This week: • Oil • Stupid • 2006 •
• Cretin • Turkmenistan • Stuff •

 

We end the year 2006 somewhat late (or rather early in 2007), as the internet was broken — through no fault of our own, honest! — and then the little red computer’s motherboard cooked itself. Abnormal service has now been resumed.

 

Somali oil gives Bush the Horn

The War On Terror™(TWOT™) surged across continents last week to occupy the Horn of Africa. Somalis joined Iraq and Afghanistan in the laser sights of the Pentagon with at least 50 dead from a bombing mission under the guise offlushing out al Qaeda.

The US intervention back in the early 1990s was a disaster. The country had been in a civil war since 1991. After the US left in 1992 and the UN in 1995, what was left behind, in the words of the redoubtable Pepe Escobar of Asia Times Online, was “beyond Mad Max — or the Taliban heyday: an absolutely failed state infested with ‘technicals’ — pickups with mounted machine guns and anti-aircraft cannons roaming around a deserted wasteland filled with demented, drugged adrenaline junkies, the mooryaan, shooting, raping and pillaging at random.”

This state of affairs carried on till last year, with the US contravening UN regulations by supplying various warlords with ammo. The rise of the Islamic Courts Union caught the US unawares.

The courts were able to regiment support from all over southern Somalia. The warlords were expelled from Mogadishu. And the courts took over the whole city. For all Western cries of Talibanization, this was not a Taliban state — not even a new Saudi Arabia.

For six months the ICU managed to impose something Somalia had not had a glimpse of during 15 years of bloody, one-million-dead, civil war: order.

The US brands the organization as an ally of al-Qaeda; in reality, it is a nationalist anti-warlord movement that contains many Muslim moderates and has no international ambitions.

Post US-aided Ethiopian forces ousted the ICU, the West wants in. A UN resolution orchestrated by the US and Britain, which hold permanent positions on the Security Council, is being used to justify sending a “peacekeeping force” to Somalia to protect the transitional US-backed government there from the ICU forces.

The Horn has great strategic value, since naval bases there can control the traffic of tankers and other ships through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

However, here’s the absolute key to all this Somalian tragedy: nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-US President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. As ever behind the righteous tones of fighting for democracy and to oust al Qaeda, murky oil tales brim to the surface in the latest expansive chapter of TWOT™.

 

 

Dems suckered by W’s dumb tactic

So here then is the end game. Bush, cornered by a Democrat Congress and Senate, is playing his strongest hand: dumb.

By announcing the dumbest strategy imaginable to succeed in Iraq, Democrats will find themselves in a no-win position. Naturally, they will slaughter it, saying, quite rightly, that Bush’s plan to add troops merely serves to add fuel to the raging fire.

However, henceforth Bush will be able to say that it was the Democrats stymieing his plan that screwed up the future of Iraq.

Likewise, when the next 9/11 happens again, Bush will be able to point the finger at the cheese eating surrender monkeys that are the Democrats. It is politics at its most base level — one where Karl Rove excels.

 

 

2006: dark days for the dark side

It was, for once, a bad year to have ever been a brutal leader. 2006 was bookended by the demise of especially nasty men — Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke in January, ousting him from power. Former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet and Turkmen despot Saparmurat Niyazov both allegedly succumbed to heart attacks in December. In the middle of the year another war criminal — Slobodan Milosevic — met an early death. Another US client turned war criminal, Saddam Hussein, was executed on the muslim day of forgiveness. Other leaders who defied democracy also had tough years, most notably the lame feathered water species occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. For George W. Bush 2006 was the year that neoconservatism faced its greatest test and came out of it as a failed experiment. Not even countless bogus terror plots to keep the public in check like this one in LA or this one in Chicago about so-called terrorists based in Miami could help make the Bush administration popular enough in the polls. The Brits got in the act too with their own terror show at Heathrow. In the wake of losing both houses in the mid-term elections this November, Donald Rumsfeld aka Donnie Darkside resigned — another architect of the Project for the New American Century to fall by the wayside.

With Rumsfeld at the Pentagon helm the five year-old War on Terror™ (TWOT™) officially became the New Cold War this spring when Rummie said that TWOT™ will be a generational conflict like its anti-Communist fight from decades before, one which the Pentagon has taken to calling the Long War.

Though despots might have taken a bit of a beating this year that did’nt stop the military industrial complex enjoying its finest year ever. Global military spending is set to break the previous Cold War record by the end of 2006, according to Oxfam. Global military spending this year is estimated to reach US$1,059bn, outstripping the highest figure reached during the Cold War in real terms, and roughly FIFTEEN times current international aid expenditure.

Yet though the military might be awash with cash unsurprisingly fewer and fewer young Americans are opting to sign up for a career in the military which led to the desperate Pentagon offering three free iTunes downloads for those willing to make contact with the military. Three whole free tunes for signing up, that’s one hell of an enticement. We mused back in issue 23 of the little red email whether one got bonus tracks for killing more A-rabs at the army of one album a day.

Since 911 the fear and outright bigotry shown by WASPs to Muslims has been truly awful. So it was understandable then this Spring when Muslims around the globe protested and showed their anger at having the prophet Mohammed portrayed as being a terrorist by a cartoon in Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. Many complained that this was blasphemous as well extremely discriminatory, and thus just another example of the West portraying all Muslims to be a bunch of crazed, blood-thirsty extremists.

Their anger was set to grow later in the year. Ariel Sharon’s demise did not bring a slow down in Israeli butchery as the new Olmert regime embarked on an ultimately fruitless yet deadly war with Lebanon and the Palestinians.

It was a hugely misleading year for the global economy especially the US one where growth does not look at all sustainable. The rich are getting richer while the income gap grows larger. The Dow Jones supassed 12,000 points in the last month but this was really a false reflection on the perilous state of the economy which like a university student is piled high with huge, never-before-seen debts. The dollar’s perilous decline could be terminal especially as the euro now looks like a genuinely credible alternative.

Almost overnight, suddenly just about everyone accepted that global warming is happening, though NASA scrapped a global warming monitoring project. The whole warming problem could actually be wrapped up for only $161bn to cure today. Indeed by the middle of the year the US had already spent more on the war in the Iraq than what the total costs for every nation would be to adhere to the much maligned Kyoto Protocol. Still global warming isn’t all bad as we learnt a few months ago when we reported on how Greenland was brewing beer using water from melted glaciers.

Elsewhere around the world Africa continued to be torn asunder by war with the latest conflcit outbreak in Somalia likely to be added to the rollcall of international hubris shame led by Darfur, which has become this decade’s Rwanda. In the Western merry go round of Despot, No Despot, Colonel Gaddaffi was brought back in from the cold, which, you understand, had nothing what so ever to do with oil reserves.

The left leaning tendencies of Central and South America were thwarted by US intervention in Mexico where an election was stolen from the left as the mighty Greg Palast highlighted in this video and we wrote about here.

The great raw material rush meant the Artic hotted up as a mineral destination to plunder, prisitne areas of Ecuador were blasted and there was even talk of mining on the moon.

Southeast Asia was amok with its usual coup fare — successful in Thailand where the generals ousted Thaksin Shinawatra, but failed in the Philippines where Gloria Arroyo clung onto power… just.

The epic tale of the Russian spy slaying in London showed both the overarching strength of Putin as well as the extreme diplomatic courtesy all nations pay to Vlad the Impaler these days as his hold on the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas are too important for anyone to curse the man.

But while the little red email continued to ruminate on the key issues of the day we always found a slot for the whackier tales, a personal favourite being the Dr Evil style news of Pentagon trained sharks with lasers — maritime mibs, if you will, that escaped.

2006 was never dull.

 

 

Bangs presents: Cretin of the Year 2006

One of the most time honored traditions in media is the year-end feature listing the superlative (or superlatives) in any particular category.  The task this year has fallen upon me, and the category on which I’ve been asked to expound by my overlords in the Canned Revolution Media Bunker (located deep inside Hong Kong’s Stonecutters Island) is that of Cretin of the Year. 

Occasional dalliances in the Far East aside,  this column has primarily concerned itself with the field of American politics, and it is thus from this field that my candidates are drawn.

Looking back at the American body politic of 2006 provides a panoramic view of scumbaggery in all its myriad forms:

• From the naked hypocrisy of an ethically bankrupt ruling party wrapping itself in the sacrosanct shroud of family values and claiming moral high ground while sheltering pedophiles within their ranks, to the dying spasms of the same party attempting to cling to power through fear, intimidation, and electoral fraud.
• From a Vice President so inured in treachery that deception was his natural strategy for dealing with a simple hunting accident, to the lapdog right wing media that attempted to spin the incident as having been the fault of the shot rather than the shooter, only to be slapped back into line by, of all people, gun nuts.
• From the outright lies told by an American president to continue the war in Iraq, to the fraud and mismanagement committed by those whose financial interests lie in the continuation of a pointless conflict physically destroying one country while simultaneously corroding the collective soul of another.

So you see, even the most cursory glance back at 2006 produces a bumper harvest of scumbags from which to chose, and picking one choice rose from such a vast, stinking field is indeed a difficult task.

Naming a “Cretin of the Year” is a heavy responsibility indeed; after all, how can the collective pains of the world possibly be blamed, even ceremonially, on one individual? This individual would need to be one revered in some circles and despised in others. The individual would need to be someone whose fingerprints could be found on the levers of power, even if the actual power itself were in the hands of an unseen cabal, with the prints put there only for appearance.

Though there are a number of worthy choices for Cretin of the Year, there is only one candidate who justifiably earns the award for being 2006’s ceremonial head scumbag. Thus, without further adieu, I’d like to announce the man upon whose head little red email bestows this dubious annual honor:

Our Cretin of the Year is a man who has proven himself completely divorced from reality. He is an individual whose bumbling clownishness has forever besmirched the reputation of American leaders in general. The damage done to America’s standing in the world by our Cretin of the Year cannot be mended by the mere passage of time. Indeed, this individual’s performance record is so shoddy that his very name will go down in the annals of history as a stain on the reputation of the office of the presidency itself:

Gerald Ford.

Though decades have passed since this buffoon was removed from power, I believe I speak for everyone at little red email when I say that that the damage done to the nation by his decision to pardon Richard Nixon, his political nurturing of both Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, not to mention his pithy ‘Whip Inflation Now’ button campaign, can never truly be… Excuse me.

…What?  No, no, the internet’s been down since the earthquake, I haven’t seen the news in days.

He what!? Shit. This changes everything. Yeah… No, I totally agree, that would be a bad move for us.

This just in. Former President Gerald Ford has passed away at the age of 93. The little red email wishes him a glorious afterlife. May death come swiftly to his enemies!

In unrelated news, for his unparalleled role in the ongoing destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, for overseeing the collapse of the American military, for willfully ignoring impending environmental disaster and for blindly leading his lemming-like constituency over a cliff and into a dark abyss from which return is nigh impossible, the little red email award for Cretin of the Year goes to George W. Bush.

Way to Go, Asshole.

Yahuda Bangs
December 28, 2006.

 

 

Turkmenistan turkey shoot

We are sick puppies here at Canned Revolution. While espousing the rights and virtues of democracy we do have a fascination with twisted regimes and so it was with a hint of regret that we learnt of the death of Turkmenbashi — the self styled all powerful leader of he Central Asian state of Turkmenistan. For all the weirdness, Kim worship and grim fascination that goes with North Korea, Turkmenistan stood out for being perhaps the strangest state on Earth and we are kicking ourselves not to have been there during the inglorious 13 year reign of the now departed Saparmurat Niyazov.

And then once we had got that disappointment out the way we stopped and thought for a second on how yet another key central Asian state had seen a very abrupt change of power. Another vitally important strategic location that has been traditionally anti-US. And Niyazov died in that most questionable of circumstances… a cardiac arrest.

To give you an idea of the importance of gas rich Turkmensistan to the US, the Pentagon’s own maps show Turkmenistan at the very center of CENTCOM’s global resource war; a vital pipeline crossroads.

Turkmenistan has reserves which amount to a whopping 22.5 trillion cubic meters, the second largest supplies in Asia. Nearly all of Turkmenistan’s gas is pumped through Russian energy giant Gazprom’s pipelines. As economist Mikail Delyagin said, “Because of Gazprom’s mismanagement, the European part of Russia cannot exist without Turkmen gas. Control over it is a categorical imperative for Russia’s development during the next 10 years.”

The Bush administration’s objectives in Turkmenistan are the exact opposite of Vladimir Putin’s. The Bush team wants to build a pipeline under the Caspian Sea to pump natural gas reserves to the West through Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and out the Mediterranean corridor or down through Bush’s “new colony” in Afghanistan through Pakistan to the coast.

The administration’s plan would also sabotage Niyazov’s prior commitments to China which has signed contracts for a pipeline to bring natural gas through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. China’s future depends heavily on Turkmenistan. According to Alex Nicholson of the AP, “Niyazov promised to pipe 30 billion cubic meters of gas beginning January 2009. [China] also won an invitation last month to tap the giant Iolotan fields, which the late president declared, contained 7 trillion cubic meters of natural gas — or more than even Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves.”

Seven trillion cubic meters of natural gas heading east to China? That’s reason enough for Bush-inflicted regime change.

The Turkmen unraveling pattern has been seen many times over in Bush’s ‘push for democracy’ from Iraq to Ukraine.

There are reports that a number of prominent ex-patriots will soon be returning to Turkmenistan to take part in the political “free-for-all.” The Turkmen equivalents of Ahmed Chalabi have been briefed and are ready to be parachuted in.

The media are helping Bush too by demanding “free elections”. Turkmenistan has no history of free elections, but the Western press sees an opportunity to serve its constituents by fomenting dramatic political change; change that is designed to install a US-friendly client.

Expect to see the usual indications of US involvement in Turkmenistan in the coming weeks; the CIA-funded public demonstrations, the “democracy promoting” coverage in the media, and the comical parade of expatriates who matriculated in US right-wing think tanks.

If we look back at the “colour coded” revolutions which were orchestrated by American NGOs and American intelligence agencies, we can see that (despite the planning and huge commitment of financial resources) they accomplished nothing of lasting value. Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan are back within Russia’s orbit and Georgia will soon follow. (Or freeze by losing access to Russia’s natural gas)

However, Turkmenistan is the jewel in the crown for Washington — resource rich, it also acts as a wedge between Iran and Russia.

Iran would be surrounded on all sides by the US and cut off from its neighbors to the north by hostile American forces. At the same time, US military bases would be set up even closer to the Iranian capital of Tehran. With aircraft carriers moving into striking position this month, there is reason to believe that Bush is lining up the ducks against Iran for an imminent strike.

 

 

Stuff we like

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

Videos of the year

Exposed: The Carlyle Group
Exposed: The Carlyle Group is a shocking documentary uncovering the subversion of US democracy by a shady group of characters.

Where those cuddly toys come from
How do you say Mickey Mouse in Chinese?

Why We Fight
What are the forces that shape and propel American militarism? The award-winning film, Why We Fight, provides an inside look at the anatomy of the American war machine. Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life?

Taking 911 beyong plain conspiracies
Loose Change Second Edition — in case you had any doubt about who blew up the world trade centre, watch this superb movie.

Exploding myths
911 Revisited is the other outstanding documentary of this burdening genre and shows how explosives were used to bring the Twin Towers down.

The Corporation
Watch The Corporation today, 145 minutes of simply mind-blowing, fact-packed, eye popping information.

Iraq: The Hidden War
Iraq’s suffering is shown almost nightly on the news, but in this film, Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow, shows how much these reports sugar-coat the bloody reality of war. Iraq: The Hidden Story shows footage used by TV news broadcasts, and compares it with the devastatingly powerful uncensored footage of the aftermath of carnage that is becoming a part of daily life in Iraq. The little red email is of the opinion that the population of a country that invades another should in no way be sheltered from seeing exactly what their government’s action entail. As Robert Fisk points out in the film, this is precisely why Western governments will not allow those pictures to be broadcast: if they did, wars would be nigh on impossible.

 

Tunes of the year

David Bowie works his songsmith magic
For those yet to see it click here for the greatest song of 2006, David Bowie’s ode to a little fat man played by Ricky Gervais in the TV series Extras, sidesplittingly funny.

Cows with guns
Look out for the pair of bovine revolutionaries, including Cow Tse Tung.

iRaq
An eminem/Iraq mash up courtesy of GNN.

I am the decider
I am me and Rummy’s he, Iraq is free and we are all together
See the world run when Dick shoots his gun, see how I lie
I’m Lying...
A humourous Beatles rehash

9/11 in da hood
A quick five minute rap rundown on life post 9/11.

 

Download of the year TWOT™ paranoia for Firefox
Need a dose of terror in your browser? Download the US Department of Homeland Insecurity Idiocy Level add-on for Firefox, and you can see the current Idiocy Level in the status bar.

 

Walken runs
A new psycho is preparing to take over from the current one, and this one is far more scary. Vote Christopher Walken 2008. And if the prospect of having the King of New York inside the White House is not an edifying one, then maybe you can vote for General Zod.

 

Cover of the year Newsweek
Newsweek has a different edition for different regions of the world: this particular 2006 edition caught Rob Newman’s eye.

 

How to dance properly
Need dancing lessons? Look no further. You’ll be swinging your pants in no time. Or maybe you wanna learn up on disco, try these memorable folk. Finally, use dance as a form of exercise as Stephen Fry expertly shows you.

 

That Dick Cheney shooting incident
Once Dick had shot his mate, the internet exploded with Cheney shooting gags. Over here, Cheney donned his best black clothes and kept his word to the inmates at California’s maximum security Folsom State Prison. He played a one hour set with his band “Dickie and The Trigger Happy Birdie Killers”.

 

From the conspiracy vaults:
Maggie Thatcher was a conspiracy theorist, The Times newspaper revealed — she authorised a trawl of Loch Ness early in her tenure looking for the mythical Nessie.

 

Mutant Rabbit Wars
Earlier this year in Germany, the world’s largest rabbit, Rudi, was unveiled at a whopping three feet one inch, weighing 22 pounds and at 12 months old is still growing with 12 inch ears and ‘paws like a lion’, you can view the beast here, but in true European form, the Brits hit back with their own thumper claiming Roberto (left) from the Bunnyland pet shop in Worcester clocks in at 35lb and is 3ft 6in long. Now wait for World Wide Super Rabbit Wrestling on your TV. And then of course there was the tale this aumtumn of the Donnie Darko-esque freaky frankenbunny, whereby British scientists said they were going to clone rabbit cells with human cells.

 

Adbusts of the year
We had some entertaining and thought provoking adbusts this year. Here's our pick of the crop:

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then then how come the biggest ice floe (an area of 66 sq km) in the last 25 years broke off?