Opinion-Columns.com

FRYING PAN TO FIRE, OIL TO NUCLEAR

No matter that three out of five past presidents are unable to properly pronounce nuclear, they keep making nuclear noise, nuclear threats and (with the current president) seem hell bent upon their own unique brand of nuclear proliferation. The irony is without end; nuclear Pakistan is OK, but a nuclear ambition on the part of Iran is beyond the pale. A nuclear powered North Korea is a precursor to war, but nuclear powered India is just good sense and good business.

The bomb is inseparable in the minds of Americans from the energy technology. Or perhaps not. Or, who knows? Or, it’s all just too complicated.

Mira Kamdar, of the Asia Society, writes in today’s Washington Post that we are “Risking Armageddon for Cold, Hard Cash.”

While everyone has been abuzz about Georgia, the Beijing Olympics and Sarah Palin, perhaps the most important development in the world has been unfolding with almost no attention. India and the United States, along with deep-pocketed corporations, have been steadily pushing along a lucrative and dangerous new nuclear pact, the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement. Both governments have been working at a fever pitch to get the pact approved by the 45-country Nuclear Suppliers Group, which governs the world's trade in nuclear materials, and before Congress for a final vote before it adjourns this month.

India, huh? The last time I was abuzz, it wasn’t about Georgia, Beijing or Palin. I personally abuzzed wondering if Dick would bomb Iran on his way home from Azerbaijan and Ukraine.

As almost any neocon can tell you, Iran is a terrorist state. Actually, Iran fashions itself a sort of religious democracy, but the point is hotly debated even within Iran. It is however, a nation of 70 million, with the youngest and most pro-American population in the Muslim world. Meanwhile;

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says the deal will let his country, which refuses to sign either the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, take "its rightful place among the comity of nations."

Singh has an interesting take on comity (an atmosphere of harmony, mutual civility and respect). Sign the treaties, Manmohan.

The historic deal will allow U.S. nuclear companies to again do business in India, something that has been barred since 1974, when New Delhi tested its first atomic bomb. (India tested nuclear bombs again in 1998, spurring Pakistan to follow suit with its own tests days later.) The pact will also lift restrictions on other countries' sales of nuclear technology and fuel to India, while asking virtually nothing from India in return. All of that will undermine the very international system that India so ardently seeks to join.

If I have it right, that would be the system that has thus far kept no one from surprising the world with those little unexpected explosions that preface an announcement of parity. No one was turned away who could access Dr. Abdul (Strangelove) Kahn in Pakistan and pay the price. We winked at that one because we needed Pakistan and temporary need redefines dictators on a depressingly regular basis over at the State Department.

But Bush is in a fury to set off strategic imbalances in Asia before January 20th, so that the neocons can profit both politically and economically from another arms race. The administration is frantic to come in on the India side against China (while there still is an India side). Mira concurs;

The deal risks triggering a new arms race in Asia: If it passes, a miffed and unstable Pakistan will seek nuclear parity with India, and China will fume at a transparent U.S. ploy to balance Beijing's rise by building up India as a counterweight next door. The pact will gut global efforts to contain the spread of nuclear materials and encourage other countries to flout the NPT that India is now being rewarded for failing to sign. The U.S.-India deal will divert billions of dollars away from India's real development needs in sustainable agriculture, education, health care, housing, sanitation and roads. It will also distract India from developing clean energy sources, such as wind and solar power, and from reducing emissions from its many coal plants. Instead, the pact will focus the nation's efforts on an energy source that will, under the rosiest of projections, contribute a mere 8 percent of India's total energy needs -- and won't even do that until 2030.

We have, in our ultimate burst of creative reason, elected to begin replacing the planets reliance on oil as a power source. It’s getting just too damned expensive and politically sensitive now that Texas has run dry. The prevailing administration view is that, rather than developing cheap and effective alternatives to fossil fuel, the dangerous, expensive and more politically sensitive resurgence of nuclear power is the answer.

Nuclear fuel, rather than being merely expensive and dwindling, is fatal to mine, dangerous as hell to ship, horrendously expensive to store and impossible to get rid of, once used. What a breakthrough technology. Instead of tapping the earth’s molten core, developing wind or solar power, we seek to proliferate the planets most life-threatening method of boiling water.

Kurt Vonnegut was right—our big brain is trying (with great success) to kill us.

So what will the deal accomplish? It will generate billions of dollars in lucrative contracts for the corporate members of the U.S.-India Business Council and the Confederation of Indian Industry. The Bush administration hopes that it will help resuscitate the moribund U.S. nuclear power industry and expand the use of this "non-polluting" source of energy, one of the pillars of the Bush team's energy policy. The deal will let the real leaders of the global nuclear-power business -- France and Russia, both of which eagerly support the deal -- reap huge profits in India. And the pact will provide spectacularly profitable opportunities to India's leading corporations, which are slavering to get their hands on a share of the booty. How much booty? This newspaper estimates more than $100 billion in business over the next 20 years, as well as perhaps tens of thousands of jobs in India and the United States.

Bush’s solution is so ‘non polluting’ that we have yet to find a state or a mountain within a state, willing to serve as a repository for spent fuel in America. It is so ‘non polluting’ that we expect to offload it to the poorest countries on earth.

In any case, the nuclear deal will not magically transform India into China's economic or military equal. A shocking 42 percent of Indians live below the World Bank's new poverty threshold of $1.25 per day. Even if India managed to match China reactor for reactor and missile for missile -- a long shot at best -- Delhi could do so only at the expense of precisely the investments in human and physical infrastructure that could make India into a truly great power, prosperous and secure. This is the real tragedy of the U.S.-India nuclear deal. It's not too late to stop it.

So,

• the politics are flawed,
• the science is opposed,
• the next Cold War is a likely result,
• India will remain a beggar state,
• China is disturbed
• and Russia (who we claim to be mad at over Georgia) will profit.

All in favor, signify by saying ‘aye.’

The ‘ayes’ will have it, unless the clock runs out.

HOLD THE PRESSES!!! This just in from the NYTimes;

The worldwide body that regulates the sale of nuclear fuel and technology approved a landmark deal on Saturday to allow India to engage in nuclear trade for the first time in three decades, after a pressure campaign by the Bush administration and despite concerns about setting off an arms race in Asia.

Approved, apparently, while I was busy parsing a paragraph. Timing is everything.

Only one hurdle now remains for the deal: final approval by the United States Congress. But passage is likely to be difficult, considering both political opposition and dwindling time in the Congressional calendar before November’s elections.

And therein lies the hope. Congress will absolutely not touch this hot-potato until a new Congress convenes.

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Media comment:

• Financial Times-UK-US races to approve India nuclear deal
• Daily Times-Pakistan-US-India nuclear deal called “foolish and risky”
• Christian Science Monitor-India a step closer to nuclear trade
• Associated Press-Delegates: US-India nuclear deal talks in disarray
• Hindustan Times-India-India waltzes past Vienna, Bush wielded the baton

 

ONE MAN'S STRANGLEHOLD IS ANOTHER MAN'S MARKET-SHARE

Here we go again, reprising the old cold-war language of strangleholds and us against them communist-capitalist comparisons. Except for the fact that they no longer (if indeed they ever did) hold water.

Some very bad stuff has just transpired in Georgia and I’m not writing about Atlanta, but rather Tbilisi. Seem a long way from home? Yeah, five or six thousand miles, but surely I need not remind you the world is becoming smaller, if not more hospitable.

Russia's Strike Shows The Power Of the Pipeline, by Steven Pearlstein

It was surely not lost on Russia's bully in chief, Vladimir Putin, that the oil giant BP decided to shut down the pipeline that runs through parts of Georgia controlled by Russian troops. Indeed, that was one of the aims of the cross-border incursion.

Putin understands better than anyone that oil and gas are the source of Russia's resurgence as a military and economic power and his own control over the Russian government and key sectors of its economy. It is oil and gas that provide the money to maintain Russia's powerful military, along with a vast internal security apparatus and network of government-controlled enterprises that allow the president-turned-premier to maintain his iron grip on the levers of political and economic power.

Iron grips and who is bully to whom are a matter of definition. Steven Pearlstein seems not to feel that the illegal and vilified hounding of Iraq into a destroyed sovereignty is the result of anything other than Iraq's thirst for democracy satisfying itself at the well (or possibly wellhead) of American ideals. 

One could hardly call George Bush America’s bully in chief, at least not without a major helping of irony. It’s amazing and not a little unsettling that these similarities continue to be lost in the translation from Eastern (push) belligerence to Western (push, push) belligerence.

. . . Nabucco (a Western intervention pipeline) also became a top priority of the Bush State Department -- in particular, of Matt Bryza, a deputy assistant secretary of state, and C. Boyden Gray, a Bush family confidante who was named a special envoy for Eurasian energy, who began actively courting the leaders of Azerbaijan. (the plot thickens--these are my parentheticals)

. . . Putin, quite correctly, viewed Nabucco as part of a larger campaign by Washington to contain and isolate Russia and limit the expansion of its burgeoning energy empire. With Gazprom, the state gas monopoly, Putin launched his own competing proposal called South Stream to build a new pipeline to the Caucasus.

Well Steve, certainly no offense taken when, shortly after the boat ride and fishing in Kennebunkport, George Bush moved to isolate and limit Russia’s energy interests.

A campaign by Washington.

I’ll be that wasn’t on the agenda over hot dogs and hamburgers. How is it that George could look into Vladimir’s eyes, see into his soul and miss South Stream? And there was Dad, right there on the boat, grinning and baiting hooks.

Ah, those baited hooks.

. . . What we've been reminded once again is that Vladimir Putin is perfectly willing to sacrifice the rule of law and the good opinion of others to protect the Russian empire and the energy monopoly that sustains it. The techniques he used to bring Georgia to heel, while more lethal and destructive, have the same thuggish quality as the techniques Putin uses to silence domestic opposition and to expropriate the energy assets of Yukos, Shell and BP.

Ouch. Steven, you are my most admired economic writer, but the references here sound as though they came directly out of the administration media-machinery. It's becoming more apparent every day that Bush and Cheney encouraged Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to lean out over the abyss, whispering in his ear that they wouldn't let go of his hand. And, like countless U.S. promises to countless dissident groups, we were not there when they got nudged from behind.

C. Boyden Gray can put that in his diplomatic bonafides when he next represents Bush in Eurasian energy circles. George Bush's thumb on the scales suddenly seemed very evidently up an embarrassing part of his anatomy. And there he was, enjoying himself so much in China--another country he works overtime to alienate.

This man and his so-called foreign policy is unable to do other than stride the world in very muddy seven-league boots, staining diplomatic carpets and muddying up the international landscape for decades to come.

Oil--the obsession of this administration and the subject of still secret energy policy constructed in the silence and darkness of Dick Cheney's office--continues to

• stoke an American with-us-or-against-us belligerence,
• triple the cost of crude,
• depreciate our currency by half,
• spiral the nation into unending debt
• and set the stage for an American economic crash second to (possibly) only one.

This administration and (I would suppose by this article) Steven Pearlstein seem to think that sovereign Russia is incapable of protecting its interests in the sphere in which those interests reside.

That's a very dangerous bit of foolishness.

America has encouraged Georgia to shove a stick in the eye of the Russian bear a time too often. What in the name of god are American military advisors doing in Georgia--smack bang up against the border of Russia?

It's no surprise Russia reacted militarily. It's no surprise that thousands died and lost their homes because of our encouragement. It's no surprise (except perhaps to a very shaken Saakashvili) that we left him holding that stick and looking stupid. It's no surprise that this poisonous and dangerous administration continues to risk American blood, treasure and reputation for their own narrow self-interest and that of their crony war-profiteers.

It's no surprise that John McCain would fall into step and march to the same sad, failed, disproven and ignorant tune.

The worst of it is that it's no surprise to find a large part of the country feeling good about itself by following in those same muddy prints.

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Media comment:

• al-Jazeera-Qatar-Russian forces sink Georgian ships
• Reuters-Russian troops not going to Tbilisi: ministry
• United Press International-Georgian troops pull back
• Guardian-UK-Georgian villages burned and looted as Russian tanks advance
• ABC News-Georgia-Russia Shaky Cease Fire

AN ADVOCACY PROBLEM IN THE "WHAT'S NEEDED" DEPARTMENT

It hardly seems normal (or acceptable) to read in separate articles in my morning's Washington Post, that federal facilities right here in our country are running too short-funded to protect themselves. This, while Boeing and Northrop haggle over who is most deserving of a $40 billion contract for refueling planes. Further along in the tanker piece, one must suspend belief to choke down the admission that an end-contract for these planes may well exceed $100 billion.

$100 billion and yet the Federal Protective Service had its budget slashed by--who else?--Homeland Security. These guys (and women) protect nearly 9,000 Federally owned and leased buildings. The FPS used to be part of the GSA (General Services Administration), but that was in the days before this privatizing-crazed administration outsourced everything from V.A. services employees to armed guards and foreign quasi-military thuggery.

Security Provider Cuts Patrols
Federal Protective Service Faces Financial Problems

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 18, 2008; B01

The police agency in charge of protecting many federal buildings is so short-staffed that it has cut outdoor patrols aimed at detecting suspicious individuals and car bombs, according to a report to be released today.

Well, what the hell, they're only suspicious individuals and suspected car-bombs, so what is that compared to the actual, known and recognized lobbying activity carried on daily in support of weapons. We gotta have weapons, people. Weapons are the only way through this era of planetary discontent.

Which brings up the question of advocacy in a government that has become so diffused and downright opaque in its character that no one knows who is running the show. Congress writhes in the impotence of no longer even knowing whom to subpoena and is forced instead to bore itself and its constituents in waves of meaningless committee hearings.

When it, tremblingly gets itself together, draws itself to its full height, puffs out its chest and actually serves a summons, it is ignored. Not only ignored, but dismissed without penalty. The list of powerful no-shows is long and infamous, running out the clock in the waning days of a presidency as well as a Congress. In circumstance after circumstance, from terror to torture, from collapsing bridges to a deteriorating National Mall, from contracting theft to congressional enabling, we have allowed our nation and its protections to be quietly slid out from under us.

Alarmingly, distracted as we are by American Idol, there is no advocacy for the deteriorating bureaucracy that runs the nation's business. Bureaucrat has become a dirty word and privatize has taken its place, although it is the hardworking Washington bureaucrat who kept us afloat in the years before Ronald Reagan made of him a laughingstock. Consider what privatization has brought us in the way of

• a military that cannot fight and includes bloated weaponry programs designed for wars that will not be waged
• a badly-named and unfortunately directed department of homeland security (I refuse to dignify it with capitals) that wastes money, squanders resources and loses its talented leaders while constantly bumping into the furniture on issue after issue
• a nation where rhetoric replaces reality, where bridges collapse on the way to fiscal responsibility and schools graduate the illiterate while leaving no child behind
• a business community shackled to the vagaries of investor-return, that ravages corporation after corporation in the name of quarterly profit, where no one is left to answer the phone.
• a service-industry oriented society where the taped message "your call is important to us" has replaced any interest in the customer service for which they are named
• the numbing daily assault on our sense of fairness and justice as one after another after another of our cherished values is crushed beneath a ceaseless lack of advocacy

The Washington Post continues;

. . . The protective service provides security for more than 1 million federal employees at about 9,000 buildings in the D.C. area and across the country. Caught in a cash squeeze in recent years, the agency has reduced its staff by about 20 percent, to 1,100 officers, the study said. They oversee about 15,000 contract security guards at the facilities.

. . . The report traces the protective service's difficulties to its absorption by the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. The service lost a $139 million annual subsidy it had received as part of the General Services Administration and slid into financial turmoil. The protective service responded by reducing officers and focusing them on overseeing the contract guards. The service said it would seek help from local police forces in responding to crime at facilities.

The report criticized that strategy, saying that it "has diminished security at GSA facilities and increased the risk of crime or terrorist attacks" at many buildings.

At many facilities, officers no longer patrol to prevent or detect crime, the report said. As a result, "law enforcement personnel cannot effectively monitor individuals surveilling federal buildings, inspect suspicious vehicles (including vehicles that could potentially bomb federal buildings) and detect and deter criminal activity," the report said.

The service also reduced officers' hours at many locations, the study said. Adding to the difficulties, many of the service's security cameras and X-ray machines have been broken "for months or years," the study said.

The report highlighted problems with contract guards, who generally work at fixed posts and do not have arrest powers. Oversight of the guards is inadequate, with some posts inspected less than once a year, it said.

In one incident, armed security guards stood idly by as a shirtless suspect wearing handcuffs on one wrist dashed through the lobby of a federal building with a Federal Protective Service officer in pursuit. The building was not identified in the report, but officers speaking on the condition of anonymity said it was a court-services facility in the District.

This is what neo-conservatism has wrought. Born of a reactionary response to the '60s counter-culture, conservatism panicked and dropped its pants to the likes of Norman Podhoertz and Irving Kristol, these 'new' conservatives who advocated the ignoring of America in an orgasm of foreign intrigue. Between this disguised liberalization of the old wire-rimmed glasses conservatives and the advent of the Harvard Business School's reverence for quarterly profit, America has steadily tanked.

For my own part, I am no teary-eyed liberal. Participant in all or part of eight decades, I believed then as now in being left the hell alone, doing the nation's economic dishes instead of stacking them in the sink and dusting under the beds of infrastructure. I do not believe in

• selling off the country's Interstate highways,
• allowing the airlines to destroy the safety and efficiency of air travel,
• outsourcing our military to Blackwater and Haliburton,
• bribing our congressional representatives
• or holding harmless the thieves and crooks who have hijacked American business for their own gain.

For over three-quarters of my life I held the belief that conservatism depended upon actually conserving something and I hold that belief today, even after the shame that every Republican president since Richard Nixon has brought to the term. Under their tutelage, we no longer have a currency that means anything, have become the largest debtors in the world, lost our manufacturing base, are well on our way to losing agricultural leadership as well and have steadily degraded our society into an orgy of selling each other whatever cheap crap can be imported from China--all in the name of neo-conservatism.

My old daddy taught me that you pay your bills, work hard, treat people fairly and make your way as well as possible through the life you were given to live. How he hated FDR's New Deal, not because the country was stronger than that but because he felt institutionalized charity denigrated and trivialized the private concern we all felt for one another as citizens.

Now his--and my--conservatism has been twisted and perverted into a state where it is no longer recognizable.  We have become the unwilling and unwitting victims of political hype and demagoguery of the worst kind--chained to our fate by the thievery of language. Mistaking the back-slap brand of  compassionate conservatism for something that actually conserved, we have had our roads, bridges, sewers, currency, rights to privacy, ecology, our world reputation, safety and international regard cashed in and traded for a lifetime of debt.

If you think Barack Obama will be able to pull us out of our fifty year slide into irrelevancy, I wish you well and hope you are right. I will vote for him because he is--above all--an advocate.

Amazingly, in this changed world where up has become down, he sounds very much like my old daddy.
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Media comment;

• GovExec.com-Study documents dangerous security gaps at federal buildings

What Sets Them Apart is What Sets Them Off

One of the great attributes that sets Americans apart from most of their world kin is what sets them off. Kate got pissed on an Austin, Texas runway and in no time had 18,000 signatures on a petition holding Congress’s feet to the fire to pass a bill of rights for passengers. She wants regulation and by god, she wants it now, before another passenger sits another hour (or ten) on some dumb runway without so much as a Perrier or an apology.

We’ll Take the Money and Run

I can’t help but wonder what Steve Mufson over at the Washington Post has been smoking. Somehow or another, he seems to think that the overpowering and financially secure Big Coal interests in the nation are on the run.

The Terrorist State We Dare Not Name

The nation we dare not name is the largest country on the Arabian Peninsula. Bordered by Jordan on the northwest, Iraq on the north and northeast, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates on the east, Oman on the southeast, and Yemen on the south, with the Persian Gulf to its northeast and the Red Sea to its west. One could hardly find a more pivotal entity.

British Petroleum (BP) Shames Itself With Green Ads and Disastrous Policy

I’ve written before about oil companies, chemical firms and pharmaceutical giants who grease the double-page spreads of magazines with ‘green-speak’ while they poison and flim-flam the public in the day-to-day reality of their business practices. It's a favorite subject of mine.

Losing Our Edge on Our Own Home Turf

John McQuaid makes the case in an editorial, The Can’t-Do Nation, that America is losing its knack for getting big things done. It’s an interesting premise.

The Fate of the World as a Mere Intellectual Exercise

William Kristol and Louis Rene Beres are professional intellectuals. Think-tank guys. Pundits. Gamblers with other people's money (or lives or futures or survival). Fearless and outspoken, as long as it's from behind a desk and their own skins are not at risk.

A Pussyfooting, Wheedling, Sniveling Approach to Confronting National Shame

Roscoe Born, prior to writing a morally unsupportable editorial in the Sunday Baltimore Sun, was Washington editor of Barron's magazine and a reporter in The Wall Street Journal'swill someone please take George Bush into a quiet, unthreatening environment and talk a little Cheney-sense into him?