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Merrick
Merrick
2148 posts

who pulls the strings
Jan 23, 2008, 21:49
Deepinder Cheema wrote:
Tell me, what will Obama do if he gets elected. Will he make a difference, what is his manifesto, has he got one, who is paying the bills?


this is the key thing.

for all people talking about him benig such a hope (read: 'he's black'), or Clinton being such a hope (read:'she's a woman'), it doesn't matter.

It's not about the colour of skin or the genitals at the top of your legs, but whose interests you serve.

The leader is, at best, a figurehead. They work hard to come over well to people who feel themselves to be a good judge of character. But even if they were being genuinely likeable people, it makes no odds. Nobody gets elected to the American presidency without hundreds of millions of dollars donated to them. What do the donors think they're buying?

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http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=892

Back in 1992, Al Gore wrote a superb book called ‘Earth in the Balance’ that laid out the challenge of climate chaos better than anyone else at the time. It was eerily prescient. He warned that global warming was making hurricanes far more intense, threatening American cities like New Orleans. He warned that Siberia’s peat bogs would melt, burping massive amounts of their stored greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. He warned that famine would increase across sub-Saharan Africa as traditional rainfall patterns were disrupted...

So why did they move in the opposite direction? The temptation for journalists is to blame it on personal moral failure. Clinton and Gore are hypocrites, liars, the old story...

The reality is less glib and more disturbing. Every American politician has to pay for their massive election campaigns, and there is one group waiting with open wallets and a few polite requests – the fossil fuel industry. Democrat or Republican, if you don’t lick the boots of the oil and gas companies, you never get the key to the White House. This legalised bribery is often so naked that many corporations give to both parties, to ensure whoever wins is in their debt. Anybody with environmental leanings is quickly tamed – 28 gas and oil companies gave to Al Gore’s election campaign, from BP Amoco to Enron, from Exxon to Chevron. Corporations like Occidental Petroleum paid for the Clinton-Gore inauguration, and stumped up an extra £50,000 after Gore personally made a begging call to their CEO.

These companies own the American political process

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and what did this man - who knew as well as anyone what climate change meant - actually do in power? This man who we now fete as the one who can turn around America's hobbling of the global response to climate change and failure to ratify Kyoto?

The Kyoto process wasn't always opposed by America. During the talks they actively participated, forcing dilution after dilution from other nations desperate to keep the Americans on board. Then, when it had gotten as weak as possible, they walked out. What a strategy.

Who led that fossil-headed American delegation? Vice President Al Gore.

for more, check this http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/12/17/hurray-were-going-backwards/

Clinton, Obama, they're both freemarketeers committed to the fossil fuel industries and runaway climate change because those things make more profit for corporate power than acting responsibly.

And they know it.
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