Again history repeats itself. In the recent sad developments in Egypt we see how far we have drifted from our nation's basic principles. In the January revolt against the long term US-supported dictator Mubarak the US vacillated long enough for a weak democracy to emerge. Not happy with the results of the people's choice of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Washington gave a green light for the July military coup by the generals. Al Jazzera and other journals have fully-documented how the USA secretly helped (using cash payments to demonstrators, its CIA, and ties to the Egyptian military)to topple the legitimate President Morsi, the first democratically elected president of Egypt. After Morsi's ouster, imprisonment and recent disappearance, we are faced with our government's hypocritical support for a new and ruthless military dictatorship. We watch as Washington remains silent as the military strongman General Al Sissi ruthlessly suppresses the Egyptian polity they disagree with. Washington hypocritically calls for "new elections" ignoring the fact that Mr. Morsi had just won with 52% of the popular vote only months ago..more than Obama did. We stand by silently, criminally helping undermine a nascent democracy in the Middle East. But more disquieting are the revelations of political machinations in our own nation in this affair. We see exposed in plain sight how here at home OUR government weakly acquiesces to the entrenched and powerful US defense contractors (with the aid of self-serving parochial Senators like Carl Levin) to ignore the long-established intention of Congress to prevent awarding aid to regimes which have gained power through military force, i.e. a military coup. With the nation and rest of the world watching, we see the Obama Administration in an embarrassing display, attempting to redefine in a Clintonesque manner what a "coup" is.
So in this "Egyptian scandal", we see revealed how the will of the people and sensible long term policies are undermined and weakened by the Obama Administration in both the USA and in Egypt! The whole affair in Egypt (as it appears to be directed from the offices of Washington defense contractors) is a scathing embarrassment and stain on our nation's reputation as the world's premiere democracy. We must ask, who runs this nation? The defense contractors or the people? Fully engaged in the hypocrisy and leading from behind is the Obama White House, led presumably by "the smartest guy in the room", a Nobel peace laureate and a legal scholar. One wonders with trepidation, what we can we expect from that office with one of the current crop of GOP hopefuls in Obama's place? God help us.
Get the picture?
rjk
Friday, July 26, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
FUKUSHIMA, FISHING DISASTER AND BIOMAGNIFICATION IN THE PACIFIC
FUKUSHIMA: FISHERY DISASTER IN PACIFIC
Lax government oversight, a too cozy relationship between the Japanese government and the nuclear power industry, and Ayn Randian style greed by Tepco the Japanese company which operates the plants, mixed with a Pacific Tsunami in 2011 to cause the nuclear disaster we know now as Fukushima Daiichi. But less is known of the fishery disaster in the Pacific that the world will have to suffer with for the next century or longer. One billion people on the Pacific Rim who depend on food from the sea will have to face the choice of going hungry, or eating radioactive contaminated fish. The key reason for the disaster: the natural process of bioconcentration in which even very minuscule levels of contaminates in the water column can be concentrated many thousands of times in the bodies of fish and plankton in the marine food chain culminate in very high levels in the top predator fish. As a result the nuclides the Japanese have permitted to seep into the Pacific will be spread far and wide over the vast Pacific, reaching the US west coast in 2017. But fish and plankton will be concentrating even low level nuclear contaminants in the top predator fish to dangerous levels before that. As a result we can expect the levels of radioactivity to INCREASE in the predator fish we favor as food over time, not decrease as we move away in time from the 2011 event.
Yesterday I came across a startling report in Le Monde. On July 10, 2013, the French daily reported that Tepco, the Japanese company which owns and operates the crippled Fukusima power plant in northern Japan, revealed a strikingincrease in levels of radioactive caesium in groundwater-monitoring wells situated between the plant and the Pacific Ocean. In three days the level of the element caesium surged to ninety times the level it had been. The information just confirmed what many have suspected, that the plant is still out of control and leaking high levels of nuclear waste into the soil below the plant and that that highly contaminated water is seeping directly into the Pacific Ocean. See extract of original article: " Japon- Fuite d'eau contaminée à Fukushima", Le Monde, July 10, 2013.
Studies estimate that the world value of wild fish landed as a result of ocean fishing is in the order of $80 billion dollars annually and more than 50% of that is from the Pacific Ocean, while the total,value in terms of jobs, supporting industries, refrigeration, boat building, tin mining ( for canned fish) packaging, transporting, and selling the fish amount to more than three times the landed value or about $240 billion dollars. (Dyck, A.J. and U.R. Sumaila. 2010. Economic impact of ocean fish populations in the global fishery. Journal of Bioeconomics. ). The Wild Salmon Center estimates that just one "species" of fish, the wild Pacific salmon, sustain a $3 billion-a-year industry and provide tens of thousands of jobs, and serve as a protein staple to millions of people in Russia, Japan, Canada and the US. The State of Alaska estimates that its Pacific fishery supports about 80,000 jobs in that state and accounts for some $6 billion dollars in revenue. Fish provide an excellent and in some nations essential source of protein to billions of people world wide. China with its 1.3 billion population harvests about 14 million tons of wild marine fish from the Pacific annually which supplements the nutrition of its citizenry. Russia harvests about 3 million tons of marine fish from this same region. While the USA takes about 5 million tons. Of that more than 50% of all U.S. landings were fish caught by trawlers in the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean catch includes groundfish such as Pacific cod, flounders, hake, ocean perch, Alaska pollock, and rockfishes. Other important commercial Pacific Ocean species are salmon, halibut, Dungeness, King and Snow crab, tuna, and squid. But since the Fukushima disaster all of these species may be found to be too contaminated to be eaten safely. That spells an economic disaster and a nutritional disaster just over the horizon.
It is now about sixteen months since the tsunami and melt down of the reactors at Fukushima and reports such as that of the Le Monde piece above are the few notices of trouble over the horizon available for concerned citizens. Our press has basically ignored this issue. Reports in some Canadian journals indicate that the fish monitored for radioactivity are showing signs of having higher radiation levels in 2012 and more recently, than in the time period closer to the disaster. That is in part an indication that the plant is still dumping contaminated water into the Pacific, but of more concern is that the levels of nuclides are increasing in the top levels of the food chain more as a result of bioconcentration. The press and other media are silent on this quiet disaster. They do not want to be blacklisted by any big industry which might quit buying advertisement space. So we must ferret out the facts and come to our own conclusions.
What we do know is that caesium 137 and caesium 134 are man-made radioactive elements which were and are continuing to be released into the Pacific Ocean at Fukushima. Ocean currents carry these materials out into the Pacific where they mix with uncontaminated water. Marine scientists have found these elements from Fuskushima thousands of miles away from the plant site and thousands of feet deep in the water column. They are absorbed or ingested by filter feeding plankton and in that way get into the food chain. These substances emit dangerous radiation which, when ingested by humans, spread over the body and concentrate in the soft tissues. In high enough concentrations they kill outright. In lower dosages they will produce cancers. The substances stay dangerously radioactive for decades. (This element has a half life of about thirty years, meaning that one half of its nuclei decay away to a stable element over a period of thirty years, over the next thirty years one-half of the remaining half decays away. So after sixty years, one fourth of the original amount is still there emitting radiation, and over the next thirty years a half of that (or 1/8 of the original) decays away.....et cetera). Once ingested these elements remain in the human body for several months. There is no special threshold below which these substances are benign. No levels of radiation are "acceptable".
We must avoid them and avoid having our children and pregnant women from ingesting them.
Our fish mongers are eager to sell product (and may unknowingly or otherwise mis-label products that they want to sell). So do not depend on the fish being labeled as radioactive or removed from sale. Unfortunately, we can not expect to receive any meaningful warnings from our government. Let us be clear. Our government (a government for the oligarchs and by the oligarchs) has as its most vital concern the viability and continued profitability and survival of the fishing and other industries associated with this quarter of a trillion dollar part of the world economy. They are not concerned with the possible health problems, cancers, suffering, and early deaths of it citizenry. That is a gradual process that politicians can easily ignore or sweep under the rug, and which will take decades to expose...and document. And you can be sure that the big banks, US state governments, foreign nations, and various companies with stakes in the fishing industry will lie, hide evidence, and distort the facts to protect those industries, as did the tobacco industry, in league with several US governments of both parties for some thirty years or more, to hide the truth regarding the dangers of smoking.
So begin tapering off your taste for tuna sushi, for Chilean Sea Bass, for Pacific cod, and Alaskan salmon and for a host of other Pacific wild fish. No one will tell you how radioactive they are. You can thank the nuclear power industry, General Electric who designed and built those plants, Tepco in Japan who mis handled the disaster, the Japanese government who failed to regulate the industry, and the government agencies which promoted and continue to promote the most dangerous way to boil water and generate electricity every imagined.
Get the picture?
rjk
Lax government oversight, a too cozy relationship between the Japanese government and the nuclear power industry, and Ayn Randian style greed by Tepco the Japanese company which operates the plants, mixed with a Pacific Tsunami in 2011 to cause the nuclear disaster we know now as Fukushima Daiichi. But less is known of the fishery disaster in the Pacific that the world will have to suffer with for the next century or longer. One billion people on the Pacific Rim who depend on food from the sea will have to face the choice of going hungry, or eating radioactive contaminated fish. The key reason for the disaster: the natural process of bioconcentration in which even very minuscule levels of contaminates in the water column can be concentrated many thousands of times in the bodies of fish and plankton in the marine food chain culminate in very high levels in the top predator fish. As a result the nuclides the Japanese have permitted to seep into the Pacific will be spread far and wide over the vast Pacific, reaching the US west coast in 2017. But fish and plankton will be concentrating even low level nuclear contaminants in the top predator fish to dangerous levels before that. As a result we can expect the levels of radioactivity to INCREASE in the predator fish we favor as food over time, not decrease as we move away in time from the 2011 event.
Yesterday I came across a startling report in Le Monde. On July 10, 2013, the French daily reported that Tepco, the Japanese company which owns and operates the crippled Fukusima power plant in northern Japan, revealed a strikingincrease in levels of radioactive caesium in groundwater-monitoring wells situated between the plant and the Pacific Ocean. In three days the level of the element caesium surged to ninety times the level it had been. The information just confirmed what many have suspected, that the plant is still out of control and leaking high levels of nuclear waste into the soil below the plant and that that highly contaminated water is seeping directly into the Pacific Ocean. See extract of original article: " Japon- Fuite d'eau contaminée à Fukushima", Le Monde, July 10, 2013.
Studies estimate that the world value of wild fish landed as a result of ocean fishing is in the order of $80 billion dollars annually and more than 50% of that is from the Pacific Ocean, while the total,value in terms of jobs, supporting industries, refrigeration, boat building, tin mining ( for canned fish) packaging, transporting, and selling the fish amount to more than three times the landed value or about $240 billion dollars. (Dyck, A.J. and U.R. Sumaila. 2010. Economic impact of ocean fish populations in the global fishery. Journal of Bioeconomics. ). The Wild Salmon Center estimates that just one "species" of fish, the wild Pacific salmon, sustain a $3 billion-a-year industry and provide tens of thousands of jobs, and serve as a protein staple to millions of people in Russia, Japan, Canada and the US. The State of Alaska estimates that its Pacific fishery supports about 80,000 jobs in that state and accounts for some $6 billion dollars in revenue. Fish provide an excellent and in some nations essential source of protein to billions of people world wide. China with its 1.3 billion population harvests about 14 million tons of wild marine fish from the Pacific annually which supplements the nutrition of its citizenry. Russia harvests about 3 million tons of marine fish from this same region. While the USA takes about 5 million tons. Of that more than 50% of all U.S. landings were fish caught by trawlers in the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean catch includes groundfish such as Pacific cod, flounders, hake, ocean perch, Alaska pollock, and rockfishes. Other important commercial Pacific Ocean species are salmon, halibut, Dungeness, King and Snow crab, tuna, and squid. But since the Fukushima disaster all of these species may be found to be too contaminated to be eaten safely. That spells an economic disaster and a nutritional disaster just over the horizon.
It is now about sixteen months since the tsunami and melt down of the reactors at Fukushima and reports such as that of the Le Monde piece above are the few notices of trouble over the horizon available for concerned citizens. Our press has basically ignored this issue. Reports in some Canadian journals indicate that the fish monitored for radioactivity are showing signs of having higher radiation levels in 2012 and more recently, than in the time period closer to the disaster. That is in part an indication that the plant is still dumping contaminated water into the Pacific, but of more concern is that the levels of nuclides are increasing in the top levels of the food chain more as a result of bioconcentration. The press and other media are silent on this quiet disaster. They do not want to be blacklisted by any big industry which might quit buying advertisement space. So we must ferret out the facts and come to our own conclusions.
What we do know is that caesium 137 and caesium 134 are man-made radioactive elements which were and are continuing to be released into the Pacific Ocean at Fukushima. Ocean currents carry these materials out into the Pacific where they mix with uncontaminated water. Marine scientists have found these elements from Fuskushima thousands of miles away from the plant site and thousands of feet deep in the water column. They are absorbed or ingested by filter feeding plankton and in that way get into the food chain. These substances emit dangerous radiation which, when ingested by humans, spread over the body and concentrate in the soft tissues. In high enough concentrations they kill outright. In lower dosages they will produce cancers. The substances stay dangerously radioactive for decades. (This element has a half life of about thirty years, meaning that one half of its nuclei decay away to a stable element over a period of thirty years, over the next thirty years one-half of the remaining half decays away. So after sixty years, one fourth of the original amount is still there emitting radiation, and over the next thirty years a half of that (or 1/8 of the original) decays away.....et cetera). Once ingested these elements remain in the human body for several months. There is no special threshold below which these substances are benign. No levels of radiation are "acceptable".
We must avoid them and avoid having our children and pregnant women from ingesting them.
Our fish mongers are eager to sell product (and may unknowingly or otherwise mis-label products that they want to sell). So do not depend on the fish being labeled as radioactive or removed from sale. Unfortunately, we can not expect to receive any meaningful warnings from our government. Let us be clear. Our government (a government for the oligarchs and by the oligarchs) has as its most vital concern the viability and continued profitability and survival of the fishing and other industries associated with this quarter of a trillion dollar part of the world economy. They are not concerned with the possible health problems, cancers, suffering, and early deaths of it citizenry. That is a gradual process that politicians can easily ignore or sweep under the rug, and which will take decades to expose...and document. And you can be sure that the big banks, US state governments, foreign nations, and various companies with stakes in the fishing industry will lie, hide evidence, and distort the facts to protect those industries, as did the tobacco industry, in league with several US governments of both parties for some thirty years or more, to hide the truth regarding the dangers of smoking.
So begin tapering off your taste for tuna sushi, for Chilean Sea Bass, for Pacific cod, and Alaskan salmon and for a host of other Pacific wild fish. No one will tell you how radioactive they are. You can thank the nuclear power industry, General Electric who designed and built those plants, Tepco in Japan who mis handled the disaster, the Japanese government who failed to regulate the industry, and the government agencies which promoted and continue to promote the most dangerous way to boil water and generate electricity every imagined.
Get the picture?
rjk
Monday, July 8, 2013
EGYPT AND MILITARY TYRANTS...WE SHOULD WORRY
"Instead of subjecting the military to the civil power, [a tyrant will make] the civil subordinate to the military. But can [he] thus put down all law under his feet? Can he erect a power superior to that which erected himself? He [can do] it indeed by force, but let him remember that force cannot give right." --Thomas Jefferson: Rights of British America, 1774.(*) ME 1:209, Papers 1:134
In an earlier blog ( see below) I outlined the foreign and domestic political situation Egypt's first democratically elected president, Mohammad Morsi, had to deal with with when he was elected a year ago. In summary his problems were: the Hosni Mubarak old-guard entrenched and barricaded by decades in power remained a powerful force, while the military and the secret service, the real power in the nation, worked to undermine the new president. From abroad Morsi also faced opposition from the White House which had decided that this PhD from the University of California steeped in ideas of "democracy" was too independent and unlikely to be a pliable and complacent "partner". Washington quietly gave the green light to others in the region that he should go. Closer to his home, across the narrow Red Sea, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah was unhappy with a democratic Egypt on its western border. It feared its own suppressed Moslem Brotherhood and worried that the very concept of the Egyptian revolution might be "exported" to Saudi Arabia. Saudi money found its way into Egypt to stir up massive demonstrations.
But Morsi faced other just as intractable problems at home in the form of a faltering economy, falling gold reserves, rising unemployment, a fragile political coalition, and a powerful, outsized military establishment with potentially traitorous ties abroad.
The Egyptian economy is long burdened by many "give aways" in the form of food, and fuel subsidies. These were instituted under Mubarak to keep the populous quiet, but which weakened the economy. In the end it turned out to be the heavily subsidized military which was Morsi's greatest threat.
The Egyptian military, the largest subsidized component of the economy, is underwritten by a powerful foreign nation. Each year the generals pocket a hefty $1.3 billion dollars in "welfare" from the USA. These funds, totaling over $70 billion dollars over the years, are a form of insurance-payment designed to keep the army's leadership in line with US interests, and, as well, to help maintain the military as a controlling element of the the Egyptian state. If the US is spending $1.3 billion per year, it wants to be sure it's paying the "top guy", and is getting its money's worth by making sure the top guy stays on top. These US funds were also a handy lever to insure that the Egyptians keep the peace with Israel, and maintain the critical sea-lane through the Suez Canal. Those seventy billions of dollars were well-used in Egypt to pamper the generals, who buy spiffy gold-encrusted uniforms, up-to-date US military hardware (but not too up to date!), and get to go on expensive jaunts abroad to US military installations, war-colleges, and camps where they are duly indoctrinated. The funds are, as well, a boon to the US arms industry, since the money can only be used to purchase American military hardware. In this way it supports and comforts burgeoning militarism on two continents. But money is fungible, and over the long decades the dollars were sidelined by entrepreneurial generals into private industry. Large amounts accrued to the Egyptian Army as investment funds for their own private businesses. It is now claimed that the military "owns" about 40% of the nation's economy. Thus, the continued flow of US funds are a significant investment in propping up elements in the Egyptian economy antithetical to democracy. The result is a weakened general economy, hindered job formation and unfair competition with independent companies which must bump shoulders with the heavily subsidized military which produces all manner of products for the market from water bottles to laptop computers.
In the end, after many unfortunate faux pas by the inexperienced Morsi and company, the powerful, entrenched military and their allies finally took down Morsi, their legitimately elected President. General Abdul Al Sissi called to give Morsi 48 hours to resign, give up all real power and accept a "nominal" presidency in which all real power resided with the generals, or they would arrest him. This was the shameful "deal" which the US Ambassador, Security Advisor Rice and President Barack Obama favored and encouraged Morsi to accept. It was a deal which would give Obama cover but turn Egypt back to despotism. Morsi decided to take a courageous stand, he gave Obama and the generals a one finger salute, forcing a take-over which all the world would see revealed as a crude power play by the powerful...a military coup. The result is that Morsi is now behind bars in a barracks near Tahrir Square. His chief aids have been rounded up as so many criminals. The generals are scouring the City with trumped-up warrants for the arrest of 300 members of Morsi's political Freedom and Justice Party. The new military despots then shut down newspapers they did not like, closed political organizations they found offensive and even arrested journalists from Al Jazeera whom they considered too "pro Morsi". Today, July 8, 2013, our US press has widely reported that the Army and Egyptian Police have "massacred" scores of peaceful sit-in pro-Morsi demonstrators, most of whom were shot in the head at close range.
The US and the rest of the free world wring their hands at the the slaughter and decry what is a clear military coup d'état. The White House has remained silent, unwilling to call the coup "a coup". Western government leaders who were complicitous with the US in helping to out Morsi are now frustrated and unhappy, having their facile ability to talk up "democracy" for third world countries turn too obviously into so much empty hypocritcal rhetoric. Here in the US, supposed leader of the "free world", we continue to conspire against "inconvienient" democracies we do not like and continue to support militarism at home and abroad....at our peril and the peril of the rest of the world. The situation in Egypt and its apparent descent into further chaos is a clear picture of what happens when we unleash the military from its civilian control. Tyranny is the result. We can not let this coup stand! We can not continue to support the despotic generals. As Thomas Jefferson so aptly stated, "....tyrants (will) make the civil, subordinate to the military. (They can do it) indeed by force, but let (them)remember that force cannot give right".
What we should remember as well, something that our own pliant press will not or can not state, is our own nation's complicity in this tragedy. We have supported the militarization of Egypt for decades. We are well-aware of how our funding has crippled their economy. We have supported the tyranny of Mubarak, and now we have underhandedly helped engineer the fall of the first democratically elected president of that nation. Our President hypocritically wrings his hands in public false despair and in private finds ways to support tyranny. We are in good part responsible for the tragedy in that region. Can we not somehow learn to be a more benign super power? Can we not somehow become a force for good in the world as our Founders certainly imagined was to be our nation's course? And too, seeing the chaos in Egypt, should we also worry that our own powerful standing army and the huge military industries which are in league with it are a danger to our own freedoms?
Get the picture?
rjk
In an earlier blog ( see below) I outlined the foreign and domestic political situation Egypt's first democratically elected president, Mohammad Morsi, had to deal with with when he was elected a year ago. In summary his problems were: the Hosni Mubarak old-guard entrenched and barricaded by decades in power remained a powerful force, while the military and the secret service, the real power in the nation, worked to undermine the new president. From abroad Morsi also faced opposition from the White House which had decided that this PhD from the University of California steeped in ideas of "democracy" was too independent and unlikely to be a pliable and complacent "partner". Washington quietly gave the green light to others in the region that he should go. Closer to his home, across the narrow Red Sea, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah was unhappy with a democratic Egypt on its western border. It feared its own suppressed Moslem Brotherhood and worried that the very concept of the Egyptian revolution might be "exported" to Saudi Arabia. Saudi money found its way into Egypt to stir up massive demonstrations.
But Morsi faced other just as intractable problems at home in the form of a faltering economy, falling gold reserves, rising unemployment, a fragile political coalition, and a powerful, outsized military establishment with potentially traitorous ties abroad.
The Egyptian economy is long burdened by many "give aways" in the form of food, and fuel subsidies. These were instituted under Mubarak to keep the populous quiet, but which weakened the economy. In the end it turned out to be the heavily subsidized military which was Morsi's greatest threat.
The Egyptian military, the largest subsidized component of the economy, is underwritten by a powerful foreign nation. Each year the generals pocket a hefty $1.3 billion dollars in "welfare" from the USA. These funds, totaling over $70 billion dollars over the years, are a form of insurance-payment designed to keep the army's leadership in line with US interests, and, as well, to help maintain the military as a controlling element of the the Egyptian state. If the US is spending $1.3 billion per year, it wants to be sure it's paying the "top guy", and is getting its money's worth by making sure the top guy stays on top. These US funds were also a handy lever to insure that the Egyptians keep the peace with Israel, and maintain the critical sea-lane through the Suez Canal. Those seventy billions of dollars were well-used in Egypt to pamper the generals, who buy spiffy gold-encrusted uniforms, up-to-date US military hardware (but not too up to date!), and get to go on expensive jaunts abroad to US military installations, war-colleges, and camps where they are duly indoctrinated. The funds are, as well, a boon to the US arms industry, since the money can only be used to purchase American military hardware. In this way it supports and comforts burgeoning militarism on two continents. But money is fungible, and over the long decades the dollars were sidelined by entrepreneurial generals into private industry. Large amounts accrued to the Egyptian Army as investment funds for their own private businesses. It is now claimed that the military "owns" about 40% of the nation's economy. Thus, the continued flow of US funds are a significant investment in propping up elements in the Egyptian economy antithetical to democracy. The result is a weakened general economy, hindered job formation and unfair competition with independent companies which must bump shoulders with the heavily subsidized military which produces all manner of products for the market from water bottles to laptop computers.
In the end, after many unfortunate faux pas by the inexperienced Morsi and company, the powerful, entrenched military and their allies finally took down Morsi, their legitimately elected President. General Abdul Al Sissi called to give Morsi 48 hours to resign, give up all real power and accept a "nominal" presidency in which all real power resided with the generals, or they would arrest him. This was the shameful "deal" which the US Ambassador, Security Advisor Rice and President Barack Obama favored and encouraged Morsi to accept. It was a deal which would give Obama cover but turn Egypt back to despotism. Morsi decided to take a courageous stand, he gave Obama and the generals a one finger salute, forcing a take-over which all the world would see revealed as a crude power play by the powerful...a military coup. The result is that Morsi is now behind bars in a barracks near Tahrir Square. His chief aids have been rounded up as so many criminals. The generals are scouring the City with trumped-up warrants for the arrest of 300 members of Morsi's political Freedom and Justice Party. The new military despots then shut down newspapers they did not like, closed political organizations they found offensive and even arrested journalists from Al Jazeera whom they considered too "pro Morsi". Today, July 8, 2013, our US press has widely reported that the Army and Egyptian Police have "massacred" scores of peaceful sit-in pro-Morsi demonstrators, most of whom were shot in the head at close range.
The US and the rest of the free world wring their hands at the the slaughter and decry what is a clear military coup d'état. The White House has remained silent, unwilling to call the coup "a coup". Western government leaders who were complicitous with the US in helping to out Morsi are now frustrated and unhappy, having their facile ability to talk up "democracy" for third world countries turn too obviously into so much empty hypocritcal rhetoric. Here in the US, supposed leader of the "free world", we continue to conspire against "inconvienient" democracies we do not like and continue to support militarism at home and abroad....at our peril and the peril of the rest of the world. The situation in Egypt and its apparent descent into further chaos is a clear picture of what happens when we unleash the military from its civilian control. Tyranny is the result. We can not let this coup stand! We can not continue to support the despotic generals. As Thomas Jefferson so aptly stated, "....tyrants (will) make the civil, subordinate to the military. (They can do it) indeed by force, but let (them)remember that force cannot give right".
What we should remember as well, something that our own pliant press will not or can not state, is our own nation's complicity in this tragedy. We have supported the militarization of Egypt for decades. We are well-aware of how our funding has crippled their economy. We have supported the tyranny of Mubarak, and now we have underhandedly helped engineer the fall of the first democratically elected president of that nation. Our President hypocritically wrings his hands in public false despair and in private finds ways to support tyranny. We are in good part responsible for the tragedy in that region. Can we not somehow learn to be a more benign super power? Can we not somehow become a force for good in the world as our Founders certainly imagined was to be our nation's course? And too, seeing the chaos in Egypt, should we also worry that our own powerful standing army and the huge military industries which are in league with it are a danger to our own freedoms?
Get the picture?
rjk
Saturday, July 6, 2013
WHITE HOUSE HYPOCRISY ON EGYPT
The White House loves to talk up "Democracy" but they don't really like to see it implemented (here or) in other countries. It's too messy. They much rather have their good ole boy dictators who take money and orders from the US Imperium and smile while they are going to the bank. This has been the story in US foreign affairs for all of the post WWII years, and in other imperial nations for thousands of years since the Roman Empire.
In 2006 the Palestinians were nudged by the west to have a "free and fair" election to decide who would lead that aborning nation in its quest for legitimacy. The results surprised all when Hamas won handily. Hamas was the more recalcitrant, less controllable, and the stiff opponent of Israeli rule. Its election was unpalatable to the Israelis, and their chief sponsor, the USA. The result was that the Israelis illegally held back tax receipts from the provinces, starving the Hamas government for funds, while the White House did not "recognize" the Hamas government and pulled every string in its "marionette set for the world" to upend the legitimate results of a free and fair election. In the end, a civil war broke out between Hamas and Fatah, and after many deaths, and destruction, a stalemate was reached in which Fatah (the more malleable and controllable group) supported by the US, eventually took control over the West Bank or those small parts of it that the Israelis let them control, and the Hamas remained in control of Gaza. The result has been economic decay, political instability, several armed conflicts, and thousands of Palestinian deaths.
History has repeated itself in Egypt, a US client state par excellence, with $1.3 billion in military aid for the last thirty years. The White House, the CIA and the Pentagon have close ties with the Egyptian military (and secret service) many of whom were trained right here in the USA. It is well known that the CIA has that nation so "wired" that nothing happens in Egypt that the US does not know about (or had control over). We are the puppeteers in Egypt and they are the stringed marionettes. Well, that was so until the chief puppet and dictator Hosni Mubarak met a startling and surprising fate when he was overthrown in a fire-storm revolution. We lost a key ally. That made us unhappy. As soon as all the hand wringing was over and we realized we had to let of Mubarak go, we began playing the "democracy" tape again and again to the Egyptians to encourage them to have "fair and free" elections. In time the US style fair and free election took place and lo and behold....a member of the formerly outlawed Moslem Brotherhood and head of the Freedom and Justice Party led by Mohammed Morsi won the Presidency, taking a whopping 52% of the vote. Morsi was the first democratically elected President of Egypt. But he had many enemies. The Saudi Arabians were unhappy with a real democracy on their western border. Perhaps their citizenry would begin to get the idea that they could spend that Saudi oil money much better and equitably than the Abdullah family could. The US lost a powerful client whom they could control right in the heart of the Middle East. Morsi was his own man and would not fill that bill. The Egyptian military and their secret service were long time opponents of the Moslem Brotherhood, many of whom they had jailed and tortured. Then too the Mubarak old guard were still around and still in positions of power. The sotto voce word went out from Washington..."this guy must go".
Right after Morsi's election, the disgruntled military tribunal of generals which ruled Egypt after the overthrow of Mubarak, shut down the Parliament and locked out the legitimately elected ministers. From that point on it was a fierce battle of wills between Morsi, the legitimately elected president, and an array of enemies including the Mubarak old guard, the Egyptian secret service and the military, as well as foreign enemies such as the CIA, the IMF ( which refused a much needed loan), the USA, which threw stumbling blocks in this president's way, and not the least, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who with the green light from Washington sent money and activists to stir up riots and unrest against Morsi. The Egyptian President was an idealist, was not going to be bought, was not able to be swayed by offers of money or power, and had immersed himself in the ideals and theory of democracy while taking a Ph D degree at USC in California. So the fact that Morsi held out for a whole year, and Egypt had one whole year of democratic rule is truly remarkable.
We love to talk democracy here in the world's self proclaimed top "democratic" nation, but we don't like it to crop up in our client states. It makes them so hard to control. These tin pot upstart leaders begin going off on their own, doing things that are actually beneficial for their nation as a whole, sometimes actually attempting to make laws or decisions that are counter to the wishes and imperatives of the USA. That ain't no way to run a world!
But in seriousness in the end we must face the facts. Our foreign policies of interventionism and control encourage despotism. Dictators exert power through brutality and repression. They keep the lid on the human need for free expression for a while, but soon, as we have seen around the world in the Arab Spring, people rise up and overthrow these pliable and greedy men we seem so determined to set up as despots over and over again. So here we go again in Egypt, which appears set for another round of phony leadership tied by strings to Washington. Why must we attempt to poke our nose into every little nation around the world....let's embrace their differences and their individuality and let's live together in respect and peace.
Get the picture?
rjk
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
OBAMA: LOFTY ORATORY AND BLOODY DEEDS
OBAMA: LOFTY ORATORY AND BLOODY DEEDS
On May 23, 2013 President Obama gave a lofty speech in which he finally seemed to be grasping the reins of control of government to reduce our military excesses. In it he described his intention to "sharply curtail the unmanned aerial vehicle killing program" and close up Guantanamo. Or did he say that? The truth is that the"Obama kill list" and drone program were beginning to look like domestic political liabilities. It is a program which Obama radically expanded and made more secretive and world wide (and deadly) upon taking office. (The British Bureau of Investigative Journalism says drone attacks in Pakistan have killed up to 3,549 people since 2004 including up to 890 civilians.) But it is clear his "drone war" has been a success only the way General Westmorland's "Vietcong body counts" were a "success" in the Vietnam War era. Counting up dead enemies may have bolstered the President's short term domestic political agenda, and staved off Republican attacks, but in the end were and remain a brutal sign of America's inability to win decisively and a mark of futility and ultimate failure. Just tally up the cost to benefit ratio. Trillions of dollars in expenditures and what are the benefits? We all know it...we are leaving Afghanistan with our tails between our legs one way or the other. But no politician wants to admit it.
But only a few days after this high flutin' misleading example of Obama's golden throated oratorical skills and obscurantisms, the CIA conducted deadly strike on June 7, in North Waziristan, killing nine people...presumably one or more "terrorists" among them. But who knows who was killed. We're they women and children? What was their ages, sex, or actual political affiliations--or if they had any? Furthermore, this deadly drone strike occurred only a few days after Pakistan's newly elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had specifically requested in his post election speech that the USA respect his nation's sovereignty and desist from any further drone strikes. Perhaps the strike was a mistake? Or it was planned before Sharif made his request and being in the "drone pipe line" the attack took place anyway. But it was not intended as a slap in the Pakistani's PM face. Sharif vociferously complained and the UN initiated an investigation. Some in the UN noted disconcertedly that the authorization for use of force by the US was getting stale, it was issued twelve years ago under the Bush administration.
Then as if ignoring Obama's speech, Sharif's plea, and the UN objections, on July 3, 2013, the CIA hit a compound in a market town of Miranshah in the northwest part of Pakistan in Waziristan with multiple war heads killing 17 or 18 people belonging to the Haqqani network. The Haqqani clan are nationalists and islamists who oppose foreign intervention in Afghanistan. Ironically, they were nurtured and armed by the CIA in the 1980s insurgency against the Soviet Union. Their contact with the Taliban make them our "enemies" today. They are certainly no existential threat to the USA and are concerned with simply getting us to leave Afghanistan. That is what we all seem to want. But how will Sharif respond to this obvious hard slap in the face. To an ally whom we actually need to help us extricate ourselves from this mess. Perhaps Sharif will close off the vital passes into Afghanistan again?
But the question remains, what was President Obama's intentions in this attack? To send a message to Sharif, who was democratically elected and who championed the idea of limiting US intervention in its northern border region and who strongly opposed the CIA use of drones against its citizenry. Sharif is a new man who replaced the former Prime Minister Ali Zadari who was much more compliant to US pressure. It was during Zadari's administration in which the number of drone attacks surged and large numbers of Pakistani civilians were killed. Was this last attack a way to get Sharif to back down? Or is Obama simply not in control? Or more likely is he simply acting like a normal Washington pol...saying one thing to his base and doing just the opposite to satisfy the powerful elites in the military-industrial-complex (MIC) to whom he is both financially and politically obligated. Obama, who at one time seemed to be our last best hope, seems today in the early part of his second term, sad to say, on the road to a failed presidency. As his actions, decisions and motivations are slowly revealed by the likes of Snowdon, Assange and Wikileaks the glittering robes of myth are falling away to expose a man who could not rise above his roots as a small time Chicago politician. He has essentially kept the course of his failed predecessor. He has not wrested the great spokes of the wheel of the ship-of-state from Bush. His face is darker, his smile is brighter but his countenance is beginning to look a lot like our former VP Cheney. This is a sad commentary on our modern way of politics. Who can progressives support?
Get the picture?
rjk
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