May 18, 2010 archive

May 18, 2010

by Kathy Kelly and Josh Brollier

Islamabad–On May 12th, the day after a U.S. drone strike killed 24 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, two men from the area agreed to tell us their perspective as eyewitnesses of previous drone strikes.    

One is a journalist, Safdar Dawar, General Secretary of the Tribal Union of Journalists. Journalists are operating under very difficult circumstances in the area, pressured by both militant groups and the Pakistani government.  Six of his colleagues have been killed while reporting in North and South Waziristan. The other man, who asked us not to disclose his name, is from Miranshah city, the epicenter of North Waziristan.  He works with the locally based Waziristan Relief Agency, a group of people committed to helping the victims of drone attacks and military actions.  “If people need blood or medicine or have to go to Peshawar or some other hospital,” said the social worker, “I’m known for helping them. I also try to arrange funds and contributions.”

Both men emphasized that Pakistan’s government has only a trivial presence in the area.  Survivors of drone attacks receive no compensation, and neither the military nor the government investigate consequences of the drone attacks.  

The black plague spreads.

The leadership lies.

The CEO’s spin.

We are not ignorant of the horrific nightmare you have unleashed.

Chris Hedges has a piece on TruthDig today about our corporate leaders and how these ‘Little Eichmanns’ are doing exactly what many thought would happen when you commoditize every living breathing thing on the planet.

You die.

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

Those who carry out this global genocide-men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume”-are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

Hedges

Something Happened

James Howard Kunstler

truthout op-ed

Tuesday, May 18, the year of the tiger

Everybody in the world is broke, except for maybe Lloyd Blankfein, and he may not end up broke so much as broken — by a political meat-grinder that is revving up to turn the world’s woes and swindles into a new kind of Long Emergency sausage, to be distributed among the roiling, angry masses as a synthetic substitute for nutriment. Call it a synthetic non-collateralized political obligation.

Something snapped in the world last week and a lot of people around the world sensed it — especially in the organs of news and opinion — but this ominous twang was not very clearly identified. It was, in fact, the sound of the financial becoming political. The macro-swindle of a worldwide Ponzi orgy now stands revealed and the vacuum left in its place is about to suck everything familiar into it — standards-of-living, hopes, dreams, not to mention lives. The political action will be a desperate scramble to determine who and what is able to escape getting sucked into this black hole of annihilation. It’s very suddenly shaping up to become an epic in human history.

Meanwhile, a giant oil blob lies quivering in deep waters off the Gulf coast, like some awful amorphous Moby Dick full of malice waiting to sink Pequod America — or at least the economies of five states. A few months from now, the BP corporation will wonder why it didn’t go into something safe and predictable like the pants business instead of oil exploration. They will surely question the viability of conducting future business anywhere near the USA, and the USA will enter a wilderness of soul-searching about the drill-baby-drill strategy that only a few scant weeks ago seemed to be a settled matter. Tough to have your future hoped-for energy supplies evaporate at the same time that your hopes for future prosperity get sucked into a black hole.

I’ve maintained for a long time that the folks down Dixie way are the the most dangerously crazy people in America and the Deepwater Horizon oil blob is not going to improve their outlook when it slops over their beaches and bayous. They’ll blame Obama for it by syllogism. Anyway, they are only marginally more crazy than the rest of the folks in the USA. Those folks are warming up for an election season that is going to send a horde of exterminating angels into the halls of congress and the governor’s mansions, and before too long those merchants of retribution are going to appoint their inquisitors. It’s going to be a heckuva spectacle.

[snip] [snip] [snip]

Jacques Offenbach was the son of a Cantor and his problem was that he was either too funny, or not quite funny enough.

You see, he made his mark as a composer and producer of Operettas that satirized not only the politics and culture of the day, but also the musical styles of other famous composers.  If you don’t speak French perhaps the best way to think about him is as the Arthur Sullivan of Paris, only without quite as much pretension.

Instead of Gilbert he had a pair of lyricists that he commonly worked with, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy.

The Second Empire had quite an appetite for frivolity and farce and Offenbach was very popular, but at the onset of the Franco Prussian War he was accused of being a Bismarkian mole and chased from Paris, based mostly on the unfortunate circumstances of his birth.  You see, he wasn’t just a Jew, he was also born in Cologne.

He fled to Spain with his family and did some touring in Italy and Austria, but he really was quite a patriotic Frenchman and soon returned to Paris.

Alas the climate had changed.  The Third Republic, as new regimes often do, ushered in a new puritanical spirit and farce and comedy were not as trendy as they once were.  He was criticized by the Right for his disrespect for the Monarchy and Army, and by the Left as being a lapdog of the establishment and a sellout, including Emile Zola in the novel Nana.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, Zola was a ‘Naturalist’ author who couldn’t write a character without using cardboard, which is kind of a fundamental failing given his philosophy.  Nietzsche on the other hand thought Offenbach 6 times the composer Wagner was, which is high praise indeed.

So he was harassed by the Police and forced into bankruptcy, but was able to make some money back with a tour of the U.S. and was able to mount a few more successful productions before his death in 1880.

Tonight’s piece, Les belles Américaines is a Waltz he composed late in his career.  It was posted by ZIEHRER18431922.