It isn't unheard of, for an entity to hire - to control random oposition.
But Tommywonk represents a ray of clean energy, as those who have been following his blog know, Tommywonk will stand in the winds and scorching sun - for clean energy.
Yet there is a history of opposition, in a state of over-development and environmental abuse, clean energy opposition (where's the wind energy?,) corporate hazardous waste stockpiles, (100% contaminated waterways;) dredge baby dredge (for fossil fuels and LNG;) climate change denial (good ridance state climatologist,) coal burning energy dominance (make NRG stop;) the Delaware nuclear radii, (the push for two more.)
Your appointment to a State clean energy position is interesting in the State of Denial, at a time when reducing greenhouse gases seems hopeless.
You represent those who know there is no choice but adding clean energy, as there is no future but to have clean energy becoming available, efficient, economical, effectively and immediately added to our energy mix. You are a voice, a spark of hope, in one greenhouse gas, polluting state, in one clean energy backward country, in a world of over population, energy greed, abuse and failing natural systems. But this is how change happens - one person, another voice, another location, another bolt of energy. And you will need an asemblage of voices behind you.
In one generation America has been transformed from a democracy into a strange new form of government, Disaster Capitalism.
Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps ...the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent. "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that."
because...
Environmental Failure: A Case for a New Green Politics Today’s politics will never deliver environmental sustainability. Environmentalists must join with those seeking to reform politics and strengthen democracy...progressive politics are too enfeebled and Washington is increasingly in the hands of powerful corporate interests and concentrations of great wealth. The best hope for real change in America is a fusion of those concerned about environment, social justice, and strong democracy into one powerful progressive force.
We were dizzy with a sense of liberation — the tea-party protest in this parallel universe was from the left, and the president was on board! We were taking back our country from the banksters!
FREE BOOK!
The fake American empire was the Achilles heel of the real one-party state,Jonathan Schell
It is essential that we develop effective alternatives to society's current patterns of violence. We will work to demilitarize, and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, without being naive about the intentions of other governments.
We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in helpless situations. We promote non-violent methods to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree, and will guide our actions toward lasting personal, community and global peace.
The abolition of war has become not only desirable but absolutely necessary if the planet is to be saved. It is an idea whose time has come.
As worldwide demand for hydrocarbons soared, the United States was left with three policy choices: It could try to combine alternative energy sources with rigorous conservation to reduce or eliminate a significant portion of energy imports; it could accept the leverage conferred on OPEC by the energy crunch and attempt to negotiate for an adequate share of what might soon enough become an inadequate supply; or it could use its military power in an effort to coerce Middle East suppliers into satisfying American requirements at the expense of everyone else. Beginning with Jimmy Carter, five U.S. presidents chose the coercive strategy, with George W. Bush finally deciding that violent, preemptive regime change was needed to make it work. The other options remain unexplored.
"Here is this kid, in the center of Beirut, with insurgents on every side. With a little self-discipline, his mom's interest and attention, and some direction and protection from an old man, he's making it.
"This is how we're going to overcome our situation, by benefitting from one another's existence."
We do know, or should know, that every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence -- if only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands, be they the government or the governed, have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to substitute violence for it.
Hannah Arendt, On Violence, 1970
As U.S. military strategy in Iraq has begun to unravel,
our military has adopted progressively more vicious methods to attempt to maintain its control of the country. In the current iteration, this involves escalated bombing attacks against densely populated urban areas in an attempt to bomb the Sunnis into submission, and the development of anti-Sunni brigades of Shia and Kurdish troops to inflict punishment on resisting cities. The American role in Iraq continues to get uglier.
This is terrorism by definition -- attacking the civilian population to get it to withdraw support from the enemy. The change in strategy, therefore, represents the embrace of terrorism as the principle tactic for subduing the Iraqi resistance.
i can wish that your boss had surrounded himself with close
advisers who had, once at least, held a dying boy in their arms and
watched the life run out of his eyes while they lied to him and told
him, over and over, "You are going to be all right. Hang on! Help is
coming. Don't quit now..." Such men in place of those who had never
known service or combat or the true cost of war, and who pays that
price, and had never sent their children off to do that hard and
unending duty.
279 photographs and 19 videos from the Army's internal investigation record a harrowing three months of detainee abuse inside the notorious prison -- and make clear that many of those responsible have yet to be held accountable.
U.S. Joint Forces Command Report: Iraqi Perspectives on Operation Iraqi Freedom
I was disheartened to discover that the News Journal did not have any coverage of a local demonstration and vigil on October 26th to commemorate the tragic milestone of 2000 soldiers dying in Iraq, as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and to protest U.S. occupation in Iraq.
This vigil was coordinated with similar events nationwide.
With rising discontent among Americans about our involvement in this war, it is an incredible disservice to Delawareans that you did not even cover a significant public demonstration.
So many Americans are uninformed about or detached from important political issues.
It is no wonder this is true in Delaware with the vacuous media coverage here.
Judy Schneider
Wilmington
[this is the original version of the letter to the editors of The News Journal, 2005-11-07]
Anti-war protesters will stretch a 400-foot-long rope decorated with hundreds of black, white and red ribbons along a section of Concord Pike on Saturday to mark the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion.
The black ribbons represent the more than 2,400 American soldiers, civilian contractors and journalists killed during the fighting, protest coordinator June Eisley said.
"The red ribbons stand for the over 16,000 U.S. soldiers who have been wounded, and the white ribbons symbolize over 30,000 Iraqi civilians who have been killed," she said.
Since the war started on March 20 in Iraq (which with the time difference was
the night of March 19 in the U.S.) over 2,237 American soldiers have been killed
and tens of thousands of Iraqis have perished. Estimates of Iraqi deaths range
from 31,800 to over 100,000, but because accurate reporting is difficult and the
war has disrupted proper operation of many water purification and sewage
treatment plants, many people who have died from preventable health problems had
the infrastructure been intact, may not have been included in these figures. No
matter what numbers you use, each of these people has left behind grieving
hearts and broken circles of family; they should never have died on the altar of
an unnecessary, immoral, and illegal war, based on faulty intelligence and
untruths. It is time for the killing of U.S. troops and Iraqis to stop.
Linda Bilmes, a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce who now teaches at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at
Columbia University and a 2001 Nobel Laureate in economics, estimate that the
ultimate dollar cost of the war in Iraq will be between $1 trillion and $2
trillion dollars. Their calculations include the money for combat operations,
plus the future costs of providing health care and disability benefits for
veterans of the war as well as 24-hour medical care for the 16,300 U.S. soldiers
so badly wounded that such care is necessary to keep them alive. Also, included
in their estimate are the expenses of replacing military hardware, re-enlistment
bonuses, higher benefits to entice re-enlistment, and the interest expenses on
the extra debt that the war has caused our nation. In their essay that points
out how expensive the rush to war has been, they conclude by stating, Had we
waited, the value of the information we would have learned from the [U.N.
weapons] inspectors would arguably have saved the nation at least $1 trillion --
enough money to fix Social Security for the next 75 years twice over.
It is ironic that The News Journal would call for honesty in its dishonest
assessment of the situation in Iraq. Honesty would be admitting that the United State invaded Iraq
for a purpose that was never viewed as acceptable; the Bush doctrine, which asserts the right to conduct
pre-emptive strikes. Honesty would be remembering that the Bush administration's stated
reasons were to find weapons of mass destruction, which were a supposed threat to our country, and to
end Iraq's links to al-Qaida. It has been proved that both of these reasons were bogus.
Honesty would not be parroting the Bush administration's fallback excuse that Iraq was invaded in order to bring democracy
to it. How free was Iraq when former ambassador L. Paul Bremer dictated that Iraqi workers would not be allowed to form
unions? How independent will Iraq be when administration officials insist that Iraq privatize most of the industries
that have been run by the government, particularly the oil industry, which gave financial help to all Iraqi citizens,
in order to allow international companies to take control of them?
Similarly, the News Journal has echoed Senator Biden's line that if we are only honest, people will accept the deaths of
thousands more American troops and squandering of our treasury, which goes to enrich the war industry.
The truth is many Arab people view the invasion of Iraq as the start of another crusade, only this time the purpose is seizure of their oil
by international corporations.
Desperate people commit desperate acts. As long as our military is present in force in Iraq, that encourages insurgents. Our invasion has created a real mess
in Iraq. We owe them financial aid. Other than that, we need to get the hell out of there to spare the spilling of more blood. Allow the
Iraqis to figure how to run their own country.
David McCorquodale
Treasurer
Green Party of Delaware
Sherwood Park II
[letter to the editors of The News Journal, 2005-06-28]
During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.
President Bush's speech ignored Congress, and instead was aimed at U.S. public opinion (where his support is dwindling) and international allies in the U.N. (where the U.S. is significantly isolated). It was designed to divert attention from the real reasons for this coming war: oil and empire. It is a war designed to rewrite the political map of the Middle East, and is not dependent on the particular threat posed by a particular dictator. The crimes of the Iraqi regime are serious and longstanding -- back to the days of massive U.S. economic and military support, and U.S. provision of the biological seed stock for the anthrax and other germs President Bush warned us about. But launching a massive bombing campaign against Baghdad, a city of more than 5 million inhabitants-- grandmothers, kindergarten classes, teenagers -- will not secure human rights for those living and dying under those bombs.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that it was always the Bush administration's intent to redesign the Middle East after the September 11 attacks, which exposed a "deep malignancy growing" in the region, and that the Iraq war was part of that plan..."So what I'm describing to you, Senator, is not what you voted for in the war resolution..."
"We have to level with the American people," said Sen. George V. Voinovich, Ohio Republican. "This is another world war."
But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war.
Frank Rich's Karl and Scooter's Excellent Adventure, 2005-10-23, NYT
For Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush to get what they wanted most, slam-dunk midterm election victories,
and for Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney to get what they wanted most, a war in Iraq for reasons predating
9/11, their real whys for going to war had to be replaced by fictional, more salable ones. We
wouldn't be invading Iraq to further Rovian domestic politics or neocon ideology; we'd be doing
so instead because there was a direct connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda and because Saddam was
on the verge of attacking America with nuclear weapons. The facts and intelligence had to be
fixed to create these whys; any contradictory evidence had to be dismissed or suppressed.
It started with George Herbert Walker Bush, and it was a policy continued through eight years of the Clinton presidency, and then brought us to this current disastrous course of action under the current Bush Administration.
...It wasn't about changing the regime. It wasn't about getting rid of the Baathist party or transforming Iraq into a modern democracy back in the early 1990s. It was about getting rid of one man, Saddam Hussein.
We [UNSCOM] thought we were going after the concealment mechanism, but it turned out that the CIA was setting us up so that we would go to facilities that housed Saddam's security. It was anticipated they would block us, and then when we withdrew, there would be a military strike that would decapitate the security of Saddam.
The hijacking of UNSCOM, by Susan Wright, May/June 1999 pp. 23-25 (vol. 55, no. 03) (c) 1999 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
A people limited in number and energy and in the land they occupy have the choice of improving to the utmost the political and economic management of their own land, confining themselves to such accessions of territory as are justified by the most economical disposition of a growing population; or they may proceed, like the slovenly farmer, to spread their power and energy over the whole earth, tempted by the speculative value or the quick profits of some new market, or else by mere greed of territorial acquisition, and ignoring the political and economic wastes and risks involved by this imperial career. John Hobson, 1904
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much our lives become apparent.
Chris Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (Anchor Books, 2003)
The beatings and other abusesserved mainly to relieve stress, according to the three soldiers. "On their day off people would show up all the time," said one sergeant. "Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport.
Pre-9/11 Plans for Attacking Iraq -- There Were Two
Greg Palast on Democracy Now, March 21, 2005: Secret U.S. Plans For Iraq's Oil Sparked Political Fight Between Neocons and Big Oil (Guess who lost?)
[transcript] [RealMedia video]
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
Greg Palast, June 15, 2005:Here is a small timeline of confidential skullduggery dug up and broadcast by my own team for BBC Television and Harper's on the secret plans to seize Iraq's assets and oil.
..."A full air offensive" was under way months before the invasion had officially begun...The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist. This was war.
"The no-fly zones had little to do with protecting ethnic and religious groups from Saddam Hussein's brutality" but were in fact an "illegal establishment...for bilateral interests of the US and the UK."
The Nation, 2005-06-01
Downing Street Memo a Growing Problem for Bush
As for allegations that he had decided to go to war against Iraq by the summer of 2002, Bush declared, "There's nothing further from the truth." He said he and Blair talked about "how can we do this peacefully. . . . Both of us didn't want to use our military."
Blair also insisted that he and Bush tried to end the dispute with Saddam without armed conflict. "The facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all," Blair said. Lawrence O'Rourke, 2005-06-17
The war between the CIA and BushCo is a BUSINESS war!!!
Oh, I'd bet it's more than just bidness...To me, with lots of tin-foil and speculation disclaimers, Plame's operation was probably onto some really really serious stuff that could've taken out the Bush family and the neocons for good.
Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney, who learned that she was a CIA officer, were obligated to protect that secret. Instead, they betrayed Valerie and helped destroy an intelligence network that was devoted to trying to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That's the real story that true Americans should be fretting over.
..."a huge problem" in terms of an abuse of power. LA Times, 2005-05-12
Analysis:
The so-called "rules of objective journalism" dovetail with the disciplined functioning of a one-party government to keep the political debate willfully opaque and stupid.
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
(an unnamed "senior advisor" to President Bush to a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall (2004))
What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground. We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.
(anonymous high-level "officials in Washington and Baghdad," Aug. 14, 2005 Washington Post, "U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq" [What Does the Administration's Leaked Mea Culpa on Iraq Portend?])
He said to me [Mickey Herskowitz in 1999]: "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief." And he said, "My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it." He said, "If I have a chance to invade...if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."
"Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."
Iraq was undoubtedly targeted for a number of reasons: The administration had energy on the brain. Cheney, among others, was looking at the globe and its energy flows in the largest of geopolitical ways. Access to and use of bases in "holy" Saudi Arabia was already in question, and Iraq, with untold, untapped oil reserves, was an obvious alternate basing spot, sitting as it did right in the heart of what the neocons were then calling the planet's "arc of instability." (Think: oil lands). There was also a Bush-family grudge match with Saddam to attend to. But perhaps most important of all, Saddam's Iraq looked like such an easy mark.
Tom Dispatch, February 21, 2006 at 8:52 am
The United States began its occupation of Germany and Japan sixty years ago, yet large U.S. military bases remain in those countries today. Does anyone really believe the Americans will walk away from their mega-bases in Iraq just because the Iraqis want the Yankees to go home? Why, that would spoil the big plan, wouldn't it? The pretext, it now appears, is dispensable, but the plan most likely is not.
July 1, 2005: The biggest obstacle, analysts say, is the nature of an elusive enemy that incessantly replenishes its ranks.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Taluto, who commands the 42nd Infantry Division in Iraq, said insurgent leaders draw from a seemingly endless pool of Iraqis willing to kill Americans for between $150 for firing a mortar and $20,000 for blowing themselves up.
Most of the solution is to get the Sunni Arabs aboard the political process. Until then, American troops in Iraq and Americans at home must have the patience to have casualties for many years to come.
Rosa Brooks: A dodo of a national security policy, March 24, 2006
An effective national security policy in the age of asymmetric warfare would bear little resemblance to the neolithic strategies we have seen from the administration over the last five years. To protect ourselves, we need a new generation of Americans who are capable of looking outward, as well as inward; we need leaders (and citizens) with the linguistic and cultural skills necessary to understand the perspectives of allies and adversaries alike.
It may already be too late to prevent Iraq from exploding, but "Our policy is to make Iraq a colony. We won't let go." The Quagmire, Robert Dreyfuss, Rolling Stone, May 7, 2005.
We are approaching a situation that is unstable, of a war of all against all, complete chaos, where the government is ineffective, the security is ineffective, and anybody can be killed at any time by anybody. Kenneth Katzman, Persian Gulf Region expert, U.S. Congressional Research Service, May 17, 2005.
Above all, keep encouraging Americans to see Iran as a nation best understood with Washington's policy-driven cliches, rather than a country with a complex and authentic political process underway. The less that Americans really know about Iran, the easier it will be to launch the missiles.
Sometimes it seems as if politicians are the only remaining enthusiastic supporters of the Iraq war even as they lay the groundwork for the next war with Iran. And yet paradoxically the antiwar movement is weak and ineffective.
Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on Iranian Ironies, a soup-to-nuts discussion of Iran, Iraq, and the Bush administration's boomerang policies when it comes to both of them.
In a historic irony, Iran's most dangerous enemy of all, the United States, invaded Iran's neighbor with an eye to eventually toppling the Tehran regime -- but succeeded only in defeating itself.
The October, 2004 Vanity Fair article,
The Path To Florida;
"Florida 2000 was so bizarre, so surreal, and, for a large number of Americans, so patently illegitimate that they can't imagine the likes of it ever happening again."
What happened in Florida, in Ohio.
United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size
of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong
terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from
Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their
ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the
Vietcong. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in
President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional
processes in South Vietnam.
US Encouraged by Vietnam Vote, Peter Grose, New York Times, Sept. 4, 1967
There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals
would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this
will always be 'the man in the street.' Arguments must therefore be crude, clear
and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was
unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.
Joseph Goebbels
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