Listics

Where the marginalized and the disenfranchised meet Ward and June and Wally and Beav…

This from Crooked Timber, 2006:

Bob Dylan, 1963 :

In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

The Vatican 2006 :

JUDAS ISCARIOT, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, is to be given a makeover by Vatican scholars. The proposed “rehabilitation” of the man who was paid 30 pieces of silver to identify Jesus to Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane, comes on the ground that he was not deliberately evil, but was just “fulfilling his part in God’s plan”.

Now, emerging out of the smoke and mirrors of the organized crime qua Christian cult that our government has become, there is a book — The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (HarperCollins, May) by Jeff Sharlet. This review by Brian Cook suggests to me that I must read it.

From the bookjacket:

They are the Family—fundamentalism’s avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen, congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a “leadership led by God,” to be won not by force but through “quiet diplomacy.” Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have written from inside its walls.

The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the Far Right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a “family” that thrives to this day. In public, they host prayer breakfasts; in private they preach a gospel of “biblical capitalism,” military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao, the Family’s leader declares, “We work with power where we can, build new power where we can’t.”

Sharlet’s discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the Cold War, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not “What do fundamentalists want?” but “What have they already done?”

Condoleezza Rice was a Chevron Director from 1991 until January 15, 2001 when she was transferred by President George W. Bush to National Security Adviser. Previously she was Senior Director, Soviet Affairs, National Security Council, and Special Assistant to President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1991.

Another Chevron Corporation giant in the Bush administration is Vice President Dick Cheney. Vice President Cheney was Chairman and Chief Executive of Dallas based Halliburton Corporation, the world’s largest oil field services company with multi-billion dollar contracts with oil corporations including Chevron.

Six years before Chevron bought Unocal (effectively freezing the Chinese out of Caspian oil transport via ), the Baku Supsa pipeline was up and running in Georgia:

A spokeswoman for the Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC) said that the new Baku-Supsa pipeline was pumping oil at its full capacity of 115,000 barrels per day. The AIOC had originally planned to bring the early oil pipeline up to full capacity in June of this year, Tamam Bayatly said. All construction work on the pipeline itself has been completed, and the sixth and final pumping station along the Baku-Supsa route was finished earlier in May, she added.

AIOC officials have said they are eager to make good use of the new pipeline, particularly since the Russian state pipeline operator Transneft appears to be having trouble keeping the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline — the consortium’s only other export outlet — open. The northern pipeline has been shut down repeatedly since the beginning of the year.

Frequent interruption of service is not the only drawback of the northern pipeline; Transneft charges the AIOC and SOCAR $ 15.67 for every ton of oil transported from the Azerbaijani border to Novorossiysk. By contrast, the cost of shipping one ton of crude from Baku to Supsa through the new pipeline has been figured at only $ 2-3 per ton.

The westward-leading pipeline may become even more economical if the AIOC builds new infrastructure facilities; with extra pumping stations and storage facilities at the Baku and Supsa terminals, industry experts say, the pipeline could handle 250,000 bpd.

BP-Amoco is the lead investor controlling the Baku/Tbilisi/Ceyhan pipeline project. They have a Joint Operating Agreement with SOCAR (the Azerbaijan state owned oil company). Israel’s interest is more complex than I thought if they really see Eilat as a trans-shipping point for Caspian oil:

…geopolitical experts note that on the surface level, the Russians are backing the separatists of S. Ossetia and neighboring Abkhazia as payback for the strengthening of American influence in tiny Georgia and its 4.5 million inhabitants. However, more immediately, the conflict has been sparked by the race for control over the pipelines carrying oil and gas out of the Caspian region.

The Russians may just bear with the pro-US Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili’s ambition to bring his country into NATO. But they draw a heavy line against his plans and those of Western oil companies, including Israeli firms, to route the oil routes from Azerbaijan and the gas lines from Turkmenistan, which transit Georgia, through Turkey instead of hooking them up to Russian pipelines.

…Jerusalem owns a strong interest in Caspian oil and gas pipelines reaching the Turkish terminal port of Ceyhan, rather than the Russian network. Intense negotiations are afoot between Israel, Turkey, Georgia, Turkmenistan and Azarbaijan for pipelines to reach Turkey and thence to Israel’s oil terminal at Ashkelon and on to its Red Sea port of Eilat. From there, supertankers can carry the gas and oil to the Far East through the Indian Ocean.

I think Chevron and BP-Amoco are wagging the dog on this one. While it looks like an international struggle for power and influence south of the Caucasus, with players as diverse as Putin and Sarkozy weighing in and attempting to influence the outcomes through diplomacy and force of arms, the global corporate struggle between the western oil cartel and the emerging Russian energy industrial oligarchy may be simply an overt example of business driving government policy. The USian government, her armies and her influence, are in the service of the oil cartel.

Is it scatter-brained to think that the nation states are mere stage dressing for a broader and more fundamental power struggle amongst an oligarchic elite that thinks they own the planet? Forbes list of billionaires provides a clue regarding who some of them are, but there are undoubtedly a lot of unwashed deca-millionaires who control shit like the world’s supply of molybdenum, power brokers who have a place at the table too.

Now this Georgia versus Russia thing flared up and I looked around and found that the Ossetians speak a language different from the Russians and different from the Georgians. Over to the west in Georgia lies the autonomous region of Abkhazia. These people speak a different language from the Georgians too. Here’s a map of the crazy quilt of ethnolinguistic groups around the Caucasus.

(You might note that Chechen is just a short way to the east of Ossetia. They speak a couple of languages there that are neither Russian nor Georgian.)

So the Russian oligarchs have some geopolitical strategy in play when they subordinate the Chechens to their will and when they clasp the Ossetians to the bosom of mother Russia. That interest has little to do with national security, since the Caucasus provide a great buffer zone of protection against any incursion from the south. A cursory inspection of the source of the wealth of the Russian oligarchs in Forbes’ list of billionaires contains no surprises… not a lot of Web 2.0 wealth, but plenty of influence tied to providing the Russian federation with gas and oil.

And Georgia is a pipeline route for oil and gas from the Caspian that is needed in countries around the Mediterranean. But ironically they are also a huge customer of Russia’s Gazprom Company (which if you look at the list of billionaires and how many owe their wealth to oil and gas… well, you see where that goes. Shoot, it almost mirrors the whole Texas oil mafia thing.)

National posturing and PR patriotism are tangential distractions for those of us in the middle and working classes. If we spend our time flag waving or debating the merits of Georgia’s territorial integrity over the rights of the Ossetians to choose Russia for their homeland, we really just look the other way while the wealthy and powerful people compete for the planet.

It’s not about Georgia. It’s not about Ossetia. It’s not about Russia. It’s about natural gas from Kazakhstan and the oligarchs who will profit from its extraction and distribution.

Technorati Tags: georgia, south ossetia, russian oligarchs

Nadezhda at American Footprints has a compilation of links, maps, and analyses of the continuing Georgia/Russia conflict. See also the CIA factbook.

Two oil pipelines cross Georgia from east to west. The Baku-Supsa pipeline runs from the rich oil fields of Azerbaijan to the Black Sea (the Baku-Supsa pipeline). The BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) pipeline runs north out of Azerbaijan through Georgia, avoiding Armenia, then turning south through Turkey to the Med. The Russian Federation is served by a single pipeline out of Baku in Azerbaijan, running north-west along the Caspian, then to the west north of the Caucasus and terminating at the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.

Russia has fifty-four billionaires listed by Forbes magazine comprising a modern industrial oligarchy. The Ukraine has three. Georgia has none.

Georgia is a representative democracy, organized as a secular, unitary, semi-presidential republic. It is currently a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the World Trade Organization, the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, and GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development. The country seeks to join NATO and, in the longer term, accession to the European Union.

It looks like Georgia’s autonomy is about to run out. The democratic interlude is over. In Russia the commissars have been replaced by the oligarchs, but for Georgia it looks like the results will be the same: subjugation to Russian rule.

The Ivins story has the smell of convenient death and cover-up. The anthrax attacks of 2001 may have been a means to an end. ABC refuses to release information on discredited sources, information that could bring clarity to the anthrax story today.

All this and more, Jay Rosen Friday on Glenn Greenwald’s podcast.

Technorati Tags: podcats, now will you believe me that Meg Thatcher Bush the First knew what they were doing in when they hurled all those greenhouse gases skyward, would you believe global warming was a plot to open a northwest passage and open the polls to oil exploration, well then would you believe that the anthrax thing was used to silence dissenters and lay a foundation for war with Iraq, kbaithx

Of course we’re voting for him. He’s our only hope in the areas of health care, reduced unemployment, environmental protection, and so on. But let’s not pretend that his approach to foreign policy is satisfactory. Down stream we will owe it to ourselves and to the world to speak up against the excesses of American hegemony, dominance, imperialism, or whatever you want to call it.