WAHOO!!!!

THAT WAS SO GREAT TODAY!!!

Please please please keep it up, it's so important and bikes are a perfect response to an oil war!

Please print out that flyer and distribute it.

More photos from the rides were posted here:

http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/03/1587545.php

I'll be there 5 PM peewee herman plaza Monday rain or shine!

Since the prevalence of suburbs is U.S. are the main reason we're in Iraq,
how about moving the protests to Livermore and sticking them with the
$450,000 daily police bill?

(Source:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/03/21/national1606EST0783.DTL )


Without the Drive Everywhere lifestyle that dominates the Bay Area,
Bechtel would not have fertile ground in which to grow. The "masses of
protest" never seem to get to the root causes of our current crisis;
instead, they elect to treat the symptoms and point fingers at
corporations, rather than back at the majority of the citizenry whose
wasteful suburban lifestyles are truly at the heart of the situation.

The big corporations have plenty to answer for. But by focusing
exclusively on them and on the war, you further condemn your own city to
a deteriorating situation of its own. For more perspective, see below.


=====

The Empire Needs New Clothes
by Thom Hartmann

It's easy to vilify George W. Bush as a cynical warmonger, anxious to
attack Iraq to repay the oil companies that funded his election
campaigns. But to do so is to make a dangerous and fundamental error, and
such a myopic view of the Bush administration's policies puts America's
future at risk.

The reality is that the current administration has a clear and specific
vision for the future of America and the world, and they believe it's a
positive vision. In order to put forward an alternative vision, it's
essential to first understand the vision of America held by the New
Right.

The core of the neoconservative vision was first articulated on June 3,
1997, in the Statement of Principles put forth by the Project For The New
American Century. Signed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Bennett,
Jeb Bush, Gary Bauer, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Vin Weber, Steve
Forbes and others from the Reagan/Bush administration, it clearly stated
that "the history of this century should have taught us to embrace the
cause of American leadership."

Frankly acknowledging that America is a small portion of the world's
population but uses a large percentage of the world's oil and other
natural resources, Poppy Bush is famous for having said, "The American
lifestyle is not negotiable."

McMansions for two-person families, a transportation infrastructure based
on 6,000-pound SUVs carrying single individuals, cheap Chinese goods at
Wal-Mart and cheap Mexican food in the supermarket - all of this is not
anything America intends to give up. We're king of the hill, and we
intend to stay that way, even if it means going to war to keep it.

At the core of this is oil. When the administration's people say American
involvement in Iraq is "not about oil," they're often responding to
charges that they're only going after profits for American oil companies.
They speak truth, in that context, when they say the war isn't about
revenues from oil - the profits will only be a desirable side-effect.
What the war is really about is the survival of the American lifestyle,
which, in their world-view, is both non-negotiable and based almost
entirely on access to cheap oil.

The same year Cheney, et al, wrote their papers on The New American
Century, I wrote a book about the coming end of American peace and
prosperity because of our dependence on a dwindling supply of oil. "Since
the discovery of oil in Titusville, PA, where the world's first oil well
was drilled in 1859," I wrote in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight,
"humans have extracted 742 billion barrels of oil from the Earth.
Currently, world oil reserves are estimated at about 1,000 billion
barrels, which will last (according to the most optimistic estimates of
the oil industry) 'for almost 45 years at current rates of consumption.'"

But that doesn't mean that we'll suck on the straw for 45 years and then
it'll suddenly stop. When about half the oil has been removed from an
underground oil field, it starts to get much harder (and thus more
expensive) to extract the remaining half. The last third to quarter can
be excruciatingly expensive to extract - so much so that wells these days
that have hit that point are usually just capped because it costs more to
extract the oil than it can be sold for, or it's more profitable to ship
oil in from the Middle East, even after accounting for the cost of
shipping.

The halfway point of an oil field is referred to as "The Hubbert Peak,"
after scientist M. King Hubbert, who first pointed this out in 1956 and
projected 1970 as the year for the Hubbert Peak of US oil supplies.
Hubbert was off by four years - 1974 saw the initial decline in US oil
production and the consequent rise in price. In 1975, Hubbert, who is now
deceased, projected 2000 for a worldwide Hubbert Peak. Once that point
had been hit, he and other experts suggested, the world could expect
economy-destabilizing spikes in the price of oil, and wars to begin over
control of this vital resource.

Most of the world has now been digitally "X-rayed" using satellites,
seismic data, and computers, in the process of locating 41,000 oil
fields. Over 641,000 exploratory wells have been drilled, and virtually
all fields which show any promise are well-known and factored into the
one-trillion barrel estimate the oil industry uses for world oil
reserves.

And of that 1 trillion barrels, Saudi Arabia has about 259 billion
barrels and Iraq is estimated by the US Government to have 432 billion
barrels, although at the moment only about 112 billion barrels have been
tapped. The rest, virgin oil, can be pumped out for as little as $1.50 a
barrel, making Iraqi oil not only the most abundant in the world, but the
most profitable. This at a time when virtually all American oil fields
(except the Alaska North Slope) have dwindled past the Hubbert Peak into
$5 to $25 per barrel pumping costs.

Thus, we see that our "lifestyle" - our ability to maintain our
auto-based transportation systems, our demand for big, warm houses, and
our appetite for a wide variety of cheap foods and consumer goods - is
currently based on access to cheap oil. If we assume that the American
people won't tolerate a change in that lifestyle, then we can extrapolate
that our very security as a stable democracy is dependent on cheap oil.

Viewed in this context, the rush to seize control of the Middle East -
where about a third of the planet's oil is located - makes perfect sense.
It's a noble endeavor, in that view, maintaining the strength and
vitality of the American Empire.

Of course, there are a few cracks in this vision. In order to have such a
new American century, we must be willing to foul our waters and air with
the byproducts of oil combustion and oil-fired power plants, and tolerate
the explosions in cancer they bring. We must be willing to gamble that
raising CO2 levels won't destabilize the atmosphere and tip us into a new
ice age by shutting down the Great Conveyor Belt warm-water currents in
the Atlantic. We must be willing to hold the rest of the world off at the
point of a bayonet, and to take on the England/Northern Ireland and
Israel/Palestine type of terrorism that inevitably comes when people
decide to assert nationalism and confront empire.

And, perhaps most distressing, the third George to be President of the
United States must be willing to clamp down on his own dissident citizens
the same way that King George III of England did in 1776. These are the
requirements of empire.

The last American statesman to put forth a different vision was President
Jimmy Carter, who candidly pointed out to the American people that oil
was a dwindling domestic resource. Carter said that we mustn't find
ourselves in a position of having to fight wars to seize other people's
oil, and that a decade or two of transition to renewable energy sources
would ensure the stability and future of America without destabilizing
the rest of the world.

It would even lead to a cleaner environment and a better quality of life.
Carter put in place energy tax credits and incentives that birthed an
exploding new industry based on building solar-heated homes,
windmill-powered communities, and the development of fuel alternatives to
petroleum.
Ronald Reagan's first official act of office was to remove Carter's solar
panels from the roof of the White House. He then repealed Carter's tax
incentives for renewable energy and killed off an entire industry. No
president since then has had the courage or vision to face the hard
reality that Carter shared with us.

And so now we discover these oddities. Osama bin Laden, for example,
explicitly said that he had attacked the US because we had troops
stationed on the holy soil of his homeland - a position not that
different from Northern Irish, Palestinian, Tamil, and Kashmiri
terrorists. And our troops are there to protect our access to Saudi oil,
a dependence legacy we inherited from Reagan's rejection of Carter's
initiatives.

If we are to hold a vision of America that doesn't depend on foreign
sources of oil and doesn't require the enormous expenditures of money and
blood to project and protect empire, simply saying "stop the war" isn't
enough. We must clearly articulate a vision of what America could be in a
world in balance, a world at peace, and a world where the planet's vital
natural resources are protected and renewed. This is the ultimate family
value, the highest patriotism, and the most desperately needed story to
guide the
next generation of Americans.

As President John F. Kennedy said in his 1961 Inaugural Address, "All
this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished
in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even
perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."

Thom Hartmann is the author of over a dozen books, including "Unequal
Protection" and "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight."
http://www.thomhartmann.com This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but
permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so
long as this credit is attached.



"If we don't give people a choice, they will have no choice but to drive
their cars." - Jeff Morales, director of Caltrans, Contra Costa Times,
June 3, 2001

"We have to look at alternative methods of moving people around." -
Jeffrey Spring, spokesman, Automobile Club of Southern California, New
York Times, August 21, 2001

=v= I think that a Livermore protest is a good idea. Feel free to organize your own affinity group and make it happen. Blue-skying on the web only goes so far; what counts is action.

Here's a video, photos and a description of both the pleasant and peaceful
rolling demonstrations, and also a racy (and legal!) freeway ride which
ended in a small part of the group being arrested:

http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/03/1589005.php

Bikes not Bombs! will continue to meet in San Francisco each business day
at 5:00 PM on Justin Herman Plaza (the same starting point as SF Critical
Mass) near Embarcadero BART, the Ferry Building and the Transbay Transit
Terminal. There's a general call for other cities to organize the same
types of demonstrations. Turns out a small group of bicyclists can get a
lot of attention.

"Turns out a small group of bicyclists can get a lot of attention"

And do a lot of good!

BUT A BIG GROUP CAN DO EVEN MORE!

Just wait until Friday when no doubt we'll see the biggest Critical Mass ride since the tenth anniversary or the BIG ONE in July 1997!

Only this time we ain't gonna be nice and ride in a straight line, because as long as blood for oil is being spilled in our name you can bet people are going to split up in every direction and have a whole-city bike-in PARTAY ON WHEEEEEEELZZZZ to protest this shit!!!

People should start riding as soon as they get out there and keep circling back to pick up more people.

Who knows, CM might even reach as far as Pacific Heights (gasp!) where lots of the rich oil war mongers who work in the corporate towers live. Envy our freedom suckas! Just try to obsolete this simple and beautiful two-wheeled answer to the ever increasing death tax your car war culture imposes!

Send the corporate wellfare bums to jail not the demonstrators! Freeloading off the finite resources we all need to share!