn. The Inn is in the style of an Old English Manor House. The restaurant and bar are excellent. Sitting at the bar I asked the bar keep about the white tents. He said for the last 10 years the Mateel Summer Festival takes place the first weekend in June. The festival is an arts and craft fair with lots of live music provided by local bands.
The next day I wandered over to the festival (admission $13.00) and made a beeline to the beer tent. With a Stella in hand I made my way down the rows of white tents looking at crude hand crafted ceramic pots, tie dye shirts and dresses, hash pipes and water pipes made of glass, leather ware sellers, herb and plant peddler; you name the craft and it was for sale. Although I was walking along the banks of the Eel River with all its lush boreal forest vegetation, the smell that permeated the air was marijuana. Like anything else, when you don't expect to see something, you're not apt to be looking for it. Once the smell of weed filled my nose, I began to see people walking around everywhere hittin' on fatties.
After walking around for about an hour I made my way back to the beer tent where they had picnic benches set up. I got another Stella and sat at the table and bench looking at/observing the people around me. Soon a slender willowy young girl, maybe 19 or 20 years old, came into the tent with her small bare breasts painted like blue bonnets. Very pretty.
About a half hour into my observations several facts began to emerge. The crowd was overwhelmingly white. There was only a smattering of Asian, Black, or Latino people. There were, surprisingly, a lot of older folks in attendance and many of those olds guys and gals were puffin' on doobies. Taken as group, the crowd was fat, like in nearly obese. But that made sense considering all the weed that was being smoked. I could only image the amount of sweet and salty munchies being consumed.
It seemed almost every person who was capable of reproducing was reproducing repeatedly. Babies and young children were clinging onto women everywhere. The fathers were ignoring the kids and the mothers looked haggard and worn out. Even the children appeared distressed crying and pawing at their young parents.
People seemed to have money and given the poor economy up here in the north woods, I wondered where they got their cash. Then it dawned on me: someone has to grow the medical marijuana being distributed in all those clinics all over the state.
I must have listened to a dozen different bands playing music on the stages erected all over the site. A common thread running through most of the music was the lack of any band playing melodies. No melodies. Only beats and rhythms grinding away at my ears and brain. And maybe that contributed to my most stunning observation. No one was smiling. There was no joy anywhere to be found. Thousands of people ghosting around showing no interest, making no human connections, not simply unfriendly but non-friendly, unengaged, even paranoid. Very, very weird.
Forty years ago I attended festivals like the Manteel. Those festivals of the past were exciting and new, and ground breaking even revolutionary. No one had ever seen anything like it before.
Perhaps its the copious amounts of herb being smoked. Perhaps it is the harsh, cold, rainy winters being endured. Perhaps it is the narrow pop culture being followed. Perhaps is it the Frankenstein monster of religious fundamentalism sucking up all the rationalism in the air. Whatever the reason, the festival I attended yesterday, and that is the correct word, I attended not participated in, was joyless and reactionary. People seemed to go through the motions and no one was trying to do anything new or interesting. Same old-same old.
In the past the youth were always seen as a revolutionary force guiding history into new directions. Young people with clear and unencumbered minds synthesizing the new from bits and pieces of the old. The young people I saw yesterday were wear worn, beat down, befuddled, and incapable of midwifing a new world. What will become of their future? What a shame, what a damn shame.
I ended the day having dinner at the Benbow Inn and going back to the rig to enjoy a nightcap. While sitting outside a neighbor guy I met and talked to earlier stopped by and sat down. Within ten minutes he was preaching Jesus to me. Why can't I catch a break?
The next day I wandered over to the festival (admission $13.00) and made a beeline to the beer tent. With a Stella in hand I made my way down the rows of white tents looking at crude hand crafted ceramic pots, tie dye shirts and dresses, hash pipes and water pipes made of glass, leather ware sellers, herb and plant peddler; you name the craft and it was for sale. Although I was walking along the banks of the Eel River with all its lush boreal forest vegetation, the smell that permeated the air was marijuana. Like anything else, when you don't expect to see something, you're not apt to be looking for it. Once the smell of weed filled my nose, I began to see people walking around everywhere hittin' on fatties.
After walking around for about an hour I made my way back to the beer tent where they had picnic benches set up. I got another Stella and sat at the table and bench looking at/observing the people around me. Soon a slender willowy young girl, maybe 19 or 20 years old, came into the tent with her small bare breasts painted like blue bonnets. Very pretty.
About a half hour into my observations several facts began to emerge. The crowd was overwhelmingly white. There was only a smattering of Asian, Black, or Latino people. There were, surprisingly, a lot of older folks in attendance and many of those olds guys and gals were puffin' on doobies. Taken as group, the crowd was fat, like in nearly obese. But that made sense considering all the weed that was being smoked. I could only image the amount of sweet and salty munchies being consumed.
It seemed almost every person who was capable of reproducing was reproducing repeatedly. Babies and young children were clinging onto women everywhere. The fathers were ignoring the kids and the mothers looked haggard and worn out. Even the children appeared distressed crying and pawing at their young parents.
People seemed to have money and given the poor economy up here in the north woods, I wondered where they got their cash. Then it dawned on me: someone has to grow the medical marijuana being distributed in all those clinics all over the state.
I must have listened to a dozen different bands playing music on the stages erected all over the site. A common thread running through most of the music was the lack of any band playing melodies. No melodies. Only beats and rhythms grinding away at my ears and brain. And maybe that contributed to my most stunning observation. No one was smiling. There was no joy anywhere to be found. Thousands of people ghosting around showing no interest, making no human connections, not simply unfriendly but non-friendly, unengaged, even paranoid. Very, very weird.
Forty years ago I attended festivals like the Manteel. Those festivals of the past were exciting and new, and ground breaking even revolutionary. No one had ever seen anything like it before.
Perhaps its the copious amounts of herb being smoked. Perhaps it is the harsh, cold, rainy winters being endured. Perhaps it is the narrow pop culture being followed. Perhaps is it the Frankenstein monster of religious fundamentalism sucking up all the rationalism in the air. Whatever the reason, the festival I attended yesterday, and that is the correct word, I attended not participated in, was joyless and reactionary. People seemed to go through the motions and no one was trying to do anything new or interesting. Same old-same old.
In the past the youth were always seen as a revolutionary force guiding history into new directions. Young people with clear and unencumbered minds synthesizing the new from bits and pieces of the old. The young people I saw yesterday were wear worn, beat down, befuddled, and incapable of midwifing a new world. What will become of their future? What a shame, what a damn shame.
I ended the day having dinner at the Benbow Inn and going back to the rig to enjoy a nightcap. While sitting outside a neighbor guy I met and talked to earlier stopped by and sat down. Within ten minutes he was preaching Jesus to me. Why can't I catch a break?
Thursday, May 20, 2010
The Specter of Big Oil
A specter is haunting the planet. — the specter of big oil. All the powers of the industrialized world have entered into an unholy alliance to osmose this specter: President and dictator, Pope and monarch, Democrat and Republican, French Radicals and English socialist. Oppose big oil and you oppose the power of the State.
Big oil has been behind much of the mayhem inflicting the planet for the last 65 years. President Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdul Aziz met aboard the USS Quincy on February 14, 1945. According to Colonel William A. Eddy, Roosevelt's interpreter and an OSS intelligence agent, "In his talks with Roosevelt, Eddy wrote, the king did not even hint at any desire for financial assistance. He traveled to the meeting seeking friends and not funds, and that is what he got, despite the arguments about Palestine and Jewish immigration. The king's view was that if the suffering of the Jews had been caused by the Germans, Germans should pay the price for it; let the Jews build their homeland on the best lands in Germany, not on the territory of Arabs who had nothing to do with what happened to them. The most he could get from Roosevelt was a promise that the president would "do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people. The king taking this as a commitment from the United States and not just from Roosevelt personally, was furious to discover three years later that Harry Truman did not consider himself bound by it.”
It was BP (then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) with the help of British Intelligence and the CIA's man on the ground, Dr. Donald N. Wilber, that overthrew the Iranian democracy in 1953 and replaced it with the brutal dictatorship of the Shah. According to a new volume published by George Washington University Press titled, " Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran," "The '28 Mordad' coup, as it is known by its Persian date, was a watershed for Iran, for the Middle East and for the standing of the United States in the region. The joint U.S.-British operation ended Iran's drive to assert sovereign control over its own resources and helped put an end to a vibrant chapter in the history of the country's nationalist and democratic movements. These consequences resonated with dramatic effect in later years. When the Shah finally fell in 1979, memories of the U.S. intervention in 1953, which made possible the monarch's subsequent, and increasingly unpopular, 25-reign intensified the anti-American character of the revolution in the minds of many Iranians." Look where we are today because of the greed of BP.
It was big oil (Exxon, known then as Standard Oil, and Royal Dutch Shell) that became worried over the possibility of losing control of Indonesia's immense wealth. Indonesia is estimated to be the fifth richest country in the world in terms of natural resources. Besides being the fifth largest oil producer, it has enormous reserves of tin, bauxite, coal, gold, silver, diamonds, manganese, phosphates, nickel, copper, rubber, coffee, palm oil, tobacco, sugar, coconuts, spices, timber and cinchona (for quinine). President Eisenhower told a state governors' conference that it was imperative for the US to finance the French colonial war in Vietnam as the ‘cheapest way' to keep control of Indonesia. Eisenhower detailed: "Now let us assume that we lose Indochina. If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Malay peninsula, the last little bit of land hanging on down there, would be scarcely defensible. The tin and tungsten we so greatly value from that area would cease coming, and all India would be outflanked. Burma would be in no position for defense. All of that position around there is very ominous to the United States, because finally if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia? So you see, somewhere along the line, this must be blocked and it must be blocked now, and that is what we are trying to do. So when the US votes $400 million to help the war (in Indochina), we are not voting a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can prevent the occurrence of something that would be of a most terrible significance to the United States of America, our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indonesian territory and from South East Asia." In 1965 a bloody coup was launched by Indonesian generals which resulted in over a million Indonesian deaths and became the opening act in implementation of the counter Domino Theory. In turn, the counter Domino Theory gave us the Vietnam War.
It was big oil that got us into the first and second Gulf War. Mark Zepezauer writes, “The whole dispute started because Kuwait was slant-drilling. Using equipment bought from National Security Council chief Brent Scowcroft's old company, Kuwait was pumping out some $14-billion worth of oil from underneath Iraqi territory. Even the territory they were drilling from had originally been Iraq's. Slant-drilling is enough to get you shot in Texas, and it's certainly enough to start a war in the Mideast. Even so, this dispute could have been negotiated. But it's hard to avoid a war when what you're actually doing is trying to provoke a war. The most famous example of that is the meeting between Saddam and the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, five days before Iraq invaded Kuwait. As CIA satellite photos showed an Iraqi invasion force massing on the Kuwaiti border, Glaspie told Hussein that "the US takes no position" on Iraq's dispute with Kuwait. A few days later, during last-minute negotiations, Kuwait's foreign minister said: "We are not going to respond to [Iraq]....If they don't like it, let them occupy our territory....We are going to bring in the Americans." The US reportedly encouraged Kuwait's attitude.
In early February 2001, two weeks after Bush-Cheney took control of the US presidency, the National Energy Policy Development Group, a task force created and chaired by Dick Cheney was formed. The mission of the task force was to “develop a supply-side national energy policy designed to help the private sector, and, as necessary and appropriate, State and local governments, promote dependable, affordable, and environmentally sound production and distribution of energy for the future." The group met in secret and never publicly disclosed it’s activities. The Washington Post obtained some documents detailing how executives from major oil corporations, including Exxon-Mobil Corp., Conoco, Royal Dutch Shell Oil Corp., and the American subsidiary of British Petroleum met with Energy Task Force participants while they were developing national energy policy. Vice President Cheney was reported to have met personally with the Chief Executive Officer of BP (formerly British Petroleum) during the time of the Energy Task Force's activities. The task force produced detailed maps of the oil fields in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. (http://www.judicialwatch.org/IraqOilMap.pdf),
(http://www.judicialwatch.org/SAOilMap.pdf), (http://www.judicialwatch.org/UAEOilMap.pdf).
After the destruction of the World Trade Towers by Saudi Arabian terrorist in September 2001, the Bush-Cheney administration, began a propaganda campaign to blame Iraq for the attacks on the Twin Towers. Bush and Cheney manufactured evidence and planted disinformation with reporters in highly visible news outlets, like the New York Times and Fox News, who were willing to parrot the propaganda. The propaganda campaign pushed two lines of “evidence.” First, Bush-Cheney claimed that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) and second the Saudi terrorists were trained in Iraq. Both lines of evidence were proven to be nonsense. So what was the actual reason for invading Iraq? The UK Guardian reported on June 4, 2003, “Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war. The US deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil. The latest comments were made by Mr. Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt. Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defense minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."
In addition to invading Iraq in order to use American soldiers to grab it’s rich oil reserves for big oil, Bush-Cheney gave us the USA Patriot Act, the largest single roll-back of civil rights legislation in American history. The two events are inextricably connected. Launching wars of aggression with the intent to use state power to grab and control the world's oil resources for private gain and the suppression of dissent at home go hand-in-hand.
Then there is Israel. It was the British and the French that clamored for the creation of Israel after the Second World War. It was the British and French and Israel that invaded the Suez Canal after Egypt nationalized the canal in 1956. Afterward US President Eisenhower threatened to call in the British and French debt thereby forcing the invading forces to withdraw from the Suez. In June 1967 the Israeli military routed Arab forces during the Six Day War using British Chieftain tanks and French Mirage jets. Only after the Six Day War did the United States fully recognize the strategic importance of a pro western Israeli State located within the oil rich middle east. When Israel nearly lost the October 1973 War to Egypt and Syria, US President Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger concluded the loss of Israel for American interest in the Middle East was not acceptable. Thus, it is big oil that provided the rationalization for introducing nuclear weapons into the Middle East via Israel. Otherwise how can the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons and the fact the United State officially does not recognize the existence of Israel's WMDs be explained without the existence of Middle Eastern oil fields?
Big oil's pursuit of profits have killed millions of Vietnamese, Iraqis, Indonesians, and tens of thousands of others from Burma to Bolivia, from Nigeria to Algeria. Big oil has polluted our planet’s land, streams, rivers, gulfs, bays, and oceans. Big oil gave us suburbs with it’s neighbor dividing fences, automobiles and freeways where most people drive alone and the only human contact is with an array of blathering fools on the radio, and strip malls where we run in and run out never knowing or caring who served us. Big oil gave us SUVs and 35,000 traffic deaths every year, and wall to wall concrete roadways and massive air pollution. And it was in defense of big oil that our government took away many of our civil rights. But most of all big oil gave us social alienation. Big oil changed our culture, our psychology, and our republican politics all for the worse. We don’t know or care about each other anymore.
Of course this borders on single factor analysis. But when a trillion dollar industry like big oil, with strong international political ties to all the major industrial/military economies always seems to be the specter in the background when modern wars are unleash and hatred and suspicion fills the air, then how else can the history of the last 65 years be explain?
Big oil has been behind much of the mayhem inflicting the planet for the last 65 years. President Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdul Aziz met aboard the USS Quincy on February 14, 1945. According to Colonel William A. Eddy, Roosevelt's interpreter and an OSS intelligence agent, "In his talks with Roosevelt, Eddy wrote, the king did not even hint at any desire for financial assistance. He traveled to the meeting seeking friends and not funds, and that is what he got, despite the arguments about Palestine and Jewish immigration. The king's view was that if the suffering of the Jews had been caused by the Germans, Germans should pay the price for it; let the Jews build their homeland on the best lands in Germany, not on the territory of Arabs who had nothing to do with what happened to them. The most he could get from Roosevelt was a promise that the president would "do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people. The king taking this as a commitment from the United States and not just from Roosevelt personally, was furious to discover three years later that Harry Truman did not consider himself bound by it.”
It was BP (then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) with the help of British Intelligence and the CIA's man on the ground, Dr. Donald N. Wilber, that overthrew the Iranian democracy in 1953 and replaced it with the brutal dictatorship of the Shah. According to a new volume published by George Washington University Press titled, " Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran," "The '28 Mordad' coup, as it is known by its Persian date, was a watershed for Iran, for the Middle East and for the standing of the United States in the region. The joint U.S.-British operation ended Iran's drive to assert sovereign control over its own resources and helped put an end to a vibrant chapter in the history of the country's nationalist and democratic movements. These consequences resonated with dramatic effect in later years. When the Shah finally fell in 1979, memories of the U.S. intervention in 1953, which made possible the monarch's subsequent, and increasingly unpopular, 25-reign intensified the anti-American character of the revolution in the minds of many Iranians." Look where we are today because of the greed of BP.
It was big oil (Exxon, known then as Standard Oil, and Royal Dutch Shell) that became worried over the possibility of losing control of Indonesia's immense wealth. Indonesia is estimated to be the fifth richest country in the world in terms of natural resources. Besides being the fifth largest oil producer, it has enormous reserves of tin, bauxite, coal, gold, silver, diamonds, manganese, phosphates, nickel, copper, rubber, coffee, palm oil, tobacco, sugar, coconuts, spices, timber and cinchona (for quinine). President Eisenhower told a state governors' conference that it was imperative for the US to finance the French colonial war in Vietnam as the ‘cheapest way' to keep control of Indonesia. Eisenhower detailed: "Now let us assume that we lose Indochina. If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Malay peninsula, the last little bit of land hanging on down there, would be scarcely defensible. The tin and tungsten we so greatly value from that area would cease coming, and all India would be outflanked. Burma would be in no position for defense. All of that position around there is very ominous to the United States, because finally if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia? So you see, somewhere along the line, this must be blocked and it must be blocked now, and that is what we are trying to do. So when the US votes $400 million to help the war (in Indochina), we are not voting a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can prevent the occurrence of something that would be of a most terrible significance to the United States of America, our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indonesian territory and from South East Asia." In 1965 a bloody coup was launched by Indonesian generals which resulted in over a million Indonesian deaths and became the opening act in implementation of the counter Domino Theory. In turn, the counter Domino Theory gave us the Vietnam War.
It was big oil that got us into the first and second Gulf War. Mark Zepezauer writes, “The whole dispute started because Kuwait was slant-drilling. Using equipment bought from National Security Council chief Brent Scowcroft's old company, Kuwait was pumping out some $14-billion worth of oil from underneath Iraqi territory. Even the territory they were drilling from had originally been Iraq's. Slant-drilling is enough to get you shot in Texas, and it's certainly enough to start a war in the Mideast. Even so, this dispute could have been negotiated. But it's hard to avoid a war when what you're actually doing is trying to provoke a war. The most famous example of that is the meeting between Saddam and the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, five days before Iraq invaded Kuwait. As CIA satellite photos showed an Iraqi invasion force massing on the Kuwaiti border, Glaspie told Hussein that "the US takes no position" on Iraq's dispute with Kuwait. A few days later, during last-minute negotiations, Kuwait's foreign minister said: "We are not going to respond to [Iraq]....If they don't like it, let them occupy our territory....We are going to bring in the Americans." The US reportedly encouraged Kuwait's attitude.
In early February 2001, two weeks after Bush-Cheney took control of the US presidency, the National Energy Policy Development Group, a task force created and chaired by Dick Cheney was formed. The mission of the task force was to “develop a supply-side national energy policy designed to help the private sector, and, as necessary and appropriate, State and local governments, promote dependable, affordable, and environmentally sound production and distribution of energy for the future." The group met in secret and never publicly disclosed it’s activities. The Washington Post obtained some documents detailing how executives from major oil corporations, including Exxon-Mobil Corp., Conoco, Royal Dutch Shell Oil Corp., and the American subsidiary of British Petroleum met with Energy Task Force participants while they were developing national energy policy. Vice President Cheney was reported to have met personally with the Chief Executive Officer of BP (formerly British Petroleum) during the time of the Energy Task Force's activities. The task force produced detailed maps of the oil fields in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. (http://www.judicialwatch.org/IraqOilMap.pdf),
(http://www.judicialwatch.org/SAOilMap.pdf), (http://www.judicialwatch.org/UAEOilMap.pdf).
After the destruction of the World Trade Towers by Saudi Arabian terrorist in September 2001, the Bush-Cheney administration, began a propaganda campaign to blame Iraq for the attacks on the Twin Towers. Bush and Cheney manufactured evidence and planted disinformation with reporters in highly visible news outlets, like the New York Times and Fox News, who were willing to parrot the propaganda. The propaganda campaign pushed two lines of “evidence.” First, Bush-Cheney claimed that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) and second the Saudi terrorists were trained in Iraq. Both lines of evidence were proven to be nonsense. So what was the actual reason for invading Iraq? The UK Guardian reported on June 4, 2003, “Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war. The US deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil. The latest comments were made by Mr. Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt. Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defense minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."
In addition to invading Iraq in order to use American soldiers to grab it’s rich oil reserves for big oil, Bush-Cheney gave us the USA Patriot Act, the largest single roll-back of civil rights legislation in American history. The two events are inextricably connected. Launching wars of aggression with the intent to use state power to grab and control the world's oil resources for private gain and the suppression of dissent at home go hand-in-hand.
Then there is Israel. It was the British and the French that clamored for the creation of Israel after the Second World War. It was the British and French and Israel that invaded the Suez Canal after Egypt nationalized the canal in 1956. Afterward US President Eisenhower threatened to call in the British and French debt thereby forcing the invading forces to withdraw from the Suez. In June 1967 the Israeli military routed Arab forces during the Six Day War using British Chieftain tanks and French Mirage jets. Only after the Six Day War did the United States fully recognize the strategic importance of a pro western Israeli State located within the oil rich middle east. When Israel nearly lost the October 1973 War to Egypt and Syria, US President Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger concluded the loss of Israel for American interest in the Middle East was not acceptable. Thus, it is big oil that provided the rationalization for introducing nuclear weapons into the Middle East via Israel. Otherwise how can the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons and the fact the United State officially does not recognize the existence of Israel's WMDs be explained without the existence of Middle Eastern oil fields?
Big oil's pursuit of profits have killed millions of Vietnamese, Iraqis, Indonesians, and tens of thousands of others from Burma to Bolivia, from Nigeria to Algeria. Big oil has polluted our planet’s land, streams, rivers, gulfs, bays, and oceans. Big oil gave us suburbs with it’s neighbor dividing fences, automobiles and freeways where most people drive alone and the only human contact is with an array of blathering fools on the radio, and strip malls where we run in and run out never knowing or caring who served us. Big oil gave us SUVs and 35,000 traffic deaths every year, and wall to wall concrete roadways and massive air pollution. And it was in defense of big oil that our government took away many of our civil rights. But most of all big oil gave us social alienation. Big oil changed our culture, our psychology, and our republican politics all for the worse. We don’t know or care about each other anymore.
Of course this borders on single factor analysis. But when a trillion dollar industry like big oil, with strong international political ties to all the major industrial/military economies always seems to be the specter in the background when modern wars are unleash and hatred and suspicion fills the air, then how else can the history of the last 65 years be explain?
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Corporations Are Parasites
Liberals and Conservatives both agree that modern corporations are a vital and necessary economic force in society. The difference between the two is merely a matter of degree. Conservatives/ Republican Party want to allow corporations free rein to exploit markets without regulatory interference. Liberals/Democratic Party want corporations to be less heavy handed by placing a vaguely defined minimum of regulatory restraints on their exploitative practices.
In the last 100 years corporations have become bigger, richer, more aggressive, and thus more powerful. In the United States, corporations are now the dominant force in civil society. They have become the dominant force because of a Supreme Court decision in 1886 known as Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railway where a distinction was made between natural persons (human beings) and legal persons (corporations). The Supreme Court ruled that legal persons had the same rights as natural persons. Then came a succession of Supreme Court rulings expanding the rights of legal persons culminating in a Supreme Court ruling (1976) known as Buckley v. Valeo where the court ruled that money was free speech. Since corporations are the richest private organizations in society, according to Buckley v. Valeo, corporations enjoy the most free speech. The more free speech corporations have the louder corporate voices become drowning out other voices. As a direct result politically, the corporate agenda becomes the agenda because nearly all of the decision makers (Liberals and Conservatives) have become servile lackeys of the corporation.
Conservatives/Republican Party talk incessantly about the need for government to stay out of free markets because the invisible hand of the free markets will ultimately create economic efficiencies through price competition thereby making life better for people in general. In bumper sticker fashion. ”Regulation is Bad. Freedom is Good.” The problem with this economic conception is that it is nothing more than a myth. The American economy is dominated by oligopolies that do not compete over price. Instead these oligopolies compete through advertising: “Buy my stuff and you will save money!”
An oligopoly is a market condition in which the production of identical or similar products is concentrated (to the tune of at least 40% of market share) in a few large firms. Examples of oligopolies in the United States include the steel, aluminum, automobile, gypsum, petroleum, tire, banking, energy, and beer industries. The introduction of new products and processes can create new oligopolies, as in the computer or synthetic fiber industries. Microsoft sells more than 80% of the operating systems in the U.S. market. Oligopolies also exist in service industries, such as the airlines industry and the food industry. Oligopolistic practices include the practice of “dumping” in order to destroy the competition. Several years ago a national hamburger chain moved into a medium size central Texas town. The town had been served by several Mom and Pop hamburger stands for years. Circumventing existing unfair competition laws in place in Texas at the time, the hamburger chain advertised locally that they would take coupons, including super market coupons. The hamburger chains pricing scheme meant that every hamburger sold was sold at a loss. Within two months the Mom and Pop stands went out of business because they could not compete at a price point that was not profitable. After the Mom and Pop stands closed, the chain stopped taking coupons. Price competition ended and the national hamburger chain controlled the entire local market. Months later another hamburger chain moved into the local market but there was no price competition between the two. The same kind of hamburger sold at the same price in each hamburger store.
The raison d'être for corporations is to get bigger, richer, and more powerful. The logical future for corporations is to replace their competitors, dominant and eventually control the entire market, and in the long run, either reduce or even eliminate government regulation. Conservatives applaud and encourage this corporate behavior. It is also no exaggeration to conclude, however, that corporations are at their core irrational, politically anarchistic, and economically parasitic. And like all parasites, corporations will kill their host and in the process commit suicide. The problem for all of us is the fact that the corporate host is civil society and the entire physical planet.
Liberals/Democratic Party will argue that the best way to deal with corporate power is to capture the government and use the legal system to control and moderate corporate excesses. They will say that since the corporation was a legally defined entity, it should not be difficult to legally rein it in or put it out of business all together. These people forget that the modern form of government is an invention of the corporation and at the same time, organically, the modern corporation is an invention of the modern form of government. This can be seen symbolically where the business suit, the uniform of the corporation has become the uniform of the government. Over the last 100 years the entire government has been transformed into a creature that primarily serves the interest of the corporation. It has been the Supreme Court in conjunction with the United States Senate that has managed this transformation over the last 100 years because the Supreme Court and the Senate has been staffed disproportionately with Conservative pro corporate lawyers and businessmen.
For example The Supreme Courts ruling in “Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee (1/21/10) swept away all restrictions on corporate spending thereby allowing corporations to overwhelm the election process. The decision was 5-4 where the five justices (sic) who ruled in favor of corporations are all corporate lawyers or Republican Party operatives. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was a corporate lawyer in his father’s practice in San Francisco and Sacramento. While in Sacramento Kennedy also worked as a lobbyist for Republican Party causes when Edwin Meese, special advisor to Ronald Reagan, advanced his career. Antonin Scalia began his legal career at Jones Day, where he worked from 1961 to 1967. Jones Day is an international law firm specializing in corporate law and is currently the second largest law firm in the United States, with approximately 2,400 lawyers and gross annual revenue in excess of US$1.4 billion. Clarence Thomas was a corporate lawyer in the pesticide and agriculture division of the Monsanto Company. Thomas’ mentor, who also shephered Thomas through the Supreme Court confirmation process, was Senator John Danforth whose grandfather was William H. Danforth the founder of Ralston Purina. Samuel A. Alito also had his career advanced by Attorney General Ed Meese when Meese had Alito appointed Assistant Solicitor General, Deputy Attorney General, and United States Attorney for New Jersey. Chief Justice John Roberts was a corporate lawyer for Hogan & Hartson, the oldest major law firm in Washington D.C. According to Chambers & Partners Global 2008: The World's Leading Lawyers for Business, Hogan & Hartson is recognized globally for its excellence in the following areas: data protection, international trade, real estate investment trusts, life sciences and technology, media and telecommunications.
The key for the future of the planet is to disband the corporation and replace it with an economic system that is not parasitic but sustainable. Just as any attempt to make a pig fly of its own accord, any attempt at reforming the corporation using the modern form of government will certainly never get off the ground.
In the last 100 years corporations have become bigger, richer, more aggressive, and thus more powerful. In the United States, corporations are now the dominant force in civil society. They have become the dominant force because of a Supreme Court decision in 1886 known as Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railway where a distinction was made between natural persons (human beings) and legal persons (corporations). The Supreme Court ruled that legal persons had the same rights as natural persons. Then came a succession of Supreme Court rulings expanding the rights of legal persons culminating in a Supreme Court ruling (1976) known as Buckley v. Valeo where the court ruled that money was free speech. Since corporations are the richest private organizations in society, according to Buckley v. Valeo, corporations enjoy the most free speech. The more free speech corporations have the louder corporate voices become drowning out other voices. As a direct result politically, the corporate agenda becomes the agenda because nearly all of the decision makers (Liberals and Conservatives) have become servile lackeys of the corporation.
Conservatives/Republican Party talk incessantly about the need for government to stay out of free markets because the invisible hand of the free markets will ultimately create economic efficiencies through price competition thereby making life better for people in general. In bumper sticker fashion. ”Regulation is Bad. Freedom is Good.” The problem with this economic conception is that it is nothing more than a myth. The American economy is dominated by oligopolies that do not compete over price. Instead these oligopolies compete through advertising: “Buy my stuff and you will save money!”
An oligopoly is a market condition in which the production of identical or similar products is concentrated (to the tune of at least 40% of market share) in a few large firms. Examples of oligopolies in the United States include the steel, aluminum, automobile, gypsum, petroleum, tire, banking, energy, and beer industries. The introduction of new products and processes can create new oligopolies, as in the computer or synthetic fiber industries. Microsoft sells more than 80% of the operating systems in the U.S. market. Oligopolies also exist in service industries, such as the airlines industry and the food industry. Oligopolistic practices include the practice of “dumping” in order to destroy the competition. Several years ago a national hamburger chain moved into a medium size central Texas town. The town had been served by several Mom and Pop hamburger stands for years. Circumventing existing unfair competition laws in place in Texas at the time, the hamburger chain advertised locally that they would take coupons, including super market coupons. The hamburger chains pricing scheme meant that every hamburger sold was sold at a loss. Within two months the Mom and Pop stands went out of business because they could not compete at a price point that was not profitable. After the Mom and Pop stands closed, the chain stopped taking coupons. Price competition ended and the national hamburger chain controlled the entire local market. Months later another hamburger chain moved into the local market but there was no price competition between the two. The same kind of hamburger sold at the same price in each hamburger store.
The raison d'être for corporations is to get bigger, richer, and more powerful. The logical future for corporations is to replace their competitors, dominant and eventually control the entire market, and in the long run, either reduce or even eliminate government regulation. Conservatives applaud and encourage this corporate behavior. It is also no exaggeration to conclude, however, that corporations are at their core irrational, politically anarchistic, and economically parasitic. And like all parasites, corporations will kill their host and in the process commit suicide. The problem for all of us is the fact that the corporate host is civil society and the entire physical planet.
Liberals/Democratic Party will argue that the best way to deal with corporate power is to capture the government and use the legal system to control and moderate corporate excesses. They will say that since the corporation was a legally defined entity, it should not be difficult to legally rein it in or put it out of business all together. These people forget that the modern form of government is an invention of the corporation and at the same time, organically, the modern corporation is an invention of the modern form of government. This can be seen symbolically where the business suit, the uniform of the corporation has become the uniform of the government. Over the last 100 years the entire government has been transformed into a creature that primarily serves the interest of the corporation. It has been the Supreme Court in conjunction with the United States Senate that has managed this transformation over the last 100 years because the Supreme Court and the Senate has been staffed disproportionately with Conservative pro corporate lawyers and businessmen.
For example The Supreme Courts ruling in “Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee (1/21/10) swept away all restrictions on corporate spending thereby allowing corporations to overwhelm the election process. The decision was 5-4 where the five justices (sic) who ruled in favor of corporations are all corporate lawyers or Republican Party operatives. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was a corporate lawyer in his father’s practice in San Francisco and Sacramento. While in Sacramento Kennedy also worked as a lobbyist for Republican Party causes when Edwin Meese, special advisor to Ronald Reagan, advanced his career. Antonin Scalia began his legal career at Jones Day, where he worked from 1961 to 1967. Jones Day is an international law firm specializing in corporate law and is currently the second largest law firm in the United States, with approximately 2,400 lawyers and gross annual revenue in excess of US$1.4 billion. Clarence Thomas was a corporate lawyer in the pesticide and agriculture division of the Monsanto Company. Thomas’ mentor, who also shephered Thomas through the Supreme Court confirmation process, was Senator John Danforth whose grandfather was William H. Danforth the founder of Ralston Purina. Samuel A. Alito also had his career advanced by Attorney General Ed Meese when Meese had Alito appointed Assistant Solicitor General, Deputy Attorney General, and United States Attorney for New Jersey. Chief Justice John Roberts was a corporate lawyer for Hogan & Hartson, the oldest major law firm in Washington D.C. According to Chambers & Partners Global 2008: The World's Leading Lawyers for Business, Hogan & Hartson is recognized globally for its excellence in the following areas: data protection, international trade, real estate investment trusts, life sciences and technology, media and telecommunications.
The key for the future of the planet is to disband the corporation and replace it with an economic system that is not parasitic but sustainable. Just as any attempt to make a pig fly of its own accord, any attempt at reforming the corporation using the modern form of government will certainly never get off the ground.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Whither Haiti
The proto-primates on the political right have been floating their none too subtle racial theories on why Haiti is so backward. On the left liberals and progressives wring their hands and shrug their shoulders offering no explanation why Haiti is such a poor and miserable place. The answer lies in Haiti's long and tortured history.
Overcoming the armies of Spain, Britain, and France, and the divisions between themselves, the slaves, mulattos, and free Blacks came together to fight their common enemy. In 1804, Haiti became an independent nation. Yet Haitians had to continually struggle to maintain their security and their freedom: The hostility of the world's powers formed insurmountable obstacles to the establishment of a healthy nation. The new rulers drawn from the gens de couleur and Black military leaders wanted to establish a profitable economy based on commodity production for export; many tried to reestablish plantations. The majority of former slaves wanted freedom from the humiliation and hardship of plantation labor, and the right to subsistence farming on their own plots of land.
Meanwhile, the world powers, led by the U.S. and the Vatican, would not recognize Haiti's sovereignty. In 1825, France finally agreed to recognize Haiti, but at a price: Haiti was to pay 90 million francs as an indemnity to the French planters who lost their land in the revolution. This saddled Haiti with a debt that crippled its already foundering economy and increased Haitian dependence on France. The U.S. refused to recognize Haiti until 1862 then continued it’s embargo on trade and political relations with this lone Black nation. By the late 1800s, principle and interest on the debt payments made to France amounted to 80% of the Haitian budget.
The new Black nation also faced the constant threat of invasion by the world powers. Haitian writer Michael J. Dash writes of how the U.S. before the Civil War, fearing that the example of a successful slave rising and independence struggle might spread, used its influence in Haiti to promote internally repressive, externally obedient, regimes. In fact the Haitian Revolution did inspired the planned slave revolt in South Carolina of Denmark Vesey in 1822, the slave revolt of Nat Turner in 1831 and militant abolitionists like John Brown and Frederick Douglas. Thus it was no accident that the internal policy of slavery followed by Jim Crow segregation in the United States mirrored U.S. foreign policy regarding Haiti. That foreign policy tended for two centuries to favor any regime which reduced Haiti to an impoverished, peasant community.
In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt began to flex the United States' new found muscle. He "asserted that the Monroe Doctrine carried 'the exercise of an international police power' in the Western Hemisphere." This assertion was quickly recognized as the Roosevelt Corollary and was often cited to exonerate intervention throughout the Caribbean. The Caribbean Basin would become known as "an American lake." If the Caribbean was an American lake, Haiti was to become America's beachfront property.
From 1915 to 1934 the U.S. played a long and devastating role in Haiti, including a brutal nineteen-year military occupation,. Writes Historian Mary Renda: “While in Haiti, marines installed a puppet president, dissolved the legislature at gunpoint, denied freedom of speech, and forced a new constitution on the Caribbean nation, one more favorable to foreign investment. In a series of speeches in his 1920 campaign for Vice President, Franklin D. Roosevelt claimed that he, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1913-1920), wrote the constitution which the U.S. imposed on Haiti in 1915. With the help of the marines, U.S. officials seized customs houses, took control of Haitian finances. U.S. Marines went straight to the Haitian national bank and removed its gold reserves to Citibank in New York City. Meanwhile, marines waged war against insurgents (called cacos) who for several years maintained an armed resistance in the countryside, and imposed a brutal system of forced labor that engendered even more fierce Haitian resistance. By official U.S. estimates, more than 3,000 Haitians were killed during this period; a more thorough accounting reveals that the death toll may have reached 1 1,500.
The attitude of the U.S. government toward the Haitians can best be summed up by the following observations made by successive American Secretaries of State. William Jennings Bryan (1913-1915) infamously said of the Haitian elite "Dear me, think of it! Niggers speaking French." Secretary of State Robert Lansing (1915-1920) believed that "the experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government.
The U.S. withdrew it’s troops in 1934. Before leaving, however, the U.S. government made a deal with Stenio Vincent, the new Haitian leader. Known as the Executive Accord of August 1933, in exchange for withdrawal of troops and a loan, the U.S. government would maintain supervision of Haitian finances until all outstanding American bonds expired in 1952.
From 1957 until 1986 Haiti was brutalized by the U.S. supported and incredibly corrupt Papa Doc/Baby Doc Duvalier dictatorship. In 1985-86 a powerful uprising swept Haiti again, forcing the U.S. to rescue Baby Doc and fly him to the French Riviera, in order to preserve their basic control of the country through the Haitian Army. A series of military governments followed, known to Haitians as “Duvalierism without Duvalier.”Under the Duvalier dictatorship, between 1973 and 1980, Haiti's debt increased from $53 million to $366 million, while the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty increased from 48 percent in 1976 to 81 percent 1985. Loans were contingent on an economic orientation on agricultural exports and the assembly industry-"The American Plan" which explicitly aimed to cut the ground out from under peasant agriculture by large-scale imports of cheaper U.S. goods, driving hundreds of thousands of peasants into the cities and shantytowns, desperate for work in U.S.-owned assembly plants being set up by the likes of Disney and Kmart, which paid workers 11 cents an hour to make pajamas and t-shirts. The American Plan proved an economic disaster. Official unemployment increased from 22 to 30 percent between 1980 and 1986, and in the same period economic growth showed an annual 2.5 percent decline.
Since the overthrow of the Duvalier dictatorship the United States continues to interfere in the internal affairs of Haiti. The popularly elected Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown by the American client Emmanuel “Toto” Constant nine month after his election in 1990. For the next three years a wave of terror was unleashed on the people of Haiti. Duvaliers death squads known as the Tontons Macoutes came out of hiding and began to rip up the networks of mass organization, especially in slums like Cite Soleil, that were Aristide’s base of support. Thousands of his supporters were killed, up to 300,000 went into hiding, and another 60,000 fled the island in makeshift boats many to Florida.The United States again invaded Haiti in 1994 with 20,000 troops. Aristide was brought back to power but only after President Bill Clinton forced Aristide to privatized electricity and phones among other state own businesses.This "deal" was known as the Governors Island Accords.
Another coup overthrew Aristide on February 29, 2004 instigated by France, Canada, and the United States after Aristide tried to undo the Governors Island Accords and simultaneous demanded France pay back, in 2004 value, the 90 million francs Haiti had to pay France in 1825. Again the United States President George W. Bush sent in 1,000 marines to occupy the country. The U.S. military literally kidnapped Aristide and his family and put him on a plane to the Central African Republic, where he was kept as a new regime in Port-au-Prince was consolidated. By March 1, hundreds of U.S. Marines again controlled the capital, and new waves of attacks, often by U.S. soldiers, were unleashed on the people. In June they were replaced by a force of 7,000 UN troops (mainly Brazilian) who have been cited by Human Rights groups as widely practicing “Summary Executions.”
When the former Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz said a century ago: “Poor Mexico! So far from God, and so close to the United States”, he did not know that he would speak for Haiti. Despite the countless natural resources of Haiti, the combined effects of American Imperialism and a predatory Haitian ruling class have conspired to reduce the vast majority of Haitians to unimaginable poverty.
While liberals blind themselves to Haiti's "Danse Macabre" with the United States and Conservatives quote history from John Wayne movies, the people of Haiti, in utter contempt for their tormentors, will continue to fight on. “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, ou la mort!”
January 2010
Overcoming the armies of Spain, Britain, and France, and the divisions between themselves, the slaves, mulattos, and free Blacks came together to fight their common enemy. In 1804, Haiti became an independent nation. Yet Haitians had to continually struggle to maintain their security and their freedom: The hostility of the world's powers formed insurmountable obstacles to the establishment of a healthy nation. The new rulers drawn from the gens de couleur and Black military leaders wanted to establish a profitable economy based on commodity production for export; many tried to reestablish plantations. The majority of former slaves wanted freedom from the humiliation and hardship of plantation labor, and the right to subsistence farming on their own plots of land.
Meanwhile, the world powers, led by the U.S. and the Vatican, would not recognize Haiti's sovereignty. In 1825, France finally agreed to recognize Haiti, but at a price: Haiti was to pay 90 million francs as an indemnity to the French planters who lost their land in the revolution. This saddled Haiti with a debt that crippled its already foundering economy and increased Haitian dependence on France. The U.S. refused to recognize Haiti until 1862 then continued it’s embargo on trade and political relations with this lone Black nation. By the late 1800s, principle and interest on the debt payments made to France amounted to 80% of the Haitian budget.
The new Black nation also faced the constant threat of invasion by the world powers. Haitian writer Michael J. Dash writes of how the U.S. before the Civil War, fearing that the example of a successful slave rising and independence struggle might spread, used its influence in Haiti to promote internally repressive, externally obedient, regimes. In fact the Haitian Revolution did inspired the planned slave revolt in South Carolina of Denmark Vesey in 1822, the slave revolt of Nat Turner in 1831 and militant abolitionists like John Brown and Frederick Douglas. Thus it was no accident that the internal policy of slavery followed by Jim Crow segregation in the United States mirrored U.S. foreign policy regarding Haiti. That foreign policy tended for two centuries to favor any regime which reduced Haiti to an impoverished, peasant community.
In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt began to flex the United States' new found muscle. He "asserted that the Monroe Doctrine carried 'the exercise of an international police power' in the Western Hemisphere." This assertion was quickly recognized as the Roosevelt Corollary and was often cited to exonerate intervention throughout the Caribbean. The Caribbean Basin would become known as "an American lake." If the Caribbean was an American lake, Haiti was to become America's beachfront property.
From 1915 to 1934 the U.S. played a long and devastating role in Haiti, including a brutal nineteen-year military occupation,. Writes Historian Mary Renda: “While in Haiti, marines installed a puppet president, dissolved the legislature at gunpoint, denied freedom of speech, and forced a new constitution on the Caribbean nation, one more favorable to foreign investment. In a series of speeches in his 1920 campaign for Vice President, Franklin D. Roosevelt claimed that he, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1913-1920), wrote the constitution which the U.S. imposed on Haiti in 1915. With the help of the marines, U.S. officials seized customs houses, took control of Haitian finances. U.S. Marines went straight to the Haitian national bank and removed its gold reserves to Citibank in New York City. Meanwhile, marines waged war against insurgents (called cacos) who for several years maintained an armed resistance in the countryside, and imposed a brutal system of forced labor that engendered even more fierce Haitian resistance. By official U.S. estimates, more than 3,000 Haitians were killed during this period; a more thorough accounting reveals that the death toll may have reached 1 1,500.
The attitude of the U.S. government toward the Haitians can best be summed up by the following observations made by successive American Secretaries of State. William Jennings Bryan (1913-1915) infamously said of the Haitian elite "Dear me, think of it! Niggers speaking French." Secretary of State Robert Lansing (1915-1920) believed that "the experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government.
The U.S. withdrew it’s troops in 1934. Before leaving, however, the U.S. government made a deal with Stenio Vincent, the new Haitian leader. Known as the Executive Accord of August 1933, in exchange for withdrawal of troops and a loan, the U.S. government would maintain supervision of Haitian finances until all outstanding American bonds expired in 1952.
From 1957 until 1986 Haiti was brutalized by the U.S. supported and incredibly corrupt Papa Doc/Baby Doc Duvalier dictatorship. In 1985-86 a powerful uprising swept Haiti again, forcing the U.S. to rescue Baby Doc and fly him to the French Riviera, in order to preserve their basic control of the country through the Haitian Army. A series of military governments followed, known to Haitians as “Duvalierism without Duvalier.”Under the Duvalier dictatorship, between 1973 and 1980, Haiti's debt increased from $53 million to $366 million, while the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty increased from 48 percent in 1976 to 81 percent 1985. Loans were contingent on an economic orientation on agricultural exports and the assembly industry-"The American Plan" which explicitly aimed to cut the ground out from under peasant agriculture by large-scale imports of cheaper U.S. goods, driving hundreds of thousands of peasants into the cities and shantytowns, desperate for work in U.S.-owned assembly plants being set up by the likes of Disney and Kmart, which paid workers 11 cents an hour to make pajamas and t-shirts. The American Plan proved an economic disaster. Official unemployment increased from 22 to 30 percent between 1980 and 1986, and in the same period economic growth showed an annual 2.5 percent decline.
Since the overthrow of the Duvalier dictatorship the United States continues to interfere in the internal affairs of Haiti. The popularly elected Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown by the American client Emmanuel “Toto” Constant nine month after his election in 1990. For the next three years a wave of terror was unleashed on the people of Haiti. Duvaliers death squads known as the Tontons Macoutes came out of hiding and began to rip up the networks of mass organization, especially in slums like Cite Soleil, that were Aristide’s base of support. Thousands of his supporters were killed, up to 300,000 went into hiding, and another 60,000 fled the island in makeshift boats many to Florida.The United States again invaded Haiti in 1994 with 20,000 troops. Aristide was brought back to power but only after President Bill Clinton forced Aristide to privatized electricity and phones among other state own businesses.This "deal" was known as the Governors Island Accords.
Another coup overthrew Aristide on February 29, 2004 instigated by France, Canada, and the United States after Aristide tried to undo the Governors Island Accords and simultaneous demanded France pay back, in 2004 value, the 90 million francs Haiti had to pay France in 1825. Again the United States President George W. Bush sent in 1,000 marines to occupy the country. The U.S. military literally kidnapped Aristide and his family and put him on a plane to the Central African Republic, where he was kept as a new regime in Port-au-Prince was consolidated. By March 1, hundreds of U.S. Marines again controlled the capital, and new waves of attacks, often by U.S. soldiers, were unleashed on the people. In June they were replaced by a force of 7,000 UN troops (mainly Brazilian) who have been cited by Human Rights groups as widely practicing “Summary Executions.”
When the former Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz said a century ago: “Poor Mexico! So far from God, and so close to the United States”, he did not know that he would speak for Haiti. Despite the countless natural resources of Haiti, the combined effects of American Imperialism and a predatory Haitian ruling class have conspired to reduce the vast majority of Haitians to unimaginable poverty.
While liberals blind themselves to Haiti's "Danse Macabre" with the United States and Conservatives quote history from John Wayne movies, the people of Haiti, in utter contempt for their tormentors, will continue to fight on. “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, ou la mort!”
January 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
