Kurds Can't Sell Oil To Neighbors

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The politics of oil exporting and the needs of the US/UK empire to divide and conquer are illuminated by the story of the Kurds and their attempt at slicing out of Turkey and Iraq as well as other neighbors, a nation that will be supported by oil exports. Also, the degradation of the workers toiling in Brazil's sugar cane fields, producing biofuels, is visited by Bloomberg news. Time to talk about energy and slavery, a thing of greatest antiquity and which looms ever greater in our futures if oil begins to run lower and lower in volume due to the Hubbert Oil Peak. And US ethanol producers are suffering a loss of profitability and this is a curious matter worth discussing.

From CBS News:

Energy companies that make deals with the Kurdish government may strike oil, but they’ll have trouble selling it, warns Iraq’s Oil Minister.

“Iraq’s neighbors - Syria, Iran and even Turkey - have said they will only allow oil over the border to market that is being exported by the federal government,” Dr. Hussein al Shahristani told CBS News.

The US invasion to control OPEC and to dominate world oil markets expost facto has placed us in the middle of the still-disintigrating Ottoman Empire. During the long reign of the descendents of the Mongloid steppes horsemen, the Kurds were pretty much left alone. They were mainly tribal herdsmen that migrated up and down the mountains in the wild countryside deep inside the heart of the Ottoman Empire. Over the previous 5,000 years, governments paid little attention to these nomads who were disorganized and mobile.

From the University of Edinburgh UK:

This map shows how the Kurds spread out across the mountains surrounding the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains. When the Ottoman Empire was broken up by the European empires, this collapse had important political divisions that were the trigger for WWI. Germany supported the Turkish empire while the British contested with both the German and the Russian empires for control of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The British method such as the one used by Lawrence of Arabia, was to go into and live with various wild nomadic tribes and get them to work as terrorists, attacking the govenment of Istanbul. This guerrila warfare was an important part of WWI and the British were very focused on justifying and assisting ethnic minorities in resisting imperial rule even though Britian was battling the Irish Celts for the exact same reasons: they had to stop ethnic groups from gaining political power at home!

To this day, the ethnic and religious differences in the United Kingdom constantly threaten to rip the last bits of that former empire to shreds! After WWI, the plan to kill off the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires revolved around slicing them all apart along ethnic/linguistic lines. Since the planet has been swept by waves of nomads and since many nomadic cultures were still pretty footloose inside of empires, drawing up language/ethnic lines was nearly impossible and indeed, a very bloody affair that is tremendously bloody as time goes by.

A paradox of all this is wrenching: ethnic minorities can move about freely within empires and actually can grow in strength and numbers and indeed, become quite powerful under the peaceful systems set up by centralized imperial rule. But once they decide to divide up an empire and establish their own countries out of the remains of an empire, then not only do all the ethnic members living spread all over the place become targets of warfare by other rival groups, they also have to try to drive our their neighbors in order to keep their own homes and this is very nasty stuff.

Hitler didn't come out of nowhere. He is the product of the ethos of ethnic identity and the push to chop up previous empires or politcal maps drawn up by marriages and conquests of the top royal families of Europe ever since the break up of the Roman Empire. These new, radical maps, tried to divide up lands according to language, religion, etc. The previous attempt at this during the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants killed off tremendous numbers of people in Middle Europe. So when the victors of WWI, all empires that would not tolerate the slightest moves towards ethnic-identity separations, imposed this regime upon the defeated Germanic empires, this meant anyone speaking German who had lived for many generations across these empires were suddenly being forced to use a new language and follow discriminatory laws aimed at driving them from their ancestral homes.

So Hitler decided that if he killed all other ethnic and religious groups, these scattered and often quite big populations of Germanic speaking people could then live in peace. The logic of ethnic cleansing is very strict: you kill or drive out anyone and everyone who is of any rival groups. The US is an empire, since day one. And the revolutionaries who founded our nation worried about all this and they tried to make this impossible by having universal laws that covered all religions and ethnic groups with two notable exceptions, of course: Africans and the natives of the Americas were ruthlessly excluded. Which seriously weakened our own empire and still troubles it to this day even after they gained full civil rights.

The ethos of large political unions uniting many different ethnic groups and religions of the United States has been stood upon its head by the US/UK imperial alliance. For the Brits practiced divide and conquer politics for many years...when attacking other empires! So here we are, presiding over more than one very bloody rending apart of the Ottoman Empire as well as supporting this deep within the Russian and Chinese empires, both of whom greatly resent this.

Within the heart of all this cruel ethnic cleansing lies Israel: a total colonial effort launched from Russia's Jewish minority who were artfully exploited by the British Crown to attack the central Mediterranean flank of the Ottoman Empire. It was no coincidence that London published the Balfour Declarations at the end of WWI.

The cockeyed, bizarro world of ethnic cleansing at its worst is embodied in the Israeli ethnic cleansing process going on today in the Middle East. I was horrified to read this article in the BBC:

Situated on a peak on the Carmel mountain range, the 77-acre village is an oasis of tranquillity, a vital ingredient in the healing of children scarred by years of conflict and abuse.

Named after Orde Charles Wingate, the controversial British army officer who trained Jewish underground forces in the 1930s, the centre provides a safe refuge, education and life skills for destitute children from the age of five, through adolescence and up to the age of 19, and, in some cases, beyond.

"We don't expel kids from here. Period," says Dr Peri. "While only one in 10 graduates stay on, those who leave know that we're always here for them, like a normal family."

Of course, the friendly interview with the insane people running this camp points out that there is no intention of harboring, helping or allowing to live within Israel, any Palestinian children. They are being killed or starved in the name of ethnic identity. I wanted to note how this project was named after a man who was working hard to undermine the last bits of Ottoman control in that region for it was still part of Turkey back then. It is rather frightful to see how the very same people, motivated by the same urges as Hitler had, are bringing in refugees who are not Jewish, not because they are kindly but to deflect critics from calling the Zionists 'Nazis'. 'See? We are nice to one or two disconnected Muslims out of distant lands who are no threat to our own ethnic cleansing actions within this land!' they disingenuously say.

Back to the Kurds: this is part of that same British project hatched 100 years ago and it is for the same reason: to prevent any empire from forming in this vital region. The political map of the mountains in this part of the world is a twisted, shattered mess just like the former lands where the Ottoman empire and the Austro-Hungarian empire used to meet. Yugoslavia is no more, it is a host of bitter, hate-filled little sub-kingdoms poised between the UK/US empire and the Russian empire.

The subdivision of this sector of the Ottoman empire is particularily complex, trememdously bloody and at the bottom of this lies oil. The UK/US empires hope they can control the oil if they fracture apart the region and make alliances with various groups so they can be kept on as 'protectors' which in empire-speak are called 'Protectorates.' The desire to do this is hitting Turkey very hard indeed and the Turks are very upset already over the ruthless dismemberment of their empire.

So the news about the Kurd's inability to sell their newly seized oil resources to their angry neighbors is no surprize to me. It is easy for Americans to ignore history while artfully trying to expoit it at the urging of our British allies. But we are on a fool's mission. Not only are we triggering bloody, retalitory ethnic wars, we are also being slowly dragged into endorsing this sort of garbage and it is now eating away at our own home base just as it boomeranged on England and is still gnawing away at England's home base!

The US, so anxious to rule the world using this divide and conquer method is now troubled by elements at home who no longer swear fealty to the concept of a united federation that honors the Constitution. Instead, everyone is now being allowed to be dual citizens and to wave the flags of one's ethnic identity homeland. Whether it be Ireland or Israel, Mexico or Mauritania, everyone is now cleaving towards their 'ancestral' homes and the hyper-flag waving post-9/11 has eroded into a lunge for more ethnic cleansing across the entire planet, sponsored by and militarily supported by the United States.

And people anxious to win these bloody, internecine battles are now twisting apart our joint needs and using our nation in ways that weaken our entire nation while benefitting their ethnic desires. This isn't just Jewish Zionists doing this though they are one of the most powerful of these groups, it is a problem for nearly everything involving our foreign relations which is being used for non-United States purposes but for only whoever has the most influence such as the Cuban Americans in Miami controlling a lot of our Caribbean relations or even endangering important alliances just because they want to embargo Cuba!

From the Pakistani News:

The government of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region expressed its anger on Saturday at being kept in the dark about an agreement between Baghdad and Ankara to crack down on rebel Turkish Kurds.

The accord was signed on Friday in Turkey’s capital by Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani and his Turkish counterpart Besir Atalay. “It would have been better if someone had told us what was going to be in the agreement,” Falah Mustafa Bakir, head of the Kurdish Regional Government’s foreign affairs department, said in a statement posted on the KRG’s website.
“We are talking about a new democratic, federal Iraq not the Iraq of dictatorship and one-party rule,” he said. Turkey says the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) enjoys free movement in northern Iraq, where it has long taken refuge, and obtains weapons and explosives there for attacks across the border.

The US/UK imperial war machine unleashed the Kurds but now they have to curb them due to geo-political realities outside of the Middle East. The US/UK empire can't attack Iran while Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia, for example, are very angry about the division of Iraq. If we look at the ethnic map above, we can see that that entire region will impossibly fracture apart if we encourage ethnic cleansing but we can't help but pick up that dangerous tool. It makes empire building so easy, at first! But then gaining control over contending ethnic groups whose hatred have redoubled due to the empire encouraging ethnic cleansing is a whole different matter.

We can't reconcile the dream of the Kurds of taking over and dominating their neighbors, driving out all rivals and setting up their own kingdom with the idea that everyone there has to be peaceful and obey our imperial rule and give us money and power and in return, we protect from each other due to the hatred we fostered so cleverly, previously. Like Britain tried to keep both India and Pakistan as part of their Common Wealth: impossible, totally impossible.

From Bloomberg:

Brazilian ethanol production will jump 22 percent in 2007 from a year earlier, to a record 5.6 billion gallons (21.3 billion liters), the Agriculture Ministry predicts.

Brazil will sell at least 818 million gallons of ethanol this year to Japan, the Netherlands and the U.S., according to Uniao da Industria de Cana-de-Acucar, or Unica, Brazil's biggest ethanol trade association.
*snip*
Sugar cane provides at least 300,000 jobs in Sao Paulo state alone, paying twice as much as other low-skilled rural work, former Agriculture Minister Roberto Rodrigues says. Ethanol is not only good for Brazil, Lula says in speeches; it's also good for the world.

Back to the energy issue: from the very first, I was sceptical about the promises of bio-fuels. As someone who has farmed in the past and who has lots of biological fuel items we call 'trees' and pasturage, I also know the limitations of Mother Nature. We can't get more than there is out of the living tissue of this earth without paying a steep price. Already, the agricultural revolution is proving very problematic as the chemicals and genetic engineering wonders fade in the teeth of the iron laws of Evolution and Mother Nature's rule. We have evolved a very energy-intense civilization and we may end up retreating from it simply because it will become increasingly impossible. Already, in Africa, the stresses of population and the decline in living standards are stark. The bounty of nature for the traditional hunter-gatherers of ancient, very ancient lineage are now under tremendous pressure. The Darfur mess is all about this. It can't be easily fixed since it is biological as well as ethnic cleansing.

The history of sugar cane and the history of slavery are one and the same. From the very start when the Europeans, who used mostly honey for sweetners, discovered sugar grasses, they fell in love with this cheap, easy to digest form of energy. Indeed, it was an addiction equal to opium or other nostrums such as tobacco. To this day, the effects of sugar and corn sugar (both are grasses, by the way) is sweeping the planet, causing obesity and other health problems. But the people who slave away in the sugar plantations are never obese. Not since day one, in the early 1600's. The long enslavement of black tribal members of Central and Western Africa began instantly since nearly all the natives of the Caribbean Islands were worked to death on the indigo and sugar plantations started by the colonial powers. This was before cotton was brought in from India and Egypt. These three crops, by the way, are quite cruel and due to their dark melanin skin, the slaves from Africa could toil in the tropical sun, painfully harvesting these crops.

And so it continues today. The Cuban revolution was launched on behalf of easing the dire conditions of the sugar cane workers there!

From Bloomberg:

Behind the rhetoric lies a harsher reality for the cane cutters of Brazil. Most are migrants, who leave their families in search of jobs that pay about $1.35 an hour. How much they make depends on how much they cut.

Companies sometimes cheat their employees by undercounting, a government study released earlier this year shows. The work is backbreaking and dangerous.

From 2002 to 2005, the most recent years for which complete statistics are available, 312 sugar and ethanol workers died on the job, and 82,995 suffered accidents while working in cane fields and ethanol plants, according to Brazil's Social Security Administration.

Labor prosecutors are investigating the cases of 21 people who have dropped dead since 2004 while cutting cane. Most were from 25 to 35 years old. ``There's strong evidence that workers die of exhaustion,'' Gomes says.

As always, human labor can be cheaper than using machines to do work because one can literally exploit other humans to death. Working people to death has a long history. Generally speaking, one does this to an ethnic group that is outside the identity of the exploiters. For example, in the US, we worked Chinese labor to death and exported the survivors. This was done all over the empire. The Panama Canal was mostly built by Asian labor that had a ferocious death rate. The cruel system I see evolving towards using human labor to create fuel for rich people to zoom about in muscular vehicles is gradually growing ever stronger. Right now, energy is still a cheap resource so we use lots of machinery to farm products used to make fuel for our lifestyles.

But in 100 years, this will devolve back into slavery because this makes more economic sense unless we take measures today to improve our energy systems. For example, the more we extend solar energy creation by encouraging this for all roof surfaces, this means we can electrify our vehicles which must all evolve together as lighter and smaller objects...this can't be done individually since anyone venturing out in any light vehicle will be massacred when hit by the behmoths that dominate the roads.

Planning ahead means we can override the worst aspects of the Hubbert Oil Peak without sliding into depravity like the Roman Empire, based on slavery and cruelty.

From Bloomberg:

The largest overseas market for Brazilian ethanol is the U.S. Last year, the U.S. imported 433.7 million gallons of ethanol from Brazil, up fourfold from 2004, according to the Washington-based Renewable Fuels Association. U.S. fuel importers buy about a dozen shipments of ethanol from Brazil per month.

They include the U.S. unit of BP Plc; Chevron Corp.; the U.S. unit of Citgo Petroleum Corp.; ConocoPhillips, the second- biggest U.S. fuel refiner; Northville Industries Corp.; the U.S. unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc; and Valero Energy Corp., according to U.S. Energy Department monthly fuel import data.

We use the sweat and tears and deaths of these semi-slaves already. The ethical challenge here is the same as England had when she used slaves to grow tobacco, sugar for rum and then cotton for the cotton mills of the English Industrial Revolution: there is blood on our hands. We can't get all soppy and sorry for Darfur while merrily drinking the ethanol produced by slave-like working conditions in Brazil. We can't chide China over labor conditions or pollution while we merrily consume the products of this business!

There is research going on in biofuels that are a concern, too. From the Economist:

The result, according to Codexis's boss, Alan Shaw, is enzymes that can perform chemical transformations unknown in nature.

Dr Shaw, however, is no longer so interested in octanol as a biofuel. Like two other, nearby firms, he is now focusing Codexis's attention on molecules even more chemically similar to petrol. The twist that Codexis brings is that unlike petrol, of which each batch from the refinery is chemically different from the others (because the crude oil from which it is derived is an arbitrary mixture of hydrocarbon molecules), biopetrol could be turned out exactly the same, again and again, and thus designed to have the optimal mixture of properties required of a motor fuel.

Exactly which molecules Codexis is most interested in these days, Dr Shaw is not yet willing to say. But Amyris Biotechnologies, which is also based in California, in Emeryville, and which also started by dabbling in drugs (in its case an antimalarial medicine called artemisinin), is slightly more forthcoming. Under the guidance of its founder Jay Keasling, it has been working on a type of isoprenoid (a class of chemicals that include rubber).

Rubber reminds me of rubber plantations and this reminds me of Brazil where great fortunes were made, growing rubber and also of Asia where the European empires conquered Malaysia and Indonesia so they could grow rubber plants and during WWII, due to shortage of rubber due to ships being sunk all over the world, both Germany and the US did intensive research in artificial compounds and subsitutes for silk, rubber, oil, etc. Hydrocarbon complexes are based on some of the most common elements. And we can see how the combinations of water---hydrogen and oxygen and join up with carbon atoms to form an amazing array of complex pseudo or real life forms that can even be self-replicating! Which we call 'life'. The problem of this is, of course, anything we artifically create will enter into the life-stream of our environment and all of this has consequences which are hard for us to foresee and we can see with our past forays in this field.

Certainly, this is bearing watching. I don't expect any nostrum of any sort to arise that will allow us to consume infinite energy or resources due to the fact that our appetites are infinite but the universe has limits.

From the NYT:

Only last year, farmers here spoke of a biofuel gold rush, and they rejoiced as prices for ethanol and the corn used to produce it set records.

But companies and farm cooperatives have built so many distilleries so quickly that the ethanol market is suddenly plagued by a glut, in part because the means to distribute it have not kept pace. The average national ethanol price on the spot market has plunged 30 percent since May, with the decline escalating sharply in the last few weeks.
*snip*
While generous government support is expected to keep the output of ethanol fuel growing, the poorly planned overexpansion of the industry raises questions about its ability to fulfill the hopes of President Bush and other policy makers to serve as a serious antidote to the nation’s heavy reliance on foreign oil.

Unlike government-run situations we have a government-subsidized situation that leads to the Chinese/Maoist 'let a thousand distilleries bloom' crisis. This is a very wasteful way of creating 'competition' when our energy systems all tend towards mega-systems in the first place. Note how all the oil companies are now a very few. Building lots of distilleries all over the place certainly has driven down the price of the distilled product but this doesn't do us much good since most of this is costing our government money in the end so this simply ads on to our budget deficit.

From the NYT:

The falling price of ethanol comes in sharp contrast to the rise in crude oil prices. Lower ethanol prices help reduce gasoline prices at the pump, where ethanol is available, but because it constitutes 10 percent or less in most blends, the impact for the consumer is marginal.

This is so bizarre and shows how government funding warps economics. It takes increasingly expensive fossil fuels from overseas to create the ethanol products that are dropping in price! Why is this?

Well, we look back at world trade: ethanol from Brazil has a tariff tacked onto it to protect the ethanol producers here who get outright government subsidies on top of this boon that has also caused the Doha rounds for 'free trade' to collapse! And these two things encourage over-production at home even as we import this stuff because of distribution problems as well as geo-political problems. We don't want Brazil to make energy for China, for example, exclusively. We want to keep a toe in that bathtub.

From the NYT:

Since construction crews broke ground on the Lincolnway plant in 2005, the price of ethanol on the local market has fallen to $1.55 a gallon from about $2, Mr. Brehm said. Over the same period, the price of corn, representing 70 percent of production costs, has risen to $3.27 a bushel from $1.60. “We’re trapped between two commodities,” he said.

The price of corn rises due to world trade, we sell a lot of corn to others and since the US has decided to cease being a value-added exporter and is now increasingly a commodity export nation, we must sell corn overseas because of our huge trade deficit with Asia and the Middle East. We can't export ethanol to the Middle East. We could export it to Asia only it is more expensive than Brazilian ethanol which uses near-slavery rather than machines using oil to grow and harvest its crops. And since the dollar is dying against most currencies and is rapidly ceasing to be the world's reserve currency (I suspect in the last 3 months, this has pretty much been true), the price of oil climbs faster than the value of our exports which is why we are seeing our trade deficit worsen over time, bit by bit.

I watched with rising alarm as nearly all farming and industries in the town of Berlin, New York, vanish in less than 10 years due to the logic and forces of 'free trade' and the dying dollar. There is virtually no commerce left here. This process is hammering all our countryside and the frantic efforts to jump this gate by turning food into fuel will not stop it...yet. Only after we go bankrupt, will commerce slowly re-emerge in the hinterlands. One would hope. And this would be reasonable to suggest, actually.

From the History Learning Site:

The Great Leap Forward planned to develop agriculture and industry. Mao believed that both had to grow to allow the other to grow. Industry could only prosper if the work force was well fed, while the agricultural workers needed industry to produce the modern tools needed for modernisation. To allow for this, China was reformed into a series of communes.

I thought of the Great Leap Forward when writing about the various government programs to spread ethanol all over the Midwest. They share some common elements.

The Great Leap Forward also encouraged communes to set up "back-yard" production plants. The most famous were 600,000backyard furnaces which produced steel for the communes. When all of these furnaces were working, they added a considerable amount of steel to China’s annual total – 11 million tonnes.

There are backyard diesel production enterprises going on right now. Using oils from the fast food places that dot America's roadsides and shopping centers, these enterprising individuals then cook the oil while adding chemicals and produce a useful diesel byproduct. We saw this sort of thing during the earlier oil rationing periods. There is no rationing now, it is monetary rationing. Namely, prices are simply rising and people are looking for angles to exploit. The ethanol subsidies are more like the Chinese Central Planning like the Great Leap mess.

The excellent growing weather of 1958 was followed by a very poor growing year in 1959. Some parts of China were hit by floods. In other growing areas, drought was a major problem. The harvest for 1959 was 170 million tons of grain – well below what China needed at the most basic level. In parts of China, starvation occurred.

1960 had even worse weather than 1959. The harvest of 1960 was 144 million tons. 9 million people are thought to have starved to death in 1960 alone; many millions were left desperately ill as a result of a lack of food. The government had to introduce rationing. This put people on the most minimal of food and between 1959 and 1962, it is thought that 20 million people died of starvation or diseases related to starvation.

The backyard furnaces also used too much coal and China’s rail system, which depended on coal driven trains, suffered accordingly.

Alas, I fear this might be in our future, too. During the 1970's oil price hikes we had an agricultural collapse as the cold, wet weather of a long and deep La Nina episode caused crop failures that increased food inflation at the same time we had a sudden jump in oil inflation. This is why a dependence on ethanol from food products is so hazardous: unlike oil wells that pump nearly uniformly until drying out, crops vaccilate greatly from year to year. The profits also gyrate wildly and frequently. Already, world stores of grains is dropping and there is no agricultural crisis big enough to cause mass starvation. But this is a future possibility. We may find ourselves in a bidding war with China over food for fuel reserves.

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Comments

[blues]

Hey Elaine!

(X-post on http://dailytrough.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/we-win/ )

I just figured out a sure-fire conspiracy that will enable us to take over the entire US of A, lock, stock, and barrel! It's so simple I don't see why I hadn't thought of it before! Here's the deal:

We buy up the entire military side of the Military-Industrial Complex. Then we sell off or tear down all other parts of the US Aggregate Productivity System (APS). We then have a population of lawyers, accountants, arms manufacturing workers, and drug addicts, who couldn't build a bicycle if their lives depended on it.

What we have then is a US population of crypto-mafia stooges that can support itself only by threatening the APS-bearing nations with nuclear weapons. We could even privatize the military itself, so we'll own that too! (A "protection" racket.) This would require a lot of "whiff of the grape" exercises to show the APS-bearing nations that we are actually insane enough to wreck the earth, but you have to break some eggs to make an omlett... The helpless and useless surplus US population then becomes a big barracks of nuclear hostages — OUR HOSTAGES! We Win!!!

The New York Times

October 2, 2007
Obama to Urge Elimination of World’s Nuclear Weapons
By JEFF ZELENY

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/us/politics/02obama.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1191330340-OlZrnFFEeNZ+qkk7V4eJMw

~~WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — Senator Barack Obama will propose on Tuesday setting a goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world, saying the United States should greatly reduce its stockpiles to lower the threat of nuclear terrorism, aides say.~~

Well... I'm holding out 'till he promises a private jet plane for every US family.

[JSmith]

">Senator Barack Obama will propose on Tuesday setting a goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world, saying the United States should greatly reduce its stockpiles ..."

Only if those other guys go first!

[Neuro Artist]

Interesting history of the Kurds. It appears the US really had no idea what mess they got into as they decided to invade. Now its like being stuck between a rock and a very hard place, and it is getting increasingly hotter, Sisyphus would have felt comparatively happy with his Rock'n Roll punishment. Turkey is not happy

[blues]

I went to a meeting with about 200 peace demonstrators shortly before the "coalition of the willing" attacked Iraq, which was built around a lecture by Scott Ritter. He was a chief UN arms inspector, and had been part of the apparently tiny US Marine intelligence unit. He said an Iran conflict would be disastrous for the US, but that the non-military, non-intel elites* (I call them elitishes, as it sounds better, and they are never really elected, ever) in the big neoconservative (he did use the term, he said they were totally unlike real conservatives, such as himself) policy institutes wanted to use conflict to alter domestic social relationships. I guess the military and intel folks knew some things that the elitish oligarchs didn't.

I am convinced that if the CFR gang finds a way to start bombing Iran, it will become a disaster in at least 10 of 1000 possible ways. I have no doubt that US ground forces would become involved in battles for Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan province. Of course, due to "unforeseeable" side effects (inevitable because of the presence of those ground forces...) it will become impossible to leave... No-no — Can't cut off funds for the "troops," etc...

[Neuro Artist]

"I guess the military and intel folks knew some things that the elitish oligarchs didn't."

-Another thing to consider is that the elitishists, knew that the results would be disastrous for the US and the world, but doesn't care....

[blues]

That's a factor too, maybe more on the mark. They don't give a damn if a whole lot of their little toys (us) get broken.

[John]

"Only if those other guys go first!"

Exactly.

The only thing dumber than modern conservatives are modern leftists. "Progressive," my ass. Sadly, while Obama scores points with me for not being a part of the current elitist political machine, he repeatedly demonstrates that he simply does not understand the real world. The real world is filled with a lot of very bad, very selfish people, who will ruthlessly subjugate everyone in their path. The idea that "if America would just be nice, then the whole world would want to be our friends!" is myopic, dangerous and chowder-headed, to say the least. It was fed to the clueless hippies by very shrewd communist types in the 1960s, and the fool hippies swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

As I see it, we have exactly ONE HOPE for America...and "as America goes, so goes the world."

That ONE hope? Dr. Ron Paul. Hey, disagree all you like. It's the truth. There isn't another person seeking the Presidency who would do anything but finish the job of overseeing America's self-destruction.

(And having Elaine in the Cabinet would be a pretty good thing, too. I'm thinking Treasury Secretary.)

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Ron Paul has to be a true liberian, then. Like, understanding women have the right to control their pregnancies, for example. Right now, he isn't that at all, alas.

[hawaii helicopter tours]

That could save a lot and can help mother nature.