If Some Don't Give A Damn About Climate Change Then Try This...

Dear Zachary,

First, note that most of the statistics below came from the obstructionist, right-wing, Know-Nothing republican Senator Dick Lugar from the great state of Indiana. For a time in the 1920's and 1930's, Indiana made the Klu Klux Klan a household word in the good old USA.

It was there in 1924 that daunting republican and proud Klan member Edward L. Jackson was resoundingly elected Governor.

So the terrorist Klan was a lot like our modern Tea Baggers and Know-Nothings. They all gleefully sport alabaster white capuchos, flaunt racist banners, carry deadly weapons, and vainly call out for lynching any weaker rivals.*

Thank you for bringing up the very, very important subject of our nation's energy consumption hidden in all the hoop-la about climate change even if the row is fomented by Tea-Baggers and Know-Nothing republicans.

For a minute, let's forget climate change. We may not last long enough to freeze to death or some satanic alternative.

What needs to be looked at is our importing foreign nations oil. Clean Energy Fuels Corp. founder T. Boone Pickens** has stated it over and over again that we need to do something quickly about oil imports because the money that is running out of our nation is a disaster in the making.

By one study of 2006 the US consumes about 20.7 million barrels of oil a day.

Now it's a little less but still around 20 million barrels per day.

Do the arithmetic: 20,000,000 x US$80.05 (Kitco's Price / Crude Oil) = US$1,601,000,000.

Okay that's about US$1.6 Billion per day.

Now for the problem: We import about 13 million barrels per day of the above amount consumed. For one year that is 13,000,000 x 365 days per year = 4,745,000,000 barrels per year imported. That comes to US$379,837,250,000 or about US$380,000,000,000.

That's US$380 Billion per year.

According to one source, for 2006 we imported about 13% of our total oil from Saudi Arabia, and another 11% of our total oil from Venezuela. And don't forget that we are paying another 10% for yearly imports from Nigeria. That's US$38,000,000,000 or US$38 Billion to Nigeria.

That means we good old boys are paying about US$49,400,000,000 or about US$49.4 Billion to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia each and every year.

Just remember the money that financed old Osama Bin Laden and his gang came from there, plus the Hamas boys, Al-Qaeda in Yemen, and only Allah knows who else.

Thank you very much King Abdallah and subjects.

We are paying the nation of Venezuela US$41,800,000,000 each and every year.

So the old "Stalinist" Chavez is getting paid about US$41.8 Billion out of our poor capitalist pockets every year.

And surely we know that old Chavez uses the cash to foment more "Stalinist" revolution all over South America and the Caribbean.

And even worse, we literally paid for that Captain Christmas kid from Lagos, Nigeria to go and get re-educated and gussied up by the Al-Qaeda guys in Yemen.

So? Are we all sleeping? Is America sleeping, again?

The Know-Nothing republicans need to believe in Climate Change for no other reason than to cut back on paying gobs of our money to a faraway midiaeval King.

Or to a rag-tag bunch of SA Stalinists.

Or to Captain Christmas for his TNT tights.

So what now Tea Baggers and Know-Nothings? Did not the great American patriots of yore throw off the chains of servitude to a faraway evil King?

Old Tom Paine would certainly say that only fools choose not to defy the chains of oppression, correct?

Don't tread on me and all, right?

Right.

We need to get extreme about fuel consumption by cars and trucks or we will suffer in the near future.

And we need to do this now. We cannot continue to deny the reality of our world oil trade.

If we continue in our denial the children of our children will refer to our ignorance as the great horror of the 21st century.

Best regards,

Your Dad Martinshushu

PS: * Please see the Comment by Gerald Hoke following.

PSS: ** T. Boone Pickens is a good libertarian-type-republican. In the 2008 election cycle he granted republican candidates US$37,200 to help the conservative cause. And please note that in fairness, and to hedge his bets, and because he does a lot of business in those states, he did contribute about US$20,000 total to democratic candidates in Colorado and New Mexico.

PSSS: One last thought son, in the 1950's the WWII General and republican US president Dwight Eisenhower reminded us that "The heart of darkest America is in the Mid-West." Ike, of course, was talking about Indiana or thereabouts.

The Five Minute Window of the Cold War and Blowback in the Timeline of Recent History

Explaining A New American Traitor:

Dick Cheney

"Who do we bomb now? Why not Cambodia?"

 Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld asked Henry Kissinger January 1969

Question: What came out of the massive secret US bombing of Cambodia in the Vietnam War?

Answer: Blowback in the form of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and the deaths of two million Cambodians.

Question: Who stopped the Killing Fields of Cambodia?

Answer: Most reviled by the above gang of Know-Nothing republicans, Ho Chi Minh sent the Vietnamese army into Cambodia to stop the murders.

Fact: Blowback is synonymous with consequence.

Fact: If you kill people in some secret operation there almost certainly will be unforeseen consequences.

Fact: Dick Cheney spent no time in any branch of the Armed services, Intelligence services, or any other government service ever requiring him to be in harm's way as a consequence of volunteering.

Fact: Huey Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name of antifascism."

Based on my own experience, fascism may come to America in the name of national security.

Fact: The great actor and precise intellectual Raul Julia once said, "America's the greatest country. You can do anything you want here, but if you really start to make a difference they will kill you."

They certainly killed Huey Long and John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. 

Fact: Dick Cheney learned about the world through some parochial dark lens of the paranoid, John Birch Society cold war chess games of the 1950s and the nuclear tête-à-têtes of the 1960s.

Fact: This background transformed Dick Cheney into a reactionary of the worst kind. Cheney believed that our nuclear armed nation needed to react to any threat with overwhelming force in a timeline of five minutes or less because the "Ruskies" are attacking us with the same stuff on the same timeline.

The Mutually Assured Destruction of strategic (read nuclear) weapons warfare.

Fact: Reagan, Cheney and Rumsfeld did not end the Cold War and tear down the Berlin Wall.

Fact: Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War and tore down the Berlin Wall.

Fact: Read some of the Marxist theory that Gorbachev certainly studied in elementary school. To a good Marxist change is inevitable. To a USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev revolutionary change is your duty to your society.  

Fact: To a good Know-Nothing republican change is something you get in the derivatives market.

Question: What Blowback is coming our way from Cheney and his gang of Know-Nothing republicans?

Answer: We citizens of a democratic USA need to find new ways of dealing with our adversaries across the planet.

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To that here are some excerpts from a speech by

US Green Party Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney

at a recent Munich, Germany Peace Rally.

Thanks to Victor Muh for the following translation from the original German language

"Thank you for allowing me to come from the United States and participate in this rally for peace.

My country has been hijacked by a criminal cabal intent on using the hard-earned dollars of the American people for war, occupation, and empire.

As a result, the national leadership of my country, both Democratic and Republican, became complicit in war crimes, torture, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace.

As a Member of Congress from the Democratic Party, I drafted Articles of Impeachment against George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice.

Later, when Democrats voted to support more war rather than take care of the needs of the people, I declared my independence from them and all national leadership.

The Green Party nominated me to run for President, which I did on a platform of truth, justice, peace, and dignity.

I watched as Candidate Barack Obama came here to Germany to speak. I saw tears on the faces of many in the crowd who believed that, finally, there was something worth believing in again.
That America had turned a page from its evil playbook that had so outraged and disappointed the world.

That good was finally about to triumph over evil.

I know that beleaguered people all over the world, victims of cruel and deadly military, economic, imperial policies finally could believe in hope and change.
And America could be believed in again.

Everywhere I went all over the world there were pictures of Barack Obama, slogans “Yes, We Can,” and the words “Hope” and “Change” plastered everywhere.

And after eight years of George W. Bush, Barack Obama seemed to be the man the world was waiting for.

So when the Candidate became the President, we held our breath in anticipation.

That torture and rendition; spying on innocent, dissenting Americans; war and occupation; crimes against the U.S. Constitution and crimes against the peace would end and that the United States would finally join the community of nations.

Sadly, one year into the Presidency of Barack Obama, that is not the case.

. . .

So what are we to do? Let us work together on behalf of truth, justice, peace, and dignity. I will struggle in the U.S. and I will struggle with you:

Not one more dime for war.

We can’t give in and we can’t give up. We must take our countries back."

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A notable comment about the 1969 Cambodia Bombing

Martinshushu,

Henry Kissinger gave the order for this mission stating essentially:
"Use anything that flies to bomb anything that moves"

Clearly, that is advocating genocide.

What if Slobodan Milosevic had said the same thing during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia?
Why was Kissinger not prosecuted for war-crimes?

Joey King

Member, National Board of Directors

Veterans for Peace

www.veteransforpeace.org