Via Orwellwasright, a dramatic Al Jazeera visualization of the real budget battle’s driving engine, that military/industrial/academic complex Ike warned us about 52 years ago.
We suspect the real number’s larger. Nor were real impacts on, for example, academia made clear. Berkeley, with it’s bandolier of National Laboratories spawned by the search for The Bomb and expanded into engines of imperialism, as in the genetically engineered cops designed to conquer land rights and demolish peasant sovereignty on behalf of private profit and the interests of the U.S. military and their CIA drone-firing gunslingers now busily setting up shop in Africa, along with AFRICOM, the new military command launched by an Air Force general who lead the air war of Afghanistan.
And it was that same general who devixsed the strategy for converting the air force in agrofueled fleet.
Africa was also the first destination of crews from Berkeley’s BP-funded, national lab participating $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute, who launched searches for suitable crops to be turned into fuels using genetically engineered microbial refineries. If all those oil countries rebelled, at least there’d be fuel plantations, operating under the watchful missile-armed eyes droning overhead.
And that’s just one on many avenues in which the single largest burner of money shapes the landscape of possibilities. . .
From BEHIND THE BRANDS: Food justice and the “Big 10” food and beverage companies, a new Oxfam report [PDF} on the power and politics of food. For more information, see this Oxfam website. Click on the image to enlarge.
Philadelphia Daily News scribe Will Bunch, writing at his blog, Attytood:
Obama’s expanded, top-secret drone war has allowed the U.S. to kill high-level members of al-Qaeda without the risks that ground troops have faced in Iraq or Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have been fighting more than 11 years.
But in doing so, a president who promised “the most open and transparent administration in history” has gone to Nixonian lengths to hide its actions from the American people and from Congress. He’s ordered missile attacks on countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia with which the nation is not at war – drone strikes that in addition to its targets have killed as many as 1,000 innocent civilians, including women and children.
And according to a White House white paper obtained by NBC News, Obama has claimed a power never even envisioned during the waterboarding-drenched years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – the ability to order the assassination of an American citizen believed to be engaged with al-Qaeda at a high level, even if that citizen is not currently plotting against the U.S.
The West is worried about the rise of Islamism in Africa. There are two big fears — one is that there is a new international terror network that will come and attack Europe and America. The other is that sneaky Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood will get themselves elected — and then promptly abolish democracy.
But behind these fears is an incredibly simplified — almost fictional — vision of the world. It possesses the minds of many western politicians, journalists and associated think tank “experts”. And at its heart is a kind of filter that wipes away anything complex about power and the struggles for power in African countries — and replaces that with a simple picture of the world as divided between goodies (us in the west) and dangerous frightening baddies who are out to destroy us.
It’s both blind and arrogant. And it’s terribly dangerous.
Curtis also features a clip from a documentary about the U.S. intervention in Somalia under Bill Clinton, filmed by British journalist Richard Dowden and featuring, from Mogadishu,
“a US marine interviewed on the street who puts it all so clearly:
“the place is filling up with American contractors all bidding to rebuild this joint. That’s all the Defence Department is. We’re bodyguards for American contractors ……………… You should know that – you’ve been to college.”
A full-scale invasion of Africa is under way. The United States is deploying troops in 35 African countries, beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger. Reported by Associated Press on Christmas Day, this was missing from most Anglo-American media.
The invasion has almost nothing to do with “Islamism”, and almost everything to do with the acquisition of resources, notably minerals, and an accelerating rivalry with China. Unlike China, the US and its allies are prepared to use a degree of violence demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Palestine. As in the cold war, a division of labour requires that western journalism and popular culture provide the cover of a holy war against a “menacing arc” of Islamic extremism, no different from the bogus “red menace” of a worldwide communist conspiracy.
Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Last year, Africom staged Operation African Endeavor, with the armed forces of 34 African nations taking part, commanded by the US military. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
Sometimes two items just seem to go together, especially for a blog that’s devoted some attention to AFRICOM and its links to Pentagon plans to exercise military suzerainty over resources in times to crisis.
First, consider the latest move to bolster AFRICOM, the command spawned by a general who’s since become a private sector agrofuel and security consultant.
From Eric Schmitt of the New York Times:
The United States military is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region.
For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens.
>snip<
A new drone base in northwest Africa would join a constellation of small airstrips in recent years on the continent, including in Ethiopia, for surveillance missions flown by drones or turboprop planes designed to look like civilian aircraft.
In light of the above, consider this question from Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard, in a blog post headlined “Top ten tough questions for Hillary Clinton”:
U.S. military forces are now organized in various regional combatant commands, each under a designated regional “commander-in-chief” or CINC. These regional CINCs have a vast array of military, intelligence, and other assets at their disposal, and the resources they can bring to bear far exceed those of the State Department. For this reason, foreign governments often pay as much or more attention to the CINCs as they do to the U.S. ambassador, for the simple reason that the CinCs can do more for or against them. Here’s my question: if you were an ambitious young person who wanted to make a mark on U.S. foreign policy, why go to a nice four-year college and then join the Foreign Service? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to West Point, Annapolis, or Colorado Springs and try to become a senior military leader instead?
From Alán Camilo Cienfuegos, writing in Irish Left Review:
The United States military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) has never been based on the African continent, headquartered instead in Germany. The chief leader of the opposition to US imperialism in Africa, the main opponent to the basing of AFRICOM bases on the continent and to the presence of US troops on the ground in African countries, was Libya under Muammar Gaddafi. Now that the anti-western Libya has been smashed, and the western-puppet Libya has been set up in its place, the field is clear for the most part for US and western imperialism to move physically into Africa and begin setting up bases in strategic locations in the region. But ironically, one of the main obstacles remaining is none other than the myriad Islamist groups funded by the west to help fight and destroy Gaddafi’s Libya. Large numbers of Islamist fighters, veterans of the war against the Libyan state, have since the fall of Gaddafi moved back across the Sahara and into Mali and surrounding countries, taking their weapons and experience with them, in order to set up their own forces to impose Islamic law on larger and larger areas of north Africa, threatening the stability of imperialism’s plans in the region. And this is where the French military comes in.
The United States has long been the spearhead of western capitalist imperialism, with its running dogs mostly playing second fiddle to its domination. But today, with the US military smarting from blows received in Afghanistan and Iraq, and gearing up for a potential war with new regional nemesis Iran (with the attendant face-off with Iranian allies Russia and China), the time has come for the rising military power of the European Union, internally strengthened by various treaties of economic integration and military co-operation, to take its place as the vanguard of the imperialist forces. Britain and France have already taken part in the destruction of Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan, and France took the lead role in the bombardment of Libya in 2011 in support of the western proxies there. The EU, with its continuing, rapid integration of economic and military power, will soon be an imperialist force to be reckoned with in the world, a vital bulwark for the United States against the equally growing powers of Russia and China.
And thus, we now have French forces, with the backing of the US and EU, bombing the same rebels they funded and armed to destroy Libya, and French troops (currently around 2,500 of them) gearing up to fight alongside the Malian government to secure the interests of imperialism in the region. One wonders if the French have learned the lessons of their past colonial adventures, for although French officials have claimed that the Mali operation will last only a few weeks, it is very possible that, in facing once again a well armed, battle-hardened and fanatical enemy on its own soil, the imperialists may well be sucked into yet another war that they cannot win, this time against an enemy of their own making.
From The Real News Network [transcript here], a fascinating discussion between Paul Jay and Timothy A Wise about the role of government ethanol mandates in fueling Third World hunger:
Some background on Wise via TRNN:
Timothy A. Wise is the Research Director of the Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE), Tufts University, and leads its Globalization and Sustainable Development Program. With a background in international development, he specializes in agricultural policy and rural development. He is involved in ongoing research in the areas of: Sustainable Rural Development, Beyond Agricultural Subsidies, Mexico Under NAFTA, WTO and Global Trade. He is the co-author of the book (in English and Spanish), Confronting Globalization: Economic Integration and Popular Resistance in Mexico, and The Promise and the Perils of Agricultural Trade Liberalization: Lessons from Latin America. He is the former executive director of Grassroots International, a Boston-based international aid organization. He holds a Masters in Public Policy from Tufts’ Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Department.
Al Jazeera has an extended report on Wise’s work here. His report on the impacts of the U.S. ethanol mandate on Mexico is here [PDF].
“Sam Baceli,” the man who directed the hate-filled Innocence of Muslims that’s inflamed the Middle East and inspired the violence that led to the death of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, has been unmasked.
And while he claimed he was Jewish and held Israeli citizenship, he’s a really a Coptic Christian from El Cerrito with a criminal record for fraud and backed by another Southern Californian with a lengthy record of connections with right wing militias.
From Gillian Flaccus and Stephen Brau of the Associated Press:
The self-proclaimed director of “Innocence of Muslims” initially claimed a Jewish and Israeli background. But others involved in the film said his statements were contrived as evidence mounted that the film’s key player was a southern Californian Coptic Christian with a checkered past.
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, told The Associated Press in an interview outside Los Angeles Wednesday that he managed logistics for the company that produced “Innocence of Muslims,” which mocked Muslims and the prophet Muhammad.
The movie has been blamed for inflaming mobs that attacked U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya this week as well as U.S. Embassy in Yemen on Thursday.
Nakoula denied he had directed the film, though he said he knew the self-described filmmaker, Sam Bacile. But the cellphone number that the AP contacted Tuesday to reach the filmmaker who identified himself as Bacile traced to the same address near Los Angeles where Nakoula was located.
But the U.S. Justice Department disagrees, telling the Associated Press today that “Nakoula is filmmaker of anti-Muslim movie blamed for violence.”
And then there’s that criminal record
Wired’s Danger Room blog got the goods on Nagoula, specifically, documents from his federal criminal record.
Noah Shachtman reports:
He went by many names, the man who helped produce “The Innocence of Muslims,” the inflammatory video now roiling the Middle East: Matthew Nekola; Ahmed Hamdy; Amal Nada; Daniel K. Caresman; Kritbag Difrat; Sobhi Bushra; Robert Bacily; Nicola Bacily; Thomas J. Tanas; Erwin Salameh; Mark Basseley Youssef; Yousseff M. Basseley; Malid Ahlawi; even P.J. Tobacco.
But his real name — the one he used when he was sent to prison for bank fraud — was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. His habit of adopting other identities earned him a 21-month sentence in federal prison. During 2008 and 2009, court documents [PDF] reviewed by Danger Room. . .show that Nakoula again and again opened bank accounts with fake names and stolen social security numbers. Then Nakoula would deposit bogus checks into the new accounts and withdraw money before the checks bounced. The scheme worked for more than a year, until he was indicted in June of 2009. Eventually, he was ordered to stay off of the internet unless he got his probation officer’s permission, and pay a $794,700 fine.
Yet Nakoula’s fakery apparently continued. Actors hired to perform in “Innocence” say they had no idea the movie they were making would be so deliberately offensive to Muslims; in fact, many of the most provocative lines were overdubbed after the fact. Basseley swears he’s not “Sam Bacile,” the director and writer of the movie; he just happens to have a similar name, and coincidentally was found at the address tied to the cellphone of “Bacile.”
Sam Klein, identified as a producer of the film, is another character with a checkered past.
From Adam Nagourney of the New York Times:
The history of the film — who financed it; how it was made; and perhaps most important, how it was translated into Arabic and posted on YouTube to Muslim viewers — was shrouded Wednesday in tales of a secret Hollywood screening; a director who may or may not exist, and used a false name if he did; and actors who appeared, thanks to computer technology, to be traipsing through Middle Eastern cities. One of its main producers, Steve Klein, a Vietnam veteran whose son was severely wounded in Iraq, is notorious across California for his involvement with anti-Muslim actions, from the courts to schoolyards to a weekly show broadcast on Christian radio in the Middle East.
Yet as much of the world was denouncing the violence that had spread across the Middle East, Mr. Klein — an insurance salesman in Hemet, Calif., a small town two hours east of here — proclaimed the video a success at portraying what he has long argued was the infamy of the Muslim world, even as he chuckled at the film’s amateur production values.
“We have reached the people that we want to reach,” he said in an interview. “And I’m sure that out of the emotion that comes out of this, a small fraction of those people will come to understand just how violent Muhammad was, and also for the people who didn’t know that much about Islam. If you merely say anything that’s derogatory about Islam, then they immediately go to violence, which I’ve experienced.”
Well, there’s this, from the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Over the years, Klein has worked with a variety of far-right groups, including the Church at Kaweah, which the SPLC lists as a hate group. The Church of Kaweah is a secretive cohort of militant Christian fundamentalists in California who are preparing for war and who believe that churches should avoid government regulation and answer only to God. Kaweah has its own militia, headed by David “Dutch” Johnson (aka Dutch Joens), a longtime antigovernment veteran of the militia movement. Johnson looks forward to the battle that will begin when “Dictator Obongo” institutes martial law. He has called Mexicans savages “who can’t run their own government” and recommended sending guns to drug cartels to “decrease the excess population in Mexico so they don’t come north.”
Klein also conducts drills with the Christian Guardians, a San Francisco-based group headed by Andrew Saqib James, an American-born Pakistani Christian who calls Islam “a giant crime syndicate” and hopes his group will become “the most feared militia in the world.” The Church of Kaweah’s website has advertised joint trainings with the Guardians, describing them as a “unique system of learning how to survive the Muslim Brotherhood as we teach the Christian Morality of Biblical Warfare.”
Another set of revelations concerns the role of the actors who starred in the film.
Turns out they thought they were shooting a low-budget sword-and-sand saga, and many of the words they appear to speak on the screen were actually dubbed in after the shooting was done.
The Gawker’s Adrian Chen reports:
Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress from Bakersfield, Calif., has a small role in the Muhammed movie as a woman whose young daughter is given to Muhammed to marry. But in a phone interview this afternoon, Garcia told us she had no idea she was participating in an offensive spoof on the life of Muhammed when she answered a casting call through an agency last summer and got the part.
The script she was given was titled simply Desert Warriors.
“It was going to be a film based on how things were 2,000 years ago,” Garcia said. “It wasn’t based on anything to do with religion, it was just on how things were run in Egypt. There wasn’t anything about Muhammed or Muslims or anything.”
In the script and during the shooting, nothing indicated the controversial nature of the final product, now called Muslim Innocence. Muhammed wasn’t even called Muhammed; he was “Master George,” Garcia said. The word “Muhammed” was dubbed Continue reading →
The death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens in a Benghazi rocket attack today resulted from rage against a cheesy film trailer [Google it; we’re not posting it].
The fellow who says he made the film calls himself “Sam Bacile,” and he claims to be an American who holds Israeli citizenship who makes his living either as a filmmaker or a real estate developer.
Problem is, there’s no evidence he’s made any films beyond Innocence of Muslims, which seems to be precisely designed to produce the kind of outrage it’s generated.
He’s not listed on the Internet Movie Data Base, and his name doesn’t appear in the data base of ZABA Search [a comprehensive database] either in California or anywhere else in the U.S. And a Google search for his name reveals no hits before the release of the film trailer.
Having covered both the film industry [and even having worked in it], we can say that if there’s one thing filmmakers want, it’s recognition. And real estate developers are widely reported on.
Given the bizarre lack of any prior web presence who a man who claims two high-profile vocations, we’re amazed at the credulity or the mainstream media in swallowing claims made over the phone to two reporters.
The Wall Street Journal’s Matt Bradley and Dion Nissenbaum identify him as a “52-year-old writer, director and producer,” while the AP reported he was 56.
Bacile claimed his film was financed by Jewish donors.
From AP’s Shaya Tayefe Mohajer:
“This is a political movie,” Bacile told the AP. “The U.S. lost a lot of money and a lot of people in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re fighting with ideas.”
Bacile said he believes the movie will help his native land by exposing Islam’s flaws to the world.
“Islam is a cancer, period,” he said repeatedly, his solemn voice thickly accented.
The two-hour movie, “Innocence of Muslims,” cost $5 million to make and was financed with the help of more than 100 Jewish donors, said Bacile, who wrote and directed it.
And then there’s this, from AP reporter Esam Mohamed [emphasis added]:
Though Bacile was apologetic about the American who was killed as a result of the outrage over his film, he blamed lax embassy security and the perpetrators of the violence.
“I feel the security system [at the embassies] is no good,” said Bacile. “America should do something to change it.”
A consultant on the film, Steve Klein, said the filmmaker is concerned for family members who live in Egypt. Bacile declined to confirm.
>snip<
He told the AP he was an Israeli Jew and an American citizen. But Israeli officials said they had not heard of Bacile and there was no record of him being a citizen. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to share personal information with the media.
Adding yet another layer of complexity to an already-murky tale, the film was heavily promoted by an Egyptian-American of the Coptic Christian faith.
So, we have a movie the looks like it was made by a high school student yet clearly designed to inflame outrage among Muslims, and it’s endorsed by Terry Jones, the Koran-burning Florida Fundie pastor.
And it comes just as Israel is beating the war drums and searching for a provocation to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and the Middle East and North Africa are aboil with tensions stirred up by an Arab Spring heavily promoted by Washington.
A U.S. ambassador is dead, the U.S. embassy grounds in Egypt were stormed and a flag burned, and millions of Muslims are outraged by a tawdry piece of trash designed to incite anger by a man who didn’t seem to exist before his trailer hit You Tube.
Forgive us for thinking something deep is afoot within that infamous wilderness of mirrors.
Here in the U.S., it’s the driest year in the last half-century and the hottest year ever recorded, a double whammy that’s leading to widespread crop failure and raising the specter, when combined with crops shortages in other countries, of massive unrest in the world’s poorer lands.
Dry weather is also cutting down on harvests in Africa, as the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction reports:
More than two-thirds of Africa’s population lives in rural areas and depend on rain-fed agriculture and pasture, making them highly vulnerable to bouts of extreme dry weather, says ARC, noting that there have been 132 recorded droughts in sub-Saharan Africa since 1990.
This year, drought is causing a crisis in the Sahel, affecting an estimated 18 million people in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Sudan. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says overall Sahelian cereal production is 26 per cent lower than last year, with countries like Chad losing as much as half its cereal crops.
Only a year ago, drought in the Horn of Africa led to a severe food crisis for 10 million people in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda. Britain’s Department for International Development, a major aid provider, says one year after famine was declared 2.5 million people in Somalia — the hardest hit country in the region — are still at risk of chronic food shortages.
And then there’s the Indian subcontinent, where Agence France-Presse reports that the annual monsoon rains arrived late this summer, and they’ve been yielding much less moisture:
The much-romanticised annual downpour that normally sweeps in at the start of June in the far south of the country is a lifeline for. . .about two thirds of the 1.2-billion population who depend on agriculture for their incomes.
But the rains have been so poor that some farmers have decided not to sow crops, spelling more bad news for a slowing economy buffeted by its worst power crisis this week following massive blackouts.
>snip<
Haryana, along with neighbouring Punjab state, is known as the “bread basket” of India, the source of over 60 per cent of food grains such as wheat, maize, rice and pulses that are grown annually.
It has been one of the worst affected this year with 65 per cent less rain than the long-term average, according to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) in New Delhi.
Nation-wide, the monsoon has been more than 20 per cent below its average, sparking fears of drought among farmers who remember vividly the failure of 2009, when India suffered its worst drought in nearly four decades.
The situation has reached extreme levels here in the U.S., breadbasket to the world. Hardest hit has been corn, where demand is driven not only by livestock and human consumption but by the federal ethanol mandate.
Here’s a status report on the drought from Bloomberg’s Brian K. Sullivan:
The two worst levels of drought now grip nearly one-fourth of the lower 48 states, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported.
About 24.1 percent of the region was suffering extreme or exceptional drought in the week ended Aug. 7, up from 22.3 percent in the previous period and 18.3 percent last year, according to the monitor, based in Lincoln, Nebraska.
While there has been some improvement in drought conditions in the Midwest, that wasn’t the case in the Great Plains, Mark Svoboda of the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln said in an accompanying analysis.
>snip<
The drought has helped push corn prices to a record. World food prices have surged 6.2 percent as dryness has also gripped Russia and below-average monsoon rains fell in India.
The primary corn and soybean agriculture areas in the U.S. had their sixth-driest April-July growing season in records dating back to 1895, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday.
For an idea of the extent of the crisis, here’s the latest edition of the U.S. Drought Monitor:
Heat wave breaks all previous records
By itself, drought would be bad enough, but then there’s record-breaking heat engulfing the American grain belt.
From Sam Nelson and Deborah Zabarenko of Reuters:
In the throes of a historic drought in the United States, a government agency said on Wednesday that it broke a heat record in July that had stood since the devastating Dust Bowl summer of 1936.
Reeling from widespread crop damage in July, Midwest farmers found some comfort on Wednesday in forecasts for rain over the next 10 days, a prospect that could take the edge off rising grain prices and concerns of food inflation worldwide.
The scorching month of July turned out to be the hottest month in the continental United States on record, beating the hottest month recorded in July 1936, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.
The January-to-July period was also the warmest since modern record-keeping began in 1895, and the warmest 12-month period, eclipsing the last record set just a month ago. It was the fourth time in as many months that U.S. temperatures broke the hottest-12-months record, according to NOAA.
“July was a pretty interesting month because there were two different things at play,” Jake Crouch, a climatologist at the agency’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., said in an interview. “We saw very warm daytime temperatures over a large part of the country related to the ongoing drought, just as in 1936. When soils are dry, especially during the summer, it drives the daytime temperatures up. But this is a very local effect.”
“On the other side, at the national level, we have also seen very warm nighttime temperatures, and that is part of a long-term trend we’ve seen across the contiguous U.S. over the past several decades,” he said. “The hotter days increase the amount of moisture the lower atmosphere can hold, and this means it doesn’t cool off as much at night anymore.”
“This clearly shows a longer-term warming trend in the U.S., not just one really hot month,” Mr. Crouch said.
The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) averaged 213 points in July 2012, as much as 12 points (6 percent) up from June, but still well below the peak of 238 points reached in February 2011. The July surge of the Index followed three months of decline. The sharp rebound was mostly driven by a jump in grain and sugar prices, and more modest Continue reading →
Former New York Times Mideast bureau chief Chris Hedges, fired for speaking out against the invasion of Iraq, talks with Bill Moyers about the devastating impacts of raptor capitalism, the collapse of news media, and much more.
The program notes:
There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist Chris Hedges calls these places “sacrifice zones,” and joins Bill this week on Moyers & Company to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that plundered them thrive.
“These are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed,” Hedges tells Bill. “It’s the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.”
The broadcast includes images from Hedges’ collaboration with comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which is an illustrated account of their travels through America’s sacrifice zones. Kirkus Reviews calls it an “unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed.”
A columnist for Truthdig, Hedges also describes the difference between truth and news. “The really great reporters — and I’ve seen them in all sorts of news organizations — are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career,” Hedges says.
An important documentary by Scott Noble. The Power Principle exposes the hidden agenda driving American foreign policy over the last seven decades and its gruesome consequences.
Historian Michael Parenti calls the film “A gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly relevant to the events of today.”
In an interview for Soldiers for the Cause, a veterans group supporting the Occupy movement, filmmaker Noble outlines the theses advanced in his documentary:
The Cold War was not just a struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States; the real struggle was between American corporations and the Third World.
Top policy planners in the US and other Western nations were acutely aware that the Soviet Union had a conservative foreign policy. You can see this in numerous declassified documents.
Nevertheless, the American government engaged in what can only be described as a campaign of terrorism against the American people, constantly invoking the “Soviet Menace” to justify military spending and war.
The United States does not have a free press.
The Pentagon is a Keynsian Mechanism.
The American government was responsible for genocide during the Cold War.
The Empire is similar to the mafia.
Corporate interests are inextricably wed with military policy.
American imperialism is not of recent vintage.
Elites deceive themselves as well as the public.
The US is not exceptional. It is behaving pretty much as powerful states always have.
Western elites supported fascism prior to, during and after WWII.
A WWIII scenario is almost inevitable unless the American public wakes up – and fast.
An Introduction to the Empire; Iran – Oil and Geopolitics; Guatemala – the “merger of state and corporate power”; The Congo – Neocolonialism; Grenada – “The Mafia Doctrine”; Chile – “libertarianism with a small l”; Globalization: Consequences.
1945: Grand Area Strategy; Fascism: a “rational system of the plutocracy”; Case Studies: the Greek Communists; The Italian Communists; the Spanish Anarchists; Fascism’s Western backers; Trading with the Enemy; Fascism as “preservation of civilization”; the Cold War and “A Century of Fear”.
The Power Principle – II: Propaganda
The program notes:
The Soviet Menace?; Case Studies: El Salvador, Nicaragua; Propaganda: Self-Deception and blowback; The “International Communist Conspiracy”; Declassified Documents; NSC 68; The Pentagon as Keynsian Mechanism; The Military Industrial Complex; The War against the Third World; Shifting rationales; What is imperialism?; Case Study: Haiti; “War is a racket”.
Fear-based conditioning – The War of the Worlds, The Triumph of the Will; World view Warfare; The Russians are coming; Television: The “perfect propaganda medium”; Soviet vs. American propaganda; Hollywood and the Pentagon; Psywarriors and the media; Operation Mockingbird; The Pentagon Pundits; Project Revere; The Bomber Gap; “scare the hell out of them”.
The Power Principle – III: Apocalypse
The program notes:
Mutually Assured Destruction; MAD men – Curtis Lemay and the super hawks; MAD men – Hermann Kahn and the Rand Corporation; Over flights as provocation; Cuba: the “danger of a good example”; terrorism against Cuba; “Unconventional warfare”; the Cuban Missile Crisis and the “man who saved the world”.
Why did the Soviet Union collapse?; Gorbachev: a “more violent, less stable world”; the Pentagon’s New Map; Did Ronald Reagan end the Cold War?; The Brink of Apocalypse: Able Archer; The betrayal of Russia; The expansion of NATO; Yugoslavia and Libya; the Yeltsin coup; Living standards in the former Soviet Union; A third way?
There was another election last weekend, in Egypt.
The outcome was a pattern familiar here in the U.S., where urban centers are often blue and the countryside red [and just how did red come to be associated with the GOP anyway?]
While Cairo went for the Ahmed Shafiq, the former Air Marshal turned government official, the countryside went for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi, giving him the vistory.
Neither candidate, of course, represented the last year’s occupation of Tahrir Square, the event that set the changes in motion which have led Egypt to a choice a technocratic politician with a military background and a religious conservative.
But the decision of voters means a lot less in light of a pair of bombs dropped by the army.
The outcome, from Ahram in Cairo:
Results from Cairo are finally in giving Shafiq a solid lead in the capital with 57.7 per cent of the vote compared to rival Mursi’s 42.3 per cent.
However, the Cairo initial tallies will not be enough to put Shafiq ahead of Mursi after votes have been reported in 27 governorates.
If these results stand, Muslim Brotherhood contender Mursi will have won Egypt’s first post-uprising elections with 51.89 per cent of the vote, succeeding toppled strongman Hosni Mubarak.
Downtown Cairo has woken up to the sound of horns and celebratory chants as Mursi supporters continue to descend on the capital’s iconic Tahrir Square.
Official results will be announced by the Supreme Presidential Electoral Commission on Thursday, 21 June; the ruling military council will “hand over power” on 30 June.
But meanwhile, the army had dropped the political equivalent of a H-bomb.
From the BBC:
Lt Muhammad al-Assar from the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (Scaf) told a news conference that a ceremony would be held in late June to hand over power to the new president, state media report.
However, the constitutional declaration issued by the Scaf late on Sunday effectively gives it legislative powers, control over the budget and over who writes the permanent constitution following mass street protests that toppled Mr Mubarak in February 2011.
It also strips the president of any authority over the army.
The Scaf have even guaranteed themselves jobs for life, the BBC’s Jon Leyne in Cairo reports.
More from Ernesto Londoño and Leila Fadel of the Washington Post:
On Sunday, the country’s military leaders issued a constitutional decree that gave the armed forces sweeping powers and downgraded the presidency to a subservient role. The seizure of power followed months in which Egypt’s ruling generals had promised to cede authority to a new civilian government by the end of June. Activists and political analysts charged that the generals’ move instead marked the start of a military dictatorship, a sharp reversal from the promise of Egypt’s popular revolt last year.
The generals sought to play down the scope of the decree during a news conference Monday. Maj. Gen. Mohamed el-Assar said the military chiefs would hold a grand ceremony before the end of the month to hand over the reins of power to the new president.
>snip<
Under the generals’ decree, Egypt’s president will have no control over the military’s budget or leadership and will not be authorized to declare war without the consent of the ruling generals.
The document said the military would soon name a group of Egyptians to draft a new constitution, which would be subject to a Continue reading →
And the subject is soybeans, presumably including strains developed by UC Berkeley’s Chris Somerville, who made millions selling genetically modified soy to Monsanto.
Somerville currently serves as head of the campus side of the Energy Biosciences Institute [EBI], funded with $500 million of BP money to develop GMO crops and microbes BP can use to produce transportation fuels.
The Brazilian case centers on one of Monsanto’s most insidious practices: Turning farmers into corporate serfs by banning the the practice at the heart of agriculture since its beginngings — saving seeds to plant next year’s crop — and imposing royalties on farmers whose crops by be contaminated by their own GMOs.
The story from Subodh Varma of the Times of India:
Five million Brazilian farmers have taken on US based biotech company Monsanto through a lawsuit demanding return of about 6.2 billion euros taken as royalties from them. The farmers are claiming that the powerful company has unfairly extracted these royalties from poor farmers because they were using seeds produced from crops grown from Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds, reports Merco Press.
In April this year, a judge in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, ruled in favor of the farmers and ordered Monsanto to return royalties paid since 2004 or a minimum of $2 billion. The ruling said that the business practices of seed multinational Monsanto violate the rules of the Brazilian Cultivars Act (No. 9.456/97).
Monsanto has appealed against the order and a federal court ruling on the case is now expected by 2014.
A telling quote defines the essence of the farmer lawsuit:
“Monsanto gets paid when it sell the seeds. The law gives producers the right to multiply the seeds they buy and nowhere in the world is there a requirement to pay (again). Producers are in effect paying a private tax on production,” Jane Berwanger, lawyer for the farmers told the media agencies.
Here’s a video report from RT
Featuring am interview with Shelly Roche of ByteStyle.TV:
Luisa Massarani, writing for Nature, describes the potential impacts:
Brazil is the second-largest producer of genetically-modified (GM) crops, after the United States. Last year, it farmed 30.3 million hectares of the crops, mostly soya beans, but also corn and cotton. It legalized the growing of GM crops in 2005, after it became clear that about three-quarters of the soya crops produced in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul were already being grown from Roundup Ready seeds that had been smuggled in from Argentina. Because the crop is resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as Roundup, farmers can spray they fields with the chemical to control weeds without risking damage to their crops.
Since the legalization, Monsanto has charged Brazilian farmers 2% of their sales of Roundup Ready soya beans, which now account for an estimated 85% of the nation’s soya-bean crop. The company also tests Brazilian soya beans that are sold as non-GM — if they turn out to be Roundup Ready, the company charges the farmers responsible for the crops some 3% of their sales.
>snip<
On 12 June, the judges of the Brazilian Supreme Court of Justice ruled against Monsanto, deciding unanimously that the ruling by the Justice Tribune of Rio Grande do Sul, once it is made, should apply nationwide. Monsanto has declined to comment on the case.
Some scientists fear that if the company is forced to repay royalties, it could trigger cuts in funding for biotech research.
If they prevail in the end, the farmers could have a major impact on Somerville’s BP project, which aims at creating massive industrial-scale plantations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia for proprietary agrofuel crops.
And they did it to generate bad press for the government of Bashir Assad, says ITN news reporter Alec Thomson.
“I’m quite clear the rebels deliberately set us up to be shot by the Syrian Army. Dead journos are bad for Damascus,” Thomson, who reports for Channel 4 News, in Britain, writes in his personal blog:
Please, do not for one me moment believe that my experience with the rebels in al Qusair was a one-off.
This morning I received the following tweet:
“@alextomo I read your piece “set up to be shot in no mans land”, I can relate as I had that same experience in Al Zabadani during our tour.”
That was from Nawaf al Thani, who is a human rights lawyer and a member of the Arab League Observer mission to Syria earlier this year.
It has to make you wonder who else has had this experience when attempting to find out what is going on in rebel-held Syria.
My point is, dead journalists are bad for Damascus. When Marie Colvin, the British journalist got killed because she was in a building which was shelled by the Syrian army in Homs, that was an appalling propaganda blow for the Damascus regime. You don’t have to be very clever to work out that the deaths of any journalist at the hands of the Syrian army are going to be an appalling blow, again, for President Assad. That’s going to reflect all the way to Moscow and all the way to Beijing. Clearly that is going to be a bad thing in terms of propaganda. So the motivation for the rebels to pull a stunt like that seems to be very obvious. I’m not angry about it, I’m not upset about it, this is a war and these things will be done. Both sides are involved in very dirty tactics in this war. This is a nasty and dirty war on both sides.
The perils of ‘parachute journalism’
The mainstream media, as we’ve been chronicling, has been drastically downsized, and costly foreign bureaus have been the very first casualties.
The result has been hit-and-run coverage of a sort given a peculiar name by folks in the news world.
In a 2006 piece for American Journalism Review Sherry Ricchiardi described the peculiar art of what folks in the news biz call parachute journalism:
News managers interviewed for this story seem resigned to the fact that robust overseas bureaus are largely artifacts of a bygone era, like typewriters and rotary phones. Instead, with a few exceptions, foreign news has entered a phase of crisis journalism — the flood-the-zone, event-driven coverage Americans witnessed during July’s Middle East crisis. The audience has little or no history before the story breaks into headlines; there has been no foreshadowing. (This is precisely what has happened in Afghanistan, where the American press corps has dwindled dramatically while conditions continue to worsen — see “The Forgotten War,” August/September.)
This approach results in a shorter media attention span. When the shooting ends, reporters scatter as quickly as they came. “We’ll pull our journalistic shock troops out, and we’ll redeploy them somewhere else because we only have a handful,” [former ABC News journalist Ted] Koppel says.
So who do reporters rely on when they arrive in a strange land whose language they don’t speak?
From a 2002 essay by Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, writing for the Potnter Institute [emphasis added]:
When journalists go to work in a country where they do not understand the language or the culture, they typically make use of the invaluable services of fixer interpreters, whose impact on global public opinion is invariably underestimated. They are the ones who, while remaining largely invisible, offer clear guidance as to how conflicts should be interpreted, as well as which sources should be chosen and which words used.
Now add another ingredient to the mix
It took WikiLeaks to expose the dark side of those“democratic” rebels who fought to overthrow the Libyan government, the same ones who were acting as guides to the Western media types who reported on such notorious disinformation as the subsequently debunked claims that Moammar Gaddafi was dosing troops with Viagra to ensure they’d rape rebels, or that his troops were bolstered by black African mercenaries.
There was no Viagra, no “mercenaries,” though plenty of black Africans were slaughtered by rebel forces.
But the stories worked, whipping up resentment and offering justification to the likes of Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy.
Now that Thomson’s story has come to light, we should be asking lots of questions about just how our news media are getting their stories after they unpack their parachutes.
The obvious questions focus on just who those translator/fixers are. Given that the U.S. has been pushing for the overthrow of the Syrian government for decades, one might reasonably ask if any of those oh-so-helpful folk are tied to intelligence agencies, U.S., British, French, or other.
But when you hit the ground running, you don’t have time for lengthy background checks, so you just take what you’re given.
But if Libya has taught us any lessons at all, we should all be asking serious questions.
If you thought the economic news was grim, consider a newly published study just published in Nature, that most eminent of scientific journals.
Written by a team of 22 internationally respected academics, the study paints a grim picture of a planet in danger of massive biological changes as the direct result of human devastation of the natural environment.
What’s not mentioned is the role Berkeley is playing in creating the very natural holocaust the researchers decry.
From UC Berkeley science Writer Robert Saunders:
A prestigious group of scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation.
“It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,” warns Anthony Barnosky, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of a review paper appearing in the June 7 issue of the journal Nature. “The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.”
Here’s Barnosky in a brief clip posted by the university:
A critical tipping point
Note in particular this section of Sander’s report on the article [which we’re unable to access because Nature hides it behind a pay wall and we’re short the $32 dollars it would take to read it]:
The authors note that studies of small-scale ecosystems show that once 50-90 percent of an area has been altered, the entire ecosystem tips irreversibly into a state far different from the original, in terms of the mix of plant and animal species and their interactions. This situation typically is accompanied by species extinctions and a loss of biodiversity.
Currently, to support a population of 7 billion people, about 43 percent of Earth’s land surface has been converted to agricultural or urban use, with roads cutting through much of the remainder. The population is expected to rise to 9 billion by 2045; at that rate, current trends suggest that half Earth’s land surface will be disturbed by 2025. To Barnosky, this is disturbingly close to a global tipping point.
“Can it really happen? Looking into the past tells us unequivocally that, yes, it can really happen. It has happened. The last glacial/interglacial transition 11,700 years ago was an example of that,” he said, noting that animal diversity still has not recovered from extinctions during that time. “I think that if we want to avoid the most unpleasant surprises, we want to stay away from that 50 percent mark.”
If the planet reaches the tipping point, UC Berkeley may be one of the principal culprits should the university’s massive research efforts on turning plants into fuel ever reach a point of commercial success.
In addition to the $500 million BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute [the EBI, headed by a scientist who made a fortune selling genetically modified plants to Monsanto], the university is also home to the federally funded Joint BioEnergy Institute and has spawned several start-up companies devoted to the same end.
EBI head Chris Somerville insisted repeatedly to fellow faculty members that fuel crops developed by the project would only be farmed on “marginal” U.S. farmlands east of the Mississippi.
The scientist who then headed BP’s secret side of the EBI was more honest, declaring that BP’s interest is global, and focused on farming the “green parts” of the planet, the lands of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Africa is already presently the target of massive land grabs by corporations from Asia and Europe, eager to corner cheap land for fuel crops, and massive dam projects to transform waterways and divert their flows to agrofuel plantations are already in the works — efforts that will radically expand the destruction of existing ecosystems.
And here’s what we wrote for the Berkeley Daily Planet on 28 December 2007:
During meetings with industry and legislative officials in Washington in June, BP officials stressed that their company was a global business with a global reach.
The multinational is keen to develop crops suitable for growth in the tropics of Africa, South America and Asia—what BP chief scientist Steve Koonin called “the green parts” of the globe.
BP’s targets are the tropics of the Third World, not just east of the Mississippi in the U.S., the region emphasized by officials at UC Berkeley and its partners at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
And the first researchers dispatched by the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), as Berkeley’s BP-funded project is formally known, headed to India and Africa in search of potential fuel crops five months before the research agreement was formally signed in November.
One area where we disagree with the studies authors is in placing primary blame on the earth’s growing population.
We would argue instead that population increase is greatest in those countries with the greatest income inequality, and that population growth becomes toxic only when coupled with political systems subservient to economies dominated by debt, corporate interests, and media systems which combine to create a noxious Continue reading →
In this Paul Jay interview from The Real News Network, Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo casts some light on the announcement that a U.S. combat brigade is headed to Africa as the first deployment under the Pentagon’s newest military command, AFRICOM.
U.S. Africa Command protects and defends the national security interests of the United States by strengthening the defense capabilities of African states and regional organizations and, when directed, conducts military operations, in order to deter and defeat transnational threats and to provide a security environment conducive to good governance and development.
We’ve written about AFRICOM before as a military force designed to secure African resources for corporate interests. While our primary focus has been on the capture of commonly held lands for agrofuel plantations, a page on the Friends of the Congo website focuses on another critical resource in that country, coltan [the metals columbium and tantalum], essential for cell phones and other high technology device.
Militias from Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi have invaded the Congo to secure the metals, and many of their customers are here in the U.S.
From the website:
Major United States players identified by the UN include:
Cabot Corporation, Boston, MA
OM Group, Cleveland, Ohio
AVX, Myrtle Beach, SC
Eagle Wings Resources International, Ohio
Trinitech International, Ohio
Kemet Electronics Corporation, Greenville, SC
Vishay Sprague. Malvern, PA
We would note once again that AFRICOM’s genesis was driven by Air Force Gen. Charles Wald during his days at CENTCOM. He was also the driving force behind the Air Force agrofuel policy. Wald retired to the private sector, finding employment as a lobbyist for the — you guessed it — agrofuel industry.
So you’ll forgive us if we don’t share the Obama administration’s enthusiasm for basing American troops in Africa.
The latest move by AFRICOM is part of a larger agenda, as American military resouces are repositioned to secure critical resources around the globe. To see it otherwise would be a tragic mistake.
Both houses have approved legislation that blocks the Navy from buying agrofuels — petroleum substitutes derived from plants, typically grown on industrial Third World plantations — unless they cost no more than conventional fuels.
Their action also bars the Pentagon from funding agrofuel refineries, a major blow to the Obama administration embrace of plant-based fuels, driven largely by Energy Secretary Steve Chu.
It was Chu who, during his tenure as head of the Alwrence Berkeley National Laboratory, played a leading role in winning UC Berkeley that $500 million BP agrofuel research grant and shifted research at the Department of Energy lab toward agrofuel research.
The Pentagon’s agrofuel efforts were initially shaped by Air Force Gen. Charles Wald, the same general also responsible for drafting plans for Africom, the Pentagon’s command for controlling the continent which has seen an ongoing wave of land acquisitions by agofuel corporations.
Just how important is the Pentagon’s agrofuel agenda? Swell, consider one simple fact: The world’s largest single consumer of oil is the U.S. military.
The story from Noah Shachtman, writing at Wired’s Danger Room:
The Navy’s ambitious renewable energy plans aren’t sunk quite yet. But they took a major hit Thursday, when the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to all-but-ban the military from buying alternative fuels.
The House Armed Services Committee passed a similar measure earlier this month. But the House is controlled by Republicans, who are generally skeptical of alternative energy efforts. Democrats are in charge of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And if anything, the Senate’s alt-fuel prohibition goes even further than the House’s. If it becomes law, if would not only sink the Navy’s attempt to sail a “Great Green Fleet,” powered largely by biofuels. It would also sabotage a half-billion dollar program to shore up a tottering biofuels industry.
Like their counterparts in the House, senators prohibited the Pentagon from buying renewable fuels that are more expensive than traditional ones — a standard that biofuels many never meet. In addition, the committee blocked the Defense Department from helping build biofuel refineries unless “specifically authorized by law” – just as the Navy was set to pour $170 million into an effort with the Departments of Energy and Agriculture to do precisely that.
>snip<
Like their counterparts in the House, senators prohibited the Pentagon from buying renewable fuels that are more expensive than traditional ones — a standard that biofuels may never meet. In addition, the committee blocked the Defense Department from helping build biofuel refineries unless “specifically authorized by law” – just as the Navy was set to pour $170 million into an effort with the Departments of Energy and Agriculture to do precisely that.
What might the impact of the Congressional action be?
Consider the case of Amyris, the local company started by Chu protégé and former employee Jay Keasling with the help of some Bill Gates money.
Amyris hopes to make synfuel with the help of genetically engineered microbes, but the diesel fuel they’ve churned out costs a whopping $29 a gallon, no sale under the pending legislation.
If the measure makes it into law, we can expect a major shakeup in the already rickety agrofuel industry.
Amyris, which has been struggling with low stock prices since peaking last year at $33.85, only to fall to $1.57 last week, has managed to make it back up to $2.65 as we write, slightly about the company’s liquidation price, if you don’t factor in that $150 million or more they’d have to pay their major investor if it all falls apart.
