Who profits from Afghanistan's Opium?

A former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, which borders Afghanistan described the open production of opium, open manufacture into heroin, and open export from the country.

That is about the only good thing you can say about the Taliban; there are plenty of very bad things to say about them. But their suppression of the opium trade and the drug barons is undeniable fact.

Now we are occupying the country, that has changed. According to the United Nations, 2006 was the biggest opium harvest in history, smashing the previous record by 60 per cent. This year will be even bigger.

Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and 'value-added' operations.

It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.

Murray doesn't go into detail about which US and UK officials and ultimately banks that launder the drug money might be benefiting from the drug trade, but he does give a helpful analogy of what happened to a Russian whistleblower on their part of the drug trade:

There are a number of theories as to why Litvinenko had to flee Russia. The most popular blames his support for the theory that FSB agents planted bombs in Russian apartment blocks to stir up anti-Chechen feeling.

But the truth is that his discoveries about the heroin trade were what put his life in danger. Litvinenko was working for the KGB in St Petersburg in 2001 and 2002. He became concerned at the vast amounts of heroin coming from Afghanistan, in particular from the fiefdom of the (now) Head of the Afghan armed forces, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, in north and east Afghanistan...

Litvinenko uncovered the St Petersburg end and was stunned by the involvement of the city authorities, local police and security services at the most senior levels. He reported in detail to President Vladimir Putin. Putin is, of course, from St Petersburg, and the people Litvinenko named were among Putin's closest political allies. That is why Litvinenko, having miscalculated badly, had to flee Russia.

I had as little luck as Litvinenko in trying to get official action against this heroin trade. At the St Petersburg end he found those involved had the top protection. In Afghanistan, General Dostum is vital to Karzai's coalition, and to the West's pretence of a stable, democratic government.

UK Daily Mail July 21, 2007

What are the chances that the assholes on Wall Street are using this drug money as a way to cover their bad bets or simply out of greed as was the case when they were caught with their hands in the drug money and terrorist cookie jar of BCCI?


That one involved former senators, congressmen, and cabinet secretaries as the final Senate Foreign Relations Conmmittee Report on BCCI included Brent Scowcroft, Clarke Clifford, Lawrence Eagleburger, and Henry Kissinger's firm among others.

If our Congress was doing it's job, they would investigate which banks are profiting from the billions in drug money that have to be laundered from a drug trade as large and out in the open as Afghanistan's, but they are unlikely to do that since it will undoubtedly lead back to the malignant cancers on Wall Street who outsourced our jobs, destroyed our economy, foreclosed our houses, and blackmailed us for trillions in bailouts.

Those cancers own our government, which means our troops will die guarding drug dealers and oil pipelines to ensure that the descendants of today's spoiled trust fund babies won't have to get a job for ten generations instead of nine.

MORE ON AFGHANISTAN

OIL THEFT MOTIVE FOR IRAQ WAR

Gen. Petraeus's comments subtext: Israel vs. OIL

The story about General David Petraeus saying Israel's treatment of Palestinians endangers our troops is not remarkable for its insight, people from Noam Chomsky to neocon Fareed Zakaria have said this since 9/11 and even before, but what is remarkable is that someone in Petraeus position SAID it and it was publicly acknowledged.

I don't doubt Petraeus' concern for our troops, but generals work for elected civilians, which means the civilians may have realized the limits of seizing oil and pipeline routes with naked force.

Recall that when Bush invaded Iraq, Cheney's energy task force had been pouring over maps of Iraqi oil fields and foreign suitors who wanted contracts to drill their (and US companies weren't on the list), Condaleeza Rice's memo about merging the seemingly unrelated objectives of fighting terrorism and seizing oil fields, and the US written Hydrocarbon Law that Bush tried to force the Iraqis to pass that would have given 88% of their oil income to foreign oil companies (ours).

The Iraqi parliament refused to pass that bill in spite of offers of millions in bribes to each member because they knew if they voted for it, they were signing their death warrants. The one popular thing Saddam did was nationalize their oil, to keep most of the profits in the country, and the politicians who undid that would be literally torn to shreds by their own people, not to mention they would never win a fair election again.

The result is that the contracts Iraqis have given out pay out far less than the oil companies wanted as the people of Iraq naturally prefer, and many those contracts have gone to non-American companies despite our troops being a literal gun to Iraq's head. Our oil companies probably could have gotten the same deals from Saddam when the sanctions were lifted if we HADN'T invaded.

Likewise in Afghanistan, though we installed a pliant puppet government with a former Unocal consultant as president to oversee the pipeline route and his heroin dealer brother to shepherd that income to Wall Street, our military presence there has not quelled the Taliban and created the peace along the pipeline route necessary to pump natural gas from Turkmenistan through Pakistan to India.

Worse, client state Pakistan has made a deal for a competing pipeline from Iran that reduces the value of "our" pipeline route. So far, our reaction has been to suddenly notice the terrorists in Pakistan who have been there all along and even funded by their government.

But that is at best a holding maneuver.

Somewhere in the corporate board rooms of the oil and gas cartels, they must be realizing that brute force is not working. The natives are not cooperating with the pillage and rape of their own country's oil, gas, and pipeline income.

So what to do? They can't simply walk away from the greatest source of the world's dwindling, easily accessible oil and gas.

Simple.

What they are doing is what they should have done in the first place: offer the natives better deals as occurred in Iraq, and minimize any political offense that would prevent their government from making deals with American companies.

Which circles back to Israel.

In countries where the leaders have to be somewhat responsive to public opinion, doing business with us means tacitly condoning our ally Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories. Their leaders can hardly afford to be seen on the front page of their newspapers signing a deal with Exxon or Chevron when the photo next to it is a dead Palestinian child or a bulldozed Palestinian home.

Likewise, even countries our oil companies already have deals with like Saudi, Kuwait, and the various Emirates must react to public opinion when it reaches a certain peak of outrage as happened during the oil embargo during the 70's.

At that point, it is no longer a matter of just padding oil companies profits, but of strategic access to the fuel that runs the world.

After the debacle of Iraq, longstanding plans to invade Saudi Arabia if the royal family is overthrown or another embargo occurred suddenly look less practical.

The only way to keep the oil flowing is to remove the political offense. Make the Israelis behave, pull back to the 1967 borders, give the Palestinians their state and stop the invasions of Lebanon. The Arab governments have said they will recognize Israel in exchange for this and polls of Arab citizens shown the same.

From the Brookings Institute

When those conditions are met, we will be in no danger of having the oil tap turned off.

Our foray into 19th century, British style colonialism in Asia has failed, and now the masters of the universe on Wall Street must swallow their pride and deal with the people of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia as equals and get some of their oil wealth or keep pretending they are inferior races to be herded and exterminated until we are chased out of their countries and get none of the oil money at all.

I think I know which side they'll take, and if it comes to a fight between the Israel Lobby and the Oil Industry, with trillions of dollars in oil income in jeopardy, there is no doubt who will drink whose milkshake.

Are Democrats pulling a Jedi mind trick on Health Care Reform?

Are Democrats about to dramatically improve and pass what so far has looked like a deeply flawed and corrupt bill by adding a strong public option or Medicare buy in?

Think about it: only an idiot would really think the Republicans would support real health care reform that took money out of the pockets of insurance companies, and if the debate started with single payer, a public option, or opening medicare to all, enough Blue Dogs and DLCers would have joined the GOP to sustain a filibuster and kill the bill. Likewise, the media would not have been kind to such a bill and would have parroted the GOP talking points about the evils of socialism.

So what do you do? Get over the initial hurdles with a bill that is nearly identical to one signed into law by a Republican governor. Republicans will protest it anyway, but swing voters might notice their hypocrisy, which would limit the effectiveness of GOP protests.

Once the bill got past the procedural hurdles to the point that it could be done with reconciliation, it still does no good to telegraph the punch, but it does help to get the public to visibly ''twist their arms'' with ever growing demands for a public option.

Then if they substitute a strong public option, Medicare buy in, or hell, even single payer at the last second, the protests of the right and their parrots in the media won't matter. The public will get it, and thank the Democrats for it at the polls in November.

It would have a side benefit as far as all the money insurance companies threw at Democrats to sway their vote. The Democrats would get to keep that money, and what could the insurance companies say? That they expected a quid pro quo? A second benefit would be that Democrats could honestly say their vote on this could not be bought in spite of all the money that was showered on them and it could reset the relationship between pols and lobbyists.

This scenario would require a lot of coordination and discipline, which the Democrats as a party rarely demonstrated apart from voting for the worst excrement of the Bush administration, and maybe the current talk of a public option is just shining us on until they pass a corporate give away--but maybe, just maybe, these aren't the droids you're looking for.

Move along.

Move along.


UPDATE: I was wrong. March 29, 2010

Democrats use Osama-Saddam bait & switch on health care

I have often complained that the Democrats have failed to learn the right lessons from the GOP's superior mastery of propaganda and PR. In the health care reform debate, they have misapplied the GOP methods again, using bait and switch, with hope and platitudes about health care replacing the GOP fear of terrorist bogeymen.

The GOP used an Osama-Saddam bait and switch. They got everybody mad at Osama, associate him with Saddam, then dropped Osama out of the equation.

With health care reform, Democrats got everybody excited about a public option, associate it with mandated private insurance, then drop the public option, which will be kept in a freezer in a cave with Osama until needed again.

The big difference is people bought the Osaddama lie for long enough to get the war started. By contrast, no one seems to be fooled by substituting slavery to private insurance companies for the kind of public insurance system every other industrialized country has that is less costly and more effective than ours (except at lining the pockets of the already wealthy).

But the Democrats don't seem to care that they haven't fooled anyone and are going ahead with legislation written by and for the criminals who have killed and bankrupted so many Americans with their epic greed.

Good luck in that fall election, Democrats.

You'll need it.

Time to call bullshit on the Bipartisan War on Public Education

Both Barack Obama and his secretary of education have praised a Rhode Island district for firing all their teachers to supposedly help the school's performance.

But in what other endeavor in life is wholesale firing of the frontline troops considered the solution to the problem?

When Abraham Lincoln had a general who wouldn't pursue the enemy, did he tell him to discharge all his troops and assemble a new army?

When American car companies lost market share to Japan for decades, could they have turned that around by firing all the workers?

When we lost the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Alexander the Great lost Afghanistan, was it because each empire needed to fire their troops and recruit fresh ones to win?

In the first two cases, the problem was clearly incompetence at the top: a general who refused to do his job, and executives who didn't think their primary job was building the best cars on the market but instead, maximizing profits by cutting corners on quality.

In the case of Vietnam and Afghanistan where multiple generals and empires failed equally, it was clearly not a failure of the generals but of the enterprise itself: occupying people who didn't want to be occupied.

The problem with public education is at the top. Politicians, tax cut advocates, and privatizers who have no interest in seeing schools succeed are setting the agenda.

First taxes were cut or kept from growing with the need to fund our schools, then that was used as an excuse to cut the enrichment programs like art and music that might have kept some marginal students engaged and class sizes increased just as more and more students were coming to school with chaotic home lives that don't prepare them for the discipline of school.

Then we allowed politicians to micromanage curriculum down to what lesson teachers will do on which day and exactly which words and exercises they will use, robbing teachers of the ability create lessons that will engage their students. Most teachers create their own materials and lessons anyway, but at the risk of their job if they have a particularly authoritarian and bureaucratic principal.

Then we let testing companies sell our politicians on endless testing instead of once or twice a year, which enriches the test companies but helps our kids no more than a doctor would who took your temperature every ten minutes but did nothing with the information except tell you how quickly you're dying.

Finally, private education companies and real estate moguls pay politicians to privatize public education under the euphemism ''charter schools,'' which skim off the students with engaged parents and oddly don't have to follow all the same rules as regular public schools, accelerating the death spiral of public education. And we all know from the Blackwater, Halliburton, and KBR examples that there are NEVER costs overruns or failure, or such close connections to certain elected officials who get campaign donations and lobbyist or CEO jobs when they leave office, which gives them incentives to overlook any failings.

And to the extent that those charter schools do work, the rewards will go to the stockholders and executives, not the teachers who are usually not unionized.

and that union business is the only other time I can think of mass firings being used, like when Ronald Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers rather than negotiating with them even though it put the flying public at risk as military air traffic controllers tried to step in handle much busier and more complex civilian traffic.

Is there any chance that's what this is about? Giving unionized workers who have some measure of control of their work environment and some foothold in a middle class income a beat down, to send a message to other unionized public workers?

Would you take a job that required a college degree but people with no training in your field could dictate exactly how you do your job, measure your success, and fire you because the teachers in other classrooms might not be doing as good a job as you? Don't we usually require college degrees for jobs that require some creativity and initiative rather than just reciting a script like a tour guide?

This is rot and corruption at the top, strip mining our kids futures for profit.

Here in LA, in addition to turning some schools over to charter companies, some have been given to teachers to run with less top down and more cooperative management, with teachers even making decisions about hiring and firing on equal terms with other stakeholders like parents instead of being treated like day laborers.

I will be curious to see how that turns out, though I suspect it's a token bone thrown to teachers, that will eventually be taken away regardless of the outcome.

Rob from the mercenaries and give to the troops

I teach writing at community college, and had a conservative student who was a Marine who had served in Iraq, and he seemed to hate Blackwater and the rest of the mercenaries as much as any lefty does.

Their presence is seriously demoralizing to our troops.

It occurred to me that even conservatives would support eliminating mercenaries from a ''support the troops'' angle.

Simply pledge to take the money from the mercenaries and give it to the troops.

And if we canceled the mercenary contracts and used every penny that had gone to them to raise the pay of our troops, especially those most at risk of being poached by mercenary companies, we would still end up saving money.

How?

Every former special forces, pilot, or other badass who leaves the military early to join a mercenary outfit cost a lot to train, and training their replacement will cost a lot. We would prevent that loss by retaining them in the regular military. (We would also cut off the gift of that taxpayer funded training to those companies).

Save money, support the troops, look like the good guys on the international stage...that would be tough for even the corrupt politicians who set up the contracts and get the kickbacks to argue against.

Hit DEBIT NOT CREDIT to screw Wall Street BACK (and it will help REAL businesses)

Our elected representatives in Washington seem congenitally unable to punish and neuter Wall Street for the economic terrorism they have visited upon the United States and the entire world with their various scams and trade deals that are decimating the middle class, so we are left to do it for ourselves.

One way to screw them is to stop doing business with national banks and move to community banks or better yet a CREDIT UNION.

NPR revealed another way to castrate these bastards when they talked about the difference between the fees for credit versus debit and who profits from each.

The bottom line is credit charges to merchants are much higher, usually a flat fee plus a percentage, whereas debits are just a flat fee. And credit card companies twists the knife in the businesses by having higher set fees for cheaper purchases. How much does it cost businesses? One merchant interviewed said:

"On the cost of a $5 purchase item, we lose a dollar of that sale."

While this directly hurts businesses, it's not hard to figure out that this extra cost will be past will be passed on to customers.

Two companies control 80% of all credit card business, which is why they can charge such extortionate rates. And those fees go to them. While debit charges travel through the same networks, they don't pay nearly as much to those monopolies.

There are two ways you can use this knowledge to screw the Wall Street assholes who are screwing us:

• Obviously, hit the DEBIT button instead of credit every time you have a choice. If enough people did this, it would help businesses as much as any tax cut (without cutting tax revenues we could use for schools, health care, and taking care of our veterans maimed in our now endless wars).

• A little less obvious is telling business people to let customers know that hitting debit saves them money and that savings could be passed on to customers. One woman called into the NPR show and said when clerks ask her "debit or credit," she asks them what they prefer and they say they don't care.

Couldn't small business people figure out a nice way to tell their customers that they accept credit but prefer debit?

I imagine the credit card companies have a clause in the fine print that says merchants can't give a discount for choosing debit, but they could figure out some creative ways to reward them.

The best thing about hitting the DEBIT button is it helps the REAL businesses that provide products and services while hurting the Ponzi schemes of sociopathic trust fund babies on Wall Street who have never made or done anything of value in their whole lives.

If the law cannot or will not reach into their gated community and private compounds, we can--not by climbing over their walls but simply by cutting off the flow of our money that keeps them alive and that they use as the club to beat us.

Now if we could just convince their servants to leave them, they would die of starvation and infection from their unwiped asses.

NOTE: The NPR story had more details like how buying gas can lead to overdraft fees even if your bank account isn't overdrawn. Here's a TRANSCRIPT and the AUDIO.

Response to Democratic party chair quitting

Chair Rochelle Sivan sent to the Framingham, Massachusettes Democratic Town Committee resigning because she changed her party affiliation from Democrat to none, and her letter was published in the Boston Globe.

My short response is ''Thank you."

The reasons why she quit will be familiar to progressive Democrats: continuing the Bush wars, the bailout that favored the Wall Street sociopaths instead of their victims, the erosion of our civil rights, and the final straw is the health care reform bill that also rewards the criminal insurance companies by delivering us as their coerced customers.

She anticipated the response of the apologists for the Democratic Party and gave her response to each:

• Elect more Democrats and progressives - there are 82 members in the Congress Progressive Caucus and only 52 conservative "blue dogs" but which side constantly prevails? The problem isn't in the numbers.

• The bill will be improved later - Like Nafta? Or the Patriot Act? Will that happen when we have control over the Congress and Presidency? Oh wait...

• The other side is worse - Yes, the Democrats are better than the party of rabid conservatives the GOP has become, but not enough to matter, not enough to make the changes this country so desperately needs.

• There is no other choice - I agree there is no viable third party but almost all of the important achievements the Left has won for the people of this country have come from people working outside of the political system - see the Abolitionists, the Labor activists, the Suffragettes and the Civil Rights movements. Apparently, the existing political system is too invested in the status quo to change without enormous outside pressure.

FULL TEXT

I posted the following response on the Boston Globe article:

In a two dominant party system like ours, the two parties don't exist forever. When one party no longer serves a sufficient constituency, it can disappear in a flash like the Whigs did. In the case of the Whigs, they failed to deal forcefully with slavery and left the wound to fester into gangrene.

We are at a very unusual place where that is about to happen to both parties. While the right wing constituency doesn't seem to realize the problem, the left does all too well--our economy and political system is rigged to benefit a very, very few even when it harms or even kills (in the case of our wars and health care system) the vast majority of working and middle class Americans.

The Bush administration pulled the mask off this system, making even the slightly milder corruption of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress intolerable to those of us who really believe our government should try to form a more perfect union and support the general welfare.

The problem is not individual politicians or even one party, but a system that makes profound corruption and amorality the norm. While there have been some campaign finance and ethics reform, the fact that politicians can leave office and go to work as lobbyists, CEOs, and board members for companies that have business before Congress and still be respected by their colleagues and even run for office again instead of being thrown in prison makes us look like a Third World kleptocracy.

To POLITICO: on "Anxious Democrats"

POLITICO posted a story discussing Democrats in Congress supposedly dithering over whether to tack to the left or center in the upcoming 2010 election. I posted this in the comments:

Unlike the Republicans who must choose between their base of racists, religious extremists, and economic royalists and independents who find them morally repulsive, the Democrats could easily appeal to both their progressive base and independents by implementing progressive policies that broad majorities of Americans would support:

• Reregulate Wall Street & prosecute and imprison those at the top who knowingly committed fraud.
  

• Break up any business big enough to buy or intimidate our democracy.
  

• Enact a Wall Street transaction tax steep enough to kill speculation, and force investors to place long term bets on companies they actually hope will succeed (instead of creating one pump & dump bubble after another).
  

• Base our trade policy on what is good for American families, not speculators on Wall Street.
  

• Pass health care reform that does more to help middle and working class families than it does to protect and enrich insurance companies.
  

• Enact a separation of corporation and state when it comes to foreign policy, so we don't overthrow governments or invade countries just because some oil company, banana plantation, or sweatshop owner got their panties in a knot because the leader of a country drove a hard bargain for their natural resources or raised the minimum wage. This change alone would make it harder for terrorist groups to recruit.
  

• End privatization of government functions that are invariably the result of corruption that in turn then uses our tax dollars to fund further corruption.
  

• Invest more in alternative energy than we do in invading and occupying oil producing and pipeline countries. Besides giving us an endless supply of nearly free energy, it would break the power of oil companies to dictate our foreign policy and impoverish countries like Saudi Arabia that use their oil wealth fund terrorist groups.
  

• Listen to teachers for advice about how to fix schools instead of scammers who hope to make money on privatizing them.
  

• Legalize marijuana and deal with other illegal drugs by reducing demand and through treatment--exactly the way the wealthy and politicians deal with their kids when get caught with the stuff.
  

And that is the bottom line to all progressive positions. Treat your fellow citizens the way you would members of your own family, not overly indulgent, but not as sheep to be fleeced or led to the slaughter either.

If Democrats did things like this, were guided by that principle, or even appeared to be, they would not have to worry about 2010 or any election after that.

Unfortunately, by trying to split the baby between the needs of the working and middle class and the rapacious, insatiable demands of the sociopathic trust fund babies on Wall Street, they look weak and unwilling to stand up for their core principles at best, and at worst, as corrupt as the Republicans only with the lipstick of soothing social justice platitudes instead of the shrill, sharp absolutes of the religious right.

Neither option will get the Democratic base out, nor will it inspire independents to vote for Democrats unless they decide based on a coin toss.