When does Afghanistan officially qualify as a “quagmire”?

We've now been in Afghanistan longer than we were in Vietnam, with a similar amount of progress. American casualties are again on the rise, along with the power of the Taliban. The new general in charge, General Petraeus, assures us that he will continue to try to minimize civilian casualties, so long as that doesn't interfere too much with his plans to bomb the hell out of the country. Our rules to protect civilians were a bit too "bureaucratic" for his liking--not that they actually worked, in any case. The now-infamous Rolling Stone profile of General McChrystal has this to say:

In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent[!] from the same period in 2009 – a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. "We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.
The Rolling Stone piece mysteriously left out the next part of McChrystal's statement. Here's the full quotation (emphasis mine):
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”

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Alleged financial reform

Regarding the recently announced "financial reform," Dylan Ratigan asks us to consider what has not been fixed.

- The Cops (regulators and ratings agencies) working for the crooks. - Banks still Too Big To Fail. - Banks gambling with your deposits. - Banks allowed to "mark to myth" and use off-balance sheet accounting to bonus themselves into the atmosphere, with the taxpayer taking the fall. - Banks getting trillions from the Fed, Fannie and Freddie -- AKA you, the future and present taxpayer. What does it mean for us? It means that the same people who brought you these horrible changes -- rising wealth discrepancy, massive unemployment and a crumbling infrastructure -- have now further institutionalized the policies that will keep the causes of these problems firmly in place.
This is Orwellian, indeed, yet the Democrats are celebrating. What's going on? Kevin Baker takes a crack at it in a Harper's article titled "The Vanishing Liberal: How the Left Learned to be Helpless."
Coming to power when he did, with the political skills and the majorities he possesses, Barack Obama squandered an almost unprecedented opportunity But it is increasingly clear that he never intended to challenge the power structure he had so skillfully penetrated. With the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations are, once more, people, American democracy has snapped shut again--the great, forced opening of the past 130 years has ended. There is no longer any meaningful reformist impulse left in or politics. The idea of modern American liberalism has vanished among our elite, and simply voting for one man or supporting one of the two major parties will not restore it. The work will have to be done from the ground up, and it will have to be done by us.

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Sheldon Whitehouse on government’s subservience to corporate money

Sheldon Whitehouse points out that recent government regulatory failures are merely symptoms of deep and insidious corruption. The problems go well beyond MMS, as Whitehouse documents in this video. Written excerpts of his speech are here. Along the way, he makes it clear that Citizens United allows the tentacles of industry to reach even further into government, until government is only serving monied interests and not the public interest. He gives many examples along the way, and demonstrates that he absolutely understands the process by which government is being corrupted by corporate money. It's a process that inevitably culminates with the surrender of meaningful government. Whitehouse names names and gives lost of examples. At the four minute mark, he makes clear that the references to "walruses" in oil company reports is not a laughing matter. It is powerful evidence that MMS was a corporate captive. This is a brave and direct statement. Whitehouse makes it clear that, given the extent of the problem, our entire Constitution and our way of life are both at risk.

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How did democracy cease to be in Iran?

What happened to democracy in Iran? It didn't die a natural death. Iranian democracy was killed by well known actors that included British Petroleum and the United States. You can learn more by listening to Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times reporter, who was iran-oil-creative-commonsinterviewed by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now (video interview). From the 1920's through the 1940's Great Britain controlled all of the oil in Iran, thanks to "a corrupt deal that they had struck with a few representatives of the old declining Iranian monarchy, all of whom had been paid off." The troubles began when Iran began to assert ownership of its own oil:

[A]fter World War II, when the winds of nationalism and anti-colonialism were blowing throughout the developing world, Iranians developed this idea: we’ve got to take our oil back. And that was the general—the kind of national passion that brought to power Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was the most prominent figure in the democratic period of Iran during the late '40s and early ’50s. It was Mosaddegh's desire, supported by a unanimous vote of the democratically elected parliament of Iran, to nationalize what was then the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. They carried out the nationalization. The British and their partners in the United States fiercely resisted this. And when they were unable to prevent it from happening, they organized the overthrow of Mosaddegh in 1953. So that overthrow not only produced the end of the Mosaddegh government, but the end of democracy in Iran, and that set off all these other following consequences. The Shah ruled for twenty-five years with increasing repression. His rule produced the explosion of the late '70s that produced the Islamic regime. So, it was to protect the interests of the oil company we now know as BP that the CIA and the British Secret Service joined together to overthrow the democratic government in Iran and produce all the consequences we've seen in Iran over the last half-century.img_0083
Why was the United States willing to get involved in this despicable overthrow? Kinzer suggests that the U.S. was more than willing to believe that there were "communists" in Iran, despite any supporting evidence. The British merely took advantage of this American paranoia. Therefore, the U.S. facilitated the overthrow of a sovereign Middle Eastern country without any justification.

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Deepwater horizon: an event horizon for the oil age?

In a speech given earlier this year, the Chief Economist for BP made his case that fears about peak oil were overblown.

"One factor is resources. They are limited, and a barrel can only be produced once. But ideas of peak oil supply are not true. Doomsayers have exaggerated the issue. The bell-shaped curve of production over time does not apply to the world's oil resources," he told the seminar in Alkhobar city. "Those who believe in peak oil tend to believe that technology and economics don't matter, and I think this is false.The application of technology, the innovation of new technology and economic forces especially mean that recoverable oil resources can increase. If there is a peak in oil, it will come from the demand side. There are always fears, but these remain overstated and exaggerated."
A barrel can only be produced once, this is true. And technology has allowed us to tap into oil reservoirs that were unthinkable a few decades ago. Yet as the catastrophic ongoing oil geyser in the Gulf of Mexico shows us, technology is not the savior the oil majors would have us believe. Advanced technology may allow us to drill for oil a mile under water, but it obviously does not offer any easy solutions when things go horribly awry as they have on the Deepwater Horizon rig, which has been spewing hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for over a month. [More . . . ]

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