Thursday, June 20, 2019
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
The DNC Can’t Be Allowed to Ignore the Climate Crisis
JUNE 19, 2019
The Democratic National
Committee continues to ignore the most pressing issue of our time — the global
climate crisis — by refusing to allow presidential candidates to hold a debate
focused specifically on the climate. Given that the president has launched a
wholesale scorched earth attack on all things environmental, it’s far past time
for the Democrats, if they truly seek to lead the nation in 2020, to make their
environmental agenda known to the public whose votes they seek.
Virtually every state in the nation
is already suffering debilitating, destructive and vastly expensive impacts
from global warming. Farmers can’t plant their fields in the Midwest because
they’re underwater from record high floods. Massive storms have swept the
Eastern Seaboard as the raging and rising sea claims more land every year. The
West Coast is fighting wildfires burning not in forests, but
in scrub brush that no amount of raking or thinning will remedy.
Alaska is again on fire where there shouldn’t be any fires. The Rockies are
facing a host of climate-caused assaults including extirpation of native
species and invasion by non-native species as they move north with the warming
climate.
In the meantime, President
Trump is doing everything possible to exacerbate the harsh impacts of global
warming. Just last week the Department of Agriculture announced it would be
issuing new administrative rules for the Forest Service to undermine compliance
with the foundational National Environmental Policy Act. Why? To speed up
permitting for more oil and gas drilling, coal and mineral mining, and
deforestation couched in the phony rubric of forest restoration.
Make no mistake, the only
thing Donald Trump has going for him is the economy that he inherited from his
nemesis President Obama — but for which he takes full and unwarranted credit.
To keep that economy rolling in the face of a global economic slowdown, Trump
has unleashed wide-open, broad spectrum pillaging of the nation’s
natural resources for the sole purpose of aiding his re-election bid which, at
this point, isn’t looking great. He’s far behind Democratic challengers in
states he carried last election and, although he’d never admit it,
the causes are the results of his own actions — tariffs and global warming
impacts.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee
has made the climate crisis a central tenant of his presidential bid, which
should come as no surprise considering his state faces the environmental and
economic crises from a rising and warming ocean. Higher tides,
devastating storm surges and failing runs of salmon that have nourished the
area’s inhabitants for millennia are just some of the impacts that motivated
Washington’s legislature to demand its utilities cease to use coal-fired power
— a move that now impacts Montana’s antiquated and uneconomical coal plants,
spreading the crisis beyond Washington’s borders.
As predicted, Montana’s
governor, Steve Bullock, did not make the cut for the first Democratic
presidential debate, which was revealed late last week. And quite frankly,
Bullock would not be well-served by joining a debate on the climate crisis
because he’s still supporting coal, gas and oil development and deforestation.
Nonetheless, Montana would benefit from such a debate since we, as a northern
tier state, are increasingly negatively impacted by the climate crisis.
Montana’s voters deserve to hear which candidates are willing to enact which
policies to protect our future and generations yet to come.
The climate crisis, with
increasing warnings of “catastrophe” from scientists and agencies, deserves its
own debate — and it will ill-serve the Democratic National Committee to ignore
or try to postpone honest and open discussion by those seeking the presidency.
Iran at the center of the Eurasian riddle
By Pepe Escobar
June 17, 2019
Russian President Vladimir
Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani walk as
they attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of
Heads of State in Bishkek on June 14, 2019. Photo: AFP / Vyacheslav Oseledko
With the dogs of war on full
alert, something extraordinary happened at the 19th summit of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) late last week in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
Virtually unknown across the
West, the SCO is the foremost Eurasian political, economic and security
alliance. It’s not a Eurasian NATO. It’s not planning any humanitarian
imperialist adventures. A single picture in Bishkek tells a quite significant
story, as we see China’s Xi, Russia’s Putin, India’s Modi and Pakistan’s Imran
Khan aligned with the leaders of four Central Asian “stans”.
These leaders represent the
current eight members of the SCO. Then there are four observer states –
Afghanistan, Belarus, Mongolia and, crucially, Iran – plus six dialogue
partners: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and, crucially, Turkey.
The SCO is bound to
significantly expand by 2020, with possible full membership for both Turkey and
Iran. It will then feature all major players of Eurasia integration.
Considering the current incandescence in the geopolitical chessboard, it’s
hardly an accident a crucial protagonist in Bishkek was the ‘observer’ state
Iran.
Iranian President Hassan
Rouhani played his cards masterfully. Rouhani speaking directly to Putin,
Xi, Modi and Imran, at the same table, is something to be taken very seriously.
He blasted the US under Trump as “a serious risk to stability in the region and
the world”. Then he diplomatically offered preferential treatment for
all companies and entrepreneurs from SCO member nations committed to investing
in the Iranian market.
The Trump administration has
claimed – without any hard evidence – that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps (IRGC), which Washington brands as a “terrorist organization” – was
behind the attacks on two tankers in the Gulf of Oman last week. As the SCO summit
developed, the narrative had already collapsed, as Yutaka Katada, president of
Japanese cargo company Kokuka Sangyo, owner of one of the tankers, said: “The
crew is saying that it was hit by a flying object.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad
Zarif had accused the White House of “sabotage diplomacy” but that did not
derail Rouhani’s actual diplomacy in Bishkek.
Xi was adamant; Beijing will
keep developing ties with Tehran “no matter how the situation changes”. Iran is
a key node of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It’s clear
for the leadership in Tehran that the way forward is full integration into the
vast, Eurasia-wide economic ecosystem. European nations that signed the nuclear
deal with Tehran – France, Britain and Germany – can’t save Iran economically.
The Indian hedge
But then Modi canceled a
bilateral with Rouhani at the last minute, with the lame excuse of “scheduling
issues”.
That’s not exactly a clever
diplomatic gambit. India was Iran’s second largest oil customer before the
Trump administration dumped the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action, over a year ago. Modi and Rouhani have discussed the
possibility of India paying for Iranian oil in rupees, bypassing the US dollar
and US sanctions.
Yet unlike Beijing and Moscow,
New Delhi refuses to unconditionally support Tehran in its do-or-die fight
against the Trump administration’s economic war and de facto blockade.
Modi faces a stark existential
choice. He’s tempted to channel his visceral anti-Belt-and-Road stance into the
siren call of a fuzzy, US-concocted Indo-Pacific
alliance – a de facto containment mechanism against “China,
China, China” as the Pentagon leadership openly admits it.
Or he could dig deeper into a
SCO/RIC (Russia-India-China) alliance focused on Eurasia integration and
multipolarity.
Aware of the high stakes, a
concerted charm offensive by the leading BRICS and SCO duo is in effect. Putin
invited Modi to be the main guest of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok
in early September. And Xi Jinping told Modi in their bilateral get together
he’s aiming at a “closer partnership”, from investment and industrial capacity
to pick up speed on the stalled Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) Economic
Corridor, another BRI stalwart.
Imran Khan, for his part,
seems to be very much aware how Pakistan may profit from becoming the ultimate
Eurasia pivot – as Islamabad offers a privileged gateway to the Arabian Sea,
side by side with SCO observer Iran. Gwadar port in the Arabian Sea is the key
hub of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), much better positioned than
Chabahar in Iran, which is being developed as the key hub of India’s mini-New
Silk Road version to Afghanistan and Central Asia.
On the Russian front, a charm
offensive on Pakistan is paying dividends, with Imran openly acknowledging Pakistan
is moving “closer” to Russia in a “changing” world, and has expressed keen
interest in buying Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets and Mi-35M attack helicopters.
Iran is at the heart of the
BRI-SCO-EAEU integration road map – the nuts and bolts of Eurasian integration.
Russia and China cannot allow Iran to be strangled. Iran boasts fabulous energy
reserves, a huge internal market, and is a frontline state fighting complex
networks of opium, weapons and jihadi smuggling – all key concerns for SCO
member states.
There’s no question that in
southwest Asia, Russia and Iran have interests that clash. What matters most
for Moscow is to prevent jihadis from migrating to the Caucasus and Central
Asia to plot attacks against the Russian Federation; to keep their navy and air
force bases in Syria; and to keep oil and gas trading in full flow.
Tehran, for its part, cannot
possibly support the sort of informal agreement Moscow established with Tel
Aviv in Syria – where alleged Hezbollah and IRGC targets are bombed by Israel,
but never Russian assets.
But still, there are margins
of maneuver for bilateral diplomacy, even if they now seem not that wide.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has issued the new rules
of the game; reduce imports to a minimum; aim for less reliance on oil and
gas exports; ease domestic political pressure (after all everyone agrees
Iranians must unite to face a mortal threat); and stick to the notion that Iran
has no established all-weather friends, even Russia and China.
St Petersburg, Bishkek,
Dushanbe
Iran is under a state of
siege. Internal regimentation must be the priority. But that does not preclude
abandoning the drive towards Eurasian integration.
The pan-Eurasian
interconnection became even more glaring at what immediately happened after
Bishkek; the summit of the Conference
on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in
Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
Bishkek and Dushanbe expanded
what had already been extensively discussed at the St Petersburg forum, as I
previously reported. Putin himself stressed that all vectors should be
integrated: BRI, EAEU, SCO, CICA and ASEAN.
The Bishkek Declaration,
adopted by SCO members, may not have been a headline-grabbing document, but it
emphasized the security guarantees of the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapons-Free
Zone Treaty, the “unacceptability of attempts to ensure one country’s security
at the expense of other countries’ security, and condemning “the unilateral and
unlimited buildup of missile defense systems by certain countries or groups of
states”.
Yet the document is a faithful
product of the drive towards a multilateral, multipolar world.
Among 21 signed agreements,
the SCO also advanced a road map for the crucial SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group,
driving deeper the Russia-China strategic partnership’s imperative that the
Afghan drama must be decided by Eurasian powers.
And what Putin, Xi and Modi
discussed in detail, in private in Bishkek will be developed by their
mini-BRICS gathering, the RIC (Russia-India-China) in the upcoming G20 summit
in Osaka in late June.
Meanwhile, the US
industrial-military-security complex will continue to be obsessed with Russia
as a “revitalized malign actor” (in Pentagonese) alongside the all-encompassing
China “threat”.
The US Navy is obsessed with
the asymmetrical know-how of “our Russian, Chinese and Iranian rivals” in
“contested waterways” from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf.
With US conservatives ratcheting
up “maximum pressure” trying to frame the alleged weak node of Eurasia
integration, which is already under total economic war because, among other
issues, is bypassing the US dollar, no one can predict how the chessboard will
look like when the 2020 SCO and BRICS summits take place in Russia.
The Fed Just Released a Damning Indictment of Capitalism
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/the-fed-just-released-a-damning-indictment-of-capitalism.html
America’s super-rich have grown about $21 trillion richer since 1989, while those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution have grown $900 billion poorer.
Koch-Oil Big Lies and Ecocide Writ Large in Canada
JUNE 18, 2019
As we know, big lies can run
free across borders with few joining the dots.
For example, no media reports
that China’s growing dispute with Canada is based on Canada’s enforcement of
the Trump administration’s unilateral and illegal embargo against
oil-competitor Iran. A cynical reply is that this is predictable. Canada
attacks any designated US Enemy in junior partnership with global corporate
command.
But this time there is a new
twist. Canada is attacking itself without knowing it.
A US Big-Oil backed juggernaut
of Conservative provincial governments and the federal Opposition are well
advanced in a Canada campaign to reverse longstanding parliamentary decisions,
environmental laws, climate action initiatives, Supreme Court directions,
first-nations negotiations, and bring down the government of Canada. Yet no-one
in public or media circles has joined the dots.
Canada’s vast tar-sands
deposits are world famous as surpassing Saudi Arabia oil-field capacities in
total barrels of potential yield. Great Canada! Yet few notice that over
two-thirds of the entire tar-sands operations are owned by foreign entities
sending their profits out of Canada, and almost all its raw product is
controlled for refining and sale in the US.
What is especially kept out of
the daily news is the incendiary fact that the infamous, election-interfering
and oft-EPA-convicted Koch brothers have a dominant stake in the toxic crude of
the Alberta tar-sands seeking a massive BC-pipeline out to their US refineries.
Koch-owned industries have
already extracted countless billions of their near $100-billion fortune from
the tar-sands and deployed their well-known voter-manipulations to change the
balance of power in Canada as they have done in the US.
The objective is the same in
both cases – ever more tax-free, publicly subsidized and state-enforced control
by US Big Oil of Alberta’s massive oil resources with no government regulations
or interferences in the way.
A Short History of the
Background Facts
Prior to the wide-mouth
pipelines of toxic Alberta crude planned through BC mountains, lands and waters
to US processors, oil has to be extracted from the tar-sands first. This
demands a continuous gargantuan depleting and polluting of the great
Athabaska Lake, River and watershed to steam-boil the tar out of the vast
open-pit mines. The immense open-pit mines are not formed or pumped out of
desert as in the Middle East. They are torn in state-size chunks out of the
earth’s mantle by monstrous wrecking machines ripping out the boreal forest
lands by the roots to destroy the carbons sinks and water-hold stabilization
they provide in the Northern region as well as pump out ever more
climate-changing gases.
To boil the tar out of the
endless open-pit mines already demands the equivalent of twice the amount of
water the entire City of Calgary uses and recycles in a year. But water
consumed by the tar-sand boiling is permanently polluted and wasted, and its
fresh- water take from the great Athabaska watershed will only increase as the
tar-sands ‘development’ is maximized, accessible oil fields are exhausted and
prices rise. So too the annihilation of the boreal forests acting as a sink for
carbon and holding the watershed together will be permanently lost.
Yet this is only the beginning
of what ends up being the biggest single point-source of carbon pollution and
climate destabilization in the world. It pollutes 2.5 times more carbon gases
than natural oil. Extraction mechanisms cost almost 8-times more fossil fuels
than natural oil, and use overall almost as much energy as is produced!
For many years now, the Kochs
have made most of their vast fortune from processing billions of
barrels of tar-sand crude in the US, not Canada. This is why their octopi
funding fronts have relentlessly pushed for ever more pipelines through others’
lands (including Dakota’s indigenous Standing Rock) to control this bigger and
safer business than tar-sand extraction itself.
This is also why the Kochs
have led the huge financing of climate change denial against the known science,
in which tar-sand extractions and burning produce far more toxic carbon gases
than high-grade oil. Most of all, the Kochs have acted out of sight to ensure
control over elected governments that might regulate and control their
above-the-law activities. They spent more than the Republican Party itself on
the 2012 US elections.
They invented and funded the
Congress-upending Tea-Party, and finance endless attack ads against all
resisters to their will to dominate the US Congress and Senate (and behind the
scenes the Trump presidency).
Canada’s Love-in With US Big
Oil as ‘Alberta’ and ‘National Unity’
In Canada, the governing
corporate media and parties have had such a media-transmitted love-in with Big
Oil that even Alberta’s NDPPremier Rachel Notley militantly demanded over
years that the US-dominated tar-sands mega project receive ever more rights and
public subsidies to run its toxic tar-sand crude over neighboring BC mountains
and the inland whale-inhabited ocean channels as a moral obligation to
Alberta.
The spell of ‘national unity’
to sell Alberta’s US-controlled oil sands is not broken even as the forest
fires and floods in BC and Ontario rage beyond all records from the
fossil-carbon-destabilized climate. Now six new pro-developer premiers of
Canada and the leader of the federal opposition are shouting that any
more delays to the Big-Oil pipelines are “breaking up the country”.
US Big Oil led by the Kochs’
political war chest and already covertly dominating the US Senate and
Presidency, has long gotten its way by such polarizing propaganda. Yet in
Canada the line is swallowed whole and spread by the national media as the
“unity crisis” facing the country.
Big Oil’s crucial step in
putting the tar-sands into the driver’s seat of Canada politics has gone
beneath the radar. First of all it assumes a premise which no-one questions
that all the toxic raw product must be piped through Canada unprocessed “to
market” (i.e., US refineries), and that Canada must duly enforce this off-shore
refinement “as a national priority”. Once this full false premise is
established as a given, it follows that the toxic Alberta crude must be piped
raw across the BC mountain forests and aquifers, and then into its
paradisal inland ocean channels for oil-tanker transport – now demanding a
rising and rarely mentioned seven-times more oil-tanker traffic with
toxic product that cannot be cleaned up.
Any ‘delays’ to this (never
named) US-Big-Oil agenda with Canada juniors are then attacked as against
‘national unity’. They are called ‘illogical’ and ‘punishing Alberta’- even
when the time is legally required for amending legislation that has been ordered
by the Supreme Court of Canada and for negotiating with the first nations whose
lands and waters will be overrun by the dirty-oil project in a period of
‘national reconciliation’.
In fact, the governing
premises here are lawless and driven by what the Kochs specialize in – a
fanatic anti-government agenda claiming to be for tax-payers and citizens. The
rule of law is implicitly dismissed. Carbon pricing legislated by elected
government – which sane oil corporations now accept as economically required –
is ferociously attacked.
Even Parliament’s long-passed
Bill C-48 protecting the Northern BC Coast from heavy oil-tanker traffic
(tankers carrying over 10,500 metric tons of tar-sand crude) – a bill supported
and voted for by over two-thirds of MP’s – is attacked in the Senate of Canada
backed by Big Oil and Alberta.
Thus the single most important
legal protection of Canada’s greatest environmental treasure, one that has been
the negotiated decision of Parliament and a condition for the oil-pipe through
BC, is marked for elimination. The federal Conservative Party goes along, and
its ever-smiling leader Andrew Scheer has promised if elected in the
approaching federal election to abolish Bill C-48.
The worst part of the whole
multiplying Big-Oil tar-sands mega-project may be the mammoth toxin-filled
tankers ploughing through and despoiling the world’s most awe-inspiring
green inland coasts in BC. It is like the Vietnam coast in this sublime natural
beauty, but even more than Vietnam, it is an ecological paradise carrying
a world of whales, eagles, biodiverse life and breathtaking
music of nature with thriving indigenous peoples protecting
the environment since ancient times in a breathtaking music of life
from rising green peaks to the fish depths of the ocean.
That the current Big Oil
forces, Alberta Conservatives, the federal Conservative Party, many in the
Senate of Canada, and various corporate media and fronts are all seeking to
reverse the already-legislated Bill C-48 protection of even the Northern BC
coasts from this grossest abuse of majestic life and beauty at every level and
scale of Creation demonstrates how cancerous the Big Oil tar-sands mega-project
has become.
Yet in the unseen, historic
shell-game going on behind the scenes, there is a convenient perpetual
side-show of attacks on PM Trudeau whose unforgiveable sin is not to push the
oil-pipes and tankers through BC fast enough.
Led by Jason Kenney as Premier
and the so-far invisible Koch brothers, the Conservative Party across provinces
and federally has formed into an implicit war against any public control over
and regulation of Big Oil. Any legal impediment to the massively toxic
extraction and export through Canada’s most pristine natural environments to US
control, refineries and far more profitable foreign sale is reverse portrayed
as an attack on Alberta and a strike at Canada’s unity as a country.
The assumed absolute necessity
of this pipeline and tanker extension of the multiplying tar-sands project is, in
fact, the demand of US-led Big Oil to loot and pollute Canada’s natural
resources for value added in the US (including for oil sale back to Canada at
multiplied prices). Yet every politician is supine before the transnational Big
Oil powers involved. Even Liberal leader Stephan Dionne who won the Liberal
leadership in 2006 on an environmental platform dared not question
the Koch-led tar-sands mega-project. “There is too much money in it’, he
responded to environmentalist concerns.
With all these unseen premises
against Canada’s common life interests now cast as inalterable necessity, the
trap is well set. As a federal election must occur before October 21, all the
wheels are being oiled for Conservative toppling of the Liberal government and
override of any resistance to the biggest force-play of US-led Big Oil in
Canada’s history.
The Unspeakable
Contradiction: Jobs, Environment, and Prosperity Lost by Raw-Crude
Pipeline and US Refinement
No-one yet recognizes the
Koch-led US Big Oil plan to extract Saudi-like treasure from Canada’s boreal
forests and to transport its toxic crude through and out of Canada with
ever-rising environmental damages at all levels is actually throwing away all
the Alberta “jobs”, “investment”, “tax revenues” and “prosperity” which it
promises to deliver. All of these economic benefits would actually materialize
and multiply many times if the tar-sands were processed and refined for
Canadian, US and global sale inside Alberta.
Most ironic of all, the
biggest immediate danger of Alberta tar-sand crude is that is irreversibly
toxic because it is not processed first before transportation over
land, aquifers, shorelands, and inland ocean channels. This is what the BC
resistance on the ground is most motivated by – the irreversibly disastrous
consequences when this unprocessed toxic crude spills anywhere along the rocky,
ocean-tempest way. The spills are an historically demonstrated certitude, but
like climate destabilization itself are denied by the Big-Oil beneficiaries in
future tens of billions in private profit.
As always in the ruling
narrative, there is ‘no alternative’. ‘It must be done now to create jobs
and get product to market’. Astonishingly, no-one in government or the
mass media observes the fact that many more well-paying permanent
jobs, far more oil revenues, and infinitely more safety from tar-oil
spills and dirty-oil carbon effluents are assured by processing the raw
bitumen in Alberta itself.
On closer examination not yet
considered, the political stampede for the trans-mountain pipeline of toxic
Alberta crude through the BC mountains and coastal waterways is based on a
very big lie. If Alberta and Canada’s government, globally
competitive Canada oil firms and working people really want
to “create jobs”, “get product to market’, “achieve
environmental security”, “provide needed investment and revenues for the
Canadian people”, and “reduce climate-destabilizing gases” the option is
economically self-evident.
Process the tar-sand product
in Canada and Alberta where the uncleanable toxins can be stripped out first by
rigorous regulation and safely precautions before flooded through
huge breakable pipes across mountains, aquifers, forests, and ocean coasts and
the world-renowned lands and waters of a 5000-year-old ecological wonder larger
and more unspoiled than any in the world.
Yet just as climate science
does not matter to rogue Big Oil, so too the prevention of toxic Alberta crude
running through Canada by processing it in Canada first is erased from
discussion. No public voice even mentions the environmental risks of pipelining
the toxic crude through the mountains and coats of BC when it could be cleaned
up in Alberta first. None yet flags all the lost Canadian fortune and economic
development going down the drain by raw-crude pipelines straight to the
control, refineries and global sale of foreign Big-Oil multi-billionnaires like
the Koch brothers. As for the foreign interference in Canada’s elections
manipulating every step, no-one reports this either.
For what? The driver is not “jobs
and prosperity”, “creating and sharing wealth”, and “making the indigenous
people independent” (what a Canada Senator incredibly just wrote to me). The
truth is the opposite on every count. Tens of thousands of high-paying jobs,
escalated tax revenues, immense new domestic profits and investment
opportunities are now all wasted for Canada by letting four times more of the
value-added go South to US Big Oil management, refineries and high-grade global
sales.
The real driver here is dispossession of
Canada’s workers, first peoples, taxpayers and the common wealth by ever more
multi-billion private profits extracted from its public lands at the lowest
oil-royalties in the world to further enrich the already obscenely rich who are
mostly not tax payers and are, in effect, lead destroyers of the life support
capacities of the planet.
More articles by: JOHN MCMURTRY
John McMurtry is a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada whose work is translated from Latin America to
Japan. He is the author of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems
published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his
most recent book isThe
Cancer Stage of Capitalism: from Crisis to Cure.
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