Re: SC47

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6458

Reviewing Linda McQuaig's "It's the Crude, Dude"
war, big oil, and the fight for the planet

............It's McQuaig's last word on the subject referring to Americans insane belief we have a birthright to drive hugely gas-guzzling "18-wheelers that accelerate like racing cars" and shove the world out of our way doing it. She focuses on Bush administration policies in the wake of the 9/11 attack. It changed everything but left the most important issues unaddressed. There's little debate over how centrally important oil is that government and industry focus on but the major media ignore. Controlling world supplies tops the list of strategic aims starting in the Middle East and headquartered in the richest of prizes in Iraq. There's no chance whatever we'd be there if the country's main export was olives instead of oil. Then there are nonsensical issues of removing a dangerous dictator and bringing democracy to the region in the form of a humanitarian intervention. Unmentioned is America does no such interventions, and our aim is to subvert democracy, not bring or support it. That's how the rules of imperial management work.

There are further vital issues unaddressed and unmentionable in public as well. What's the real motive behind America's "war on terrorism" that's quite different from the fictional media account we've gotten since it was launched right after the 9/11 attack. Few in the West know "Enemy Number One" bin Ladin was a CIA asset (not an agent) recruited through Pakistan's ISI to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the idea one sickly man in a cave outwitted the entire $40 - $50 billion-a-year American intelligence establishment is preposterous.

He and Al-Queda have been assets ever since. They're used to scare the public to death and provide a pretext for the Bush administration's permanent war on the world and against the homeland. It's in the form of hugely bloated military budgets and adventurism, oppressive police state laws and loss of civil liberties, the greatest ever wealth transfer in history from the public to the rich, and the systematic dismantling of what remains of an imperfect social state Americans were once proud of nonetheless. That's all sacrificed for the greater aim of unchallengeable world dominance and an unrestrained use of military power maintaining it. It's all for the sake of making the world safe for capital and limitless amounts of energy resources needed to make it hum and grow.

We know incontrovertibly the Afghan and Iraq wars were planned well in advance of September 11, 2001 to kick things off. We were practically signaled they were coming in 1998 by the Project for a New American Century schemers. They stated their wishes for a revolutionary hard line transformation of the nation that would be long in coming "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" that, low and behold, happened that fateful day. The "shock and awe" on Afghanistan began four weeks later, moved to Iraq in March, 2003, never stopped, and now everyone's paying for it and targeted if we get in the way.

The danger today is greater than ever as the Bush regime may have more ominous schemes in mind to bail itself out of its disastrous Middle East adventure. It may even be extreme enough to be unthinkable - using another major terror attack some analysts and DHS Secretary Chertoff think is inevitable as a pretext to declare martial law in the name of national security and end a functioning democracy as we know it.

Consider that compared to our claimed birthright to control and consume limitless amounts of the world's dwindling resources and emit enough greenhouse gases to destroy it way in the future that's someone else's problem. McQuaig concluded her important book explaining that "efficiency is our god (but) when it comes to the engine of the modern economy - energy" - efficiency is discarded. Workable solutions abound at least effective enough to mitigate our wasteful consumption habits, but volunteer methods to achieve them won't work. Mandating them along with convincing the public they're important is the only approach that can succeed and will if implemented. If they are, the savings will be dramatic and enormous.

If not, we face an eventual ecological calamity too dire to imagine. In addition, they'll be huge economic costs according to one analyst McQuaig cited. He believed it could cost America 1 - 2% of GDP annually and the world $1 trillion a year at least and likely much more. And it will only get worse in the out years. Global warming is far and away the single greatest environmental threat to the planet, second only to a nuclear winter. Rich and poor alike will be victims because "We're all in the big greenhouse together." It's the moral and survival challenge of our age with no time to waste implementing a solution. Everyone's future depends on it as does ending our resource wars that will destroy us if we don't. "It's (all about) the Crude, Dude," and we better not forget it..............