Recent Bush Administration mutterings about an enduring "Status of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) between the US and Iraq, together with the still-pending passage of a new "Oil Law" in Iraq, inspires the following:








FUTURE REAL-SPEAK NEWS FLASH -- CHENEY: "IT’S THE OIL!"

Sweet Crude Victory!

US Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney convened a press conference early this morning on the White House lawn to announce and publish, "Our Open Letter to the World: Yes, Our Sights Were Set Upon Iraq’s Oil." The Vice President was flanked by several, prominent signatories of this newly published "Open Letter," later identified as officials or principal participants from the VP’s Energy Task Force; the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans; and The White House Iraq Group.

The Vice President began his remarks by announcing what he describes as, "[O]ur true and final victory in Iraq." These remarks referenced the Iraqi government’s passage and ratification, earlier this week, of both it’s new "Oil Law" and the "The Permanent US/Iraq Agreement on Military Cooperation."

"Iraq’s new Oil Law," said the Vice President, "at last codifies all three of our fundamental and hard-won objectives in Iraq." The Vice President also noted "the indispensable and enduring importance" of the new "Permanent Agreement," also recently passed by the Iraqi Parliament. "This Agreement, " said the Vice President, "ensures our ongoing ability to enforce the new legal rights granted to our corporations by Iraq’s Oil Law."

A summary of those "three . . . fundamental" objectives was later spelled out in an "Official Supplementary Press Release" distributed immediately after the news conference, which included the full text of "Our Open Letter to the World." As that "Letter" states, those "fundamental objectives" were: "1) The de-nationalization of Iraq’s oil industry; 2) The expulsion of ‘foreign suitors’ for Iraq’s oil; and 3) The delivery of control over Iraq’s vast oil wealth to ‘our’ oil extraction and oil service corporations."

When asked to comment on the US "victory" in achieving these objectives, the Administration official distributing the "Release" remarked only, "Bub-bye France! Bub-bye Russia! Bub-bye China!"

Soon after the press conference, the Vice President was regaled at a "Victory Luncheon" held within the White House. Of all the hortatory remarks lavished upon VP Cheney, it was a statement read by AEI-fellow, Michael Ledeen that brought all the luncheon’s attendees to their feet:

"Our bombs express only our benevolence. Our DU munitions are tipped with love! Our torture chambers are but workshops of our compassion. Our corporations will now begin to export 'shrink-wrapped pallets of cash' out of Iraq, but will plant in this arid, blood-soaked place the patented seeds of our superior McCivilization. And now that our benevolence and love and compassion have conquered the futile resistance to our goodness, let’s join hands around the smoking rubble, the funeral pyres, and ‘blend with ours your voices in the triumph song!’"

Mr. Ledeen summarily punctuated his statement by shaking his fist in the air and exclaiming, "Victory in Iraq! On to Iran!"

------------------------------------

A "SOFA" agreement, together with the "benchmark" passage of a new "Oil Law" in Iraq, encapsulates the real, yet-unresolved, "mother of all legal battles" still roiling both in Baghdad and our nation's Capitol.

caught this segment on 60 minutes, about these folks, Remote Area Medical.  Tremendous!

When lords of orange topple a red dictator, does indigo applaud?


In a recent Holons poll, If the 2008 Presidential Election were being held today, for whom would you vote?, I found several of the comments there "whacks" to the side of my head.

TC: "I too am swamped by green and often disguise my vote for the sake of civility and friendship while reaching downward toward orange and amber to help preserve my self absorbed friends of green from the wrath of red."

Could it be that Cheney & Company, by instigating the biggest armed robbery of this nascent new century (the oil grab in Iraq), are somehow preservers and defenders of The Spiral unfolding?

Should "integral" blogrolls be amended to include the philosophy of Leo Strauss, The Project for a New American Century, Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, Halliburton, Blackwater, et al?

Seeking an integral perspective on the US/British invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq,

rhobherto



courtesy of Formless Mountain: AQAL chart

[link]

Oscar for ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’

No Comment readers recently saw my interview with Alex Gibney, the producer of “Taxi to the Dark Side.” Last night, Alex and his team got the best documentary Oscar. (Disclosure: I appear in “Taxi” and had many discussions with Alex and his crew about shaping it.) Here’s a wire report:

An investigation into the death later found Dilawar had been repeatedly kicked and punched and was chained to the ceiling of his cell for days. Gibney, who also produced hit documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”, said in his acceptance speech that his wife had wanted him to make a romantic comedy.

“But honestly after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition that simply wasn’t possible,” the film-maker said before dedicating the film to Dilawar, and his own father.

“This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us, Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver and my father a Navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury at what was being done to the rule of law,” said Gibney.

“Let’s hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and go back to the light,” he said.

Discovery originally took broadcast rights to the documentary, and then backed out, saying it was “too controversial.” Actually there is nothing “controversial” about the film. It is a compelling, honest account of something that the Bush Administration fervently hopes that Americans learn nothing. Discovery evidenced supreme cowardice. I was halfway expecting them to take a lambasting from the Oscar podium, but the “Taxi” team is far too classy for that.

The film rights were flipped to HBO. Let’s hope HBO gets it out and on the air quickly.

Caught a rebroadcast of Bill Moyers' keynote address to the 2004 Inequality Matters Conference,  aired on LinkTV earlier this week.

excerpts from, This is the Fight of Our Lives:

I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and new deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less....it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."

The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.

. . .

In a book to be published this summer, Daniel Altman describes what he calls the "neo-economy -- a place without taxes, without a social safety net, where rich and poor live in different financial worlds -- and [said Altman] it's coming to America." He's a little late. It's here. Says Warren Buffett, the savviest investor of them all: "My class won."

Look at the spoils of victory:

Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts -- almost all tilted towards the wealthiest people in the country.

Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes.

Cuts in taxes on investment income.

And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.

More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest one percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services for and raise taxes on middle class working America.

Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next ten years.

These deficits have been part of their strategy. Some of you will remember that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us 20 years ago, when he predicted that President Ronald Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as such. Now the leading rightwing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to "starve the beast" -- with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the United States Government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.

There's no question about it: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

 

Had me googling "class war;" leading me (not for the first time) to the Third World Traveler site, where eventually I settled in on an excised version of Lewis Lapham's book, Pretensions to Empire.

Quote grab from the book:

"Suppose that this administration did con us into war. And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions .... In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted."

~ Paul Krugman

Speaking of Krugman, his, The Tax-Cut Con, speaks to the "class war" theme; as does, Starving the Beast, by Ed Kilgore.



Highly recommended:


Dismantling the arguments against impeachment, a DKos dairy entry by occams hatchet

If one were able to remove all of the "political factors" that have
led Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers and other congressional Democrats to
declare impeachment off limits - to strip away the fears about
November's elections, the fears about timing, the fears about what
others might say - if one were able to decide whether to pursue
impeachment strictly on the basis of whether it were the right thing to do, would one do it?

I hope that no one reading this hesitated for even a moment before
answering, emphatically, "Yes!" If ever a president and vice president
deserved impeachment, George Bush and Dick Cheney do.

Inside the world of war profiteers, by Chicago Tribune reporters David Jackson and Jason Grotto

ROCK ISLAND, Ill.—Inside the stout federal courthouse of this Mississippi River town, the dirty secrets of Iraq war profiteering keep pouring out.

The Audacity of Hopelessness, by NYT columinst Frank Rich

WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the
Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended
in the long dark shadow of Iraq.

It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless
value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her
still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then
compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy
that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After
promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.

Election Madness, by Howard Zinn, The Progressive

Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war.

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

Final thought:

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

~ Frederick Douglas

What do they share in common?  They are all clients of Mark Penn, "worldwide CEO" of Burson-Marsteller.

Was reading a NYT opinion piece by Chris Suellentrop, Clinton's Delegate Tactics, and a comment mentions Penn and his company:

"This is all about karma. Penn heads Burson Marsteller, a company that is probably the most deeply cynical in American history. If a company makes cigarettes, cow hormones that end up in milk, dangerous pesticides, or massive clearcuts they call Penn at BM. He will turn death and poison into flowers and honey."

Hmmm?  I'd heard of the guy; that he is Hillary Clinton's chief campaign strategist, but decided to dig a bit deeper:

• wikipedia entry on Mark Penn
• Corporate Watch profile of Burson-Marsteller
• SourceWatch profile of Burson-Marsteller
• Blackwater's Hired Guns: Hillary's Helpers, by Sharon Weinberger
  

What I find there I find downright revolting.  And I am completely prepared to take a rap for jumping on the Hillary-bashing bandwagon.  (Sorry, Hillblazers.)

Today, I double-down anything and everything I can do for Obama'08.



[Blackwater, Spam]

see more here

[glommed from TruthDig]



The inevitable parodies of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” video have begun—this one isn’t so much about Obama or Hillary Clinton as it is about Republican front-runner John McCain, whose infamous hundred-year (or more) plan for America’s presence in Iraq is deservedly and humorously lambasted here.

Watch the clip:

Lawrence Lessig offers up, 20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack:






and a follow-up -- 10 minutes on whether Hillary can win:

discoverd the Wayback Machine and dug up my first webpage:

[sans graphics -- oh well]

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