High Ate Us

"Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full"

Leon Trotsky 27 February 1940 - Coyoacan, Mexico


With this entry, your esteemed and privileged author is taking an extended break, but will return from time-to-time to update links and answer mail. I have a number of personal projects taking too much time for me to prepare the weekly column. I appreciate your time and I invite you to read any of my archived columns going back to the fall of 2005. What a long strange trip our world has taken since then.

Please write me at trotskytalk@sympatico.ca I'm curious to know if your part of the world is moving in the right direction.

Peace!

That's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

It's Not Easy Being Green

Oh great, the world experts on Global Warming and Climate Change have made it official: the planet is warming due to the activities of humankind. That’s easy to swallow but hard to believe, especially when it’s -15C outside your window. So now governments and politicians are trying to make it their “priority” in 2007. That’s nice, but where were you ten years ago or even 5 years ago? Running for office, naturally. And so it goes in 2007, politicians looking to make political fodder out of the latest issue: climate change.

That’s a hard task for a political platform if you ask me. On the one hand the politician has to appear as if he/she cares about the problem and to propose solutions that can affect environmental change. On the other hand, he/she can’t shake the economic and political machine that put him/her in office. The system of democracy makes the politician the servant to two masters: the voter and the financial officer. In order to affect the kind of environmental changes necessary to reduce the effects of Global Warming, one of the two parties has to give up its controlling share of the politician’s heartstrings.

Under current circumstances, I don’t see this fundamental change happening very soon. Our thinking is the same but everything else is changing. We as species can’t handle the big picture because we aren’t physically capable of seeing it properly. Our species is one that can only see what our eyes tell us. Right now, for instance, my eyes are looking a computer screen as I type out my thoughts for this week’s column. Can I see the effect of climate change? No, I’m busy trying to deal with what’s in front of me. [and that's how politicians work too]

The efforts of humankind to change the course of human activity requires imagination and a sense of purpose. It’s a process and not a quick fix scenario that our political leaders would have us believe. We need to fundamentally change everything and consider every choice we make by thinking of the long term effects to our children’s planet. But I’m confident that humankind can do the one thing it has been able to do for over 2 millennia: adapt.

That’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

To The Victor Go The Spoils

We all know that war is hell. It ruins lives by displacing families, creating refugees and causing death and destruction. The continuing war in Iraq is also ruining their civilization and their history. Iraq has a lot of things of value including oil; artifacts from an earlier era often called the cradle of civilization.

Since the war started in 2003, the looting of precious artifacts from museums and archeological sites is out of control. According to a story I read in the Philadelphia Inquirer, 10,000 artifacts have been hijacked out of Iraqi museums. Most of these antiquities are ancient : remnants of our earliest ancestors. And while we may be shocked and awed by the cultural rape of the country, we should also know that it has been going on for thousands of years. That said, it’s crimes like these today that really indicate how little war has changed anything about a country’s civility. Yet George W. Bush has believed all along that Democracy will prevail and stabilize Iraq and all it’s neighbours.

War changes very little. It ruins and disparages cultures, buries creativity and leaves bruises on our civil society. Yet Bush and his neocon gang want us to be “patient”. Clearly, people around the world are impatient and want an end to this war asap.

Regrettably, the looting continues, the death count rises and the artifacts of a civilized society are bought and sold on the black market. What an embarrassing record for the history books.

That’s just my opinion. I could be wrong

It Takes A Licking But Keeps On Ticking

So, the Doomsday Clock is 5 minutes to Midnight.

It was 7 minutes to Midnight in 2002. What's two minutes between disasters anyway? Are we closer to the end than we think? It all depends on who you talk to and the subjectivity of opinion. One person's security is another person's fearfulness. But The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists do point to some inconsistencies in the peace process and remind us that nuclear weapons are still the number one enemy of our civilization.

The no-nukes of the 1980s are silent today, but the weapons remain. As far as Global Warming and Climate Change is concerned, I have a little trouble including it in the mix that the Atomic Scientists say is a factor. They specifically state: " the perils of 27,000 nuclear weapons, 2000 of them ready to launch within minutes; and the destruction of human habitats from climate change, " is the reason they changed the clock to 5 minutes to Midnight.
 
The question is: which will come first? If the United States decides to invade Iran, then World War III will begin and once the nukes are launched it’s going to be over relatively quickly for all of us. If it's climate change, then the human race still has a chance to make amends and reduce the effects of pollution.
 
Someone once cursed "may you live in interesting times". And while I would heed the words of the Atomic Scientists, I can't help but feel that the human race has always been better than the fatalists, such as George Bush and Evangelists would suggest.

How interesting it is to consider the end of the world when we have so much to live for. Perhaps the clock is running a little fast. 

That's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
 
See: http://www.thebulletin.org/

George Wordsmith Bush

Last week's 20 minute speech by George W. Bush was so carefully worded, rehearsed and prepared, he looked like one of those robotic Presidents in Disneyland. Mechanical is a word that best describes his performance; stiff might be another one. But the mechanics of sending another 21,000 troops to Iraq sounded well greased with nary a squeak to be heard in West Point.

It's a pity that the move won't make much difference except in the body count. As far as the strategy is concerned, I'll leave that to the military pundits. In the end, it's the deeds that count, but for Bush it was all in the words.

Here's a rundown of the number of times he used the following keywords:

Al Qaeda = 9
America = 8
Civil War = 0 
Death = 1
Failure = 2
Freedom = 6
Iran = 6
Iraqis = 35+
Liberty = 3
Peace = 3
September 11 = 1
Syria = 2
Terror or terrorists = 12
War = 2 [but only in the context of the War on Terror] 

My nomination for best performance by a President of the United States? G.W. Bush.
Unfortunately, only one nomination in one category. Everybody else loses.

That's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Iran's Oily Dilemma

Whenever I read a story about oil, the Middle East and the United States, I can’t help but ask the question: Is it real or imagined?

Such is the case of a recent report out of John Hopkins University suggesting that Iran is headed for an “oil industry crisis”. Now how could this be? We’re talking about one of the leading oil producers in the world and this report by Roger Stern suggests that “if oil revenues decline the country could become unstable.” So the question really should be about the effectiveness of economic sanctions in light of Iran’s desire to go nuclear.

By the way, the United Nations Security Council voted in favour of sanctions on Iran’s importing of nuclear technology on December 23rd. The Stern report suggests these sanctions and the fact that Iran has failed to meet its OPEC quotas for the past 18 months, will put Iran into an economic squeeze. Consequently, says Stern, Iran could fall into political chaos.[how convenient]

So here’s the decision we have to make regarding the real or imagined threat and Iran’s oil supplies. Does Iran truly hold the fourth largest reserves or are they exaggerating the quantity in supply? If it’s the former, then the world is truly running out of sweet crude in the region. If it’s the latter, then Iran is playing a very dangerous political game with its fellow OPEC members.[who fashion the truth] But I for one, don’t believe they are going nuclear for their own energy needs. Clearly, they are moving forward on the notion that oil supply in the entire region has peaked and they are making the first in a series of moves to become an energy supplier.

But could this report from Stern also signal a plan for the United States to justify its actions over the next year? Could they be exaggerating the Iran crisis in order to scare off foreign investment and move in? Considering the aggressive and flawed behaviour of the Bush Gang since 2000, me thinks a plot is afoot.

That’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Oatmeal Man

A few words about Gerald Ford, courtesy of Gil Scott Heron. It’s from a poem he wrote just after Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for any wrongdoing regarding Watergate. Ford always said that he wanted “to heal America”, but it’s hard to believe that Nixon, the man who tried to steal America, was wounded in anyway. Nevertheless, that’s what Ford believed and so he pardoned public enemy number one at the time.

Gil Scott Heron, the African-American poet who could turn a phrase with majesty during his best years in the 1970s, wrote a poem marking the occasion of the Nixon’s exemption from justice. Here’s a selected passage that puts the Ford legacy into perspective:

We beg your pardon, America.
We beg your pardon because the pardon you gave this time was not yours to give.

They said National Security, but do you feel secure with the man who tried to steal America back on the streets again?

And what were the results of this pardon?
We now have Oatmeal Man.

Anytime you find someone in the middle
Anytime you find someone who is tepid
Anytime you find someone who is lukewarm
Anytime you find someone who has been in Congress for 25 years and no one ever heard of him, you’ve got Oatmeal Man.

Oatmeal Man: The man who said you could fit all of his Black friends in the trunk of his car and still have room for the Republican elephant.

We beg your pardon America, because the pardon you gave this time was not yours to give.

From: The Mind Of Gil Scott-Heron. Copyright 1975 Brouhaha Music Inc.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Scott-Heron

The story of Gerald Ford might be clouded in nostalgia over the next few days, but it wasn’t all that quaint in 1974. Ford was the quiet fall guy for the Republican Party. A scapegoat who would lose the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter and pave the way for Ronald Reagan.

That’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.