The Peace Wager

What was the prison guard with a pyschology degree doing negotiating with the murderous head of an army of abducted children, the Lord’s Resistance Army? What do American Christian Fundamentalists, including the son of the American tele-evangalist Billy Graham, have to do with the civil wars in the Sudan and Uganda? How is this connected to the genocide in Darfur? And what does any of this have to do with the guinea-worm?

For the answers to these questions and more, see The Peace Wager in The Walrus.

We will make you whole again

On March 24, 1989 Captain Joe Hazelwood was drunk on duty of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez and ran it aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound.

Exxon (now ExxonMobil) did nothing to contain or clean up the spill for three days of clear weather. On the fourth day, a storm hit, spreading crude oil across 3,200 miles of coastline. In the face of one of the greatest man-made environmental disasters in history, Exxon official Don Cornett told the Price William Sound community "We will make you whole again."

Not only did the oil spill cause environmental havoc, but it also meant ruin to the locals: ruin to their livelihoods, ruin to their businesses, and in some cases, ruin to their health due to exposure to the toxic chemicals used to clean up the oil. Eighteen years later, the area has still not recovered from the disaster: out of the thirty significant species in the area, seven have not recovered at all, and only ten have recovered fully. With such long-lasting damage to the environment, neither has the economy of the area. The multi-million dollar herring industry which supported the local economy has been closed indefinitely.

In 1994, a US Federal Court awarded the 34,000 locals affected US$4.5 billion dollars in punitive damages: about $26,000 per person per year at the time. This was on top of the $300 million in voluntary payments Exxon made to eleven thousand of the locals.

Eighteen years after the disaster, Exxon have still not paid the damages. Of the 34,000 people who are yet to received one cent to compensate them for the harm caused by Exxon's negligence, about six thousand people have died.

The purpose of punitive damages is to discourage negligent and harmful behavior. Has ExxonMobil been discouraged? As early as 1994 they had written off for tax purposes $2.8 billion, turning what could have been a big loss into a small loss. They successfully sued their insurer, Lloyds of London, and recouped $411 million for cleanup expenses and interest. Exxon has still not fitted double-hulls on its tankers in the area, displaying an appallingly negligent attitude.

In 2005 ExxonMobil had the most profitable year of any corporation in history, posting a profit of $36 billion dollars. Obviously not enough for them to pay off their obligations to the people of Prince William Sound.

Addicted

James Wimberley from the Reality-Based Community has reprinted an interesting letter from the International Herald Tribune:

President George W. Bush has rightly pointed out that America is addicted to oil, but he fails to note the predictable consequences. Addicts break into houses, steal stuff and shoot people. America is breaking into countries, stealing stuff and shooting people. Why is anyone surprised that those homeowners object to our addictive behavior?
Sheila Stoll Morcote, Switzerland

Why indeed?

Addicts, too, come up with the most incredible (in the literal sense) rationalisations for their anti-social behaviour: "they hate our freedoms".

Selling ice to Eskimos

And oil to Iraqis.

A good measure of the incompetent handling of the Iraqi occupation is the news that not only is Iraq suffering from major fuel shortages, but that they are getting worse, not better: Iraq has had to double the amount of money it spends on importing oil and related products.

Is ethanol really a green fuel?

That depends on how it is made. Regardless though, you can bet a lot of greenies will jump on the ethanol bandwagon, as will the corporate corn farmers. There's nothing like government subsidies to have corporate CEOs falling over themselves to act green. (And remember folks, the essential nature of acting is that it is all pretend.)

Still, anything that reduces the need to pump oil out of the ground is a good thing. If I'm going to be peon to a baron, I'd rather it be a corn baron than an oil baron.

A year off from reality

Tom the Dancing Bug has a cartoon about General Motor's offer to give new Hummer buyers a year off from reality. Link.

The new Cold War -- over oil

Mark Ames from The eXile writes about the new Cold War starting between the U.S. and Russia. Of course, it is over oil. (What else would it be over?)

The rat of course was the insane hypocrisy of a foaming fascist like Dick Cheney suddenly getting all Amnesty International righteous over a bad regime that does bad things. The fact that Cheney flew straight to Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan right after squirting over Russia's human rights problems turned the rank hypocrisy into a bad black comedy routine, barely fit for even a Tom Green. Kazakhstan is a country where opposition politicians and media aren't merely jailed, exiled or cowed as they are in Russia, but are shot and dumped in forests, Miller's Crossing-style, on behalf of a despot whose family runs the country like its own fiefdom.

Don't hold back, tell us what you really think of Cheney and his buddies in Kazakhstan.

Cheney's speech raised a lot of questions and a lot of debate, but no one asked one of the most obvious questions of all: Why did Cheney choose to flaunt his hypocrisy in everyone's faces? Why not try faking it, the way most Western leaders operate when they mix righteous words with rapacious policies?
[...]
The best way to answer this is to go back and retrace how Russia and America wound up in this once-unimaginable situation. It would seem to be a massive policy failure, allowing Russia to become a Cold War enemy again, perhaps the greatest American foreign policy failure of our time. Unless, of course, you put all the blame on Putin's evil little authoritarian shoulders, which is the natural tendency of nearly every American commentator.

They say Americans' memories are short, but that's like saying a Nazi's sense of compassion was fleeting. Americans literally rewrite their memories over and over. Case in point: Just four-and-a-half years ago, Vladimir Putin was treated as a rock star in America. You probably forgot about it, so I'm going to remind you because it's not a pretty memory.

Face isn't everything in international politics, but it is almost everything. Putin went out on a limb for the Americans, going against his base at great political cost -- and Bush and Cheney rewarded him with a six-pack of Screw-You and a bucket of Up-Yours by pulling out of the ABM Treaty and starting up the old Star Wars missile shield programme again. The Russians aren't idiots: they know that the missile shield is an offensive weapon designed to make a nuclear first-strike practical.

This is where the bad blood started. At America's darkest hour, we reached out to Russia and got full cooperation and trust. And literally the second we felt tough again, we announced our intention to build a weapons system that targeted Russia for total annihilation.
[...]
I don't think a jackal like Cheney is capable of recognizing hypocrisy. I think he meant everything he said, with a straight face, and that he saw it as both rationally and morally right to chastise Russia's record on democracy while praising Kazakhstan's and Azerbaijan's in the same trip.

Democracy isn't about voting. It's about serving America's interests.

And serving America's interests is more tightly defined a serving the interests of the oil oligarchs in Houston, where Cheney spent the previous 10 years. In fact, it's even more simple than that. It's personal. America's interests are Cheney's interests. Il est l'etat. In that sense, Putin is indeed a genuine menace.

And that's what makes this Cold War so different: Whereas the last one was a mortal struggle over two different systems, this is a struggle between two short, balding, bloodless men, and the oil -- other people's oil -- that made them as powerful as they are today.

With the end of the Cold War, it is easy to forget that the nuclear Sword of Damocles is still hanging over us. As late as 2002, the U.S. had over 10,000 nuclear warheads in active service. Russia had 18,000, of which all but about 8,000 were in the process of being dismanted. Four years later, the U.S. has modernized their strategic arsenals, and every indication is that the U.S. has the ability to deliver those warheads more accurately and with less risk of retaliation than every before. On the other hand, the Russians' delivery systems are in tatters. Likewise China, with between 200 and 400 warheads, has no long-range systems in place, and needs at least two hours to launch even a single missile, putting them in distant fifth place, just behind Britain and France. Nobody, not even Russia, comes even close to being a real threat to the U.S.A.