Oil / Gas

Jeremy Scahill

Scott Horton Interviews Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill discusses Yemen, President Saleh, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Al Qaeda, Obama, Bush, Ed Schultz, Libya.
Source: Scott Horton Interviews Jeremy Scahill

Congressman Dennis Kucinich

Scott Horton Interviews Rep. Dennis Kucinich

Rep. Dennis Kucinich discusses his attempt to provoke debate in Congress concerning the authority to declare war. He voted to defund the Libyan War.
Source: Scott Horton Interviews Rep. Dennis Kucinich

Glenn Greenwald

Scott Horton Interviews Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald talks about Obama and War Powers Act and the Libyan War. He also comments on WikiLeaks Julian Assange and journalism.
Source: Scott Horton Interviews Glenn Greenwald

Nick Turse

Scott Horton Interviews Nick Turse

Nick Turse discusses how JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command became the president’s own private army. He also comments on why the precision airstrikes in Libya were probably guided by special operations forces on the ground.
Source: Scott Horton Interviews Nick Turse

Play Program or Download(before the fold)

The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gasses and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn’t working. But rather than invest in something better, we continue to keep this ‘dinosaur economy’ on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money. The Story of Broke calls for a shift in government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions—renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste and more—that can deliver jobs AND a healthier environment. It’s time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let’s build it better.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address was delivered January 17, 1961. He explains the military-industrial complex to a U.S. audience.
Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address

Gareth Porter

Scott Horton Interviews Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for IPS News, discusses Eisenhower’s extraordinary farewell address and the overblown Soviet threat and missile gap hoax scare. They discuss the revelations that the British mission in Afghanistan was simply to give the Army something to do and the three choices for fighting back against state militarism: abolish government, protest for change, or expatriate.
Source: Scott Horton Interviews Gareth Porter

Ray McGovern

Scott Horton Interviews Ray McGovern

Ray McGovern is a former senior analyst at the CIA. He discusses the Dept. of Justice's decision to use military tribunals instead of federal court trials for the alleged 9/11 plotters. He also discusses where the U.S. empire of bases intersects with the domination of oil and gas resources.
Source: Scott Horton Interviews Ray McGovern

King George III Won: Happy Fourth of July!
By David Swanson
http://warisacrime.org/node/58333

The Declaration of Independence is best remembered as a declaration of war, a war declared on the grounds that we wanted our own flag. The sheer stupidity and anachronism of the idea serves to discourage any thoughts about why Canada didn't need a bloody war, whether the U.S. war benefitted people outside the new aristocracy to whom power was transferred, what bothered Frederick Douglas so much about a day celebrating "independence," or what the Declaration of Independence actually said.

When you read the Declaration of Independence, it turns out to be an indictment of King George III for various abuses of power. And those abuses of power look fairly similar to abuses of power we happily permit U.S. presidents to engage in today, either as regards the people of this nation or the people of territories and nations that our military occupies today in a manner uncomfortably resembling Britain's rule over the 13 colonies.

Or perhaps I should say, a large portion of us take turns being happy or outraged depending on the political party with which the current president is identified.

U.S. Busting Labor Unions in Iraq

[...]

Instead of supporting Iraq’s pro-democracy labor unions, which would have put Washington on the side of the working-class, the U.S. signaled its attitude toward Iraqi labor unions in 2003 “when coalition troops stormed the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) headquarters in Baghdad, ransacked their offices, arrested eight union workers, and shut down the office,” wrote Matthew Harwood in the April, 2005, issue of “The Washington Monthly.” Harwood added that when historians re-examine what went wrong during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, “somewhere on the list will be the administration’s indifference, indeed hostility, to Iraqi organized labor. The Iraqi people are paying a price for that attitude.”

This hostility continues to this very day. In an article titled, “Unionbusting, Iraq-Style,” published in the October 25th “The Nation” magazine, author David Bacon writes “because Iraqi unions have organized opposition to privatization since the start of the occupation, the (Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-) Maliki administration is enforcing with a vengeance Saddam Hussein’s prohibition of public sector unions.” Last March, he writes, after oil workers protested low pay and their union’s “illegal” status, “leaders were transferred hundreds of miles from home.”

The unions’ “crime” in Iraq is to oppose production-sharing agreements with foreign oil companies, which would then get a share of what they produce rather than a fee for services. In the past, some oil outfits used this tack to swindle their government partners out of huge sums. In Iran, BP’s predecessor in the Fifties wouldn’t even tell Tehran how much oil it was extracting! “Although the (Iraqi) oil union doesn’t oppose all foreign investment, it has criticized the (Maliki) government for signing unfavorable contracts with oil corporations, in particular production-sharing agreements…” writes Bacon.

The first of two videos with Emmy Award winning reporter George Knapp. It exposes the corruption and outright baldfaced lies by the corporate-to-BLM-and-back-again-revolving-door and political-career-climber-muckety-muck-bureaucrats. The next video explains the reason for BP's involvement with the roundups in Nv. and possibly California ... which is, BP's, among other's, interest in the Ruby Pipeline, a 42" Natural Gas Pipeline from Wyoming to Oregon.

The Mustang Conspiracy: Sex, Drugs, Corruption, and BP

[...]

Part one covers the history of the BLM's lies and a former BLM employee, Craig Downer who quit in disgust and has proven the BLM's data is false, provides the factual counterpoint to those lies. Part one also covers the investigations into the bogus data used to support these lies, via FOIA work done by a private citizen, Cindy MacDonald, that shows what the true motivations are behind these heinous acts. We'll also get a glimpse into George's 20 plus year investigation of this activity , the truth about the horses, their land and how it's been handed over to Big Agriculture (Corporate Cattle Ranches) and Big Oil, all at the expense of the U.S. Tax Payer and in violation of U.S. Federal Law.

President Obama

The bottom line is this: given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth, produce jobs and keep our businesses competitive, we’re going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel. So today we're announcing the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration

Click for more pics

Gulf: 5 times what they originally claimed

Chevron Vs. Filmmaker

More: Stop Nestlé Waters; Cosmo Garvin - Going against the flow; Source Watch; Atty. Gen. Brown Warns Nestlé Of Legal Challenge To (McCloud) Water Bottling Plant; All Bottled Up: Nestlé’s Pursuit of Community Water; and last but not least, click the top picture for the trailer to Tapped, the Movie review here

What Nestle doesn’t want you to know about its plans to open a water bottling plant in Sacramento

• Nestlé and the City of Sacramento worked hard to quietly fast-track this project so Nestlé could open its South Sacramento bottling plant by January 2010. The project was only announced in a brief back page article in the Sacramento Bee at the end of July.

• While Sacramento residents are required to abide by city-imposed water restrictions, Nestlé would be able to siphon water from our municipal water supply 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. According to one staff member at the Economic Development Department, the only limit on the amount of water Nestlé can pump is the size of their pipes.

• Nestlé claims the Sacramento plant would be a “micro-bottling plant,” bottling only 50 million gallons of water per year. However, according to the Department of Utilities, the estimated water usage is 215 thousand – 320 thousand gallons of water per day (78 – 116 millions per year). This would make Nestlé one of the top ten water users in Sacramento at a time when we are in our third consecutive year of a drought.

• According to Nestlé, approximately 30 million gallons of water would come from Sacramento’s municipal water system and 20 million would be trucked to the plant from “private springs.” City staff have refused to answer questions about the springs and Nestlé has provided no information about their location, other than telling the Sacramento News & Review that they are somewhere in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

  

• Bottling 50 million gallons of water a year would create 800 million water bottles annually. It takes over 400,000 barrels of oil to produce that much plastic. Only 14% of plastic bottles get recycled – the rest end up not only in our landfills, but also in our forests, streams, and oceans.

• The diesel fuel required to truck 20 million gallons of water from the “nearby springs” to Sacramento and 800 million bottles across the state is enormous. Diesel truck emissions contain carbon dioxide and diesel soot, which both contribute to global warming. Diesel exhaust also contributes to air contamination, which is known to cause cancer and other health problems.

• Nestlé would take our tap water and sell it back to us after marking it up over 1,000 times what they paid for it. If Nestlé is allowed to build a water bottling plant in Sacramento, they can take as much water as they want, for as long as they want, without any limits or accountability.

• Water is becoming scarcer as the population grows and the drought continues. The water in Sacramento should be for the plants, animals and humans in this region to live on, not for big companies to amass enormous wealth. If Nestlé is allowed to build this plant, we give up even more control of our water for as long as that plant exists. The City says that Nestlé has a right to move here. Shouldn’t Sacramentans have a right to a secure water supply?

[I've wanted to do this for a week but haven't had time. And I know this has been covered ... a little bit ... but no where near as much as the Iranian elections which have had wall-to-wall coverage. Wonder why that is? And it's nice that the Peruvian Parliament has "suspended" the disputed laws which caused the protests, but I have a feeling they will go back into place once the US military base at Palanquero, Colombia gets built - what? you haven't heard of it? Hmmm, sounds like one of the next blogs. Anyway click the links for the three articles, and here's another really good one from indymedia Ireland]

Massacre in the Amazon: The U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement Sparks a Battle Over Land and Resources

Raúl Zibechi | June 16, 2009

On June 5, World Environment Day, Amazon Indians were massacred by the government of Alan Garcia in the latest chapter of a long war to take over common lands—a war unleashed by the signing of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Peru and the United States.

Three MI-17 helicopters took off from the base of the National Police in El Milagro at six in the morning of Friday, June 5. They flew over Devil's Curve, the part of the highway that joins the jungle with the northern coast, which had been occupied for the past 10 days by some 5,000 Awajún and Wampi indigenous peoples. The copters launched tear gas on the crowd (other versions say that they also shot machine guns), while simultaneously a group of agents attacked the road block by ground, firing AKM rifles. A hundred people were wounded by gunshot and between 20-25 were killed.

The population of the nearby city of Bagua, some thousand kilometers northeast of Lima near the border with Ecuador, came out into the streets to support the indigenous people's demonstration, setting fire to state institutions and local office of the official party APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana). Several police officers were attacked and killed in the counter-attack, and other indigenous protestors were killed by police. At the same time, a group of 38 police who were guarding an oil station in the Amazon were taken hostage. Some were killed by their captors, while some 1,000 Indians threatened to set fire to Station Number 6 of the northern Peruvian oil pipeline.

The versions are contradictory. The government claimed days after the events that there are 11 indigenous dead and 23 police. The indigenous organizations reported 50 dead among their ranks and up to 400 disappeared. According to witnesses, the military burned bodies and threw them into the river to hide the massacre, and also took prisoners among the wounded in the hospitals. In any case, what is certain is that the government sent the armed forces to evict a peaceful protest that had been going on for 57 days in the jungle regions of five departments: Amazonas, Cusco, Loreto, San Martin, and Ucayali.

The Inter-American Human Rights Commission (CIDH), part of the Organization of American States, condemned the violent acts on June 8 and reminded the Peruvian government of its obligation to clear up the facts and to compensate for the consequences and called on both sides to promote a process of dialogue.1 On June 9, the National Coordination of Human Rights announced that it found a series of irregularities and possible human rights violations in the Bagua area. It denounced the government's refusal to divulge what police are in charge of the investigation of the events, and expressed concern for the situation of 25 detained at the El Milagro base and the 99 arrested since a curfew was imposed in Bagua.2

President Garcia accused the Indians of being "terrorists" and spoke of an "international conspiracy," in which, according to government ministers, Bolivia and Venezuela are involved because as oil- and gas-producing countries they want to keep Peru from exploiting these resources and becoming a competitor.3 Just a few weeks ago, Peru granted asylum to the anti-Chavez leader, Venezuelan Manuel Rosas, accused of corruption, and three former Bolivian ministers from the government of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lazada prosecuted for the death of nearly 700 persons during the "gas war" of October 2003.

[...]

Peru: Battle lines drawn over the Amazon

AB 32 - California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 requires Sacramento City’s 2030 General Plan to mitigate for additional greenhouse gases produced as the result of the growth of Sacramento.



Global warming is serious problem that will continue to get worse for the rest of this century. It’s also a difficult problem manage effectively. All the effective responses require some sacrifice and may not pay-off for a generation.