A Really Astonishing BBC Interview with Benazir Bhutto

What follows is a link to an interview done by David Frost "Frost Over the World" with Benazir Bhutto on Al Jazeera TV. There is also a link to the BBC version of the same video. It's interesting to note the difference.


Have a look at this. I won't tell you what the surprise it, but it's truly startling.
existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2007/12/bbc-censored-benazir-bhuttos-reports.html

The Threat of Jihad

With the collapse of the Soviet Union (and that itself is an interesting story) the US found itself without an enemy. This ought to have been a occasion of great rejoicing--and with some, it was. It presented a problem. The demise of the superpower which had justified our massive military spending in the past meant that, now, it should become unnecessary. An examination of the information at the folllowing web site will show, however, that the change in actual spending was really quite small.

www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0904490.html

From 1997 to 1998, spending fell from 305.3 billion dollar a year to 296.7, or 8.6 billion dollars. By 1999, we were up to 298.4 and by 2000 we were spending 311.7. Barely a blip here. Still, without something to confront, such expenditure would be difficult to justify, and 300 billion a year is a hell of a lot of money. As the worlds largest arms dealer, a peaceful world would be bad for business. In all honesty, a peaceful world was and is unlikely, but something would be needed to justify spending this kind of money on military preparedness when Americans were chafing at the collapse of school music programs, lunch programs, educational quality and massive heath care costs that left the US at the top of the heap in terms of per capita expenditure on health care, but well down the list on common health care metrics, the most worrisome of which was the number of folks without health care coverage at all. Three hundred million a year would cover a lot of social programs--but those with power in the US don't want social programs.

The US, after 1980, came under the increasing influence of people we now call "neo-cons". These I remember as the pathetic little bastards who populated things like the "Young Americans for Freedom" back in my college days. People like Karl Rove (formerly "Carl", a typo which 'anonymous'--my proof reader--was kind enough to catch for me), Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz come to mind. The neocons had a vision. It required that the US consolidate it's position as the only superpower, and crush any opponent as soon as it seemed a potential threat. This would involve more military spending, and would call for a new sort of military--one that was nimble and mobile and carried massive fire power to crush opponents quickly. The idea would be to maintain American hegemony, and, interestingly, to spread democracy around the world--by force if needed. The neocons recognized that these changes in policy would be controversial and might take a fair amount of time unless there were some Pearl Harbor like episode to galvanize public opinion.

The rest is history. More to come.

Some useful sources.

The War on Truth :

www.amazon.com/War-Truth-Disinformation-Anatomy-Terrorism/dp/1566565960


An amazing book. Get it from the library, if you can. It's pretty reasonable in paperback on Amazon.com.

www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

I'm an economist. The things here were a revalation to me. More on this later.

For those interested in pursuing the threat of jihad, and it's emergence here, there are more links on other posts in this blog.

The Soviet Threat

At the end of World War II, many feared the western world would plunge, once again, into the Great Depression which the war had set aside. Millions of soldiers would return, seeking employment. Government deficit spending which had been done at unprecedented levels would largely dry up, shrinking the very aggregate demand which would be needed to provide work for returning servicemen. As it turned out, the US didn't dramatically cut it's military spending, but, instead continued and expanded it. The US established a huge, draft based standing military, something unprecedented in US history. This military posture was necessary to meet the Soviet Threat, or the threat of International Communism.

Churchill famously said "from Trieste in the Adriatic to Stettin on the Baltic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent." Surely, the Soviet Union expanded westward after WWII, absorbing Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland and so on. This expansion was understandable from a Russian historical perspective. Russia always looked at the Warsaw Pact nations as part of it's "buffer" to the west. The Soviets had been invaded by the Western Powers after WWI, and saw the Baltic nations as necessary for their security from the Western Nations.

This is not to argue that the Warsaw Pact was a democratic venture. It was certainly not, at least from our perspective. On the other hand, neither was Russia itself. But that's not the point. The point is this, what and how real was the Soviet Threat? Did the Soviets intend to "bury us" in a literal sense, through physical force; or was Krushchev speaking metaphorically in the sense that their system would win, and ours fade away. The arms race was real enough.

I remember crouching under my desk at school in the air raid "kiss your ass goodby" ritual. I also remember being sent to my empty home since the school had decided that it was better that I was incinerated at home than at school. I remember the "missile gap" of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign. I can personally recall much of the public rhetoric about the need to match Soviet power. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) comes quickly to mind. It was all worth literally trillions of dollars. Defence became a huge industry. Defense expenditures hovered at $300-400 billion a year. All this raises the question of Soviet aggression.

The Soviets kept a firm grip on their Warsaw Pact neighbors, even sending in the troops on several occasions to quell democratic uprisings. They also aided various leftist rebel groups around the world--so called Armies of Liberation. Considering the nature of the governments these rebels opposed--governments we largely supported--it might be entirely appropriate to call them Armies of Liberation.

We had wars, as well. We fought the Commies in Korea and Vietnam. The Korean War was likely not a Soviet project because on the day the Security Council of the UN voted to initiate a UN Police Action to push the North Koreans out of the South, the Soviet delegation was boycotting the Security Council. Something to do with US support of Formosa, I will guess. Were the Soviets in on the attack, they would have certainly been at the UN to veto the Security Council resolution.

Overall, there weren't many examples of Soviet military actions against other nations. Clearly, they attacked their Warsaw Pact partners, but the Soviets didn't really see these as independent nations. They attacked Afghanistan, but this was an effort to aid the leftist government there which was being toppled by the Taliban. The had, for what it's worth, a treaty which allowed the Afghan governent to invite Soviet military assistance.

This involvement isn't just a Soviet thing. The US overthrew the democratically elected Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 (for having the audacity to nationalize Iranian oil), installing the Shah of Iran in his stead. We tossed out the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala, installing Castillo Armas as dictator in 1954. The CIA overthrew democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile, installing Augusto Pinochet in 1973. This is a partial list, but one that illustrates that the US was hardly the champion of democracy we like to paint ourselves as.

The Soviet Threat, was, I suspect, largely a myth. We needed to construct an enemy after WWII to continue the defense spending which many economists felt was necessary to avoid a return to depression. The Soviet Threat provided the rational for maintaining a huge standing military and military related industrial complex. It has, now, become our national industry and export.

The collapse of the Soviet Union presented the specter of greatly diminished military spending. This didn't happen. We got new enemies, and discovered a way to make warfare far more profitable than it had ever been before.

Stay tuned...

Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto is dead. I don't know what this means to me. I have little knowledge about the family, or about Benazir. She attended both Harvard and Oxford, which is cool, and was elected twice to be Prime Minister. I am a bit concerned that she was anointed by the current administration to run against Musharraf. It's sort of like Abbas in Palestine. We have our favorite candidates, who are put up to aid our cause. Bhutto is a bit more obscure a choice than Abbas who will be clearly seen as a US puppet against Hamas which was the clear choice of the Palestinian people. Still, one wonders how Bhutto managed to get the corruption charges against her dropped, even though many sources argue that she and her husband plundered the Pakistani budget for over one billion dollars. Still, I won't push this because I really know nothing. I just found the killing of this charismatic and lovely woman quite disturbing.

A Message From the Fifties

HOWL

BY ALAN GINSBERG

For Carl Solomon

To Hear Ginsberg read at least much of HOWL, click on the title bar.

Well, yes, they were gay.


I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- ment roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- ing their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer after noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook- lyn Bridge, lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, ho vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind- ings and migraines of China under junk-with- drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis ionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla homa on the impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown rain, ho lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire place Chicago, who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu- scripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fatethe one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom, who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling n the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices, who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over loftyincantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the lilthy Pas saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles, who arreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's tod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity, who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes, who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz, who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp notism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury, who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy, and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol ectricityhydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia, who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in Catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night- mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat- ing plane, who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intel -ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con- fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi- nation? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time! Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am I'm with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother I'm with you in Rockland where you've murdered your twelve secretaries I'm with you in Rockland where you laugh at this invisible humor I'm with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter I'm with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio I'm with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses I'm with you in Rocklandwhere you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica I'm with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx I'm with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss I'm with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse I'm with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void I'm with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha I'm with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I'm with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep I'm with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here victory forget your underwear we're free I'm with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a seajourney on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

You Don't Want To Know This

I know. It's absurd. The attacks of 9/11 can't be an inside job. It's just too awful to contemplate, and those who think these thoughts are "conspiracy nuts". Well, dream on, children. As time goes by, it becomes more and more clear that nothing else makes sense--and a "false flag" operation becomes increasingly logical. I encourage you to go to the site which can be reached by clicking on the title (You Don't Want To Know This) above and start poking around.

I'll give you a few interesting hints. Building 7 wasn't hit by an airplane, and it had only minor fires, yet it collapsed on it's own footprint in 6.5 seconds--virtually free fall. Witnesses, on tape, talk about explosions, and pre-knowledge which we can hear real time from fire and police officers at the scene, that the building was coming down. There's more, much, much more. It's important to learn about this. Please, swallow your doubts and have a look. Examining evidence is never a bad idea. To go to the Journal of 911 Studies, simply click on the title of this posting.

Mandatory Minimums

From the Oregonian, Portland December 27th....

A 27-year-old Beaverton woman who spent just under a year in prison for sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy at the Hillsboro Boys & Girls Club will have to serve another five years under an Oregon Appeals Court decision released Wednesday.

A three-judge appeals panel decided that Washington County Circuit Court Judge Nancy W. Campbell was wrong in not imposing the full 75-month Measure 11 sentence on Veronica Lee Rodriguez, a Boys & Girls Club coordinator who was convicted of first-degree sexual abuse in 2005....

...In September 2005, a jury found Rodriguez guilty of one count of first-degree sexual abuse for pulling a boy's head into her breasts while rubbing his temples and running her fingers through his hair in the downtown Hillsboro club's snack room....

This is a perfect example of what is wrong with mandatory minimum sentences. The image that prompted folks to vote the minimum sentences into law was that of "lenient judges" letting heinous criminals off with a "slap on the wrist", something that would have been uncommon to say the least. What voters have achieved is a system that fails to allow judges to recognize individual circumstances. In this case, for example, the woman is going to serve over six years in prison for something I believe she should not have even been indicted for.

Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth

Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth:
A Quechua Christmas Carol
By Greg Palast
GregPalast.com

Monday 24 December 2007

Quito - I don't know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.

I'm not Barbara Walters. It's not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said, "My father was unemployed."

He paused. Then added, "He took a little drugs to the States ... This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states - in a jail."

He continued. "I'd never talked about my father before."

Apparently he hadn't. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa's dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original "banana republic" - and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.

"My mother told us he was working in the States."

His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

"We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night."

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called - who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don't shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador's finances by the throat, to go to hell. He ripped up the "agreements" which his predecessors had signed at financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said ‘We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. " Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.

It was a stunning performance. I'd met two years ago with his predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, "We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can we pay?" Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand. They didn't. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.

But Ecuador didn't fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics Minister, secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela's president and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived.

And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in America - to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.

Correa STILL wasn't done.

I'd returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest - by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan's chief. His three year old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came out vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it's not just any company he was challenging. Chevron's largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of Directors, the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.

The Cofan have sued Condi's corporation, demanding the oil company clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12 billion. Correa won't comment on the suit itself, a private legal action. But if there's a verdict in favor of Ecuador's citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year. Correa is not deterred.

He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.

This is hard core. No one - NO ONE - has made such a threat to Bush and Big Oil and lived to carry it out.

And, in an office tower looking down on Quito, the lawyers for Chevron were not amused. I met with them.

"And it's the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?" Rodrigo Perez, Texaco's top lawyer in Ecuador was chuckling over the legal difficulties the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco caused their kids' deaths. "If there is somebody with cancer there, [the Cofan parents] must prove [the deaths were] caused by crude or by petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude - which is absolutely impossible." He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.

The oil company lawyer added, "No one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil." Really? You could swim in the stuff and you'd be just fine.

The Cofan had heard this before. When Chevron's Texaco unit came to their land the the oil men said they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now Condi's men had told me that crude oil doesn't cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I'm no expert. So I called one. Robert F Kennedy Jr., professor of Environmental Law at Pace University, told me that elements of crude oil production - benzene, toluene, and xylene, "are well-known carcinogens." Kennedy told me he's seen Chevron-Texaco's ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this toxic dumping would mean jail time in the USA.

But it wasn't as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle. The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy, Jaime Varela, with a blond bouffant hairdo, in the kind of yellow chinos you'd see on country club links, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles the Cofan would face. Especially this one: Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn't get a dime. "What about the chairs in this office?" I asked. Couldn't the Cofan at least get those? "No," they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.

Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa's threat to use the power of his Presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No one could have expected that. And Correa, no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush Administration. But to this President, it's all about justice, fairness. "You [Americans] wouldn't do this to your own people," he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska's Natives.

Correa's not unique. He's the latest of a new breed in Latin America. Lula, President of Brazil, Evo Morales, the first Indian ever elected President of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. All "Leftists," as the press tells us. But all have something else in common: they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blonds.

When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as, "the monkey." Chavez told me proudly, "I am negro e indio" - Black and Indian, like most Venezuelans. Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blond-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of "monkey." Now, all over Latin America, the "monkeys" are in charge.

And they are unlocking the economic cages.

Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blond oil company executive. He never made much in oil - but every time he lost his money or his investors' money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.

I know this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.

But maybe it's just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is Good and Evil.

Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who's been good and who's been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up on Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas Future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan's drinking water.

Or maybe we'll have to figure it out ourselves. When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back, when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native village of Chenega. I was investigating the damage done by Exxon's oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega's beaches. It was March 1991, and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island's shore, watching CNN. We stared in silence as "smart" bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.

Then Paul said to me, in that slow, quiet way he had, "Well, I guess we're all Natives now."

Well, maybe we are. But we don't have to be, do we?

Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the center of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn't have to worry that her dad would forget about "the poor children who are cold" on the streets of Quito.

Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.

Declaring Victory

It seem we've decided to declare victory, and move on. Increasingly, the US has decided to talk about "progress" in Iraq. We speak of how the local tribal folks are fighting "al-quaeda" and how the neighborhoods are safer. Would that this were true. Violence in the neighborhoods has to do with the fact that sunni and sheite people have separated for self preservation. There is, thus, less sectarian violence. We've also built massive concrete walls between neighborhoods so that people are seriously separated. It's probably true that none of this has anything to do with the "surge" of American troops. They are still not able to speak arabic, do not know the people or culture, and still wander about as aliens in the land they occupy. If there is a reduction in violence (and reading my newspaper, I'm not sure that is statistically true), it's probably due more to the self separation of hostile groups than anything the "green zone" authorities or the US forces did. Still, it is an opportunity for GW Bush and his cronies to begin to declare victory in Iraq. They do not derserve the honor to do so.

About the Dollar

It had to happen. We've been buying more than we've sold. In the end, we owe. This is about the effects of that. When you owe, you must pay. I must apologize about the gold standard stuff. Not my cup of tea. A modern economy can't operate using gold, so the longings of the later commentator for gold doesn't touch me--unless we argue that the modern economy was a bad idea. That an interesting argument. Still, it's a broadly correct video. Have a lowok.
www.in
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18934.htm

An Interesting post on the history of the conflict between the west and islam

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-904260387446539297An interesting story about the contest between the west and islam. Have a look. It's a BBC film in three parts shown, here, on Google video.

Episode One
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5676065093252868951&hl=en

Episode Two
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3873152810355283441

Episode Three
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-904260387446539297

A Very Good Link

Democracy Now is a daily online news program with a refreshingly left wing perspective. It's a great place to flesh out your perspectives on current events, and to find out about things you won't see on CNN.

www.democracynow.org

A Good Movie for Christmas

A bit of a harsh beginning, but hang in there, it gets better; particularly the bit on Christianity which immediately follows the rather explosive beginning.


Zeitgeist The Movie

It's just so fun.

A Greg Palast Film on Hugo Chavez

This film is a little dated, but still interesting.


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-107721931861791042&hl=en

Gregg Palast reports for the BBC, and has a decidedly "progressive " perspective.

The Great Car Idea

It was a cool idea. We’d all have a car or two, hop in them and go where we wanted, when we wanted. If it were hot, we’d turn on the AC and motor along in cool air. If cold, we had ample heat to warm us. Music would drift from a fine stereo, and the miles would fly by. We could whisk off to the mall or supermarket to shop for frills and food brought from afar, we could ride in comfort to work and transport our families on their various errands here and there. Yet, when I look at traffic as it exists, I know all of this was madness. It doesn’t work.

I’m sitting, locked in traffic; cars all around, "parked" on a road a total of six lanes wide. I will eventually find a way to escape this, but my alternative street won’t be much better. I recall taking the bus into work one morning. It’s about a 7 mile ride into downtown Portland where I work, and it should take perhaps 15 to 20 minutes on clear streets. As the bus, trapped in traffic like everyone else, crawled along at literally a snail’s pace, passengers got off and walked. Walking was much faster. Our system of transport is preposterous. I suppose that on a typical morning there must be at least 300,000 people going to work in the greater Portland area. Effectively all of them commute by car. If there are 1.5 riders per car, that would be 200,000 automobiles, These cars will have a replacement value of around $500 million, and weigh, collectively about 600 million pounds or 300,000 tons. They will have about 40 million collective horsepower and will use around 300,000 gallons of gasoline making their trip to work and back. This is just for Portland, Or.—a small city.

Portland has mass transit, and some folks use it. Mostly, however, people don’t. Our city isn’t set up for mass transit. Like most urban areas, we have moved our retail to malls, and drive to them to shop. These malls are surrounded by acres of parking lots. The stores, particularly the “big box” stores rely on the presence of cheap transport to move products from China, and elsewhere, where they’re made, to the mall where we pick them up and drive them home.

The idea of each home owning a couple of $25,000 transport devices and piloting them in great herds down vast highways that cover millions of acres of ground is stunning. Nikita Krushchev, head of the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 through the early 1960s, remarked, on one of his visits to the US about, the tremendous waste in our automobile culture. Most cars only have one occupant, he noted. He was surprised and stunned. At that time, most Soviet citizens didn’t even own a car.

One of the frightening things about our insane automotive culture is the degree to which other peoples want to have their own. China is the fastest growing automobile market in the world, India isn’t far behind. The people of all developing nations crave an automobile and look forward to the mobile Western life style they see portrayed in the media. The threat of Peak Oil suggests that we will soon, or already have reached the peak of would oil output. This suggest a future of rising energy prices, further exacerbated by the skyrocketing demand from developing nations. The international struggle for control of oil resources is already feverish. As noted middle east reporter Robert Fisk so beautifully stated it, “is the Iraq war about oil. Of course it is. Would the 82nd Airborne division be in Iraq if the country’s chief export was tomatoes or asparagus? I very much doubt it.” The pace of killing over oil can do nothing but increase exponentially.

It’s not a question of whether we like it, it’s doesn’t matter if we deny or pooh-pooh it, the end of oil is coming. It’s completely inexorable, and it’s going to be sooner rather than later. My children will face it, fully. The amazing advance of humanity since the 18th century has been propelled by the burning “skyrocket” of fossil fuels. This rocket has been powerful, but it’s fuel is rapidly running. We will lose our cars. Our cities will need complete redesigning. Carpenters will use hammers and manual saws again. Holes will be excavated with shovels and tall buildings will be poured by men pushing wheel barrows of concrete up long ramps. We will not eat tomatoes flown in from Israel, and goods from China will be too expensive to ship to America. Thinking of all the ways the end of oil will affect us is an engrossing mental exercise. Try it. It will help wile away the time while you sit locked in traffic.

For information on peal oil, go to:
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/