Alright folks, let's start with a little Pop Quiz here. What's worse for a planetary ecosystem on the brink of collapse, than a huge war? The answer of course is a huge fossil fuel war that leads to massively increased production, and widespread profiteering by an oil and gas sector that should by all rights be charged with crimes against humanity already.
"Under conservative estimates, we find the U.S. upstream oil and gas industry will collect a windfall of $37 to $126 billion in 2022 alone," the groups' report states."
There will of course be those who want to quibble about the significant difference between thirty-seven billion dollars, and a hundred and twenty billion dollars, but from my distinctly labor class perspective, this is pretty obviously war profiteering by another name. Please keep in mind that this is an industry that's already raking profits in hand over fist, while openly threatening the existence of most life on earth, every single day. Whether it's a question of cause, or effect, why should humanity continue to tolerate a business that rings up big money every time (primarily poor) people die?
As long time readers of Nina-Bytes will no doubt be aware, I'm firmly in favor of not only disbanding the entire fossil fuel industry, but also seizing their ill-gotten profits, and the profits of their investors, to fight climate change. If war profiteering on the brink of a climate apocalypse isn't enough for you, will spending billions of dollars to hide the truth about fossil fuels from the public do? How many wars over a gas field that should be kept in the ground does it take, before the price is too high? How many dead bodies does it require for "respectable" CEOs to become mass murderers?
Yet collectively in the Pig Empire, we live in a society where this industry's army of lobbyists write the laws designed to fight climate catastrophe. Indeed, these same corporations, headed by mass murderers, easily buy and sell our politicians like so many sow bellies. Do you really believe the guys raking in billions from this war, are encouraging their in-pocket representatives to sue for peace? I sure don't. Once you're prepared to put billions of lives at risk to snag a quarterly bonus, what's one more natural gas war on the edge of Europe?
Like most observers, I hope (for the sake of labor class folks everywhere) that Vladimir Putin will call off his invasion; the price of peace, even for him, is at an all-time low right now. Regardless of how this sad story ends however, the simple truth is that the fossil fuel industry represents an existential threat to all life on earth, and a primary generator of imperialist wars. It does no good to pray for peace, while bathing yourself in profits from the black blood of war. Big Oil must die; or it will ensure that the rest of us do instead - and those are just the facts, Jack.
Look, I don't want to say that the mainstream media always lies, because most of the time they don't really have to. As I've explained before, it's pretty easy to abuse context, or lack thereof, to distort how the news is perceived, while still technically reporting "the truth." Recently for example, I've watched this technique being deployed while reporting on various aspects of federal spending by the Biden administration. Consider for a moment the wildly different ways our record $778 billion defense budge for 2022, and the social spending in the budget reconciliation bill are being reporting.
Not only is the focus on reporting the highest possible spending number (over 10 years) when reporting the reconciliation bill, but the media also credulously accepts the complaints of so called budget hawk Senators demanding huge funding cuts for social and environmental programs. As Sharon Zhang notes over on Truthout however, nobody even bats an eyelash when those same "budget hawks" fall all over themselves to give the Pentagon more money than it asked for! Sorry kids; we're pawning your future so Lockheed Martin can bill the government for more Javelin missiles we absolutely don't need. This situation is not only absurd, but it's an active threat to what passes for American democracy. Oh, and also all life on earth.
As I've written recently; figuring out why Democrats can't pass the Build Back Better Act isn't a convoluted mystery. The answer is bald-faced corruption; anarcho-capitalist billionaires and corporations have bribed two Senators to sink it at all costs. Maybe you can argue that the political media in America can't report that because bribery is effectively legal. I don't agree with that argument, but it exists. A truly adversarial free press however, would at least report the fact that these guys are shoveling cash at a carbon-spewing war machine, at the same time as they're crying that the country's coffers are too short to pay for climate crisis reduction programs.
The problem here of course is that we don't have a free and adversarial press. We have a corporate propaganda machine actively partnered with the war machine, to make bucket loads of money keeping America perpetually prepared for, or engaging in, another war. Social spending costs rich people money, while weapons contracts make rich people money; this isn't that complex. Obviously in an economy built on blood and oil, the survival of the species just doesn't rate.
Maybe poor kids and polar bears should hire themselves some lobbyists.
Editor's note: welcome back to Film Sessions; our quasi-regular feature here on Media Madness in which I share, analyze and expand on a relevant video created by someone on the left wing of YouTube.
Over the past couple weeks however, Chapman has released consecutive, interrelated video essays about climate catastrophe as it pertains to capitalism, and its handmaiden imperialism respectively. In response, I'm going to change up our format a little bit here on Film Sessions and group these two videos together with a third, slightly older video about why the origins of our climate crisis don't actually matter to our survival as a species, into a single analysis essay. To facilitate organized reading, I'll put my analysis under each embedded video and then lump all the additional resources and citations into a footer at the bottom.
As always you can check these presentations out on YouTube by clicking the headers above each video, or simply watch inside the embedded boxes below.
Alright then, let's start by ignoring Jeff Bezos' annoying and self-defeating paywall, to look at WaPo's effectively anonymous little blog post in all of its five hundred word glory:
"Opinion: The Bolivian government is on a lawless course. Its democracy must be preserved.
ONLY
A FEW months ago, the Andean nation of Bolivia seemed to be on its
way to healing, after a year that had thrown its political future
into jeopardy. Luis
Arce,
a candidate of the country’s socialist party, had won the Oct. 18
presidential elections. His opponents — Carlos Mesa, who ran
against him on a centrist platform, and the conservative then-interim
president, Jeanine Áñez — had accepted the result. And Mr. Arce
had pledged to govern on the basis of unity and conciliation. Thus
did Bolivia appear to exit a crisis that the leader of Mr. Arce’s
party, former president Evo Morales, precipitated by attempting to
steal a fourth term through election fraud in 2019, leading to
often-violent demonstrations, the military’s abandonment of the
Morales-led government — and Mr. Morales’s departure to exile.
Now,
unfortunately, Mr. Arce appears to have reverted to a more one-sided
and vengeful leadership style characteristic of Mr. Morales, who has
returned to Bolivia and still wields considerable power. On March 13,
the government jailed
Ms. Áñez and
two former members of her cabinet, threatening them with prosecution
and long prison terms; warrants are out for several other former top
officials. These actions follow an
amnesty for
Mr. Morales’s supporters accused of human rights violations
while Ms. Áñez was in power, as well as the institution of
de facto political loyalty tests for
key government employees.
Mr.
Arce’s government claims that
it is merely enforcing laws against sedition that Ms. Áñez
purportedly broke by fomenting a “coup” against Mr. Morales. Ms.
Áñez is certainly not blameless in Bolivia’s problems, having
governed high-handedly, including by trying, shortly after she took
office, to shield security forces from punishment for sometimes
deadly violence against pro-Morales protesters.
Yet
Ms. Áñez, facing pressure from human rights advocates, withdrew
that decree; and the accusation at the core of her arrest now —
that she plotted with the Bolivian military and others to overthrow
Mr. Morales — is at odds with historical reality. Mr. Morales lost
power because of his own attempt to subvert the 2019 election —
which Organization of American States (OAS) observers confirmed at
the time — and the Bolivian people’s massive rejection of it in
the streets. Ms. Áñez succeeded to the presidency under a tenuous
but constitutionally prescribed emergency process; and, to her
credit, she peacefully ceded power to Mr. Arce when he won last year.
Tens
of thousands of Bolivians have taken to the streets in opposition to
what Mr. Arce is now doing. Bolivia’s Catholic bishops
have issued a statement against
what they called an attempt to turn the justice system into a
partisan weapon and to “create a false account of history,
inventing the truth and manipulating the conscience of
Bolivians.” The
OAS secretariat also
decried the arrest of Ms. Áñez, prompting Mr. Arce’s minister
of justice to threaten OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro with
prosecution.
The
Bolivian government’s lawless course threatens further chaos, if
not civil war and outright dictatorship, at a time when the country,
among the hardest hit by covid-19 in
the world, should be fighting the pandemic. The Biden administration
should lead a regional effort to preserve democratic stability in
this long-suffering country, lest crisis turn into catastrophe."
Okay so before we get to a sort of line by line refutation of what's going on here, let me start by noting that the above WaPo piece is by no means a legitimate news item, but it's certainly an impressive piece of Pig Empire propaganda; even if only for its crass dishonesty and cynical assumptions about the reading public in general. Given the outrageous omissions, misrepresentations, and outright lies covered in this concise little smear job, it's really not a surprise the always pro-empire Washington Post is hiding behind both its editorial board byline, and the "Opinion" tag here either. Despite this however - words do actually mean things, and when you state falsehoods as facts, it's got absolutely nothing to do with subjective analysis or a right to express unpopular ideas.
“William Kaliman, former Commander in Chief of the Bolivian armed forces, forced President Evo Morales to resign,” Kinzer noted. “A week later he moved to the United States.”
“Evo’s term runs through January 2020. Even if you don’t accept the election of October 20th, Morales’ term as president that he won five years ago should still be ongoing. The succession laws that are supposed to be followed after a president resigns were completely flouted. Several members of the MAS were passed over and power was passed unconstitutionally to Añez.”
All of which then leaves us with the WaPo editorial board's lies by omission; of which there are many. Since I assume you're starting to get a sense of just how full of crap this piece is already, I'll wrap this portion of our examination up by discussing only the three most glaring and dishonest omissions in this article.
"No
mainstream outlet warned its readers that the OAS is a Cold War
organization, explicitly set up to halt the spread of leftist
governments. In 1962, for example, it passed
an official resolutionclaiming
that the Cuban government was “incompatible with the principles and
objectives of the inter-American system.” Furthermore, the
organization is bankrolled by the US government; indeed, in
justifying its continued funding, US AID arguedthat
the OAS is a crucial tool in “promot[ing] US interests in the
Western hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-US countries”
like Bolivia."
"The
coup regime is now led by Jeanine Áñez, a Christian-fundamentalist
senator and opponent of Morales, who in 2013 tweeted (translation):
“I dream of a Bolivia free of indigenous satanic rites, the city is
not for ‘Indians,’ they better go to the highlands or El Chaco.”
On claiming the presidency after the army “asked” Morales to step
down (he fled to Mexico following threats to his life and has since
moved to Argentina), Áñez declared, “Thank God the Bible has
returned to the Bolivian government.” About two-thirds of Bolivia’s
population is Indigenous, forming a major part of Morales’s support
base. Before the coup, MAS held majorities in both the Bolivian
chamber of deputies and the senate."
"An
ultraconservative Catholic senator, Áñez hails from the thinly
populated Amazonian department of Beni, a region whose indigenous
peoples first made the demand for a constituent assembly in the
1990s. But Áñez is no ally of indigenous Bolivians. She believes
indigenous spirituality to be a sign of Satan, and upon seizing power
in the days after November 10, she declared the national government
to be “at last” free of paganism. Her partisans trampled upon and
burned the Wiphala — the banner of indigenous unity — prompting
tens of thousands of indigenous people to pour into the streets in
protest."
Oh you poor, sweet, summer child - I feel like I'm telling an orphan there's no Santa Claus:
Well damn Tony; given the Biden administration's rhetoric about cleansing the legacy of Trump's foreign policy, that's pretty awkward, ain't it my dude? So much for build back better, I guess.
