by ELLEN BROWN

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

The image of the Earth rising over the surface of the moon, a photograph taken by the first U.S. astronauts to orbit the moon.

An inconvenient truth for “libertarians” is that their ideology of a minimalist U.S. government grew out of the South’s institution of human bondage, i.e., the contractual right of a white person to own a black person, and from the desire of slaveholders to keep the federal government small so it could never abolish slavery.

That is why many “libertarian” icons — the likes of Patrick Henry, George Mason, Thomas Jefferson and the later incarnation of James Madison — were slave owners who understood the link between the emergence of a strong national government and the threat to slavery.

[pullquote] Some “libertarians” accept the global-warming science but still can’t bring themselves to recognize that a coordinated government response is needed. Anti-government ideology trumps even the possible destruction of life on the planet, a very real possibility given the likelihood of mass dislocations of populations and the availability of nuclear weapons. [/pullquote]

More recently, “libertarian” political favorites, such as Ron and Rand Paul, have either opposed or criticized civil rights laws that, in their view, infringe on the rights of white businessmen to discriminate against blacks. And libertarian-oriented Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court and in  legislatures  across the country are gutting voting rights for black and brown Americans.But an even bigger crisis facing “libertarianism” now — and why the ideology is particularly dangerous — is the existential threat from global warming and the urgent need for collective government action on a worldwide scale to reduce human output of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping chemicals.

The “libertarian” response to the overwhelming scientific consensus on this life-threatening reality has been either to deny the facts or to propose implausible “free market” solutions that would barely dent the crisis. Some dismiss the threat in mocking tones as some kind of “statist” conspiracy. Typical were sarcastic comments by the Independent Institute’s Mary Theroux, writing: “The climate crisis is real, it’s here, and it’s time for absolute power for Obama!”

There’s also lots of sophistry and quibbling about the science. The preferred “libertarian” position adopts the pretense that the release of carbon dioxide by human activity contributes little or nothing to climate change.

Other “libertarians” accept the science but still can’t bring themselves to recognize that a coordinated government response is needed. Anti-government ideology trumps even the possible destruction of life on the planet, a very real possibility given the likelihood of mass dislocations of populations and the availability of nuclear weapons.

The “libertarians” are further hampered in their thinking about global warming by the fact that many of their principal funders are major energy extractors — and it’s nearly impossible to get people to think rationally about a problem when their paychecks depend on them not doing so.

Most notably the billionaire Koch Brothers who own Koch Industries, a giant oil and natural gas company, have lavished millions upon millions of dollars on “think tanks,” academic centers and Tea-Party-style activist groups to raise doubts about climate-change science and to deflect public demands for action.

Pluses and Minuses

Clearly, “libertarianism” does have its valid points — especially regarding the absurdity of U.S. drug laws, the destructive wastefulness of the American Empire and the excessive surveillance that followed 9/11 — but there are many other crazy elements to the ideology and its resistance to reason.

Its principal tenet of unregulated “free markets” has been discredited again and again, through market crashes, economic depressions and the foisting of dangerous products on customers. There is also the grander lie that “free markets” somehow can or will address broader societal needs when capitalism is really about how to maximize short-term profits regardless of the danger inflicted on the environment or individuals.

There also are legitimate societal concerns that “libertarianism” would essentially ignore, such as how to care for the elderly, how to educate the population for today’s economic challenges, how to ameliorate the suffering of the poor, how to maintain an effective infrastructure, etc.

That doesn’t mean that government has all the answers. But there is a significant difference between adopting a position favoring a government only doing what it needs to do and the “libertarian” insistence on the smallest government conceivable. The former accepts that capitalism can handle many undertakings with minimal government regulation, while recognizing that the failure of “free markets” in other settings requires greater government intervention to “promote the general welfare” as the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution states.

For instance, the private sector can’t do transportation infrastructure very well. Thus, governments have to step in with spending for roads, rail, airports, etc. Capitalism also has little need for aging, worn-out or sick workers. So, the government is needed to avert a humanitarian catastrophe.

On a current topic, the Affordable Care Act represented the government’s recognition that the profit motive behind private health insurance had failed millions of Americans, forcing them to overburden hospital emergency rooms and requiring some government intervention. Yet, “libertarians” still cry tears for the insurance industry.

Of course, even among those holding a pragmatic view toward the need for government, there can be legitimate differences over policy prescriptions, whether a certain rail project makes sense or how best to care for the sick. But “libertarianism” and its ideological hatred of “guv-mint” has an irrationality to it, which only makes sense if you reflect on the origins of the philosophy, born in the intensity of the South’s resentment toward the federal government’s intervention to end slavery and later to stop racial segregation.

Slavery’s Interests

Some “libertarians” get angry over anyone making this connection between their supposedly freedom-loving ideology and slavery, but it is historically undeniable. Any serious study of the U.S. Constitution, its ratification and its early implementation reveals intense Southern fears about the Constitution’s creation of a vibrant central government and its eventual implications on slavery.

For instance, as historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in Madison and Jefferson, Patrick Henry and George Mason, two “libertarian” heroes who opposed the Constitution and its strong central government, warned plantation owners at the Virginia ratification convention that “slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected.”

“Mason repeated what he had said during the Constitutional Convention: that the new government failed to provide for ‘domestic safety’ if there was no explicit protection for Virginians’ slave property,” Burstein and Isenberg wrote…

“Henry called up the by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections — the direct result, he believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia. …”Madison rose to reject their conspiratorial view. He argued that the central government had no power to order emancipation, and that Congress would never ‘alienate the affections five-thirteenths of the Union’ by stripping southerners of their property. ‘Such an idea never entered into any American breast,’ he said indignantly, ‘nor do I believe it ever will.’

“Madison was doing his best to make Henry and Mason sound like fear-mongers. Yet Mason struck a chord in his insistence that northerners could never understand slavery; and Henry roused the crowd with his refusal to trust ‘any man on earth’ with his rights. Virginians were hearing that their sovereignty was in jeopardy.”

Despite the success of Mason and Henry to play on the fears of plantation owners, the broader arguments stressing the advantages of Union carried the day, albeit narrowly. Virginia ultimately approved ratification by 89 to 79.

Key Framers of the Constitution — the likes of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the earlier incarnation of Madison — had envisioned an activist federal government that would address the needs of the young nation, from finances to road-building. However, after Thomas Jefferson returned from France in 1789, he emerged as the charismatic leader of the “small government” faction dedicated to protecting the “rights” of Southern whites to own blacks.

Jefferson pulled Madison, his central Virginia neighbor, from Washington’s orbit into his own as Jefferson fashioned what became known as the Virginia Dynasty of three consecutive presidents, Jefferson, Madison and James Monroe, all from Virginia, all defenders of the South’s slavery. By the time Virginia’s grip was broken in the late 1820s, the young United States was on course toward the Civil War. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Dubious Claim to Madison.”]

This marriage of “small government” ideology and racial bigotry has never been broken. It was reaffirmed during Jim Crow days and during the battle against racial integration. Even today, advocates of “libertarianism” are among those pushing for new restrictions on voting rights with the obvious (though usually unstated) goal of suppressing the votes of black and brown citizens who are seen as likely to vote Democratic. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Marriage of Libertarians and Racists.”]

Global Warming’s Threat

But the most serious threat posed today by the “libertarians” is their resistance to serious government action to curb global warming. Surely, individuals can take personal action to reduce their own carbon footprints, but the scope of the crisis requires aggressive intervention by governments to maintain the livability of the planet.

In his June 25 speech on climate change, President Barack Obama began and closed his remarks with references to the famous “Earth rise” photograph taken in 1968 by Apollo 8 astronauts circling the moon and looking back on the blue globe that holds the only life that we know to exist in the universe.

Obama’s speech echoed one given by President John F. Kennedy a half century ago, on June 10, 1963, at American University, in which Kennedy said, “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

What astronomers have also come to understand in recent decades is how extremely rare — possibly unique — the circumstances were that let advanced life forms develop over four billion years on Earth. The planet has a stable, circular orbit around a small-to-medium-sized star, not too close to burn up but not too far away for a permanent ice age. Plus, there were other lucky breaks, like the giant Jupiter circling outside the Earth and absorbing asteroids that otherwise could have made the planet unlivable.

Peering around our galaxy and deep into the universe, astronomers have found scientific conditions intensely hostile to the development of life as we know it. Interspersed through the frigid void of space, there are powerful stars crashing into one another, exploding as pulsars and collapsing into black holes that then drag other stars and planets to their doom.

Most planets that have been detected are spinning too close to their stars or revolve in irregular orbits that go from searing heat to intense cold. The relatively gentle and nearly perfectly circular orbit of Earth around the Sun is extremely rare.

Because the universe is so vast, one might hope or assume that other planets exist that have been lucky enough to have the combination of factors that makes life possible on Earth. But so far scientists haven’t detected such a place. As far as we know, Earth may be the only place where complex life forms have ever evolved.

Thus our current understanding of the universe makes protecting this remarkable planet even more of an imperative. It would be a tragedy beyond measure if some anti-government ideology — especially one that sprang from the evils of slavery — were allowed to serve the interests of the Koch Brothers and thus doom the one habitable sphere spinning in the universe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’
Submitters Website: http://www.consortiumnews.com

By Paul Craig Roberts
“Overwhelmed by its hubris, Washington threatens all life on earth.”

Germany’s Merkel: What does the Washington mafia have on her?

No one likes a bully, and Washington’s NATO puppets have been bullied for six decades. British prime ministers, German chancellors, and French presidents have to salute and say “yes sir.”

They all hate it, but they love Washington’s money; so they prostitute themselves and their countries for Washington’s money. Even a person of Winston Churchill’s stature had to suck up to Washington in order to get his bills and his country’s bills paid.

[pullquote] In a world in which every member of the Forbes Four Hundred is a billionaire plus or multi-billionaire, $35,000,000 just doesn’t cut it. In 2006 the manager of one hedge fund was paid $1,700,000,000 for one year’s thieving. Another 25 were paid $575,000,000 for their skills in front-running trades. $35 million is probably the annual budget for their household servants. [/pullquote]

But what the bought European leaders are finding is that Washington doesn’t pay enough for the prostitution required. One year out of office Tony Blair was worth $35 million dollars. But that’s not enough to get Blair on the waiting list for $50 million 200 foot yachts, to have a chalet in Gstaad, $50 million penthouses in Paris and New York, and a private plane to fly between them, or to wear a $736,000 Franck Muller watch on his wrist, sign his name with a $700,000 Mont Blanc jewel-encrusted pen, and drink $10,000 “martinis on a rock” (gin or vodka poured over a diamond) at New York’s Algonquin Hotel.

In a world in which every member of the Forbes Four Hundred is a billionaire plus or multi-billionaire, $35,000,000 just doesn’t cut it. In 2006 the manager of one hedge fund was paid $1,700,000,000 for one year’s thieving. Another 25 were paid $575,000,000 for their skills in front-running trades. $35 million is probably the annual budget for their household servants.

The British seem content in their role as Washington’s favorite lackey, but France and Germany have not enjoyed that role. France’s last real leader, General De Gaulle, would have nothing to do with it and refused to join NATO. Germany, dismembered with East Germany occupied by the Soviets, had no choice. Germans’ gratitude to President Reagan for their unification resulted in re-unified Germany falling under Washington’s hegemony.

However, if news reports from Berlin are true, Germany has had enough. The catalyst was Edward Snowden’s revelations that Washington spies on everyone including its allies, both Germany and the EU in particular. Moreover, Washington uses Britain as the Trojan Horse within the EU as a backup spy in case NSA misses something.

According to news reports, the German, French, and EU governments are upset to find out that their extreme subservience to Washington has not protected them and their citizens from being spied upon. Here they are, fighting Washington’s wars in far distant Afghanistan, the fate of which is completely unrelated to their own, and what does Washington do but embarrass them by spying on the personal lives of their citizens.

Who does the Merkel government represent, Germans are asking, Germans or the NSA? Why does the Merkel government kowtow to Washington? The next question will be: “what does Washington’s spies have on Merkel?”

With the German government put on the spot by Washington’s betrayal, news headlines are: “Germany Ready to Charge UK and US Intelligence Over Bugging Operations.”

Little wonder Washington and its media whores hate Edward Snowden. “A spokesman for the [German] Federal Prosecutor said the office was preparing to bring charges against” the UK and US intelligence services. In light of the Snowden affair, it will be wonderful if Germany issues arrest warrants and Washington and London refuse to extradite its NSA and UK spy operatives who have violated every law and every trust.

The German Justice Minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenburger, demanded an “immediate explanation” why Washington was applying to Germany policies “reminiscent of the actions against enemies during the Cold War.”

The president of France has said that France will not again cooperate with Washington on any issue until France receives “full assurances” that Washington will cease spying on France.

The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, and the EU Commissioner for Justice, Viviane Reding, demand Washington’s answer to Snowden’s revelations that Washington has betrayed its own allies.

The question that must be asked is: do any of these protests from politicians who are almost certain to be on Washington’s payroll mean anything, or are they just make-believe protests to quiet the domestic European populations who have been betrayed by their elected leaders? Why would the French president and the German justice minister think any reassurance from Washington meant anything? When in human memory has Washington told the truth about anything? When has Washington’s reassurance meant anything?

The Tonkin Gulf? Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Iranian nukes? Assad’s sarin gas attack? FBI orchestrated “terror attacks”? It is a proven fact that the US government lies every time it opens its mouth. [Compared to Washington, Hitler, Tojo, Franco, Pinochet and Pol Pot were truthful.]

Washington’s reply to Europe’s demands for explanation is: “We will discuss these issues bilaterally with EU member states,” but “we are not going to comment publicly on specific alleged intelligence activities.”

You know what that means. Bilateral means that Washington is going to talk with each EU country separately, using the information NSA has obtained to blackmail each complainant into silence. Whereas the EU together could stand up to Washington, separately the countries can be browbeat and offered more money or threats that illicit love affairs will be revealed to shut them up. Washington is betting on its power to intimidate individual countries with the threat of isolation and being cut off from money. If the EU countries agree to the secret bilateral explanations from Washington, the affair will end and the spying on Europe will continue while Washington and the EU politicians deny that the spying continues.

[pullquote] Why would the French president and the German justice minister think any reassurance from Washington meant anything? When in human memory has Washington told the truth about anything? When has Washington’s reassurance meant anything? [/pullquote]

By now the entire world must know that Washington is not merely lawless, but also totally out of control, reveling in arrogance and hubris, driven by desires for hegemony over the entire world. Washington is so paranoid and distrustful that it doesn’t even trust its own citizens or the European puppet governments that it has bought and paid for.

Washington is the only government that has ever used nuclear weapons, and Washington used them against a defeated government that was trying to surrender. Today the craziness in Washington is much worse. Decision-making councils are full of crazed neoconservative war-mongers, such as National Security Advisor Susan Rice, a threat to humanity. Washington think tanks and media are over-represented by neoconservatives such as William Kristol who wants to know “what good are nuclear weapons if you can’t use them?”

The sleazy European politicians and media who took Washington’s money provided for their own economic security, but they betrayed the security of the entire world. By enabling Washington’s hegemony, they unleashed Washington’s arrogance. This arrogance now threatens not merely the independence of every country but life on earth.

Instead of meeting unilaterally alone with Washington, the European countries should stand together. After all, supposedly there is an EU. If there is an EU, Washington should meet with the EU, not with its constituent parts individually, no one of which can stand up to Washington’s intimidation and bribes.

If thermo-nuclear war is to be avoided and life is to continue on earth, Europe must disband NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in the aftermath of World War II. Its purpose was to prevent the powerful Red Army, which defeated Nazi Germany, from overrunning all of Western Europe.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, 22 years ago. Yet, NATO still exists. Moreover, against President Reagan’s intentions, NATO has grown. NATO now includes former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire, such as Eastern Europe, and former constituent parts of the Soviet Union itself, such as Georgia, the government of which is bought and paid for by Washington. The NGOs that Washington funds might even deliver Ukraine into Washington’s fold.

Egged on by Washington, Georgia initiated a war with present day Russia, which superior Russian forces quickly ended. In the opinion of many, the Russian government showed far too much tolerance for its defeated enemy, which is being rearmed by Washington and encouraged into new military adventures. Washington is working to make Georgia, located in Asia between the Black and Caspian seas, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO membership would make Georgia a treaty protectorate of Washington and its NATO puppets. Washington thinks that this elevation of Georgia would result in Russia acquiescing to Georgian aggression in order to avoid war with the US and NATO.

China, also, has been amazingly abused by Washington, and instead of replying in kind, has taken it in stride. This magnanimity on the part of the Chinese has been misinterpreted by Washington as fear. The fear that Washington imagines is causing China to quake in its boots has encouraged Washington to surround China with new naval, air, and troop bases. The fact that however numerous are Washington’s bases in the Pacific and South China Sea, Washington itself is an ICBM away has not registered on the ignorant scum that rules Amerika. Overwhelmed by its hubris, Washington threatens all life on earth.

About Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Improbably, the brilliant and outspoken Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under none other than Ronald Reagan, and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.

ADDENDUM

Below an editorial comment we approve of, it is about Zionist warmonger Bill Kristol, one of the most abject creatures that ever disgraced the face of this planet.  If anything, Icke is too kind. Men like Kristol and his ilk are far more dangerous than the Black Plague.

Posted by David Icke

Neo-con Bill Kristol is a Maniac

Kristol .. the baby-faced assassin. Like Dick Cheney, another supreme Neocon scumbag, no crime is too great or repulsive to be out of the question. No Complete sociopathy rules their actions. No wonder they are influential in the US government.

‘Bill Kristol has never seen a war he didn’t like. No, that’s too soft. A war he didn’t love and lust after. Here’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing pretending to be a serious, sober minded analyst on television when in reality he is trying to get us sucked into horrific wars that other people will die fighting. Will he ever put on a uniform and fight any of the wars he so desperately wants to start? Hell no. Will anyone in his family or friends? Hell no.’

Tweaking While the Earth Burns

by SASHA ROSS
To begin his speech on climate change at Georgetown, President Obama evoked the image of earth as seen from space in 1968. “[W]hile the sight of our planet from space might seem routine today, imagine what it looked like to those of us seeing our home, our planet, for the first time.” Imagine what it looks like today—the Alberta tar sands’ vast tailing ponds expanding into the boreal forest, plumes of smoke from brush fires obscuring parts of Australia, algae blooms clogging the rivers, widening deserts, retreating glaciers.

If Obama’s speech made one lasting impression, it was that the US “will reduce its greenhouse-gas pollution to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.” Really, that’s only a 5 percent drop from today. While the reduction in greenhouse-gases in the US will come through a very complex system of tax breaks, emissions caps, techno-fixes, and carbon trading schemes, a recent report published in Energy Policy admits that the US and other developed countries will require a 50 percent reduction in 1990 levels—this report places Obama’s target far from the mark. The national climate change policy has its head in the clouds, and obscures what is happening on the ground.

Land is really what is at stake. Just this week, two separate direct action protests against the construction of an Enbridge pipeline set to carry tar sands oil out of Alberta. One protest in Michigan included an activist entering the pipeline and locking down, while the other in Ontario involved an extensive multiple-day occupation and numerous lock-downs. Obama has focused, along with much of the Climate Justice Movement, on the Keystone XL pipeline miles away, and Obama even mentioned in his speech that he would ensure the pipeline would be halted unless the State Department could certify that it would not significantly contribute to climate change. The trouble is, the State Department already made such claims, so it looks like the pipeline will be accepted.

Oil production, largely derived from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, hit the sharpest spike in decades in the years 2011 and 2012. Concomitant with this increase of oil production is the rise of sexual assault and violence, as oil workers invade small towns looking for a good time. Judging by this “male dystopia,” the jobs-jobs-jobs agenda stinks with the residue of structural misogyny and rape culture. At the same time, due to the drive to frack oil wells, Texas oil production may double by 2020. Obama did not mention that shipments of petroleum by train increased 46 percent in 2012, and new routes for coal exports are projected for the West Coast in spite of a heated protest movement spearheaded by community groups. Meanwhile, coal production continues to rise steadily over the past several years, as the “Saudi Arabia of Coal” in the Powder River Basin finds new routes out of the North America.

Obama’s strongest defense is, “even as we’re producing more domestic oil, we’re also producing more cleaner-burning natural gas than any other country on Earth.” US natural gas production hit an all-time record high in 2012, and is projected to increase in coming years—in Obama’s speech, he insisted that such production boosts jobs, promotes clean energy, and calls for more infrastructure. Gas production is, however, often facilitated by alterations to residential zoning laws that have become possible through subversion of the democratic process by public-private partnerships. That the frack wells have poisoned aquifers, making life virtually impossible in some areas, only provides more fodder for contemporary enclosures and residential market speculators. Pennsylvania Alliance for Clean Water and Air keeps a growing list, currently over a thousand people driven from their homes and/or suffering from long-term health problems throughout the Marcellus Shale, as well as in the fracking hubs of Colorado and Texas. In just one of numerous accidents, on May 24, a natural gas processor spilled 241 barrels of natural gas liquid into Parachute Creek, polluting local irrigation reservoir with carcinogenic benzene.

Obama continues, “sometimes there are disputes about natural gas, but let me say this: We should strengthen our position as the top natural gas producer because, in the medium term at least, it not only can provide safe, cheap power, but it can also help reduce our carbon emissions.” The reductionist logic of such liberal platitudes to the Climate Justice Movement ignore the industrial poisoning of the land. Anything will work, as long as it is “clean burning” or promotes “clean energy.” Obama states, “we’ll keep working with the industry to make drilling safer and cleaner, to make sure that we’re not seeing methane emissions”—this notion of “not seeing methane emissions” is especially strange, considering scientists and engineers like Cornell University’s Anthony Ingraffea insist that methane emissions have made natural gas into a failed climate solution. According to Ingraffea, “It is not enough of a benefit to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to expand natural gas when that money could be put to use in deployment of renewables.” Even renewables have problems, however.

Comparing the rush for “clean energy” to the Space Race, Obama announced that the US ought to compete with Chinese production of solar panels. This is by all accounts a frightening declaration, considering that solar panel factories happen to emit extremely toxic fumes and pollutants into the air and water, while using rare earth metals that require extremely damaging mining enterprises. The problem with these factories came to a head in China in 2011 when the workers at a Zhejang plant forced the factory to close its doors, due to terrible health effects, including, among other things, cancer. Although solar factories may create more jobs, the workers in China have already met with their negative aspects. Obama calls upon the developing world to meet the same standards of pollution control as the US, while simultaneously encouraging regimes around the world to produce more fossil fuels (in Libya, for instance), while mandating that the US increases its own extractive industries. It is, indeed, a fact that the US has obstructed climate change proceedings around the world since at least the Kyoto Protocols, and Obama himself helped scuttle the optimistic attempts of the African Union to put forward a real climate change policy during COP15 in Copenhagen.

Focusing on emissions, Obama completely overlooked one of the worst contributors to climate change and biggest destroyers of land and water—deforestation. Deforestation contributed nearly twice the amount of emissions of heat trapping gases in 2010, yet Obama’s Forest Service has mandated a 20 percent increase in volume of board feet harvested from National Forests by 2014. This hike is alarming, considering that the forest service already considers “public lands” to be “plantation lands” on a thirty-year cycle. The FS and Bureau of Land Management have been hacking away at everything they can get their saws through since the RARE II report in 1977—what’s left is either short growth or critical late successional reserve forest that has been left to mature since the massive clear cuts of the 1950s and 1980s. These forests are teeming with endangered species, and they are the country’s last carbon banks—according to the Wilderness Society, almost all of the most critical national forests are up in the Pacific Northwest Cascadia bioregion.

In Mount Hood, the US’s most hiked glacial peak, the FS is sharpening the blades of the timber industry to reap 6,000 acres out of an area sweeping the north face of the mountain, but environmental groups were afforded no fair chance at field checking the sales. Before local biodiversity group, Bark, helped stop it, another 2,000 acre timber sale was slated for the western side of Mount Hood, putting the most beautiful part of that temperate rainforest up for grabs, including 150-year-old trees, the probable stomping grounds of the endangered Sierra Nevada Red Fox, and the last thriving salmon habitat on the mountain, the wild Sandy River.

Most bioregions are not so privileged as to have enough biodiversity groups to ensure that the Endangered Species Act and Environmental Protection Act are followed. Since the Clinton Administration’s heinous “Salvage Rider,” which allowed timber industries to cut down old growth for “fire prevention,” and the Bush Administration’s “Healthy Forests Initiative” (check-marked by Oregon’s finest Democrats), budgetary items that went to enforcement of environmental standards—namely, requirements for federal checking of timber sales—have been cut.

While conservatives like to blame environmentalists for the decline in the timber industry’s employment rolls, it is the timber industry’s all-out assault on the working class that should be blamed first. There are frequent claims that 13 percent of Oregon’s economy comes from timber. In Oregon, however, property taxes, income taxes, and tree severance taxes on timberlands paid by the timber barons rarely account for more than 5 percent of the counties’ total. Sixty-to-seventy percent of timber harvested is shipped overseas with minimal tariffs, much of it without even touching local sawmills, which used to be bastions of union labor. The seasonal employment of logging is notorious, up there with coal mining as a non-unionized and highly dangerous career with very little rewards.

The amount of board feet harvested today is roughly equivalent to that harvested in 1940, yet in timber states, the industry employs as little as 15 percent of their previous workforce. In 1990, timber production was more than four times what it is today, yet, between 1990 and 2007, the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries Timberland Index reported an annual compounded return of 12.88 percent, nearly 20 percent higher than the S&P index. The decline in harvested timber since the early 1990s does not seem to have impacted the corporations’ bottom line, in fact, the return price for stock in timber companies like Weyerhauser has increased as much as 60 percent since April 2012. Still, taxpayers subsidize the logging roads, sometimes using the FS and BLM’s ability to bypass environmental impact analyses to cut roads straight through old growth. In a strange inversion of the expected reality, the federal government is known to spend more on constructing logging roads for a given timber sale than it receives for the lease of the land. And the seasonal loggers get screwed along with the good old Spotted Owl.

Throughout the world, the general pattern of the World Timber Total Return Index shows that timber industry stocks have risen 215 percent between 2009 and 2011. Since the beginnings of the global food crisis, moneyed interests, multinational corporations and national elites have captured billions of acres across the Global South. The ramping up of the timber harvest in the US is only a small part of the resource push spearheaded by extractive industry throughout the world. It extends to other industries in the US as well, and increasing solar and wind production will not help to mitigate the problem. An average of 8 percent of land in every state of the Union is owned by foreign investors, with the exception of Maine where foreign investors own twice that. Half of this land is forest, much of it owned by timber companies from Canada and the Netherlands like Irving Woodlands. The Dutch pension fund is typically pointed to as the reason for their expansive investment in the US—the Dutch are staking their future on US land while we here are hemorrhaging social wealth (whether this points towards a larger pattern of the chicken coming home to roost, we will have to wait and see).

The rural farming sector of the US is also increasingly falling into the hands of outside investors. In Illinois, outside investment in farm sales increased by 66 percent in 2011, to 73 percent of all sales. This trend echoes a larger buy-out of land in the US. Between 2005 and 2010, the total amount of privately held farmland rose by 65 percent. Foreign direct investment leaped 6.7 percent in 10 months during 2010, reining in a total area the size of Indiana. While the features of the Global Land Grab are different in the US than they are in the rest of the world, it appears as though what is happening in the US is similar to what is happening in the Global South. First of all, the amount of available land in the North Atlantic countries is far less than that of the Global South. It is also more expensive, so the stakes are different—while foreign investment in land is rising, it does not touch the levels at which corporations are buying up land in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Land grabs are “legitimized” and enforced in the US by police and facilitated by courts and private-public partnerships, but that does not make what is happening in the US any more “legal” in terms of democratic control over public lands and resources. Instead, there is a run on natural resources in the US, and the financialization of the economy has provided the pretext to siphon the revenue directly to the upper class.

By all accounts, if Obama is calling for an increase in solar panel construction, emissions caps, and so on, he is also responsible for a simultaneous increase of extractive industry throughout the world. In his speech, Obama insisted that subsidies to coal-fired power plants worldwide must end, but only if those plants do not have carbon capture technology, which is highly dubious in terms of its proposed positive impacts. Since, forecasts show that coal, oil, and natural gas are only set to increase, it will clearly take concerted citizens’ campaigns to overthrow the industry barons and empower workers to take their fair share from the economy. While Obama speaks of climate change and the future of ecology in the US, he will not attempt to delink from the imperialist economy he has helped to build out of fossil fuels and deforestation, and the security state he has helped enfranchise to keep it in place.

Sasha Ross is a moderator of the Earth First! Newswire, the coordinator of the Earth First! Journal—Cascadia Field Office, and an activist with Bark. His recent writings can be found in continent., The Singapore Review of Books, and Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). He is also the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Grabbing Back: Resistance Against the Global Land Grab (AK Press 2014). This article is also being published at newswire.earthfirstjournal.org.