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Monday, February 3, 2003 |
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"We are going to have to talk to all the people that will listen to us about what it is we believe, what it is we know to be right. We are going to have to find ways to talk to the people that we cannot talk to now. We are going to have to find ways to be a communication ourselves."
- - John Trudell
RHINO HERE:
Recently, in attempts to counter accusations that the shrub gang just wants to invade Iraq to glom its oil fields, Secretary of State Colin Powell promised that if the U.S. military occupies the country after an invasion, the U.S. would hold Iraq's oil fields "in trust" for the Iraqi people. This in an interview with U.S. journalists.
"If we are the occupying power, it will be held for the benefit of the Iraqi people and it will be operated for the benefit of the Iraqi people," Powell said.
http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2003/16794.htm
If anyone believes this blatant lie, I've got a big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. I'll sell ya cheap. It reminds me of the story of the NASA representatives asking some American Indians if they would make an offering to place in a capsule, along with other symbolic American memorabilia, that would go up into space to hopefully be found by Extra Terrestrials. The Indians said sure and gave them a plaque with some writing in a Native language. When the NASA guys got home, they asked their language experts to tell them what the plaque said. Turns out the translated message read, "Watch out for these thievin' idiots! They'll steal all your land!"
Ya see, when the U.S. Government took over Indian lands, they told the Indians they'd hold the land "in trust", and they'd account for any profits that were made on the leasing of those lands, and pay the Indian people & their decedents in perpetuity. For those not familiar, there is a landmark Indian trust lawsuit, "Cobell v. Norton", which seeks to uncover the full scope of malfeasance in the government's mismanagement of BILLIONS of dollars of assets held in trust for 500,000 individual Indian trust beneficiaries, and recover those funds.
LEARN ABOUT THE PENDING "INDIAN TRUST" CASE
http://www.indiantrust.com/
MOYERS ON THE MISSING ELEMENT OF THE STATE OF THE UNION
Speaking of "Billions Of Dollars" here's a short commentary of shrub's SOTU speech by former presidential speech writer Bill Moyers, focusing on what little bush left out of the speech, namely how to pay for all those wonderful ideas while cutting taxes.
"Paying for War", by Bill Moyers , PBS.com, 1/31/03
Listening to the president's State of the Union speech, i was reminded of my own experience working on presidential speeches many years ago for LBJ. We, too, practiced the adage to "accentuate the positive". What we didn't say was often more telling than what we did; we never put a price tag on the Vietnam War, for example; we wanted a cheap war and a great society, and got neither. Mr. Bush this week was expansive on what he wants, and silent on the total bill for it. You may remember he fired the adviser who publicly predicted the war against Iraq would cost as much as $200 billion; now no one's talking, except to admit the Pentagon has no reliable estimate of the ultimate price.
In his State of the Union speech last year, Mr. Bush said the federal budget deficit "will be small and short term." He said nothing about it this year, although we now know that the budget to be released on Monday will show a deficit of $300 billion or more - the largest deficit in American history. The largest - and that's before the cost of the war is added on, or the cost of occupying Iraq once Saddam Hussein is gone.
Watching Mr. Bush grow intense and animated and eloquent as he made the case for war - and hearing the exuberance that filled Washington and the pundits' chatter afterward - I was reminded of a speech by Abraham Lincoln back in 1848. He was Congressman Lincoln then, he voted against war with Mexico, and he lamented the coming of that "attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood, that serpent's eye that charms to destroy." The price of Mr. Bush's war is yet to be reckoned.
THIS COMMENTARY POSTED AT:
http://www.pbs.org/now/commentary/moyers18.html
ONE MILLION TAXPAYERS FOR PEACE
If you're interested in taking a position of tax resistance in connection with the current military buildup, you might consider a plan originating in the 1040 club of Santa Rosa, California.
The taxpayer makes out a check for the amount of Federal taxes due, less $10.40. A letter is enclosed with the the check and form, explaining that the action of withholding the $10.40 is an expression of opposition to war as a strategy for justice or peacemaking, and that the money will be used for domestic social purposes. A check for $10.40 can then be made out to the CMTC (Conscience and Military Tax Campaign), marked "For OMTFP" (One MillionTaxpayers for Peace), and mailed to: OMTFP, 467 Sebastopol Ave., Santa Rosa, CA 95401.
These are then forwarded to The CMTC and deposited in an escrow account and uses the interest to fund peace and social justice movements. The CMTC is a long-established program of the Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia, in Seattle. The plan offers a way of civil disobedience is relatively risk-free, but can make an impact. Consider how Thoreau's refusal to pay the dollar in poll tax levied to support the Mexican War has affected world opinion. Here are a couple of links to other options and more information: http://www.tea-circle.com/sctfp/1040club.html
http://www.monitor.net/~1mt/who.html
THE BOTTOM LINE today is an article from the UK Observer, very telling on issues of whether this proposed war is about oil or not. It leaks statements from "Pentagon sources" saying that US military planners "have crafted strategies that will allow us to secure and protect those fields as rapidly as possible in order to then preserve those prior to destruction". In other words, instead of allowing Saddam to destroy any oil fields during the war as he did in Kuwait, this time the U.S. plans to "secure" the oil fields first.
This heightened concerned wouldn't be because the U.S. is currently facing the most chronic shortage of its oil stocks in 27 years, would it? Apparently this shortage, contributed to by the loss of imports from Venezuela, is so alarming, that the U.S. is now importing barrels from........Iraq???
7:51:29 AM 
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UK Observer, 1/26/03 - ...Washington is split along hawk-dove lines about the role of oil in a post-Saddam Iraq. Two sets of meetings sponsored by the State Department and Vice-President Dick Cheney's staff have been attended by representatives of ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhilips and Halliburton, the company that Cheney ran before his election.
The dovish line, led by Colin Powell, places the emphasis on 'protection' of Iraq's oil for Iraq's people. His State Department has pointed to a precedent in the US interpretation of international law set in the 1970s. Then, when Israel occupied Egypt's Sinai desert, the US did not support attempts to transfer oil resources.
While the State Department is mindful of cynical world opinion about US war aims, officials do not always stick to the script. Grant Aldonas, Under Secretary at the US Department of Commerce, said war 'would open up this spigot on Iraqi oil which certainly would have a profound effect in terms of the performance of the world economy for those countries that are manufacturers and oil consumers'.
The US economy will announce zero growth this week, prolonging three years of sluggish performance. Cheap oil would boost an economy importing half of its daily consumption of 20m barrels...
ENTIRE ARTICLE AT:
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,882512,00.html
7:32:18 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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