A Corporate Death Penalty

Here at In Case You Missed It we like to fess up to our mistakes, errors, follies and bone-headed pleas whenever we can. A couple of years back we published one of our most popular posts titled Rent Seeking Parasites which accused the financial industry of parasitism, getting a free ride on the backs of its host, society - you and me. While this seemed a reasonable metaphor at the time operating as we were under the assumption that regulation and taxes would have to be reintroduced to curb their feeding excesses eventually, it has proven wrong. Parasites they are not - they are parasitoids, creatures that similarly live off the back of their hosts but eventually return the favour by killing them.

Don't you dare roll your eyes at the thought of another climate change, anti-oil screed, I promise to not even go there, even though it's the easiest path to prove our faith and reliance on crony capitalism and corporations is suicidal. No, instead we'll start in Greece, a country that's been forced to live under the indignity of not only being labeled one of the PIIGS but the worst of the bunch, a profligate, lazy, early-retiring, ouzo-swilling, tax cheater that built a shack out of straw. Despite the falsity of the stereotype or how they actually got in over their heads in debt, the Greeks have been pushed into debt-slavery, a no longer sovereign nation forced to accede to the austerity demands of the troika, the EU/ECB/IMF.

Strangely enough, these policies have not only led the Greek economy into a vicious debt trap circle - reduced spending leading to lower growth and the need for more borrowing to bridge the budget gaps provoking further calls for deeper cuts - but they've also effected people in the same depression-inducing way. Gross domestic product in the second quarter was down more than 7% from last year amid government spending cuts and tax increases that, combined, will add up to about 20% of GDP while unemployment is over 16%. Predictably, crime, homelessness, emigration and personal bankruptcies are on the rise. Tragically, as a result of these market forces, recorded suicides have roughly doubled since before the crisis to about six per 100,000 residents annually according to the Greek health ministry and a charitable organization called Klimaka.

The Greeks aren't alone in the suffering being induced in order to pay off the often fraudulent debt incurred in order to keep the financial ponzi scheme afloat while suffering under the humiliation of taking orders from the financial markets and their lackeys. Ireland's pot-o-gold bank guarantees led to overnight insolvency and a double austerity dose causing another mass emigration, Portugal's ignominious acceptance of the same troika treatment will produce the same cure as Ireland, Italy had their debt downgraded despite cutting, re-cutting and then cutting the budget some more to please the market wolves while Spain not only had a gun held to their head by the same hit men until they changed their constitution to 'limit' debt without a referendum a month before an election but also had to increase 'labour market flexibility', an Orwellian moniker which will somehow create more employment by making it easier to fire young workers. When markets attack French banks, rules are changed to protect them, but the assault on society causes lives to be lost when fruit stand owners use gasoline to light themselves on fire to draw attention to problems in Tunis or mix it with beer to literally drown their sorrows in Athens or when there's riots on the streets of London. The worst off seems to be Latvia, the anti-Iceland of Europe, a country that could become the first murder victim of neoliberal austerity measures.

Yet German bank inspired bailouts provided by the European Financial Stability Facility and the European Financial Stabilization Mechanism won't solve the problem, it will continue indefinitely without debt forgiveness. Ironically, these obligations being forced on the public will serve the same function as that of the war reparations forced upon Germany after the Treaty of Versailles when John Maynard Keynes warned the world that the "policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable...even if it does not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe". I think we can all still remember the seeds that were sown and how many lives were reaped thanks to that plan. 

In America we need to be granted a little bit of poetic license to expand the metaphor a bit, after all it is the land of the ever-expanding waistband. According the the General Accountability Office, the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and around the world over the past couple of years. This goes along with the $1.2 trillion in slightly less secret back door loans we later found out about last year or the (only) $700 billion TARP money a couple of years back that everyone talks about. Hurray, the corporatocracy was brought back to life thanks to the politicians they paid for! Funny thing is this transfer of wealth hasn't trickled down to the people yet, nor have the efficiency gains of the past 30 odd years of economic growth. No, the result of the neoliberal free market driven policies of major tax cuts for high-income Americans, union-busting, aided and abetted by federal policy, and financial deregulation such as the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which has fed inequality because very high incomes come disproportionately from that sector, has strangely enough only benefited those the policies were meant to help, the rich and the corporations. Median incomes adjusted for inflation have fallen over that time while the number of Americans below the poverty line has reached 46 million with 21.6% of American children now living in poverty (predicted to hit 25% soon; it's 3.7% in Denmark). The very corporations who the Fed helped out instead of people are often making record profits from this poverty and play a part in the bloodbath, as this poverty is a death sentence.

Instead of using this infusion of cash along with the access granted to US and non-US banks and corporations to near-zero financing at the Fed window to you know, create jobs, financial firms have used it to increase our suffering while lining their pockets. They've thanked the people who cover their losses by betting on their death and creating new casino-like commodity markets, hurting the poor most as increases in the price of rice and gasoline hit them harder. The flip side of the profit prospect created by wheat price volatility for a corporation is starvation for the world's dispossessed thanks to the increased price of bread. A food system where Americans waste enough food everyday to fill the Rose Bowl is great for those who can afford the luxury. For those that can't, well, you know. Worse, a McDonald's corporation that took part in the $1.3 trillion short term lending bonanza gets to serve $5 Big Mac meals thanks in large part to the billions in corn subsidies lavished by the government in support of the unholy alliance of agribusiness and science to produce high-fructose corn syrop (HFCS) and ethanol to put in everything from french fries to feed for filet-o-fish or filling the Ford Fiesta.



The subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables. The end result is that budget wary consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to "choose" the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support. The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry is "that a dollar [can] buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit". This Super-Size-Me economy leads to early death through obesity, diabetes and heart disease. This lifestyle non-choice has played a big role in the decline of life expectancy for women over the past 20 years in 313 counties in the United States, a problem exacerbated by poverty, with the proof played out in the fact that those in the top 20% of American incomes live, on average, at least 6.5 years longer than those in the lowest income group. So you see, privatizing both profits and losses of corporations is paid for in not only gold but also lives by society. It's become more than a crime to be poor - poverty is a death sentence and corporations, who we're told over and over are job creators, are in fact, executioners.

In a culture where Orwellian political vocabulary turns the idea of universal single-payer health care into "death panels" while advocating actually killing grandma and rationalizes disenfranchisement of "non-productive citizens", it should come as no surprise that Obama's faux-populist promise to veto any budget proposal that doesn't contain tax increases can be turned into a class war, when, in fact, the war has been hot for decades and it's pretty clear which side is winning. The reality is this war doesn't differentiate between innocent and guilty when choosing its victims though it does discriminate based on race just like capital punishment. Just imagine the cognitive dissonance involved in being both pro-life and pro-death. Murderous spectacles are put on to appease the mob with circenses as if the panem killing them weren't enough. Maybe this explains the indifference to executing possibly innocent men like Troy Davis in Georgia or the Tea Party cheering for the straight shooting style of killing kids, the mentally ill and the innocent among the 234 people Rick Perry has executed in Texas:



It's a death sentence to be poor, especially if you're among the 49.9 million Americans who lack health insurance, a number that soared by 13.3 million since 2000. The main driver in both the national and personal bankruptcy story is a health care system whose costs are spiraling out of control thanks to corporate greed in both the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. State enforced patent protection of the latter isn't only killing AIDS babies in Soweto while thanks to the former, the only evidence that really matters in determining treatment based on evidence-based medicine is what's in your wallet. Tea Partiers like to cheer on this corporate killing too (listen for it at 0:55):

Killing requires a large staff

Poverty is also the best recruiting tool ever invented by the ultimate killing machine, the armed forces, and thus provides the fodder to feed the military industrial complex. Again, corporations are there to innovate new ways of killing and can even fill the void with corporate mercenaries when volunteers run short. The stark contradiction between the money making mantra of murder and Christ's advice, "If you want to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me" lends a dark layer of irony to our present wars justified by condemning Islam as a death-glorifying cult. Even though we know innocent people will die when we're bombing, droning or whatever we call trying to kill brown people we've labeled terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan or Libya, it's somehow different than when those terrorists kill innocent people when they blow themselves up on buses in London or trains in Madrid. We're Americans celebrating the illegal killing of the most-wanted criminal of our generation thanks to our culture of death or out of relief from a false belief they wouldn't be called to die as the perpetual war on terror would end with Osama bin Laden's death? USA! United States of Assassination! Woo hoo death to international rule of law!



What? Killing bin Laden didn't solve that war on terror problem? You mean, it's all related, people blowing themselves up at outdoor cafes, creating terrorists by raining death down on Tripoli, Kabul and Baghdad or being the only vote in the UN to support Israelis killing Palestinians, allowing illegal settlements on their land or even denying them statehood next month. Killing is killing, whether in the name of good, Zeus, protection, defense or Allah. Once you accept it as no more than collateral damage you think differently, become indifferent to death and probably think it's ok to torture while praying in a church that covers up for pedophiles. Another victory for Oceania over Eurasia or Eastasia won't alter the course in the perpetual war because there's money to be made for McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, BAE and IBM from death.

But if, as the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, corporations are people then shouldn't they get the death penalty for killing people? Even at a time when slavery was legal, America had the morality to realize corporate killing wasn't. The corporate death penalty could be applied in cases of "operating contrary to the public interest" or those that saw "a pattern of abuses" and result in their charters being revoked. Ah, those were the progressive days, the very time today's right-wingnuts would like to take us back to with its lack of child labor laws, clean water protection and such. Trials might go something like this if such a world still existed I suppose:



Yeah. We not only wage war and trample human rights for oil companies' drilling rights, we just make them pay a fine for destroying entire ecosystems and spraying chemicals with unknown long-term effects to clean up the surface for the cameras. We enable through our continued consumption and ignorance of corporate evasion of responsibility for less visible murder via contamination or explosions in places like Ecuador or Nigeria. Move on to do the same in the Arctic while other gas companies extracting using hydraulic fracturing which pollutes the very water table we rely on for life will make sure we don't figure out how their harming human life. Car companies? What better way to kill millions than by rigging the game to ensure we drive cars forever? Big tobacco serves as a role model for the Catholic Church on how to cover up scandals after killing millions more. Obfuscate, donate and litigate.

Wait. All this and no mention of Bhopal. Yeah, that's right, when 3,800 people are killed almost immediately when tonnes of toxic gas escape and today more than 100,000 people remain chronically ill from exposure, it's more of the same, obfuscate (corporate takeover of Union Carbide by Dow Chemical - it's not our fault!), donate (maybe a stadium for the Olympics!) and litigate. Rinse and repeat. How about Monsanto? Who could have foreseen that allowing a corporation to patent life would have, well, life-ending consequences, right? DeBeers, turning blood diamonds into love? The beverage industry from Coca-Cola to Red Bull and Budweiser, the fashion industry or even Hollywood for toxification, body image distortion and indoctrination? As long as there's an app for you iPhone to keep you connected who cares how many Apple kills to make them. What about the billions of people whose lives are threatened by the ecological disaster sure to come about as a result of the greed for profit written into the DNA of the corporate psychopaths we've created. Oh yeah, that's right, I made a no climate change promise. That would be controversial and might give someone the idea to protest, maybe even occupy Madrid's Plaza del Sol or decide to march to Brussels or, heaven forbid, occupy Wall Street in the heart of NYC if perhaps the corpocracy's killing of the middle class and slaughter of the poor weren't enough. Oh, some people have already done that, are heading there and doing that (see below for live stream when available), fighting our fight. If they need a suggestion for one demand mine is to bring back the corporate death penalty - capital punishment for corporations!

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

Further reading:
Occupy Wall Street 
March to Brussels
Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe 1919-2009
US Poverty figures
IMF inequality report
US Uncut / UK Uncut
Further Viewing:
Sugar: The Bitter Truth
Food Inc. (It might take an extra click)
Clip from Inside Job
Interview with Josh Fox - maker of Gasland

A Keystone XL Rube Goldberg Machine

Not so long ago it seemed like the world had woken up to the fact that perpetual growth powered by finite resources on a finite planet was impossible. People spoke of a transition to a green economy in which little bunnies would frolic among solar collector panels while soaring birds would circle wind turbines. Gas prices were skyrocketing, people were talking about peak oil and it was clear that we were inviting ecological, social and economic disaster by continuing our energy policy. No, I'm not talking about this summer or last year, that was 1970 and a conservative into conservation was in the White House - Richard Nixon. He brought the Environmental Protection Agency into existence and along with it a raft of legislation to protect the air, water and land. Well, here we are forty years later facing the same problems again and an American president who promised his election would bring "the moment when the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet will begin to heal..." on the verge of completing our suicidal Rube Goldberg Machine and signing our death sentence by allowing a project which Jim Hansen of NASA, the world's foremost climate scientist, said is "essentially game over" for our planet.

What, you still haven't looked up Rube Goldberg? First, it's known as Heath Robinson in the UK. Still not there? Did you ever play the game Mouse Trap when you were a kid? Too old school? How about The Incredible Machines? Still too '90s? Ok, well maybe you've seen this video:



That's a Rube Goldberg Machine, a a deliberately over-engineered machine that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion, usually including a chain reaction. With a little imagination it's not hard to see the world's dependence on oil as one giant Rube Goldberg machine whose aim optimistically is to burden us financially for the benefit of a few oil companies, pessimistically to catalyze the burning of the planet. Many had hoped that we'd either save ourselves by developing a new technology to replace oil or that it would simply run out, so called Peak Oil. Our machine is so deviously complex that it even works against both solutions. Despite the enormous wealth oil has created for a few companies (ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Shell made $35 billion in profit in the first quarter this year), our governments still give them massive tax breaks (more than $4 billion for that previous group of five from Uncle Sam) and allow them to write the legislation (see Dick Cheney's 2005 energy bill and it's Haliburton Loophole) to keep producing oil and gas thanks to the political influence they can buy in our corpocracy. Worse, instead of technology setting us free, it's further enslaved us in recent years making deep sea drilling, hydraulic fracturing and tar sand extraction feasible and profitable. The games been rigged and the trigger is about to be pulled.

When President Obama got back from vacation at Martha's Vineyard last weekend I wonder if he even saw the hundreds of people in front of the gates waiting to be arrested. A couple of thousand people signed up to be arrested for sitting, singing and holding signs protesting against TransCanada's plans to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Once you get past the 'huh, they can be arrested for that?' moment (you know, it would be embarrassing if the tourist saw them or worse, they could be terrorists) one naturally wonders what could drive people to such an extreme. The answer lies in northern Alberta, the source of the pipelines payload. See, Alberta's oil isn't the conventional kind, it's even got it's own name, tar sands, or if you prefer, oil sands, which is actually vast deposits of bitumen - black, tarlike goo that is mixed with sand, clay, water and oil. There are approximately 2.5 trillion barrels of the stuff, the largest hydrocarbon deposits in the world and in terms of recoverable oil, the 2nd biggest in the world outside of Saudi Arabia. The problem is and has always been turning this crud into crude.

The view over Mordor, er, near Fort McMurray

Unsurprisingly, it was Obama's predecessor(s) who made it all possible. When Dubya's handlers were scouting international locations for him to begin reaping the rewards of his presidential legacy - giving speeches for cash - they found their options to be rather limited thanks to the international crimes he had committed. Fortunately for them, there was one place in the world sure to welcome him being much like Dubya's home state it was more Texas than Texas and all- Alberta, Canada. So, instead of being arrested by the ICC as he disembarked from the plane in Calgary, he only had to deal with a few protestors on his way to a $4,000/plate speech. Yes, Alberta, home of pickup trucks with shotgun racks and oil. Lots and lots of oil. It's been said that the only winner of the invasion of Iraq was Alberta as it played a part in the machine, helping push the price of oil into the triple digits and thus turning Alberta's biggest natural resource from a perennial money loser into the next big thing.

You see, strip mining the world's largest boreal forest for oil ain't cheap, environmentally or financially. It's kinda like ripping out your lungs while filling your chest with smoke. Loading the world's largest trucks with crud, moving it, heating it with natural gas (28 cubic metres or 1000 cubic feet of natural gas to produce one barrel of oil), mixing with 2.5 to 4 barrels of water, storing the toxic waste in tailing ponds big enough to be seen from space and finally transporting it costs money. With the price of oil stuck around $20/barrel (as low as $12 in 1998/99) it didn't make economic sense for oil companies to do the dirty work, so the government did. For decades the people of Alberta made up the loss in subsidies. A habit they still haven't seemed to shake despite the turnaround, giving more in subsidies to tar sands producers than the entire Environment Canada budget.

Higher oil prices have indeed led to an R&D extravaganza along with profits, but it is squarely focused on figuring out how to get the dirtiest possible oil out of the hardest-to-reach places. Shell, for instance, is working on a "novel thermal recovery process", embedding large electric heaters in the deposits and literally cooking the earth. Thanks to war and insatiable usage, the surge in oil prices allowed the United States Energy Information Administration to "discover" oil in the tar sands. It announced that Alberta - previously thought to have only 5 billion barrels of oil - was actually sitting on at least 174 billion "economically recoverable" barrels. The next year, Canada overtook Saudi Arabia as the leading provider of foreign oil to the United States. Iraq's oil boom wasn't delayed; it was relocated. There is a certain irony there: The United States invaded Iraq at least in part to secure access to its oil. Now, thanks partly to economic blowback from that disastrous decision, it has found the "security" it was looking for right next door.

Click to enlarge

So thank dog it's not Dubya sitting in the Oval Office deciding whether or not to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to cross the border and deliver oil all the way to the Gulf of Mexico via Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Nebraska's Sand Hills, the Yellowstone River and the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground reservoir that supplies two million Americans in the Midwest with water all lie along the path. Especially when the precursor pipeline suffered a dozen leaks in the past year would mean that a larger one in which 1.3 million barrels of bitumen with dozens of poisons needed to act as lubricants is forced at high pressure over 1,711 miles (over 2,750 kms) is bound to suffer a major leak sometime. Or wait, maybe it's the knowledge that it doesn't matter who's sleeping at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that so many people are willing to face arrest to raise awareness of what is being done to us. Faced with a financial crisis caused by too big to fail banks, greed, corruption and out of control inequality, Obama chose to bail out the very same banks and extend the Bush tax cuts which incentivized the greed and blew open the gap between rich and poor. Faced with an out of control health care system which delivers worse results for way more money than any other OECD country, Obama chose to reward the insurance industry that lead to the problems of exclusion and cost. A winning Rube Goldberg Machine takes delicate planning to put everything in place. The oil industry gets preferential access to Canadian Prime Minister Harper, together they lobby against the Europeans banning tar sands to protect the dirty fuel's clean image and a former ambassador to the US gets dispatched to lobby in Washington fueled by the petrodollars at the disposal of Exxon and BP and finding familiar nameplates in the very corridors tasked with shaping the laws and regulations for the industry. No one was surprised to hear Hillary Clinton comment that she was inclined to approve the pipeline months before the State Department or the EPA had even compiled a report. Even less surprisingly, the State Department has since given the KXL project green lights, while receiving red from watchdogs, in all their flawed reports to date.

Tar Sands. Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking). Deep Sea and Arctic Drilling. Mountaintop Removal (MTR). Nuclear Energy. It seems so counter-intuitive when we know the dangers behind each but these are the energy sources that America and the world are turning to when we have alternatives. The oil companies simply play their spin machine to keep us addicted to their crack. Fracking is poisoning watersheds and water tables across America, it's been documented, we've been warned but it'll keep being done and move to to Europe, including the UK with the same dearth of regulation and even here to Poland. The technology that goes into drilling for oil thousands of feet below the sea is impressive so nothing could ever go wrong like it did in the Gulf of Mexico until it did, disastrously with BP last summer. Or just a few weeks ago for Shell in the North Sea and, gosh, ruining their reputation! Following the Gulf of Mexico disaster, Obama gave the OK to expand drilling over 20 million acres in the Gulf and soon probably in the Arctic Ocean. Remember how hard it was to stop the Gulf spill? Now imagine the remote Arctic. But, but, the technology! Let's not even speak of the horrors of blowing the tops off mountains to get at ever more inaccessible coal. We learned the lesson of Fukishima too, right? The Germans may have but not America and certainly not China. Holy shit, thanks again Wikileaks.



If you read the wrong newspapers or watch nearly any TV (really, people still do) the oil companies myth making machines will be screaming about the jobs these projects while using numbers made up by the industry to create while presenting a false choice between the economy and the environment. Even if true the reality runs something like this - we (as in us, it's our planet) grant oil, coal and nuclear companies access to our land for a minimum fee, while providing them with subsidies and tax incentives so that they can make billions in profit today and we have to pay with our health, lives and cash thanks to the damage that they leave behind. Yeah, sounds fair, kinda like the banking industry. There are better, safer, sustainable ways to spend $7 billion. I'll bet you didn't know that America is actually a $1.9 billion net exporter of solar energy products. I'd say the big problem is that it's not the right people making or saving the money the money when alternative energy is used. BP and Exxon can charge us for the oil for as long as we need it but they can't charge us for the sun and wind.

The Real Slippery Slope

There'll also be the banshee screams of those claiming that oil from Alberta is more ethical than that from places such as Saudi Arabia, Nigeria or Venezuela, countries that are potentially unstable or hostile. Um, yeah, Canadian's farts don't smell either. And the most childish (see what I did there?) spin of all, finger pointing, the old "if we don't do it, someone else will". This one's trumpeted over and over with the tar sands, that if the US doesn't get it, then the Chinese will. The Chinese! Wrong. A devastating new report from Oil Change International shows that Keystone XL will not only allow oil companies to exploit big domestic (read US the biggest kind) tax loopholes but also send most of its oil to export. USA! USA! Not only do you get all the risk of spills but you won't even get taxes to help pay for it. Anyway, a pipeline to the Pacific will be fought in the courts by native tribes and the people of the BC will fight any plan to fill tankers with the gunk off their coast. At the very least it will staunch the flow, time will be bought, time to build alternative energy sources. Fort McMurray, Alberta is a long way from anywhere so killing this pipeline turns the tar sands into a landlocked bomb instead of a nuclear submarine. Tar sand production is set to triple by 2020, stopping this pipeline throws a wrench into those plans. As an oil company economist and vice-president said, "Unless we get increased market access, like with Keystone XL, we’re going to be stuck". Alberta’s Energy Minister, Ron Liepert added "If there was something that kept me up at night, it would be the fear that before too long we’re going to be landlocked in bitumen...We’re not going to be an energy superpower if we can’t get the oil out of Alberta." Exactly.

Back to Richard Nixon. He wasn't really more progressive than Obama when it comes to the environment. It took 20 million people out in the streets for Earth Day in 1970 to get him to finally act. Yes, people power forced him to sign the bills that established the EPA and the landmark Clean Air Act then in 1972 Nixon signed the Coastal Zone Management Act; the Ocean Dumping Act; the Marine Mammal Protection Act; the Federal Insecticide, Fungide, Rodenticide Act; and the Toxic Substances Control Act. Nixon's term also saw passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974. Somehow we've allowed ourselves to be sent back to the 70's while becoming so apathetic that only a handful are forced to try to defuse the largest carbon bomb on the planet.

Look, I'm not here to try to convince you that climate change is happening. It is, regardless of what your chosen means of indoctrination tell you. Of course this doesn't mean we're causing it regardless of what most climate scientists are telling us. I get it, there's no way to prove it despite the overwhelming evidence. The fact is we might be and whether or not you think volcanoes contribute more CO2 to the atmosphere than human activity (they don't) or that stolen emails showed that scientists manipulated data (they didn't) or that only an benign deity can influence the planet (he/she/it doesn't), carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is steadily climbing. So, as we approach seven billion inhabitants we're allowing the powers that be dictate our continued addiction to oil which will get harder and more dangerous to retrieve. Simultaneously, tar sands not only uses vast amounts of fresh water, it poisons it as part of the production process and carries an elevated risk of contaminating more in transportation. War is a natural consequence of shortages in either oil or water and now we've also learned that it also occurs thanks to warmer weather associated with El Nino. Hmmm, not good if the planet is indeed heating up. Oh, yeah, all part of the Rube Goldberg suicide machine. Tar Sands production is set to triple by 2020 while producing more CO2 than conventional oil both in production and ultimate use, you know, when you burn it in your Godcar going down to Wal-Mart. As most emissions come from burning it, the industry tries to spout figures comparing "well to wheels" (about 15% higher) instead of the more damning "well to tank" figure (up to 300% higher).

To stop it we need a change, not just in energy production, transportation and exploitation, but in our way of thinking, behaving and advancing. Regardless, you don't have to believe in climate change, anthropogenic or not, to believe in the increasing cancer rates caused around Fort Chipewyan by tar sands extraction and the destruction wreaked by the run off of arsenic, lead and mercury into the Athabasca River flowing into and thus endangering the Peace-Athabasca Delta. More than just mutant fish I'm afraid. Alberta won't stop it, decades of pro tar sands cheerleading have ensured the population is completely misinformed by what was just recently revealed to be pure propaganda as a federal report released in December accused the authorities of not having anywhere near the proper monitoring and controls in place.

To be fair, as the Economist pointed out, the report also indicated that environmentalist's claims that the tar sands are the "most environmentally destructive project on Earth" were "not accurate". Via the Globe and Mail on the same report, it "notes that scientific data shows air pollution is minimal, water pollution a potential concern but is having no immediate impact, that there's no correlation between oil sands pollution and an elevated cancer rate in Fort Chipewyan". All this of course without saying what is more destructive or much data thanks to the lack of monitoring. You might remember the preferred method of regulation and oversight in the Alberta oil industry from the financial industry a couple years ago. Ironically, the one man who can bring a change is the same who promised he'd bring it a few years ago, Barack Obama. As it crosses an international border, Obama and no one else gets to decide if the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico goes forward or not.

View of the Athabasca-Peace Delta

There's a lot of things that I just can't seem to wrap my head around. There are Christians who profess to follow the teachings of the world's most famous socialist, Jesus Christ, yet whose true system of belief is based on a greed that makes them believe the best way to allocate scarce resources is a corrupt, oligarchical system they call the free market or capitalism. Haven't they even read the bible? Don't they even listen to the pope? Even sillier are those who believe in a democracy in which two (or maybe even three) corporate financed and thus controlled parties conspire to determine who maybe half of the population will choose between. America is of course where economics, politics and religion meet head on. It's the only place in the world where batshit crazy wackos such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry could be considered for the presidency. Thanks to folks like them monopolizing the media, the tandem of natural disasters that hit Washington DC in the last couple of weeks are more likely to be seen as acts of god warning the American people to cut spending in the words of Bachmann (please, don't look into her eyes) than independent events. Perry can extol the wonders of Texas schools teaching creationism alongside evolution to children in a land where most of the population believes that a bearded man in the sky created the Earth in six days around 6,000 years ago to once again drown out the lesson that could be learned of preparation and conservation by screaming like the monkeys they really evolved from.

Ah, Rube Goldberg again, keep the people stupid, feed them garbage and keep degrading the science that tells us that our actions aren't necessarily creating the climate but almost definitely making it worse. How else could Americans not connect the dots from April, when a series of killer tornadoes tore up the South to May, when floods ravaged the entire Mississippi River basin, through July, when killer heat waves seared the Midwest and Northeast to August, when Texas officially passed its worst one-year drought on record and finally to the warmer ocean pulling Hurrican Irene northward last weekend? The same way as last year. And the previous decade. By framing the issue with their media cohorts by asking the wrong question - "What caused these events?" - instead of "What's making them worse?". Despite 595 people (and counting) - from regular folks from Nebraska to event organizer and 350.org founder Bill McKibben and Daryl Hannah - being arrested in front of his bedroom, it's clear the Faux sound machine and the petro-interests have made sure President Obama has heard the wrong question on this issue as they have on all the others. We're this close to getting him to hear the message but there's only a few more days in Washington (then September 26th in Ottawa) so stand up, sit down, sign up, help out and call out the right answer to the right question - US!

Additional links (cause you can just never have enough!):
- Stop the Pipeline!
- "Tipping Point: The Age of the Oil Sands" (only available in Canada)
- Top 10 Tar Sands Facts
- Is There a Cancer Threat from the Oil Sands Industry?
- Slow Motion Oil Spill
- Ten Years After 9/11 - Canada's True Cost of Oil (great pics)

The Decade of Nothingness

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men’s blood: I only speak right on;
I tell you that which you yourselves do know;

         -Shakespeare Julius Caesar Act III, Scene 2

I heard, or rather read, the decade that's now coming to a close referred to as the aught's the other day. Looking back at the disastrous past ten years makes we think we need a more descriptive moniker. The Brits say noughties but maybe we should have something with zero in it seeing as the world hasn't put any points on the scoreboard over the decade, I guess the double zeros would do, or double oh's, the oh-oh's. (Is it the teens next before the 20's, the tens?) For a variety of reasons no one seems to even try to understand the problems we face anymore, instead they rely on some talking head's opinion or blogger's spin. Ten years ago we had the Kyoto Protocol, hopes for a final Mideast peace agreement and an economic boom with no end in sight. How did it all go so wrong? Fear could be one explanation. Fear that our beliefs are wrong, fear that our lifestyles are destroying our world and fear of the other. Fear, the old fight or flight, paralyzes and poisons as it confuses, robbing us of our self-control. Most frustrating of all, faced with the triple threat of climate, finance and terrorism, instead of focusing on facts and solutions, the rhetoric of fear has driven us onto a self-destructive path through lies and misinformation.

The decade of fear brought many global threats, from SARS and swine flu to Jenny McCarthy and Osama Bin Laden. The shadow of 9/11 pushed terrorism into our everyday lives with threat level updates and two intractable, open-ended conflicts. While acknowledging that we were dealing with a new kind of enemy, our leaders responded in the traditional manner, war and increased defence spending. The jingoistic fear factory pumped up the rhetoric as Dubya and his cronies fed a nation's desire for revenge with the Bush Doctrine which imperceptibly altered an entire country's mindset, guiding a bloodthirsty nation to war.

Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.

-Otto von Bismarck

In Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes the window that opens between a shock and analysis, a disorientation gap where a new set of beliefs find fertile ground. When planes hit the WTC on September 11th, 2001, that window was blown wide open and a new narrative was created. First in Afghanistan, the "With Us or Against Us" doctrine provided the justification for not only pursuing Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but also for deposing the Taliban. If you ever wonder why no one knows the reason we're still in Afghanistan, don't worry you're not alone, that was the idea. While Condi Rice first came up with the "no distinction" idea, it was Darth Cheney who first started calling it the "Bush Doctrine" in public. Blurring the lines between terrorists and states that harbour them was a propaganda coup. In a November 2001 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cheney offered this definition: "We will hold those who harbor terrorists, those who provide sanctuary to terrorists, responsible for their acts."

It wasn't until the anthrax and smallpox threat hysteria broke out that the justification for war in Iraq achieved critical mass. With a leap of faith, and a huge dose of fabrication (think WMD's and "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."), Iraq was linked with every terror plot ever hatched against the US, giving birth to the war of preemption. Even today, many would link Saddam and Osama in their minds as one and the same threat. Only now, after Obama has picked up his Nobel Peace Prize, do we realize the extent to which the public have become disoriented. Instead of seeing the honour as an incentive to change and repudiate the disastrous actions of the last decade, the US press and public responded like a wounded animal, lashing out, forcing Obama's hand into escalating a war he cannot win.

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We've entered the truly bizarro world where putting an end date on a war is wrong after having wasted more that 8 years ensuring there can be no resolution to the conflict. The cognitive dissonance involved when claiming to promote liberal democracy on the one hand while supporting a corrupt leader who stole an election with the other at a cost of a million dollars per soldier must be painful (yes, 30,000 extra troops will cost about $30 billion a year). I guess it's nothing having fundamentally shifted from the knowledge that torture was wrong with even Reagan signing the UN Convention on Torture to a society that produces Abu Ghraib and believing torture can now be justified and certainly not prosecutable.

Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist
-Warren Buffett

The efficacy of fear as a manipulator has been further tested in the financial world, selling us the need to put capitalism on permanent life support. Taking a page out of the terrorism playbook, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson played a little game of fear tag team with Geithner, Bernanke, Bush, the IMF and Warren Buffet to pull off the greatest transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the rich in history. Somewhere between $4.7 and $23.7 trillion in the US alone. Buffet, the world’s sometimes richest man, threw his weight behind the programme in order to avoid "an economic Pearl Harbour", then going further, saying "...we were at the brink of something that would have made anything that’s happened in financial history pale...I’m not saying the Paulson plan will eliminate the problem but it’s absolutely necessary, in my view, to avoid going off the precipice." Wasn't there a line about fear during the real Depression, yeah, some Roosevelt quote, er, what was it again? Oh yeah, "we have nothing to fear, but fear itself". How adorable, so folksy, but then again, that was another time. A time when instead of handing the economy over to those who ruined it, rules and policies were implemented to try to ensure it didn't happen again.

This time, normal legislative procedures were bypassed as congressmen were warned of civil unrest, martial law and stock market collapse if they failed to pass the bank bailout. Never mind the true cause of the failure of the economic model, an over-concentration of wealth and power brought about by globalization, tax-policy and focus on short term profits. Instead of fixing the inequity brought about by the failed policies of the past, the world was hoodwinked into transferring trillions over to those who caused the problem. A decade that began with the internet bubble and merger between AOL and Time Warner is ending with their quiet divorce and the entire financial world on life support. The warnings were there all along if we'd of just paid attention and connected the dots from WorldCom to Enron, Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff, Tyco to Parmalat (a list of corporate scandals in 2000-2002 only!), putting power in the hands of the few as the world rushed to embrace the madness of the markets. Instead, every action seemed to reinforce bad behaviour; as CEO pay and bonuses grew, taxes were sliced for the privileged few. Those left behind saw their power shrink along with their wages until a breaking point was reached, inequality not seen since the Great Depression. The top 1% of earners now earn a higher percentage of income than anytime since 1928 while income mobility, the chances of being born poor and becoming rich, has shrunk to pre-Horacio Alger levels. Somehow though there isn't enough evidence to convince the true corporate shills, those Ayn Rand dreamers, who wholeheartedly believe in the superiority of the rich, that their financial pyramid is all an illusion. Fear of collapse seems to be enough to keep us all chasing our tails.

"They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent… Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…. We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now…”
- Winston Churchill, November 12, 1936

Fear has been the sales tool of the decade. It's worked great for the military industrial complex, selling us two wars. It's worked even better convincing us that we need to have rich, large, powerful corporations controlling our lives. Sadly, we can be fooled into killing foreigners and giving money to bankers but we can't be 'tricked' by those pesky fear-mongering scientists into any kind of real action to prevent a global catastrophe resulting from climate change. It's become clear that this marketing tool doesn't always work as witnessed by the dismal failure to sell the world on the need to save it from ourselves. We've been inundated with stories of melting glaciers, shrinking ice caps, sinking islands and polar bears eating their cubs for the past decade in an attempt to convince the world that we're hurtling towards disaster. So why has shock and awe environmentalism failed so miserably? Why does it seem more important to the deniers that Al Gore may profit from green energy than Goldman Sachs profited from the bailout or Blackwater and Haliburton from the wars of preemption? How can we justify subsidizing an oil based economy that enriches kings in Saudi Arabia over investing in new technologies at home to lessen our reliance on others and spark a real economic recovery? Why is Obama labeled as 'dithering' for delaying a decision to send young men to die in a futile effort while the reality is he's playing the part of the prototypical Danish procrastinator Hamlet in his native land, trying to sell us some more smoke and mirrors wrapped in hope and change and carbon trading, driving us all to the inevitable tragic conclusion of the play?

God, time and money. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein claims to be "doing God's work while the same deity guided Dubya "'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did.". Meanwhile, those pesky scientists are once again questioning the divine by saying that man may actually be influencing his environment. Typical human arrogance, thinking we hold god-like influence over our planet. Fear also fails here due to the time scale, to work it cannot be an implied threat of something too far in the future, or people will lose interest. This is especially true as climate gets mixed up with weather all too easily in people's minds and there are too many cold winter days between now and the tipping point for people to feel any urgency. Given enough time and resources one can convince the majority of folks just about anything. The most remarkable aspect of the deniers success is that they've convinced a large segment of the population that they are really smart because they can recite the rhetoric the global plutocracy has tricked them into believing instead of actually believing in science. Such beauties as: "Remember global cooling", "Medieval Warm Period", "No warming since 1998", "Faulty evidence", "Solar energy output", "Plants need CO2", "Water Vapour is a greenhouse gas"; most have truth to them, but all have been misused and disseminated to the public in order to confuse the masses.

All the while the ultimate fear card is played over and over. "Climate-change policies will destroy jobs and growth". It's here that the real irony starts to hit home. Not only can sharp reductions in emissions be attained with limited impact on growth at low costs, but an agreement in Copenhagen could have been the recipe for real economic recovery. But here's the real kicker. The fear factory may have already cost itself its place at the top of the global pecking order by refusing to see the obvious. Climate change feedback loops are self-reinforcing cycles; problems that echo off each other and quickly spiral out of control. Here’s how it goes: Melting tundra in Siberia releases methane into the atmosphere, which raises the water temperature, which melts sea ice, causing more solar heat to be absorbed by the oceans. As the Arctic has been melting and America has been acting the part of a 2-year old who can close his eyes and make the world go away, Russia and China have put themselves in position to reap the resource rewards, a sort of global power feedback loop. The last lie has been that we'll run out of cheap oil soon enough forcing the market to solve the problem for us. But the effects of a warmer planet are not only making it easier to dig up northern Alberta, it's also thawing the cover off of the final poisoned payload. Not only will we be sailing across the pole, a quarter of the world's mineral wealth will also be accessible, ensuring that we'll keep burning until we're truly burning. At the same time, China has positioned herself to lead the world, if not through some kind of carbon treaty, then she has at least bought up enough of Africa and South America to feed herself during the coming droughts and to maintain a steady supply of resources. Droughts? Let's not even get started on freshwater.

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought 

-Shakespeare Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

Put it all together with the latest "Climategate" (nice name-calling propaganda technique wouldn't you say?) scandal involving the hacked emails and public confidence in climatology is probably at its lowest point in at least the past decade. The facts are simple though. The planet is warming; for 150 years we've known that CO2, even in low concentrations, acts as a greenhouse gas; man is contributing to the increase in CO2. No, we don't know for certain that we are driving the warmth, but as then-Vice President Dick Cheney said when faced with concerns that a Pakistani scientist was offering nuclear-weapons expertise to Al Qaeda "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response." Well Dick, I'd say that we're at least 1% sure about us playing a part in global warming, so, shouldn't we respond?

Cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? About $1 trillion to date
Cost of the financial bailout? About $5 trillion
Cost to save the planet? You guessed it...priceless

The wheels on the bus go...

'round and round, round and round. Just like the earth goes round the sun. This week the air felt clearer as if a weight had been lifted and the future once again bright. I was wondering what in the world many of us bloggers will write about now that our favourite target has retired to his ranch in Texas, when the light shone down and gave me a sign:

THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD
NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE


What started as a little British story more than half a year ago, then spread to the continent has made the jump across the pond. That's right, it's the atheist bus campaign. In a two pronged attack the British movement is taking hold alongside an American incarnation. The nation that has spent so much energy trying to spread her beliefs across the globe finally seems to be willing to take some lessons from the rest of the world.

Could it be that the land of free and the home of the brave is once again ready to put science before the bible? While the first signs out of the new Obama administration are positive, there's still many reasons to fear the fundamentalists (I mean the scary kind, the Christians). Watching the Obama inauguration, not only did we have to listen to Rick Warren's invocation, one had to hear the g word uttered far too many times for comfort. However, there was a tiny crack in the religious armor that appeared with Obama's words: "For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers." That's right, even non-believers are citizens!

Two things flew in under the radar last week. One, the Texas Board of Education tentatively adopted new teaching standards that would make it more difficult to teach creationism in Lone Star state schools in an 8 to 7 vote. Even more importantly, President Obama lifted the ban on US funding for international organisations that offer advice or perform abortions, hoping to ease the suffering of millions of women worldwide. In a move that is sure to piss off a boatload of fundamentalists, he quietly rescinded what had become known as the "global gag order"- not the comedy kind of gag, the one where if you so much as think the word abortion, you lose your funding from the US government. Reagan created it, Clinton repealed it, Bush re-instated it and now Obama has continued the ping-pong rally between knowledge and faith. In fact, much like a mirror-image of Obama, Dubya re-instated the law in his first working day as president. After a campaign in which he said, "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us...If we're a humble nation but strong, they'll welcome us. We've got to be humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom." Then upon taking office, his first executive order imposed his way of thinking, the morality of the Christian Right, on the world. Of course, these were more innocent times, before the US was at war and there were more important things to worry about: (Get to about 1:20)

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Yes, before 9/11 my friends, check out the date, June 14, 2001, ahh, those we're the days. One of the new president's biggest challenges is going to be overturning the ignorance that the Bush administration propagated and return his nation to the path of science.

Unlike the signing of the order to close Gitmo, this repeal was low-key. This follows the inauguration ceremony which featured a religious tightrope act by Obama involving the above mentioned Warren and the liberal appeasing invitation to Gene Robinson, the openly homosexual Episcopalian bishop. Someone from outside of America wouldn't understand the controversy surrounding the words "so help me G(g)od". The same could be said of the controversies around the Reverends Jeremiah Wright, Rod Parsley and John Hagee stories, strange doings in a strange land. Of course keeping people stupid has its advantages, especially for the big corporations, particularly big oil. A little learning might make us question why a nation would want to continue feeding a habit that directly supports and created the people who wants to destroy them. The only reason to deny that climate change is possibly created by mankind's actions and thereby avoid doing anything about it is the religious answer. Only God has the power to change the world, little ol' us couldn't possibly do any harm. They miss the point. Whether or not climate change is a dire threat, the solutions to it is primarily an energy problem. Reducing pollution is an energy problem, concerns about the global oil supply is an energy problem, reducing dependence on foreign oil is an energy problem, reducing the trade deficit is an energy problem, improving national security is, you guessed it, an energy problem.

Maybe we should capitalize the word Science. The window of opportunity is closing for America to change its ways, to become energy independent through smart investment in Science. Even one of the American dollar oil fed creation of Abu Dhabi is creating a zero-carbon city, heck it won't even have any cars, as the emirate can foresee a time when alternative energy is king. Yet, mention CO2 reduction as a good idea to a fundamentalist and the same old myths to protect their right to continue supporting the enemy in the 'war on terror' through the continued reliance on black gold spew forth. Maybe we should ask a Bulgarian if they think it's a good idea to continue to rely on Russian gas anymore. At a time when more effort needs to be focused on investing in education, specifically real Science, we shouldn't be wasting our energy arguing about whether or not intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution or if women should have access to all possible health information. It didn't seem to matter when it was far more important to get into business school and someday work on Wall Street, become a Master of the Universe by inventing a new financial derivative. The true Masters of the next century need to be the Science nerds who invent things we can use and once put a man on the moon. This time the work needs to be done closer to home, from the $1.6 trillion in needed infrastructure to the power grid to the means of producing that power. Time will tell if America can be guided off its course toward ignorance and hate, but reaffirming the division between church and state is a good place to start.

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