We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, October 27, 2012

The Backfire in Baghdad

Click here to access article by Ben Van Heuvelen from Foreign Policy.
How ExxonMobil's God Pod beat Iraq's oil chieftains at their own game.
This report is all about the maneuvering of ExxonMobil to gain their booty from the spoils made available to corporations by the US invasion and victory in Iraq. While the new puppet leaders pretended to represent the interests of the Iraqi people, ExxonMobil outflanked them by dealing directly with Kurdistan provincial authorities. Corporate sociopaths will do whatever it takes to get what they want including bribes, lies, threats, and crimes against humanity.

More importantly, the report provides an illustration of the differences between 20th century classic imperialist invasions of other countries to plunder resources and the current neo-liberal, globalist version of imperialism. Instead of US based corporations taking all the loot, under globalization the plunder is made available to all corporations which are owned by the trans-national One Percents. Trans-national corporations--most prominent among them are the major banks--are now directly engineering world events through various governmental and supranational agencies on behalf of the global capitalist class instead of national capitalist classes. The only condition required to play on this team is to recognise and follow the leadership of the dominant players--US, Britain, and Israel. An excerpt from Wikipedia helps to explain this new arrangement:
Bush [Bush Sr] started to take the initiative from Gorbachev during the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, when he began to define the elements of the new world order as he saw it, and link the new order’s success to the international community’s response in Kuwait.
Initial agreement by the Soviets to allow action against Saddam highlighted this linkage in the press. The Washington Post declared that this superpower cooperation demonstrates that the Soviet Union has joined the international community, and that in the new world order Saddam faces not just the U.S. but the international community itself. A New York Times editorial was the first to assert that at stake in the collective response to Saddam was "nothing less than the new world order which [Bush] and other leaders struggle to shape."
In A World Transformed, Scowcroft notes that Bush even offered to have Soviet troops amongst the coalition forces liberating Kuwait. Bush places the fate of the new world order on the ability of the U.S. and the Soviet Union to respond to Hussein’s aggression. The idea that the Persian Gulf War would usher in the new world order began to take shape. Bush notes that the "premise [was] that the United States henceforth would be obligated to lead the world community to an unprecedented degree, as demonstrated by the Iraqi crisis, and that we should attempt to pursue our national interests, wherever possible, within a framework of concert with our friends and the international community."
Of course, some inter-nation rivalries will still continue to threaten Anglo-Israeli-American dominance of this New World Order that Bush Sr outlined. The current dominant leaders of this New World Order are seeing that China and Russia are not cooperating as well as they expected. Hence, especially with regard to China, we see efforts being made to militarily contain them.