Here is the bad news about living in New York State right now: we are standing between what’s perceived to be valuable mineral deposits and some of the richest corporations in the world. That’s never a good place to be.
Ask Iraq. Their abundant oil deposits have brought them nothing but misery, from the moment the West determined that they existed. We (ourselves and, early on, the British) saddled them with repressive regimes, bombed them when they weren’t sufficiently compliant, and generally pressed our advantage as the richest and most militarily powerful nations on Earth. Once the home of some of the Arab world’s most learned people – they used to say that, in the Middle East, books are written in Cairo, published in Beirut, and read in Baghdad – the place is now a basket case, wracked by sectarian strife, its infrastructure still in a shambles, waiting for the next chapter in a seemingly endless chain of misfortune.
Make no mistake – this is not an authorless crime. In Iraq and Saudi Arabia, in the Congo, in Indonesia, and in many, many other places, we have used a heavy hand to maintain effective control over valuable resources. And our extractive industries – oil, gas, mining, etc. – have been an integral part of that process. So just understand, if these companies have an eye on all that shale gas, they will use every means available to get to it. I’m not suggesting military force, but everything short of that. They have deep enough pockets to buy politicians, propagandize on a massive scale, and pay off residents enough to divide communities.
The fact is, you can see them working on public opinion every day of the week, twenty-four hours a day. Just surf around the channels and you’ll see them. I can tell you that on MSNBC, generally considered a liberal network, in between panel discussions more progressive than anything you’ll hear outside of Democracy Now! can be seen pricey and persistent advertising by the oil and natural gas industry trade group, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others. The trade group ads are targeted directly on hydrofracking, tying shale-gas development to economic growth and prosperity, calling their extractive methods “safe” and pro-fracking policies “smart”, etc. Hammering away, hour after hour, day after day, gradually moving that public opinion needle into positive territory.
This past week, the New York Times reported that governor Andrew Cuomo is considering a plan to allow hydrofracking in southern tier counties, along the Pennsylvania border. If you care about this issue, call Cuomo’s office at 518-474-8390 or “like” his facebook page and leave a message opposing this policy.
Don’t let these buggers make a monkey out of us. That’s what they’re best at.
luv u,
jp
Of course, we all know how this story ends. What became of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons ambitions about which “there can be no doubt”? It was just as defector Hussein Kemal described it in the mid 1990s, in interviews that were well circulated before the Iraq war: Iraq had never gotten beyond the theoretical stage in weapons development, and what technology they had relating to uranium enrichment was broken up and buried after the Gulf War. And their missile technologies? We all know about the aluminum tube hoax. Then there were the deadly drones – basically model planes bound together with duct tape. This is why the current claims about Iran shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Korea invading Korea – but not on the devastating attack we mounted against them. Christine Ahn of the Korea Policy Institute spoke to this fact on 
I’m thinking about NPR particularly because of the president’s declaration that the Iraq war will be drawn to a close at the end of this year, despite the administration’s efforts to keep it rolling for an indefinite period of deployment. NPR was completely on board with the Iraq war back in 2002-03; they dropped the ball on anything like investigative journalism at a time when it might have mattered to get the truth out. People tend to forget that the alternative press, plus outlets like the London Independent, blew holes in the Bush Administration’s case for war well before the shooting began. 
It’s hard to imagine how a war this difficult to justify could last a decade or more on the backs of anything other than an all-volunteer force. If there’d been a draft, these wars might never have started. If the true costs were passed along to taxpayers, they certainly wouldn’t have lasted as long as this. Our nation’s war making power has been effectively insulated from public involvement and, consequently, from meaningful public input as well. America’s wars are now self-contained and self-perpetuating; they are fought by a separate nation of military families – one that bears every burden, pays every price, while we continue our normal lives, only vaguely aware of the catastrophe our elected leaders are visiting upon these unfortunate men, women, and children.
would be well-advised to avoid any bold statements of success based on this experience. This is Iraq war II; this is Bush lite. There may well be many negative consequences that will fall out of the rebel’s eventual victory, as well – I guess we will have to see.
World War II, flattening its dissidents, outlasting its main rivals … until we managed to elect a man so incompetent he could, to borrow a phrase, destroy the empire merely by strolling through it. I’m sure to the nation’s imperial board of trustees, George W. seemed a relatively safe bet, particularly with such seemingly reliable minders as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld keeping an eye on the store. That miscalculation is proving very costly. Just as our attack on Vietnam bled us dry (to say nothing of what it did to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians), this past decade of war – coupled with an amazingly irresponsible policy of deep war-time tax cuts – has helped to hobble our economy, perhaps beyond recovery.
I don’t get choked up very often listening to NPR, but I heard a story on Memorial Day weekend that did it – about the father of a soldier killed in Iraq, talking about how he’d planted sunflowers near his son’s gravestone because the young man liked them so much, and how the father went to Iraq and saw his son, he claims, and the apparition asked him what the f**k he was doing there, told him he should go home, and said that it was all right, he was in a better place. We’re on year ten of stories like this. Jesus! Time to shut it down.
G.O.P. “tsunami” myth from materializing.
Not your monkey. It’s the economy, stupid, to be sure, but what about the economy? If a generalization can be made about the past three decades in U.S. economic history, it’s that the rich have done extremely well and the middle class and poor have lost ground… lots of ground. Someone no doubt has shouted “class war!” already, but friends, there has been a class war underway for thirty years now, and it’s being waged on us. And frankly, we’re losing. Part of the reason for that is that we are atomized, disorganized, and at war with one another. We are encouraged to be so from the moment we become aware of the world around us.