Nation at war
We actually appeared to have forgotten we are a nation “at war” if news reporting is any indication from a personal search, except for the DC centered coverage of Gen. McChrystal. Notice it was a music magazine that got the scoop, more power to them, not mainstream media.
Here are some thoughts from Tomdispatch to remind us of the dark side of our history in the Middle East. Follow the link for more.
Doesn’t it seem, sometimes, that American history, the “people’s history,” is actually made by about 17 giant government and corporate entities, all hopelessly intertwined — and worse yet, that they never go away? On Tuesday, TomDispatch posted Stephen Kinzer’s piece, “BP in the Gulf — The Persian Gulf.” It was a reminder that, more than half a century ago (when it was called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company), the giant oil corporation now despoiling the Gulf of Mexico had, in quite a different way, despoiled Iranian democracy to maintain its hold on that country’s oil. It did so in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency, which, in 1953, overthrew a democratic Iranian government eager to nationalize that oil.
Well, neither of them has gone away. That’s obvious enough. Last week, the CIA popped up again, this time in conjunction with another of its favorite corporations, the infamous rent-a-gun company formerly known as Blackwater, now Xe Services. The Agency has given that for-profit warrior outfit a new $100 million contract to guard its various outposts in Afghanistan “and elsewhere”…
…Worse yet, the CIA wasn’t alone, as the State Department just agreed to shell out $120,123,293 in taxpayer dough to a unit of Xe to pay for guarding some of its facilities in Afghanistan. (The awarding of this contract, reports CBS News which broke the story, comes barely “four months after the government of Iraq ordered hundreds of Blackwater-linked security guards to leave the country within seven days or face possible arrest.”)
Since we are talking about BP, history, war/environment, etc. here’s an article that discusses current administration efforts in the Gulf. It concludes with: “The obvious fact is that Obama has no executive experience, and neither do any of his top advisors. Without a clear mandate from the top, needed efforts to salvage the situation are repeatedly stymied by well meaning bureaucrats strictly following the letter of their agency policy and federal law. The result, ironically, of their determined efforts to protect the environment has been the greatest environmental disaster in history. But some turtles are OK!”
The article cites actions by the USCG, OSHA, Fish and Wild Life that thwarted the Alabama efforts to protect its shore line. We know how the Corp of Engineers slowed and in some instances thwarted the Lousiana effort to build berms. Both states reverted to: “Eventually, the state stopped listening to federal agencies and just has gone ahead and given funds directly to the local folks fighting the spill rather than paying attention to the directives of the Unified Command.”
The article got my attention originally with this:
“In the end, most of the damage on the Gulf Coast will be laid at the doorstep of the federal government and the presidency itself for executive inaction. They did nothing!
BP is going to be able to show how their best efforts were thwarted by the government itself. What a perfect defense. Yes your honor, we had all these resources on standby to solve the problem, but the federal government on the third instance refused to let us deploy. We ask that our liability to be limited only to the brief time in which we were allowed to deploy.”
And you folks thought the response to Katrina was bad????
The article is here: http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/
CoRev,
Are you the most deceitful commenter on this site, I wonder. Cantab would have had difficulty matching your duplicity. Or, maybe you are Cantab the sock puppet. You link to some site called globalwarming-arclein.com as though it were some innocent provider of facts. That link links the substance of its article, which is nothing more than an opinion piece, to frontpagemag.com. Guess who? Good old David Horowitz, that source of everything known to be fact or fantasy, which ever works best for you. That link:
http://frontpagemag.com/?s=dick+morris Yes, you’re reading correctly. That link identifies the original source of the opinion piece as good old Dicky Morris, a well established propagandist of conservative Republican bent.
http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/2010/06/28/how-obama-bungled-the-oil-spill-an-inside-story/
And good old Dick doesn’t even give Eileeen McGann credit on the FrontPage site.
An opinion piece appearing on two propagandist blogs does not qualify as good information. It provides not one reference. It is purely the opinion of a couple of long term neo-con operatives. And yes, that’s the smiling face of Bill O’Reilly on the header of Dick’s web site. Can you imagine, those two are going to sponsor some kind of Economic Crisis Summit.
CoRev, you are slicker than slick Willy. Try providing references to the original sources of your
mythologies so that we can all avoid reading bull shit.
Gee; sort of reminds me when the crack war was taking place on the streets of American cities and black kids were getting killed daily only a walk from our TV outlets was totally ignored — while our TV outlets saturated the airwaves with the war in Bosnia where European whites were killing each other 8,000 miles away.
Well, since every quote is bathed in ad hominy grits and fortune-telling, I’m not surprised CoRev likes it. Facts would just make the whole thing so boring. Seriously? We are asked to take this vilifying anti-Obama howl seriously?
Pretty clearly, the government response has not been all that good. Pretty clearly, the GOP spin machine went right to “Obama’s Katrina” and CoRev is just mouthing what he has been told to mouth. But bile is not history, and what CoRev is recommending is laden with bile – as usual.
kh,
Given that it comes straight from the pen of Dick Morris what else would you expect. Seems CoRev left out that little bit of information. Folow the links. They go directly to Diok Morris by way of that other finder of fiction, David Horowitz.