Canada's 'responsibility to protect' US oil bidness

"He simply will not last very long," Harper said of Gaddafi back in March, as Canada prepared to drop $27-million of smart money smart bombs on Libya in order to oust him.
As of now Gaddafi controls most of the country including the capital.

On Tuesday Parliament will debate Steve's resolution to support NATO's proposal for another three month extension, supported last time by all opposition parties.
One will recall that Steve does not like to miss a parade :

"I noted that there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein operates programs to produce weapons of mass destruction. Experience confirms this. British, Canadian and American intelligence leaves no doubt on the matter.

In my judgment Canada will eventually join with the allied coalition if war on Iraq comes to pass. The government will join, notwithstanding its failure to prepare, its neglect in co-operating with its allies, or its inability to contribute. ...  It will not join as a leader but unnoticed at the back of the parade."

As we wait for this war's versions of uranium yellowcake and "he gasses his own people" to go into spin overdrive, perhaps our opposition politicians - so eager to be onboard this latest 'coalition of the willing to protect the people of Libya while ignoring the similar plight of the peoples of Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria' - could take a moment to read Glenn Greenwald's perusal of the WikiLeaks cables info found in a Washington Post article :

In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war

"The relationship between Gaddafi and the U.S. oil industry as a whole was odd. In 2004, President George W. Bush unexpectedly lifted economic sanctions on Libya in return for its renunciation of nuclear weapons and terrorism. There was a burst of optimism among American oil executives eager to return to the Libyan oil fields they had been forced to abandon two decades earlier. . . .


Yet even before armed conflict drove the U.S. companies out of Libya this year, their relations with Gaddafi had soured. The Libyan leader demanded tough contract terms. ...

Libya has some of the biggest and most proven oil reserves -- 43.6 billion barrels -- outside Saudi Arabia, and some of the best drilling prospects. . . .

By the time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited in 2008, U.S. joint ventures accounted for 510,000 of Libya's 1.7 million barrels a day of production, a State Department cable said. . . .
 But all was not well. By November 2007, a State Department cable noted "growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism. ... Libya's oil production has foundered, sagging to about 1.5 million barrels a day by early this year before unrest broke out.

Yet when representatives of the rebel coalition in Benghazi spoke to the U.S.-Libya Business Council in Washington four weeks ago, representatives from ConocoPhillips and other oil firms attended, according to Richard Mintz, a public relations expert at the Harbour Group, which represents the Benghazi coalition."

End of Greenwald.

So let's hear a rebel yell for the Harbour Group, the Washington public relations firm whose leadership includes former staff director for Hillary Clinton Richard Mintz, and for the Benghazi coalition, represented by former Libyan Ambassador Ali Aujali, seen here with Paul Wolfowitz in his April speech to the American Enterprise Institute.

In another pure coincidence, neocon Wolfowitz and his AEI buddies at PNAC, the Project for the New American Century, were the original architects of the war on Iraq, arguing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein back in 1998.  Later Wolfowitz and AEI were supposedly hoodwinked by Iraq's Ahmed Chalabi and Curveball into thinking the Iraqis would greet their US liberators with roses.  Nudge, nudge, wink, hoodwink.

Speaking of Hillary and Iraq :

"Hillary Clinton hosted a meeting of top executives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Halliburton, GE, Chevron, Lockheed Martin, Citigroup, Occidental Petroleum, etc. etc. to plot how to exploit "economic opportunities in the new Iraq." 

And so it goes ...
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The SPP is dead; long live the PPA

Last week spp.gov, the official US home of the SPP, read:

"The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) is no longer an active initiative and as such this website will act as an archive for SPP documents. There will not be any updates to this site."

This week it seems they did think of an update after all. spp.gov :

"Going forward, we want to build on the accomplishments achieved by the SPP and further improve our cooperation."

We are then redirected to the Joint Statement by the North American Leaders (August 10, 2009) [excerpt mine] :

"Our three governments recognize that we cannot limit our efforts to North America alone, and we have agreed to instruct our respective Ministers to strive for greater cooperation and coordination as we work to promote security and institutional development with our neighbors in Central America and the Caribbean ...

We commend the progress achieved on reducing unnecessary regulatory differences and have instructed our respective Ministers to continue this work by building on the previous efforts, developing focused priorities and a specific timeline. "

So in other words - expanding some version of the SPP of North America to include Central and South America as well.

Didn't this used to be called the FTAA, the spectacularly FAIL Free Trade Area of the Americas ?
You know : "We, the democratically elected Heads of State and Government of the Americas, have met in Quebec City at our Third Summit, to renew our commitment to hemispheric integration." Followed by 100,000+ protesters, rubber bullets, and so much tear gas that the we-the-democratically-elected could smell it inside their summit.

Enter FTAA Plan B - Bush's final gift to Obama in Sept 2008
The Pathways to Prosperity of the Americas was announced at the headquarters of the corporate lobby group Council of the Americas.
Heide Bronke, U.S. State Department, in the Miami Herald in 2008:

''Eleven leaders in the hemisphere met with our president and stood with him in a project aimed at expanding economic integration. This is not just free trade, it's a political vision for the hemisphere."

Current member states : US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay

The rightwing Heritage Foundation : Finding Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas

"The PPA is an attempt to re-energize U.S. government and regional efforts to enlarge a free trade area in the Western Hemisphere and create positive momentum for open-market policies that will carry over into the next Administration.

Styled in part after other current efforts to improve economic relations with key trade and investment partners--such as the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (U.S., Canada, and Mexico) - the PPA would provide a forum for not only finding avenues to improve the flow of commerce but also promoting greater coherence and consistency in the rules specified under the five separate free trade agreements (FTAs) that currently define trade between PPA members. With the basic trade agreements already in place, members of the PPA can focus on dismantling remaining barriers to trade and ensuring that business is able to take advantage of new opportunities brought by lower trade and investment barriers.

On a grander scale, success under the PPA could result in new momentum for concluding a broader Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA)."

So did the PPA manage to "carry over into the next Administration"?

Address of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State
Pathways to Prosperity Ministerial, May 31, 2009
US State Dept website :

"President Obama has emphasized that it's not important whether ideas come from one party or another, so long as they move us in the right direction. This meeting builds on the work of the previous U.S. administration, but the President and I are also committed to re-launching Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas and expanding its work to spread the benefits of economic recovery, growth, and open markets ..."

Elsewhere Senator Clinton has described the Pathways to Prosperity accord as "a multilateral initiative to promote shared security and prosperity throughout the Americas".

Alliance for Responsible Trade :

"The PPA bears many of the hallmarks of the SPP. According to the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade, the PPA is "based on two similar components to the SPP: on one hand an economic, mercantile and financial agenda covered by the term ‘prosperity', and on the other a ‘security' agenda of enhancing military and police powers to combat terrorism, narcotraffic, illegal migration, etc.." The PPA, like the SPP, is little more than an attempt to justify economic deregulation and to promote an escalation of militarism in the region."

Stuart Trew from the Council of Canadians writes The SPP is dead, so where's the champagne? :

"The NAFTA-plus agenda died in Guadalajara, Mexico last week. We killed it. And we should be singing it from the rooftops."

Ok, just one glass of champagne, Stuart, but then as you say : Back to work.
Because we don't care what it's called : SPP, North American Union, deep integration, the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, Pathways to Prosperity of the Americas. We don't care. Really. Call it whatever you like.
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Oil bidness you can believe in

Then - June 2008 :

Obama's fight against 'dirty oil' :

"Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed he would break America's addiction to "dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive" oil if he is elected U.S. president -- and one of his first targets might well be Canada's oil sands.

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"The amount of energy that you have to use to get that oil out of the ground is such that it actually creates a much greater impact on climate change, as well as using much more energy than even traditional petroleum," he said."

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The extraction of a barrel of crude from oil sands is estimated to generate as much as five times more greenhouse gas emissions as from a barrel of conventional crude.

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Now : Aug 21, 2009 :

Washington approves oil-sands pipeline :

"The Obama administration yesterday approved a pipeline to carry oil-sands fuel from Canada into the US, saying its action was designed to send "a positive economic signal in a difficult economic period".

Many environmentalists had expressed hopes that Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, would reject a permit to build the Alberta Clipper, a 1,000-mile pipeline designed to carry up to 800,000 barrels a day of fuel from Canada's vast oil sands. But the State Department said greenhouse-gas emissions are best addressed through each country's domestic policies and a strong international agreement.

After undertaking what it said was considerable evaluation, the US said it would permit Enbridge Energy to build the pipeline to advance a number of US strategic interests."

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Bonus oil bidness from Rabble :

Alberta to cut acid-rain tests in oilsands region

"To reduce costs, Alberta will do less testing for acid rain in the northern oilsands region, Alberta Environment said Monday. The program has been in place since 1978, and the sampling and testing had previously been done once a week."

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Laila Yuile : Support divided for Enbridge Northern Pipeline and the resulting oil tanker traffic along sensitive BC coastline

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Laila Yuile : The column Enbridge responded to but wouldn't post on the Northern Gateway site

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The Tyee : Environmental groups demand public inquiry into Enbridge Pipeline

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