FJS: What sort of ecological and cultural damage has the war caused thus far?
DJ: Iraq has been devastated. In a report earlier this week, scientists showed us that so much depleted uranium and other weapons deployed in Fallujah has created a cancer rate higher than what exists in Hiroshima.
If you look at what was done during the first Gulf War in Basra, all the way up to Baghdad recently, it's been total devastation. And now look at Fallujah. It's a town that's unlivable. If I was living there and had a family and had means to leave living there, I would've left, no hesitation. And that can be said about much of Iraq.
FJS: It's been said that the money used to deploy 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan ($59 billion the House OK'd recently") is enough to invest in agricultural reconstruction, something that would fare better for their economy moreso than militarization and minerals exploitation" what gives?
DJ: Again, when we look at massive amounts of money being dumped into the occupation, one of the reasons it's so expensive is due to privatization, which is in accordance with the influx of corporate interests in the region. Private mercenaries are being paid over $1000 per day, of taxpayer's money mind you and that's much more expensive than using the military. Combat pay is maybe 100-bucks-a-day, maybe that. But that's the whole point: to maximize the profits of companies that make money on war. With regard to the Iraq War, Halliburton, in the first 2-3 years, was posting records of profits regularly. And still right now there are at least 600 Western companies with contracts allowed to operate in Iraq, and that's what it's all about the corporate bottom line. And that's how it is with the war in Afghanistan. To paraphrase what someone once said: As long as these companies are profiting from war the way that they are, we'll always have war. The reality of this makes Heller's Catch 22 look like kids stuff.
FJS: OK, let's switch tracks here; you've been reporting on the BP oil spill as of late. Oil disaster response workers are facing some damningly harsh conditions. Care to explain?
DJ: In the context of everything we've discussed so far this is the same war, just a different front. Big corporations are being allowed to do whatever the f*ck they want to do; regulations, safety-measures, emergency response plans all have been given a pass by the government because it's so clear now who's running the whole show not the government but the corporations comprised of the same people running and influencing the government.
The first thing that survivors were asked to do when they were helicoptered out from the BP disaster-site was to sign a release form saying they don't know what happened and that they don't hold BP reliable. BP could care less about the environment and citizens; all they care about is maximizing profits. And that should not come as a surprise. Corporations have personhood, and their charters hold them down to producing profits for their shareholders, which means minimizing all liability, paying out as little as they can and assuring the operating of business-as-usual. As a result the Gulf of Mexico, assuming these relief wells are successful and that's a huge assumption right now, we're looking at 2-3 decades to get the Gulf back to where it was before this spill happened which wasn't really all that good in the first place. The Gulf was trashed even before the spill. There's something like 20,000 abandoned wells, deteriorating, leaking oil, and at least three other well accidents in that region have occurred since the BP accident
FJS: Really?
DJ: Oh yeah, really. Just recently a tugboat hit a well in Barataria Bay. It sent a 20-100-foot plume of oil into the air, created an oil slick more than a mile long; in a bay that is already one of the most heavily affected bays from the BP oil disaster"
FJS: At mandatory HAZWOPER (hazardous waste operations and emergency response) classes, required by OSHA, disaster response workers are being told the work-to-be-done is "harmless" wtf?(!), we all know that's as far from the truth as Neptune is from the Andromeda galaxy" right?
DJ: Right. People in those classes are being told that nothing is harmful. But it makes sense if we understand the logic of corporate charters, they're legally obliged to operate that way, it makes no sense for a corporation with corporate personhood to operate in any other way other than to maximize profit. It's never about doing what's good for the people, for the environment never about the moral thing. Period.
The other problem is that we have a government so bought off, so corrupted, a government that is nothing more than a f**king sock puppet for corporations, and that is why the Gulf is being demolished and why there's no intellectual honesty about real change in the future.
FJS: We're led to believe that all these discrete current events i.e. the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, the BP oil spill, etc & c. are all separate, not interconnected no matter how tenuous. If it's possible, would you like to take a crack at connecting these dots, viz. what is the relationship between the culture of Empire, oil, and the ethnic destruction and ecological degradation happening the world over?
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