“We want to keep the oil”

“We Want To Keep The Oil”

Oct 24 · 6 min read

“Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand,
workin’ in the dark against your fellow man.
But as sure as God made black and white
what’s down in the dark will be brought to the light.”
~ Johnny Cash/traditional, ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’

The Grayzone has an excellent new article out titled “US troops are staying in Syria to ‘keep the oil’ — and have already killed hundreds over it” detailing the many ways the Trump administration has openly admitted that it is keeping US troops in Syria to control the nation’s oil fields so that the Syrian government can’t use it to fund reconstruction efforts.

“We’ve secured the oil, and therefore a small number of US troops will remain in the area where they have the oil,” Trump said in a recent press conference. “And we’re going to be protecting it. And we’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future.”

“We want to keep the oil,” Trump said in a cabinet meeting a few days earlier. “Maybe we’ll have one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”

“A purpose of those [US] forces, working with the SDF, is to deny access to those oil fields by ISIS and others who may benefit from revenues that could be earned,” said Defense Secretary Mark Esper. As Grayzone’s Ben Norton accurately explains, “and others” necessarily means the Syrian government; preventing Assad from accessing Syrian oil is standing US military policy.

And that of course is the real reason US armed forces constantly remain in Syria despite all the empty babble about ending wars and bringing home the troops: it’s about control over a nation in a key geostrategic location which refuses to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire. Controlling its material wealth is an ideal way to do this.

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limitarianism

!tw #limitarianism / below is a selection of current Latest tweets with this hashtag






Chris Hedges: The Age of Radical Evil


image is from this tweet; article is here; all tweets that link to it are here

excerpt:

Immanuel Kant coined the term “radical evil.” It was the privileging of one’s own interest over that of others, effectively reducing those around you to objects to be manipulated and used for your own ends. But Hannah Arendt, who also used the term “radical evil,” saw that it was worse than merely treating others as objects. Radical evil, she wrote, rendered vast numbers of people superfluous. They possessed no value at all. They were, once they could not be utilized by the powerful, discarded as human refuse.

We live in an age of radical evil. The architects of this evil are despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction. They are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms. They are orchestrating the growing social inequity, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a cabal of global oligarchs. They are destroying our democratic institutions, turning elected office into a system of legalized bribery, stacking our courts with judges who invert constitutional rights so that unlimited corporate money invested in political campaigns is disguised as the right to petition the government or a form of free speech. Their seizure of power has vomited up demagogues and con artists including Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, each the distortion of a failed democracy. They are turning America’s poor communities into internal militarized colonies where police carry out lethal campaigns of terror and use the blunt instrument of mass incarceration as a tool of social control. They are waging endless wars in the Middle East and diverting half of all discretionary spending to a bloated military. They are placing the rights of the corporation above the rights of the citizen.

Arendt captured the radical evil of a corporate capitalism in which people are rendered superfluous—surplus labor as Karl Marx said—and pushed to the margins of society where they and their children are no longer considered to have value, value always determined by the amount of money produced and amassed. But as the Gospel of Luke reminds us, “what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.”

That’s the first three paragraphs. You can read the rest here.

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inexcusable inequality

Here's a copy-paste of a still from the animated infographic in the tweet below.

It really is worth watching the 12-second animation in the tweet – also embedded below – where you also can click through to the NYT op-ed by David Leonhardt if you feel so inclined. If you need to, you can read an archived copy (missing the animated graphic you already saw in the tweet).

Note how the 99% used to pay tax at a much lower rate than the 1%. That was then, this is now. The richest 400 taxpayers now pay at a lower rate than anyone else. (Okay, at a lower rate than the rate for any decile.)

The situation is not hopeless.* See the NYT op-ed by David Leonhardt.

David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis.

*We've simply been propagandized for years by the rich and their well-compensated enablers in the media and government to believe that “there is no alternative” (!gb) to how things are.









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Brett McGurk: Syria and Turkey … “policy incoherence and risk”

Profile picture
18 hours ago, 15 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter

Regarding Syria and Turkey, there is some disinformation out there (including from the POTUS himself), so here is some background on what is admittedly a complex matter with no easy or magic formulas:

First: It was Trump (not Obama) that made the decision to arm the Kurdish component (YPG) of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to take Raqqa, then ISIS’s capital city. He made this decision after his national security team developed options for his review.

The SDF suffered thousands of casualties in the Raqqa battle. Not a single American life was lost. Trump later expanded the operation down the ERV. He touts these operations in political rallies but without apparent thought as to who did the fighting and dying.

The weapons provided were meager and just enough for the battle against ISIS. (The SDF cleared IEDs by purchasing flocks of sheep.) They were not “paid massive amounts of money and equipment” (as Trump said today). Nearly all stabilization funding came from the @coalition.[the coalition against Daesh (!?) [dahy-EESH] (ISIS)]

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DuckDuckGo bang commands for Vancouver Unitarians (and for everyone)

There are some good reasons for using the DuckDuckGo search engine and even for making it the default search engine on your browser so you can just type search terms right into the location bar (address bar) at the top of your screen.

This post goes into just one reason: the bang command.

There are thousands of bang commands. Below are a few that may interest you and others wanting to know more about UCV from its website (vancouveruntiarians.ca) and from elsewhere. There are links to results of the bang commands here embedded in them so you don’t have to type them to try them out. Just click on them.

!bang / then scroll down (the spaced slash and the rest of the line are not part of the bang command)
!bang acronym / looking for a bang command that searches a website listing acronyms/initialisms
!acro UCV / for information on initialism UCV; the UCV on 49th at Oak is in <cough> the Acronym Attic
!bang UCV / looking for a !ucv bang command (and – spoiler alert – that was it, used just there)

!ucv / entering a bang command without a search term takes you to the home page
!ucv small groups / joining a small group is a good way to connect with people sharing an interest
!ucv principles for kids / for grownups too (see link in item found)
!ucv vision statement / !? “What it says on the tin.” / … as they say
!ucv core documents / then scroll down and click on link in large type

!? bylaws and rules (pdf) site:uua.org / seven principles, six sources on first page after contents

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‘It makes absolutely no sense … unless … in which case it makes perfect sense’

Novelty Joke PM From Fake Country Meets With Trump, Silent On Assange

Sep 20 · 6 min read

Scott Morrison, the novelty joke Prime Minister from the imaginary nation of Australia, met with his boss Donald Trump today without any mention of the US government’s transnational conspiracy to imprison an Australian citizen for exposing American war crimes. The two imperial governors publicly discussed the possibility of Australia accompanying the US into a war with Iran, as well as the US trade war with China and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s brownface scandal, but there is no record of any mention of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

It makes absolutely no sense [for the country to act like this] unless you think of [the country] as part of a single US-centralized empire, in which case it makes perfect sense.

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Cory Morningstar: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent

see other tweets that link to this piece

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent series has been written in two volumes.

[Volume I: ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI • Addenda I] [Book form]

[Volume II: An Object Lesson In Spectacle • ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V] [ACTS VI & VII forthcoming]

updated with these two tweets:




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Wei Wu Wei


!gb “Quite so: the only practice—and once.” (Wei Wu Wei)

!? writer Wei Wu Wei :: !w Wei Wu Wei :: !wq Wei Wu Wei

Terence Gray (Wei Wu Wei) was born in England in 1895, left the country in middle age, and died in Monaco in 1986, aged 90. As Wei Wu Wei he wrote seven books published in the years 1958 to 1968. In the preface to the first he explains why he uses a pseudonym.



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“There are no war heroes. There are only war victims. It’s time to grow up and stop …”

It is more cognitively comfortable for veterans and their families to maintain the fairy tale that those who helped facilitate US imperialism are heroes who did something helpful and meaningful, but the fact that human minds are preconditioned to select for cognitive ease is a glitch in our operating systems which causes unhelpful cognitive biases; it’s a flaw we need to overcome, not a virtue to be coddled. By continuing to coddle it you are facilitating war propaganda, and war propaganda is the indispensable foundation of war itself. By facilitating war propaganda you are participating in the war machine as surely as someone who takes up arms and fights in it, only less honest because, as Representative Crenshaw’s face attests, at least someone who takes up arms is putting some real skin in that monstrous game…

There are no war heroes. There are only war victims. It’s time to grow up and stop pretending otherwise.
—Caitlin Johnstone


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