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Seems as if Al Gore's part-documentary part-campaign flick is reaching quite a few people this summer. Environmentalists and skeptics alike. Perhaps the ol’ VP is repenting for some of the dirty deeds he supported during his compliant years in Washington.

One of the more egregious of Gore’s follies while serving his country came about in the late 1990s when the Clinton administration was debating whether or not to back the largest international environmental pact in history, the Kyoto Protocol. Mr. Gore, the big “enviro”, despite common belief, was the one most responsible for Clinton’s derailment of the landmark accord.

Seems contradictory, I know. Here’s the most popular environmentalist speaking out about the fact the Earth is rapidly warming, indeed pointing out that humans are at least partially to blame, yet when he had the power to do something significant at the governmental level, he refused to act. In fact Gore’s culpability in enviro degradation goes well beyond his family’s past ownership in Occidental Petroleum, where they owned over a quarter of a million dollars in the company while Gore sought the presidency in 2000.

It was the winter of 1997 when Vice President Gore, who was in direct control of Clinton’s environmental policies, flew to Japan to address the international delegation about the US’s position on the Kyoto Protocol. Gore and Clinton had just come off an election victory and it was time to pay back the big oil and gas companies who had handed over $6 million to their party the year prior.

Gore warmed up his attentive audience by affirming that Clinton and the US public believed the Earth was in peril and that all global citizens must act swiftly to save it. But in typical Gore doublespeak, he declared the United States would not support the agreement because it did not ask enough of developing nations, even though the US is the leading polluter in the world.

As Gore put it then, "Signing the Protocol, while an important step forward, imposes no obligations on the United States. The Protocol becomes binding only with the advice and consent of the US Senate.”

Gore soon returned to Washington only to reiterate his message that the Clinton administration would not put the Kyoto Protocol before the Senate. "As we have said before, we will not submit the Protocol for ratification without the meaningful participation of key developing countries in efforts to address climate change,” he said.

It was at that moment when Clinton and Gore ruined any chances of the Kyoto Protocol being honestly debated in Washington. Later in November of 1998 Gore "symbolically" signed the accord, likely to appease his environmental pals like the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope, a close friend of Al’s.

But the Vice President’s tepid gesture couldn't have carried less weight. The Clinton administration, with Gore's guidance, refused to allow the Republican controlled Senate to decide on the Kyoto Protocol for themselves. Gore advised Clinton not to send the Protocol to the Senate to be ratified. The blame could have burdened the Republican Party, not the Democrats and the Clinton administration. But instead the buck stopped with Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Predictably, President Bush followed their lead.

And there you have it. It was Mr. Global Warming himself who first tried to kill off the Kyoto Protocol.

--Joshua Frank

Did you ever expect otherwise? - JF

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (CA) and House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (MD) (7/12/06):

"The House Democratic leadership strongly condemns the seizure of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah terrorists operating from Lebanon... Countries with influence over Hezbollah, particularly Syria and Iran, must move quickly to bring about the return of the soldiers and the end of rocket attacks on Israeli civilians from Hezbollah positions in Lebanon. The Palestinian Authority, and countries with influence over Hamas, must take similar action in Gaza.
                  
"Those who finance, direct, or otherwise support acts like these need to understand that they have produced an extremely dangerous situation and that they are responsible for the consequences.  Israel has an inherent right to defend itself, and the United States supports our ally."
                  
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (NV) (7/12/06):
                  
"Today's attacks by Hezbollah in Israeli territory were disgraceful and unwarranted acts of violence by a terrorist organization.  Hezbollah must release the captured Israeli soldiers immediately.  Hezbollah must be  dismantled, and all nations have an obligation to cease any and all assistance to this terrorist organization. Israel has a right to live in peace and security, and the United States will stand by our ally in this difficult time."
                  
U.S. Representative Gary Ackerman (NY), Ranking Democrat of the House of Representatives International Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia  (7/12/06):
                  
"If the world is serious about peace in the Middle East, then Tehran and Damascus need to be held accountable for feeding, fostering, and occasionally unleashing, these rabid, blood-spattered killers.  The money, weapons and political support Hezbollah and Hamas receive from Iran and Syria are not uncontrollable or natural phenomena and the international community must demand that they stop. Cross-border attacks on Israel should result in tough  international sanctions on Syria and Iran, and the UN Security Council should immediately pursue this option...
                  
"Israel has an absolute right to defend itself from this aggression and the Israeli Defense Forces has shown it knows how to do this."
                  
U.S. Representative Alcee Hastings (FL), Co-Chair, House of Representatives Democratic Working Group on Israel (7/12/06):
                  
"Hezbollah's actions against Israel are unconsciousable.  Instead of working towards peace, Hezbollah has chosen to perpetuate the violence. Terrorist attacks such as these are cowardly and resolve nothing... Let us not be misled into believing these attacks arise from a single source.  The terrorist organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas, are unquestionably sponsored and guided by the Iranian and Syrian governments...  The Syrian and Iranian governments should be condemned along with the terrorist groups they harbor.
                  
"Israel must have the right to defend herself. Like the United States and other sovereign nations, Israel is justified in reestablishing its deterrent posture."
                  
U.S. Representative Gene Green (TX), Co-Chair, House of Representatives Democratic Working Group on Israel (7/13/06):
                  
"Attempts by Hezbollah to open a second front after the kidnapping from Gaza are an attack on Israel's sovereignty.  Hezbollah's actions require Israel to defend itself, and Israel's actions to take out terrorist camps along its borders to prevent this from happening again are warranted and justified.
                  
"Israel has had to defend itself from terrorist organizations that have felt it shouldn't exist throughout its history, and must continue to do so following these killings and kidnappings to protect its people and free the soldiers taken by the terrorist group Hezbollah."
                  
U.S. Representative Robert Wexler (FL), Ranking Democrat of the House of Representatives International Relations Subcommittee on Europe and Emerging Threats (7/12/06):
                  
"I strongly condemn the horrific attack on Israel's northern border carried-out by Hezbollah terrorists based in Southern Lebanon. The murder and abduction of Israelisoldiers - in conjunction with the infiltration of Israeli military bases and rocket attacks on Northern Israel - are inexcusable acts of aggression that further destabilize the Middle East.
                  
"These provocations stand in stark violation of international law, and I strongly support Israel's unequivocal right to self-defense."

--Joshua Frank

This article will be published in the forthcoming print edition of Left Turn. I think it does a fantastic job of clearing up the distorted view of Hizbullah that the media has been propagating for so long here in the US, especially given Israel's latest actions. - JF

God has always had little mercy to spare the poor Shia Muslims of Lebanon. They suffered centuries of seamless persecution often accompanied by extreme poverty, cast away far from the religious centers of Shi’ism in Iraq and Iran. With the exception of the 10th Century when sympathetic dynasties ruled the region, Lebanon’s Shia existed on the margins of history, making an appearance only as victims. So much so that Shi’ism itself became in practice a religion of the dispossessed and disinherited, of the denial and longing for justice. A small and vulnerable minority living in a sea of Sunnis, their religious leaders long advocated a politics of “quietism,” a state best described as either outright submission to authority however unjust or complete withdrawal from the political sphere. A politics of keep your head low, don’t rock the boat, and one day the long-awaited mahdi will return to make things right.

It's stories like this that really piss you off.  The NY Times is actively attacking the video evidence that AMLO has of massive ballot-stuffing the rural counties of Mexico.  It's increasingly apparent that the ruling class in the United States, via their proxies at the Times, have no interest in a recount or having anyone but Calderon as president.  If you're interested in the real story, the journalists at Narconews have provided it here.

--Peter LaVenia

Priti and Stan Cox's yard in Salina, Kansas is featured in this article. Stan is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. Indeed, there is a fine story by Stan in yesterday's online edition of CP about the Critical Art Ensemble's latest play, Marching Plague. The print edition in the Times contains a photo of Stan and Priti and their yard, though Priti says "they got it all wrong." Of course, they did. It's the NYT!

--Jeffrey St. Clair

I think we may all have theories as to why DailyKos's ratings are down (in an election year at that). Mine is that DK pretty much sucks. Their numbers will go up again in 2008, as DKers bounce back to silly blogs like this one to make some change in the presidential race. They won't get out on the streets and do it, you can bet on that.

--Joshua Frank

Apparently the League of Conservation Voters here in New York is going to announce today whether or not they will sponsor a debate between Democratic candidates for US Senate, Hillary Clinton and Jonathan Tasini. The League, of course, will most likely not be including Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins, or any other third party bid against Hill for that matter. We'll keep you posted. This would be great news for the Tasini camp.

--Joshua Frank

A dire situation worsens. Two Israeli soldiers kidnapped.

--Joshua Frank

Seems as if Al Gore's movie is reaching a lot of Americans these days. Perhaps the old VP is finally repenting. Do you remember what Gore did for the Kyoto Protocol? Well, he didn't do much. First he went to Japan and told the Kyoto delegation the US would not ratify the accord until developing countries were included in its language. At that point Gore essentially derailed the Protocol. He "symbolically" signed on later, but his tepid gesture couldn't have carried less weight. The Clinton administration, with Gore's trusty guidance, never allowed the Senate to ratify it. And Bush followed Gore's lead.

And there you have it. Mr. Global Warming himself killed the Kyoto Protocol.

--Joshua Frank

Before Evo Morales won a landslide victory in the Bolivian presidential election on December 18, 2005, one of his key campaign promises was to organize a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. The election for representatives to that assembly took place on Sunday, July 2nd in tandem with a referendum on autonomy for all provinces. The election, and its results, revealed significant aspects of the relationship between the Morales administration and the social movements that helped put him in power.

For years, Bolivian social movements have been demanding that a constituent assembly be organized to rewrite the constitution in part to create a more egalitarian society. The constituent assembly which will take place in Sucre on August 6th was supposed to be by and for the people and was presented that way throughout the presidential election. As the July 2nd Election Day approached, more criticisms emerged about the organization of the race and the assembly itself. Though the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS, the party of Evo Morales) had support in its policies and candidates for the assembly, many people in Bolivia said the way in which the elections and assembly was organized excluded the country's social movements. As Jim Shultz in Cochabamba wrote on the Democracy Center's website, in order to qualify to run a candidate in the election, "Unions, indigenous groups, and other social movements had to hit the streets and gather 15,000 signatures each - complete with fingerprints and identification card numbers - in a few weeks.

Bad news for wine lovers.

--Joshua Frank

Iraq's Civil War Turns Even More Violent

It was just last month when President Bush assured the world that the situation in Iraq was dramatically improving. Sectarian tensions were going to relax as a result of Zarqawi’s overly publicized death. As Bush put it bluntly, the death of Zarqawi served as “an opportunity for Iraq's new government to turn the tide in this struggle." But it’s becoming painfully evident that Zarqawi, like Saddam’s illusive WMDs, was just another creation of the US propaganda machine.

There were other times the White House attempted to paint the chaos in Iraq in a positive light. Remember when US armed forces annihilated Saddam’s wretched sons Oday and Qusay? Or how about when they captured Saddam and promised things were starting to look up? At best these token events only served as minor diversions for most of the US media, not unlike the alleged thwarting of a terrorist attack on the Holland Tunnel in New York late last week.

Over the weekend, Sunni and Shi’ite militias were said to have been responsible for the deaths of more than 60 Iraqi civilians while injuring dozens more. Just another tranquil weekend in the streets of Baghdad. Rarely do we hear reports of what’s going on outside the Green Zone, where the ethnically driven civil war is believed to be even worse.

On June 6, shortly before Zarqawi’s death, the infamous blogger behind “Baghdad Burning” reported; “There’s an ethnic cleansing in progress and it’s impossible to deny. People are being killed according to their ID card ... We hear about Shia being killed in the ‘Sunni triangle’ and corpses of Sunnis named ‘Omar’ (a Sunni name) arriving by the dozen at the Baghdad morgue. I never thought I’d actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn’t seek you out because you’re Sunni or Shia.”

Unfortunately, political opposition to the war is weak here in the United States. Washington supports an ongoing occupation, if it can even be called such a thing these days. Dissent is all but dead in DC, where candidates so-often flex their foreign policy muscle in fear that they’ll be looked at as soft on terror.

But how could anyone reasonably argue that things were worse with Saddam at the helm? Iraq under US control is far more violent and malicious. Not that the US has any sort of legitimate control over the large country. In fact, the US is now just one of many armed militias in Iraq, truly unable to contain the exponentially increasing sectarian warfare.  Every reservation critics of the war put on the table before the invasion is now coming true. Iraq is unwinnable, and the bloodshed is only being exacerbated by the presence of US military.

No matter how many troops the US and its allies shovel at the ever-growing sectarian flames, the fighting is sure to spread. The US military is only fueling the fire. And if there were ever a reason why the troops should be brought home immediately, this would be it.

--Joshua Frank

Greg Palast latest article is reporting a few interesting things from Mexico:

1.  827,000 people went into the polling booths and didn't cast a vote for president, even though they voted for lower offices.  Most of these were in poorer districts where Lopez Obrador's support is highest.

2.  Calderon's party, the PAN, had illegal access to voter lists provided by the Bush administration's arm, the International Republican Institute (who had them provided by Choicepoint, Inc., the same people who scrubbed Florida's voter lists in 2000 and those in New Mexico in 2004).  Preliminary reports from poorer districts are that scores of people were kept from voting by these voter "caging" lists which the PAN used to challenge their right to vote (the same way Florida Republicans challenged thousands of blacks' right to vote because they had "incorrectly" been marked as felons by Choicepoint's data). 

It's intriguing that the noise from the newsmedia that Lopez Obrador is a "sore loser" conveniently omits the long history of fraud and machine politics in Mexican society, plus the US history of meddling in foreign elections.  This is the same newsmedia that backed the US candidate in the Ukrainian "Orange Revolution" (even though the US meddled in that election as well, though Russia was doing the same thing for the other side) without calling him anything close to a crybaby.  If anything, doing two different case studies on the US media's coverage of the Ukrainian and Mexican elections would probably be a good dissertation topic for an examination of the Chomskyian thesis on the media (and how correct it is).

--Peter LaVenia

Here's your song of the week, by Sleater-Kinney.

--Joshua Frank

Calderon is holding onto a 243,000 vote lead according to the latest results, but over 827,000 ballots Mexican ballots exist "without a mark for president".  The idea that almost a million people went to the polls in a closely contested election and failed to mark a choice for president hard to swallow for you too?  Well, we're going to see the mettle of the Mexican left quite soon; I hope that the radical left in Mexico as represented by the Zapatistas et al joins the protests over an election that's increasingly smelling like fraud even as the international newsmedia try to push the neo-con's candidate on the Mexican public.

--Peter LaVenia