Blue Corn Comics -- News from a Multicultural Perspective
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News from a Multicultural Perspective
Political and Social Developments Ripped from the Headlines
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Thursday, August 21, 2008
Cold War more fun than terror "war"Among neocons and assorted righties, Cold War nostalgia has been widespread lately. And no wonder: Just compare the Cold War with the Global War on Terror. "Cold War" had a real ring to it. But "Global War on Terror"? Clumsy, and what a crummy acronym--GWOT.The GWOT got off to a decent start, with Al Qaeda and the "axis of evil" to go after, but it turned out to be a dud. Maybe it was because having a "war" on "terror" never made much sense. Maybe it was because we quickly ran out of targets in Afghanistan and then became targets in Iraq (and now in Afghanistan too). Maybe it's because Osama bin Laden, who seemed like an excellent candidate for arch-fiend, vanished. Maybe it's because U.S.-sponsored torture didn't sit well with most Americans, who had actually taken to heart all that stuff about how we won the Cold War through the "power of our values."Whatever. Thanks to events in Georgia, we can put the tedium of the GWOT behind us and return to the Cold War.*****
Neocons party like it's 1981As an extra treat (and with a little assistance from Russia and the Republic of Georgia), we're bringing back the Cold War.In 1981, Ronald Reagan began his first term as president and lost no time warming up the shivering Cold War. Remember the "evil empire," the debate about a "Star Wars" missile defense and how thrilling it was to be in a perpetual nuclear standoff with the Soviets?Wouldn't it be great to go "back to the future," as in the 1980s hit movie? The Cold War was, as Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates mused in 2007, "a less complex time" for which he was "almost nostalgic." Historian Niall Ferguson shared the sentiment: "I miss the Cold War," he wrote in 2006 in the London Daily Telegraph. "Soviet wickedness made politics so much simpler."*****
McCain is no Teddy Roosevelt[W]hat is telling about this particular difference between Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain is that it is so illustrative of what Roosevelt was really about, and how fundamentally different that was from what Senator McCain and the latter-day Republican Party is about.“The truth of the matter is that Roosevelt today would be on the left,” said Mr. Brinkley, who is writing a biography of the former president titled “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt’s and the Crusade for America.”Roosevelt believed passionately in regulating industry and curbing the excesses of the great corporations. He favored the imposition of an inheritance tax and fought his party’s increasing tendency to cater to the very wealthy. And, of course, he was a ferocious protector of the environment.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
McCain eager for war(s) In a front-pager on Sunday, The New York Times took on the question, is John McCain a warmonger? The paper did not put it in such an indelicate manner. But that was (and is) essentially the issue at hand. The story reminded readers of McCain's bellicose rhetoric after 9/11. In October 2001, he appeared on David Letterman's show and said that Iraq might behind the anthrax attacks. He also claimed that Mohamed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, had met with Iraqi intelligence--even though the evidence at the time was unclear. (The entire charge was eventually debunked by U.S. intelligence.) And on an aircraft carrier in January 2002, he yelled to sailors, "Next up, Baghdad!"None of this trip down memory lane was surprising, given that McCain months ago was joking about bombing Iran. McCain is a guy who despite his own military service and POW experience has been too eager in recent years to play the war card. Not only was he among those who made false claims about Iraq to win popular support for a U.S. invasion of that country; he seemed eager for the war. The Obama campaign might consider reminding voters of his excessive enthusiasm for military confrontation with Iraq and Iran.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Bush's hypocrisy on GeorgiaRussia did bide its time. Putin knew enough to wait for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to attack South Ossetia, before he sent in his tanks. In striking first, the Georgians ceded the moral high ground. That makes it immeasurably harder now for the international community to pressure the Russians to withdraw.And as for Bush? He ceded the moral high ground five years ago. Unlike Putin today, he lacked even the pretext of a pretext for his invasion. And yet he has the gall to demand now that the Russians leave Georgia, on principle.*****
McCain: myth vs. realityMcCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying. *****
McCain doesn't know crisesJohn McCain says: "My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War. This is an act of aggression."Let's run-down the list. Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, followed by the US expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait. Collapse of Yugoslavia and subsequent wars of aggression between successor states. US invasion of Afghanistan. US invasion of Iraq. There are a slew of other examples of serious international crises over last 16-18 years.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Americans pay Iraqis' billsIraq sits atop the world's third-biggest known oil reserves, and the Iraqi government keeps a mounting pile of petrodollars firmly tucked away in American banks. A new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office shows that Iraqi oil revenues will reach up to $85 billion this year, resulting in a budget surplus of as much as $50 billion. But despite all the money that is pouring in, Iraq is not taking responsibility for its own reconstruction.Instead, the U.S. military is footing the reconstruction bill. Over the last two years, while Iraq has earned nearly $100 billion in oil revenues (and spent just $2 billion on capital investments such as roads, water and electricity), U.S. taxpayers have plowed $48 billion into reconstruction activities in Iraq. About half of that has gone to the oil and electricity infrastructures. The U.S. has also helped to renovate 3,000 schools, train 30,000 teachers, distribute 8 million textbooks and rebuild irrigation infrastructure for 400,000 people, as well as fund projects to improve drinking water, bridges, roads, sewage treatment, airports and, of course, oil pipelines and refineries.*****
The end of Pax AmericanaBy itself, as I said, the war in Georgia isn’t that big a deal economically. But it does mark the end of the Pax Americana—the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization.Most obviously, Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, especially natural gas, now looks very dangerous—more dangerous, arguably, than its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. After all, Russia has already used gas as a weapon: in 2006, it cut off supplies to Ukraine amid a dispute over prices. *****
Dead zones growMany coastal areas of the world’s oceans are being starved of oxygen at an alarming rate, with vast stretches along the seafloor depleted of it to the point that they can barely sustain marine life, researchers are reporting.The main culprit, scientists say, is nitrogen-rich nutrients from crop fertilizers that spill into coastal waters by way of rivers and streams.A study to be published Friday in the journal Science says the number of these marine “dead zones” around the world has doubled about every 10 years since the 1960s. About 400 coastal areas now have periodically or perpetually oxygen-starved bottom waters, many of them growing in size and intensity. Combined, the zones are larger than Oregon.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Endangered Species Act endangeredThe Bush administration Monday proposed a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act to allow federal agencies to decide whether protected species would be imperiled by agency projects, eliminating the independent scientific reviews that have been required for more than three decades.The new rules, which will be subject to a 30-day comment period, would use administrative powers to make broad changes in the law that Congress has resisted for years. Under current law, agencies must subject any plans that potentially affect endangered animals and plants to an independent review by scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service. Under the proposed new rules, dam and highway construction and other federal projects could proceed without delay if the agency in charge decides they would not harm vulnerable species.*****
Bush = Clockwatcher-in-ChiefLater that night, during the parade of nations, he was practically slumped in his seat, toting a small American flag--was it made in China?--with a bored expression on his face. Prior to the games, there was a debate over whether he should attend and further legitimize the repressive Chinese regime. But as he sat there, that debate no longer seemed so relevant, for he looked irrelevant. There was no one next to him but his wife. And the question was, didn't he have anything better to do with his time? The apparent answer: no.War was breaking out between Russia and Georgia. The economy in the United States was continuing a downward slide. Negotiations between Washington and Iraq over an agreement governing U.S. troops had seemingly failed. And his presidency was running out of time. Yet he seemed like not such a busy guy. He even stayed in China to watch events. I, too, would have enjoyed witnessing Michael Phelps first gold-medal victory of these Olympics, but, then again, I don't have a superpower to run.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Senators point fingers on energy Senate Republicans tried to leverage voters’ anguish by offering proposals that furthered their unexamined strategy to expand offshore drilling. The Democrats responded by pinning the blame for the surge in oil prices on financial speculators, and offering a bill to curb trading. The usual bogeymen appeared, with Republicans’ accusing environmentalists of locking up precious oil supplies and the Democrats’ blaming Wall Street.These competing bills provided a dashing image of senators hard at work, but neither provided any hope of relief at the pump for beleaguered constituents. The oil industry already has access to fourth-fifths of the nation’s recoverable offshore resources, mostly off Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico, and drilling the forbidden areas—protected by a longstanding Congressional moratorium that President Bush is trying to lift—would make only a marginal difference in prices 15 years down the road.As to the speculators so reviled by the Democrats, most economists believe that they have little or nothing to do with oil prices.
Friday, August 01, 2008
Bush's illegal putschA report released Tuesday by the Justice Department has documented the Bush administration's unprecedented--and illegal--effort to politicize the ranks of the agency's prosecutors and civil service employees with conservatives and true believers in the religious right's agenda.Under then-Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, a thirtysomething lawyer named Monica M. Goodling--a graduate of a law school founded by Pat Robertson--had virtual veto power over the appointment of U.S. attorneys, other prosecutors and immigration judges. Goodling, as the Washington Post reported, demanded that candidates "espouse conservative priorities and Christian lifestyle choices," especially on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. The goal, according to the report, was to create a Republican "farm system" inside the Justice Department.*****
Soldiers fired on civiliansThe American military admitted Sunday night that a platoon of soldiers raked a car of innocent Iraqi civilians with hundreds of rounds of gunfire and that the military then issued a news release larded with misstatements, asserting that the victims were criminals who had fired on the troops.The attack on June 25 killed three people, a man and two women, as they drove to work at a bank at Baghdad’s airport. The attack infuriated Iraqi officials and even prompted the Iraqi armed forces general command to call the shooting cold-blooded murder.*****
Bush's DoJ broke lawsSenior aides to former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales broke Civil Service laws by using politics to guide their hiring decisions, picking less-qualified applicants for important nonpolitical positions, slowing the hiring process at critical times and damaging the department’s credibility, an internal report concluded on Monday.A longtime prosecutor who drew rave reviews from his supervisors was passed over for an important counterterrorism slot because his wife was active in Democratic politics, and a much-less-experienced lawyer with Republican leanings got the job, the report said. *****
Bush's record-high deficitPresident Bush will leave his successor with a record-high budget deficit of $482 billion, according to an administration estimate released Monday.White House officials blamed the slowing economy and a $150-billion bipartisan stimulus package for the worsening picture for the 2009 fiscal year, but Democrats cited the president's tax cuts and fiscal management over his eight years in office.*****
Financial regulation neededThe moral of this story seems clear—and it’s what Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has been saying for some time: financial regulation needs to be extended to cover a much wider range of institutions. Basically, the financial framework created in the 1930s, which brought generations of relative stability, needs to be updated to 21st-century conditions.The desperate rescue efforts of the past year make expanded regulation even more urgent. If the government is going to stand behind financial institutions, those institutions had better be carefully regulated—because otherwise the game of heads I win, tails you lose will be played more furiously than ever, at taxpayers’ expense.
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All material © copyright its original owners, except where noted.Original text and pictures © copyright 2008 by Robert Schmidt.
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