Ecocide is everywhere you look. Even if you’re a big fan of nature, watching beautiful animals on television on television shows that encourage conservation contributes to killing those animals and, eventually, ourselves.
Here’s The Real Reason Why Some Americans Hate Iran Nuclear Deal
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Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
The nuclear deal with Iran is a good thing. President Obama deserves credit for initiating the dialogue and for negotiations that led to terms to which both sides can agree. As Winston Churchill said but too few Americans believe:
“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”
So why are there still so many high-profile opponents to this agreement, which provides for an inspections regime to enforce Iran’s promise not to develop a nuclear weapons program in exchange for lifting international economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic?
According to the vast majority of writers and broadcasters working for corporate media, the opposition is ideological.
Saudi Arabia, they say, is afraid that Shiite Iran will violate the agreement in order to become the second nuclear state in the Middle East, after Israel, and might threaten to use it against them or one of their Sunni allies. Both Saudi Arabia and Israel, by this way of thinking, are also worried that Iran might increase its support of terrorist organizations as its economy improves.
Since President Obama has promised to veto any attempt by the Republican-led Congress to derail the agreement, and it would be difficult for the GOP to muster the two thirds majority necessary to override the president’s veto, resistance is pretty much pro forma.
According to the Republicans, they’re not afraid of peace or jonesing for war against Iran – they just don’t think there’s any way to prevent the Iranians from cheating the inspectors, and in an echo of the classic complaint that a restaurant has terrible food and such small portions, the inspections don’t go far enough into the future.
The media has been playing his usual role as government transcriber, taking GOP officials at their word.
Even Obama has paid lipservice to these concerns, expressing his own complaints about Iran’s “threats” against Israel in his speech announcing the deal.
In fact, the much-ballyhooed statement by former Iranian President Ahmadinejad about wanting to “wipe Israel off the map” has been debunked. He never said that.)
The truth is, opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has a lot more to do with business than ideology.
Iran has the fourth-largest proven oil reserves in the world. After all the sanctions are lifted, energy analysts believe that there will be a significant price drop for a barrel of crude worldwide. “The thinks Iran can get back to producing 4 million barrels of oil per day — the level it was at in 2008 — by the end of this decade. Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zangeneh wants Iran to resume its spot as the world’s No. 2 oil exporter behind Saudi Arabia (a spot currently occupied by Russia). But that’s far from assured, and there could easily be hiccups on the way,” reports Vox.
Oil prices have already been declining. This is been terrible news for Saudi Arabia, the world number-one oil producer, currently responsible for about 10 million barrels per day of production. “A potential return of Iranian oil to the market could not have come at a worse time,” Barclays commodities analyst Michael Cohen says. “An increase in Iranian exports beyond 300,000 to 400,000 barrels a day would be difficult for the market to absorb.” Goldman Sachs agrees. So do commodities markets, which pushed oil futures lower when news of the Iran deal broke.
The only terrorism that the Saudi royal family cares about is a 9/11-style attack on their numbered Swiss bank accounts, which they fear might be the effect of all that new Iranian oil coming online. (Anyway, Saudi Arabia is probably in a better position than just about any other country to put a dent in terrorism if it ever felt like it, since it funds radical Wahhabi-inspired madrasahs and insurgent groups throughout Asia and Africa.)
Here in the United States, opposition to allowing Iran to enjoy full trading relations and diplomatic links with the global community is centered around right-wing Republicans in the House and Senate. As with the Saudis, the real reason that they’re against this deal is that it represents a clear and present danger to big oil.
87% of donations by oil and gas companies and 95% of those from the coal industry to members of Congress go to Republicans. The Republican Party is owned lock, stock and barrel by energy conglomerates, which stand to see their profits shrink as oil prices drop in response to the increasing global production anticipated by the revival of Iran’s oil sector.
So the next time you watch talking heads go on and on about the fear that the crazy mullahs of Tehran want to fire an ICBM into Tel Aviv, remember that this rhetoric has a lot less to do with worrying about terrorism or the safety of Israel, and everything to do with oil company profits.
Gays Get the Right to Murder Muslims and Steal Their Oil Too
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For the first time, the Pentagon has announced that gay and lesbian troops cannot be fired for their sexual orientation. So much for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell! But trans people still don’t have the right to murder Muslims and steal their oil.
Guest Post: Obama’s Speech.
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Susan here. This is a quote from Obama’s speech:
“To my friends on the left, I ask you to reconcile your belief in freedom and dignity for all people with those images of children writhing in pain, and going still on a cold hospital floor. For sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough.”
My response is this:
Fuck you, Obama. Fuck you for trying to come to us on the Left when you need us, and then shitting on us when you don’t. You do NOT have my permission to bomb Syria, and you will NEVER get it. You will NOT get my permission to bomb Syria based upon a YouTube video that conveniently surfaced just as the UN weapons inspectors were checking into their Damascus hotel. There are hundreds of videos of the so-called Syrian opposition al-Qaeda “rebels” committing atrocities like beheading Christians, practicing cannibalism, and sawing a little girl’s arms and legs off while she is still alive. And yet, we are supposed to ignore these atrocities and focus on the one (conveniently-timed) atrocity that Assad would never actually be stupid enough to commit.
I am tired of your patronization. I am tired of your lies. I am tired of looking at your face. I am tired of hearing your voice. And I’m tired of you trying to soften up Syria for the kill, and slouching us inch by inch into World War III. Because unlike Libya in 2011 and Iraq in 2003, Syria has allies, allies who are likely to retaliate. If Iran retaliates, the price of oil will go sky high, and we will freeze in winter-time, and the price of just about every product will go up due to the higher cost of shipping. Because 50% of the world’s oil comes from the Persian Gulf. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, Mr. Obama. That’s what you pay that useless Cabinet of yours to do.
But since you did address Leftists such as myself in your speech, I will tell you this: The US used chemical weapons in Vietnam (Agent Orange), and used them again in Iraq and Afghanistan (White Phosphorus, Depleted Uranium). So we are in NO position to lecture others on the use of chemicals as weapons. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Gaseous Vengeance
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Laws in the United States and Europe that mandate the increased use of biofuels have contributed to soaring food prices and land shortages in Third World countries like Guatemala. What are the people affected to do? Maybe if we’re going to put their food into our gas tanks, they can put our gas into their stomachs.
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Underwater on the Car
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I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: Gas prices in California are at a record high for the third day in a row, up slightly more than a cent overnight at $4.668 for a gallon of regular just as motorists start their work week. The cost of fueling up has soared in recent days, as refinery and pipeline problems squeezed supply. The steep and sudden run-up caused Gov. Jerry Brown to call Sunday for a quick infusion of winter-blend gasoline.
Hours After the End of the Iraq War
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The Iraq War is over. Now the Obama Administration is sabre-rattling with Iran.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Osama bin Laden’s Ultimate Victory
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Culturally Clueless and Politically Tonedeaf, U.S. Gave Bin Laden the Martyrdom He Craved
The assassination of Osama bin Laden was masterfully orchestrated to appeal to American media consumers. But it will play poorly overseas.
President Obama’s Sunday evening announcement, timed to fill Monday’s papers with a sickening orgy of gleeful triumph but little information, prompted bipartisan high-fives and hoots all around. “U-S-A! U-S-A!” chanted a mob of drunken oafs in front of the White House. Blending the low satire of two Bush-era classic send-ups of a nation allergic to self-reflection, “Team America: World Police” and “Idiocracy,” they set the tone for a week or a month or whatever of troop-praising, God-blessing-America, frat-boy self-backslapping. “So that’s what success looks like,” wrote New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley in the paper’s special ten-page “The Death of Bin Laden” pull-out section.
Success for Obama, certainly. He’ll see a much-needed bump in the polls. But it won’t last. Eventually the unemployed will wonder why the president devotes so many resources to killing one man but so little to them.
On the geopolitical front, the CIA’s ballyhooed Bin Laden takedown operation couldn’t possibly have been handled any worse. The War on Terror, if it ever existed, is a war for the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims.
Remember?
It’s about them. Not us.
“Bin Laden wanted to die as a martyr. In this sense, his wish was obliged,” notes Stephen Diamond in Psychology Today.
You betcha.
Nothing was more important to Osama than to be seen as a brave soldier in an epic clash of civilizations. Claims that he hardly saw combat during the anti-Soviet resistance of the 1980s hurt him. The soft son of a Saudi billionaire and a former mother’s boy, Osama wanted to prove himself.
This past weekend, thanks to Navy Seals, he did. He went out in a blaze of glory, like Scarface. His status as a martyr, as a legend of jihad, is assured.
Yet another screw-up for the U.S., which fell into Bin Laden’s trap after 9/11. To Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups, the United States and the West is enemy #2. Their biggest foe is pro-American Muslim dictators and autocrats, and the apathy and indifference among Muslims that allows them to remain in power.
As with most actions carried out by small terrorist groups against enemies with superior manpower and weaponry, the operations attributed to Bin Laden—the bombings of the U.S. embassies in east Africa in 1998 and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and 9/11—were intended to provoke the U.S. into overreacting, thus exposing it as the monster he said it was. The invasions of two Muslim countries, Guantánamo, torture, Abu Ghraib, the secret prisons and disappearances and all the rest neatly fit into Osama Bin Laden’s narrative, proving his point more succinctly than a zillion fatwas faxed into Al Jazeera.
Everything about Bin Laden’s killing squares with the jihadi narrative.
The operation violated the sovereignty of a Muslim country, a constant complaint of radical jihadis. Armed commandos lawlessly invaded Pakistan. Infidel soldiers shot up a house and crashed a helicopter down the street from a military academy. Pakistanis see American drone planes buzzing around overhead, invading their airspace without the thinnest veneer of legality; American missiles blow up houses indiscriminately. Taking out Bin Laden without asking Pakistan’s government for permission is an act of war to which the country’s poverty permits no response. It’s yet another humiliation, another triumph of might over right.
Much will be made of the disrespectful treatment of Bin Laden’s body.
In an echo of Bush’s selection of Guantánamo as a extraterritorial not-U.S.-not-foreign no man’s land, the Obama Administration claimed that it buried Bin Laden at sea because it couldn’t find a country to accept his body within the required 24 hours after death, and to avoid the possibility that his grave would become a shrine for Muslim extremists. However, Bin Laden’s Wahhabi sect of Islam allows neither shrines nor burial at sea.
Of course, few Americans care about respecting Muslim religious sensibilities. So this decision went over well in the States. Countless editorial cartoons depicted sharks feasting on the carcass of the Bogeyman of the Twin Towers.
But it will inflame Muslim purists. Worse than that, dumping Osama into the Indian Ocean feeds an image the United States would be smart to shake, of a superpower hell-bent on occupying Muslim lands, stealing their oil and trashing their religion.
On the hearts-and-minds front, Americans’ chest-thumping is a PR disaster.
“Rot in Hell,” blared the headline of the New York Daily News. “Justice has been done,” pundits and politicians claimed—a strange endorsement of extrajudicial assassination by a nation based on the rule of law.
“Triumphalism and unapologetic patriotism are in order,” wrote Eugene Robinson for The Washington Post. “We got the son of a bitch.”
Classy.
Islam teaches combatants to respect their enemies. The death of an opponent is tragic, sometimes a tragic necessity, but never trivial, never a subject for joking. A vanquished enemy should be dispatched quickly, presumably to be chastised by Allah for his wickedness in the afterlife, but he is never to be mocked. A Muslim should not enjoy war or combat, nor gloat when victorious. When the powerful crush the weak, as was the case with the U.S. killing of Bin Laden, dancing around like a beefy hunk of steroids spiking the football at the touchdown line makes one look small.
It also makes us look dumb. As anyone not drunk on bloodlust knows, the worst thing that could have happened to Osama Bin Laden would have been arrest followed by a fair trial.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL
Lifecycle of U.S. Foreign Relations
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How the U.S. interacts with other nations depends on what stage of development its government–and geology–is in.
