Author Archives: QZZNannette

Let’s Be Careful With the "White Supremacy" Label

by QZZNannette Posted on November 26, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Bernie Sanders has taken some heat recently for his remarks to a woman who said she hoped to someday become the second Latina senator and asked him for some tips about getting into politics. His reply, essentially, was that being Latina wasn’t enough. She also needed to “stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.” Nancy LeTourneau was pretty critical of Sanders’ answer:

It is true that in order to end racism and sexism we have to begin by giving women and people of color a seat at the table. But that accomplishes very little unless/until we listen to them and find a way to work with them in coalition. To the extent that Sanders wants to avoid doing that in order to foster division within the Democratic Party, he is merely defending white male supremacy.

I’m not suggesting that the senator’s agenda is necessarily white male supremacy.

I was listening in on a listserv conversation the other day, and someone asked how and when it became fashionable to use the term “white supremacy” as a substitute for ordinary racism. Good question. I don’t know the answer, but my guess is that it started with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who began using it frequently a little while ago. Anyone have a better idea?

For what it’s worth, this is a terrible fad. With the exception of actual neo-Nazis and a few others, there isn’t anyone in America who’s trying to promote the idea that whites are inherently superior to blacks or Latinos. Conversely, there are loads of Americans who display signs of overt racism—or unconscious bias or racial insensitivity or resentment over loss of status—in varying degrees.

This isn’t just pedantic. It matters. It’s bad enough that liberals toss around charges of racism with more abandon than we should, but it’s far worse if we start calling every sign of racial animus—big or small, accidental or deliberate—white supremacy. I can hardly imagine a better way of proving to the non-liberal community that we’re all a bunch of out-of-touch nutbars who are going to label everyone and everything we don’t like as racist.

Petty theft is not the same as robbing a bank. A lewd comment is not the same as rape. A possible lack of sensitivity is not a sign of latent support for apartheid. Bernie Sanders is not a white male supremacist.

Likewise, using a faddish term is not a sign of wokeness, no matter who started it. Let’s keep calling out real racism whenever we need to, but let’s save “white supremacy” for the people and institutions that really deserve it.1

1For example, there’s the faction of the alt-right that really is dedicated to white supremacism. You can read all about them here, here, and here.

POSTSCRIPT: I may be wrong about this, but I gather that some people use “white supremacy” because they want to avoid the R word as too antagonistic. Needless to say, this is also a bad idea. If something is racist, call it racist. If it’s not, don’t call it that.

Original article:  

Let’s Be Careful With the "White Supremacy" Label

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Let’s Be Careful With the "White Supremacy" Label

Bribes, Favors, and a Billion-Dollar Yacht: Inside the Crazy World of the Men Who Do Oil Companies’ Dirty Work

by QZZNannette Posted on May 14, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When big oil companies like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron set their sights on a prime new oil reserve in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East, the first phone call they make usually isn’t to the government office putting it up for sale. Instead, they ring up one of their contacts in a small, elite group of so-called “fixers,” a shady cabal of a few dozen well-connected billionaires who hold the strings on the market for the world’s most valuable commodity. The fixer gets a fat fee and a straightforward assignment: Do whatever you need to do to get us those oil rights.

Unlike the US, where oil rights are held by individual property owners and leased to mining companies, in most developing nations oil rights are held by the government, and getting them means having a personal relationship with the right ministers—and knowing how to grease their palms. Since the mid-1900s, oil companies have relied on fixers to do their dirty work, crisscrossing the globe with a Rolodex stacked with the calling cards of corrupt heads of state. In the end, we get cheap oil, oil companies get plausible deniability, and the leaders of some of the world’s most oppressive regimes get astronomically rich.

Ken Silverstein is a veteran journalist who has spent the last several years finagling his way into the traditionally hyper-reclusive world of oil fixers, gaining unprecedented access to many key players and amassing a portfolio of outrageous tales of bribery, exploitation, and obscene wealth. His book, The Secret World of Oil, hit shelves yesterday, and I spoke to him about how US companies continue to skirt anti-bribery laws in the high-stakes pursuit of oil.

Climate Desk: The oil companies that are using fixers, these are the companies that people are familiar with—Exxon, Chevron?

Ken Silverstein: In all the big oil companies, it would be rare for them never to use fixers in their deals. The bigger firms like Exxon have a lot of power and local knowledge and may handle this sort of thing on their own. But even Exxon, for part of the negotiations, is going to rely on a fixer. One of the reasons is that it’s a dicey game. It’s not always flat-out bribery, although in the old days it really was. The old model was that let’s say you were a company and you wanted a concession in Nigeria. Well, you’d go to Fixer A and give Fixer A, say, a million dollars, and Fixer A would go to his friends in the Nigerian government and wire half a million dollars into a few Swiss bank accounts—or just, you know, a suitcase full of cash. That was it. Fixer A kept his half million, the government officials had their half million, and the company got its oil concession. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward.

Well, that’s changed a lot, partly because the US and Europe have outlawed bribery. So it’s gotten dicier. There’s a senior Halliburton official who’s currently in jail, who was implicated in a massive bribery scandal that helped Halliburton win a multimillion dollar stake in Nigeria. Typically, though, the companies want one or two degrees of separation—you’re not going to have your senior vice president meeting with a government official who you need to pay off. You want an intermediary, a fixer who can handle that, who, if anything goes wrong, you can disown all knowledge of and the fixer gets dumped and blamed.

Ken Silverstein Courtesy Verso Books

CD: Is any of this legal, what the fixers are doing? It seems like it’s in a strange grey area.

KS: It’s illegal if you get caught. But you’d rarely be so stupid now as to wire money into an official’s account, you don’t do it that way. Here’s a real example from what Exxon did in Equatorial Guinea, one of the world’s worst dictatorships sitting on untold amounts of oil. In some places where there is no corruption, there’s closed-door bidding and whoever makes the best offer wins. In a place like Equatorial Guinea that’s not the way it works. It’s whoever figures out how to give the president and his inner circle the most money, gets the contract. And sometimes it may be flat-out bribes, but Exxon doesn’t want to do that. What did Exxon do? They wanted land to build their compound, and to develop their project. And where did they buy the land? “Well, the president owns some land and it would be perfect for us.” And so they just overpaid by an enormous amount of money, and it’s clearly just putting money in the president’s pocket.

CD: Here, in Texas or North Dakota or wherever, you have a private landowner who owns the mineral rights and can sell them to whoever they want. But in the countries you’re talking about oil is owned to start with by the government. Does that lend the process to the kind of corruption you’re talking about?

KS: It’s a very highly politicized process to get access to that oil, so yes it absolutely does lend itself to corruption. And it also lends itself to reinforcing the power of these regimes that frequently are dictatorships. I want to cite Ed Chow, a former Chevron executive. He said: “In Texas I can convince landowners to lease me their mineral rights. They get a royalty check every month and the companies leave a small footprint on their land. What’s not to love? There’s no equivalent in places like Nigeria or Angola or Kazakhstan. You get the land, but you don’t provide a lot of jobs, you may be destroying the environment, and most of the profit goes to international capital. The companies don’t have a strong case to sell to local communities, so they come to not only accept highly centralized government, but to crave it. A strongman president can make all the necessary decisions. It’s a lot easier to win support from the top than to build it from the bottom.”

That’s precisely the environment where fixers thrive.

Continue Reading »

Originally posted here:  

Bribes, Favors, and a Billion-Dollar Yacht: Inside the Crazy World of the Men Who Do Oil Companies’ Dirty Work

Posted in alo, Anchor, Anker, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bribes, Favors, and a Billion-Dollar Yacht: Inside the Crazy World of the Men Who Do Oil Companies’ Dirty Work

Fort Hood Shooter Ivan Lopez: A Familiar Profile

by QZZNannette Posted on April 3, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Details are still emerging as to exactly how and why Army Specialist Ivan Lopez shot 3 people to death and injured 16 others in a rampage on Wednesday, but we already know enough to be certain about one thing: We’ve seen this grim story before, and not just literally at Fort Hood, the site of a previous bloodbath in 2009. As the data from our in-depth investigation of mass shootings in America shows, Lopez fits a familiar profile for perpetrators of this type of crime. Here’s how his background and actions echo those of many mass shooters we analyzed from 67 cases over the past three decades:

Mental health problems
Lopez had serious mental health issues: He served in Iraq in 2011 and was being treated for anxiety and depression, and he was under evaluation for post-traumatic stress disorder at the time of the attack. The majority of the mass shooters we studied had mental health problems—and at least 38 of them displayed signs of it prior to the killings. (Mental health problems among Iraq and Afghanistan vets are a major problem in and of itself.)

Guns obtained legally
Lopez reportedly purchased the gun he used, passing a background check, in nearby Killeen, Texas. The overwhelming majority of mass shooters in the scores of cases through 2012 obtained their weapons legally—nearly 80 percent of them. And the mass shooters in all five of the additional cases last year, from Santa Monica to the Washington Navy Yard, also got their guns legally.

Semi-automatic handguns
Lopez used a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson in the attack. Semi-automatic handguns are the weapon of choice for most mass shooters. It remains unclear how many shots Lopez fired or what type of ammunition device he used, but given his military background and the casualty count, it’s more likely than not that he used a high-capacity magazine.

Age and gender of killers
As our study showed, the vast majority of mass shooters were men, ranging from young adult to middle-aged. Their average age was 35. Lopez was 34.

Murder-suicide cases
Just as Lopez did on Wednesday at Fort Hood, killers in 36 past cases ended their attacks by shooting themselves to death. Seven others died in police shootouts they had little hope of surviving, a.k.a. “suicide by cop.” Lopez’s case appears to be at the intersection of these factors: He shot himself in the head when confronted by a military police officer. (All five of the mass shooters in 2013 were shot and killed by law enforcement officers responding to the attacks.)

the haunting repeat of such gun violence at Fort Hood means that in the days ahead there will be intense scrutiny on security protocols at the sprawling military site, including what has or hasn’t changed since 2009. But in terms of getting a handle on the perpetrator and the crime, investigators already have a lot to go on from scores of cases all over the country.

For much more of our reporting on mass shootings, gun violence and gun laws, see our full special reports: America Under the Gun and Newtown: One Year After.

Original link:  

Fort Hood Shooter Ivan Lopez: A Familiar Profile

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fort Hood Shooter Ivan Lopez: A Familiar Profile