Timeline of an anonymous journey

It doesn't take long or a lot of work to find dots and snippets of the past that give us glimpses of what was to come. This page contains links gathered by anonymous people over four years (crowdsourced as it were) on "things" -told and leaked stories, whistle spit (and working theories) for further investigation into and analysis of "things", for finding (counter) moves healthy for ourselves, life, and others.

Merchants of Death

September 4, 1934 "Merchants of Death": On a hot Tuesday morning following Labor Day in 1934, several hundred people crowded into the Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building to witness the opening of an investigation that journalists were already calling "historic." Although World War I had been over for 16 years, the inquiry promised to reopen an intense debate about whether the nation should ever have gotten involved in that costly conflict. To lead the seven-member special committee, the Senate’s Democratic majority chose a Republican—42-year-old North Dakota Senator Gerald P. Nye. Typical of western agrarian progressives, Nye energetically opposed U.S. involvement in foreign wars. He promised, "when the Senate investigation is over, we shall see that war and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few.

Who will claim common heritage?

It is 1978 and corporate interests endanger international agreement on deep seabed minerals: Resting undisturbed on the ocean floor, potato-size mineral nodules, "ferro manganese concretions" to the scientists, have become the subject of a unique attempt at international economic cooperation. In 1970, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring all underwater resources, to be the common heritage of mankind. In 1973, the UN Law of the Sea Conference took up the task of establishing an international regime for the exploitation of deep seabed minerals.

But most of the Conference's sessions to date have exhibited a tension common to international negotiations:. the developed countries are protective of their advanced technology and capital resources while the underdeveloped countries are suspicious of the aims and motives of the industrialized states that are alone capable of deep seabed mineral extraction. Watching the proceedings carefully - and not without a hand in the intrigue that has marked the deliberations - are several multinational corporations, members of international consortia ready to begin mining operations beneath the sea.

It's the oil, stupid!

Oil and the outcome of the Iran-Iraq war

An article with excerpts from a report by Thomas McNaugher and William Quandt of the Brookings Institution, published on May 14, 1984 by Cambridge Energy Research Associates. These excerpts appeared in Arab Oil and Gas (Paris), June 1, 1984: The Iran-Iraq war is reaching a critical phase. As a result, there is more of a chance today than ever before that a major change in the war is at hand. This could have both major consequences for the flow of oil in the near term, and broader implications for power and influence in the region over the longer term. Although we are not yet convinced that the Iran-Iraq war threatens a major disruption in the flow of oil, the odds are beginning to change in the direction of greater danger for Western interests -- meaning that the threat to the world oil market could become larger in this new phase. But the gravest threat could come not during the war itself but from the outcome of the war.

Mentioned are three scenarios: Scenario One: Balance of Power; Scenario Two: Iranian Hegemony; Scenario Three: Continuing Attrition and Oil Disruption.

Occidental Petroleum and the U'wa

An ongoing story since 1990: Occidental Petroleum, a U.S. based petroleum company, has had its sights set on the 1.5 billion oil barrels that lie beneath the ground in the Samoré Block (the name for the entire cloudforest region within which the U’wa territory lies) since the early 1990s. The oil company’s history is linked to human rights violations and environmental destruction. Occidental (or “Oxy” as it is commonly referred to) was the parent company of Hooker Chemical, which is the company responsible for the “Love Canal” disaster of the 1940s and 1950s. [...] More recently, Oxy has set up an oil pipeline north of U’wa territory in the Arauca region, which has been responsible for the displacement of many native people and rendered the water in the region too polluted for human consumption.

Oil and the gulf war

In a 1991 article in the Middle East Research and Information Project: The arrangements that will follow the US defeat of Iraq will likely produce a kind of joint “oil dominion” between major consumer countries and a core of oil exporters which will override the interests of the poorer oil importers and exporters alike. At the center of this new alignment will no longer be the “seven sisters” -- the major private companies that dominated the industry before the 1970s -- but what South magazine has dubbed the “four stepsisters” -- Saudi Aramco, PDV, and Exxon and Shell, the two largest private firms. But OPEC will have to confront some serious conflicts within its ranks which may well split the organization. Producers like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela are investing huge amounts of capital to expand their production capacity: Will they be ready to scale back their market share once Iraq and Kuwait resume production? The new world order of oil could bring unprecedented producer-consumer cooperation for the privileged states and companies, and increasingly harder times for the rest.

Defending oil supplies

In 1998, in Fueling Global Warming: Federal Subsidies to Oil in the United States: The United States needs oil. Despite some progress on alternatives, oil continues to fuel our transportation fleet and our military. However, much of the nation’s oil is transported through fairly precarious means. Approximately, 25 percent of our domestic crude flows through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, and about 45 percent of our total petroleum consumption is transported through a limited number of oil tanker channels.

These delivery systems are vulnerable to disruption. Markets react in three primary ways to vulnerable supplies. First, they demand a higher price to reflect the higher risks. Second, they invest in approaches to make the supply less risky. This includes diversification of suppliers, the development of new supplies, the establishment of stockpiles to cover demand if supply is interrupted, and the attempt to reduce the likelihood of supply disruptions. Third, markets develop substitute materials and ways to use the limited supplies more efficiently.

In the oil industry, corporations have invested in diversifying their supply base across countries. However, it has been the United States government, rather than private firms, that has developed the largest stockpiles (such as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, described later in this chapter) and spent billions of dollars in defense costs to reduce the likelihood of supply interruptions and price shocks. Because the government has borne these costs of securing supply, they are not reflected in the current price of oil. Thus, producers and consumers lack important price signals that would encourage investment in substitutes. The government’s costs act as a subsidy to oil. We estimate the costs of defending oil shipments and stockpiling reserves for our base year, 1995. This estimate has two elements: defending oil shipments from the Persian Gulf and the costs of building and maintaining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We also qualitatively discuss oil-related military activities within Alaska. In order for markets to make well-informed decisions between energy types, these costs should be reflected in the price we pay for oil.

And it's not just the oil, stupid!

In the mid 1990’s economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner noticed a funny thing. One would think that countries that were well endowed with oil, gas and mineral wealth would be correspondingly economically well off – but in fact just the reverse seemed to be true. Some peeps have dubbed it “The Resource Curse” alias “Paradox of Plenty”: countries and regions with an abundance of natural resources, specifically point-source non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. This is hypothesized to happen for many different reasons.

Natural resource abundance and economic growth

In November, 1997, in Natural resource abundance and economic growth: One of the surprising features of modern economic growth is that economies abundant in natural resources have tended to grow slower than economies without substantial natural resources. In this paper we show that economies with a high ratio of natural resource exports to GDP in 1970 (the base year) tended to grow slowly during the subsequent 20-year period 1970-1990. This negative relationship holds true even after controlling for many variables found to be important for economic growth by previous authors. We discuss several theories and present additional evidence to understand the source of this negative association.

In an oxfam report from 2001, Extractive sectors and the poor: With this increase in the environmental and social impact of resource extraction, economists and activists in both the North and South are challenging economic models that base development on the extraction of non-renewable natural resources. They point to the fact that many countries in the developing world possess tremendous oil and mineral wealth yet continue to suffer from crushing poverty. For a variety of reasons, these countries simply have not converted their resource wealth into real improvements in the lives of the majority of their citizens.

Despite these failures and the challenges made to the “extractive paradigm,” national governments and international financial institutions such as the World Bank continue to promote these industries for poverty reduction purposes.

Drilling into debt

In Drilling into Debt: An Investigation into the Relationship Between Debt and Oil of July 2005: Countries that produce oil tend to be poorer and less productive economically than they should be, given their supposed blessings. This has been well documented over the last decade. Further research has confirmed that oil export-dependent states tend to suffer from unusually high rates of corruption, authoritarian government, government ineffectiveness, military spending, and civil war.

Coupling these previous efforts with our key findings we see a disturbing picture of a global oil economy that primarily serves the interests of Northern consumers, creditors, and governments, while running counter to the interests of poverty alleviation, development, and a stable climate in the rest of the world.

Glimpses of planned information operations

In 2005 the BBC reports that the US military is planning to win the hearts of young people in the Middle East by publishing a new comic in order to "achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East" and reveals in 2006 US plans to 'fight the net': A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks .

The Raw Story reports in 2007 that CENTCOM sent emails to "bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information" .

More alarming seems to be the article from the Register on wargame simulations: Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale informing us that the US DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and artificial reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda .

2009 is the year the US Air Force releases ‘Counter-Blog’ marching orders to its airmen as part of an Air Force push to "counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the U.S. government and the Air Force" .

It's also the water!

2008, for Love of Water: Salina builds a case against the growing privatization of the world’s dwindling fresh water supply with an unflinching focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel. Interviews with scientists and activists reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while begging the question "Can anyone really own the water?"

Beyond identifying the problem, FLOW also gives viewers a look at the people and institutions providing practical solutions to the water crisis and those developing new technologies, which are fast becoming blueprints for a successful global and economic turnaround.

Natural resources and conflict in Africa

Paul Collier posted November 2009: Why has Africa had so much civil war? In all other regions of the world the incidence of civil war has been on a broadly declining trend over the past thirty years: but in Africa the long term trend has been upwards. Of course, every civil war has its ‘story’ – the personalities, the social cleavages, the triggering events, the inflammatory discourse, the atrocities. But is there anything more? Are there structural conditions – social, political or economic – which make a country prone to civil war? Might it be that the same inflammatory politician, playing on the same social cleavages, and with the same triggering events, might ‘cause’ war under one set of conditions and merely be an ugly irritant in another?

[...] Natural resources generate what economists term ‘rents’ – meaning profits that are much higher than the minimum level needed to keep the activity going. The trouble from natural resources stems from these rents. There are six routes by which natural resource rents increase the risk of violent conflict; four relate to political economy and two are straight economics. Let’s start with the political economy. The most obvious route is that natural resource rents are a ‘honey pot’. Politics comes to be about the contest for control of these revenues. This produces a politics of corruption – aided and abetted by foreign corporate behavior – and sometimes directly a politics of violence.

Libya is "freed"

The tension was tangible through linguistic patterns in the IRC channels of the anonymous hives in 2011. An anonymous operation was starting up . Photos and messages kept appearing on atrocities commited by Ghadafi. Do-gooders jumped in, farts saw an opportunity for leadership. But all was not what it seemed as we'd learn later. Human rights investigations reported NATO bombing the Great Man-Made River , RT reported on the plundering of Libya by Goldman Sachs and two weeks later again, with the numbers . O aye, and many more lies behind the West's war on Libya appeared . It is not as if the anonymous operation made any real difference, but still the old adage goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice ...

Spin and Occupy Wallstreet

Also in 2011, Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and a US expert on crafting the perfect political message, said, "I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death. They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism." Next Luntz offered tips on how Republicans could discuss the grievances of the Occupiers, and help the governors better handle all these new questions from constituents about "income inequality" and "paying your fair share." Yahoo News sat in on the session, and counted 10 do’s and don’ts from Luntz covering how Republicans should fight back by changing the way they discuss the movement . And young turks followed up on that .

The entire planet is for sale!?!

Food crisis and the global land grab: Planet for sale

In 2011 the documentary Food crisis and the global land grab: Planet for Sale appears: In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, investors, leaders from around the world, and globalist bankers are buying up farmland at an alarming rate. In recent years, more than 80 million hectares of land have changed hands to investors with support from their respective governments that wish to guarantee the food security of their countries, or financial players in search of profitable investments, resulting in a "land rush" to snap up the best land in poor countries. Countries that have experienced food riots or resorted to foreign aid to feed their people …

Deep sea mining

2011, Catalyst, on possibly destroying of what could be the roots of life: Most volcanic activity happens not on land, but kilometres down in the deep ocean. Geological research has revealed that underwater volcanoes, or hydrothermal vents, are rich in metals like copper, zinc, silver and gold at concentrations that make them commercially attractive to miners. But, they are also colonised by exotic life-forms and scientists believe the vents may have been the location where life originated. Mark Horstman takes a look at a mining project that is set to commence operations in the deep waters off Papua New Guinea.

The price of steel

The International Network for Economic, Social & Cultural Rights reports in June of 2013: The Price of Steel: Human Rights and Forced Evictions in the POSCO-India Project documents the human rights abuses being carried out to facilitate the establishment of the POSCO-India project, and the associated illegal seizures of land which threaten to forcibly displace as many as 22,000 people in India’s eastern state of Odisha. The report, produced by ESCR-Net and the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) at NYU School of Law, calls for a suspension of the POSCO-India project and a halt to the human rights abuses.

Canada to claim north pole as its own

UN submission will seek to redefine Canada's continental shelf to capture more Arctic oil and gas resources: Countries including the US and Russia are increasingly looking to the Arctic as a source of natural resources and shipping lanes. The US Geological Survey says the region contains 30% of the world's undiscovered natural gas and 15% of oil. If Canada's claim is accepted by the UN commission it would dramatically grow its share. Countries must submit proposals to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to request an extension of their nautical borders. Currently, under international law, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the US – the five countries with territories near the Arctic Circle – are allotted 200 nautical miles from their northern coasts. Under the UN convention on the law of the sea, exclusive claims can be vastly expanded for Arctic nations that prove that their part of the continental shelf extends beyond that zone.

Who Owns the Arctic? An interactive map online showing Territorial claims of countries in the Arctic.

Several countries, along with corporations like ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, are preparing to exploit the region’s enormous oil and natural gas reserves. New shipping routes will compete with the Panama and Suez Canals. Vast fisheries are being opened to commercial harvesting, without regulation. Coastal areas that are home to indigenous communities are eroding into the sea. China and the European Union are among non-Arctic governments rushing to assert their interests in the region. Some states have increased military personnel and equipment there.

Rise of fascism in Europe

Banning golden dawn

In September of 2013 there was talk of banning Golden Dawn . This target could not have been chosen better if authorities wanted to introduce people to banning and proactive arrests becoming "normal" in Greece and Europe.

Foreclosing the future?

Examining 20 years of the World Bank's environmental performance

Bruce Rich examines 20 years of the World Bank's environmental performance in 2013: The World Bank Group has a unique wealth of experience that could help build governance at the local, national, and international levels, if only the Bank would learn from its experience rather than flee from it. In the late 1990s an internal review of the Bank’s operations described the Bank’s underlying problem, which continues to this day, as unfounded 'institutional optimism' based on pervasive 'institutional amnesia.' "The lessons from past experience are well known," the Bank’s (now defunct) Quality Assurance Group concluded, "yet they are generally ignored in the design of new operations."

Earlier, in 2011, he wrote Foreclosing the Future: The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction.

And the story isn't over yet

With the challenges that humans now face in climate change, resource depletion, soil degradation, water scarcity and myriad other issues impinging on human survival--all of which have their origins in excessive energy use--we may find that the cooperative and abstemious strains within us may be called to the fore. Or we may find that these problems simply lead to a Hobbesian war of all against all.

The french african connection

It is 2014, and Al Jazeera publishes a three-part series telling the story of 'France Afrique': a brutal and nefarious tale of corruption, massacres, dictators supported and progressive leaders murdered, weapon-smuggling, cloak-and-dagger secret services, and spectacular military operations: The first story reveals the lengths the former colonial power has gone to – from coups and assassinations to rigged elections and embezzlement – in order to satisfy its thirst for energy; The second episode reveals France's ongoing mission to secure access to oil and maintain a firm grip over its former colonies; and the third story outlines France's gradual loss of power in its former colonies - some called it reverse colonisation; others called it independence.

Call for a moratorium on seabed mining

In 2014, NGOs from Australia, Canada and India call for an international moratorium on deep seabed mining in light of the International Seabed Authority’s (ISA) issuing of 7 exploration licences for deep seabed mining in international waters.