Free Trade – Starving the Poor and Middle Class
Now that it’s clear that prices for food all over the world are going through the roof it should be even clearer that so-called free trade, which is dominated by the intention of the stronger powers to eliminate local agriculture, is making a major contribution to starving the poorest peoples, and making the classes just above – including the middle classes -- more and more hungry.
Showing posts with label Clinton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Clinton. Show all posts
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Monday, September 17, 2007
NYT (1993): The FBI Allowed (or arranged) the WTC '93 Bombing: What Was Clinton's Role?
Ralph Schoenman was recently in NYC (May 2006) for some lectures, parts of which were broadcast on local, soon to be gone, community access cable. In connection with false flag operations, Schoenman mentioned the 1993 WTC bombing and gave the documentation regarding the Times account which blew the whistle on the FBI operation.
So the truth comes out in plain sight, but it doesn't matter, since it's never repeated and certainly not part of the official story, the only story that is allowed.
In his lecture Schoenman laid out his theory that the Blind Sheik was brought in to this country against Egypt's protests to serve as a patsy in these false flag operations and was aided by the CIA while in Egypt as part of a larger operation to destabilize secular Arab governments.
This reminder from 1993 brings up again the question of Clinton's involvement in these shadow operations. This false flag operation was intended to jump start the war against the Muslim community in the CIA/FBI creation of an Islamic villain and permanent war that is their mission.
Did Clinton know in advance? After the incident, what effort if any did he make to get to the bottom of it? In all likelihood, the best that can be said is that he kept a hands off approach.
--Ronald
The FBI allowed the 1993
WTC bombing to happen
THE NEW YORK TIMES * * * * * Thursday October 28, 1993 Page A1
"Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast" By Ralph Blumenthal
Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building
a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center,
and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting
harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after
the blast. The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb
and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by
an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer,
Emad Salem, should be used, the informer said. The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings that Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as
being in a far better position than previously known to foil
the February 26th bombing of New York City's tallest towers.
The explosion left six people dead, more than a thousand people
injured, and damages in excess of half-a-billion dollars. Four men are now on trial in Manhattan Federal Court [on charges of involvement] in that attack. Mr. Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian Army officer, was used by the Government [of the United States] to penetrate a circle of Muslim extremists who are now charged in two bombing cases:
the World Trade Center attack, and a foiled plot to destroy
the United Nations, the Hudson River tunnels, and other New York City landmarks. He is the crucial witness in the second bombing case, but his work for the Government was erratic, and for months before the World Trade Center blast,
he was feuding with the F.B.I. Supervisor `Messed It Up' After the bombing, he resumed his undercover work. In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period,Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent
about an unnamed F.B.I. supervisor who, he said, "came and messed it up."
"He requested to meet me in the hotel," Mr. Salem says of the supervisor. "He requested to make me to testify, and if he didn't push for that, we'll be going building the bomb with a phony powder, and grabbing the people who was
involved in it. But since you, we didn't do that." The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to F.B.I. Headquarters in Washington about the
Bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev.
Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him, "He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York Office to go to
Washington, D.C." Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute
Mr. Salem's account, but rather, appears to agree with it, saying of the `New York people': "Well, of course not, because they don't want to get their butts chewed."
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Mitchel Cohen: Gore and Clinton's inconvenient truths
Here's one of the many choice paragraphs from the article below:
During the Clinton presidency:
"Thousands of acres of healthy forestland across the West were rampaged. Washington's Colville National Forest saw the clear cutting of over 4,000 acres. Thousands more in Montana's Yak River Basin, hundreds of acres of pristine forest land in Idaho, while the endangered Mexican Spotted Owl habitat in Arizona fell victim to corporate interests. Old growth trees in Washington's majestic Olympic Peninsula -- home to wild Steelhead, endangered Sockeye salmon, and threatened Marbled Murrieta -- were chopped with unremitting provocation by the US Forest Service."
Is there anyone reading this who thinks a Hillary Clinton presidency would be any better?
Ronald
http://desip.igc.org
***
February 2, 2007
Some Inconvenient Truths About the Politics of Environmental Crisis
Listen Gore
http://www.counterpunch.org/cohen02022007.html
By MITCHEL COHEN
Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," raises the issue of global warming in a way that scares the bejeezus out of viewers, as it should since the consequences of global climate change are truly earth-shaking. The former Vice-President does a good job of presenting the graphic evidence, exquisite and terrifying pictures that document the melting of the polar ice caps and the effects on other species, new diseases, and rising ocean levels.
But, typically, the solutions Gore offers are standard Democratic Party fare. You'd never know by watching this film that Gore and Clinton ran this country for 8 years and that their policies -- as much as those of the Bush regime -- helped pave the way for the crisis we face today.
Gore never critiques the system causing the global ecological crisis. At one point, he even mourns the negative impact of global warming on U.S. oil pipelines. Oh, the horror! What it all comes down to, for Gore and the Democrats, is that we need to shift away from reliance on fossil fuels and tweak existing consumption patterns.
Even there, Gore and Clinton did nothing to improve fuel efficiency in the U.S. -- a topic which Gore talks about in the movie without any hint that he'd once actually been in a position to do something about it. The question Gore poses is, Who can best manage the relatively minor solutions he recommends, the Democrats or Republicans? For Gore, it's sort of "trust US, not THEM, to deal with this situation because they are liars and we're not." Well, should we trust him?
As Joshua Frank writes, during the campaign for president in 1992 Gore promised a group of supporters that the Clinton-Gore EPA would never approve a hazardous waste incinerator located near an elementary school in Liverpool, Ohio, which was operated by WTI. "Only three months into Clinton's tenure," Frank writes, "the EPA issued an operating permit for the toxic burner. Gore raised no qualms. Not surprisingly, most of the money behind WTI came from the bulging pockets of Jackson Stephens, who just happened to be one of the Clinton-Gore's top campaign contributors."(1)
But failing to shut down toxic incinerators is just the tip of their great betrayal. In the film, Gore references the Kyoto Accords and states that he personally went to Kyoto during the negotiations, giving the impression that he was a key figure in fighting to reduce air pollution emissions that destroy the ozone layer. What he omits is that his mission in going to Kyoto was to scuttle the Accords, to block them from moving forward. And he succeeded.
The Clinton-Gore years were anything but environment-friendly. Under Clinton-Gore, more old growth forests were cut down than under any other recent U.S. administration. "Wise Use" committees -- set up by the lumber industry -- were permitted to clearcut whole mountain ranges, while Clinton-Gore helped to "greenwash" their activities for public consumption.
Under Clinton-Gore, the biotech industry was given carte blanche to write the US government's regulations (paltry as they are) on genetic engineering of agriculture, and to move full speed ahead with implementing the private patenting of genetic sequences with nary a qualm passing Gore's lips.
You'd think watching this film that Gore is just some concerned professor who never had access to power or held hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Occidental Petroleum (driving the U'wa off their lands in Colombia), let alone was the Number Two man actually running the U.S. government!
"Gore, like Clinton who quipped that 'the invisible hand has a green thumb,' extolled a free-market attitude toward environmental issues," writes Frank, who goes on to quote Jeffrey St. Clair: "Since the mid-1980s Gore has argued with increasing stridency that the bracing forces of market capitalism are potent curatives for the ecological entropy now bearing down on the global environment. He is a passionate disciple of the gospel of efficiency, suffused with an inchoate technophilia."(2)
Before Kyoto, before the Clinton-Gore massive depleted uranium bombings of Yugoslavia and Iraq, before their missile "deconstruction" of the only existing pharmaceutical production facility in northern Africa in the Sudan (which exacerbated the very serious problems there, as we're seeing in Darfur today), there was NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. The task of Clinton-Gore was to push through this legislation which not even strong Republican administrations under Reagan or Bush Sr. had been able to do. Since its inception, NAFTA has undermined U.S. environmental laws, chased production facilities out of the U.S. and across the borders, vastly increased pollution from Maquilladoras (enterprise zones) along the U.S./Mexico border and helped to undermine the indigenous sustainable agrarian-based communities in southern Mexico -- as predicted by leftists in both countries, leading to the Zapatista uprising from those communities on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect.
Clinton-Gore also approved the destructive deal with the sugar barons of South Florida arranged by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, which doomed the Everglades. (In fact, Clinton was on the phone with Alfonso Fanjul, Jr., the chief of the sugar barons, while Monica Lewinsky was busy doing her thing in her famous blue dress under Clinton's desk.)
Early in Clinton-Gore's first administration, they pledged they would stop the plunder of the Northwest forests, writes former Village Voice columnist James Ridgeway. "They then double-crossed their environmental backers. Under Bush Sr., the courts had enjoined logging in the Northwest habitats of the spotted owl. Clinton-Gore persuaded environmentalists to join them in axing the injunction. The Clinton administration went before a Reagan-appointed judge who had a record as a stalwart environmentalist and with the eco toadies in tow, got him to remove the injunction, and with it the moratorium on existing timber sales."(3) Then Gore and Clinton "capitulated to the demands of Western Democrats and yanked from its initial budget proposals a call to reform grazing, mining, and timber practices on federal lands. When Clinton convened a timber summit in Portland, Oregon, in April 1994, the conference was, as one might expect, dominated by logging interests. Predictably, the summit gave way to a plan to restart clear-cutting in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest for the first time in three years, giving the timber industry its get rich wish."(4)
Gore and Clinton sent to Congress the infamous Salvage Rider, known to radical environmentalists as the "Logging without Laws" bill, "perhaps the most gruesome legislation ever enacted under the pretext of preserving ecosystem health." Like Bush's "Healthy Forests" plan, the Clinton-Gore act "was chock full of deception and special interest pandering. 'When [the Salvage Rider] bill was given to me, I was told that the timber industry was circulating this language among the Northwest Congressional delegation and others to try to get it attached as a rider to the fiscal year Interior Spending Bill,' environmental lawyer Kevin Kirchner says. 'There is no question that representatives of the timber industry had a role in promoting this rider. That is no secret.'"(5) What the Salvage Rider did was to "temporarily exempt ... salvage timber sales on federal forest lands from environmental and wildlife laws, administrative appeals, and judicial review," according to the Wilderness Society -- long enough for multinational lumber and paper corporations to clear-cut all but a sliver of the U.S.'s remaining old growth forests.
"Thousands of acres of healthy forestland across the West were rampaged. Washington's Colville National Forest saw the clear cutting of over 4,000 acres. Thousands more in Montana's Yak River Basin, hundreds of acres of pristine forest land in Idaho, while the endangered Mexican Spotted Owl habitat in Arizona fell victim to corporate interests. Old growth trees in Washington's majestic Olympic Peninsula -- home to wild Steelhead, endangered Sockeye salmon, and threatened Marbled Murrieta -- were chopped with unremitting provocation by the US Forest Service."(6)
The assault on nature continued with Gore's blessing.
Around the same time, Clinton-Gore appointee Carol Browner, head of the EPA, was quoted in the NY Times as having said that the administration would be "relaxing" the Delaney Clause (named after its author, Congressman James Delaney, D-NY). Congress had inserted this clause into section 409 of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1958. It prohibited FDA approval of any food additive found to cause cancer in humans or animals. Alone among all food-related directives, this legislation put the onus on the manufacturers to demonstrate that their products were safe before they were allowed to become commercially available. (7) A federal appeals court in July 1992 expanded the jurisdiction of the Delaney Clause, ruling that it was applicable to cancer-causing pesticides in processed food. Browner retracted her comment, claiming she'd never said it, but the proof was in the pudding. The ban on cancer-causing additives (the "Precautionary Principle") that had held through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush, Sr. administrations was finally removed, not by the Republicans but by the Clinton-Gore administration. Instead of expanding the Delaney clause to protect produce and other unprocessed foods, the new Food Quality Protection Act legislation permitted "safe" amounts of carcinogenic chemicals (as designated by the Environmental Protection Agency) to be added to all food. (According to Peter Montague, editor of Rachel's Weekly, "no one knows how 'safe amounts' of carcinogens can be established, especially when several carcinogens and other poisons are added simultaneously to the food of tens of millions of people.) Nevertheless, the Clinton-Gore administration spun this as "progress."
The Clinton administration, with guidance from Gore's office, also cut numerous deals over the pesticide Methyl Bromide despite its reported effects of contributing to Ozone depletion and its devastating health consequences on farm workers picking strawberries.
Much is being made these days about the need to save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. But Clinton-Gore opened the National Petroleum Reserve " 24 million untouched acres adjacent to the refuge, home to a large caribou herd and numerous arctic species " to oil drilling. The chief beneficiaary of this was Arco, a major ($1.4 million) contributor to the Democratic Party. At the same time, writes James Ridgeway, "Clinton dropped the ban on selling Alaskan oil abroad. This also benefits Arco, which is opening refineries in China. So although the oil companies won the right to exploit Alaskan oil on grounds that to do so would benefit national development, Clinton-Gore unilaterally changed the agreement so that it benefits China's industrial growth."(8)
Not once in the entire film does Gore criticize this awful environmental record or raise the critical questions we need to answer if we are to effectively reverse global warming: Is it really the case that the vast destruction of our environment that went on under his watch and, continuing today, is simply a result of poor consumer choices and ineffective government policies? Is the global environmental devastation we are facing today rectifiable with some simple tuning-up, as Gore proposes?
Neither he -- as point man for the Clinton administration on environmental issues -- nor Clinton-Gore's Energy Secretary Bill Richardson (with major ties to Occidental Petroleum), nor the Democratic Party in general offer anything more than putting a tiny Band-Aid on the earth's gaping wounds, which they themselves helped to gash open.
Clearly, the vast destruction of the global ecology is a consequence not just of poor governmental policies but of the capitalist system's fundamental drive towards Growth and what passes for Development -- Grow or Die. Environmental activists won't find in Gore the kind of systemic analysis that is needed to stop global warming. Instead, we need to look elsewhere for that sort of deep systemic critique.
Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "G", the newspaper of the NY State Greens. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
NOTES
1. Joshua Frank, Counterpunch, May 31, 2006, Frank is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, and edits www.BrickBurner.org
2. Jeffrey St. Clair, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature, Common Courage Press, 2004.
3. James Ridgeway, "Eco Spaniel Kennedy: Nipping at Nader's Heels," Village Voice, Aug. 16-22, 2000.
4,5,6 Joshua Frank.
7. The battle over the Delaney Clause has been ably documented by Rachel's Weekly, at www.rachel.org
8. Ridgeway, op cit.
During the Clinton presidency:
"Thousands of acres of healthy forestland across the West were rampaged. Washington's Colville National Forest saw the clear cutting of over 4,000 acres. Thousands more in Montana's Yak River Basin, hundreds of acres of pristine forest land in Idaho, while the endangered Mexican Spotted Owl habitat in Arizona fell victim to corporate interests. Old growth trees in Washington's majestic Olympic Peninsula -- home to wild Steelhead, endangered Sockeye salmon, and threatened Marbled Murrieta -- were chopped with unremitting provocation by the US Forest Service."
Is there anyone reading this who thinks a Hillary Clinton presidency would be any better?
Ronald
http://desip.igc.org
***
February 2, 2007
Some Inconvenient Truths About the Politics of Environmental Crisis
Listen Gore
http://www.counterpunch.org/cohen02022007.html
By MITCHEL COHEN
Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," raises the issue of global warming in a way that scares the bejeezus out of viewers, as it should since the consequences of global climate change are truly earth-shaking. The former Vice-President does a good job of presenting the graphic evidence, exquisite and terrifying pictures that document the melting of the polar ice caps and the effects on other species, new diseases, and rising ocean levels.
But, typically, the solutions Gore offers are standard Democratic Party fare. You'd never know by watching this film that Gore and Clinton ran this country for 8 years and that their policies -- as much as those of the Bush regime -- helped pave the way for the crisis we face today.
Gore never critiques the system causing the global ecological crisis. At one point, he even mourns the negative impact of global warming on U.S. oil pipelines. Oh, the horror! What it all comes down to, for Gore and the Democrats, is that we need to shift away from reliance on fossil fuels and tweak existing consumption patterns.
Even there, Gore and Clinton did nothing to improve fuel efficiency in the U.S. -- a topic which Gore talks about in the movie without any hint that he'd once actually been in a position to do something about it. The question Gore poses is, Who can best manage the relatively minor solutions he recommends, the Democrats or Republicans? For Gore, it's sort of "trust US, not THEM, to deal with this situation because they are liars and we're not." Well, should we trust him?
As Joshua Frank writes, during the campaign for president in 1992 Gore promised a group of supporters that the Clinton-Gore EPA would never approve a hazardous waste incinerator located near an elementary school in Liverpool, Ohio, which was operated by WTI. "Only three months into Clinton's tenure," Frank writes, "the EPA issued an operating permit for the toxic burner. Gore raised no qualms. Not surprisingly, most of the money behind WTI came from the bulging pockets of Jackson Stephens, who just happened to be one of the Clinton-Gore's top campaign contributors."(1)
But failing to shut down toxic incinerators is just the tip of their great betrayal. In the film, Gore references the Kyoto Accords and states that he personally went to Kyoto during the negotiations, giving the impression that he was a key figure in fighting to reduce air pollution emissions that destroy the ozone layer. What he omits is that his mission in going to Kyoto was to scuttle the Accords, to block them from moving forward. And he succeeded.
The Clinton-Gore years were anything but environment-friendly. Under Clinton-Gore, more old growth forests were cut down than under any other recent U.S. administration. "Wise Use" committees -- set up by the lumber industry -- were permitted to clearcut whole mountain ranges, while Clinton-Gore helped to "greenwash" their activities for public consumption.
Under Clinton-Gore, the biotech industry was given carte blanche to write the US government's regulations (paltry as they are) on genetic engineering of agriculture, and to move full speed ahead with implementing the private patenting of genetic sequences with nary a qualm passing Gore's lips.
You'd think watching this film that Gore is just some concerned professor who never had access to power or held hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Occidental Petroleum (driving the U'wa off their lands in Colombia), let alone was the Number Two man actually running the U.S. government!
"Gore, like Clinton who quipped that 'the invisible hand has a green thumb,' extolled a free-market attitude toward environmental issues," writes Frank, who goes on to quote Jeffrey St. Clair: "Since the mid-1980s Gore has argued with increasing stridency that the bracing forces of market capitalism are potent curatives for the ecological entropy now bearing down on the global environment. He is a passionate disciple of the gospel of efficiency, suffused with an inchoate technophilia."(2)
Before Kyoto, before the Clinton-Gore massive depleted uranium bombings of Yugoslavia and Iraq, before their missile "deconstruction" of the only existing pharmaceutical production facility in northern Africa in the Sudan (which exacerbated the very serious problems there, as we're seeing in Darfur today), there was NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. The task of Clinton-Gore was to push through this legislation which not even strong Republican administrations under Reagan or Bush Sr. had been able to do. Since its inception, NAFTA has undermined U.S. environmental laws, chased production facilities out of the U.S. and across the borders, vastly increased pollution from Maquilladoras (enterprise zones) along the U.S./Mexico border and helped to undermine the indigenous sustainable agrarian-based communities in southern Mexico -- as predicted by leftists in both countries, leading to the Zapatista uprising from those communities on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect.
Clinton-Gore also approved the destructive deal with the sugar barons of South Florida arranged by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, which doomed the Everglades. (In fact, Clinton was on the phone with Alfonso Fanjul, Jr., the chief of the sugar barons, while Monica Lewinsky was busy doing her thing in her famous blue dress under Clinton's desk.)
Early in Clinton-Gore's first administration, they pledged they would stop the plunder of the Northwest forests, writes former Village Voice columnist James Ridgeway. "They then double-crossed their environmental backers. Under Bush Sr., the courts had enjoined logging in the Northwest habitats of the spotted owl. Clinton-Gore persuaded environmentalists to join them in axing the injunction. The Clinton administration went before a Reagan-appointed judge who had a record as a stalwart environmentalist and with the eco toadies in tow, got him to remove the injunction, and with it the moratorium on existing timber sales."(3) Then Gore and Clinton "capitulated to the demands of Western Democrats and yanked from its initial budget proposals a call to reform grazing, mining, and timber practices on federal lands. When Clinton convened a timber summit in Portland, Oregon, in April 1994, the conference was, as one might expect, dominated by logging interests. Predictably, the summit gave way to a plan to restart clear-cutting in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest for the first time in three years, giving the timber industry its get rich wish."(4)
Gore and Clinton sent to Congress the infamous Salvage Rider, known to radical environmentalists as the "Logging without Laws" bill, "perhaps the most gruesome legislation ever enacted under the pretext of preserving ecosystem health." Like Bush's "Healthy Forests" plan, the Clinton-Gore act "was chock full of deception and special interest pandering. 'When [the Salvage Rider] bill was given to me, I was told that the timber industry was circulating this language among the Northwest Congressional delegation and others to try to get it attached as a rider to the fiscal year Interior Spending Bill,' environmental lawyer Kevin Kirchner says. 'There is no question that representatives of the timber industry had a role in promoting this rider. That is no secret.'"(5) What the Salvage Rider did was to "temporarily exempt ... salvage timber sales on federal forest lands from environmental and wildlife laws, administrative appeals, and judicial review," according to the Wilderness Society -- long enough for multinational lumber and paper corporations to clear-cut all but a sliver of the U.S.'s remaining old growth forests.
"Thousands of acres of healthy forestland across the West were rampaged. Washington's Colville National Forest saw the clear cutting of over 4,000 acres. Thousands more in Montana's Yak River Basin, hundreds of acres of pristine forest land in Idaho, while the endangered Mexican Spotted Owl habitat in Arizona fell victim to corporate interests. Old growth trees in Washington's majestic Olympic Peninsula -- home to wild Steelhead, endangered Sockeye salmon, and threatened Marbled Murrieta -- were chopped with unremitting provocation by the US Forest Service."(6)
The assault on nature continued with Gore's blessing.
Around the same time, Clinton-Gore appointee Carol Browner, head of the EPA, was quoted in the NY Times as having said that the administration would be "relaxing" the Delaney Clause (named after its author, Congressman James Delaney, D-NY). Congress had inserted this clause into section 409 of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1958. It prohibited FDA approval of any food additive found to cause cancer in humans or animals. Alone among all food-related directives, this legislation put the onus on the manufacturers to demonstrate that their products were safe before they were allowed to become commercially available. (7) A federal appeals court in July 1992 expanded the jurisdiction of the Delaney Clause, ruling that it was applicable to cancer-causing pesticides in processed food. Browner retracted her comment, claiming she'd never said it, but the proof was in the pudding. The ban on cancer-causing additives (the "Precautionary Principle") that had held through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush, Sr. administrations was finally removed, not by the Republicans but by the Clinton-Gore administration. Instead of expanding the Delaney clause to protect produce and other unprocessed foods, the new Food Quality Protection Act legislation permitted "safe" amounts of carcinogenic chemicals (as designated by the Environmental Protection Agency) to be added to all food. (According to Peter Montague, editor of Rachel's Weekly, "no one knows how 'safe amounts' of carcinogens can be established, especially when several carcinogens and other poisons are added simultaneously to the food of tens of millions of people.) Nevertheless, the Clinton-Gore administration spun this as "progress."
The Clinton administration, with guidance from Gore's office, also cut numerous deals over the pesticide Methyl Bromide despite its reported effects of contributing to Ozone depletion and its devastating health consequences on farm workers picking strawberries.
Much is being made these days about the need to save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. But Clinton-Gore opened the National Petroleum Reserve " 24 million untouched acres adjacent to the refuge, home to a large caribou herd and numerous arctic species " to oil drilling. The chief beneficiaary of this was Arco, a major ($1.4 million) contributor to the Democratic Party. At the same time, writes James Ridgeway, "Clinton dropped the ban on selling Alaskan oil abroad. This also benefits Arco, which is opening refineries in China. So although the oil companies won the right to exploit Alaskan oil on grounds that to do so would benefit national development, Clinton-Gore unilaterally changed the agreement so that it benefits China's industrial growth."(8)
Not once in the entire film does Gore criticize this awful environmental record or raise the critical questions we need to answer if we are to effectively reverse global warming: Is it really the case that the vast destruction of our environment that went on under his watch and, continuing today, is simply a result of poor consumer choices and ineffective government policies? Is the global environmental devastation we are facing today rectifiable with some simple tuning-up, as Gore proposes?
Neither he -- as point man for the Clinton administration on environmental issues -- nor Clinton-Gore's Energy Secretary Bill Richardson (with major ties to Occidental Petroleum), nor the Democratic Party in general offer anything more than putting a tiny Band-Aid on the earth's gaping wounds, which they themselves helped to gash open.
Clearly, the vast destruction of the global ecology is a consequence not just of poor governmental policies but of the capitalist system's fundamental drive towards Growth and what passes for Development -- Grow or Die. Environmental activists won't find in Gore the kind of systemic analysis that is needed to stop global warming. Instead, we need to look elsewhere for that sort of deep systemic critique.
Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "G", the newspaper of the NY State Greens. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
NOTES
1. Joshua Frank, Counterpunch, May 31, 2006, Frank is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, and edits www.BrickBurner.org
2. Jeffrey St. Clair, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature, Common Courage Press, 2004.
3. James Ridgeway, "Eco Spaniel Kennedy: Nipping at Nader's Heels," Village Voice, Aug. 16-22, 2000.
4,5,6 Joshua Frank.
7. The battle over the Delaney Clause has been ably documented by Rachel's Weekly, at www.rachel.org
8. Ridgeway, op cit.
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