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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Tag Archives: Neoliberal Capitalism

Sic Transit Imperium

02 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by darbikrash in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation

≈ 55 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Neoliberal Capitalism

…. The passing of empire.

The dank and musty allure of 19th century opium dens beckoned to those weak of will and lustful for escape. An opioid fuel of sorts, nature’s stock for an addiction that consumed its adherents in exchange for a state of nonchalant bliss, a temporary reprieve from the thousand paper cuts of life.

Experienced practioners knew to employ the buddy system, in advance soliciting a disinterested friend to come collect the user after 12 hours or so, sternly instructed to ignore any pleas to the contrary, and to extract the user from the den and the throes of opioid delirium, forcibly if necessary. Failure to do so might mean the will for a voluntary exit could well evaporate after a few days, and any exit might be feet first in a pine box.

An early example of the addictive effects of nature’s stock upon humans.

Amid much fanfare and production, the scientists of our society engage us in cultural clashes where arguments pertaining to climate change rage on, point and counterpoint, endless minutiae and technical details debated and argued. Advocates and denialists in full combat, in a battle of data against superstition that has lasted the ages and will never resolve.

Exactly as the instigators intended.

What is missing from these credentialed technical arguments are more basic questions, such as Why? Or How?

Why did our culture take up an addiction to fossil fuels, and How did this happen?

Human ecology professor, Andreas Malm has taken to addressing these two overarching questions in his book “Fossil Capital” which I shall review here.

“Fossil Capital” deviates from the typical climate change discussion as he strives to understand the onset and dependency of fossil fuels from a Marxist perspective. I must admit I was somewhat skeptical, orthodox Marxism is notoriously lax in addressing the largest threat to our planet, seemingly content to lather about in worker exploitation and revolts that never seem to happen.

However, the author reminds us that the core construct of Marx’s magnum opus is based on the philosophy of social relations, if anything, Capital shows us the dialectic relationship between capital, the political economy, and society at large. It shows us how capitalist property relations impacts workers, and how workers impact capital, leading ultimately to Malm’s staggering conclusion- that our addiction to fossil fuels, the resulting present day climate impact, and the onset and general adoption of fossil fuels was not due to technology, not due to scarcity of existing organic resources, and importantly, not due to intrinsic and supposedly dormant human tendencies to plunder the planet.

With academic rigor, Andreas Malm answers the Why and How, as he traces the onset of fossil fuels into general usage, and in so doing discovers that a very small group of men in a very small part of the world, belonging to an even smaller class of participants, are wholly, totally, and irrefutably responsible.

Malm finds that those responsible belong to the Capitalist class of 19th century England.

He explains this by animating Marx’s discoveries of property relations and the laws of motion of Capitalist production. He takes the dry, tedious text of Marx and shows how it fits chapter and verse with the 19th century ascension of the Industrial Revolution.

Fortunately for Malm, 19th century England is one of the most thoroughly documented periods and he find much empirical support for his thesis. The records are quite clear, voluminous data is available for parsing and analysis and he takes full advantage to make his case.

“Fossil Capital” starts with a debunking of the two prevailing mainstream theories as to how we evolved into a fossil fuel economy. The first, the so-called “Elizabethan leap” contains the more common bourgeoisie understanding of how 16th Europe migrated from burning wood for heat and cooking, to the use of coal. The superficial explanation is that wood was a declining resource experiencing scarcity in England and Continental Europe, and the migration to coal was an entirely natural progression to a more dense and efficient energy source.

There are a couple of problems with this, not the least of which is that coal did not make any significant inroads into energy consumption (in England anyway) until the late 18th century, so there is the small matter of a 200 year discrepancy.

But Malm considers even this to be a red herring, he suggests that the use of either wood or coal for heating and cooking purposes (the dominant uses in this time period) is really not a very interesting story, in his words this is a “proto-fossil fuel” economy, the real story begins when these fuels are used for purposes other than cooking and heating.

As all of this late 18th century stuff was taking place in England, to supplement the superficial, the theories of Ricardo, Malthus, and our dear friend Adam Smith all get roped into contributing to this explanation. Ricardo, as he posits that the available land for photosynthesis (the main vehicle for organic fuel production) is insufficient to support an exponential expansion of energy in the soon to occur industrial revolution. Malthus, with his converging and exponential population growth, needs to preserve at least some arable land for food instead of fuel production, and of course, Smith for his division of labor theories.

The author calls this first explanation the “Ricardo-Malthusian” theory, which seeks to explain the evolutionary and entirely “necessary” conversion from wood to coal because of insufficient land mass, and a geometrically expanding population with arithmetically expanding food production. As the organic economy of pre-industrial England is in effect dependent on plants (photosynthesis) for energy production, these arguments might make some sense.

A review of the historical data reveals some troubling problems with the Ricardo-Malthusian explanation. First of all, the use of organic fuels such as wood for cooking and heating cannot explain the explosion of energy expansion in 19th century England. Between 1800 and 1870 the population of England grew by 160%, yet energy consumption grew by some 4,000%.

Next, these theories were applied after the fact, using a modern interpretation (within the last century) to explain what is now a self evident problem, but this is less than convincing as no one in 19th century Britain sat down with quill and ink and forecast the energy demands of the forthcoming industrial revolution, concluding that we must switch to a coal economy toute de suite.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Malm finds no evidence of scarcity of either arable land for wood production, or of wood as a commodity as seen by market forces, e.g. there were no price spikes in this time period that would indicate a shortage, or of pending scarcity. Now there are plenty of papers and scholarly opinions that conclude that large scale shortages were present in this time period, but Malm disagrees.

Malm theorizes with some justification, that if there were resource limits to organic energy production (wood) in this time period there would be at least some price anomalies- he found none.

What then? What could be the cause for a several thousand percent increase in energy consumption- and a paradigm shift away from an organic energy economy to one wholly sustained by fossil fuels?

The genesis can be found in James Watt’s 1784 patent of the steam engine.

Knowledge of the nature of the phase change of water when boiled, and the resulting energy release had been known for centuries. What Watt had done with his steam engine patents was to harness this effect in a self contained boiler, converting steam pressure into smooth, rotative motion. This system converted the choppy, erratic motion of a steam piston into a spinning wheel, which could then be used to power other machines through belt drive connections.

Machines which would soon be called “means of production”.

With twice the BTU’s and half the volumetric density of wood, coal was the perfect fuel to propel the steam engine into mainstream use. In the period of 1800-1870, the vast majority of all coal burned was used to power steam engines, and the largest use of steam engines was in the production of cotton.

And here is where it gets really interesting.

In 19th century in Britain, the economy was all about the production of cotton. By 1870, cotton accounted for nearly 40% of the UK GDP. So cotton was a big deal, not just in sheer numbers, but in the rapid adoption of Capitalist modes of production in the industrial scale up of this commodity. In 1780, it took approximately 600 man hours to process a single bale of cotton, with the invention of the cotton gin (1793), this dropped to around 12 man hours per bale. Adding to the efficiencies, the spinning jenny (1764) and Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1768) which was designed to be powered by water flow- all represented an ushering in of a crude form of machine age- centered around cotton production.

Significantly, the main competitive fuel to coal in the early 19th century was water power. It wasn’t even close, by far water power was the first choice of any and all sources of rotative power. The reasons were simple and compelling- it did not cost anything to run. Water flow was free. Any fuel that burned, be it wood or coal, had a cost associated with it and factory owners did not want to pay when water was readily available and free for the taking.

Water was clean, reusable, quiet, and put forth no emissions. And it was cheap. So why then would anyone want to abandon this cheap and abundant energy source and switch to the dirtier, and far more expensive coal?

Well initially anyway, no one did. But as the production of cotton began to scale, and as Britain shed its mercantilist mode of production for Capitalist tendencies, issues of property and social relations began to rear their ugly heads.

Another consideration was that the use of water flow was by its very nature collective. No one owns the water, and if other mill owners shared the same water source for their own mills, which was common, there could be a conflict between users of the same resource.

So as Malm describes it, the problems began to originate from the spatial attributes of the water mills, they were by necessity located near water sources, which meant that they were generally not near urban centers, and generally located in rural or countryside locations. So it became difficult to attract and keep labor at these semi-remote locations. There was little external infrastructure, often no towns or support resources for life, however short it might be, outside of the factory mills. And retaining labor once so located was also difficult as they might just run off, converting to a ruthless and grueling factory pace of 16-18 hours days, 6 days a week was a difficult adjustment from an agrarian lifestyle which marked the previous way of life.

So the ascendant Industrial revolution began to experience labor strife, it was to become acute, perhaps more acute than any time in modern history, as large numbers of people migrated from agrarian lifestyles to a wage labor supported factory life- they did not make the change with open arms.

The mill owners quickly came up with a brilliant solution as the realties of Capitalist property relations began to settle in. It seemed that the local orphanages were full to brimming with abandoned and runaway children from all walks of life, and surely, the mill owners would be doing all a tremendous favor to “rescue” these misfits and delinquents from their stultifying existence, unshackling them for a vigorous and meditative visit to the British countryside, where they might partake in fresh air and healthy exercise.

For around 20 years.

Ever the social liberals, the headmasters of the orphanages insisted that room and board be offered to each child, and perhaps an hour per week of study so as to insure that some level of education be maintained.

Other than that, they were happy to see them go.

 

To support this newfound labor pool, the Capitalist mill owners often had to construct at their own expense a compound, buildings to house workers, eating halls, etc. in effect all the necessities of a labor camp.

There were still more problems. Not all workers were children of course- most were not. Some of the labor classifications, such as spinners were highly skilled and these in-demand workers began to demand high wages. If a group of spinners left a mill, they could cripple production and the prospects for replacement staff was not good- given the remote locales of the water mills. As the water mills became more widespread throughout Britain, child labor also grew. Soon, the moral prospect of working young orphans 16 hours a day began to wear on society as a whole, and a bitter struggle for reformed labor laws ensued lasting throughout most of the first half of the 19th century. A brief listing:

-The Cotton Mills and Factories Act of 1819. Limited employment to children age 9 or older, children aged 9-12 could not work more than 12 hours per day.

– The Cotton Mills Regulation Act 1825. Limited work hours to 10 hours on Sat, added a one hour lunch break. The mill owners were having problems with inconsistent water flow, so they needed “make up” time, e.g. extra hours during the day when workers could be forced to work longer to make up for poor flow or equipment failures. This Act accommodated these conditions by imposing limits as to how many hours could be worked and how late they could be enforced, typically no later than 11:00 PM.

– Labor in Cotton Mills Act of 1831. Extended the 12 hour day limit to anyone under 18, no night work allowed for minor children.

– Numerous legislation passed between 1831-1867 essentially limiting children, and ultimately most adults to no more than 10 hours a day of work.

One might wonder why it took 50-60 years to resolve which seems like a simple issue of social justice, using children for indentured labor. The answer is twofold, first, the capitalist class put enormous pressure on British parliament to refrain from interfering with any regulations that might impede production, the “compromise” was a highly publicized effort to address the children, as the lawmakers understood that the optics of defending this egregious practice was not going to stand, so they made much of these paltry reliefs specific to child labor. The other reason was that of male suffrage. Incredibly, throughout the 19th century, men without property ownership simply could not vote. This held until the early 20th century, indeed until the 1918 Representation of the People act, which removed the restriction of property ownership and allowed all men (and some women) the right to vote.

All of these acts and legislations were bitterly opposed by the Capitalist class- but none more vigorously than the provision allowing mill owners to work extra hours if the water flow fell off during a production day, or if equipment broke. This provision allowed the mill owner to enforce a labor effort not just by the clock, but to make sure that this labor product could be productively deployed when all the conditions of production were operational- which they often weren’t. So if you were signed up for a 12-16 hour day, and water flow dropped off midday so as to deny production, you had to stay at the mill and make the time up when the water flow returned.

A typical workday might be 16 hours. And in this workday we are reminded of Marx’s principle of abstract surplus value, which says that the workday is organized to first cover the cost to reproduce the worker, then additional hours are used to provide surplus value to the Capitalist. That’s how we get to 16 hour days. 10 hours in this example to reproduce (cover costs) and 6 hours for surplus.

But when forced by regulations to limit the workday to 10 hours, with limited ability for make up time, we have a big problem as now we have to ask where does the surplus value come from?

And the answer is that it comes from intensification of production, e.g. with speeding up the machinery. This now gives us relative surplus value, so named as the surplus is now recovered by extending backward into the workday, by working faster we can reproduce the workers cost in 8 hours and get the same surplus as before in 10 hours total.

But we have to run the machines and the people faster to achieve this result.

And as it turns out, it is pretty easy to speed up a steam engine, not so much for a water wheel. And in fact according to Malm, the sum of these attributes outlines the fundamental reason for the shift to fossil fuels- they were infinitely more tolerant to the demands of the Capitalist class than renewable resources, even though they cost more.

Steam engines could be placed conveniently next to coal mines, or to even greater advantage in the middle of population centers where there was not scarcity of labor. If a crew of experienced spinners up and quit, a replacement crew could be assembled without too much trouble. Also, population centers did not need the infrastructure build out for living quarters for example, that the water mills needed, it already existed.

And this is exactly what happened, despite the more attractive cost model of renewable energy resources, the labor relations outcome was disastrous for the water mill owners and the shift to coal powered steam engines proved unstoppable. By 1840, the battle between water power and coal was largely over, coal fueled steam engines had made significant headway into the sphere of production. This however, was no panacea, labor revolts and labor strikes grew to epic proportions, as capitalists tried to lower wages, with roving bands of strikers marauding through the cities destroying the hated steam engines as Capitalist property owners reduced wages to increase profits.

In 1842 one of the largest strikes ever was assembled, involving some 500,000 striking workers. They took to destroying steam engines, many by pulling the plugs on the pressure vessel rendering the engines useless. The phrase “pulling the plug” is still in common use today and stems from this calamitous riot in Britain.

Soon after, intentionally damaging steam engines became a crime punishable by death in Britain.

Interestingly, the word ‘Power’ in the English language has two meanings, one meaning, the noun, describes ‘…the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events…’

The other usage is as a verb, “…..to supply (a device) with mechanical or electrical energy….’

In no other language does this word share this duality. This is instructive, as it became apparent that those that controlled the power, indeed had social power. We can still see evidence of this today in modern politics.

If Malm had been unkind to the Ricardo-Malthusian explanation for the onset of fossil fuels, he is not particularly generous to the more contemporary Anthropocene narrative. Malm’s objection with this movement is not necessarily to deny the labeling of this as an ecological epoch, rather, he takes issue with the notion that somehow man was intrinsically and irreversibly responsible as a species for the onset of fossil fuel usage and the resulting climate change.

He argues that early man’s mastery of fire does not necessarily implicate humans as destined to destroy the planet, he makes the rather succinct point that ownership of steam engines, and the resulting adoption of coal to feed these engines, was specific to a very small class of people, namely, wealthy white guys involved in the Capitalist mode of production. An average wage laborer did not own a steam engine in the 19th Century, why would she? The Capitalist class acted directly to divert an organic economy that was already successful and underway with renewable hydro power to an economy that relied on fossil fuels, specifically to avoid the untenable social relations present in using a collective energy resource like water power. The Capitalist must own not just the means of production, but the fuel sources as well.

Beyond this Malm ventures into some truly interesting commentary, he discusses in some detail the need for constant exponential expansion intrinsic to Capitalism, and makes a most interesting observation about this expansion from the perspective of fossil fuels.

To do this, he discusses the time honored theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which is the primary failure mechanism of Capitalism in orthodox Marxism. The rate of profit tends to fall, as the organic composition of constant capital to variable capital changes. In plain English, this means that as machines and automation replace people, the profits left for the Capitalist decline. This is because if labor is the source of all value, as labor content declines, so does surplus value.

But this “tendency” is not a hard and fast rule, there are ways that this “tendency” can be mitigated, indeed, the Capitalism of today goes to great pains to deflect these tendencies- largely through State interventions. However, we do know that as more machines are created to replace or accelerate human labor, more fossil fuels will be used to power them- just as it did in 19th century Britain.

Malm suggests that this energy consumption component of value production is a hard and fast rule- not a tendency, and that as the composition of constant Capital increases, the consumption of fossil fuels must also increase- exponentially. He expresses this as an increased carbon content per unit of production. This would suggest a death spiral related to fossil fuel use, unstoppable and with no known restraint under the laws of motion of a Capitalist economy.

To the notion that man as a species is intrinsically responsible and destined to destroy the planet, his view is that if we all are responsible, then no one is responsible. By this he suggests that if all are guilty, then no one can be deposed or held accountable.

And this narrative is starting to sound vaguely familiar, yes, blame the working class and the poor for societies woes, and for good measure be sure to inflict the greatest amount of retribution and payback amongst those least responsible.

This is a time honored strategy unique to class structure. A secondary outcome is the blaming of workers for global warming through consumption.

Malm makes a solid case using historical reconstruction and a Marxist framework to unveil the unity between energy and exploitation. He suggests that the need for exploitation within the Capitalist mode of production is largely the driver towards unfettered fossil fuel consumption. Another thrust, which he is covering in a new book, is the notion that the nexus to petroleum energy was in direct response to the crippling coal miner’s strikes.

So it is not surprising then that we see similar characteristics in our current bourgeoisie government in the persona of Trump. We see the ascension of energy moguls to the levers of power for exactly the same reasons, with exactly the same objectives that were there in 19th century Britain.

The current era Capitalist class is deeply concerned with the declining rate of profit, despite the mitigating influence of neo-liberal expansion. They reflexively return to tried and true restorative strategies, central to this is an expansion of fossil fuel production and simultaneous relaxation of regulations- of which we see abundant evidence that this is underway.

If there is an area of weakness in Malm’s work, it is in his explanation of why man is not acting in his own best interests. While I find his rejection of the culpability of man as a species gratifying, it is hard to connect the dots between the Plug Riots of 1842 and a similar modern day Black Friday mob descending like locusts on a Wal Mart sale. There really is no coherent explanation offered to connect the dots between these disparate behaviors, and it really is one of the more important questions of our time.

Perhaps a narrative that revolves around addiction, and its close companion denial is more appropriate.

Overall in his wrap up to include modern times, Malm is not hopeful for any relief from the fossil fuel madness or any meaningful redress to climate change. He points out that sunk capital costs in coal fired plants, refineries, and other capital intensive investments are unlikely to be unwound until they are fully amortized. Once paid for, there is little motivation to sunset them as after all, they are paid up and can then contribute to supra-profits. The modern day Capitalist class does not make these kind of massive investments without a priori policy assurances from the State- which they actively seek and receive.

In the end Malm accomplishes a great deal with his book, the approach of leaving aside pure science and using tools of sociology to examine causality is very effective. It will be interesting to see where he takes this thread in his upcoming book, continuing with a similar framework around petroleum fuels.

It is more likely that we will find coal a source of sunlight, than sunlight a competitor of coal.

William Stanley Jevons 1860

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Rise of the Deplorables

15 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by darbikrash in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Peak Oil

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Corporatocracy, Inverted Totalitarianism, Neoliberal Capitalism

Well the preprogrammed spectacle that has been the US Presidential election has finally concluded. The enormity of the result is staggering to behold, how exactly a buffoon with a third grade vocabulary can elevate himself to presumably the most powerful position in world politics boggles the mind.

Much political hand wringing awaits, as the punditry tries to make sense of their gross miscalculations, the nonstop media blitz, and the tacit realization that somehow, despite the protestations from the elitist high priests, a professional grifter has taken the top seat.


Accompanied by a rise of the correctly termed deplorables, a bolus of miscreants and malformed post-adolescent actors constituting a wave of lumpenproleteriat, swept the orange haired overlord into the center ring to claim his rightful throne. His superficial gaze ponders the land that he now lords over, a cornucopia of expansive panorama befitting a real estate baron. It is the jackpot, the mother lode, the penultimate land grab, a polity based version of accumulation by dispossession.

The alternative candidate was only marginally better.

So how does this happen? What possible explanation can be given for this outcome?

It turns out that the calculus of this is well understood, a narrative that goes back 150 years to elemental concepts of dialectic materialism and class consciousness. Viewed through the prism of class consciousness, the spectacle of Donald Trump and HRC makes perfect sense, for they are not opposites, not even opponents, they in fact occupy the same class structure. One is the unbridled face of capitalist excess, harkening back to the robber baron age of which he is a direct descendant, the other a sycophant of corporate dictate, a reliable war horse schooled in the art of fealty to the monied set. Both of the same class, he by inherited birthright and subsequent day job, she by studiously apprenticing to the political elites through a subservient career demonstrating pliability to corporate power.

Both textbook examples of the edict that money can be converted directly to social power.

But this is only part of the story, politicians are elected not by largesse and class membership, but by those that elevate them.

Irony in the extreme

It is fashionable for the left to publish scathing screeds denouncing the right wing deplorables, elitist rants that implore the gods to strike down those unworthy primates in their feeble mud huts. Why, they proclaim, we have turned the controls of the spaceship over to pooh flinging Neanderthals ransacking their disheveled Planet-of the Apes dioramas.

What is missing is a Margret Mead style field investigation to visit the deplorable on his home turf, to see him or her in situ, in their natural habitat. To do so is to witness a class decimated by opiate abuse, a cohort reduced to observer status in a consumerist driven economy-unable to participate at anything other than a token level as compared to their elitist contemporaries. A group asphyxiated by a toxic cocktail of service level jobs on the lower end of scale, counter balanced by a vastly underappreciated skilled labor component on the high end. It is this high skill level that is most misunderstood, much has been written about demeaning service jobs, the real story is not in this sector, the real story is in the upper level blue and grey collar worker. It is this group that has animated the Trump campaign

This cohort is typically not college educated, and often not exclusively white male. What it is though is productive skilled labor. On the purely blue collar side, they range from aircraft assemblers, machinists and other skilled craftsmen, to the iterant IT class, programmers, coders and mid-level technology workers.

What this group has in common is exploitation, alienation, and loss of the workmanship ideal. This coupled with an inchoate rage fanned by the fires of AM talk radio, Fox News, alt-right blogs and websites foments a misappropriated ethos of revenge, as an alienated cohort is forced to witness elites- decidedly unproductive workers- achieve high levels of undeserved success- at their expense.

These elites are living in the best houses, driving the nicest cars and fully reaping the bounty of a consumer class resplendent with trinkets and bobbles- and these people don’t know shit and they don’t do shit.

There is no greater insult in a capitalist economy than to see the spoils of plunder go to those who do nothing. And since time immemorial, this is the very essence of capitalist class exploitation, those that do the least get the most. Those of privilege subsume those without.

Deep State My Ass

Although an old story, we have at the same time amnesia and a new twist. We have lost the intellectual narrative of Das Capital, we have endured decades of abusive labor struggles, corrupted unions, and flat out wars with robber barons- and the left has lost. Labor has lost, collectivism has lost- and lost badly.

The New Deal set in motion a negotiated end to wildcat strikes and unruly pockets of labor unrest, in exchange for a social safety net and the newly formed principle of collective bargaining.

Labor disputes were to be centralized, and negotiated en masse to avoid any annoying (and costly) disruption to the capitalist class. Once so centralized, labor management was easy to co-opt, and in a few short decades was rendered impotent.

The intensity of these techniques remained vigorous during the 50’s, 60’s and early ‘70’s coinciding with the more or less chronic post war labor shortage while capital rebuilt and rolled out a highly networked system of value production. Tight labor markets confounded efforts to tamp down labor concessions- and the middle class prospered.

The laws of motion of Capital were not lost on the elites, as they moved to a neo—liberal agenda in the mid ‘70’s, specifically designed to offshore labor to low cost markets, and thwart a growing regulatory environment stateside.

This proved wildly successful (for Capital) by resetting the bar for socially necessary labor time to a new low, by using far eastern labor to dramatically undercut stateside salaries, effectively using soft power to bust labor unions. And, as any student of Marx knows, the cost of labor to Capital is driven by the cost of labor to reproduce itself, the availability of cheap foreign produced goods is consumed disproportionally by lower income workers, further enhancing the effects of globalization to benefit Capital.

These factors comprise the fundamentals of a superstructure that allows the accumulation of capital to purchase social power, and now the recipe is complete- hegemonic control over the political economy in Capital’s pursuit of unfettered value production.

This is an uncomfortable narrative for bourgeoisie economists and the punditry, they prefer to offer a new, pro-capitalist explanation for what we can observe, and they call this the Deep State. This supposedly is a secretive cabal of mysterious power brokers who operate behind the scenes to influence politics, the markets, foreign policy, and just about anything else that needs explaining.

There of course is no such thing, it’s just Capital operating with business as usual.

Early warning signs

I suppose you could trace the first spasms of the deplorables to Ned Ludd pitching his sewing machine out the third story window of 18th century England textile factory- as labor’s reaction to Capital’s scheming to suppress labor costs goes back centuries.

The first contemporary example, at least in the context of the Trump travesty, of the deplorables lashing out, is the appearance of Japanese cars in the parking lots of General Motors and Ford Motor Company, as (some) workers purchased imported cars that were better than what they were manufacturing at lower prices. The reaction from mainstream labor was swift and violent, cars were smashed by incensed co-workers as it was immediately recognized that jobs would be lost and collective labor bargaining defanged.

And of course Capital doubled down, immediately offshoring everything they could, first to the Japanese, then to the Chinese and other peripheral countries when Japanese labor rose to near US levels.

The current rise of the deplorable embodied by Trump’s supporters then is but a reconstitution of a very old sentiment, the lashing out of a cohort of the working class as they come to terms with a diffuse reality permeated with alienation, diminishing social power, and flat or declining wages. Their white collar managers are demonstrably incompetent, products of an overpriced university system turning out graduates with low level skill sets, high debt, and poor prospects for job opportunities.

To be sure, this group attracts truly unsavory subsets and species, these hangers on are not exploited worker class participants, the KKK and various and sundry white supremist groups do find common ground in the nationalist tendencies that are embedded in these movements, and one cannot discount the seriousness of these influences. But for the most part these nationalistic tendencies are reactionary, part of the inchoate response of alienation, and not deliberately predatory as is characteristic of hate groups

Media complicity

Much has been made recently of the role of the media in reporting, inaccurate polling data, the apparent rise of HRC, and the tendency to discount and even outwardly mock Trump’s rise. There are several areas to blame here, but inaccurate polling and disproportionate reporting of emails scandals are not really relevant.

One cannot forget that all the broadcast media accessible to mainstream voters are owned by Capitalist entities. They primarily make money through the sale of advertising, and nothing sells like conflict and controversy.


The instigating event to media complicity was the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. This FCC policy insured that controversial subjects received fair and impartial converge by news media, and a full spectrum of competing viewpoints were to be presented by the broadcast media. The operating theory is that the airwaves were part of the publicly owned commons, and that the privatization of these airwaves could and would lead to capture of what would amount to a corporate owned propaganda tool.

Indeed, within a year of the act’s elimination, Rush Limbaugh’s show hit the AM talk radio circuit, sowing the seeds of a vast communication portal to the disenfranchised lumpen. (Limbaugh reportedly has a $70mm annual salary)

Ten years later we had the beginnings of Fox News, and the official genesis of corporate media capture for the express purpose of policy promotion and influencing elections.

The effect of these efforts was profound- the growing and increasingly vocal discontent of alienated labor was subjected to a propaganda intervention, the media tools were designed to focus this building angst to anti-government/pro-capitalist belief systems. Much of this onslaught revolves around conspiracy theories, and these media portals rely on the technique of fabricating preposterous stories, wrapped in the all knowing glow of insider only knowledge, to reassure the recipient that they are truly privileged thinkers, as they can see what only the wise can see.

All that was missing was the appearance of a strong man- preferably with television media bonafides- to step up and receive the mantle of authenticity from a fawning media hungry for click throughs and profits.

It is important to note the promotion of Stephen Brannon as a senior advisor in the Trump cabinet, this move insures that the alt-right media is directly plugged into the highest level of White House proceedings. The significance of this is that Brannon has now become a de facto Minister of Information for the Trump administration, specifically chosen to disseminate spin to the alt-right media, keeping his proto-Fascist base properly satiated.

The Trump Dominion

So what might the Trump “brand” bring to American governance? We can again view this through the lens of capitalist valorization, as without question Trump’s hyper-capitalist underpinnings will animate his presidency.

First, at the personal level we know that hyper-capitalists in powerful political positions become de facto kleptocrats, using their position to personally enrich themselves, their immediate families, and associated cronies. Look for foreign policy relationships with other kleptocrats such as Putin and Mexican president Enrique Nieto. His business entities are inseparable from his political responsibilities, so we can and should expect an explosion of cross pollinated corruption as he intermingles his empire holdings with American political gravitas.

We should expect these “leadership” qualities to normalize the prioritization of capitalist objectives over any other considerations, and this ethos will quickly trickle down through the entire business ecosystem.

Make no mistake, this election result is an unmitigated disaster for the environment, for social and financial equality, and for the planet. There may well be no recovery from this, as the take away is unbridled, runaway capitalist value production, ironically, that will have the largest negative impact on the deplorable base constituency which elected him in the first place.

To help visualize the form that his rule will likely take, we might look to Mainland China for an example of what happens when State Capitalism intersects authoritarian rule. China may be called a Communist country, but it is very clearly a State Capitalist political economy under authoritarian rule. The State is used to clear the way for capitalist expansion at all costs, no regulations for any initiative that creates value production, the deconstruction of labor into quasi-prison conditions, and plenty of accumulation by dispossession in the form of displacing rice farmers into labor camps dedicated to capitalist production.

Trump’s stated focus on trade policies contain contradictions, but we might postulate that at least some of these policies might mirror Chinese action which attempt to bias trade agreements to allow for one sided tariff systems as well as technology transfers.

A further characteristic of China’s trade policy was massive investment in internal infrastructure, a policy Trump is almost certain to pursue.

We might also expect attempts to repatriate US corporations offshore profits, stockpiled over the last 10 years as a result of quasi-legal tax dodges, as well as significant reduction in corporate tax rates.

Many of his campaign promises contain intrinsic contradictions, or outright measures not favorable to value production. This is almost always due to ignorance of the laws of motion of Capitalism, and will quickly prove untenable.

An example would be his infamous anti-immigration wall. Apparently unbeknownst to Trump, Capital requires a permanent underclass to process seasonal labor, such as migrant farm work. Other low margin industries also require an undocumented underclass that can be further exploited outside of the mainstream minimum wage and benefits systems- such as car washes, restaurants, domestic help and gardeners for the upper class.

None of these industries can support payroll at the prevailing fair market wage. You’d have $10 tomatoes and $100 car washes, which of course just won’t do. This was tried under the Reagan administration when ICE was first formed, workplace raids were soon discontinued at the bequest of Capital as soon as they proved effective. Expect the same results with Trump’s wall, which will be stillborn.

This pattern will continue with most of his campaign promises, expect tangible change only in areas where Capital is the clear winner, such as infrastructure spending which will benefit Trump’s construction cronies. The same fate awaits the vaunted unraveling of Obama care, this will be watered down and ultimately look very similar to what is currently in place.

When will the deplorables first acknowledge that they have been duped?

Revolutions and the decline of the left

This situation is directly attributable to the failure of the left. What passes for the left in this country is not really leftist, but rather progressive. This political energy has been misdirected to insidious social issues, such as whether or not plastic bags should be provided in supermarkets, Big Gulp soft drink bans, and an inordinate amount of attention to LBGT issues. I’m not suggesting these issues are without merit, just not at the current energy spend that is being allocated.

These tactics result in inflaming the value systems of the deplorables, they lash out (rightly so) at the prospect of behavioral overreach of the progressive movement, this coupled with their sanctimonious highbrow attitude delegitimizes progressive causes, and expensive political capital is expended on third tier issues.

This energy is misdirected and disproportionate, the left should stand for anti-Capitalist causes, first and foremost. The left should be demonstrating frequently and loudly with well-defined objectives and messaging, so as to become a thorn in the side of value production, and at the same time, persistently contradicting the alt-right media propaganda that tries to evangelize the Capitalist mode of production.

The center of mass of the right’s “deplorables” is largely alienated labor and this should be recognized and reinforced with consistency.

This cohort shares much in common with Bernie Sander’s coalition for example, but the media shapes the perceptions to create an adversarial identity politics. In the main, the groups share the same sensibilities, but are compartmentalized by fabricated ideologies that bear little resemblance to reality.

Certainly they do not reflect a fundamental understanding of the laws of motion of Capital value production- from either side.

Work still needs to be done by the left to comprehend new forms of value production that are rapidly materializing. Examples would be the emergence of cognitive capital, which is the production of use value without labor participation, and reputational capital, which is the occurrence of supra profits without commiserate labor value through the use of branding and vanity labeling of commodities.

Capital is rolling out new forms of exploitation faster than the left can process these changes into a coherent theory of value.

The right invests in this type of intellectual post processing through the use of corporate funded think tanks, but of course, this is not available to leftist interests for obvious reasons, so other methods must be employed, such as university level study into post Capitalist possibilities.


Next steps

Much of the misdirection of the current election is due to the inability to recognize fundamental symptoms of alienated labor. The Democrats missed it, and so did the mainstream Republicans.

Alienated labor is unquestionably the domain of anti-Capitalist ideology, this is the only group that not only recognizes the depth of the problem, but has a narrative that explains how it occurs and what to do about it.

Any suggested corrective action at the political level is going to be cold comfort to those who recognize the complete collapse of the environment that is occurring around us. We must keep in mind that it took Capital 400 years to get to this point, and it will not be erased overnight excepting some planet scale calamity- which we cannot of course rule out.

But political level initiatives can prove effective in the meantime.

If the focus is kept on discouraging value production and dismantling socially necessary labor time, inroads can be made against the Capitalist mode of production.

Some tactics to achieve this are to shift focus to the point of realization, which is to attack Capital from the retail front. Some of these measures start out as Pollyannaish, such as don’t shop at chain stores, use credit unions not banks, do not use credit cards, look to buy commodity goods from businesses organized as collectives whenever possible.

But quickly we can see some areas that offer the potential for concrete change, if you feel you can start a business do so, but do so as a collective, e.g. structure the business to return profits in an equitable distribution to employees. This collapses the class structure and eliminates exploitation in a shift away from the principle of socially necessary labor time.

A compilation of such businesses at the community scale can then extend favorable conditions to supply chain partners that are also collectives, and non-favorable terms to traditional corporate models, whenever possible.

To promote these types of entities beyond a given community, state wide tax incentives can be used to encourage the creation and operation of collectives. One strategy might be to allow these businesses to operate tax free, while traditional corporate structures have to pay full freight.

Initiatives that support privatization in any form should be vigorously opposed- and protested. Examples would be the obvious attempts to privatize social security, national parks, etc., but awareness and activism should also extend to resisting privatization of intellectual property as well, such as attempts to extend the duration of protection on utility patents, new efforts to privatize internet IP, and drug compound monopolization- to name but a few.

This is a grass roots style build out, when successful at the state or regional level, this can expand to the national level, where with sufficient political strength, more substantial measures can be deployed to discourage traditional corporate value production. Examples might be limiting businesses to less than 500 employees maximum, by applying draconian tax structures when these employment numbers are exceeded.

Longer term, energy production should be nationalized, as well as the financial system.

Taken as an integrated system, these measures redirect, however slowly, towards a more equitable system that ultimately can be based on needs production, instead of the bottomless pit of value production.

Or we can just wait until the next election.

 

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Spectating at the End of the World

02 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 205 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Abrupt Climate Change, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Davi Kopenawa, Eco-Apocalypse, Extinction of Man, Green Washing, Guy McPherson, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Mr. Natural, Neoliberal Capitalism, Robert Crumb, Security and Surveillance State, Social Psychology and Theories of Consumer Culture: A Political Economy

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Front Row Seat to the Eco-Apocalypse

“I fear their euphoria of merchandise will have no end and they will entangle themselves to the point of chaos. They do not seem concerned that they are making us all perish with the epidemic of fumes that escape from all these things…” ~ Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami leader and shaman

Another year has turned over on Earth, home to an exothermic, bipedal omnivore known as capitalist carbon man whose expanding numbers and army of fossil-fueled machinery spans the globe. There’s nothing subtle or restrained about his reign of terror. He pokes and prods the climate change beast while taking for granted the stability of the Holocene, a peculiar aberration in the paleoclimate record. Plotted on a graph, the history of Earth’s climate resembles the jagged teeth of a demonic monster, a volatile creature whose abrupt and catastrophic shifts have wiped landscapes clean of most life. The consequences of burning the equivalent of an olympic sized swimming pool of oil (300,000 liters) per second, year after year, into the atmosphere will ultimately prove lethal to the planet’s habitability. Recently, scientists were surprised to discover a “Delaware-sized methane cloud” hovering over the U.S. southwest, the remnant of “years of intentionally released and errantly leaked natural gas during fossil fuel drilling operations.” No less problematic to the Earth’s homeostasis are the many other destructive habits of capitalist carbon man such as moving ten times more dirt than all natural processes, fixing more nitrogen than all terrestrial bacteria, and producing more sulfate than all ocean phytoplankton.

The exponential melting of Earth’s cryospheric regions is a foreboding harbinger of devastating sea level rise, altering oceanic and jet stream circulation, changing hydrologic cycles, and wholesale disruption of the entire planet’s biospheric system. A brief retrospective of our unfolding environmental meltdown by a major news source concludes that “2014 will likely go down as the year that melting polar ice caps graduated from being a geographic abstraction to a symbol of the irreversible ways we’ve warped the planet.” News reports continue to grow more ominous with recent warnings that the oceans are on the verge of belching their decades of stored heat from human industrial activity. CIVILIZATION is in the process of going ‘poof’ as its leaders play monkey politics and the masses are drowned in a sea of consumerist images. As Dr. McPherson recently pointed out, gallows humor is the 6th stage of grief for coping with a civilization that is blind to its own demise.

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“Going Green” is a Marketing Slogan and Inverted Totalitarianism is the Most Successful Form of Tyranny

The unsettling truth is that the slogan “going green” has become a marketing ploy to greenwash capitalism and keep business-as-usual going. The speeches of corporate and political leaders are sprinkled with conscious-soothing key words such as “sustainable”, “eco-friendly”, and “2°C climate goal”, but there’s nothing sustainable about globalized techno-capitalism and the target of limiting warming to 2°C is a cruel illusion. So-called “green energy” is severely limited by suitable geography and intermittency of power production. The behemoth Google learned from its own extensive research that “today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us.” The top business firms appear to be having a problem squaring their green rhetoric with reality, and there seems to be no way to make automobiles truly sustainable. Germany, the poster child for a green economy, is now “burning more coal than at any point since 1990.“:

“We already are on the edge of what is possible,” Mr. Löllgen said in an interview at his Düsseldorf office. “Is it worth it if we as a country succeed in reaching our targets in reducing carbon emissions, but sacrifice good jobs and our industrial base?”

Another misleading headline I get tired of reading states that humans may be headed for a 6th mass extinction. Let’s clarify this statement once and for all by admitting emphatically that we are well in the throes of a mass extinction which will likely include ourselves within this century. By all rational evidence, industrial civilization with its billions of inhabitants cannot survive without fossil fuels. The only way capitalist carbon man will ever be sustainable is as fertilizer beneath the crumbled concrete and asphalt ruins of industrial civilization. Don’t expect any mea culpa from a culture which has been programmed to believe converting all of nature into inanimate symbols of wealth is “progress” and “development”. Not even the dire warnings of esteemed scientists and religious leaders can break the spell cast by capitalism and its definition of progress. Our institutions have become intransigent, petrified monoliths to which all will be sacrificed.

“I think the notions of free will and self-determination have the appearance of reality during a civilization’s gestation and expansion phases, when there is more opportunity and social mobility. As things calcify, instruments becoming institutions that serve their own ends, the facade is harder to maintain. Human existence has always been contingent and constrained by circumstances. These ‘free’ notions are illusions, narrow windows of perception with a limited range of influence during times of transient prosperity.” ~ BP

The term inverted totalitarianism, coined a decade ago by philosopher Sheldon Wolin, describes America’s brand of despotism in which “every natural resource and every living being is commodified and exploited to collapse as the citizenry is lulled and manipulated into surrendering their liberties and their participation in government through excess consumerism and sensationalism.” Opposition to this dominant consumer culture is systematically co-opted and suppressed by the marginalization and alienation of alternative thought. Neoliberal capitalism governs not only states and economies, but extends right down to an individual’s behavior and way of living:

One of the goals of neoliberalism is to foster a population of individuals who will play an active role in their own self-governance by interacting with the market and consumption through calculated acts and investments… sets of rules and conditions are established between institutions, economic and social practices, and patterns of behavior. They generally function outside of conscious awareness and they habitually influence social behavior. Examples of dominant consumer culture discourse include the political linking of consumer sovereignty and choice with freedom, the linking of citizenship and national pride with consumption, the work and spend treadmill that many people choose to pursue, the commercialization of childhood and adolescence, and the celebration of consumer values through the mass media and advertising.
– Social Psychology and Theories of Consumer Culture: A Political Economy

Who better to label people as “unpatriotic” if they acknowledge the reality of climate change than the host of TV’s quintessential symbol of capitalism, The Wheel of Fortune? Beneath this digital web of commercials and TV infotainment is the iron fist of militarized local police and the panopticon surveillance state which can quickly stomp out those troublesome malcontents who break free of the American hologram. What better way is there for controlling entire populations than to condition them to enjoy their chains of slavery? America’s form of tyranny, a blend of covert and overt oppression, is the most successful in the history of mankind.

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None of This Can Really Be Happening, Can It?

With all the disjointed and delusional thinking out there, I feel compelled to write a blog post periodically to get the facts straight and assure myself that what I see and hear every day is really happening. Yes, we really are terraforming the Earth into a barren wasteland while convincing ourselves that it’s worth it for the sake of a cubicle job and life in cookie-cutter suburbia. Yes, we really are ruled by the Washington-Wall Street-Pentagon complex. No, you will never get the raw truth from mainstream news outlets. Yes, I’m getting older and need to exercise more because a sedentary lifestyle is as bad as smoking. Yes, industrial civilization is still on track to collapse within my lifetime. As Robert Crumb’s mystic guru Mr. Natural exclaimed, “The whole universe is completely insane!”

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The Systemic Roots of a Global Pandemic

19 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

≈ 50 Comments

Tags

Allee Effect, Antebacterial Drug Resistance, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Bill Gates, Capitalism, Center for Disease Control (CDC), Circuits of Capital, Conflict Minerals, Corporate Neo-Colonialism, Ebola, Epidemic, IMF, Infinite Growth Paradigm, ISIS, Neoliberal Capitalism, Pandemic, Peak Antibiotics, Rare Earth Minerals, Resource Wars, Rob Wallace, The Global Land Grab, The Resource Curse, The Roman Empire, War for Profit, World Bank, World Health Organization, Yves Smith

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Over the ages, a number of empires have exploited and looted the resource-rich lands of Africa. At its height, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland in the northern hemisphere to the deserts of Africa in the south. The Romans stripped their North African territory of its trees, making it their breadbasket of grain production. Originating in central Africa, malaria was likely spread to the center of the Roman Empire on their cargo ships. Passengers on their boats could have carried malaria in their bloodstream before becoming symptomatic, and water barrels on board could have harbored mosquito larvae. In fact, the DNA work of Dr. Robert Sallares has proven that the most lethal form of malaria helped topple ancient Rome. Fast forwarding to today, the blow-back from industrial agriculture and transnational corporate land grabs in Africa has now reached the shores of the hegemonic American Empire in the form of a deadly tropical disease called Ebola.

The Roman Empire seized fertile African land by brute force, but in modern times capitalist industrial civilization takes over Third World countries with the stroke of a pen. Structural adjustment loans by such tools of western power as the IMF and World Bank are signed requiring privatization of the economy and government cuts in social spending. Vast tracks of forests are cleared for mining or monoculture crop production such as palm oil. Subsistence farmers are dispossessed of their ancestral lands and forced to migrate to cities in search of work. Deprived of adequate healthcare and the opportunity to earn a livable wage, these urban poor live in squalor and are driven to hunt in the surrounding forests for a cheap source of protein known as bushmeat. Fruit bats, a keystone environmental species, have been identified as an Ebola virus host that has spread the disease through bushmeat consumption, habitat destruction, and human encroachment. Thus the neoliberal agenda of ‘developed’ nations has acted to create the atmosphere from which this pandemic arose.

Due to the long history of exploitation by outside powers, native Africans are justifiably wary and prone to conspiracy theories involving intervention by Western institutions as well as their own governments which have been, to a great degree, corrupted by the resource curse. These unpleasant facts are, of course, never mentioned by the MSM because it might spark a flicker of moral compunction in the ‘developed’ world which has ended up with so much of Africa’s wealth in the form of rare earth minerals used inside electronic devices, gold and diamonds in jewelry, or petrol pumped into vehicles. The horrific realities behind conflict minerals are always kept out of sight and out of mind by the next consumer diversion.

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The following video is a brilliant lecture by Rob Wallace, evolutionary biologist and public health phylogeographer, discussing the epidemiologic links between the current Ebola outbreak and the socioeconomic policies of capitalist industrial civilization.

“Pathogens routinely trace society’s inequalities and expropriations like water traces cracks in ice… Ebola represents such a case. The shifts in land use in the Guinean region where the new strain apparently emerged are connected to the kinds of neoliberal structural adjustments that, alongside divesting public health infrastructure, open domestic food production to global circuits of capital… [The corporate agribusiness land acquisitions in Africa] are markers of a complex policy-driven faith change in agroecology…that undergirds Ebola’s emergence here.” ~ Rob Wallace

In biology there is a phenomenon known as the Allee effect which occurs when a species declines to a critical population threshold, becoming too spread out over a large area to find a mate for reproduction and thereby making a crash to extinction all but inevitable. The Allee effect applies to infectious diseases as well, and if you can knock down an outbreak below an infection threshold through such methods as vaccinations or proper sanitation, then the outbreak can burn out on its own. However, as Rob Wallace wryly states, “…structural problems can render emergency responses null and void, no matter how much Bill Gates pays out.” In other words, we may have destroyed the ecosystem’s natural ability to keep such pathogens in check and from expanding out of control in the future:

“…commoditizing the forest and neoliberal dispossession may have lowered the region’s ecosystemic threshold to a point that no emergency intervention can drive the pathogen population low enough to burn out on its own. The pathogen will continue to circulate with the potential to explode. In short, neoliberalism’s shifts aren’t just a background upon which such emergencies take place. It is the emergency as much as the virus itself. And history has demonstrated this time and again. Faith changes and social organization, for better and for worse, change epidemiologies. Domesticated livestock served as sources for human diphtheria, influenza, measles, mumps, plague, pertussis, rotavirus, tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, etc. Ecological changes brought about upon landscapes by human intervention selected for spill-overs of cholera from algae, malaria from birds, and dengue fever and yellow fever from wild primates… We can pretend otherwise for Ebola, but in protecting the rationals for institutions and policies that likely brought about such outbreaks, if as byproducts of a greater economy alone, we will surely only compound the problem. If not by Ebola this year, then perhaps something else next.”

In addition to the ecosystemic impact of industrial agriculture and global circuits of capital, our highly mobile society and the consequent climate disruption from fossil-fueled globalization have worked to propel the spread of invasive species, diseases, and pathogens:

Snap 2014-10-19 at 09.47.53

The following graph show the increase of invasive species since 1500 with an explosion in the last 100 years:

download

Overuse of antibiotics and lack of developing new antibiotics are also facilitating the mutation, spread, and rebirth of deadly pathogens across the globe. No new class of antibiotics has been discovered since the 1980’s.

Below is a chart showing the increase in bacterial resistance for selected pathogens. “For example, Staphylococcus aureus resistant to methicillin has increased almost 70% since about 1975.” The dawning of an antibiotic apocalypse is upon us:

Snap 2014-10-19 at 10.14.49

A new tv special entitled The Trouble with Antibiotics aired this past week (h/t reader PBM):

“FRONTLINE investigates the widespread use of antibiotics in food animals and whether it is fueling the growing crisis of antibiotic resistance in people. Plus an exclusive interview with the family of a young man who died in a superbug outbreak that swept through a hospital at the National Institutes of Health.”

Amplifying what some call peak antibiotics is the fact that in our capitalist economy, the perverse incentive for monetary profit discourages pharmaceutical companies from developing new antibiotics; there is no market for curing… only prolonging:

…Ebola emerged 40 years ago, and, Dr. Chan said, there were no vaccines or other remedies because it has traditionally been confined to poor African countries. A profit-driven pharmaceutical industry had no incentive to make products for countries that could not pay, she said.

The risks of neglecting health care in developing countries are global, Dr. Chan said, adding that “when a deadly and dreaded virus hits the destitute and spirals out of control, the whole world is put at risk.”… – link

The budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has also stagnated, leaving Dr. Francis Collins, head of the NIH, to admit that an Ebola vaccine would likely have been found by now if not for budget cuts:

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The fragmented and “crapified” nature of America’s for-profit healthcare system has also factored into the fumbled response to Ebola’s invasion into America, as Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism explained recently:

…the statistics say compared to other developed countries, US processes and outcomes are at best mediocre using the best of some admittedly flawed metrics (look here), yet our costs are much higher than those of comparable countries. Furthermore, on Health Care Renewal we have been connecting the dots among severe problems with cost, quality and access on one hand, and huge problems with concentration and abuse of power, enabled by leadership of health care organizations that is ill-informed, incompetent, unsympathetic or hostile to health care professionals’ values, self-interested, conflicted, dishonest, or even corrupt and governance that fails to foster transparency, accountability, ethics and honesty…

…The US health care system is now heavily commercialized. Health care corporations, including pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, are often lead by generic managers who subscribe to the business school dogma of the “shareholder value theory,” which seems to translate into putting short-term revenues ahead of all other goals. Thus they have been“financialized.”  At least in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector, such financialization appears to now be global…

…from 1983 to 2000, the number of managers working in the US health care system grew 726%, while the number of physicians grew 39%, so the manager/physician ratio went from roughly one to six to one to one (see 2005 post here). As we noted here, the growth continued, so there are now 10 managers for every US physician…

International institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) have also been “crapified’ under neoliberal ideology:

There is little wonder why the Ebola outbreak caught the WHO so flat footed as they spent months making mealy mouthed statements but never coordinating an effective response. The Gates foundation is the WHO boss, not governments, and if they weren’t demanding action, then the desperate people affected by Ebola weren’t going to get any…

…The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged an additional $50 million to fight the current Ebola epidemic but that too is problematic, as Director General Chan describes. “When there’s an event, we have money. Then after that, the money stops coming in, then all the staff you recruited to do the response, you have to terminate their contracts.” The WHO should not be lurching from crisis to crisis, SARS, MERS, or H1N1 influenza based on the whims of philanthropy. The principles of public health should be carried out by knowledgeable medical professionals who are not dependent upon rich people for their jobs.

The Gates are not alone in using their deep pockets to confound what should be publicly held responsibilities. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was contributing $25 million to fight Ebola. His donation will go to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation. Most Americans are probably unaware that such a foundation even exists. Yet there it is, run by a mostly corporate board which will inevitably interfere with the public good…

Essentially, both ISIS and the Ebola pandemic are crises of the corporate state’s own making. Vast sums of money have flowed into America’s war machine to fight the terrorist threat of ISIS, yet the specter of a global pandemic has elicited a much more belated and tepid reaction from the leaders of our brave new privatized and financialized system of government. As with climate change, it has become clear once again that the health of the world and its people cannot be trusted with these adherents of neoliberal capitalism, and as I stated in a previous blog post, the conspiracy is systemic and legalized. The virus of capitalist industrial civilization appears to be on an unstoppable trajectory of burning itself out within our children’s lifetime.

“It was a nice run for the biosphere, but it finally came down with a lethal disease, homeostasis lost, the pyramid of life reduced to the pancake of life.” ~ James

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Bearing Witness

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, American Empire, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Kenn Orphan, Neoliberal Capitalism

The Tree of Death.jpg
Championing the rapacious conversion of the Earth into dead commodities and its peoples into soulless consumers, the adherents of capitalism have succeeded in entrenching their ideology into the minds of the vast populations as the only viable economic system and way of life. Mesmerized by the electronic gadgetry of the digital age and singing the praises of the “free market”, atomized citizens blissfully hack away at the tree of life that supports them. The bio-destructive power of capitalist industrial civilization stamps out the poetry of nature, silencing entire ecosystems. This essay by Kenn Orphan describes the mindless march towards self-destruction and the redemption that comes by bearing witness to it.

Kenn Orphan

Jonathon Blair - Copy

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” – Carl Sagan

We are all witnesses to the Great Dying, a sixth mass extinction, the last one being 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs. This is not hyperbole; it is a defining feature of our age.

Countless species are falling prey to the wealthy’s indifference, militarism and folly everyday. As in ancient civilizations, the wealthy and the privileged are generally the last to feel the pain of collapse, yet are most often the root cause. And compared to the mass of humanity we share this planet with, and as a result of rapacious exploitation and plunder, Americans, and westerners in general, are the wealthy and the privileged of modern civilization.

Despite overwhelming evidence of crashing ecosystems, many of us living in the twilight years of the American empire seem oblivious to the canaries in the coal mine. Every…

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This Way Out

06 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by darbikrash in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire

≈ 100 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Neoliberal Capitalism, Professor Peter Hudis, Regulatory Capture

Who’s got a hand on the crackdown?
Who’s got the word on the double talk?
Hands on the wheel in a flash of steel
We got a secret letter with a government seal
……
Nerves are pinched but the heads are calm
The cargo’s all loaded and the red light’s on
Check the map, you navigator sap
Or we’ll all end up with our heads in our lap

Only with capitalism does commodity exchange become the universal source of social interaction through the commodification of labor power, value then becomes the defining principle of social reproduction.

There are many criticisms against Capitalism, but not much in the way of concrete alternatives. I’ve just finished reading Professor Peter Hudis’ book “The Alternative to Capitalism”, and while he does not offer much specificity in the way of concrete alternatives, he does offer a useful and provocative analysis of Marx’s theories pertaining to what might come next. The book is unique in that it distills down and interprets thousands of pages of Marx’s writing into a handful of useful conclusions that illustrate what Marx envisioned in a post Capitalist society.

Below is a recent podcast in which Professor Hudis is interviewed, and this gives a quick overview of the concepts and conclusions of his vision of a post Capitalist society.

http://fromalpha2omega.podomatic.com/entry/2014-08-16T14_40_49-07_00

The central argument in Hudis’ reading of Marx is that any Post Capitalist society that is to succeed must at first recognize, then dismantle, the system of value production. This differs significantly from conventional anti-capitalist thinking which suggests that the capitalist mode of production and the system of private property ownership are principally responsible for the contradictions and subsequent failures in Capitalism.

Additionally, he points out that Marx expressly disagreed with the popularized notion that to achieve this, the ownership of the means of production must transfer to the State. Marx was very clear that ownership of the means of production must not belong to the Capitalist, nor the State, rather, to those in the involved with the actual production process.

Hudis suggests that these palliative measures are not only misplaced, but wrong.

To dive further into what is being said here, some discussion of the meaning of the phrase value production is in order.

Value production in a capitalist society means that all social relations are governed by the drive to augment and increase value, with no regard for human needs or capacities.

This suggests (and Hudis does a good supporting his thesis with an academically rigorous approach in his book) that the essence of the perpetually expanding nature of Capital, the expansion that consumes resources and poisons the planet, stems from this fundamental conclusion.

Value is not material wealth, it is wealth computed in terms of money. As Hudis points out, once such a system of value production becomes the dominant form of social relations, the drive to constantly increase value becomes unstoppable.

Drilling deeper into the construct of value production, what comes forward is that one of the key contributors to this unstoppable force is the notion of socially necessary labor time. On this subject, it becomes evident that not even the Capitalists themselves have control of the system, as even they are not able to manage the forces that control production. Time becomes inverted, the predicate becomes the subject, and the whole process leads to the incredulous discovery that the products we produce control all of human relations.

And it was always supposed to be the other way around.

The concept of socially necessary labor time dictates several key factors, principally, that goods are produced in accordance with average labor inputs, and any production labor in excess of the social average is wasted and deemed not useful. This means that Capitalists that engage in production are not in control of their exchange values, this is communicated by the market and discovered when goods reach the point of sale. It is then that the Capitalist determines if his goods are competitively priced, and if he can monetize his exchange value. If another firm has produced the same commodity using less labor (or cheaper labor) at the same quality, then the original capitalist will not be able to monetize his surplus value.

This uncertainty, coupled with the intrinsic self expansive nature of Capital, sets into motion a destructive and unstoppable cycle of ever decreasing inputs of labor time.

Time, in the pursuit of commodity production, becomes our master, we work longer, faster, to achieve the same standard of living.

These factors were not present in pre-capitalist societies. And Hudis argues that they cannot be present in any post Capitalist society either. These conditions of value production in general, and of socially necessary labor time in particular are unique to Capitalism.

We see in the news today disturbing events, loss of personal liberties, privacy issues, destruction of the planet and wanton disregard for resource depletion- it is hard to know which bogey to fear first and foremost.

Most disturbing to me is the almost footnoted mention in the news media of the egregious tax avoidance strategies being employed by large multi-nationals. Companies like Tesla are now dictating terms and conditions which they will require to build production factories in a specific state. They are in effect competitively bidding individual states against each other to maximize the tax deferments and various other concessions as a condition of doing business.

Tesla has negotiated approximately $1.25 Bn dollars worth of concessions, and some analysts are claiming the return on investment for the number of jobs created is a fiction.

Additionally, these tactics are by no means limited to inside the US, there is a battle royale raging in countries like Ireland, where Apple has effectively negotiated terms that reduce their effective tax liabilities to around 2%. By their own admission, there is ‘no scientific or numerical basis’ for their arguments, meaning they just drove the best bargain they thought they could get away with, and Ireland signed up- not wanting to risk the ~6,000 jobs that Apple has in Cork County.

While many are content to lament the State’s complicity in the machinations of Capital, these events indicate something new and much more dangerous- Capital is now overtly dictating terms to the State and holding monopoly power over the State to insure conditions of production that are favorable to Capital. Again, the predicate becomes the subject, as we see an inversion of the production relations. This is very dangerous.

Next we can envision corporate sanctioned labor camps for those deemed unemployable, subsuming the State unemployment programs with privatized “camps” as an extension of the massive prison system- with better wall colors and more frequent conjugal visits.

Social relations will be transformed to support only matters of production relations, education further diluted to rote training farms, subsidized and wholly captured by the large multi-nationals, and hard wired to provide curriculum and performance standards beholden only to their interests.

The hand maidens of Capital have successfully employed an “Arsonists in Fire Chief Hats” strategy wherein they have systematically dismantled any regulatory components of the State, and then cry foul when the hobbled remains proves ineffective at its intended role.

The only logical conclusion in this outcome is of course further privatization, drowning government in the proverbial bathtub so that Capital may advance beyond its perch as owner of all assets into its newly expanded role as owner of all labor.

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American Empire: Reaping What It Has Sown in Latin America

24 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution

≈ 78 Comments

Tags

American Empire, CAFTA, Capitalism, CARSI (Central America Regional Security Initiative), Climate Change, Climate Refugees, Coffee Rust Fungus, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Financial Elite, Globalization, Hemileia vastatrix, Inverted Totalitarianism, Maquiladoras, Militarization of Society, Military Industrial Complex, NAFTA, Narcotrafficking, Neoliberal Capitalism, School of the Americas, The Drug War, The Immigration Crisis, US Intervention in Latin America, William Blum, Zapatista

BeFunky_null_3.jpg

The Blood-Soaked Foreign Policy of the U.S.

Citizens of the First World live in ignorance of their country’s violent imperialistic history. As Joe Bageant said, “Americans are cultivated like mushrooms from birth to death, kept in the dark and fed horseshit.” Nonetheless, the average pleb in America should realize by now that they too will be treated no different from those in the Third World exploited by empire. As illustrated by a recent study, U.S. citizens are mere cardboard cutouts in a façade of democracy with essentially no voice in their government’s actions. The wealthy elite call the shots, determining crucial government policy and the law of the land. When all the propaganda and myths are swept aside, America is revealed to be nothing more than a heartless oligarchy; you and I are simply marketing statistics and consumers, pawns and cogs within capitalist industrial civilization.

Empires weave their own self-serving and grandiose history while the vanquished are left to struggle for survival in the wreckage. A case in point is America’s current immigration crisis and its superficial analysis by the mainstream media which serves only to stoke racial fears amongst the ignorant masses while ignoring uncomfortable and disturbing root causes. The harsh reality is that America has a long history of carrying out covert and overt operations as well as instituting economic policies designed to exploit South and Central America, not to mention much of the rest of the world. One recent example was the 2009 coup of populist left-wing Honduran president Manuel Zelaya by elite military forces trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. Consider the following timeline of American intervention in Latin America since the 1950’s:

Snap 2014-07-22 at 12.27.32

‘Free Trade’ for Corporations and Misery for Local Populations

Now consider the trade deals of NAFTA, CAFTA, and other “free trade” globalization schemes which have flooded our southern neighbors with cheap, subsidized produce from U.S. Big AG, decimating small farms and pushing millions off their land and into extreme destitution:

As part of neoliberal restructuring, Mexico would have to re-orientate its economy to the export rather than the domestic market. Mexico was already heavily dependent on trade with the US, but post-1982, Mexico’s dependency has become almost akin to that of a colony. US agricultural products – most notably corn – subsidised by American taxpayers now flooded the Mexican market, undercutting small domestic producers. For Mexican farmers the consequences have been ruinous and have devastated domestic production, a process which continues under the recent government of the National Action Party (PAN)…

…From the implementation of NAFTA in 1994 to 2000, 2 million farmers abandoned their lands. Fewer Mexicans now have access to health care and education than prior to 1980 as public spending has been cut as a result of ‘reforms’. By 2005 50 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line, pushing some 3.3 million children under the age of 14 into work. Following the government’s agreement to exchange investment rights and trade barriers for loans and financial aid, Mexicans saw huge changes in their circumstances, such that by 1988 the cost of living had risen by 90 percent, while per capita income had fallen by some 50 percent. With the abandonment of social programmes, which alleviated at least some of the worst hardships, many communities in Mexico, with little or almost no help from the state, have had to fend for themselves…

…Much farming has since been replaced by agribusiness and large-scale meat farms, mostly foreign-owned. In recent years, widespread unemployment and the inability of farmers to gain an income from the land have meant that rural towns are being emptied of their inhabitants, leading to a tremendous population drain to the cities and the United States…Impoverished Mexican workers – employed primarily because they are cheaper to exploit than their US and Canadian counterparts – work to produce commodities which have no tangible benefit for their own society…

…The improved leverage of US power over Mexico’s economy is not solely an issue of having a workforce so ‘flexible’ that much of it is forced into sweatshop labour. The maquiladora belt functions effectively as an economic colony, with the local Mexican police, paid for by the Mexican taxpayer, providing the ‘security’ necessary for factories to operate unhindered by nuisance unions and human rights activists.

One of Mexico’s chief exports, then, is labour. Just as profits and goods leave the country, significant amounts of labour time are not reflected in the Mexican economy. Corporations benefit enormously from this win-win situation resulting in the continuing breakdown of society, a state of affairs reminiscent of a colonial economy, albeit without foreign control of what in any case is a pliant government. As a result, Mexican workers in the maquiladoras, notes Delgado-Wise, are little more than ‘manpower for foreign capital’.

While many of the poor seek work in factories owned by foreign companies or quit the countryside for work in the expanding metropolises, others cross into the US. If significant swathes of the arable land of northern Mexico are emptying, this is a trend connected intimately with free trade… – link

Snap 2014-07-24 at 10.26.53

Militarizing the ‘Drug War’ and Arming Fascist Governments

So after destroying the means of survival for so many in Latin America, the poor and destitute turn to whatever means necessary in order to stay alive — crime, gangs, and the drug trade. The U.S. has reacted to this lawlessness by militarizing the “war on drugs”, providing even more weaponry and support to fascist governments who can then brutally squash any grassroots social movements which challenge the neoliberal capitalist order. It’s a vicious feedback loop in which the U.S. is forced to combat the very social disintegration of Latin America that U.S. economic policy has created. Thus, a fourth factor in America’s immigration crisis is the neocon militarization of the drug war and support of fascist governments aligned with U.S. corporate interests:

Narcotrafficking, like neoliberal capitalism, it seems, thrives in areas of severe poverty and unemployment where the civilian population is economically and politically disempowered and where state authorities are not powerful or willing enough to prevent the violent conflicts that narcotrafficking has produced. Additionally, for those who now have few opportunities in the traditional and legal sectors of the economy, narcotrafficking proves to be the only lucrative alternative…

…Civil society found itself vulnerable, impoverished and unable to rebuild the damaged and broken social services and infrastructure demolished by structural adjustment and neoliberal policy. Furthermore, the power and influence of the state have weakened in the last two and a half decades to the extent that in some areas drug traffickers operate quite freely and are immune to prosecution…

…With the authorities weakened, the line between the state and the narcotics industry is becoming increasingly blurred. A United Nations report estimated that between 50 and 60 percent of Mexican municipal government offices have been ‘captured or feudalised’ and coopted by narcotrafficking organisations. Mexican intelligence estimates that 62 percent of the Mexican police are presently under the control of the narco trade. According to rank and effectiveness, members of the police forces can receive anywhere between 5 to 70 thousand pesos monthly from cartels, a dramatic net increase on their state salaries. Of the 2.9 million arms given to the Mexican police forces, 57 percent are used in illicit activities.

Human Rights Watch reports that the military, in its purported struggle against the narcos, commits serious abuses against the civilian population, exposing its role rather as an institution of internal colonisation than one protecting society from violence. The same Mexican soldiers – potentially a force which could combat trafficking – are now deserting on a mass scale. Poor working conditions and pay led 217,000 Mexican soldiers to desert between 1993 and 2009. Among them, many leave the army to join the cartels and take their arms with them. One of the most powerful factions, the mercenary army, Los Zetas, was formed by deserters from an elite anti-drug squad of the Mexican army, taking with them their arms and training. Their sophisticated and professional tactics were developed, ironically, from training in the US by the DEA, the FBI and the US military in the war on drugs…

…Historian Miguel Tinker Salas has noted that in the case of Plan Colombia, military spending was intended to crush the strength of rural insurgents and guerrillas to offset the possibility of a popular rebellion, particularly as Colombia had among the worst levels of inequality in Latin America. In Mexico, maintaining a status quo which sees unprecedented levels of inequality and widespread poverty – exacerbated since the 1980s – is likely to involve the increasing use of force in order to quash the threat to the established order posed by social movements and popular revolt, all the more real as Mexico inches closer to collapse. Increasing attacks on organisers and activists of the anti-capitalist Zapatista initiative, La otra campaña, in Chiapas and the prolonged assault on inhabitants of Oaxaca in 2006 remind us that the state will always use military might to repress challenges to its authority and to the socio-economic order. US training of the Mexican military should be viewed in this light, bearing in mind that imperialism has two arms in Latin America – one military, the other economic.

Increasing poverty levels hardly seem to be a top priority for the leaders of the NAFTA signatories. For it is a state of affairs which benefits elites who have no interest in seeing ordinary Mexicans rise from poverty. Vast gaps between rich and poor may seem inexplicably cruel to outside observers, but within is a logic of which NAFTA was a clear expression. Rendering the population more desperate, reducing services and public spending, aggravating society’s vulnerability, rewards the powerful with greater political and economic dominance… – link

snap-2014-07-23-at-16-44-27

Climate Change and the Coffee Rust Fungus

A fourth factor not discussed much is how climate change is wreaking havoc on the major South American crop of coffee which many rely upon for their livelihood and is the second most traded commodity in the world after oil. Coffee rust, known as “roya” in Spanish, first appeared in the region in the 1970s when climate change began to cause higher temperatures and excess rainfall favorable to the moisture-loving fungus. It has since mutated and spread throughout the region. Resistant coffee hybrids that scientists have created can’t keep up with the fast mutating rust fungus which seems to be growing stronger as climate change accelerates. For the past two years, the rust fungus called Hemileia vastatrix has destroyed 30% or more of the coffee harvest in Central America where coffee production employes one-third or more of the population in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua :

All the coffee-producing countries of Central America have seen drops in production of 30% or more in each of the past two years. Some, such as Guatemala, report rising cases of chronic malnutrition in coffee workers’ children. Last week Oxfam cited coffee among other crops in a report that warned climate change was putting back the global fight against hunger “by decades”.

Nicaragua’s problem is particularly acute. Along with neighbouring Honduras, and Burma, it is already one of the three countries most affected by climate change, according to the 2013 Global Climate Risk Index. Nearly a third of its working population, about 750,000 people, depend on coffee directly or indirectly for a living. Coffee provides 20% of GDP. The Nicaraguan government is deeply worried: it has predicted that, because of falling rainfall and rising temperatures, by 2050 80% of its current coffee growing areas will no longer be usable.

This will mean disaster…

Snap 2014-07-24 at 12.38.08

Warmer temperatures are also threatening a genetically diverse type of coffee called Arabica which is considered essential to the industry and comprises 70% of global coffee production. According to a recent study, by 2080 global warming will make two-thirds of today’s farms too hot to grow Arabica.

The three countries making up the largest percentage of child migrants that have been flooding the U.S. in recent times are Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. These three countries also happen to be closely allied with the U.S. and its neo-liberal economic model. Nicaragua is an exception to its neighbors. Despite suffering similar losses to its coffee crop from rust fingus, Nicaraguan farmers did not fare as badly because they were supported by the programs of their socialist government, an anathema to America’s ruling oligarchs and neoliberal politicians:

In sharp contrast, Nicaragua, an equally poor country that receives far less U.S. aid because of our government’s hostility toward the Sandinistas, sends far fewer children across the U.S. border. Why? Since coming back into power in 2006, the Sandinistas have enacted strong programs designed to allow the poor to become self-sufficient.

The Immigration Issue: Red Meat for the American Masses

The only way to actually fix the immigration crisis is to address the root causes I have identified above. The response to date from the U.S. government has been to request billions in detention center and deportation funds, launch a PR campaign in the media of Central American countries to dissuade illegal immigration, and increase spending in law enforcement aid through CARSI (Central America Regional Security Initiative). Meanwhile, right-wing politicians fan the flames of racism and xenophobia with calls for militarizing the border to stop the hoards of swarthy barbarians at America’s doorstep. In reality, the current deteriorating social conditions in Central and South America are a direct result of the American corporatocracy and its rapacious economic system as well as anthropogenic climate disruption. The child migrants flooding across America’s border are, to a great degree, victims of U.S. foreign policy and climate change.

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The Dull Static

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by td0s in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

≈ 172 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dark Mountain Project, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Mass Die Off, Mike Ruppert, Neoliberal Capitalism, Paul Kingsnorth, Peak Oil, Uncivilization

Originally posted at: Prayforcalamity.com


The flowering dogwoods are in bloom. Along the country lanes, the pink petals have already exploded into ephemeral radiance and begun to wither and fall from the branches of the Jane Magnolia trees. For me this means no longer having the agonizing luxury of hours to sit and write. After six months of bi-weekly essays, I feel I have expressed much of what had become balled up and cluttered in my mind, and now it is time to ruminate in the garden once again.

I named this blog, “Pray for Calamity,” because there are several major crises converging which threaten human civilization, and there are no existing structures capable of mitigating them. Democracy, capitalism, neo-liberal globalization; they are all incapable of undertaking the work necessary to avert cataclysm. The paradigms of thought and approach which are almost hardwired into the modern mind at this point, need to be scrubbed. Of the remaining, solvable ecological crises, which may not include climate change, there is no tool available to attend to them that comes from the conventional tool box of legal, lawful pursuit. These ecological crises, which range from topsoil depletion to tree extinctions to massive die off of oceanic life, cannot be remedied without a fundamental shift in the thinking of the people in the civilized world. If people do not begin to perceive the world as a living entity, interconnected, conscious, and with intrinsic value beyond how it can be carved up and sold, then it is only a matter of time until the human race begins to suffer on a massive scale due to their callous disregard for the other beings with whom they share this planet.

And then there are the political and economic and resource depletion crises as well.

Changing our minds, changing how we think, is physically speaking one of the easiest things we can do. However, when our egos and our identities are wholly interwoven with an idea or an ideology, changing our way of thinking and discarding the old ideas, can be the hardest thing we are asked to undertake. If our physical reality changes, this can create a rip in the threads that stitch our view of ourselves with a dogma or a paradigm. So I await calamity because the egos of the civilized have hardened their hearts and deafened their ears, and until those in the first world middle class feel the gnawing pain of persistent hunger and the fear of deafening uncertainty, they will refuse to consider that maybe everything they have been taught to believe about themselves and their collective destiny, is abjectly wrong.

—

“We’re many generations overdue for a revolution, in our thinking. I’m not talking about blood and violence although I’m afraid thats already happened. I’m talking about a revolution that’s probably the hardest kind, the kind that takes place within the human soul and the human mind. To be able to tear everything down, throw everything out, and start with a completely fresh piece of paper and say, ‘OK, how do we solve this problem?’”

Mike Ruppert said that in the documentary “Collapse.” While by no means a perfect man, Mike was a good person, and did his best to tell the truth as he knew it. He shot himself two weeks ago. He left many insights like this one as gifts for us.

People who become aware of the depth of the problems facing humanity at this juncture in time, often seek answers. They want to know what we need to do. Some suggest we need a revolution. Some suggest we need to take to the hills and hide on personal homesteads, to perhaps form communities of these homesteads and just hold on white knuckled through the bottle neck of collapse. Then there is Paul Kingsnorth of the Dark Mountain Project, who speaks of the difference between problems which are to be solved, and predicaments which are to be endured.

“What do you do,” he asked, “when you accept that all of these changes are coming, things that you value are going to be lost, things that make you unhappy are going to happen, things that you wanted to achieve you can’t achieve, but you still have to live with it, and there’s still beauty, and there’s still meaning, and there are still things you can do to make the world less bad? And that’s not a series of questions that have any answers other than people’s personal answers to them. Selfishly it’s just a process I’m going through.” He laughed. “It’s extremely narcissistic of me. Rather than just having a personal crisis, I’ve said: ‘Hey! Come share my crisis with me!’

Kingsnorth was recently interviewed by the New York Times. As a long time environmental activist who years ago lost faith that there is much we can do to “save the planet,” he decries the false hope sold by mainstream environmentalist groups. With friend Dougald Hine, Kingsnorth wrote the “Uncivilization” manifesto, on which The New York Times writes:

“Uncivilization” was firm in its conviction that climate change and other ecological crises are predicaments, and it called for a cadre of like-minded writers to “challenge the stories which underpin our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality and the myth of separation from ‘nature.’ ”

On this matter I think Kingsnorth and Hine are right on the mark. We will never weather the predicaments before us, let alone solve what problems remain solvable, if we refuse to take an honest look at who we are, where we are, and just what the hell we are doing. I think this is a meditation that would benefit revolutionaries and those hiding in the hills alike. We must ask if civilization is something we are even interested in continuing. We must ask what it is we value most and whether or not the lifestyles we are cordoned into are even in line with those values. We must ask what it means to be human. And if we are to trust any of our conclusions, we must first find a way to step outside of everything our culture has programmed us to believe.

—

Civilization is a power structure. It is a rejection of natural law in favor of the control of those high on social hierarchies. Civilization is the domestication of nature and people alike. It is the creation of a once regional, now global farm where the multitudes of humans are livestock, restricted by the borders of various owners, and subjugated and exploited for the extraction of the surplus values generated by their labor. Non human life forms and entire ecosystems are subjugated likewise, and as this control apparatus is now world wide and hell bent on growing in scale year over year, life itself is at risk. Simultaneously, this architecture of domestication and control has blunted the souls of the humans it dominates, and like house pets, the great many people have been declawed and broken. This is the existential portion of the crisis we face. The meaninglessness of life on the inside. The dull static of the best case scenario, where those in the first world yearn for the life of tepid, safe predictability offered by the owner class, should only one produce enough without question or complaint. We are a wretched bunch who fetishize our oppressors and spew vitriol at insurrectionaries who would in trying to shake us loose even for a moment, dare make us late for work.

Navigating circumstances beyond our control in which masters are hostile to us, constantly maneuvering to exert more control over our lives as well as to extract more value from us even in our imprisonment or death; most people are surviving, not thriving. Merely jockeying through a preset condition of work and fee schedules has muted the potential of our species. What has been throttled cannot be measured in discoveries or inventions, but in the satisfaction of individuals and communities to thrive on their own terms. To be fully actualized and autonomous creatures. To witness the assembly line life of modern man is to suffer a snuff film.

If we are to rescue our own hearts and our minds, if we are to save the last embers of burning wildness in our souls and to break the tethers that bind our thinking to suicidal paradigms, then we must uncivilize. Like Buck in “The Call of the Wild,” we must seek to undomesticate ourselves, no only to survive the realities of the world into which we are being thrust, but because to be a house mutt lying bored at master’s feet is to barely exist at all.

—

So what does any of this really mean? What are the steps, the actions to undertake which will align the force of our arms with the rhythms of our hearts? Do we fight or do we flee? Or do we stand upon the hill and bear witness until the fire consumes us? Or is there perhaps some combination of all; a time for rebellion, a time to tend our gardens, and a time to merely sit and say goodbye?

Certainly, if people seek a recipe for action that can maintain society in a form even remotely similar to its present incarnation, then I offer nothing. If what people desire is a map of the future from which plans can be derived and survival assured, I have none. I think maybe it is time to give up on maps. Maybe it is time to just be in the territory for a while. Maybe it is time to give up on human words and to leave the electronic buzz of the internet and to set foot on soil and rock. If domestication is the product of being in the domicile, in the house, then perhaps what we need is to step outside. If the stories we have been told for generations have poisoned us; if these myths about the greatness of the lines on maps and the men who ruled those patchwork lines have only served to make us slaves to abstractions, engendering in us a self righteousness and a malice towards all that isn’t of our hands and seeding in us a fear of what lies outside comfortable walls, then perhaps it is time to go and to hear some different voices. To hear some new stories. Maybe, lost in the ballad of crowing frogs and moaning trees we can crumple up what is written before us and find a blank piece of paper, and on it we will write of our sadness and our fear. We will admit our weakness in the face of all that we have made and we will scratch out our apologies and our gratitude.

Then we will collect up everything that we think the future needs to be given, and we will carry it within us to barricades and to garden gates, to jail cells and to barn bays and to graves. We will find the fire that will make tomorrow worth struggling towards, in that dark, when we are bent and cold heaps of hungry, smoke smelling bone and sinew beneath taught and blackened skin. The madness of the world will grow raw, and real. Privation and awfulness will bloom, and we will endure it.

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Current Reality Vs. Utopian Visions of Technology and Wealth

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Brazilian Protests, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Refugees, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Libertarianism, Methane Time Bomb, Neoliberal Capitalism, Poverty, Privatization, Seasteading Institute, Social Unrest, Techno-Optimists, Technophiliacs, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

“No respect for nature, only a destructive, elitist,
machine-like attitude towards nature.” ~ Iamronen

 
More threatening than the recent milestone of reaching 400 parts per million CO2 (ppm) is that of a methane level reaching 1800 parts per billion (ppb) which occured on the morning of June 16, 2013. This is more than two and a half times the methane levels of pre-industrial times.

From a historic perspective, greenhouse gas levels have risen abruptly to unprecedented levels. While already at a historic peak, humans have caused emissions of additional greenhouse gases. There’s no doubt that such greenhouse gas levels will lead to huge rises in temperatures. The question is how long it will take for temperatures to catch up and rise. – source

Robert Scribbler also reports that a persistently stagnant(blocked) and bulging Jet Stream has delivered historic heat waves to that region of Alaska and the Arctic. Melt ponds can be seen from satellite images:

…Yesterday, temperatures in Prince William Sound hit upwards of 93 degrees. Communities there, including Valdez and Cordova, both set new record highs. Talkeetna hit 94 degrees, also an all-time record high for the date. Meanwhile, Seward hit a new record of 88 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures in the interior rose to between the mid 80s and lower 90s.

This pulse of heat was driven by a persistent bulge in the Jet Stream over the Pacific Ocean, the Western United States, and the Pacific Northwest that has been present since mid winter. The bulge has resulted in warmer than normal temperatures and drier conditions for much of the Western US while keeping temperatures warm for western Canada and Alaska. It is a blocking pattern implicated in the ongoing drought conditions in places from Colorado to Nevada and California. A pattern which sees 44% of the US still locked in drought.

Sunday and Monday, this blocking pattern enabled warm air to flood north into Alaska, setting off a record heatwave there. You may not think of 50 and 60 degree temperatures in Barrow, Alaska as a heatwave. But when average highs for June there are about 38 degrees, 50 and 60 degree weather is quite hot for this time of year…

Last month it was reported that America will ‘officially’ see its own first climate refugees within the next four years:

image[5]

The 350 residents of Newtok, Alaska, will soon be the country’s first “climate refugees.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the village is likely to be underwater in just four years…

…”The snow comes in a different time now. The snow disappears way late,” says villager Nathan Tom. “That’s making the geese come at the wrong time. Now they’re starting to lay eggs when there’s still snow and ice. We can’t even travel and go pick them. It’s getting harder. It’s changing a lot.”…

…The U.S. Government Accountability Office has estimated that the cost of moving Newtok — with 63 homes — might reach $130 million. The people of Newtok do not have that kind of money, Goldenberg says.

“These people are living well below the average income of other Americans. They’re able to live that way because they hunt and fish for what they eat,” she says. “So they can’t all of a sudden go and build and pay for new houses on the other side.”

The money has not been forthcoming from the government either, Goldenberg says. Neither the state nor federal government recognizes climate change as a disaster for the appropriation of relief funds…

Contrast this stark reality with the wildly unrealistic views of man’s technological infallibility. A concept which appeared back in 2008 is the utopia of floating cities, called “Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees”, which would hold 50,000 climate refugees as the coasts become inundated with rising sea water. I wonder how well these things, if they even were feasible and the money, materials, and energy were available, would hold up to the kinds of hurricanes that climate chaos would throw at it. No doubt it would fold up and sink to the bottom of the ocean like a tin pan:

float 1 (2)
float 2

Actually, there is another idea similar to the one above which was/is being planned by a billionaire libertarian. I can’t think of a more elitist view towards the Earth and fellow humans than this libertarian wet dream:

Picture from the Seasteading Institute…

sea-steading-3

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”

“There are quite a lot of people who think it’s not possible,” Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009, according to Details. (His first donation was in 2008, for $500,000.) “That’s a good thing. We don’t need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don’t think it’s possible they won’t take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late…

As I said in my previous post, the über wealthy will try to insulate themselves from climate chaos, leaving the masses in their countries as climate refugees and victims of industrial civilization’s climate disaster. And the shit rolls downhill; third world countries and the poor will bear the brunt of it all. As you can see from the first part of this post, Native Americans in Alaska, some of America’s most disenfranchised and poverty-stricken citizens, will be the first to be flushed down the toilet of neoliberal capitalism. Perhaps we should take note of current events in Brazil.

image[5]

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Reading the Tea Leaves (or Mega Billboards for the More Acutely Aware)

15 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

ASPO-USA, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Collapse of Mexico's Cantrell Oil Fields, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Evan D.G. Fraser's 'Empires of Food', Gail Tverberg, Guy McPherson, Jay Hanson of DieOff.org, Mass Die Off, Nate Hagens, Neoliberal Capitalism, Peak Oil

Excellent summary by Jay Hanson(America 2.0) on a new report covering the peak net energy situation in America:

Untitled 14

That’s interesting that 2015 is pegged as the time when maximum U.S. production will occur from our present drilling binge. That’s the same year mentioned in this report:

US military warns oil output may dip causing massive shortages by 2015

And Nate Hagens mentioned in my previous post that in 2015 Mexico would become an importer of oil due to the precipitous drop in production of their once great Cantrell oil fields.

Craftier, but apparently no wiser than yeast, the human species will follow the same path of other biota in the well-worn process of overshoot and collapse. Gail Tverberg explains:

Untitled 1tt

As far as future scenarios are concerned, I thought the following exchange was telling:

Snap 2013-05-14 at 23.25.12

Some believe that a near-term financial crash will prevent the further catastrophic burning of fossil fuels. I think that just the opposite will occur. The financial system will be kept artificially propped up and industrial civilization will indeed burn as much fossil fuels as it can lay its hands on… until climate chaos wreaks havoc on our ability to mass produce food. The money system can be manipulated to keep industrial civilization going until real world biophysical constraints come into play. With higher energy prices, the economy will be cannibalized to keep the whole fetid system chugging along, as it has since 1970 when neoliberal capitalism emerged. Yeast eats itself [autolysis] after using up available sugars, so why would humans behave differently after burning through our keystone resource?

This whole post reminds me of another article I read a few years ago which gave me chills. It’s no longer available at its original source, so I’ve reproduced it here:

Untitled 1yy

We think we have free will and the ability to forge the future, but from a biological systems perspective the human species appears to have no real control over its final fate. As Brutus said, “The future is the future is the future whether we subscribe to it or not.”

Untitled 1g

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Who really pulls the strings?:

The megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. The bought-and-paid politicians sitting in Washington are simply the marionettes of the corporations and financial elite who are dictating public policy and regulations.

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  • John McAdams - Top JFK Assassination Disinformationist - Dead At 75 April 19, 2021
  • Bimbo Boebert To Cancer Patients: You Ain't Worth Running Up The National Debt April 17, 2021

RSS Brave New World

  • Islam: The Overlooked Aspect of Rumi’s Poetry March 9, 2021
  • Remembering Nur ad-Din Zengi: The Light of Faith March 6, 2021
  • Francophobia Among Muslims: Just Another Myth? February 25, 2021
  • A Year in Kazakhstan: Some General Observations October 25, 2020

RSS Breaking the Set

  • Abby Martin Breaks the Set One Last Time February 28, 2015
  • Never Stop Breaking the Set! February 28, 2015
  • Cuba Part III: The Evolution of Revolution February 27, 2015
  • Cuba Part II: Ebola Solidarity & Castro’s Daughter on Gay Rights February 26, 2015
  • Why Are Americans Getting Their Medical Degrees in Cuba? February 26, 2015

RSS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  • Paradise altered: EPA approves first release of genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida Keys April 19, 2021
  • Join us for The Artificial Intelligence Era: What will the future look like? April 15, 2021
  • National Academies calls for a fusion pilot plant April 14, 2021

RSS Business Insider

  • Master Your Money Virtual Event: Personal finance professionals demystify credit and debt April 19, 2021
  • Inside Goldman Sachs' big wealth management and consumer banking push April 19, 2021
  • Amazon's 30 bestselling audiobooks right now, from Matthew McConaughey's new memoir to the cult-favorite "Atomic Habits" April 19, 2021
  • Coinbase could jump 21% due to growth in the 'cryptoeconomy' and buy in from institutional investors, CFRA says April 19, 2021
  • Mike Lindell says his company MyPillow is suing Dominion for $1.6 billion April 19, 2021
  • A Republican House member bought dogecoin, and is already sitting on gains of thousands of dollars April 19, 2021
  • Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett gets $2 million advance for a book deal, according to new report April 19, 2021
  • GameStop shares jump 12% as the company announces CEO George Sherman will step down in 3 months or sooner April 19, 2021
  • A Tesla crash killed two people in Texas. Authorities say nobody was driving - and the fire took 32,000 gallons of water to extinguish April 19, 2021
  • Florida Gov. DeSantis signs 'anti-riot' bill that grants civil immunity to drivers who hit protestors and protects police budgets from being cut April 19, 2021

RSS C-Realm

  • Automation and SJWs: A Conversation with James Howard Kunstler February 12, 2016
  • It's official. The Age of Limits gathering is on hiatus January 22, 2015
  • Three Conferences in Three Weeks June 13, 2014

RSS Cagle: Premium Cartoon News

  • Pandemic Planning center April 18, 2021
  • Top Ten Cartoons of the Week – April 18, 2021 April 18, 2021
  • Herd Stupidity April 18, 2021
  • Flood Gaetz April 18, 2021
  • Vladimir Putin and US sunction April 18, 2021
  • Turkish Sofagate April 18, 2021

RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

  • Cassandra is Dead. Long Live Cassandra! April 15, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect": The Collapse of Saudi Arabia's Water Supply April 12, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest Post on "The Seneca Effect" April 5, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's Latest post on "The Seneca Effect" April 1, 2021
  • Ugo Bardi's latest post on "The Seneca Effect" March 29, 2021

RSS Censored News

  • Journalism and the NO DAPL Movement: On Being Present and Censorship April 16, 2021
  • Facebooking While Brown: Indigenous Man in Arizona Imprisoned for Social Media 'Shock-Talk' about #BLM Protest April 16, 2021
  • Tribes from across U.S. testify in support of Oak Flat April 14, 2021

RSS Center For Biological Diversity

  • Judge Rules Against Federal Sheep Station Grazing in Idaho’s Centennial Mountains April 16, 2021
  • Lawsuit Filed to Obtain Protection for Rare Southern Nevada Wildflower, Bee April 16, 2021
  • New Study: Undisclosed Inert Ingredients in Some Popular Roundup Products Found to Be Highly Toxic to Bumblebees April 16, 2021

RSS Center for Investigative Journalism

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RSS Center for Economic & Policy Research

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RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

  • Entwicklung im Zeitalter der Ökologie October 30, 2018
  • Das Zeitalter, in dem wir einander brauchen November 20, 2017

RSS Chomsky

  • The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians June 9, 2013
  • Upcoming speaking event in Boston with Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Jeremy Scahill April 19, 2013

RSS Chris Hedges

  • Imagining A New World on the Other Side of the Pandemic March 20, 2020

RSS Class Warfare Blog

  • We Are All In This Together April 17, 2021
  • A Retitling of this Blog April 16, 2021

RSS Cliff Schecter

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RSS Climate and Capitalism

  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, April 2021 April 17, 2021
  • Indian monsoons becoming more chaotic April 14, 2021
  • The ocean is becoming more stable – and that’s not good news April 10, 2021
  • Carbon dioxide levels now at highest level in 3.6 million years April 8, 2021
  • Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism, Part 3 April 5, 2021
  • Tipping points confirmed for massive Antarctic glacier April 2, 2021

RSS Climate Central

  • Historic Harriet Tubman Sites at Risk of Rising Seas on Eastern Shore
  • Climate Change Threatens Homes of Boston’s Most Vulnerable
  • The Carbon Skyscraper
  • Miami Beach’s Housing Crisis Worsened By Climate Change

RSS Climate Change: The Next Generation

  • Amy Westerfelt: The Reason COVID-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation April 27, 2020
  • Bill McKibben's response to Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans April 24, 2020
  • WaPo: The Congo rain forest is losing ability to absorb carbon dioxide. That’s bad for climate change March 8, 2020

RSS Climate Citizen

  • Statement by John Englart on Synthetic Turf to Moreland Council April 15, 2021
  • Literature Review: Synthetic Turf carbon footprint, environmental, health, microplastics and biodiversity impacts April 15, 2021
  • Annotated Bibliography: Synthetic Turf and Climate, health, biodiversity and microplastics pollution issues April 15, 2021

RSS Climate Code Red

  • Net zero emissions must be reached before 2030 for 2°C target, new analysis says April 13, 2021
  • Zero by 2050 or 2030? 1.5°C or 2°C? Overshoot or not? Demystifying carbon budgets. March 2, 2021
  • Matters of fact that we ignore at our peril February 7, 2021

RSS Climate Connections

  • Climate Connections Update February 5, 2015
  • CIC’s environmental and social justice photography contest open for entries January 9, 2015
  • FBI Harassing Activists in Pacific Northwest January 7, 2015

RSS Climate Denial Crock of the Week

  • Investors Fleeing..Is Gas the New Coal? April 19, 2021
  • Can We Do 50×30 ? April 19, 2021
  • Capping Orphan Oil/Gas Wells a Mammoth Challenge April 18, 2021

RSS Climate Progress

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RSS Climate Snapshot

  • "Carbon tsunami" lead by Enbridge Northern Gateway takes aim at BC June 18, 2014
  • BC's tar sands? Thirteen proposed LNG projects equivalent to 13 times current BC emissions June 9, 2014
  • Car Carbon series: cool new animation, plus the jaw-dropping impact it left out May 13, 2014
  • Climate change fuels both California's record drought and "polar vortex" storms May 6, 2014

RSS ClimateSight

  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia (Part 2) March 23, 2021
  • Let’s hear more from the women who leave academia. March 11, 2021
  • Talking, typing, and the social model of disability July 22, 2020

RSS Club Orlov

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RSS ClusterFuck Nation

  • The Movie Follows the Script April 19, 2021
  • Joe Biden’s Demonic Phase April 16, 2021

RSS Cocktailhag – FDL

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RSS Colin Tudge

  • Let's not bet the farm | Colin Tudge April 3, 2013
  • Why the world needs a renaissance of small farming | Colin Tudge September 18, 2012

RSS Common Dreams: News

  • Global Covid Cases Soar to 'Absolutely Staggering' Weekly Record Amid Vaccine Apartheid April 19, 2021
  • Progressives Fume as Democrats Eye Smaller Corporate Tax Hike to Appease Centrists April 19, 2021
  • Climate Activists Put 'All Eyes on BlackRock' With Protests Demanding Shareholder Action April 18, 2021
  • Covid-19 Death Toll Tops 3 Million, Bolstering Call for #PeoplesVaccine April 18, 2021
  • Youth Demand US Action on Climate-Induced Loss and Damage in Global South April 18, 2021

RSS Consortium News

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RSS Consumer Energy Report

  • Notice: New R-Squared Is rrapier.com June 3, 2017
  • Contact Information And Blog Migration Update May 19, 2017
  • Guest Post: Offshore Wind Power Cost Update April 20, 2017
  • The Peak Oil Estimate You Won’t Believe: A Tale Of Two Sigmoids March 28, 2017

RSS Corp Watch

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RSS CorrenteWire

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RSS CorrenteWire – Quick Hits

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RSS Counter Currents

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RSS CounterPunch

  • Advanced Nuclear Dreaming in Washington State April 19, 2021
  • Putting the Debt in Context April 19, 2021
  • Why Xinjiang is Emerging as the Epicenter of the U.S. Cold War on China April 19, 2021
  • Renegotiating JCPOA: Biden, Europe and Iran April 19, 2021
  • The Spread of Global Hate April 19, 2021
  • Exiting Afghanistan: Biden Sets the Date April 19, 2021
  • Daunte Wright’s Killing Makes the Case for Shrinking Police Budgets April 19, 2021
  • U.S. Joins Past Empires In Afghan Graveyard April 19, 2021
  • Ruralist Lament: Afghanistan, 20 Years On April 19, 2021
  • Have Republicans Finally Gone Too Far, Even for Corporate America? April 19, 2021

RSS Crooked Timber

  • Sunday photoblogging: car reflections April 18, 2021
  • Generational replacement and the leftward shift of the Democrats April 17, 2021
  • Testing the Tebbit Test April 16, 2021
  • Zarathustra – Columnar Emersonian or Divine Hanswurst? April 14, 2021

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene Moves To Expel Maxine Waters From Congress April 19, 2021
  • In Her A.M. Debut, Brianna Keilar Brings Sharp Attack On Fox Chyrons April 19, 2021
  • Last Week Tonight: We Need Bankruptcy Reform And We Won't Get It April 19, 2021
  • Florida Ferris Wheel Operator Gets A Beating After Assaulting Black Mom April 19, 2021

RSS Cryptome

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RSS Culture Change

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RSS Dahr Jamail

  • Living in a World in Which Nature Has Already Lost April 12, 2021
  • Life in the US Has the Hallmarks of a “Low-Grade War Zone” September 21, 2020

RSS Daily Kos Comics

  • Cartoon: The never ending news April 19, 2021
  • Cartoon: Defund the robot cops April 16, 2021
  • Cartoon: The prior previous police shooting(s) April 16, 2021
  • Cartoon: News of the Times: Republicans move to suppress democratic rights of certain Americans April 15, 2021
  • Cartoon: Unaccompanied minor April 3, 2021
  • Cartoon: Trump Inc. April 14, 2021

RSS Damn the Matrix

  • The cost of progress April 14, 2021
  • You can never go back April 5, 2021

RSS Dan Hagen

  • Real Education: The Antithesis of Ameica April 16, 2021
  • The Left That Wasn't There April 6, 2021

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • Too Busy Writing New Baseless News Stories. We Don’t Have Time to Retract the Old Ones April 18, 2021
  • The Inevitable Question April 18, 2021
  • Story about BLM Co-Founder Not Allowed Pursuant to Facebook’s Version of Free Speech April 17, 2021

RSS Dark Ages America

  • A Path with a Heart April 13, 2021
  • 423 April 2, 2021
  • 422 March 21, 2021
  • 421 March 11, 2021

RSS David Bollier

  • Katherine Gibson and the Community Economies Research Network April 1, 2021
  • Novel Overtures to the More-than-Human World March 9, 2021
  • Andreas Weber on Aliveness and Interdependence February 23, 2021

RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – National Memo)

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RSS David Cay Johnston (Link – Tax Analysts)

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RSS David Harvey

  • Interview: What Would Marx Do About Joe Biden? April 1, 2021
  • Book Review: The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles March 31, 2021
  • Interview on Pacifica Radio’s Letters & Politics: David Harvey on a History of Neoliberalism and the Current Economic Crisis March 30, 2021

RSS David Hilfiker

  • Welcome August 4, 2011

RSS David McNally

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RSS David Roberts

  • Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck June 5, 2015
  • Please support Grist April 10, 2015
  • There’s an emerging right-wing divide on climate denial. Here’s what it means (and doesn’t) April 8, 2015

RSS Death by Car: Capitalism’s Drive to Carmageddon

  • Size of Luxury Battery Pack April 15, 2021
  • Technology’s Cutting Edge April 13, 2021
  • Commodification March 29, 2021
  • When 42,060 = Zero March 5, 2021
  • Brandalism February 19, 2021

RSS Decline of the Empire

  • Fascism Marches On — Episode 1
  • There Is No Middle

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • The Long Shadow of the Tar Sands: Lithium Mining and Tar Sands Sulfur [Dispatches from Thacker Pass] April 18, 2021
  • Happening Today: Live Streaming Event “Ending The Greenwashing” April 17, 2021
  • Political Organizing 101: Advocacy, Mobilizing and Organizing April 16, 2021
  • Brazilian Supreme Court takes crucial step towards recognizing indigenous rights April 15, 2021

RSS Deepak Tripathi’s Diary

  • UK’s Brexit Maze October 29, 2019
  • Book Review: Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy August 23, 2019

RSS Democratic Underground

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RSS Democratic Underground – Breaking News

  • U.S. Rep. Steve Stivers leaving Congress to lead Ohio Chamber of Commerce, won't run for U.S. Senate April 19, 2021
  • South Africa wildfire burns University of Cape Town, library of African antiquities April 19, 2021
  • Police arrest former Texas deputy in Austin shooting that left 3 dead April 19, 2021
  • Wolf Signs Disaster Emergency For Philly Ahead Of Chauvin Verdict April 19, 2021
  • NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Succeeds in Historic First Flight April 19, 2021
  • Ingenuity's First Black-and-White Image From the Air April 19, 2021
  • Two dead in Tesla crash in Texas that was believed to be driverless April 19, 2021
  • Five people shot in Louisiana incident; 3rd U.S. multiple shooting in one day April 19, 2021
  • Kyle Rittenhouse, Facebook and militia groups to face lawsuit over fatal shootings at Jacob Blake pr April 19, 2021
  • Chicago Teachers Union approves deal to reopen high schools Monday April 19, 2021

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • How A Museum's Human Skull Collection Sparked A Racial Reckoning April 19, 2021
  • Canada has second case of rare blood clots after AstraZeneca vaccine April 19, 2021
  • California Beach Seized in 1924 From a Black Family Could Be Returned April 19, 2021
  • New York State Hands Billions Back to Wealthy Investors--and NYT Doesn't See a Story April 19, 2021
  • 'Divisive': How Corporate Media Dismiss Ideas Unpopular With Elites April 19, 2021
  • The Week in Anti-Semitism in Europe (No. Ireland, The Netherlands, France) April 19, 2021
  • The Indefensible Violence of Wildlife Killing Contests April 19, 2021
  • Armed Racism Keeps No One Safe April 19, 2021
  • On infrastructure, do Republicans want to strike a pose or build things? April 19, 2021
  • Opinion: America desperately needs a Truth and Racial Healing Commission April 18, 2021

RSS Democracy Now

  • Meet Cariol Horne, Black Police Officer Fired After Stopping Fellow Cop's Assault on Handcuffed Man April 19, 2021
  • Black & Latinx Lieutenant Sues Virginia Cops Who Threatened to Kill Him During Traffic Stop April 19, 2021
  • Cops Have Brutalized Chicago's Latinx Community for Decades; Adam Toledo, 13, Is the Latest Victim April 19, 2021
  • Headlines for April 19, 2021 April 19, 2021
  • Biden Sanctions Russia for Cyber Espionage While Remaining Silent over Israeli Cyberattack on Iran April 16, 2021
  • Medical Examiner Accused of Covering Up Police Killing in Maryland Becomes Witness for Derek Chauvin April 16, 2021
  • "Cold-Blooded Murder": Chicago Police Officer Shot 13-Year-Old Adam Toledo with His Hands in the Air April 16, 2021
  • Headlines for April 16, 2021 April 16, 2021
  • "We're in a Transition Phase": Dr. Monica Gandhi on Vaccine Safety & Why You Still Need a Mask April 15, 2021
  • Cut the Defense Budget: Rep. Khanna on Bloated Pentagon Spending, Ending War in Yemen, UAE Arms Deal April 15, 2021

RSS Derrick Jensen

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RSS Desdemona Despair

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RSS Desertification

  • UNCCD welcomes two new initiatives to recover millions of hectares of degrading land April 15, 2021
  • Great Green Wall receives over $14 billion to regreen the Sahel – France, World Bank listed among donors April 15, 2021
  • Canada to support land restoration in developing countries April 15, 2021
  • Recent change of vegetation growth trend in China April 15, 2021
  • Satellite images show China going green April 15, 2021

RSS deSmog Blog

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RSS Digbys Blog

  • Untitled January 12, 2020
  • They can save the world by @BloggersRUs January 12, 2020
  • Just drifting: R.I.P. Buck Henry By Dennis Hartley January 12, 2020
  • It looks like he wants to take Iraq's oil money January 12, 2020
  • Untitled January 11, 2020
  • Let's not forget who worked with Suleimani's IRGC January 11, 2020

RSS Disinfo – Ecology

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RSS Dispatches from the Underclass

  • Bipartisan Injustice: Racist Border Crisis & Police Killings April 9, 2021
  • Eyewitness Report: On the Ground in Haiti April 4, 2021
  • Big Announcement: I’m joining BreakThrough News! March 25, 2021
  • Censorship, Imperialism, & Biden Presidency March 6, 2021
  • Two-State Delusion: Israel Is A Racist One State Nightmare February 28, 2021

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • A Reparative Politics for the Climate Crisis: A Roundtable April 19, 2021
  • Restorative Justice in Indian Country April 16, 2021
  • The Rise and Fall of Multilateralism April 14, 2021
  • The Next Amazon Union Drive April 12, 2021

RSS Dissident Voice

  • Coronavirus Strikes Papua New Guinea April 19, 2021
  • Inflated Charter School Waitlists April 19, 2021
  • US President Joe Biden’s Shameful Push for War with China and Russia April 18, 2021
  • A Most Political, and Perfidious, Pandemic April 18, 2021
  • An Epidemic of Low Expectations April 18, 2021
  • Labour disclosure “shows antisemitism was weaponised against Corbyn”, activists say April 17, 2021
  • The Dirty Campaign Underlying Ecuador’s “Free and Fair” Election April 17, 2021
  • Pseudonymity and Genocide April 17, 2021

RSS Do the Math

  • Ultimate Success April 13, 2021

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

  • Taxing More from the Rich Is Difficult. This Is How to Do It. March 16, 2021
  • March/April 2021 Issue March 4, 2021
  • For Black History Month: The Economics of the Great Migration February 28, 2021
  • GameStop and the Mechanics of Inverted Totalitarianism February 18, 2021
  • January/February 2021 Issue January 1, 2021
  • Polly Cleveland on Monopoly on The Analysis December 2, 2020

RSS Doug Stanhope

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RSS Douglas Rushkoff

  • Team Human Serialization #37 & 38: The Damage We Do to Ourselves When We Try to Function Like Computers May 29, 2020
  • Team Human Serialization #36: On the Internet of Things, We People Are the Things May 29, 2020
  • Team Human ep. 157: Tyson Yunkaporta “Everything Indigenous is Human” May 27, 2020

RSS Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

  • The FBI Refuses to Investigate the Joe/Hunter Biden Scandals April 19, 2021
  • Fair Trials in America Are Hard to Come By April 19, 2021

RSS Dredd Blog

  • New Slang - 5 April 19, 2021
  • Appendix NS4 One April 19, 2021
  • Appendix NS4 Two April 19, 2021
  • Appendix NS4 Three April 19, 2021

RSS Ear to the Ground – Truth Dig

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RSS Early Warning

  • New York Not Close to Exiting Lockdown April 17, 2020
  • Is New York Containing Covid? April 8, 2020
  • New York vs Italy March 23, 2020

RSS Earth First

  • “UNC Dildo-Boy” accosts homophobic preacher, releases anti-technology declaration March 2, 2014
  • Subpoena caps bad week for fossil fuel March 2, 2014
  • Less Than 60 Hours Left to Support Indigenous Land Defenders! February 18, 2014

RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day, Natural Hazards, and News

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RSS Earth Observatory: Image of the Day

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RSS Earth Observatory: Natural Hazards

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RSS Earth Policy Institute Blog

  • Data Highlight - Wind Power Beats Nuclear Again in China
  • Data Highlight - Plastic Bag Bans or Fees Cover 49 Million Americans
  • Plan B Update - Fossil Fuel Development in the Arctic is a Bad Investment

RSS Ecocide Alert

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RSS Ecohuman World

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RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: Plants & Animals Wiped Out by Climate Change April 14, 2021

RSS Ecological Headstand

  • For the Abolition of the Wages System! June 18, 2015
  • The Incredible Shrinking Blog June 9, 2015
  • Keynes "hadn't got round to it" May 25, 2015
  • Napoleon Solow and the Phantom Mechanism May 20, 2015

RSS Ecological Sociology

  • Commons Enabling Infrastucture August 31, 2013
  • A Short History of Progress: Book Review August 26, 2013
  • Foucault, Power, Truth and Ecology August 14, 2013

RSS Ecologise

  • Charles Eisenstein: The Coronation May 16, 2020
  • Visakhapatnam gas leak accident: A preliminary modelling study May 15, 2020
  • The electric car must fail March 30, 2020
  • Economy and ecology are now in conflict; it’s time to integrate them with wisdom March 27, 2020
  • War, mismanagement and climate change: Iraq’s environment on the brink March 20, 2020
  • Big Farms make Big Flu: The deadly connection between industrial farming and pandemics March 17, 2020
  • The Songs of Trees: Stories From Nature’s Great Connectors March 13, 2020
  • Charles Hugh Smith: Could Covid-19 overwhelm us in the months ahead? March 10, 2020
  • Just like the economy, India’s forests too are thriving only on paper March 7, 2020
  • New Zealand’s ‘well-being budget’ and the unnecessary evil of economic growth March 4, 2020

RSS Economic Hardship Reporting Project

  • EHRP Nets Two Nominations at Deadline Club Awards April 7, 2021
  • Can Lawyers and Traumatized Clients Learn to Trust Each Other? April 1, 2021
  • The Digital Divide Pushed My Dad’s Life to the Brink March 31, 2021
  • How Housing Activists Took On Philadelphia and Won March 29, 2021
  • The True Cost of the Pandemic for Moms March 24, 2021
  • The Cost of the Pandemic for Women and Mothers March 24, 2021

RSS Economic Undertow

  • Cars and More Cars … March 22, 2021
  • Repost From 2015: Pied Piper of Dumb Money January 26, 2021
  • The Arc of the Moral Universe January 13, 2021

RSS EcoWorldView

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RSS Empire Burlesque

  • On the 18th Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq March 19, 2021
  • On the Acquittal of the Murderous Thug Donald Trump February 13, 2021

RSS Empirical Magazine

  • From the Empirical Archives: Genius or Folly? August 30, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Nights Such as These August 29, 2013
  • From the Empirical Archives: Second Time Foster Child August 28, 2013

RSS EmptyWheel

  • Updated List of January 6 Assault Defendants
  • Two One-Time Devin Nunes Flunkies Under Investigation for Leaks
  • The US Government Accuses Roger Stone of Rat-Fucking the IRS

RSS End of More

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RSS Energy Balance

  • Covid-19, Fracking and the Global Oil Supply. October 29, 2020
  • Solving the Plastic Problem: from Cradle to Grave, to Reincarnation. October 2, 2020
  • What Kind of a World do We Want? (...really?) August 16, 2020
  • Economic Recovery from Covid-19 and Climate Action: Twin Challenges. July 31, 2020
  • Will the Virus Go Away – “Post-Covid”, or Recalibration? July 21, 2020
  • Year 2020: Last Chance to Avoid Rebound into Carbon Chaos. June 23, 2020

RSS Environment & Food Justice

  • National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Statement on the Climate Crisis October 31, 2019
  • La Lucha por La Sierra | Scion of Texas Oil Barons Seeks to Overturn Historic Use Rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant August 30, 2018
  • Biopiracy in Mexico | Foundation stealing wild beehives in Yucatán June 14, 2018

RSS Envisionation Blog

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RSS Extraenvironmentalist Blog and Podcasts

  • [ Episode #95 // Economy of Things ] January 28, 2017
  • [ Episode #94 // Rocking the Google Bus ] October 25, 2016
  • [ Episode #93 // Climate Agreements ] September 5, 2016

RSS ExtraEnvironmentalist’s Videos

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RSS ExtraGeographic

  • Brexit, empire and cultural dementia. David Andress demolishes lazy nationalism
    A leave voter at the Save Brexit Rally wants Brexit so that Britain can “get back to being a British Empire”.… Read more The post Brexit, empire and cultural dementia. David Andress demolishes lazy nationalism first appeared on Extra Geographic.
  • Brexit explained in three tweets
    Three recent tweets encapsulate the misinformation, corruption and mess of Brexit Britain. They’re a window into a peculiar time. The UK government’s Department for International Trade (DIT) “helps businesses export, drives inward and outward investment, negotiates market access and trade deals, and champions free trade”.… Read more The post Brexit explained […]
  • Ann Pettifor on Carillion: ‘a grand Ponzi scheme’
    In a recent interview Ann Pettifor, global financial analyst, spoke about the corrupted crony capitalism that led to the collapse of Carillion, a major Government contractor.… Read more The post Ann Pettifor on Carillion: ‘a grand Ponzi scheme’ first appeared on Extra Geographic.
  • James Joyce in summary: escape is a key theme in his work
    Throughout his life James Joyce attempted to escape – from war, religion, convention, narrative structure, language… “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.… Read more The post James Joyce in summary: escape is a key theme in his work first appeared on Extra Geographic.
  • Jeremy Clarkson buys an electric car: an optimistic vision of the UK’s EV future
    A nation’s stories play a large part in its future. Established ideas become conventional wisdom in social institutions. The institutions then draw on this wisdom when enacting public policy.… Read more The post Jeremy Clarkson buys an electric car: an optimistic vision of the UK’s EV future first appeared on Extra Geographic.

RSS Facts for Working People

  • MNA Executive Board's Cowardly Response to St. Paul Events April 18, 2021
  • Union Activist Receives Death Threats After National Guard Eviction From Labor Building in St. Paul April 18, 2021
  • BBC: How cancer put me off joining Amazon union April 18, 2021

RSS Fair: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

  • States Have No Inherent ‘Right to Exist’—but It’s a Media Fixation on Israel/Palestine February 12, 2021
  • Factchecking NPR’s Attempted Takedown of Bernie Sanders February 18, 2020
  • Wired’s Gee-Whiz High-Tech Militarism August 7, 2019

RSS Fairewinds

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RSS Fairfax Climate Watch

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RSS Farooque Chowdhury’s Diary

  • Road rage faces student spirit August 4, 2018
  • Fires within the Arctic Circle July 28, 2018
  • A Facebook post on quota mobilisation July 14, 2018

RSS Feasta

  • Banking on the community, investing locally for resilience: webinar on April 14 March 31, 2021
  • Banking on the community, investing locally for resilience: webinar on April 14 March 31, 2021
  • Podcast: crises and collectivity March 31, 2021

RSS FireDogLake

  • Dissenter Weekly: Leak Prosecutions Against BLM Protesters, Police Whistleblower In Illinois July 11, 2020
  • US Government Plays Games With Reality Winner’s Life As Coronavirus Outbreak Is Confirmed At Carswell July 8, 2020
  • Beyond Prisons: Historian David Stein Reflects On Ascent Of Abolition July 8, 2020
  • Protest Song Of The Week: ‘All Tomorrow Carry’ By Special Interest July 8, 2020

RSS Fish Out of Water

  • Extreme Tornado Outbreak likely today in the mid south March 25, 2021
  • Extreme Blizzard May Hit High Plains this Weekend with Tornadoes in Oklahoma March 9, 2021
  • Very Good News about the Polar Vortex Breakdown February 17, 2021
  • Trump began the incitement towards armed insurrection in Wilmington, NC on 9 August 2016 February 10, 2021
  • Trump's ICE/CBP dumped U.S. citizen newborns & moms on Mexican streets February 5, 2021
  • Polar Vortex breaking down now: Major Stratospheric Warming will impact weather all winter December 31, 2020

RSS Foreign Confidential

  • Chinese Virologist, MD, PhD, Says Coronavirus Made in Wuhan Lab September 15, 2020
  • Rebels and Spies: the [GREAT] Graphic Novels of Vittorio Giardino July 18, 2020
  • Deep in Red China ... July 6, 2020
  • Preview Video Comic Strip Hero Battles Totalitarian China July 5, 2020

RSS FracTracker

  • 2021 Pipeline Incidents Update: Safety Record Not Improving April 14, 2021
  • New York State Oil & Gas Well Drilling: Patterns Over Time April 1, 2021
  • Risky Byhalia Connection Pipeline Threatens Tennessee & Mississippi Health, Water Supply March 17, 2021

RSS George Monbiot (Alternet)

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RSS George Monbiot (Official Home Page)

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RSS Get Real List: Chris Nelder

  • My new gig December 5, 2015
  • Announcing the Energy Transition Show October 14, 2015
  • Guest appearance on The Energy Gang podcast May 14, 2015

RSS Gil Smart

  • Gil Smart right on development February 8, 2015
  • With Gil Smart on guns, the NRA January 19, 2015
  • Gil Smart makes sense May 19, 2014
  • Right on, Gil Smart February 17, 2014

RSS Glen Ford – Black Agenda Report

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RSS Global Guerrillas

  • The Long Night is Coming January 4, 2019
  • Disruption, Drones, and Big Airports December 20, 2018

RSS Global Occupy News

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RSS Global Oneness Project

  • Student Curiosity and The Human Spirit During COVID-19 March 2, 2021

RSS Global Research

  • Malaysia Inches Back Toward ‘Elder Brother’ China April 19, 2021
  • The Global Green Shift in Electric Power: China in Comparative Perspective April 19, 2021
  • Fukushima Daiichi Radioactive Dumping and the Summer Olympics in Japan in Question April 19, 2021

RSS Global Research CA

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RSS Gonzalo Lira

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RSS Green is the New Red

  • Trump Supporter Promises Legislation to Label Protest as “Economic Terrorism” November 22, 2016
  • Violence against environmentalists is now at an all-time high July 8, 2016
  • “To Build a Fire”: New Split EP With “Old Lines” and Will Potter June 13, 2016
  • “It changes who you are—forever. What you do with that change is what defines who you are.” April 28, 2016
  • Exclusive: New Virtual Reality Investigation Goes Inside Factory Farms April 13, 2016
  • New Sticker — Animal Rights Activists Must “Join or Die” February 22, 2016
  • “Truth and Power” TV series features Will Potter on “eco-terrorism,” ag-gag laws, and investigative journalism February 15, 2016
  • This woman rowed straight into a hurricane. And you should too. February 11, 2016
  • 6 Lessons From How the FBI and Media Treat Militia Groups January 12, 2016
  • Here’s How One Activist Convinced the FBI to Leave Him Alone December 7, 2015

RSS Green on Huffington Post

  • First-Ever Wild Wolf Collar Camera Shows What They Really Do All Day Long April 19, 2021
  • US West Prepares For Possible First Water Shortage Declaration April 18, 2021
  • Man Picks Up And Hurls Away Rabid Bobcat In Wild Viral Footage April 16, 2021
  • Deb Haaland Scraps A Slew Of Fossil Fuel-Friendly Trump Orders April 16, 2021
  • Notre Dame, Tree Killer: Centuries-Old Oaks Felled To Replace Gothic Spire April 16, 2021
  • For 25 Years, Taxpayers Picked Up Polluters’ Superfund Bill. That May Finally Change. April 16, 2021
  • Killing A Cat In A Hit-And-Run Could Become Illegal In New Hampshire April 15, 2021
  • Here's What A Civilian Climate Corps Could Look Like April 14, 2021

RSS Greenpeace Blogs

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RSS Greg Palast

  • Deepwater Horizon: Accident — or Negligent Homicide?Excerpts from Vultures' Picnic: Chapters 1 and 2 April 19, 2021
  • Wisconsin court win stops purge of 129,000 votersBlack Voters Matter, Palast found list "wrong and racist" April 11, 2021

RSS Gregor Macdonald

  • Oil Fall December 31, 2018

RSS Grinning Planet

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RSS Grist

  • Deb Haaland’s top priorities for Interior Department: climate change and environmental justice April 19, 2021
  • The details in Biden’s infrastructure plan that could bring Republicans to the table April 19, 2021
  • Biden wants to build 500,000 EV charging stations. Where will they all go? April 19, 2021
  • First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys April 17, 2021

RSS Growth Busters

  • Finding Common Ground (podcast episode 53) February 4, 2021
  • Shrinking Your Travel Footprint (podcast episode 52) December 28, 2020
  • Philosophy of Shrinking Footprints (podcast episode 51) December 26, 2020
  • Taking a Vacation from Carbon Emissions (podcast episode 50) October 27, 2020

RSS Guernica Mag

  • Gina Frangello: Truth and Consequences April 19, 2021
  • Flat Stanley & the Praying Mantis April 16, 2021
  • Hinterlands April 15, 2021
  • The Secret Spies Keeping Baghdad Safe April 14, 2021

RSS Guy McPherson’s Blog

  • Rizzle Out, YouTube In (”Extinction Monologues”) April 19, 2021
  • Tim: Just Surface Paranoia April 18, 2021

RSS Health After Oil

  • Public Health’s Response to Decline: Loyalty to the 1% December 15, 2014

RSS Hot Topic: Global Warming and the Future of New Zealand

  • Postcards from La La Land #132: time warps and twaddle June 7, 2018
  • The final cut: crank paper on NZ temperature record gets its rebuttal – warming continues unabated May 2, 2018
  • Anthropogenic climate change is real: pithy post-punk anthem for the Trump generation December 9, 2017

RSS How to Save the World

  • Bird Stories April 15, 2021
  • Links of the Month: April 2021 April 12, 2021
  • Gaslit at Every Turn April 11, 2021

RSS I am Not a Number

  • The civil war in the LP was NEVER about antisemitism. November 20, 2020
  • English patriotism and the left – a political conundrum October 3, 2020
  • The new Reclaim Party and the ‘culture wars’ – the incoherence of our two party system and the failure of liberalism October 3, 2020

RSS I Cite

  • "Feudalism Lives on in the Delta" -- Ray Sprigle August 17, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 2 April 2, 2020
  • Critical Theory and Climate Change 1 March 23, 2020
  • Untitled July 18, 2019
  • America's obsession with rooting out communism is making a comeback September 25, 2018

RSS Iamronen

  • Choking on my past? April 5, 2021
  • Seeing Samkhya March 21, 2021
  • Farewell Milford Graves February 14, 2021
  • ההיסטוריה המלאה שלנו January 18, 2021
  • Yoga Practice – Winter 2020/21 December 29, 2020

RSS Ian Welsh

  • Capitalism and Good Post-Capitalism April 19, 2021

RSS Idea Explorer

  • Values and Responsibilities March 11, 2021
  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • Marginal Hope August 24, 2020
  • A Pandemic-Altered Future April 15, 2020
  • Bridging the Future March 31, 2020

RSS Idea Explorer – Big Pic Explorer

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RSS Idea Explorer: Land of Conscience

  • Responsible Survival January 1, 2020
  • Every Day December 23, 2019
  • Memories of Value July 23, 2019

RSS If You Love This Planet – Helen Caldicott

  • Steven Starr, Bruce Gagnon and William Hartung at the Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction symposium April 18, 2017
  • Dr. Helen Caldicott, Ted Postol, Max Tegmark and Alan Robock at The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction symposium June 23, 2016
  • Dr. Caldicott’s October 2014 speech: The Ukraine Crisis, Is Nuclear Conflict Likely? February 17, 2015
  • Dr. Helen Caldicott interviewed by Bob Herbert about her latest book, “Loving This Planet” December 28, 2012

RSS Indybay Features

  • Rising Up Against Anti-Asian Hate
  • Bay Area Solidarity with Alabama Amazon Workers' Union Drive
  • After Health Scare, Call Remains to Free Abu-Jamal
  • Call for US to End Support of Saudi-Led War

RSS Indybay Newswire

  • Billionaires Cut: Autopilot to Extinction
  • Sonoma County’s Institutional Responses to the Black Lives Matter Movement
  • COVID protests and Weimar Family Court
  • The Corona New Speak
  • Oakland Education Association attempts to defuse anger over reckless return to schools

RSS Information Clearing House

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RSS Inside Left – The OFFICIAL Anti-Olympics Blog™

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RSS Institute for Public Accuracy

  • How Bill Gates Makes Intellectual Property More Important than Public Health April 19, 2021
  • Wall St. Pumped Record $2.9 Billion to Washington Politicians, At Least April 16, 2021
  • The U.S. Government Will Not Withdraw Forces from Afghanistan April 14, 2021
  • The Case Against Fukushima Releasing Over One Million Metric Tons of Radioactive Wastewater April 14, 2021
  • Did Biden’s Pick for Border Agency Cover-up Police Killings? April 13, 2021
  • Israeli Attack on Iraqi Nuclear Facility *Began* Weapons Program April 12, 2021

RSS International Debt Observatory

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RSS io9

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RSS iWatch: Global Muckraking

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RSS Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer Blog

  • Five Things We Need to Know About the “Fiscal Cliff” December 10, 2012
  • Wasteful Pentagon Spending and Costly Wars Hurting Minnesota Communities November 6, 2012

RSS Jacobin

  • The Lead Organizer for the Amazon Union Drive Has No Regrets April 19, 2021
  • Capitalist Greed Created the European Super League April 19, 2021
  • The Fight for Health Care for All Is Opening Up in the States April 19, 2021
  • We’ll Have a Socialist New York City Mayor — But Not This Year April 18, 2021
  • In New York City, Big Tech Is Bailing Out Big Real Estate April 18, 2021
  • Canada’s Carbon Tax Has Survived a Legal Challenge — But It’s Still No Help In the Fight Against Climate Change April 18, 2021

RSS Jeremy Scahill

  • Biden Should End Espionage Act Prosecutions of Whistleblowers and Journalists January 21, 2021

RSS Jill Stein

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RSS Joe Bageant

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RSS John Cook Video Uploads

  • Climate misinformation: Will Happer on CO2 being plant food January 24, 2021
  • Climate misinformation: David Legates & Willie Soon on CO2 lag January 24, 2021
  • Climate misinformation: Marco Rubio on past climate change January 24, 2021
  • Climate misinformation: Rick Perry compares climate denial to Galileo January 24, 2021

RSS John Hively

  • Is President Biden Serious About His Infrastructure Package? April 10, 2021
  • President Joe Biden and the False Promises of Immigration Reform and Raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 February 20, 2021

RSS John Pilger

  • THE MOST LETHAL VIRUS IS NOT COVID. IT IS WAR.

RSS John Perkins

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RSS John W. Whitehead

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RSS John Zerzan: Anarchy Radio

  • Anarchy Radio 04 12 2021 April 13, 2021
  • Anarchy Radio 04 06.2021 April 6, 2021
  • Anarchy Radio 03 30 2021 March 30, 2021

RSS Jonathan Turley

  • Protesters Deface The Former Home Of Defense Witness In Chauvin Trial April 19, 2021
  • America’s Micro State: Why Congress Should Consider Retrocession Rather Than Statehood April 19, 2021
  • Trump’s Surprise Witness: Rep. Waters Becomes A Possible Witness Against Her Own Lawsuit April 19, 2021
  • Chicago Prosecutor Suspended For Stating Adam Toledo Was Armed Before The Shooting April 18, 2021

RSS Karl Grossman

  • I've switched from this site to my website -- www.karlgrossman.com -- for my blog. November 29, 2015
  • The End of Police Raids -- at Long Last -- on Gays of Fire Island July 1, 2015
  • "Fire Island Was Paradise,Truly Paradise" June 21, 2015
  • My First Big Story June 1, 2015
  • Disaster Waiting to Happen at Indian Point May 12, 2015

RSS Karl North Eco-Intelligence

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RSS Kate Ausburn

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RSS Keith Farnish

  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 2) May 7, 2014
  • Uprooting Civilization (Part 1) February 21, 2014
  • The Problem With…Conspiracy Theories January 7, 2014

RSS Knight Science Journalism – MIT

  • The Tracker Now Lives Here … November 1, 2015
  • A farewell post: Three reasons why good science writing is worth defending. January 6, 2015
  • Globe story on non-invasive prenatal testing offers murky argument. December 31, 2014
  • (UPDATED/2*) What Ho? A 2014 List of Lists of best, worst, or otherwisest in 2014 December 30, 2014
  • Cancer & poverty: When a reporter’s journey becomes part of the story. December 23, 2014

RSS Kulture Critic

  • A New World Apocalyptic Eschatology February 13, 2021

RSS Kunstler Cast

  • John B. McLemore Email to JHK: Huffing gas fumes in shittown alabama June 1, 2017
  • Release: S-Town Podcast Prequel: KunstlerCast Ready for Binge Listening May 31, 2017
  • KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017
  • James Howard Kunstler on John B. McLemore of S-Town May 31, 2017
  • Transcript: KunstlerCast: S-Town May 31, 2017

RSS Kurt Kobb

  • Asking the right questions about human genetic engineering April 18, 2021

RSS Lack of Environment

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RSS Law and Disorder

  • Law and Disorder April 19, 2021 April 19, 2021
  • Law and Disorder April 12, 2021 April 12, 2021
  • Law and Disorder April 5, 2021 April 5, 2021

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

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RSS Le Monde diplomatique – Open Page

  • How much of a threat is Alexey Navalny? April 17, 2021
  • China's emperor of e-commerce April 16, 2021
  • Rojava's suspended future April 15, 2021
  • Biden's Middle East challenges April 13, 2021
  • Trumpism will outlive Trump April 5, 2021

RSS Leaving Babylon

  • Even Iran is laughing at us November 9, 2020

RSS Lee Camp

  • MOC #76 – Comedy in Politics (w/ Dave Anthony) April 19, 2021
  • Gov’t Secrets No. 36 – Truth About Police Pt. 2 & The Secret Societies of The Presidents April 18, 2021
  • Common Censored #152 – Elon Musk Is Not God, Leaving Afghanistan & Ending Fracking April 18, 2021
  • Redacted Tonight #331 – Fox News Launches Disastrous Comedy Show April 17, 2021
  • Redacted Tonight VIP #227 – The Fight Against Amazon Has Just Begun (w/ Monica Cruz) April 17, 2021
  • MOC #75 – The Truth About The Chauvin Trial (w/ Ajamu Baraka) April 15, 2021

RSS Lee Fang

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RSS Leonardo Boff

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RSS Les Leopold

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RSS Life Itself

  • 2020, the Year the US Imploded, so Where is Hope? December 27, 2020
  • The best and worst of my US of A July 4, 2020
  • The little virus that could is not done with us, is it? May 29, 2020

RSS Limited, Inc.

  • Geography lesson April 19, 2021
  • Art for art's sake , motherfuckers April 16, 2021
  • Tiresome Tiresome anti-cancel culture and what it is all about April 11, 2021

RSS Link TV – Earth Focus

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RSS Low-Tech Magazine

  • Urban Fish Ponds: Low-tech Sewage Treatment for Towns and Cities March 30, 2021
  • How Sustainable is High-tech Health Care? February 18, 2021

RSS LRB Blog

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RSS Luis J. Rodriguez

  • Stand Firm on Election Day November 3, 2020
  • 50th Anniversary of Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War August 31, 2020
  • Trump's War on the United States July 24, 2020

RSS Mabinogogiblog

  • Zoom Meeting on the Melbourne Isolation Hood to stop spread of Covid in Hospital January 16, 2021
  • We Can Cut the Number of Hospital Acquired Covid Infections January 1, 2021
  • JCVI has not thought through their vaccine prioritisation December 4, 2020
  • The Changing of the Shared Narrative December 3, 2020

RSS Manicore – Accueil

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RSS Marginal Revolution

  • Effective Altruism: An Introduction April 19, 2021
  • *Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis* April 19, 2021
  • What is the proper framework for thinking about cybersecurity? April 19, 2021

RSS Mark Biskeborn – Underground Essays

  • Kafkaesque November 11, 2014
  • Larry Summers Still Living Large April 9, 2013
  • War and Corruption Deficits: Insects and Leviathans January 21, 2013
  • Breaking News: Lt. Col. Shaffer Accuses Former CIA Dir. Tenet December 29, 2012

RSS Mark Fiore

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RSS Mark Lynas

  • Saved by the pandemic? June 30, 2020
  • New book – ‘Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency’ June 30, 2020
  • ‘The single most important goal of the candidates’ climate plan’ – CNN.com September 6, 2019
  • The planet is being consumed by humans – CNN.com August 8, 2019
  • UK and Trump miles apart on climate change – CNN.com June 3, 2019

RSS Martin Wolf

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RSS Matt Bruenig

  • New Website? April 12, 2021

RSS Matt Taibbi

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RSS Matt Wuerker

  • Cartoon: Freedom of speech is absolute, but... April 30, 2015
  • Cartoon: Clinton Inc April 23, 2015
  • Cartoon: Reince's Women Issues April 16, 2015
  • Cartoon: The way to win April 9, 2015
  • No Cake for you! April 2, 2015

RSS Max Keiser

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RSS Media Lens

  • Shocking Omissions: ‘Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 Years Of The Guardian’ – John Pilger and Jonathan Cook Respond April 19, 2021
  • Propaganda By Omission: Libya, Syria, Venezuela And The UK March 29, 2021
  • The Impossible Peter Oborne March 16, 2021

RSS Media Matters – Environment

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RSS Media Matters – Everything

  • Fox guest on possible troop withdrawal from Afghanistan: "The solution is more blood, sweat, and tears" 
  • Fox host defends Trump: "Just because you use harsh language doesn't mean your intent is to denigrate another race"
  • Fox News is talking more about abortion than the Democratic debates did

RSS Media Roots

  • Empire Files: Uganda Dictatorship: Imperialism’s Pearl of Africa April 11, 2021
  • Media Roots Radio: Mass Shooting USA, China Bashing, Exclusive Q&A w/ Abby & Robbie Martin [Preview] April 2, 2021
  • Media Roots Radio: Justice League Snyder Cut, Batfleck’s CIA Boost & Liz Warren Granny Goodness w/Leslie Lee III April 1, 2021

RSS Methane Hydrates

  • Joint New Zealand - German 3D survey reveals massive seabed gas hydrate and methane system May 12, 2014
  • Noctilucent clouds: further confirmation of large methane releases December 10, 2013
  • Earthquake M6.7 hits Sea of Okhotsk October 2, 2013

RSS Michael Hudson

  • America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs. China’s Industrial Socialism April 15, 2021
  • Dream House, Nightmare Mortgage: Carry on! April 7, 2021
  • What Flavour Oligarchy? March 29, 2021

RSS Michael Miller – Viewpoint

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RSS Michael Parenti

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RSS Mike Philbin – Free Planet

  • LAST OF THE CATHEDRA available in trade paperback from Amazon. October 24, 2020
  • OUR ELECTRIC MOON October 21, 2019
  • Best Real-time in-game Physics engine EVER by Dennis Gustafsson September 13, 2019

RSS Mondoweiss

  • Palestinian ingenuity makes it to Mars April 19, 2021
  • Justice is embedded in our struggle April 17, 2021

RSS Mons Angelorum: Deadly Serious 3

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RSS Mons Angelorum: Waiting for Good Weather

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RSS Mother Jones

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RSS MR Zine

  • Yoshie Furuhashi, "After MRZine" January 1, 2017
  • Louis Allday, "Controlling the Narrative on Syria" December 14, 2016
  • Marta Harnecker, "Fidel, Today and Forever" December 11, 2016
  • Prabhat Patnaik, "Developing 'Infrastructure'" December 9, 2016
  • Susie Day, "Forward Ever, Normal Never: Taking Down Donald Trump" December 6, 2016
  • Samir Amin, "The Election of Donald Trump" December 1, 2016

RSS Musings on Iraq

  • This Day In Iraqi History - Apr 18 April 18, 2021
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Apr 17 April 17, 2021
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Apr 16 April 16, 2021

RSS Nafeez Ahmed

  • IDF's Gaza assault is to control Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis | Nafeez Ahmed July 9, 2014
  • World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Nafeez Ahmed July 3, 2014
  • The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy | Nafeez Ahmed June 19, 2014
  • Iraq blowback: Isis rise manufactured by insatiable oil addiction June 16, 2014

RSS Naked Capitalism

  • Links 4/19/2021 April 19, 2021
  • The CDC’s VAERS and Vaccine Complications: The System is Broken April 19, 2021
  • Two Dozen Senators Tell Biden It Is ‘Past Time’ to Finally Close Guantánamo April 19, 2021
  • US Security Analysts Tackle Shape-Shifting Threats With… More of the Same April 19, 2021
  • Take the Train: France Moves to Ban Short-Haul Domestic Flights April 18, 2021

RSS Naomi Klein

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RSS Naomi Klein – Guardian.UK

  • Naomi Klein: how big tech helps India target climate activists March 4, 2021
  • We were told Joe Biden was the 'safe choice'. But it was risky to offer so little | Naomi Klein November 8, 2020

RSS Nature Protects, As She is Protected

  • No Name Calling Please, Give Us Evidence Which Proves GM Crops Are Safe March 30, 2017
  • Let’s Be Honest About Genetically Modified Crops March 9, 2017

RSS Navdanya’s Diary

  • Rewilding food, rewilding farming January 25, 2020
  • Which future of food do we want? November 24, 2019
  • Vandana Shiva : No to Junk Food in Schools, Yes to Climate Change Education in Schools November 12, 2019

RSS New Internationalist

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RSS New Left Project

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RSS New World Notes

  • Confronting the Authorities April 17, 2021
  • Peasant of the Dawn April 11, 2021
  • Police April 6, 2021

RSS News Junkie Post

  • Capitol Riots: The Day of Infamy When Populism Became Fascism January 12, 2021
  • The Three Farm Laws: Not Only a Fight of Farmers for Themselves but Also for India’s Food Security December 17, 2020
  • COVID-19 Behavior Policing: Rehearsal for Crackdown on Dissent Ahead of Climate Collapse? December 4, 2020
  • Slavery of Fear July 28, 2020
  • COVID-19: Confirmed Wuhan Man-Made Coronavirus Chimera Enters Vaccine Design July 8, 2020
  • COVID-19 Cold War: Will the Second Wave Come from Vaccine Trials? June 16, 2020

RSS NOAA: Monthly State of the Climate Report

  • March 2021 National Climate Report

RSS Notes from the Aboveground

  • On Inequality July 27, 2015
  • Shameless is as shameless does July 21, 2015

RSS NYT Examiner

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RSS Occupy.com

  • Kill the Bill: UK Fights to Protect the Democratic Right to Protest April 12, 2021
  • Green New Deal XI: Costa Rica Demonstrates One Pathway Toward a Rewilded World April 11, 2021
  • Green New Deal X: Denmark Shows How a Country Can Power Beyond Fossil Fuels March 19, 2021
  • Green New Deal IX: Learning Lessons about Equality and Education from Finland February 19, 2021
  • Post-Brexit Scrapping of Erasmus Student Exchange Harms Economy and Undermines UK Relations with Europe February 17, 2021
  • Sedition caucus mimics Trump’s worst sin: Demolition of content—legal, moral, democratic or electoral January 14, 2021
  • Tell Congress to #StopLine3 January 12, 2021
  • UK’s 5-day Hiatus from Christmas Lockdown May Pave the Way for Ill-Fated New Year for Britain's Poorest January 10, 2021

RSS Occupy las Vegas

  • TONNELLATA gratuita per fondersi con Dune Network in un accordo di M&A decentralizzato February 3, 2021
  • Bitcoin s’élève à 1 700 $ en 48 heures : Plus de 19 000 dollars pour une capitalisation boursière de 20 milliards de dollars (Market Watch) January 25, 2021
  • Crypto-kriminalitet falder, men Bitcoin-ransomware steg i 2020! January 20, 2021

RSS Occupy Wall Street

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RSS Oddity Central

  • Retired Couple Have Been Fighting the Desert for Almost Two Decades April 19, 2021
  • Muscular Body Suits Are All the Rage on Chinese eCommerce Platforms April 19, 2021
  • Couple Change Houses 18 Times in 3 Years Due to Wife’s Fear of Cockroaches April 19, 2021
  • Meet Spitfire, the Michael Jordan of Dock Diving Dogs April 16, 2021
  • A Must Hear: Canadian Sets New Record For Lowest Musical Note Sang by a Woman April 16, 2021
  • The Line – Saudi Arabia’s Controversial 170-Km-Long Linear City of the Future April 15, 2021

RSS Of Two Minds

  • America's Fatal Synergies April 19, 2021
  • If You Don't See Any Risk, Ask Who Will "Buy the Dip" in a Freefall? April 17, 2021
  • What's Taboo? Everything Except Greed April 16, 2021

RSS One Penny Sheet

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RSS One Struggle – South Florida

  • Reflections on the Can’t Criminalize Protest Event April 9, 2021
  • Florida Must Resist Becoming A Testing Ground For State Repression! February 8, 2021
  • Teachers Resist! Lessons in Solidarity from Haiti November 13, 2020
  • WTF Is Still Happening? What isn’t Progressive: the Biden/Harris Capitalist Alternative November 7, 2020

RSS Orion Magazine

  • Editor’s Choice: “What I Wanted to Tell You About the Wind” April 14, 2021
  • Four Winged Poems to Celebrate National Poetry Month April 12, 2021
  • Behind the Cover: Nikki McClure April 6, 2021

RSS Our Finite World

  • We can’t expect COVID-19 to go away; we should plan accordingly April 11, 2021
  • Headed for a Collapsing Debt Bubble March 20, 2021
  • Why Collapse Occurs; Why It May Not Be Far Away February 25, 2021

RSS Pando Daily

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RSS Paul Haeder

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