Surviving Capitalism (Not) : North Field gas keeps Qatar crisis stalemated: Fuel for Thought

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, July 31, 2017

North Field gas keeps Qatar crisis stalemated: Fuel for Thought

Click here to access article by Tamsin Carlisle, Senior Editor of The Barrel website, a major petroleum industry source of online information. (Updated as of 8:25 PM Seattle time, also several minor clarifications up until 3 PM Seattle time on 8/1/2017.)

The article likely explains by implication why the news has dropped out of corporate media about the major conflict that has recently developed between the ruling classes (more like extended monarchical families in this area) in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Egypt on one side with Qatar and Turkey on the other side. It's obvious with major Western petroleum corporations so involved in highly profitable operations on both sides of this quarrel that Empire media corporations don't know how to integrate this development so that it corresponds well with all their other Empire interests and simplistic propaganda, that is, the "good guys" of the US Empire versus the "bad guys" of Russia and Putin.

However when I searched for articles specifically in major capitalist online publications like the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News, I did find recent extensive coverage of this conflict. The moral of this story is that the purpose of major media corporations is to target the general population and guide ordinary people to support the interests of the Empire's ruling capitalist classes--not to create an understanding of other major issues such as this which deals with inter-capitalist Western interests.

(Writers often use the names of capital cities to represent countries and ruling classes. If you don't know the region very well, here are maps (with pipelines) to guide you as to what the author refers to in the article.)