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No, we are NOT “all BP”.

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Susan Stark

(This commentary is posted by Susan Stark, a guest here who crashes on Ted’s virtual couch now and then. I haven’t been here in a while, so I thought I’d stop by again.)

Whenever a disaster strikes as a result of corporate malfeasance, there is particular argument that well-meaning people make that annoys me, mainly because it’s not completely true. Take this New York Times letter to the editor:

In “BP’s Responsibility” (editorial, June 12), you say that while a possible total bill of $40 billion for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is breathtaking, the “destruction BP has wrought is even more so.” Like so much commentary on the disaster, this focuses blame wholly on the oil company.

Undoubtedly BP is responsible, but so are all of us who drive cars, travel by plane or consume goods produced and shipped with oil. If we didn’t use it, BP wouldn’t drill for it. Until we recognize that demand for oil is as much the problem as supply, and start to change the way we live to reduce it, environmental destruction is inevitable.

We are all BP.

Martin Brown

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I beg to differ. This type of argument is something that actually works in the favor of corporations like BP, because it essentially lets them off the hook for what they do. It allows them to say, essentially, that “We are just giving the people what they want, don’t blame us for the result”.

But even if it’s true that we are responsible because we consume oil, we are not all equally responsible. Someone who drives an SUV or any other gas-guzzler is more responsible than someone who takes public transportation. A person who jacks up the thermostat in winter is more responsible than someone who wears extra layers of clothing. If you use air-conditioner rather than a fan, then you are more responsible for these types of disasters than if you chose the fan.

But the people who are the most responsible are the members of the corporate “personhood” of BP. They made the decision to cut safety procedures in order maximize profit. They made the decision to forgo obtaining a kill switch which would have prevented the disaster, merely because it would’ve cost them five hundred grand (which is a drop in the bucket for a multinational oil company like BP).

So yes, we are all responsible, but not equally. BP is the most responsible, and needs to pay for what they did.

Susan

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Ethnic Cleansing in Kyrgyzstan

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Ted Rall

More American Chickens Come Home to Roost

Believe it or not, I don’t scour the headlines looking for tragedies and atrocities to blame on the United States.

But that’s how it often works out.

When the big earthquake ravaged Haiti earlier this year, it would have been a relief to look at the resulting pain and despair and see nothing more than the terrible result of tectonic movements. It would have been nice to be able to blame nature. Or France.

But France’s crimes were over a century old. The freshly spilt blood in Haiti was and remains on the hands of the Americans who raped the Caribbean nation throughout the 20th century, and opened the 21st by keeping relief supplies and rescue teams out of the disaster zone so long that the people trapped under the rubble had bled or starved to death.

Now it’s Kyrgyzstan’s turn to fall apart as the result of American malfeasance.

The images coming out of Osh, a culturally diverse Silk Road city in the Ferghana Valley that recently celebrated its 5000th anniversary, are reminiscent of the collapse of Yugoslavia. Ethnic Kyrgyz, resentful over the recent ouster of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev and angry about an economy that always seems to get worse, have murdered hundreds of ethnic Uzbeks because they support the new interim government. Kyrgyz rioters burned Uzbek-owned homes and businesses, prompting tens of thousands of Uzbeks to flee across the border into Uzbekistan. Buildings spray-painted with the word “Kyrgyz” were spared.

Even by the never-a-dull-moment standards of Central Asia, this is worrisome. When feuding neighbors like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have a dispute, they bring in Kyrgyz mediators due to their reputation for wisdom and levelheadedness.

U.S. news consumers following the Kyrgyz crisis are repeatedly reminded about America’s airbase near the capital of Bishkek, used to supply NATO forces occupying Afghanistan. The base, they say, is what we should care about. As for the recent violence, U.S. state-controlled media implies, this is more of the same in a region where tribes are constantly at one another’s throats. “In 1990,” reminded the Associated Press, “hundreds of people were killed in a violent land dispute between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Osh, and only the quick deployment of Soviet troops quelled the fighting.”

But the base isn’t why Kyrgyzstan really matters. The big effect is that the events in Osh mark the beginning of a new surge of anti-Americanism with long-term repercussions.

Sadly the voices of the most reliable experts on Central Asia, people like Ahmed Rashid and Martha Louise Alcott, are missing from an Ameri-centric narrative cut-and-pasted from wire service stories and neoconservative commentators.

True, Osh can be a tense place. In August 2000 my drivers were detained by Kyrgyz cops on suspicion of being Tajik. Hours later, I was forced to flee when hundreds of guerillas of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a radical Islamic group allied with the Taliban and based in Tajikistan, swarmed into the city.

Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom is wrong. This latest outbreak of violence represents something new. First, it’s worse: bigger and more widespread. Second, as most Central Asians know, it’s delayed fallout from George W. Bush’s misadventures in regime change.

Bush’s military-CIA complex had more than Iraq and Afghanistan on its collective mind. Over the course of six years, they toppled or attempted to overthrow the governments of Venezuela, Haiti, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine—and, yes, Kyrgyzstan.

In March 2005 a CIA-backed (and in some cases -trained) mob of conservative Muslim young men from Osh drove up to Bishkek and stormed the presidential palace. President Askar Akayev, a former physicist who had been the only democratically-elected president in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, fled into exile in Russia.

Akayev, considered a liberal reformer throughout the 1990s, had turned more autocratic during his last years in power. Still, he had nothing on neighboring dictators like Uzbek President Islam Karimov, known for boiling political dissidents to death, or Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had his two main political opponents tied up, shot, dumped on the side of a road—and declared suicides shortly before a presidential election. As of 2005 Akayev held exactly one political prisoner in custody.

Anyway, Akayev’s real mistake was crossing Bush. After 9/11 the U.S. demanded an airbase at Manas airport, paying nominal rent. Reconsidering after the fact, the Kyrgyz government demanded more money: $10 million a year, quite a chunk of change in a country with an average salary of $25 a month.

Bakiyev, the Osh-based leader who replaced Akayev, was supposed to be more accommodating. Instead, he threatened to kick out the Americans unless they raised the rent again. Which they did, from $17 million to $63 million.

And now he’s in exile too.

Obama learned a lot from Bush.

Just two weeks ago, on June 2nd, Obama’s Air Force was again at odds with the Kyrgyz over money—this time over jet fuel prices. The post-Bakiyev interim government of Acting Prime Minister Roza Otunbayeva wants to close the base—but, as the residents of Okinawa can attest, the U.S. military is harder to get rid of than crabgrass.

Kyrgyzstan was never a lucky country. Surrounded by neighbors with vast energy resources and other natural resources, the Kyrgyz have little but water and rocks. But it enjoyed a strategic location. Under Akayev, people were poor but the country enjoyed relative stability.

Since then there has been political disintegration, with southern provinces turned into de facto fiefdoms run by brutal for-profit warlords. Neither Bakiyev nor Otunbayeva, both brought to power by mobs, has enjoyed legitimacy or full acceptance. This is the real story: political and economic chaos masquerading as ethnic cleansing.

Once again—as in Haiti—it’s largely our fault.

(Ted Rall is the author of the upcoming “The Anti-American Manifesto,” to be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Hustler on YOLD

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Ted Rall

This may not come as a total shock, but Huslter magazine loves “The Year of Loving Dangerously. Click the link for a three-page excerpt and computer cookies that you’ll need to explain to your spouse.

Das Beard: Week Two

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Ted Rall

Wherein your humble hirsute narrator presents, for all to see and regale, the result of 14 days of non shaving in preparation for his August trip back to Afghanistan.

Oil catastrophe — another kind of war?

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Stephanie McMillan

Under capitalism, competition causes the rate of profit to drop, and for goods to be overproduced. This is when the business cycle dips, and we experience recessions and depressions.

To restore the rate of profit and force the cycle up again, capitalists have several methods including financial speculation and deliberate waste. Plus they must destroy excess capital, usually through wars. (This is to lower the ratio of fixed production costs to variable costs like labor — so acts like cutting wages to make profits go up again has more of an effect).

During the current dip we have seen a frenzy of financial speculation, waste, and wars. In the process of destroying excess capital to save capitalism, there is always contention among capitalists: whose capital will be destroyed? No one wants it to be their own. When this conflict becomes acute, it can be resolved antagonistically, by fighting it out.

At the moment, the capital of a British oil company, the fourth largest corporation in the world, is being destroyed. BP was allowed to create this destructive situation by the US government. Most people assume it must have been due to greed, negligence and short-sightedness.

But what if it wasn’t? Could this, actually, be war in another form (since the usual war-fighting resources are stretched very thin right now) — the deliberate facilitation of destruction of British-based capital by representatives of US-based capital?

That would explain why Obama isn’t doing anything about it.

Don’t ask the leader of our enemies to lead us

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Stephanie McMillan

Among the headlines on commondreams.org earlier this week, I spotted this: “If There Was Ever a Moment to Seize,” by Bill McKibben. For one wild second I thought — wow, McKibben sees the revolutionary potential in this crisis and is finally going to encourage people to rise up and overthrow the maniacs killing the planet!!!

But that was not, of course, the case. Instead of asking *us* to seize the moment, he is asking *Obama* to do so. He wants Obama to be the leader of a people’s movement for sustainability.

Um… I think Obama is already very busy being the leader of the ecocidal, murderous capitalist class that runs this country.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: First They Came for the Cranky White House Columnist

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Ted Rall

Helen Thomas Learns That Free Speech is a Myth

This is why a lot of people think Jews control the media.

Not me. I’ve worked in the media most of my life. So I know that the media is controlled by morons.

Still, what happened to Helen Thomas will feed the rants of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists.

On June 7th the professional life of Helen Thomas came to an end. The acid-tongued “dean” of the White House press corps since the Kennedy Administration got fired by her newspaper syndicate, dumped by her speakers’ bureau, and disinvited by a Bethesda high school that had asked her to address its commencement ceremonies. The White House Correspondents Association condemned her. President Obama took time out from not doing anything about unemployment or the Gulf oil spill to weigh in.

Chastened, reviled and subjected to the kind of national opprobrium normally reserved for international terrorists and blind baseball umpires, Thomas apologized and announced her retirement.

All in one day.

So what did Thomas do to merit such derision?

No, it wasn’t that journalistic career killer, plagiarism.

Actually, in America today, stealing people’s words and ideas and pretending they’re yours is A-OK. Mike Barnicle, fired by the Boston Globe for ripping off a column from a George Carlin book in 1998, landed on his feet at the New York Daily News and now works for the Boston Herald. And he’s on MSNBC. Monica Crowley, who plagiarized in the Wall Street Journal in 1999, is now at Fox News and The Washington Times. (Jayson Blair has yet to reappear in print, but that’s different. He’s black.)

No, Helen Thomas didn’t participate in the attempt to throw a presidential election.

Unlike George Will. The right-wing columnist may or may not have stolen President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 debate briefing book and handed it over to the Reagan camp, as Carter has claimed. But Will did admit in a 2005 column that he had seen the purloined document at Reagan economic advisor David Stockman’s house during the campaign. Will had a legal obligation to describe what he had seen to the police, and an ethical duty to his readers to report a blockbuster story to his readers. He did neither. Yet Will still works for Newsweek and the Washington Post, publications whose readers must not care about the truth.

No, Thomas didn’t say anything racist.

But racism doesn’t get you fired from journalism. Just ask Pat Buchanan, another MSNBC regular.

Here’s what killed Thomas’ illustrious career: “Tell them [Israelis] to get the hell out of Palestine,” she told a rabbi in a spontaneous video interview. “Remember, these people [Palestinians] are occupied, and it’s their land; it’s not German, it’s not Poland’s.” Asked where Jewish Israelis should go, she replied, “They should go home” to “Poland, Germany… America and everywhere else.”

No doubt, Thomas’ comments were simplistic. Three generations of Jews have made their homes in Israel. Asking them to back up and “return” to places where they’ve never visited, much less lived, would be inhumane, not to mention impractical. Of course, this is no different from current U.S. immigration policy, which calls for the arrest and deportation of undocumented people whose parents brought them here as small children.

Her words also demonstrate historical ignorance. Surely Thomas, who is 89, ought to know that most Israeli Jews were born there. As for the rest, many came from the former Soviet Union, not Poland or Germany (which murdered most of their Jews during, and even after, the Holocaust).

But are these remarks so beyond the pale that their utterance ought to mean the end of your professional life?

Ari Fleischer, who ought to be in prison for defending torture and concentration camps as press secretary for George W. Bush, called Thomas a fan of “religious cleansing.” Equating opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism, ex-Clinton spokesman Lanny Davis called Thomas “an anti-Semitic bigot.”

“If she had asked all blacks to go back to Africa, what would White House Correspondents Association position be as to whether she deserved White House press room credentials —much less a privileged honorary seat?” Davis asked.

Davis is entitled to his opinion. But so is Helen Thomas—not that you’d be able to tell by reading the avalanche of self-righteous yowling by politicians and editorialists.

Thomas isn’t unusual. Like it or not, supporters of the State of Israel should understand that Israel’s creation was and remains highly controversial—and not just among anti-Semites.

The postwar decision to establish a Jewish homeland by seizing land from Arabs who had nothing to do with the Holocaust—instead of, say, Germany—continues to bewilder. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are living in refugee camps, where old men and women still wave the deeds and keys to their old homes when they see a reporter, attests to the freshness of the wound. Feeling sorry for them and taking the position that they have a right to be compensated doesn’t make you a Jew-hater.

Moreover, the might-makes-right tactics of Israeli political leaders doesn’t make them any friends in the world. Acting above the law, they ignore resolutions issued by the same U.N. that made their country possible in the first place. Dissembling about their own “secret” (and illegal) nuclear weapons, they bomb an Iraqi nuke plant and threaten to do the same to Iran. Mossad operatives traveling to Dubai to assassinate political opponents.

Israel’s policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians turn off a lot of people who don’t have a bigoted bone in their body.

Settlements in the occupied territories, apartheid-like economic planning, bulldozing the homes of the relatives of accused Palestinian terrorists, the Berlin Wall-esque “security fence,” and now the outrageous blockade of Gaza have angered millions of Americans. What makes these acts even more appalling is that Israel, as the number-one beneficiary of U.S. foreign aid, is America’s de facto representative in the Middle East.

Lanny Davis’ attempt to draw an analogy between Israelis and African-Americans is historical nonsense. Blacks were brought to the U.S. forcibly as slaves. Israel is occupying Palestine, and not just in Gaza and the West Bank. Eventually, the world—even Muslim countries—will come to accept the existence of the State of Israel as a fait accompli. But that will require the passage of time, as well as Israeli politicians who work harder to accommodate themselves to the Arabs inside and outside their borders.

So is Helen Thomas an anti-Semite? I don’t know. I do know that her comments were not inherently anti-Semitic.

The bigger question is: What if she were? Should she have been fired?

Of course not. Free speech must be defended no matter what—even that of cranky anti-Semitic columnists (if that’s what Thomas is/was). Unless we are truly free to say what we think—without fear of reprisal—free speech is not a right. It is merely a permission.

Besides, if every American columnist or politician lost his job over bigotry, what would that mean for all those “family values conservatives” who bash gays, not to mention the nativists who attack Latino immigrants and Muslims?

We owe Helen Thomas an apology.

(Ted Rall is the author of the upcoming “The Anti-American Manifesto,” to be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Growin’ a Beard

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Ted Rall

The old Taliban stricture that required visitors to Afghanistan to wear a beard at least the length of a fist (whose fist?) is technically no longer valid. In reality, however, it’s important to show respect for a culture where men are expected, in many parts of the country, to display their manhair. So here’s what I look like one week after I quit shaving.

In other news, we’re waiting for visas from Iran and Tajikistan.

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