"Blood and Oil" Review

Somewhat recently, I read a book called "Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum" by Michael T. Klare. To be honest, it was a couple months ago and I have really procrastinated in writing this review. But now that it's summer and I have time on my hands, I'd like to showcase what I think is a great read.

As you may be able to infer from the title, the book is about oil. And about blood, meaning the wars fought over oil. The reason for this is that Klare wrote a book, "Resource Wars" (which i have yet to read) which argued that wars are fought mainly over resources. But Klare later realized that oil was a much larger factor than any other resource. But why is this? Why does oil create more conflict than any other resource, whether it is gold or diamonds, food or water, stone or wood?

Everything in our modern society is based off of oil, which is why everyone feels the crunch when oil prices rise. Shipping, and therefore the prices of every good you buy in a store, is affected by fuel costs. The list goes on, but Klare is a much better linguist and scholar than I, and explains oil's importance in the introduction to this book.

Because of its importance, which is really the main point of the book, is that oil is the one resource that has been deemed a matter of national security. Due to this, the government can use oil as a reason to use the military wherever it sees fit. Putting aside the obvious relation to the Iraq War (which is not the focus of this book, which I liked), the United States supports many countries, namely Saudi Arabia, due to oil. But I will not go into a summary of this book, which you could probably find on sparknotes. All I would like to say is that this book has a great balance between history and current events to be both nonpartisan and interesting.

To give my own opinion, this book is a must-read. Before I read it, I never understoof why people always claimed that the Iraq War was started over oil. But now I now understand the argument, and whether or not you agree with it, this book will show you the reasoning for it. But I think that it was quite nonpartisan, criticizing FDR just as much as George W. Bush. And most importantly, Klare does not merely say that the current situation is bad, but he actually produces some ways to fix it. Klare explains his points well, with intelligence and articulation. The bibliography is huge, and it contains a nifty index. I'm definitely going to read some more stuff by Klare, or on the subject.

Here's where you can buy the book (I bought it at Barnes & Noble for $16):

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Oil-Consequences-Dependency-Petroleum/dp/0805079386/ref=ed_oe_p

What Democracy Means

Recently I brought myself around to seeing Michael Moore's controversial documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, for the first time. Released in 2004, a little over a year after the invasion of Iraq, the film examines the first three and a half years of the Bush presidency, beginning with the election controversy in Florida, and moving into September 11, 2001 and its aftermath.

I won't try to say that Moore's account is fair and even-handed, or that there is no liberal bias here. If you want the straight facts to make up your own mind on this issue, then go somewhere else first, or be sure to find an equally conservative source.

That said, this documentary was not necessarily made with the objective of scrupulously reporting all of the facts. It focuses on the facts that support the liberal position, while downplaying those that support the conservative viewpoint. (If you've seen it, did you notice that it features interviews with people opposed to the war, but uses brief soundbites from those who support it?) This movie was made to support a point of view.

However, as I watched, I noticed that there was an entirely separate message that transcended politics. One of Moore's most frequent accusations was that people simply rolled over and allowed the Bush administration to accomplish its agenda unhindered. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the American people as a whole put their trust behind the President, without questioning any of his actions. One scene featured Brittany Spears saying to do just that. The press was accused of not scrutinizing the administration. The Democrats, now well known as the party that wants to leave Iraq as soon as possible, largely supported Bush's initiatives, including the Patriot Act and the Iraq War resolution, without even reading them. Because of this willingness to entrust President Bush with our national security five-plus years ago, we find ourselves in a conflict in Iraq with no visible end, and no clear way to extracting ourselves without further damaging our position. Ladies and gentlemen, don't let this happen again.

I'm not saying you can't support a war, or a politician, or a cause. I'm not saying you can never trust a politician to make the right decision. What I'm trying to say, and what this movie helps to clarify, is that the decision to do so must be made on you own. Don't simply think that having a leader means you no longer have to think about or analyze an issue.

This goes for everyone--liberal, conservative, Socialist, Libertarian, or whatever you happen to be, no matter how much you love your elected officials, don't simply elect them so you don't have to think anymore, because that's not your job as a citizen. We closed our eyes on Bush after 9/11, and this is where we got; it could be so easy to allow this to happen again. When a politician says something, don't nod your head in approval like a brainwashed sheep, think about it. Research the issue, make up your own mind. Tell your politicians to do the same--the Iraq war resolution passed with the support of more than half the Senate Democrats, many of whom now claim that they were opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning (including Hillary Clinton). And yes, the Democrats are as much responsible for Iraq as the Republicans and the Bush administration, seeing as they sat on their hands as the executive branch produced its evidence that al-Qaeda was connected to Iraq, and that Saddam Hussein had and could use weapons of mass destruction.

America is the oldest democratic nation in the world, and democracy is based on the ability of the citizens to partake in the political process, and blindly trusting an elected official is simply not consistent with partaking. So my message to you, America, is to do your job as Americans, and join in the political process. Vote if you are old enough. Pay attention to politics and make your own mind up--don't listen to what Michael Moore or Bill O'Reilly say about an issue and think that because they think that, you should too. Don't believe for one minute that the President automatically knows what's best for the country and leave it at that, and that includes our next president, whether he be John McCain or Barack Obama. It's time for America to start paying attention to the issues again.

But don't take my word for it.

Slick Barry

So in an expected move, Obama has officially decided to forgo the 85 million dollars in campaign funds from the Government and continue to run on his own money that he is raising from supporters. It sounds really great when he gets on TV and talks about how he is "breaking free from a broken system," and it sure looks awesome when on his website, under his "donate" button, it says "declare your independence" from the public financing. But here's one supporter thats none too pleased with this decision

Months ago, when Barack wasn't the clear front-runner, and wasn't raising astronomical sums of money, he was all over the campaign trail talking about how public financing of campaigns is important, and how he would take the money. Keep in mind that at that point in time, 85 million probably wasn't looking so bad. Had the primaries ended there, who's to say he wouldn't have taken the money right on the spot? I guarantee it would have.

Now, however, he is a rock star. He's raising millions like its nothing, and 85 million is chump change compared to what he could probably raise on his own, and he knows it. Should he accept the public financing, he can't spend any of his own raised money, so taking it would make no sense. Except, of course, if he wanted to keep his word.

Now he's changed the rhetoric. He's going off about how "the system is broken" and how taxpayers shouldn't be financing general election campaigns. Because he's not accepting the funds, now he can pour as much money as he wants into this campaign....substantially more than McCain, especially if McCain chooses to take the 85 million, which I don't think he will now that Barack has chosen not to take it.

It becomes an issue of trust. Barack had said in the past that he was open to taking the public funds, but now that he suddenly has more money on hand, the entire message has changed. Now he's acting like the system is archaic and wrong. I think that the 85 million cap for public financing is a GOOD thing. It keeps the playing field even, and keeps the negative campaigning to a relative low. Lets see how Barack chooses to use all of this extra money that he will have. I don't suspect he will be running McCain off the air with negative campaigning, but I do suspect he will be using it to buy influence in areas he can't reach. It may end up buying votes, and thats the largest crime at all.

He has created a great talking point for McCain, who can try to paint him as a flip-flopper, which is pretty much a death sentence for a young democrat in today's electorate. Obama needs to work hard to make this a non-issue, or something that he thought would help could end up coming back and biting him in the...well it seems appropriate to say "wallet-area."

The Florida-Michigan Resolution

Yesterday, the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws committee finally decided just what would happen with the delegations from Florida and Michigan, which as we all know had their delegates stripped by the party for holding their primaries too early in violation of a party rule. The decision? Their full delegation will be seated, but each delegate will only have half a vote as a penalty. Also, the results from Florida will be counted as they were in the primary, but the 44% of Michigan ballots that chose "uncommitted" were counted towards Obama, whose name was not on the ballot in that state. Clinton earned 55% there.

Finally, a resolution that compromises both sides in a very difficult situation. Now can we please stop making a big deal out of this? I'm talking to you, Hillary Clinton! This decision only gave her a net of 24 votes at the convention, and while it is a fair decision that recognizes the interests and arguments of both sides, it does not bring here anywhere near Obama, or being able to make her case that she is more electable with any sort of credibility. He remains nearly two hundred delegate equivalents ahead of her, and now needs to garner just 67 more to reach the requisite 2118, adjusted from the previous 2026 to account for the Florida/Michigan delegations. This changed almost nothing, except for laying Obama back some twenty delegates. And here's the thing--the primary season ends this Tuesday, and with three remaining contests, she has no chance to close the gap without going to the superdelegates, who are expected based on recent behavior to support the majority of pledged delegates and back Obama.

Now Clinton and her supporters are complaining about this decision, ostensibly because they want their votes counted, but in reality it is because this changed absolutely nothing. At the end of the day, she is (as a practical matter) no closer to catching up with Obama than she was at the beginning. But her supporters have turned seriously ugly because of this, even going so far as to say that they will vote for McCain if Hillary isn't nominated or booing Obama, the presumptive nominee.

The party will unite after the convention, Hillary? Really?

Because what we are seeing in your insistence to keep running is going to destroy the party. Florida and Michigan, your last great hopes, were resolved in a way that is fair to everyone, and you are no better off because of it. What happens after Tuesday, when the superdelegates begin to announce their allegiance to Obama, and he finds himself with a majority of the convention's delegates? Are you going to keep fighting until the convention itself, as you and your supporters have hinted? Because if you do, and even then fail to get the nomination, the Democratic Party that leaves Denver will be even more fractured than when it entered. It's over, Senator. The people have chosen, and shouldn't that be enough for you? Or do you really not care about the people, and are only so egotistical to believe that you deserve the nomination no matter what they say, willingly sabotaging your party's chances of winning in November by deepening the rift between your supporters and Obama's? Way to...umm...unite the party?

Cluster Bombs Ban

So you may or may not have heard about the recent dispute about the banning of cluster bombs. If you are like most people and don't know exactly what a cluster bomb is, it's simply a large bomb that is launched (from the ground, or more often dropped from a plane) that breaks into many tiny "bomblets" before it hits the ground. These spread out and cover a large area, and from the military point of view, they are very useful for "taking out dispersed ground targets," in other words, killing a lot of people who are standing far apart from eachother.

The controversy lies in the fact that a large amount of cluster bombs, from 10 to 40 percent, do not detonate when they are supposed to. They merely land on the battlefield, then are forgotten in the heat of conflict and left there. Years later, they can be set off by being touched, which is a huge risk to civilians, particularly children who don't know better than to pick up a bomb. You could just google image "cluster bomb victims", and there will be hundreds of hits. I didn't include any pictures because I didn't want to force anyone to look at the reality, but if you aren't squeamish, just look at the pictures and see how horrible the weapons really are.

This debate draws a parallel with the prior controversy over landmines, which many countries agreed to ban with the Ottawa Treaty, which took effect in 1999. But guess which country is not a signatory to the Ottawa Treaty, and has already shown resistance to the recent effort to ban cluster bombs. That's it, the good old US of A. The American urge to have the world's strongest military, no matter the monetary or moral cost, is yet again keeping us from banning a weapon that does serious harm to civilians, many years after a conflict is over. An estimated 300 people die every year in Vietnam from cluster bombs that were dropped by the United States. I'm honestly not sure whose decision it is to ban them or not, if it's just an executive call, or if something must be passed in Congress, or what. But I would like to know who it is that is keeping our country on the list of those who continue to use weapons notorious for harming civilians.

Here's what you can do to help: sign online petitions. I'm sure there are many sites out there that have petitions going, but I'll only post the link to one. It takes less than twenty seconds to put down your name, zip code, email, and some other little bits of info. By adding yourself to the list of people against cluster bombs, you will help send a message to the world's governments that the citizens of the US will not stand for allowing the continued use of weapons that kill innocent people years after being dropped. And if you like cluster bombs or don't care, just don't sign. As always, it doesn't take any effort to keep things the way they are, it only takes work to change them.

To sign the petition:
http://www.clusterbombs.org/i-want-to-sign/

To learn more:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/05/19/cluster.bombs/#cnnSTCText

Faux News Strikes Again- Trotta Style

This past Sunday, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta made some pretty shocking remarks regarding Barack Obama. While responding to Hillary’s now infamous RFK remarks, she made the following comment,

[...] and now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama. Um, uh, Obama. Well both, if we could.

Trotta immediately followed this comment with laughter, as the host of the show mockingly asked her to “tell us how you really feel.” On Memorial Day, she made a half hearted apology, where she characterized it as a “lame attempt at humor,” and said she was “sorry to anyone I might have offended.”

Besides the fact that you know and I know she is not sorry for what she said, there is something bigger at risk here, much bigger. I have been noticing more and more that Fox News is beginning to bring people on air who regularly leave their position as objective news reporters to make their own personal commentaries on political issues.

The mainstream media is meant to provide information to the masses, pure, unbiased information that people can then take and interpret in their own highly personal ways. When big news sources like Fox continually put people like Liz Trotta on air, who seem to advocate the assassination of someone like Barack Obama, the media is failing as an institution. This is by no means the first time anyone from the media showed their own political colors, I’m just saying that as we near closer to November, this becomes a pretty big issue.

What I saw as I watched Liz Trotta on Sunday was not one lunatic political analyst making a monumental mistake, I saw a calculated attack on both Democratic Presidential candidates. I think that Fox may have tipped their cap at the violent hate filled tactics that we should expect as the election nears closer. They claim to be “fair and balanced,” but you and I both know that is a lie.

This is not an isolated event. You will see more of this, and of that I am sure. As it continues to happen, the other media sources will make a big deal for a few days, the talking head will be forced to make an apology, and then the media will find some other scandal to focus on, and the commentator will get off scot-free. Yet the message they implanted into millions of heads across the country will not fade so easily. The mainstream media still seems to find calling Obama “Osama” pretty damn funny, and until they stop, people across the nation will continue to believe he is Muslim, or even a threat to our country.
It needs to stop, and yet the only tool we have is our viewership. They control our information, and so we need them, and they know it. What can we do except turn off our television sets and deprive them of their demographic? Nothing, but in doing that, we become uninformed. It is a nasty little pickle we find ourselves in.

The only solace we can find is to only look towards sources we know that we can trust, such as The Washington Post, or The New York Times. If you are looking for political information, I suggest you look to one of those newspapers. If its on the TV, take it with a grain of salt.

That is my advice, do with it what you will. Or not, since I’m just some random guy writing on the internet.

Democratic Primary Season, day 144

Well, it's been two months since I last wrote about the Democrats, but one would think that the only thing that's changed is that both candidates now have higher delegate counts, although Obama is now in much better shape. With only three contests remaining, he has a majority of pledged delegates attending the convention, a lead in superdelegates, and increasing media coverage labelling him as the presumptive nominee. He is now only fifty-seven delgates shy of the requisite 2026 needed to be nominated. Yet Clinton, who trails Obama by nearly 200 delegates, remains in the race, not because she has any real chance, but because she refuses to leave.
Let's face it, the only reason that Obama isn't already labelled the presumptive nominee by everyone is because no one wants to have to break it to the Clintons--and that includes Bill as much as it does Hillary. But as they become increasingly desperate to show by any way they can that Senator Clinton deserves the nomination, one wonders if it's time for someone to tell them to get out now with class than to drag this thing to the convention.

The thing is, Clinton doesn't have a clear path to the nomination. The logic employed by Clinton supporters to show that she should get the nomination over Obama's head is increasingly tortured, with ironies and contradictions that make the summer gas tax seem like a good idea in comparison. She claims that she will not leave the race until "every voice was heard and every vote counted," yet she claims she is leading in the popular vote by counting Michigan (where Obama supporters were not even given the chance to vote for him) and Florida, and by discounting the people in caucus states, because somehow their opinions don't matter (or is it simply because Obama has dominated the caucuses?) She claims every voice needs to be heard, and so the votes in Florida and Michigan must be counted, even though that didn't become important to her until she realized that her nomination was about to be "stolen." She says she wants the votes of Americans to be counted, yet is desperately making her case to the superdelegates to buck the pledged delegates and choose her over Obama.
Recently she went so far as to claim that the Democrats need to change their nomination process, because the current one "fails to represent the will of the American voters." I quote,

“I think that’s an issue for debate in the future because I believe we should have primaries everywhere, and everybody, as many people as possible should be encouraged to vote...We ought to group them so that nobody is at the tail end, so everybody has a chance to participate. But that’s all for the future.”

You know, I didn't realize Hillary was the champion of nomination reform until the current system gave someone like Obama the chance to turn over the establishment candidate. I mean, give me a break. Lets face it, if the primaries were all held on the same day, Clinton, with national name recognition and a convincing lead in polls, probably could have won the nomination outright. However, the spaced out nature of the nominating process allowed Obama to gain name recognition as he won contests, particulary his surprising win in the Iowa caucuses. Now, suddenly, it's not democratic to give relative unknowns the chance to win popular support?
What this comes down to is that Clinton feels that she deserves the nomination, and when the people chose someone else it was because of some flaw in the nominating system. Will it ever occur to her that the Democratic Party perhaps found someone they liked more? It's as if she's personally offended by this whole ordeal, and her arguments are tantamount to claiming that the votes of the people don't matter at all. Give it up, Hillary.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/05/24/clinton-democratic-nomination-process-needs-to-change/