Robin Williams on the Arsenio Hall Show 1/4
Robin Williams on the Arsenio Hall Show 2/4
Robin Williams on the Arsenio Hall Show 3/4
Robin Williams on the Arsenio Hall Show 4/4
Craig Ferguson 2009 02 03 Robin Williams
Jana Wendt - Robin Williams interview
(HQ) Robin Williams on Jonathan Ross 2010.07.02 (part 1)
(HQ) Robin Williams on Jonathan Ross 2010.07.02 (part 2)
Robin Williams On Late Show With David Letterman Part1 (29/03/10)
Robin Williams On Late Show With David Letterman Part2 (29/03/10)
Robin Williams as the American Flag
Lance Armstrong hanging with Robin Williams
Lance Armstrong and Robin Williams
Whose Line Is It Anyway? Robin Williams
Robin Williams Hijacks TED BBC conference (Williams comes onto the stage and gives an unplanned stand-up routine during technical difficulties. Sergey Brin & Dan Gilbert are on the panel.)
WEAPONS OF SELF DESTRUCTION
Robin Williams Weapons of self destruction Part 1
Robin Williams Weapons of self destruction Part 2
Robin Williams Weapons of self destruction part 3
Robin Williams Weapons of self destruction part 4
Robin Williams Weapons of self destruction part 5
Robin Williams Weapons of self destruction part 6
Robin Williams Weapons of self destruction part 7
Robin Williams Weapons of self destruction part 8
Robin Williams Weapons of self destruction part 9
Carol Burnett and Robin Williams -The Funeral
Robin Williams speech at D23 Expo Disney Legends ceremony
Robin Williams - Live At The Met - Cocaine
Robin William Atomic Bomb
Popeye - I Yam What I Yam - Robin Williams Shelley Duvall
Robin Williams interview on ROVE (Australia) Live & Uncensored DVD
Robin Williams on Ellen (full)
Five questions for Robin Williams
Robin Williams on Johnny Carson Part 1 of 3
Robin Williams on Johnny Carson Part 2 of 3
Robin Williams on Johnny Carson Part 3 of 3
robbin williams - when you hit 40's
Robin Williams - Impersonation of a Smart Kid
Robin Williams! Destroys President Bush
Robin Williams Rubs Graham's Lamp - The Graham Norton Show - BBC Two
Official: BP's Tony Hayward on Way Out
BYE! DON'T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU ON THE 'WAY OUT'!
The Making of the Plastiki
What is the Plastiki?
EARTH DAY MESSAGE FROM THE PLASTIKI
World biggest garbage dump - plastic in the Ocean
Plastic boat completes Pacific voyage
Khmer Rouge chief jailer sentenced to 19 years
Khmer Rouge Rice Fields 1/3
Khmer Rouge Rice Fields 2/3
Khmer Rouge Rice Fields 3/3
Survivors of the Khmer Rouge: The cadre's story 01 Apr 09
Cambodian Remembers Khmer Rogue Genocide Ahead of Trial
Breaking news: 17/02/2009 First Khmer Rouge trial Under way
Duch Testifies and Asks for Forgiveness
IS THE MOST IMPRESSIVE TITLE TO THIS PIECE, PUBLISHED BY 'BAD ATTITUDES'
Learn To Love Big Brother
Oh, God, and I thought this whole Twilight saga was bad. We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet:
Get ready for “Goldman Sachs: The Movie.”
That isn’t a real movie title. But filmmaker Ric Burns, who created the PBS series “The Civil War” with his brother Ken, is shooting a documentary about the Wall Street firm. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is paying for the film, has editorial control and is overseeing the project through its marketing department, a Goldman spokesman said.
It’s not enough that they wreck the economy and pilfer the U.S. Treasury. It’s not enough they’ve driven the country into near penury while they prance around like the Bourbons or the Romanovs. It’s not enough that they own the US government and now, as a result of Citizens United, will own it for all time. No. They want more. They want us to love them for it. They have our bodies, now they want our souls as well. Why not? There’s nothing else left among the ruins they’ve created. It’s the only thing left to steal.
Apparently this movie is “for employees only.” So I guess this is going to be used as in-house propaganda to convince themselves that they aren’t, in fact, wicked parasites whose criminality is ushering us into an economic dark age, but just swell, hard-working folks who deserve six-figure bonuses and a house in the Hamptons. After all, they hire gardeners and maids, don’t they? What service to the economy do gardeners and maids provide, huh?
But that’s beside the point. This film will be leaked and Goldman knows it, just as surely as they knew the housing bubble would collapse. They are many things, but they aren’t stupid. When that movie does make the rounds on the Internet, we’ll all see the inner workings of Goldman Sachs precisely as they want us to see it. We’ll be embedded, as it were, and come away with whatever impression they want us to have.
Do you suppose it’s possible that our banker friends are panging for a little of the glamour that accompanies other wealthy professions? Let’s face it, bankers are boring. The only way they can achieve any color is by being villainous, but not even that works for the current gang on Wall Street, who manage to be both deadly villainous and deadly boring, Lex Luthors without charisma. This is doubly true for bald-headed, lisping Lloyd Blankfein, who would be selling life insurance or working as a grocery clerk in a more just world. It must rankle that on any given day, he, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of the great Goldman Sachs, gets less — and less positive — media coverage than Justin Bieber or Lindsay Lohan. It’s all so unfair. The solution? Pimp yourself in the only medium that matters. Make a movie. It can make you a celebrity, and once you become a celebrity you are beyond good and evil in American culture.
I have no idea how big or little this story really is, but I know it must be true because I read about it in the Wall Street Journal.
David Letterman - Tony Hayward Top Ten
Message From Tony Hayward - Screw You!
BP deny Tony Hayward exit plans
NEED TO KNOW | Next Week's News: Tony Hayward's week | PBS
McChrystal Retires
General McChrystal Last Afghanistan Press Conference
Gen. McChrystal to Retire After Magazine Flap
Special Comment: Olbermann Skewers General McChrystal Over Pat Tillman Lies!
DEDICATED TO FACHTNA O'CEALLAIGH
Sinead O'Connor Speaks Out On Church Child Sex Scandal (SHE WAS TEN YEARS AHEAD OF THE TIMES! BUT WAS BRANDED)
AS OVER-THE-TOP
Sinead O'Connor - The Emperor's New Clothes
The Late Late Show: Sinead O'Connor
Sinead O'Connor Unique version of Dylans The Times They are a Changin'.wmv
Sinead o Connor 5-12-08 interview
Sinead O'Connor The Late Late Show Live Part 1
Sinead O'Connor The Late Late Show Part 2
Sinead O'Connor The Late Late Show Part 3
Sinéad O'Connor on Queen Latifah Part 1
Sinéad O'Connor on Queen Latifah Part 2
Sinéad O'Connor on Queen Latifah Part 3
Sinead O'Connor - Feel So Different
DEDICATED TO FACHTNA O'CEALLAIGH
Sinead O'Connor "don't cry for me argentina"
Dave Stewart, Sinéad O'Connor, Kylie Minogue and Natalie Imbruglia Sweet Dreams
Sinead O`Connor-Black boys on mopeds /Henry Rollins Show/
Sinead O'Connor - Streets of London
Sinead O'Connor and The Edge - Heroine
Danny Boy - Sinead O Connor (THE FIRST SONG I REMEMBER EVER HEARING)
Sinead O'Connor: Interview
Sinead O'Connor-Fire on Babylon
Sinead O'Connor-Famine
Ry Cooder - Jesus On The Mainline
Ry Cooder - How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live
Ry Cooder - Crazy 'Bout An Automobile
Ry Cooder, Bobby King - Chain Gang
Ry Cooder - Just A Little Bit
Ry Cooder - Down In Mississippi
Ry Cooder Dark End of the Street
In The Know: Are We Giving Robots Too Much Power?
President Obama White House Apologizes To Shirley Sherrod USDA Firing NEWS
Shirley Sherrod: the FULL video
White farmers at the center of Shirley Sherrod controversy: 'No way in the world' she is a racist.
Rachel Maddow - Fox Assissination (1) Kills Again - Shirley Sherrod
Keith Olbermann Special Comment On Shirley Sherrod Controversy (Part 1)
Keith Olbermann Special Comment On Shirley Sherrod Controversy (Part 2)
Blood of the Earth - The BP Gulf Oil Spill part 1
Blood of the Earth - The BP Gulf Oil Spill part 2
Blood of the Earth - The BP Gulf Oil Spill part 3
Blood of the Earth - The BP Gulf Oil Spill part 4
Blood of the Earth - The BP Gulf Oil Spill part 5
Blood of the Earth - The BP Gulf Oil Spill part 6
Blood of the Earth - The BP Gulf Oil Spill part 7
Blood of the Earth - The BP Gulf Oil Spill part 8
Blood of the Earth - The BP Gulf Oil Spill part 9
Eminem VS Mariah - Obsessed Warning (The Video)
Eminem - Wont Back Down ( ft Pink ) HD
Eminem - Mockingbird
Eminem - White America
EMINEMEMINEMEMINEMEMINEM
EMINEMEMINEMEMINEMEMINEM
EMINEMEMINEMEMINEMEMINEM
EMINEM
EMINEM
EMINEMEMINEMEMINEM
EMINEMEMINEMEMINEM
EMINEM
EMINEM
EMINEMEMINEMEMINEMEMINEM
EMINEMEMINEMEMINEMEMINEM
EMINEMEMINEMEMINEMEMINEM
Eminem - Role Model Dirty Full
Eminem - Beautiful
The Tanton Network
Mexican-Americans Already Arrested Based on Arizona Immigration Law
UPFRONT with Mike Gousha, July 18, 2010 - Illegal Immigration An Issue In Wisconsin
Hidden Cameras on the Arizona Border 2: Drugs, Guns and 850 Illegal Aliens
Coverage of Hidden Carmeras on the Arizona Border 2 (FOX - 7/15/10 and 7/16/10)
Illegal Immigration from Senegal to Spain
Deadly sea crossing for African illegal aliens
New Italian law against illegal immigrants
Chinese immigrants - many illegal - are flooding into Italy
Common Wealth.wmv
How to Solve Illegal Immigration
'AN EXTENDED XENOPHOBIC RANT'
STRANGE, FOR A COUNTRY OF IMMIGRANTS, ALL OF US
Marilyn Monroe - Photos (Rare) (Barbra Streisand - Memory)
Marilyn Monroe - Photos (Rare II) (Elton John - The One)
Marilyn Monroe - Photos (Rare III)
Marilyn Monroe (Paparazzi) (Nicole Campbell - Fly Away)
Marilyn Monroe - Photos (Paparazzi /Candid) (Miro - Holding On)
A HEARTFELT THANKS TO MonroeNumber1Fan FOR THE INCREDIBLE PICTURES!
Hank Cochran & Willie Nelson - Ain't Life Hell (1977)
Hank Cochran - I Just Burned A Dream
I'm Ready - Hank Cochran (U.ARTISTS 1956 rockabilly gtr:Eddie)
Patsy Cline - She's Got You (BY HANK COCHRAN)
"I Want To Go With You" (This song was recorded by Eddy Arnold and written by Hank Cochran.)
Jeannie Seely - Don't Touch Me (BY HANK COCHRAN)
Wade Hayes - Summer Was a Bummer (1998) (Hank Cochran/Dean Dillon, 1998)
FROM 'UNDERNEWS'
Tech Dirt - An article from The Root goes through who gets paid what for music sales, and the basic answer is
not the musician. That report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40. Here's
the chart that the article shows, though you should read the whole article for all of the details:
Going back ten years ago, Courtney Love famously laid out the details of recording economics, where the label
can make $11 million. . . and the actual artists make absolutely nothing. It starts off with a band getting a
massive $1 million advance, and then you follow the money:
What happens to that million dollars?
They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to
their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.
That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That
comes out to $45,000 per person.
That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released
The Human Price of Sanctions
Worth It?
By ANDREW COCKBURN
Few people now remember that for many months after the First World War ended in November 1918 the blockade of Germany, where the population was already on the edge of starvation, was maintained with full rigour. By the following spring, the German authorities were projecting a 50 per cent increase in the infant mortality rate. In a later memoir, John Maynard Keynes attributed the prolongation of civilian punishment
to a cause inherent in bureaucracy. The blockade had become by that time a very perfect instrument. It had taken four years to create and was Whitehall’s finest achievement; it had evoked the qualities of the English at their subtlest. Its authors had grown to love it for its own sake; it included some recent improvements, which would be wasted if it came to an end; it was very complicated, and a vast organisation had established a vested interest. The experts reported, therefore, that it was our one instrument for imposing our peace terms on Germany, and that once suspended it could hardly be reimposed.
In the event, the ban on food imports was lifted (for fear of promoting Bolshevism) before Germany accepted the punitive terms of the Versailles treaty, but blockades have retained their popularity as a weapon deployed by strong powers against the weak. In most instances they have been ineffective in achieving their stated purpose, the notable exception being the sanctions reluctantly levied by Western governments in response to popular pressure against the South African apartheid regime. More often they constitute an exercise in vindictiveness, as with the US embargo on Vietnam and Cambodia after the Indochina war, or Israel’s blockade of Gaza with the expressed intention of ‘putting the population on a diet’.
The multiple disasters inflicted on Iraq since the 2003 Anglo-American invasion have tended to overshadow the lethally effective ‘invisible war’ waged against Iraqi civilians between August 1990 and May 2003 with the full authority of the United Nations and the tireless attention of the US and British governments. As an example of carefully crafted callousness this story offers a close parallel to Britain’s German exercise. In both cases, sanctions were retained after their original purpose – the military defeat of the blockaded nation – had been achieved, and in both cases they targeted civilians while leaving their rulers relatively unscathed. Those implementing the blockades argued vehemently that their suspension would mean a reversal of the victory on the battlefield and the defeated power’s return to its bellicose ways.
Even at the time, the sanctions against Iraq drew only sporadic public comment, and even less attention was paid to the bureaucratic manoeuvres in Washington, always with the dutiful assistance of London, which ensured the deaths of half a million children, among other consequences. In her excellent book Invisible War: the United States and the Iraq Sanctions, Joy Gordon charts these in horrifying detail, while providing a rigorous examination of the alibis and excuses given by sanctioneers at the time and since: the suffering was entirely due to Saddam Hussein’s obduracy; supplies of food and medicine were available but withheld by the regime in the interests of propaganda; the Oil For Food programme was corrupt and enabled Saddam to evade the impact of sanctions, and so on.
The legal foundation for the campaign rested on Security Council Resolution 661, passed in August 1990 shortly after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. This prohibited all UN member states from trading with Iraq: the ban crucially included all oil purchases. Leaving nothing to chance, the US proffered douceurs of economic aid prior to the vote to impoverished countries such as Ethiopia and Zaire, which were then serving as temporary members of the Security Council. After voting against the resolution, the Yemeni ambassador to the UN was tersely informed: ‘That will be the most expensive “no” vote you ever cast.’ Three days later the US cancelled its entire aid programme to his country.
Ironically, Iraqi sanctions were popular at first among the liberal-minded because they appeared to offer an alternative to war. As the Bush administration’s determination to go to war became clearer, allowing sanctions ‘time to work’ became a rallying cry for the peace party. After all, economic sanctions had brought the apartheid regime to its knees without bloodshed or noticeable suffering among the population: why not use them against Saddam Hussein? Less well publicised were the severe US sanctions against Cambodia, motivated by little other than spite over the regime’s defeat of the Khmer Rouge with Vietnamese help. Coincidentally, these were being phased out in 1990 after embarrassing revelations of continuing covert American support for the Khmer Rouge.
The war, when it came, was directed as much against Iraq’s economy as against its army in Kuwait. Key features of the bombing campaign were designed – as its principal planner, Colonel John Warden of the US air force, explained to me afterwards – to destroy the ‘critical nodes’ that enabled Iraq to function as a modern industrial society. The air force had dreamed of being able to do this sort of thing since before the Second World War, and Warden thought the introduction of precision-guided ‘smart bombs’ now made it a practical proposition. Iraq’s electrical power plants, telecommunications centres, oil refineries, sewage plants and other key infrastructure were destroyed or badly damaged. Warden, I recall, was piqued that bombing in addition to his original scheme had obscured the impact of his surgical assault on the pillars supporting modern Iraqi society.
Astonishingly, much of the damage was repaired within a year of the war’s end following a national campaign billed as ‘the counter-attack’. I had visited al-Dora power station on the edge of Baghdad in July 1991 and found a heap of twisted metal. Seven months later, I found half of the station functioning again. The control room, totally demolished by allied bombs, had been re-created, complete with the pastel colour scheme favoured by its original Italian designers. Looking closely at the control panel dials I could see that the numbers had been painstakingly painted on with a thin brush. If this reconstruction programme had been able to make use of the billions of dollars that had once poured in from oil sales, Iraq could soon have returned to its prewar condition. But the counter-attack was fought with makeshift repairs and cannibalised spare parts. As the blockade persisted, the deterioration of the infrastructure was unremitting.
The first intimation that the blockade would continue even though Iraq had been evicted from Kuwait came in an offhand remark by Bush at a press briefing on 16 April 1991. There would be no normal relations with Iraq, he said, until ‘Saddam Hussein is out of there’: ‘We will continue the economic sanctions.’ Officially, the US was on record as pledging that sanctions would be lifted once Kuwait had been compensated for the damage wrought during six months of occupation and once it was confirmed that Iraq no longer possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or the capacity to make them. A special UN inspection organisation, Unscom, was created, headed by the Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus, a veteran of arms control negotiations. But in case anyone had missed the point of Bush’s statement, his deputy national security adviser, Robert Gates (now Obama’s secretary of defence), spelled it out a few weeks later: ‘Saddam is discredited and cannot be redeemed. His leadership will never be accepted by the world community. Therefore,’ Gates continued, ‘Iraqis will pay the price while he remains in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained until he is gone.’
Despite this explicit confirmation that the official justification for sanctions was irrelevant, Saddam’s supposed refusal to turn over his deadly arsenal would be brandished by the sanctioneers whenever the price being paid by Iraqis attracted attention from the outside world. And although Bush and Gates claimed that Saddam, not his weapons, was the real object of the sanctions, I was assured at the time by officials at CIA headquarters in Langley that an overthrow of the dictator by a population rendered desperate by sanctions was ‘the least likely alternative’. The impoverishment of Iraq – not to mention the exclusion of its oil from the global market to the benefit of oil prices – was not a means to an end: it was the end.
Visiting Iraq in that first summer of postwar sanctions I found a population stunned by the disaster that was reducing them to a Third World standard of living. Baghdad auction houses were filled with the heirlooms and furniture of the middle classes, hawked in a desperate effort to stay ahead of inflation. In the upper-middle-class enclave of Mansour, I watched as a frantic crowd of housewives rushed to collect food supplies distributed by the American charity Catholic Relief Services. Doctors, most of them trained in Britain, displayed their empty dispensaries. Everywhere, people asked when sanctions would be lifted, assuming that it could only be a matter of months at the most (a belief initially shared by Saddam). The notion that they would still be in force a decade later was unimaginable.
The doctors should not have had anything to worry about. Resolution 661 prohibited the sale or supply of any goods to Iraq (or to Kuwait while it was under Iraqi control) with the explicit exception of ‘supplies intended strictly for medical purposes, and, in humanitarian circumstances, foodstuffs’. However, every single item Iraq sought to import, including food and medicine, had to be approved by the ‘661 Committee’, created for this purpose and staffed by diplomats from the 15 members of the Security Council. The committee met in secret and published scarcely any record of its proceedings. Thanks to the demise of the Soviet Union, the US now dominated the UN, using it to provide a cloak of legitimacy for its unilateral actions.
The 661 Committee’s stated purpose was to review and authorise exceptions to the sanctions, but as Gordon explains, its actual function was to deny the import of even the most innocuous items on the grounds that they might, conceivably, be used in the production of weapons of mass destruction. An ingenious provision allowed any committee member to put any item for which clearance had been requested on hold. So, while other members, even a majority, might wish to speed goods to Iraq, the US and its ever willing British partner could and did block whatever they chose on the flimsiest of excuses. As a means of reducing a formerly prosperous state to a pre-industrial condition and keeping it there, this system would have aroused the envy of the blockade bureaucrats derided by Keynes. Thus in the early 1990s the United States blocked, among other items, salt, water pipes, children’s bikes, materials used to make nappies, equipment to process powdered milk and fabric to make clothes. The list would later be expanded to include switches, sockets, window frames, ceramic tiles and paint. In 1991 American representatives forcefully argued against permitting Iraq to import powdered milk on the grounds that it did not fulfil a humanitarian need. Later, the diplomats dutifully argued that an order for child vaccines, deemed ‘suspicious’ by weapons experts in Washington, should be denied.
Throughout the period of sanctions, the United States frustrated Iraq’s attempts to import pumps needed in the plants treating water from the Tigris, which had become an open sewer thanks to the destruction of treatment plants. Chlorine, vital for treating a contaminated water supply, was banned on the grounds that it could be used as a chemical weapon. The consequences of all this were visible in paediatric wards. Every year the number of children who died before they reached their first birthday rose, from one in 30 in 1990 to one in eight seven years later. Health specialists agreed that contaminated water was responsible: children were especially susceptible to the gastroenteritis and cholera caused by dirty water.
If the aim of such a comprehensive embargo had indeed been the dictator’s overthrow, its perpetrators might have pondered the fact that it was having the opposite effect. Saddam, whose invasion of Kuwait had led to the disaster, was now able to point to the outside powers as the source of Iraqis’ suffering. As most people’s savings and income dwindled away in the face of raging inflation and widespread unemployment, they became ever more dependent on the rations, however meagre, distributed through Saddam’s efficient government apparatus. Because medicine was in short supply and hospitals were deteriorating, Iraqis came to believe that almost any disease might be curable were it not for sanctions. In the countryside, villagers often kept dusty X-rays in case sanctions ended one day and they could find a cure.
Most of the time, those overseeing the blockade were able to go about their task without public reproach. Every so often a press report from Baghdad would highlight the immense slow-motion disaster in Iraq, but for the most part the conscience of the world, and especially that of the American public, remained untroubled. Administration officials reassured themselves that any hardship was entirely the fault of Saddam, and that in any case reports of civilian suffering were deliberately exaggerated by the Iraqi regime. As one US official with a key role in the Unscom weapons inspections said to me in all sincerity at the time: ‘Those people who report all those dying babies are very carefully steered to certain hospitals by the government.’ In spite of reams of child mortality statistics collected by various reputable outside parties, such as the World Health Organisation, it was impossible to convince him otherwise.
Very occasionally, a ray of truth would shine through. In 1996, the 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the UN. Albright maintained that sanctions had proved their value because Saddam had made some admissions about his weapons programmes and had recognised the independence of Kuwait (he did this in 1991, right after the war). Asked whether this was worth the death of half a million children, Albright replied: ‘We think the price is worth it.’ Years later, as Gordon observes, Albright was still ‘trying to explain her way out of her failure to respond more effectively to what she described as “our public relations problem”’. Her attempts to justify the policy were echoed by other sanctioneers, such as the State Department official quoted by Gordon who maintained that ‘the US is conducting a public good which it has done a poor job of selling to other countries.’
In the first year of sanctions the UN offered to allow Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil under strict conditions. Saddam turned this down on the grounds that it infringed on Iraq’s sovereignty, but five years later he accepted an improved offer which allowed Iraq to sell its oil and use the proceeds, under UN supervision, to buy food and some other necessities. Under the terms of the programme, much of the money was immediately siphoned off to settle what critics called Kuwait’s ‘implausibly high’ claims for compensation for damage from the 1990 invasion and to pay for the Unscom inspections and other UN administrative costs in Iraq. Although the arrangement did permit some improvement in living standards, there was no fundamental change: the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan reported in November 1997 that despite the programme, 31 per cent of children under five still suffered from malnutrition, supplies of safe water and medicine were ‘grossly inadequate’ and the health infrastructure suffered from ‘exceptionally serious deterioration’.
It was possible for the Iraqis to wring some pecuniary advantage from the Oil for Food programme by extracting kickbacks from the oil traders whom it favoured with allocations, as well as from companies, such as wheat traders, from which it bought supplies. In 2004, as Iraq disintegrated, the ‘Oil for Food scandal’ was ballyhooed in the US press as ‘the largest rip-off in history’. Congress, which had maintained a near total silence during the years of sanctions, now erupted with denunciations of the fallen dictator’s fraud and deception, which, with alleged UN complicity, had supposedly been the direct cause of so many deaths.
Gordon puts all this in context. ‘Under the Oil for Food programme, the Iraqi government skimmed about 10 per cent from import contracts and for a brief time received illicit payments from oil sales. The two combined amounted to about $2 billion . . . By contrast, in 14 months of occupation, the US-led occupation authority depleted $18 billion in funds’ – money earned from the sale of oil, most of which disappeared with little or no accounting and no discernible return to the Iraqi people. Saddam may have lavished millions on marble palaces (largely jerry-built, as their subsequent US military occupants discovered) but his greed paled in comparison to that of his successors.
The economic strangulation of Iraq was justified on the basis of Saddam’s supposed possession of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Year after year, UN inspectors combed Iraq in search of evidence that these WMD existed. But after 1991, the first year of inspections, when the infrastructure of Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme was detected and destroyed, along with missiles and an extensive arsenal of chemical weapons, nothing more was ever found. Given Saddam’s record of denying the existence of his nuclear project (his chemical arsenal was well known; he had used it extensively in the Iran-Iraq war, with US approval) the inspectors had strong grounds for suspicion, at least until August 1995. That was when Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and the former overseer of his weapons programmes, suddenly defected to Jordan, where he was debriefed by the CIA, MI6 and Unscom. In those interviews he made it perfectly clear that the entire stock of WMD had been destroyed in 1991, a confession that his interlocutors, including the UN inspectors, took great pains to conceal from the outside world.
Nevertheless, by early 1997 Rolf Ekeus had concluded, as he told me many years later, that he must report to the Security Council that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and was therefore in compliance with the Council’s resolutions, barring a few points. He felt bound to recommend that the sanctions should be lifted. Reports of his intentions threw the Clinton administration into a panic. The end of sanctions would lay Clinton open to Republican attacks for letting Saddam off the hook. The problem was solved, Ekeus explained to me, by getting Madeleine Albright, newly installed as secretary of state, to declare in a public address on 26 March 1997 that ‘we do not agree with the nations who argue that, if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted.’ The predictable result was that Saddam saw little further point in co-operating with the inspectors. This provoked an escalating series of confrontations between the Unscom team and Iraqi security officials, ending in the expulsion of the inspectors, claims that Saddam was ‘refusing to disarm’, and, ultimately, war.
Denis Halliday, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq who resigned in 1998 in protest at what he called the ‘genocidal’ sanctions regime, described at that time its more insidious effects on Iraqi society. An entire generation of young people had grown up in isolation from the outside world. He compared them, ominously, to the orphans of the Russian war in Afghanistan who later formed the Taliban. ‘What should be of concern is the possibility at least of more fundamentalist Islamic thinking developing,’ Halliday warned. ‘It is not well understood as a possible spin-off of the sanctions regime. We are pushing people to take extreme positions.’ This was the society US and British armies confronted in 2003: impoverished, extremist and angry. As they count the losses they have sustained from roadside bombs and suicide attacks, the West should think carefully before once again deploying the ‘perfect instrument’ of a blockade.
Andrew Cockburn is the co-producer of the 2009 documentary American Casino. He can be reached at: amcockburn@gmail.com
This article originally appeared in the London Review of Books.
CounterPunch Diary
The Fall of Obama
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
The man who seized the White House by fomenting a mood of irrational expectation is now facing the bitter price exacted by reality. The reality is that there can be no “good” American president. It’s an impossible hand to play. Obama is close to being finished.
The nation’s first black president promised change at the precise moment when no single man, even if endowed with the communicative powers of Franklin Roosevelt, the politic mastery of Lyndon Johnson, the brazen agility of Bill Clinton, could turn the tide that has been carrying America to disaster for 30 years.
This summer many Americans are frightened. Over 100,000 of them file for bankruptcy every month. Three million homeowners face foreclosure this year. Add them to the 2.8 million who were foreclosed in 2009, Obama’s first year in office. Nearly seven million have been without jobs in the last year for six months or longer. By the time you tot up the people who have given up looking for work and the people on part-time, the total is heading toward 20 million.
Fearful people are irrational. So are racists. Obama is the target of insane charges. A hefty percentage of Americans believe that he is a socialist – a charge as ludicrous as accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of being a closet Druid. Obama reveres the capitalist system. He admires the apex predators of Wall Street who showered his campaign treasury with millions of dollars. The frightful catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico stemmed directly from the green light he and his Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, gave to BP.
It is not Obama’s fault that for 30 years America’s policy – under Reagan, both Bushes and Bill Clinton – has been to export jobs permanently to the Third World. The jobs that Americans now desperately seek are no longer here, in the homeland, and never will be. They’re in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Indonesia.
No stimulus program, giving money to cement contractors to fix potholes along the federal interstate highway system, is going to bring those jobs back. Highly trained tool and die workers, the aristocrats of the manufacturing sector, are flipping hamburgers – at best – for $7.50 an hour because U.S. corporations sent their jobs to Guangzhou, with the approval of politicians flush with the money of the “free trade” lobby.
It is not Obama’s fault that across 30 years more and more money has floated up to the apex of the social pyramid till America is heading back to where it was in the 1880s, a nation of tramps and millionaires. It’s not his fault that every tax break, every regulation, every judicial decision tilts toward business and the rich. That was the neoliberal America conjured into malign vitality back in the mid 1970s.
But it is Obama’s fault that he did not understand this, that always, from the getgo, he flattered Americans with paeans to their greatness, without adequate warning of the political and corporate corruption destroying America and the resistance he would face if he really fought against the prevailing arrangements that were destroying America. He offered them a free and easy pass to a better future, and now they see that the promise was empty.
It’s Obama’s fault, too, that, as a communicator, he cannot rally and inspire the nation from its fears. From his earliest years he has schooled himself not to be excitable, not to be an angry black man who would be alarming to his white friends at Harvard and his later corporate patrons. Self-control was his passport to the guardians of the system, who were desperate to find a symbolic leader to restore America’s credibility in the world after the disasters of the Bush era. He is too cool.
So, now Americans in increasing numbers have lost confidence in him. For the first time in the polls negative assessments outnumber the positive. He no longer commands trust. His support is drifting down to 40 per cent. The straddle that allowed him to flatter corporate chieftains at the same time as blue-collar workers now seems like the most vapid opportunism. The casual campaign pledge to wipe out al-Quaida in Afghanistan is now being cashed out in a disastrous campaign viewed with dismay by a majority of Americans.
The polls portend disaster. It now looks as though the Republicans may well recapture not only the House but, conceivably, the Senate as well. The public mood is so contrarian that, even though polls show that voters think the Democrats may well have better solutions on the economy than Republicans, they will vote against incumbent Democrats in the midterm elections next fall. They just want to throw the bums out.
Obama has sought out Bill Clinton to advise him in this desperate hour. If Clinton is frank, he will remind Obama that his own hopes for a progressive first term were destroyed by the failure of his health reform in the spring of 1993. By August of that year, he was importing a Republican, David Gergen, to run the White House.
Obama had his window of opportunity last year, when he could have made jobs and financial reform his prime objectives. That’s what Americans hoped for. Mesmerized by economic advisers who were creatures of the banks, he instead plunged into the Sargasso Sea of “health reform,” wasted the better part of a year, and ended up with something that pleases no one.
What can save Obama now? It’s hard even to identify a straw he can grasp at. It’s awfully early in the game to say it, but, as Marlene Dietrich said to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, “your future is all used up.”
Ben Sonnenberg: Farewell to A Friend
Ben Sonnenberg died on June 26, at the age of 73, and with his passing CounterPunch has lost its long-time counselor. The world has lost a true humanist in the full Renaissance strength of that word, one in whom refinement of taste, wideness of reading mingled with political passion. I mourn a very close friend.
His greatest literary achievement was Grand Street, the quarterly he founded in 1981, and edited till 1990, when multiple sclerosis was far advanced and his fortune somewhat depleted. His friend Jean Stein took the magazine over and it ran till 2004. As he put it laconically, “I printed only what I liked; never once did I publish an editorial statement; I offered no writers’ guidelines; and I stopped when I couldn’t turn the pages anymore.” As another great editor Bruce Anderson, of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, wrote after Ben’s death, “Grand Street under Sonnenberg was the best literary magazine ever produced in this doomed country. His Grand Street was readable front-to-back. If you've never seen a Grand Street, the last literary quarterly we're going to have, hustle out to the last book store and get yourself one and lament what is gone.”
When I first came to New York in 1973, I went to a couple of parties thrown by Ben’s father, Ben Sr., one of the trailblazers in public relations who gave elaborately staged parties to advance the interests of his various clients, at 19 Gramercy Park. He looked a bit like a comfortably retired Edwardian bookie in London of the 1890s, with enough knowingness in his glance to deliver “fair warning” to the unwary. Though he publicly prided himself on never have taken a dime from either Howard Hughes or the Kennedys, Ben Sr. certainly milked big clients like General Motors of plenty of moolah, a satisfactory chunk of which he left to Ben.
Ben Jr. detailed his somewhat raffish and caddish youth in his 1991 memoir, Lost Property, but I had already known for almost a decade the tastes that he listed on the first page and that endeared me to him: “My favorite autobiographers in this century are Vladimir Nabokov, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.” A paragraph later he cited “my friend Edward Said,” whose savage essay “Michael Walzer’s ‘Exodus and Revolution’ – a Canaanite Reading,” Ben had published in Grand Street in 1986. There was no other cultural periodical at that time that would have given the finger so vigorously to polite New York intellectual opinion. The finger could be prankish. In January of 1989 he faxed me his offer – which I promptly published in The Nation -- on behalf of himself, me and others, to Marty Peretz….
You want to know what Ben wrote to Peretz? My full tribute to Ben is in our latest newsletter, along with wonderful pieces about Ben from JoAnn Wypijewski and Daniel Wolff. And also in this newsletter, hot off the presses: Part two of Jeffrey St Clair’s superb, path-breaking investigation of how BP and the Obama administration have been joined at the hip in the creation and handling of the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Find out here how Obama and Interior Sec. Ken Salazar put a top BP exec in charge of deep sea drilling in the Gulf.
How much does it cost to be driven past a corrupt border patrol agent at an official port of entry to the U.S. from Mexico? Frank Bardacke reports from Watsonville on the real border-crossing economy.
I urge you to subscribe now!
Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.
REAL BUT AIN'T EXACTLY THERE
LEONARD COHEN LIVE IN LONDON | DEMOCRACY | PBS
NEIL YOUNG | MOTHER EARTH (HASSELT, 1995)
CONCRETE BLONDE | EVERYBODY KNOWS
N I C O | H E R O E S
DAVID BOWIE | SLIP AWAY
Joy Division | Closer - The Eternal
TIMARU | GULLS
