dissociatedpress.com » Iraq

BP and Exxon Literally Going to War?

admin — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 05:05:28 +0000

I’ll always remember the first time I heard the name “United Fruit”. I was a teen reading (yup, reading) Playboy, and in an interview with Mel Brooks, he made some reference to his bum being blown off in the war, and being replaced with a United Fruit box. This was before the web, so even though the reference perplexed me, I forgot about it until years later, when I was reading about the atrocities committed by corporate America in the interest of keeping the bananas on your breakfast cereal cheap. To this day, I’m rather astounded by the gall of naming a clothing store “Banana Republic”. Yeah, let’s go shopping at that store that’s run by a CIA puppet who’s taking grift from Chiquita and Coca Cola and killing his compatriots to keep the Latin American masses enslaved and the banana split floats affordable at Dairy Queen. I was reminded of all of this recently when I ran across this piece which tells the rather bizarre story of how Exxon and BP seem to be on the verge of being directly at war with each other in Iraq. The story intrigued me, because futurist thinkers for a couple of decades have talked about the Corporate Nation State, and although we see signs of this evolution all around us in America – largely in the form of lobby money and politicians on the corporate grift – this is the first time I’d ever heard of two corporations manipulating two governments that are potential enemies, and driving them toward war. I mean, we’ve all heard of the destabilizing strategies talked about in books like Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and we’ve all heard of proxy wars, but corporate proxy wars? What a crazy idea! But as I poked around a bit to see if there were other conflicts like this elsewhere, I immediately ran across this piece about the Mali resource war, which describes the first ever use of the French military to directly defend the assets of a corporation, in this case the Areva Mining Business Group, which mines Uranium in Mali and elsewhere. This is indeed probably the war of the future. It’s fairly common knowledge that near future wars will likely be over resources like water or oil, but it hadn’t occurred to me personally just who would be fighting them. And it actually makes a perverted and troubling kind of sense that it would be the corporations that profit from those resources who would wage the wars. Imagine Coke and Pepsi duking it out over sugar resources, or Verizon and AT&T battling for frequency spectra as we keep demanding more and more ways to be wireless and connected. I guess our only real concern right now should be how good the pay is, and whether they’ll call us “employees of the United States” or “citizens of Monsanto”.

Mike Prysner – A True War Hero

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:18:46 +0000

I couldn’t possibly express my feelings on war better than Mike Prysner, Iraq War veteran, and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. So here’s a video edited to his presentation for an IVAW panel on Dehumanization of the Enemy. In his words: “Our real enemy is not the ones living in a distant land whose names or policies we don’t understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it’s profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it’s profitable, the insurance companies who deny us health care when it’s profitable, the banks who take away our homes when it’s profitable. Our enemies are not five thousand miles away…they are right here in front of us…we were told we were fighting terrorists…the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism was this occupation”.

The Next Civil War: Red vs Blue

admin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 04:01:01 +0000

Slate recently ran a How is America Going to End game/survey in which you get to choose the way that you predict the American Empire will come to an end. Well, the results are in, and I have to say I’m a little disappointed that my chosen scenario – the Red vs. Blue Civil War – came in 13th. That map on the left highlights an interesting fact: the whole red state vs. blue state debate becomes a little irrelevant when you look at things on a more granular level. Those aren’t mega-highrises of the future, those are voters by population density. And you’ll notice that most of the spikes are blue. An American civil war may seem preposterous, especially when a crazy Russian academic predicts it, but the re-emergence of the “bubba militias” makes it seem a little less far-fetched in a country that’s been split in two by Rovian/Luntzian politics. When winning is everything, everyone loses. It says a lot when a large group of people (the average knee-jerk, ignorant Republican voter) gets behind a trillion-dollar activity that kills thousands of Americans but violently protests one that is intended to save American lives. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if things eventually got ugly on a larger scale; when you get a bunch of ignorant PBR-swilling yahoos riled up, there’s usually going to be some kind of fight. But I’m not worried. We city-folk have this one covered in spades, and we have maps and charts to prove it. First of all, we all know blue voters are smarter, and all the smart people live in the cities. Perhaps more important from a strategic point of view though, is the fact that we have almost all the airports, and many of the military bases. On the map below, the green dots are major airports and the tiny yellow areas are major military bases:

We also have all the money. This map shows aggregate income by county, blue being the highest:

But perhaps most important of all, we’re consistent. The map below shows party swings from 1960-2004. Note that while all the fickle hick flyovers are voting like drunken sorority girls for 44 years, the areas that stay consistently blue are – you guessed it – major metropolitan areas.

Bring it on, ya dumb hillbillies.

Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran

admin — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 13:35:37 +0000

Bush & Rove Laughing Hysterically
At Gullibility of American Public

Back in 2001, right after the attacks on the World Trade Center (someone’s going to kill me for that link), a friend of mine and I joked about how Bush would somehow try to link the attacks to Saddam Hussein so he could invade Iraq. At the time, the idea sounded preposterous, and we had a big laugh. That’s why, after joking last year with a friend that “the only way a Republican will be in office in 2009 is if we go to war with Iran”, I’ll go out on a limb and predict an invasion by October. Some headlines this weekend: US prepares military blitz against Iran’s N-sites, Dutch pull spies on Iran attack fears, Israel ready to attack if Iran goes nuclear, US and UK begin war games in Persian Gulf , and the only one in the U.S. media: Iran warns any attack would start ‘world war’. Gentleman, rattle your sabres…

The Bush Legacy

admin — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 04:18:57 +0000

Why Do You Think They Call Him Dick?

admin — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:54:12 +0000

Dick Cheney explains why, if the U.S. had continued to Baghdad in the first Gulf War, there “…would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq…” and how it would have been “…a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq…”

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?
CHENEY: No.
Q: Why not?
CHENEY: Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off — part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim, fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.