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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization

Tag Archives: Poverty

Burning Down the House

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by td0s in Peak Oil

≈ 71 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Chaos, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecocide, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Police State, Poverty

Cross posted from Pray for Calmity
By TDoS

Despite the oddly warm weather that blew in today, we are in the depth of autumn. The days have been full of regular chores. Splitting firewood and stacking it on pallets outside the front door is something I tend to every third day or so, and I try to split in excess so that come the raw cold days of winter, I need not swing the maul. The gardens are almost all covered in a layer of horse manure, and the chicken coop is surrounded with straw bales in the hope that the next round of polar vortecies will not claim the lives of any of our birds. The quiet days spent fleshing deer hides and hauling gravel into the drainage trench around our house arouse my mind to thinking. Furious thinking about the state of the planet, the state of human beings within this culture, and just what the hell any of us should do with our time, our will, and our strength as we collectively are drawn into a decidedly more difficult future.

The bulk of my days this summer past were dedicated to the construction of our house. We have several acres of beautiful land in one of the forested pockets of North America, and through the heat and the rain I swung a framing hammer until at long last I now have a small, mostly finished cabin. It was not once lost on me, that building my house in a rural place as part of an attempt to alleviate myself of the necessity of the industrial capitalist system, I quite often had to lean heavily on that very system. “Using the grid to go off the grid,” my friend said. Despite having no wires or pipes running to my cabin, I know the truth of the matter: there is no escaping civilization. One can scoot to the edges, hang out near the lifeboats if you will, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the moment reality dawns on the crew and they cry “Abandon ship!” But no matter how far one goes, no matter how many comforts they shuck, the chemicals of industry still course through their blood. Catastrophic climate change will wipe out ways of life even in the remote, uncontacted jungles of the world. People who never drove a car or owned a cell phone will be subject to famine and cancer. Ironically, it is the poor who will likely suffer greatest as climatic change spurs droughts, floods, and mega storms. Worse yet, it is the non-human species who are being eradicated daily, never to return, for the hubris of petroleum man.

—

I hate this civilization, this machine, this juggernaut, this sleepwalking hungry ghost, this pathological ideology, this imaginary cage that we cannot seem to imagine a key for no matter how deeply we come to resent our captivity. But I still wanted a steel roof so that I could collect rainwater. It was July when I screwed the roof down to the purlins, and on that day I asked myself, “What does a person do, when they simultaneously need a thing, and need to destroy it?” Such a double bind cannot possibly have a rational answer, because the rational is captured by society, trademarked and owned by the dominant culture. We can only know in our souls, in the still wild places of our being what must be done, but making the case with the words crafted in the forges of civilization will almost certainly always fail. Words and arguments are Trojan Horses, trap doors to counter arguments, to platitudes, to endless winding hallways of thought not designed to deliver you anywhere, but merely to sap you of your energy in the traveling.

We know what we must do, and we know that we will never be able to rationalize it to the denizens of civilization, because at its very core a rationalization is a request for permission. Those who benefit most from the demise of the natural world and from the agony of the global poor will never permit anyone to cut the lights on this cavalcade of compounding tragedies.

We know what we must do. We must burn down the house we have built, force ourselves back into the wild. And further, we must tell the story to all of our children explaining that the house made us weak, it made us sedentary, it turned us against our land and our kin who dwell on the land, it made us servile to its own needs even as it fell apart around us, off-gassing formaldehyde and leaching fire retardants into our blood. We must explain that the lure the comfort of the house provides is undeniable, and that a long many days from now, the children of our children’s children may forget the perils that the house presents. We must send strong words and songs far into the unseen future, so that those who come after us value the freedom of their life out of doors with only simple shelters, that they understand the impermanence of the tipi or the wigwam is not a failing, but a strength, as the nature of life on this Earth is that of impermanence. We must convey the futility of attempts to forever banish the cold, the rain, or the wind with immovable dwellings, and that such folly will forever chain those who build them to a lifetime of work while making enemies of their surroundings as they till more soil for crops, as they sink more mines for more metal, as they cut trees for more wood, and still lose their great battle against the ravages of weather and time.

It is a great house we have collectively built. Many will say there is no other way of being. They will say that despite the dangers the house presents to body, mind, and soul, that these dangers are nothing when weighed against the impossibility of life outside. There will be those who even acknowledge the limitations of this house, they will nod in agreement when you tell them that the roof is caving and the foundation buckling. They will say, “Yes, yes, I know” when you present the children afflicted with leukemia brought about by the toxicity of the house’s very construction, and they will fight you still when you suggest dismantling this place and creating something new.

The house is a prison, and the people within it have become institutionalized, domesticated. They have been subjugated in spirit and thought to think there is no life outside the walls. If it were possible merely to escape, to dig a mighty tunnel to the far reaches of the mortar and beyond, perhaps that would be the righteous choice. But there is no place left that the ravages cannot reach you. There are no lands across the sea where you will not be subject the dictates of the warden, where the poisons of industry will not claim your health and kill your landbase. The walls must go, by any means necessary, even if in the here and now, we rely upon them.

Sleet is falling now outside of my window. It has been a long season of work, and as my body finds itself resting more, my mind grows agitated. There have been uprisings against police authority across the United States in recent weeks. The petroleum markets are in turmoil as global powers seek domination over their competitors. Experts are advising that the temperature of the planet will necessarily rise to one and a half degrees Celsius above baseline, and still the owner class seeks to exploit tar sand, deep-water oil, and coal.

What is a person to do? It seems that simultaneously, everything and nothing is possible. Action and inaction both appear to be dead ends. There are those who silently hope for a massive solar flare or a great pandemic, assuming the only way to break from this Mobius strip of horrors is if it is severed by some cataclysm delivered from above. This is praying for calamity, it is begging a still listening God for absolution, as if we have done anything to earn such favors.

As the winter sets in, I will be writing about our responsibilities in such times.

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Capitalist Industrial Civilization = M.A.D.

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 82 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, David Suzuki, Depleted Uranium, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Gross Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Mountaintop Removal, NSA chief Keith Alexander, Nuclear Waste, Ocean Acidification, Plasticizing the Planet, Poverty, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, Strip, The Revolving Door Between Government and Corporations, War for Profit

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“This, then, is the legacy we leave to future generations so that we can turn on our lights and computers or make nuclear weapons… Have we, the human species, the ability to mature psychologically in time to avert these catastrophes, or, is it in fact, too late?” ~ Dr. Helen Caldicott

Radical, wide-scale planning should have been executed decades ago in response to the Limits to Growth study. Instead, we carried on with business-as-usual as the natural world underwent cataclysmic, mass extinction level changes. Every day, the insanity of capitalist industrial civilization(CIC) is on full display as we entertain ourselves with the illusion of token political gestures towards “sustainability”. None of it changes our death march over the cliff of extinction. Nature died long ago with man’s discovery of fossil fuels which fed his terminal overshoot. Any isolated pockets of remaining wilderness are trampled underfoot, amounting to no more than a mere novelty destination commercialized by the tourist industry.

Enslaved to his own self-destructive technology, CIC continues to toxify and irradiate the planet, plasticize the oceans, and disrupt the chemical conditions that allow for life. A society that dehumanizes everything with the fetishization of technology and money will always see disaster as a money-making opportunity. Anthropogenic climate disruption is no exception. Competition amongst nations and corporations for economic/military supremacy, wealth, and power demands that the energy resources to be exploited first are those with the highest available ERoEI, i.e. fossil fuels. The charts bear out this cutthroat strategy and so do the actions of nation states who have made it a legal duty to maximize greenhouse gases. Giving up the competitive advantage of coal, oil, and gas ensures you will be eaten alive in the global economy. Thus nation states are locked into a capitalist race to the grave. The nasty greenhouse gas-emitting side effects of these fuels are simply another negative externality quietly pushed onto future generations. However, physical reality will eventually overtake a fake mass-media culture consumed by the idolatry of materialism and greed. The Earth doesn’t bail out a species that continuously spends more than it saves. Instead, the biospheric slate is wiped clean to make way for the next bout of evolutionary events.

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Like radiation, GHG’s are seemingly invisible yet their effects are all too real. Because of the lag period involved in anthropogenic climate disruption, their devastating environmental costs will never be fully appreciated in time to avert disaster. Adding up the land, air, ice, and ocean warming data, a study from last year found that in recent decades the earth has been heating up at a rate of 250 trillion Joules per second. This is equivalent to:

    • Detonating four Hiroshima atomic bombs per second
    • Experiencing two Hurricane Sandys per second
    • Enduring four 6.0 Richter scale earthquakes per second
    • Being struck by 500,000 lightning bolts per second
    • Exploding more than eight Big Ben towers, with every inch packed full of dynamite, per second

For the Fox-news-befuddled masses, such analogies are meaningless because the threat is not in their face. In their conspiracy-addled minds, climate change is a socialist plot to ruin the American economy and undermine capitalism itself. To the genuflecting masses of capitalism, the mythical free market is seen as an all-powerful, self-regulating mechanism of the Earth, the Sun, and the Universe. Man-made constructs are inanimate and artificial, yet we cling to them as if they were immutable laws of nature.

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Keeping industrial civilization chugging along in the face of planetary ecological collapse is eerily similar to the military doctrine of nuclear deterrence called M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction), as commenter James explained:

Our competitive growth is MAD and considered on a geological time scale is only slightly slower than a sudden launch of nuclear missiles which may also eventually occur. We kid ourselves when we think that we’ll be fine as long as we never have a nuclear exchange, that sustainability is a possibility if we prevent nuclear war…

…This planet has the Big C, civilization, and it will torture its denizens as they struggle to maintain normalcy while the onslaught of malnutrition, decay and chaos drive them mad.

Do you think Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney are going to ameliorate the conditions of your decline? Ever wonder what it’s like to be a human sacrifice?

Capitalist carbon man’s unwavering faith in the powers of technology ensures that Big C’s omnicidal, energy-slurping $46 trillion-dollar infrastructure(U.S.A. only) and its array of mechanized contraptions cranks onward, squeezing out the last drop of resources from a spent Earth. Human cannon fodder will continue to be shoveled into Iraq and the Middle East to keep the fossil fuel furnaces burning. America’s corporate-industrial-military-political-financial complex will protect its financial coffers at the expense of the destitute masses and a habitable planet. When it comes to money, there is no loyalty to anyone or anything in the land of the FEE and home of the bamboozled. Just like countless Wall Street predators who have passed through the revolving corporate/government door, former NSA chief Keith Alexander is now getting in on the action to exploit his national security credentials. 

A simple lesson not learned from the two recent epic industrial disasters:

Collusion between big business, government and industry is hardly restricted to Japan. In every country, the health and safety of working people in their workplaces and their communities are routinely subordinated to the dictates of profit. Moreover, the past three decades of market restructuring have led to the systematic erosion of the limited regulations that previously existed. In many instances, regulatory bodies have been cut back or replaced by corporate “self-regulation”.

Fukushima is just one of the major disasters that have exposed the criminal character of capitalism. One year earlier, an explosion at the BP-run Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and created the worst environmental catastrophe in US history. The Bush and Obama administrations fast-tracked the project, which proceeded without an environmental impact study, despite public concern and opposition. In the wake of the oil spill, the Obama administration acted as a virtual attorney for BP, assisting the energy giant to minimise the economic and political fallout. From the outset, the White House made clear that the disaster would not impede further offshore oil projects—including by BP.

The Japanese government, first under Prime Minister Naoto Kan, and now Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, has performed a similar service for TEPCO—providing a huge bailout for the company and limiting the payouts to small businesses and individuals whose lives have been devastated…

…The real lesson that should be drawn from the report’s revelations is the incompatibility between capitalism and even the most elementary needs of humanity for a healthy and secure environment….

Structuring a society to reward the most sociopathic and ruthless amongst us, create grotesque levels of inequality and political disenfranchisement, deify material wealth as the primary metric of success, privatize and profitize war, and use the planet as a garbage dump for toxic waste is a recipe for disaster.

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Humans have thrown into the geological evolutionary processes of Earth several long-lived and very disruptive monkey wrenches. There are three which are noteworthy and will outlive us all in the deep time of planetary history:

    • Anthopogenic climate disruption will essentially last forever, according to Professor David Archer of Chicago University and his associates. He says “the climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, far longer than the age of human civilization so far. Ultimate recovery takes place on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, a geologic longevity typically associated in public perceptions with nuclear waste.”
    • Ocean Acidification, the so-called ‘evil twin’ of climate change, will mirror the longevity of anthropogenic CO2…

Snap 2014-06-27 at 11.07.57

    • Nuclear Waste from the production of nuclear power and nuclear bombs lasts essentially until the end of time. Coal-fired electric plants produce their own witch’s brew of radioactive waste as well. In the U.S. alone, roughly 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are produced every year with 70,000 tons now sitting at some 100 temporary sites across the country. A permanent disposal site has yet to be established to store the fatal stuff. The recent egregious, Homer Simpson-esque mishaps and incompetence at America’s only radioactive waste repository located in New Mexico don’t inspire any confidence that we can store this stuff safely even for a brief period, let alone for the thousands of years required. We’re too busy fracking around that fragile site to worry about any long-term consequences. Humans have sufficiently booby-trapped the planet that in the dying days of the Anthropocene, your chance of survival is the same as winning the Lotto.

A few of the deadly radioisotopes that can be found in nuclear waste are the following:

– uranium 238 (half-life 4.468 billion years)
– uranium 235 (half-life 700 million years)
– plutonium 244 (half-life 80 million years)
– iodine-129 (half-life 15.7 million years)
– neptunium-237 (half-life two million years)
– plutonium 242 (half-life 373,300 years)
– technetium-99 (half-life 220,000 years)
– plutonium-239 (half-life 24,000 years)

Depleted uranium is a byproduct of processing mined uranium for fuel in nuclear energy plants and as a component for nuclear bombs. Depleted uranium contains U-234, U-235, U-236, and U-238. Only two countries have acknowledged using depleted uranium in their weaponry, the US and UK, for its armor-piercing advantages. Only one country, Belgium, has banned its use. A couple of years ago, New Zealand put forth a bill to ban DU munitions, but it failed by one vote. The Dutch peace group PAX recently confirmed that the U.S. fired DU munitions into Iraqi civilian populations.

Once a DU shell impacts a target, it aerosolizes into a fine gas or mist which can then travel in the air for miles. These radioactive particles can get kicked up again and again by the wind or other disturbances after they have settled on the ground or in the sand. Once inhaled by humans, DNA is damaged and the ensuing cell mutations lead to cancer. For an example of the havoc depleted uranium has wreaked on the health of returning soldiers, watch this video. Investigative reporter Dr Nafeez Ahmed recently reported how the World Health Organization tried to cover up the horrific, lingering effects of depleted uranium contamination in Iraq. For those Middle East countries, the use of these radioactive DU munitions by Western forces constitutes an under-the-radar nuclear scourge with cancers, birth defects, and chronic ill-health affecting generations upon generations into the distant future.

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I suppose one could add plastics to the list of unimaginably long-lasting pollutants to the list. Microscopic particles of the stuff can be found at any beach and even in mountaintop lakes. And of course the scars from massive strip mining operations will remain as an indelible reminder of industrial civilization’s insatiable appetite for energy. Scientists didn’t declare this the Anthropocene Epoch for nothing; we have certainly left our mark like no other species before or since, literally terraforming the Earth into a planet inhospitable to ourselves. Perhaps aliens will pay a visit after the dust has all settled. They’ll surely shake their heads in disgust at the poisonous wreckage left behind by our fossil-fueled madness before zooming off into the night skies in search of a planet that has intelligent life.

 

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Endlessly Apologizing for a Self-Destructive System

24 Saturday May 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 57 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate $tate, Corporatocracy, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, James Howard Kunstler, Joel Magnuson, Mass Media Manipulation, Mindful Economics: How the U.S. Economy Works - Why it Matters - and How it Could Be Different, Monopoly Capitalism, Monopsony, Noam Chomsky, Poverty, Regulatory Capture, Richard Wolff, Systemic Disorder, Systemic Fraud in Politics, The Invisible Hand of the Free Market, The Myth of Laissez Faire Capitalism, The Profit Motive

occupytoronto-021

Although I agree with much of what J. H. Kunstler has to say, particularly on his analysis of energy and his critiques of American suburbia, when it comes to his views on the human-made system that is driving this entire train wreck, he gets it dead wrong. Here is a quote from his last blog post:

Now I am, going to reveal to you why it is so difficult to get a live human being on the telephone at these important places: because the more of a racketeering matrix medicine becomes, the more it seeks to evade responsibility for the consequences. That is, the more medicine becomes a criminal enterprise, the less it wants to hear from its client/victims. The same ethos is at work in just about every other realm of corporate enterprise in the USA. Our problem in the USA is not “capitalism,” it’s racketeering. Why we fail to comprehend it is one of the abiding mysteries of contemporary life.

…It ought to be self-evident that this could only happen in a profoundly corrupt, dishonest, and degenerate society, because it took the form of a social compact that accepted this sort of behavior as okay…

Kunstler is perpetuating a deep-seated myth about capitalism that many in American society repeat. Laying the blame on those victimized by an economic system, which by design exploits, disenfranchises, and discards its subjects, overlooks the fact that the problem is the system itself. Capitalism is not an ethical system, and its overriding force of motivation is always the bottom line. Inequality, conflict, and regulatory corruption are all part and parcel of capitalism. History has borne this out numerous times. Unless someone steps in to break them up, monopolies are the natural result of unbridled capitalism (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

Winner-take-all

Corporate money greases the wheels of the political system which then passes regulations discouraging competition and favoring large corporations. Regulatory capture is inevitably what happens when successful capitalists amass wealth and buy off the political class whose lifeblood is, after all, money. Under the present system, we will never see a candidate elected to office without a substantial war chest of funds stuffed with corporate ‘donations‘. Government does the bidding of capitalists, not vise versa. We saw this in spades with the election of Obama when all his campaign promises of “hope and change” evaporated into thin air as he filled his cabinet with Wall Street and Goldman Sachs cronies. Who wrote the legislation for Obama’s healthcare reform? — lobbyists for the healthcare industrial complex where, not surprisingly, “the big bucks are currently earned not through the delivery of care, but from overseeing the business of medicine.” The corruption that Kunstler decries is not an aberration of capitalism, but a natural feature of it:

…What chiefly drives this sort of political corruption today is capitalism’s structure. For many capitalist enterprises, competitive and other pressures exist to increase profits, growth rates, and/or market share. Their boards and top managers seek to find cheaper produced inputs and cheaper labor power, to extract more output from their workers, to sell their outputs at the highest possible prices and to find more profitable technologies. The structure provides them with every incentive of financial gain and/or career security and advancement to behave in those ways. Thus, boards and top managers seek the maximum obtainable assistance of government officials in all these areas and also try to pay the least possible portion of their net revenues as taxes. Boards of directors tap their corporations’ profits to corrupt mostly the top echelons of the government bureaucracy, those needed to make advantageous official decisions.

Individual capitalists act to corrupt government officials to serve their enterprise’s needs. Grouped into associations, they do likewise for their industries. When organized as a whole (in “chambers of commerce” or “manufacturers alliances,” etc.), they corrupt to secure their class interests. When such corruption is not secret, capitalists articulate their demands to corrupted officials as “good for the economy or society as a whole.” Such phrases constitute the “appropriate language” that enables officials publicly to disguise and hopefully to legitimate their corrupt acts.

Strict moral codes, regulations and laws have been imposed to prevent individual or grouped capitalists from corrupting government officials. Evidence suggests, however, that neither civic-minded ethics, nor regulations nor laws have come close to ending capitalists’ corruption. Countless government courts, commissions, etc., have hardly ended official complicities in that corruption. Mainstream economics mostly proceeds in its analyses and policy prescriptions as if rampant corruption did not exist. Mass media tend to treat capitalist corruption (at least in their home countries) as exceptional and government efforts to stop it as serious. These, too, are further examples of that “appropriate language” with which modern capitalist societies mask systemic corruption.
~ Richard D Wolff

Noam Chomsky uses the acronym RECD (Really Existing Capitalist Democracy, pronounced ‘wrecked‘) to describe the capitalism that exists in the real world, and he doesn’t hold out much hope for civilization surviving it. Any sort of idyllic form of capitalism only exists in people’s heads and is kept alive by the myth of laissez-faire capitalism (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

Myth of a free market

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A democracy cannot exist without an informed and intelligent electorate, and when corporations and monied interests intentionally spin the news, the populous are reduced to conspiracy mongers and what Gore Vidal scoffingly called ‘consumer-depositors’ in thrall to the financial elite. Alas, the institution intended to educate the public, aka the Fourth Estate, on matters of vital importance has been thoroughly dismantled and perverted by capitalism. The internet, the last bastion of independent and alternative news, is soon to follow suite (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

media

If the masses are unable to see through the spin and distortion propagated by a class of greedy parasites, there is one entity that will not suffer the fate of the dispossessed, dying quietly in some dark corner. The Earth is not so forgiving to such continued capitalist assaults, and it’s not fooled by propaganda such as ‘sustainable development’, ‘green growth’, or ‘corporate social responsibility’. Since pre-industrial times, the global temperature has ‘only’ risen 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit), and we can already see the havoc to civilization’s infrastructure that climate chaos is wreaking. With forecasts of average global temperature to be many fold greater by mid century, it would seem that only a miracle will save us.

Systemic Disorder published an important essay yesterday on the systematic destruction of labor rights throughout the world. How long will these myths about capitalism persist until the exploited finally wake up and realize their blood, sweat, and sacrifice are what fills the coffers of the über rich? Many at the bottom of the economic hierarchy bend over backwards to apologize for our current system, calling it everything but capitalism. No matter how often capitalism fails, no matter how many people it kills, it is religiously touted as the only and the best economic system available despite its flaws. Will humans continue to amuse themselves to death, defending a systemically self-destructive system?

…

We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We ohhed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah

And when they found our shadows
Grouped ’round the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death . . .

…

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Overpopulated by Homo Colossus

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Pollution

≈ 118 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Derrick Jensen, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Overconsumption, Overpopulation, Poverty, Social Unrest, Wage Slave, William Catton

Snap 2014-04-01 at 21.56.52 Do citizens of industrialized, consumerist nations have the moral authority to lecture the world about overpopulation, singling it out as the root of all the world’s problems? William Catton coined the term Homo colossus to describe those living in the industrialized world whose consumption of resources is disproportionately greater than those in the so-called undeveloped world:

Snap 2014-04-20 at 11.42.06 In his book Endgame, Derrick Jensen points out that the argument of overpopulation becomes rather meaningless unless it is framed within the context of consumption levels:

Snap 2014-04-20 at 09.24.25 If we take a look at who is actually pushing the environment to collapse according to their consumption levels, it becomes clear by the numbers that the real planet destroyers are not the teeming masses of the Third World, but industrial civilization’s energy gluttons driving their SUV’s, checking their stock portfolios on the internet, and wagging their finger at the huddled masses who have been corralled into megacities because globalization wiped out their indigenous means of subsistence:

consumption-inequality-2005-pie

consumption-inequality-2005-bar

…What is immediately apparent from Chart 1[above] is that the 10 percent of the world’s population with the highest income, some 700 million people, are responsible for the overwhelmingly majority of the problem. It should be kept in mind that this is not just an issue of the rich countries. Very wealthy people live in almost all countries of the world—the wealthiest person in the world is Mexican, and there are more Asians than North Americans with net worth over $100 million. When looked at from a global perspective, the poor become essentially irrelevant to the problem of resource use and pollution. The poorest 40 percent of people on Earth are estimated to consume less than 5 percent of natural resources. The poorest 20 percent, about 1.4 billion people, use less than 2 percent of natural resources. If somehow the poorest billion people disappeared tomorrow, it would have a barely noticeable effect on global natural resource use and pollution. (It is the poor countries, with high population growth, that have low per capita greenhouse gas emissions.22) However, resource use and pollution could be cut in half if the richest 700 million lived at an average global standard of living.

Thus, we are forced to conclude that when considering global resource use and environmental degradation there really is a “population problem.” But it is not too many people—and certainly not too many poor people—but rather too many rich people living too “high on the hog” and consuming too much. Thus birth control programs in poor countries or other means to lower the population in these regions will do nothing to help deal with the great problems of global resource use and environmental destruction… – link

By far, the wealthy have the world’s largest environmental footprint :

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the carbon footprint of the top quintile is over three times that of the bottom. Even in relatively egalitarian Canada, the top income decile has a mobility footprint nine times that of the lowest, a consumer goods footprint four times greater, and an overall ecological footprint two-and-a-half times larger. Air travel is frequently pegged as one of the most rapidly growing sources of carbon emissions, but it’s not simply because budget airlines have “democratized the skies”–rather, flying has truly exploded among the hyper-mobile affluent. Thus in Western Europe, the transportation footprint of the top income earners is 250 percent of that of the poor. And global carbon emissions are particularly uneven: the top five hundred million people by income, comprising about 8 percent of global population, are responsible for 50 percent of all emissions. It’s a truly global elite, with high emitters present in all countries of the world.

In the post Earth to Humans: “Get Off Your Merry-Go-Round Ride to Extinction”, I quoted a well-reasoned article by Devon G. Peña who explained the self-serving and hypocritical stance taken by the capitalist industrialized nations regarding the issue of overpopulation. The root causes driving mankind to extinction are completely sidestepped:

…In climate change debates, overpopulation arguments serve to delay making structural changes in North and South away from the extraction and use of fossil fuels; to explain the failure of carbon markets to tackle the problem; to justify increased and multiple interventions in the countries deemed to hold the surplus people; and to excuse those interventions when they cause further environmental degradation, migration or conflict.

As such, population theory is far more than a theory or a principle. It is above all a political strategy that obscures the relationships of power between different groups in societies, whether these be local, national, global, while at the same time justifying those political relationships that allow certain groups to dominate others structurally, be they men over women, property owners over commoners, or ‘us’ over ‘them’. The “too many” are hardly ever the speakers, they are always the Other.

This partially explains why those considered to be surplus are not those who profit from continued fossil fuel extraction but those most harmed by it and by climate change…

As was shown in the post The Biophysics of Civilization, Money = Energy, and the Inevitability of Collapse, GDP and money are tied to energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity and our economic model and profligate way of life are on a collision course with catastrophe. Realistic solutions require dealing with the root of the problem, not the symptoms. Geoengineering, carbon trading schemes, and GMO’s are technocapitalist solutions to climate change. Focusing on overpopulaion ignores the socio-economic system behind all the exploitation and destruction.

…It is not surprising, however, that a worsening climate situation is often attributed not to continued fossil fuel extraction but to too many people. Whenever global environmental crises, Third World poverty or world hunger are at issue, whenever conflict, migration or economic growth are discussed, economists, demographers, planners, corporate financiers and political pundits (at least in the North) frequently invoke overpopulation.

Over 200 years ago, at a time of immense social, political and economic upheavals and deprivation in England triggered by the enclosure of common lands and forests on which peasant livelihoods depended, free market economist Thomas Malthus wrote a story about how nature and humans interact. The punch line was his mathematical analogy for the disparity between human and food increases. Harnessing politics to mathematics, he provided a spuriously neutral set of arguments for promoting a new political correctness – one that denied the shared rights of everyone to subsistence, sanctioning instead the rights of the “deserving” over the “undeserving”, with the market as arbiter of entitlements. The poor were poor because they lacked restraint and discipline, not because of privatisation. This is the essence of the overpopulation argument.

Today, a range of industries use the same argument to colonise the future for their particular interests and to privatise commonally-held goods. In agriculture, for instance, the talk is of extra mouths in the South causing global famine — unless biotechnology companies have the right to patent and genetically-engineer seeds. With respect to water, growing numbers of thirsty slum dwellers are held to threaten water wars — unless water resources are handed over to private sector water companies. And in climate, the talk is of teeming Chinese and Indians causing whole cities to be lost to flooding through their greenhouse gas emissions — unless polluting companies are granted property rights in the atmosphere through carbon-trading schemes and carbon offsets. These are the tools of the main official approach to the climate crisis that aims to build a global carbon market worth trillions of dollars.

Two centuries ago, Malthus was compelled to admit that his mathematical and geometric series of increases in food and humans were not observable in any society. He acknowledged that his “power of number” was just an image — an admission demographers have since confirmed. And for over 200 years, his theory and arguments — that it is the number of people that cause resource scarcity — have been refuted endlessly by demonstrations that any problem attributed to human numbers can more convincingly be explained by social inequality, or that the statistical correlation is ambiguous. Malthus’s greatest achievement was in fact to obscure the roots of poverty, inequality and environmental deterioration. The “war-room” mentality generated by predictions of scarcity-driven apocalypse has always diverted attention away from the awkward social and environmental history of discredited policies and projects – a more important focus of study.

Frequently left out of discussions about tackling malnutrition, hunger, starvation and famine, for instance, are the maldistribution of the world’s food supplies, skewed access to land, trade policies, the hazards of devoting land to agrofuel or carbon offset production, unequal access to money to buy food, and commodity speculation.

If over one billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, it is because water, like food, flows to those with the most bargaining power: industry and bigger farmers first, richer consumers second, and the poor last, whose water is polluted by industrial effluent, exported in foodstuffs or poured down the drain through others’ wasteful consumption… – link

And of course we can always wash our hands of everything by saying humans, driven by base biological urges, are inherently aggressive, selfish, and hierarchical by nature. We can blame our fossil fuel consumption on the optimal foraging theory and the lethal mutation of higher intelligence. We can excuse our self-destructive behavior on account of evolutionary blind spots such as faulty human brain circuitry with its numerous cognitive biases and inability to perceive long-term threats like climate change. We can say that “complex global human systems” are beyond anyone’s control and therefore cannot be altered or stopped. In other words, we can rationalize inaction and put forth many reasons for why we are helpless as our manmade economic system speeds toward the cliff, but as the masses see the system for what it really is, the facade becomes harder and harder to maintain. The mantra of business-as-usual is becoming a curse for most, and if continued on for much longer will most certainly be a death sentence for all.

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Dying Under the Spell of the American Dream

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Inequality

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate $tate, Corporate Rule, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Culture of Poverty Theory, Discrimination, Financial Elite, Genetic Superiority Myth, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Maldistribution of Wealth, Mass Media Propaganda, Meritocracy, Poverty, Social Injustice, The Elite 1%, The Myth of the American Dream, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, Wall Street Fraud

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While the false debate continues in mostly right-wing circles that today’s Capitalism is some aberrant form of “true” Capitalism, the end game and final victory of Capital continues to play out with multinational corporations becoming the ‘winner take all’ in their complete takeover of the world’s economies and governments. As discussed before, the TTIP and TPP are the latest maneuvers in this corporate grab for power, wealth, and resources. Any last vestiges of environmental protection, worker rights, and sovereignty will be shredded. No illusions of democracy should be maintained in a world of corporate feudalism where gross social inequality will have become irreversible and the will of common people smothered by the abuses of great wealth:

“[The TTIP] proposes to establish a Regulatory Co-operation Council combining US and EU regulatory agencies with the purpose of working towards deeper ‘regulatory co-operation and increased compatibility for future and existing regulatory measures’. For example, health and safety regulations and food standards between the US and the EU will be made ‘compatible’, or more simply put, downgraded or removed.

The TTIP and TPP are intended to include investor-state dispute settlement clauses. When a corporation considers its expected future profits are being harmed by a government it can lodge a case before these tribunals consisting of three lawyers who represent corporate interests. These lawyers have no conflict of interest restrictions on their operations. There are no limits on the awards that can be claimed against governments and very limited rights of appeal for governments. Even if a government wins a case it must pay the tribunal’s costs and legal fees – averaging $9m a case. UNCTAD reports a tenfold increase in such cases since 2000. Any health or environmental policy that conflicted with corporate interests would be subjected to these extra-judicial tribunals. Tribunals are currently organised under World Bank and United Nations rules. The compensation is taken from the taxpayers.

Of the world’s ten biggest law firms, ranked by revenue, four are British and six are US. A golden age for corporate lawyers beckons! ConDem Coalition government Minister without Portfolio Ken Clarke explained, ‘Investor protection is a standard part of free-trade agreements – it was designed to support businesses investing in countries where the rule of law is unpredictable, to say the least.’

Legalised plunder

The following are just a few of the cases that corporations have brought to the investor-state dispute settlement tribunals: …” – link

The PR machine continues to churn out lies even under the glaring reality of today’s obscene wealth disparity. One particular study, entitled Your Fate? Thank Your Ancestors, was discussed in the New York Times recently, proclaiming that an individual’s path to success or failure in any society is foreordained in their genetic make-up and family lineage. Of course genes do play a part in the intelligence, talents, and behavior of every individual, but this particular meme is based on the myth that people in present day capitalist economies live and operate within “modern meritocracy societies” wherein everyone has the freedom and opportunity to develop and utilize the full potential of their talents. As one commenter at the New York Times rightly stated:

“This [study] appears to be one of a growing number arguing for the inherent superiority of some people over others while strenuously avoiding terms like superiority. The claim that some are born to lead and rule and others to be ruled over is as old as human civilization.”

Such propaganda serves the purpose of those at the top of the capitalist social hierarchy, allowing them to justify capitalism’s grotesque social inequality while at the same time preaching to the masses that their poor standing in society is a result of their genetic heritage and not the result of a structurally unjust and undemocratic system. In other words, those at the top deserve to be there and so do those at the bottom.

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Many people remain under the spell of the American Dream which promises they can rise to the top of this corrupt system or at least receive the trickle down benefits it claims to offer, but the stark reality of shrinking wages and pensions, persistent unemployment, and rising costs of bare necessities prove otherwise. It’s known as “the meritocracy myth” and one book with that title, written by two professors, explains that a person’s social status is based more on factors such as class structure, politics, and race rather than on individual merit and initiative. Their major arguments are summarized below:

“Factors associated with Individual “Merit”

1.) Money makes money.
Sources of revenue that are unrelated to jobs, such as income from capital gains, dividends, interest payments, government subsidies as well as appreciating assets of wealth such as businesses, real estate, and stocks are predominantly owned by a small fraction of society’s upper echelon. This maldistribution of wealth illustrates that America is not a “middle class society”, but one of the haves and have-nots where wealth is concentrated at the very top of the system.

“…the shape of the distribution of merit resembles a “bell curve” with small numbers of incompetent people at the lower end, most people of average abilities in the middle and small numbers of talented people at the upper end. The highly skewed distribution of economic outcomes, however, appears quite in excess of any reasonable distribution of merit. Something that is distributed “normally” cannot be the direct and proportional cause of something with such skewed distributions…”

2.) “Your IQ has really no relationship to your wealth.”

“Most experts point out, for instance, that ‘intelligence,’ as measured by IQ tests, is partially a reflection of inherent intellectual capacity and partially a reflection of environmental influences. It is the combination of capacity and experience that determines ‘intelligence.’ Even allowing for this ‘environmental’ caveat, IQ scores only account for about 10% of the variance in income differences among individuals (Fisher et al. 1996). Since wealth is less tied to achievement than income, the amount of influence of intelligence on wealth is much less. Other purportedly innate ‘talents’ cannot be separated from experience, since any ‘talent’ must be displayed to be recognized and labeled as such (Chambliss 1989). There is no way to determine for certain, for instance, how many potential world-class violinists there are in the general population but who have never once picked up a violin. Such ‘talents’ do not spontaneously erupt but must be identified and cultivated.”

3.) Hard work does not necessarily equate to economic success.

“Applying talents is also necessary. Working hard is often seen in this context as part of the merit formula. Heads nod in acknowledgment whenever hard work is mentioned in conjunction with economic success. Rarely is this assumption questioned. But what exactly do we mean by hard work? Does it mean the number of hours expended in the effort to achieve a goal? Does it mean the amount of energy or sheer physical exertion expended in the completion of tasks?  Neither of these measures of “hard” work is directly associated with economic success. In fact, those who work the most hours and expend the most effort (at least physically) are often the most poorly paid in society. By contrast, the really big money in America comes not from working at all but from owning, which requires no expenditure of effort, either physical or mental. In short, working hard is not in and of itself directly related to the amount of income and wealth that individuals have.”

4.) Mental Attitude

“According to the culture of poverty argument, people are poor because of deviant or pathological values that are then passed on from one generation to the next, creating a “vicious cycle of poverty.”  According to this perspective, poor people are viewed as anti-work, anti-family, anti-school, and anti-success.  Recent evidence reported in this journal (Wynn, 2003) and elsewhere (Barnes, Gould ;1999, Wilson, 1996), however, indicates that poor people appear to value work, family, school, and achievement as much as other Americans.  Instead of having “deviant” or “pathological” values, the evidence suggests that poor people adjust their ambitions and outlooks according to realistic assessments of their more limited life chances.

    An example of such an adjustment is the supposed “present-orientation” of the poor.  According to the culture of poverty theory, poor people are “present-oriented” and are unable to “defer gratification.”   Present orientation may encourage young adults to drop out of school to take low wage jobs instead staying in school to increase future earning potential.  However, the present orientation of the poor can be an “effect” of poverty rather than a “cause.”  That is, if you are desperately poor, you may be forced to be present oriented.  If you do not know where your next meal is coming from, you essentially have no choice but to be focused on immediate needs first and foremost.   By contrast, the rich and middle class can “afford” to be more future oriented since their immediate needs are secure.  Similarly, the poor may report more modest ambitions than the affluent, not because they are unmotivated, but because of a realistic assessment of limited life chances.  In this sense, observed differences in outlooks between the poor and the more affluent are more likely a reflection of fundamentally different life circumstances than fundamentally different attitudes or values.”

5.) Moral character and integrity

“Although ‘honesty may be the best policy’ in terms of how one should conduct oneself in relations with others, there is little evidence that the economically successful are more honest than the less successful. The recent spate of alleged corporate ethics scandals at such corporations as Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Adelphia, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Duke Energy, Global Crossing, Xerox as well as recent allegations of misconduct in the vast mutual funds industry reveal how corporate executives often enrich themselves through less than honest means. White-collar crime in the form of insider trading, embezzlement, tax fraud, insurance fraud and the like is hardly evidence of honesty and virtue in practice. And neither is the extensive and sometimes highly lucrative so-called ‘irregular’ or ‘under the table’ economy—much of it related to vice in the form of drug trafficking, gambling, pornography, loan sharking, or smuggling. Clearly, wealth alone is not a reflection of moral superiority. To get ahead in America, it no doubt helps to be bright, shrewd, to work hard, and to have the right combination of attitudes that maximize success within given fields of endeavor. Playing by the rules, however, probably works to suppress prospects for economic success since those who play by the rules are more restricted in their opportunities to attain wealth and income than those who choose to ignore the rules.”

Nonmerit Barriers to Mobility

1.) The effects of initial class placement at birth on future life chances.

“…those born into great wealth start far ahead of those born to poor parents, who have a huge deficit to overcome if they are to catch up. Indeed, of all the factors that we might consider, where we start out in life has the greatest effect on where we end up. In the race to get ahead, the effects of inheritance come first and merit second, not the other way around.

    Inheritance provides numerous cumulative nonmerit advantages that are available in varying degrees to all those born into at least some relative advantage, excluding only those at the very bottom of the system. Included among these nonmerit advantages are high standards of living from birth, inter vivos gifts (gifts between the living) such as infusions of cash and property bestowed by parents on their children at critical junctures in the life course (going to college, getting married, buying a home, having children, starting a business, etc.), insulation from downward mobility (family safety nets which prevent children from skidding in times of personal crises, setbacks, or as the result of personal failures), access to educational opportunities as well as other opportunities to acquire personal merit or to have merit identified and cultivated, better health care and consequently longer and healthier lives (which increases earning power and the ability to accumulate assets during the life course).

    Another advantage of inheritance is access to high-powered forms of social and cultural capital. Social capital is one’s ‘social resources’ and refers to essentially to the value of whom you know. Cultural capital is one’s cultural resources and refers essentially to the social value of what you know. Everyone has friends, but those born into privilege have friends in high places with resources and power. Everyone possesses culture—bodies of knowledge and information needed to navigate through social space. Full acceptance into the highest social circles, however, requires knowledge of the ways of life of a particular group…”

2.) Bad Luck

“Bad luck can take many forms but two very common forms of bad luck are to be laid off from a job that you are good at or to spend many years preparing for a job for which demand either never materializes or declines. In looking at jobs and job opportunities, Americans tend to focus on the ‘supply’ side of markets for labor; that is, the pool of available people in the labor force. Much less attention is paid to the ‘demand’ side, or the number and types of jobs available. In the race to get ahead, it is possible and all too common for meritorious individuals to be ‘all dressed up with no place to go.’  For the past twenty years, the ‘growth’ jobs in America have disproportionately been in the low wage service sector of the economy. At the same time, more Americans are getting more education, especially higher education. Simply put, these trends are running in opposite directions: the economy is not producing as many high-powered jobs as the society is producing highly qualified people to fill them (Collins 1979, Livingstone 1998).

In addition to the number and types of jobs available, the locations of jobs both geographically and within different sectors of the economy also represent non-merit factors in the prospects for employment. For instance, a janitor who works for a large corporation New York City may get paid much more for doing essentially the same job as a janitor who works for a small family business in a small town in Mississippi. These effects are independent of the demands of the jobs or the qualifications or merit of the individuals holding them.  Differences in benefits and wages between such jobs are often substantial and may mean the difference between a secure existence and poverty… rates of poverty in the United States continue to vary by region and locations within regions suggesting that geography is still a major factor in the distribution of economic opportunity.”

3.) Education

“…those with more education, on average, have higher income and wealth. Education is thus often seen as the primary means of upward social mobility. In this context, education is widely perceived as a gatekeeper institution which sifts and sorts individuals according to individual merit. Grades, credits, diplomas, degrees, and certificates are clearly “earned,” not purchased or appropriated. But, as much research has demonstrated, educational opportunity is not equally distributed in the population (Bowles and Gintis 1976, 2002, Bourdieu and Passeron 1990, Aschaffenburg and Maas 1997, Kozol, 1991, Sacks, 2003, Ballantine 2001). Upper class children tend to get upper class educations (e.g. at elite private prep schools and ivy league colleges), middle class children tend to get middle class educations (e.g. at public schools and public universities), and working class people tend to get working class educations (e.g. public schools and technical or community colleges), and poor people tend to get poor educations (e.g. inner city schools that have high drop out rates and usually no higher education). Educational attainment clearly depends on family economic standing and is not simply a major independent cause of it. The quality of schools and the quality of educational opportunity vary according to where one lives, and where one lives depend on familial economic resources and race. Most public schools, for instance, are supported by local property taxes. The tax base is higher in wealthy communities and proportionally lower in poorer areas. These discrepancies give rise to the perpetual parental scramble to locate in communities and neighborhoods that have reputations for “good schools,” since parents want to provide every possible advantage to their children that they can afford. To the extent that parents are actually successful in passing on such advantages, educational attainment is primarily a reflection of family income. In sum, it is important to recognize that individual achievement occurs within a context of unequal educational opportunity.”

4.) Loss of Self-Employment Opportunities and the Offshoring of Jobs

“…self-employment is popularly perceived as a major route to upward mobility. Opportunities to get ahead on the basis of being self-employed or striking out on one’s own to start a new business, however, have sharply declined. In colonial times, about three-fourths of the non-slave American population was self- employed most as small family farmers. Today, only seven percent of the labor force is self-employed (U.S. Census Bureau 2002). The “family farm,” in particular, is on the brink of statistical extinction. As self-employment has declined, the size and dominance of corporations has increased. This leaves many fewer opportunities for “self-made” individuals to enter existing markets or to establish new ones. America has witnessed the sharp decline of “mom and pop” stores, restaurants, and retail shops and the concomitant rise of Wal-Marts, Holiday Inns, and McDonalds. As more Americans work for someone else in increasingly bureaucratized settings, the prospects of rapid “rags to riches” mobility decline.

    In addition to the decline of self-employment, manufacturing has also experienced drastic workforce reduction as production facilities have increasingly moved to foreign countries in efforts to reduce costs of production. This is a significant trend since the United States became a world power based on its industrial strength, which supported a large and relatively prosperous working and middle class. Some service jobs, such as customer service and computer programming, are also being moved to foreign countries in increasing numbers. All of these trends are occurring quite independent of the merit of individuals but nevertheless profoundly impact the opportunities of individuals to get ahead…”

5.) Discrimination

“Discrimination not only suppresses merit; it is the antithesis of merit. Race and sex discrimination have been the most pervasive forms of discrimination in America, [but others include] sexual orientation, religion, age, physical disability (unrelated to job performance), physical appearance…”

In addition to the worsening inequality endemic to the system, the social fabric of society will be torn apart by a world now in the throes of multiple ecological crises. The availability and affordability of food and water will be magnified by anthropogenic climate change as the agricultural regions of an overpopulated world are ravaged by drought, flood, and fire. Infrastructure will begin to fail more frequently as extreme weather begins to rack up damage. The aloof elite, who ensconce themselves behind gated walls and the luxury that their wealth buys, will fan the flames of resentment and civil unrest in a desperate population scrambling just for the necessities of life. The cultural myths of capitalism are fraying and the collapse of industrial civilization, unable to change its omnicidal course for sundry reasons, is seemingly written in stone.

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We’ll Have Nothing Left to Lose!!!

05 Sunday Jan 2014

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

≈ 61 Comments

Tags

Banksy, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate Espionage, Corporate Lobbyists, Corporate Shills, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Disneyfication of Society, Eco-Apocalypse, Economic Collapse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Financialization of the Economy, Globalization, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, McDonaldization of Society, Military Industrial Complex, Near-Term Extinction, Nine Inch Nails, Peak Oil, Philip K. Dick, Police State, Ponzi Schemes, Poverty, Propaganda, Pseudo-Realities, Public Relations, Ralph Nader, Resource Wars, Revolution, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Stephen Fjellman, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Vinyl Leaves:Walt Disney World and America, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit, Worship of Mammon

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Rejoice: McDonald’s to open up first restaurant in Vietnam in 2014. Disneyland can’t be too far behind.

The . . . metamessage of our time is that the commodity form is natural and inescapable. Our lives can only be well lived (or lived at all) through the purchase of particular commodities. Thus our major existential interest consists of maneuvering for eligibility to buy such commodities in the market. Further, we have been taught that it is right and just—ordained by history, human nature, and God—that the means of life in all its forms be available only as commodities. . . . Americans live in an overcommodified world, with needs that are generated in the interests of the market and that can be met only through the market.
~ Stephen Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves:Walt Disney World and America

From the Amazonian tribe driven off its land by fossil fuel companies to the wage-enslaved city dweller dependent on mass-produced food and other commodities, no place on Earth has escaped the planet-wide reach of capitalist industrial civilization’s profit-extracting mechanisms. The oligarch’s of industry and banking shape public thought through an all-pervasive mass media monopoly, control legislation and regulation by pulling political purse-strings and commanding an army of lobbyists, sew death and mayhem with the global arms trade, sacrifice the next generation in resource wars, decimate ecosystems for short-term gain, manipulate and devalue currencies, create economic bubbles, and sell this entire vile process back to the masses as “progress” and “development” with measurements of inflated stock prices and skewed GDP figures. The untold human and environmental costs are now bursting at the seams with societal disintegration, epidemic mental illness, wide-scale resource depletion, industrial pollution and contamination, and the on-going collapse of the Earth’s biosphere.

If you’re wondering why there can never seem to be any significant action taken on climate change, don’t look for honest answers from those whose livelihood is tied to capitalism. If the true costs of the global industrial economy were calculated in terms of environmental damage, the ill-health effects on workers and the public, as well as the fraying of the Earth’s web of life, industries would find the costs too great to bear. The honest truth is that this ecocidal economic system would have to be dismantled for there to be any hope of humanity preserving a living planet and averting extinction.

“…big-time corporate capitalism is an omnicidal momentum. I mean, it just has one thing in mind, and it will destroy or weaken or co-opt anything in its way that is civic, that is democratic….corporations have been very clever A) in distracting people, especially young generation, with entertainment, with professional sports, turning them into spectators. Now you’ve got, you know, 24/7 entertainment. There’s no end to it. And they’ve also been very good in making people internalize a sense of powerlessness.” ~ Ralph Nader

Perhaps the three biggest crises facing civilization are unrestrained financialization of commerce and society, climate change, and peak oil (or peak net energy). Let’s take a quick look at how America is handling each of these crises:

Employing paid shills for the financial industry is now simply standard operating procedure in the U.$.A.:

Snap 2014-01-05 at 21.19.12

…Consumer advocates and independent analysts do their best to weigh in as well, but they are outgunned. Meanwhile, consulting firms dedicated to playing matchmaker between corporations and hired experts have flourished in the new regulatory environment. Director Charles Ferguson, whose film Inside Job highlighted the role of sponsored professors in supporting the deregulatory policies that led to the financial meltdown in 2008, says the business of economic consulting firms that work to “source” academics for expert testimony and regulatory filings “has been going on for quite a while, and it’s now quite a large industry.”…

Of course anthropogenic climate change, the existential threat of modern times, would seem to be a catastrophe deserving of mankind’s attention, would it not? Well, as you can see, the capitalist only views it as a public relations war:

An extensive study into the financial networks that support groups denying the science behind climate change and opposing political action has found a vast, secretive web of think tanks and industry associations, bankrolled by conservative billionaires.

“I call it the climate-change counter movement,” study author Robert Brulle, who published his results in the journal Climatic Change, told the Guardian. “It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort.”

His work, which is focused on the United States, shows how a network of 91 think tanks and industry groups are primarily responsible for conservative opposition to climate policy. Almost 80 percent of these groups are registered as charitable organisations for tax purposes, and collectively received more than seven billion dollars between 2003 and 2010.

How about peak oil? Again, the energy industry has its PR machine in full swing touting America’s imminent energy independence along with many other myths, but commenter James of this blog cuts to the chase:

Now, which ponzi is most despicable, a religious or financial one? Both are based upon deceit and both serve primarily the enrichment of the scheme officialdom. One promises a payoff in eternal life while the other promises financial success. One examines your credit score while the other applies tick marks in you behavioral ledger of good and evil. Both systems of fleecing are based upon human fear and herd mentality. Society shuns the heretic of either ponzi and damnation awaits those that do not participate fully. Ponzis collapse when increasing numbers of fools, resources and energy can no longer be sucked into their cancerous growth schemes. The religious structures will be more enduring as they can always find plenty of poor dolts to give their last penny to gain a chance at the big after-life payoff. The financial schemers, faced now with meeting the absolutely unbelievable limits of growth will have to leave all those little nest eggs of promises, unhatched. The key is to convince the ponzi participants that the U.S. is the new Saudi Arabia, that fracking oil and natural gas is the future and we can get enough oil from shale to last a million years. “Just relax folks, you’re all gonna get your money back”. Not. What a miraculous world we live in.

As you can see, America is handling all three crises like a sleazy car salesman unloading a lot full of lemons.

And if anyone was spooked by the Snowden revelations of government spying, the implications of corporate espionage on social-change organizations that threaten to impede unfettered access to profits is truly terrifying.

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Although I’m not a particularly religious person, all evidence does point to a civilization which has completely succumbed to the worship of Mammon:

…The fruits of such idolatry are clear: the injustice and unemployment and waste of human talents; the corruption of our political leadership and their collusion with immoral financial practices; the depredation and degradation of our natural environments and the exhaustion of our natural resources; the inevitable wars and other crises that arise from the systematic fostering of base human appetites and the refusal to compromise our ways of life, and pursue a more equitable sharing of the gifts bequeathed to us…

I would not blame anyone for wanting to seek comfort in a bottle or some other form of self-medication, but perhaps doing something more dramatic to escape this nightmarish reality of a thoroughly corrupted, money-worshipping society is in the cards. When your back is against the wall and you’ve lost faith in everything, then revolution is the antidote for the “pseudo-realities” that plague us.

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.” ~ Philip K. Dick

Anonymouse-David-Aja

The specter of death, near-term extinction, haunts us as we silently endure the evil and decay all around us, going along just to get along in the belly of the American empire. One day pent-up anger and hunger will burst forth, pushing us into the streets. Blood and emotions will flow freely. Inept and crooked governments will fall. We’ll have nothing left to lose.

micky909

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“There’s no stopping this train.”

28 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 31 Comments

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Aaron Paul, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Albuquerque, Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston, Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Drug Addiction, Empire, Financial Elite, Giancarlo Esposito, Gross Inequality, Gustavo "Gus" Fring, Jesse Pinkman, Medical Bill Bankruptcy, Poverty, The Elite 1%, The Methamphetamine Crisis, unwashed public, Vince Gilligan, Wall Street Fraud, Walter White, Warren Buffett

american-breaking-gothic-breaking-bad-33126796-900-1072In an era of end-stage capitalism where life has become a sordid grab for dollars while the world lives on the edge of financial and ecological collapse, it comes as no surprise that America would be captivated by the story of a struggling school teacher going for the ‘American dream’ by crook or by hook. A tourist mystique has even been created in this show’s filming location of Albuquerque. The premise for this darkly comic tale is an all too familiar one for the average American family – the threat of bankrupting medical bills. Recently diagnosed with stage-three lung cancer and now at the end of his financial rope, Walter descends into the seedy world of illicit drugs in an attempt to save his family from economic ruin. Walter’s predicament represents the dilemma of most Americans who live quiet lives of desperation, just one paycheck away from hunger and homelessness. Ironically, the drug that Walter and his reluctant partner Jesse Pinkman wind up producing is also the drug of choice for many chained to the hamster wheel of capitalism:

“…the rise of meth coincided with the rise of low-paying low-skilled service work, where people had to work multiple menial jobs to earn the same amount they used to earn in one manufacturing job, or other good-paying low-skilled position.

The CDC notes that some meth users rely on it to get “increased energy to work multiple jobs.” Researchers at Indiana University and at the Universities of Colorado and Kentucky have found that, “The long hours and tedious work in oil fields, agriculture, construction, ancillary health care and fast food restaurants may be more tolerable on methamphetamine. Users report using meth to provide the energy to work multiple jobs or be a good mother.”

Guides to identifying and treating meth addiction, like Herbert Covey’s “The Methamphetamine Crisis,” tell readers to look out for, “workaholics or low-income adults who use it to stay awake and perform in multiple jobs. Working low-income individuals find meth attractive because they must work several jobs or long hours to support themselves or their families. They find that higher energy and alertness (ability to stay awake for prolonged periods) helps them cope with the demands of multiple jobs.”

This holds up if you look at places where meth use is highest. Hawaii’s heavy rate of meth use has been attributed to its high cost of living and service-based economy. “If you’re doing mind-numbing, repetitive work, this enables you to overcome both the painful tedium of the boredom as well as increase concentration and safety,” Dr. William Haning, a psychiatry professor at the University of Hawaii, once told the Maui News…“

From his former business partners at Grey Matter Technologies who stole his ideas and became incredibly wealthy to the demeaning work he endures at his car wash moonlighting job, the elusive ‘American dream’ has haunted Walter White. At first his scheme is to generate just enough cash to cover his medical expenses and secure a modicum of financial security for his family, but in a society whose primary metric of self-worth is the number of dollars one can accumulate, Walter quickly transforms into a cutthroat businessman bent on building an empire. His metamorphosis from a meek, mild-mannered family man to a Machiavellian drug kingpin is quite astonishing. Walter rationalizes and euphemizes his manufacture of the insidious drug meth by referring to it as his “product”, following strict steps to create “the highest quality product to perform as advertised.” “The chemistry must be respected,” proclaims Walter.

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In this world of hyper-exploitive capitalism, ‘staying in the game’ involves making choices that seldom include moral concerns. As the dead bodies continue to pile up around Walter’s drug operation, the more callous and psychopathic he becomes. Warren Buffet, the poster child for Capitalism, has praised the business acumen of the show’s main character while even tweeting a picture of himself as Walter White. Replace Walt’s blue crystal with iPhones or any other mass-produced product and the basic business model is eerily the same. The Economist even published an essay illustrating how ‘Breaking Bad’ was a “first-rate primer on business“:

“…Mr White’s biggest failing is also a common one in business: hubris. The more successful he becomes, the more invulnerable he feels. The more rules he breaks, the more righteous he feels. And the more wealth he accumulates, the more he wants. An impressive volume of social-science studies suggests that leaders are more willing to break the rules than followers. There is no shortage of corporate examples, from Enron to Olympus, to illustrate this. Walter White is a thoroughly odd character: Mr Chips turned Scarface, as the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, puts it. But he also holds a worrying mirror to the business world….“

Walter seals his own fate when he proclaims “there’s no stopping this train.” The accumulation of money becomes the “be-all and the end-all” for Walt’s existence, but for all the mountains of cash piling up in duffel bags, crawl spaces, storage units, and 55-gallon barrels, Walter and his family are unable to make much use of it and in fact are plagued by it. In the end, the money becomes a curse, destroying the very thing it was supposed to save… Walt and his family.

Walter White Meth Labs

Another irony among many is that the bruised and battered psyche of Jesse Pinkman, the drug addict ostracized by his well-to-do suburbanite parents, serves as the moral compass in a world of lies, deceit, and betrayal. Despite the fact that Walter and Jesse are producing one of the most destructive drugs in history, outright murder was never in their plans. Walter becomes inured to the killings, but Jesse is unable to cope. He sees their ill-gotten gains as “blood money” and gets rid of his share by tossing it all over a neighborhood. It’s quite fitting then that in the final conclusion Jesse ends up as the sole survivor of this trip through hell.

Interestingly, those who are masters at getting away with their crimes are the ones hiding in plain sight who have ingratiated themselves with law enforcement and other institutions of society. Behind the clean-cut and bespectacled mask of Gustavo “Gus” Fring lurks a cold-blooded drug lord whose meth superlab sits beneath the façade of an industrial laundry business. The distribution network of the drug is integrated into Fring’s fast food chicken chain. Gus Fring is a perfect representative for the psychopathic elite in our society who hide behind the phony rhetoric of PR firms, lobbyists, and dark money politics. I see an analogy with the toxicity of meth and the climate change wrought by fossil fuels. Industrial civilization’s addiction to fossil fuels is similar to the feeling of unlimited energy that a meth addict gets, but the downside is that both kill. For the psychopaths at the helm of industrial civilization, business-as-usual must be protected even as we race toward extinction. To quote a reader of this blog:

“…steady or rising coal and gas consumption in advanced countries (all countries, really), in the face of all this ecocide (not that so many actually consider it to be in their face) illustrates the inability of either producer or consumer to dial back within the confines of our system–a polygamy of empire and finance and thermodynamics. …we can’t get off the train…not in one piece anyhow.”

Walter White’s self-destructive end seems to be as tragic and foolish as the one capitalist industrial civilization is hurtling towards, or perhaps it’s simply the inevitable course of events governing all of life:

“As many of you know, I have a background as a chemistry teacher. I’ve come to realize that much of what I teach my students applies not only to what goes on in the classroom, but in life also. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. You see, technically, chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change: Electrons change their energy levels. Molecules change their bonds. Elements combine and change into compounds. But that’s all of life, right? It’s the constant, it’s the cycle. It’s solution, dissolution. Just over and over and over. It is growth, then decay, then transformation. It’s fascinating really. It’s a shame so many of us never take time to consider its implications.” ~ Walter White

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Disillusioned in Dismayland

09 Saturday Nov 2013

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

≈ 157 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Globalization, Gross Inequality, Idiocracy, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jeff Gillette, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Police State, Poverty, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, The Elite 1%, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

original

Capitalism has, throughout its history, built itself off the backs of the weak through dispossession, slavery, colonialism, technology and military power. Protecting the capitalist system into the 21st century, U.S. military served as the all-powerful proxy force of the global corporate elite. In the waning days of modern-day civilization, transnational corporations found even more ways to amass power and squeeze out every last penny from the Earth to the gods of capital. In the name of ‘free trade’, secretive agreements with alphabet soup-acronyms like TTP and TPIP were concocted to protect and expand profits as well as investor returns at the expense of all else, including the sovereignty of nations and the very habitability of the planet. Corporations became the new kings and queens, tsars and tsaritsas, bishops and popes. The last grab for what was left could now be done more swiftly while circumventing the laws of nations. 

“…Capitalism has an inbuilt wondrous capacity of resurrection and regeneration; though this is capacity of a kind shared with parasites – organisms that feed on other organisms, belonging to other species. After a complete or near-complete exhaustion of one host organism, a parasite tends and manages to find another, that would supply it with life juices for a successive, albeit also limited, stretch of time.

A hundred years ago Rosa Luxemburg grasped that secret of the eerie, phoenix-like ability of capitalism to rise, repeatedly, from the ashes; an ability that leaves behind a track of devastation – the history of capitalism is marked by the graves of living organisms sucked of their life juices to exhaustion…” ~ Zygmunt Bauman

In a world of finite resources controlled by a tiny capitalist class, there would eventually only be two classes remaining – the über-wealthy or global elite and the vast underclass of disposable workers who eked out a subsistence existence. The wealth of society continued to be funneled upwards to the corporate overlords by way of deregulation, privatization, low or nonexistent tax rates, control of the legal system, and the cutting away of any last scraps of a social safety net.

Preoccupied by their digital screen devices and satiated on mass-produced junk food, the plebs never really noticed they were living in an open-air prison. In the meantime, the walls of a police state rose up to protect the sociopathic elite. As long as the ‘consumers’ were kept in a continual state of ‘amusement madness’ and on the treadmill of work exhaustion, there would be no time for contemplating the reality of climate change, the ever-widening wealth gap, the rise of a corporate fascist state, or the disappearance of the natural world.

“Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.”
~ J. B. Priestley

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This Ponzi scheme economy was so entrenched in the psyche of the general populace that essentially none questioned its validity, even in the face of increasingly chaotic weather and rising seas, mountains of toxic waste, lifeless oceans, epidemic industrial disease, and grotesque wealth maldistribution. The right to seek profit trumped the health and safety of humans, the stability of the environment, and the legal recourse of governments on behalf of their citizens. National borders were effectively erased and a global corporatocracy now ruled the planet. Ironically, the one world government feared by so many right-wing conspiracists had become reality without any protest from them.

Acid rain and erratic weather, the unintended consequences of half-baked geoengineering fixes, forced most food production into industrial greenhouses. Due to the chemical pollution levels in the environment, all water had to be treated before it was used for anything, and gas masks became ‘everyday outdoor wear’ like hats and umbrellas. Most stayed indoors to escape such hazards, immersing themselves in the artificial environments of virtual reality software. Zoos became the only sanctuaries for wildlife, their sperm safely kept frozen for the day humans might want to de-extinctify them. National parks were privatized and plastered with corporate logos. The ranks of the homeless and destitute swelled, but most soon found themselves living inside the cell of a private, for-profit prison where they toiled away as cheap labor contracted by the corporations. Such crises were always looked upon as business opportunities, a niche to fill in the profit-seeking mind of homo economicus. Commodification and commercialization of everything became completely normalized.

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Taken to the extreme and turned into a rigid belief system, all ideologies can become dangerous. When the ethics of a society bow to laissez-faire capitalism, life in the U$A becomes a cruel joke:

  • War for profit (the world’s largest war machine eating up half of every tax dollar)
  • Healthcare for profit (the most expensive and least effective healthcare in the industrialized world)
  • Imprisonment for profit (most incarcerated individuals per capita in the world)
  • Higher education for profit ($1.2 trillion student debt and counting)
  • Corporate welfare (one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the developed world and subsidies for the giant transnational corporations costing the average American family $6,000 or more per year)
  • U.S. Now leading the world into climate chaos with unconventional oil & gas production (expensive extraction of dirty, low EROEI sources)
  • Corporate-controlled media (just 6 corporations own 90% of the media)
  • Corporate-controlled government (lobbying dollars just keep increasing)
  • Permanent quantitative easing (endless money printing did not work)
  • Gross wealth disparity (highest income gap of any developed country)

Need I go further? The day that the movie ‘Idiocracy’ is looked upon as genius and prophetic, civilization will have become a parody of itself. I think that day has arrived.

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The Conspiracy is Systemic and Legalized.

08 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism

≈ 69 Comments

Tags

Apophenia, Capitalism, Class War, Colin Todhunter, Confirmation Bias, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Dr Patrick Leman, Empire, Financial Elite, Glenn Beck, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Michael Parenti, Military Industrial Complex, Noam Chomsky, Patternicity, Plutocracy, Police State, Poverty, Regulatory Capture, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Subjective Validation, The Elite 1%, True-Believer Syndrome, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

conspiricy-blog-2-colossal-concerns-2

If you are a person who gets their news solely from mainstream media and forms a worldview from that information, then this website would perhaps strike you as radical, off-base, and conspiratorial. But what if nearly everything you listen to and read has been filtered through the monied interests of the most powerful entities on the planet? And what if those entities quite literally control the government by way of a revolving door, campaign contributions, and lobbyists who unduly influence the crafting of legislation in favor of big business while ignoring the needs of the common citizenry? What if you are merely a pawn in the machinations of such a system — a consumer for the all-important world market and a disposable human resource in its labor pool? What if the wealth created by such an economy is amassing at the very tip of this pyramid scheme while leaving those below to fend for themselves in a world depleted of its resources and poisoned by industrial waste. Would such a grim reality be considered a conspiracy theory? In other words, would the previously described outcome of such a socio-economic system necessarily have to be the plan of a secret cabal of powerful people? If corporations must compete to survive and are legally bound to look after the financial interests of their shareholders, then protecting and growing profits must in the end override all other concerns — environmental and social. The gross wealth disparity, environmental destruction, and political disenfranchisement created by capitalism is not the byproduct of a conspiracy; it’s simply the end-result of a system operating as intended. Concentration of wealth, a characteristic result of capitalism, inevitably leads to a near total corruption of journalism and democracy. Of course the corporate elite may collude to price-fix, bribe regulators or heads of state, and cover up environmental damage and dangers to public health, amongst many other devious activities, but it is invariably done in the interest of gaining dominance in the market place and protecting profits. Capitalism and democracy are not compatible. In fact, life on Earth is ultimately not compatible with capitalism.

One author who has written extensively on conspiracy theories is Colin Todhunter. In his essay New World Order “Conspiracy Theories”: Diversions and Deceptions, he pinpoints the time at which conspiracy theories became widespread:

“…Although conspiracy theories have been around for centuries, some gained in popularity during the 1960s and 70s as ‘post-modern disillusionment’ set in and people began to question the very notion of ‘progress’. Modernity had not lived up to expectations. Living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, poverty and the inability of science or politics to address such concerns, people began moving towards ‘new age’ beliefs and concepts or embracing unconventional theories that seemed to explain humanity’s plight.

This all occurred against a backdrop of (failed) proposals to collectively address worldwide problems that went beyond the capacity of individual nation states acting alone. The UN had been set up along with various other international institutions in order to address global issues but also to cement US global hegemony…”

In his insightful essay The Role of Anti-Establishment “Conspiracy Theories”, Todhunter informs us about the exploitive and unstable nature of a system that has given rise to so much conspiracy theory:

“…The advocates of populist conspiracy theories seek to explain everything in terms of secret societies and codes, Zionism, ‘communism’ or the hand of ‘Rothschild’. Of course, families like the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and groups like Bilderberg exist and do hold great power. That much is not in dispute. However, the nature of the dynamics of power is. Groups or think tanks like Bilderberg, Brookings Institute, Trilateral Commission, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, RAND Corporation and so on are where capitalism’s state-corporate hegemons, including the rich families mentioned above, meet to discuss, devise policies and manage capitalism.

Radical critiques of society have often focused on the underlying logic and processes of capital accumulation and capitalist economic crises as well as capitalism’s inherent contradictions. An analysis of the historical antecedents of modernity according to scholarly analysis has also been prevalent. Today, it is popular to assert that the members of some shadowy group have been in charge all this time – the Illuminati, often used as a metaphor for ‘the Jews’.

The rise of such explanations are understandable in a complex world, where the ordinary person feels utterly powerless, confused and craves easy answers. Little surprise then that events and crises are said to be the work of some sinister ‘Illuminati’, an explanation which tends to steer clear of any genuine analysis of capitalism.

In the West, jobs are being outsourced, wages are falling and unemployment rising. As the market becomes saturated with goods and demand is unable to mop up supply, firms go bust. There is a shift towards powerful monopoly capitalism, while citizens and workers experience increasing powerlessness and immiseration. And to seek out new profits, imperialist ventures abroad become the norm. State-corporate monopoly capitalism and imperialist intent are not part of a ‘New World Order’ but are part of a world in which the few benefit at the expense of the many and that has been in the making ever since Britain became the first industrial nation and capitalism emerged.

But what we now have isn’t free market capitalism, some might say. The notion of the free market has always been a myth. It’s always been controlled and manipulated. It’s never been ‘free’.  And we are now witnessing advanced capitalism in all its gore.

Capitalism has inherent contradictions. All was never intended to be fine. Remember the slogan to end poverty by 2020 (or whatever the date was)? Capitalism thrives on poverty. It’s integral to the system. That’s why it is rampant in the West and much more so in the cheap labour economies of the ‘developing world’. The increasing concentration of power, ownership and wealth and the rising impoverishment of the masses is one of capitalism’s greatest contradictions. It’s not some kind of conspiracy to keep the masses in poverty or in fear of falling into it.  It’s built in to capitalism.

But many do not refer Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky to gain an understanding of the processes of dialectic materialism and capitalism.  They and their theories are regarded as being part of the Zionist conspiracy. If socialism and communism are the creation of Zionism, which supposedly exerts so much control over the US and Britain, strange then that the secret services of both the US and Britain spent so much time and energy on infiltrating, deradicalising and subverting the left (3).

While the late Antony C Sutton (sometimes regarded as the father of modern conspiracy theories) provides food for thought in his writings and research (4), conspiracy theories tend to provide limited insight into the dynamics of power and oppression in the 21st century.

However imperfect the work of people like Robert Brenner (5) and Barrington Moore (6) may have been, their research was based on broad comparative sociological analysis of the cultural, historical, agrarian and economic factors that led to the rise of capitalism, fascism and communism in various societies. In the absence of this, however, prominent proponents of conspiracy theories in the US and Britain make crude assumptions about such phenomena comprising part of an Illuminati plot, which play on the prejudices and fears of ordinary people, who in turn latch on to the explanation offered as a proxy for the underlying causes of their powerlessness and frustrations.

Why bother having an informed understanding of the dynamics of the modern world based on rigorous research? Much easier to watch a few YouTube clips about some secret, manipulative elite or even amphibians from outer space with an agenda to control the world.

Many conspiracy theorists have indeed actually been quite informative on how the banking system works and how bankers conspire to control policies by keeping governments in permanent debt. They have also highlighted glaring flaws in official accounts of 9/11. They have rightly pinpointed what the mainstream misses out of its narratives and have raised issues that many on the left had tended to ignore or gave scant attention to. But such useful insights then become wrapped up in theories that too often appear to be based on flights of fancy.

There is no doubting that people can and do conspire to shape events. Not everything can be explained by structures where individual motive is eradicated. For example, corporations conspire to produce price cartels, media barons conspire to dominate and state-corporate interests embark on military jaunts to control markets and resources. And yes, bankers conspire to restrict credit for various reasons. But this has to be placed within the wider context of Empire and capitalism.

In capitalism, the compulsion to compete, dominate and pursue profit casts long shadows over virtually every social and cultural institution, from government and politics to education, law, agriculture and entertainment.

Conspiracy theorists and their followers may well appreciate aspects of this, but merely speculate about the intentions of and actions of groups of people without addressing how capitalism shapes any of it…”

How many commercials and advertisements are bombarded at the average person every waking day of their life. It’s in the thousands – everything from TV commercials to billboards to junk mail to radio adverts. Don’t you think this would have some sort of effect on a person’s psychological well-being? Is it any wonder that the one country in which conspiracy theories thrive most also happens to be the epicenter of unbridled capitalism? British author Roger Cohen said, “Captive minds… resort to conspiracy theory because it is the ultimate refuge of the disempowered.” In an environment where everyone is expected to sell themselves everyday in order to eat and ‘the truth’ is manufactured so as to protect the vested interests of those who bring you the ‘news’, desperate souls grasp at any explanation for why the system is so dysfunctional, corrupt, and unfair. According to Dr Patrick Leman, a psychologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, the weak and marginalized of society gravitate towards conspiracy theories because they have no voice in society:

…People are also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories if they feel powerless in the face of large social authorities or institutions, and not part of the mainstream of society.

This is supported by the observation in the USA that beliefs in conspiracy theories tend to be stronger amongst members of ethnic minority groups.

Sociologists suggest that these minority groups feel politically disenfranchised or discriminated against and this gives rise to higher levels of belief in conspiracy theories…

Cognitive bias also encourages the acceptance of conspiracy theories. One such behavior is the human tendency to seek patterns from random information. Conspiracy theorists are said to be notorious for this proclivity and it goes by several different names such as apophenia or patternicity. Other cognitive biases include confirmation bias, subjective validation, and true-believer syndrome.

Development of hi-tech communication technology coupled with the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web and social networking has fueled the growth of conspiracy theories around the world. With little money, the rantings of anyone can be voiced to the world. Below is a picture of a twenty-dollar bill folded in such a way as to resemble the twin towers on 9-11. It quickly spread across the internet and was picked up by Glenn Beck, a monger of conspiracy theories, and featured on his blog:

“What are the odds that a simple geometric folding of the $20 bill would accidentally contain a representation of both terror attacks?”

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“The radical analysis sees such things as ecological crises, military interventions, the national security state, homelessness, poverty, an inequitable tax system, and undemocratic social institutions such as the corporate owned media, etc… It sees these things not as the aberrant outcome of a basically rational system, but as rational outcomes of a system whose central goal is the accumulation of wealth and power for a privileged class…” ~ Michael Parenti

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Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian #7

06 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Bill Maher, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Conspiracy Theorists, Corporate $tate, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Economic Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Police State, Poverty, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, The End of the World As We Know It, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. I plan on doing an essay on conspiracy theories and the dangers they impose when large numbers of people subscribe to them. I decided on this idea the other day after trying to have a discussion with a coworker about the state of the world. I quickly discovered that his head was filled with UFO’s, lizard illuminati, climate change denialism, chip implants for all under Obamacare, and a one-world totalitarian government. The only place in his fantastical worldview I could find any connection with reality was in the idea that governments are becoming more authoritarian. Perhaps this is where so many conspiracy theories spring forth. With only the interests of a small elite being served and nearly everyone else disenfranchised from the institutions of government, people are desperate to find meaning in such an exploitative and fraudulent system that they grasp at any story, no matter how outlandish and otherworldly it may be. And with a faux democratic government fictitiously “serving the people” and becoming increasingly dictatorial as the economy craters, the wealth gap continues to skyrocket, the environment melts down, peak net energy bites, and climate change worsens, such conspiracy theories will only continue to supplant the real world in the minds of the unwashed masses.

The Future: Delusional Hope vs. Stark Reality

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Cassandra’s Revenge?

the-end-489036

The Corporate State (aka the military–industrial–congressional complex) : It’s own worst enemy…

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The Apocalypse commercialized:

proof-that-things-can-always-get-worse

thit

throw-the-bums-out-of-congress-10-28-10

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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.

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm). To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%." - Albert Bates

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  • Cinema Politica
  • Clive Hamilton 'Requiem for a Species'
  • Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
  • Conspiracy Rising
  • Consumed – Is Our Consumer Culture Leading to Disaster?
  • Conversations with Great Minds – Climate Scientist Dr. Curt Stager
  • Dark Days – Documentary by Marc Singer
  • David Fridley – Green Dreams: Future or Fantasy?
  • Developing a Sustainable Community – Simon Michaux
  • Do Fox News Viewers Understand Basic Science At All?
  • Do Fox viewers understand the propaganda they are watching?
  • Earth 2100 – Full Documentary / Movie Full HD
  • Earth Days (2009) – Full Movie
  • Earth Under Water – Worldwide Flooding | Sea Level Rise (SLR)
  • END CIV Resist Or Die (Full)
  • END:CIV 2011
  • Facing the Anthropocene: fossil capitalism and the crisis of the earth system
  • Final Warning Limits to Growth
  • Four Horsemen
  • Garbage Warrior [Full Length Documentary]
  • Gasland Part II
  • Geo Scarcity – Geo Destinies in the Coming Age
  • Geologic and human time scales: How can we salvage our global civilization?
  • Green Illusions
  • Green Illusions: "Solar Cells and Other Fairy Tales"
  • Guy McPherson – Earth Extinction 2030
  • Guy’s Climate Chaos Presentation from Pauline Schneider
  • Harvest of Empire
  • Hoodwinked: Who Stole Our World – Presented By John Perkins
  • Into Eternity ( A Nuclear Waste World )
  • Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers • FULL DOCUMENTARY
  • Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, & Steel
  • Jeremy Jackson: Ocean Apocalypse
  • Joseph Tainter: The Energy Crisis and the End of The Industrial Age
  • Journeyman Pictures
  • Koch Brothers Exposed
  • Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance
  • LAST CALL: the untold reasons of the global crisis
  • Last Hours for Humanity?
  • Lecture on Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter
  • Life After People
  • Manufacturing Consent
  • Modern Black Death – The Next Pandemic – BBC Horizon
  • Nate Hagens – Limits to Growth: Where We Are and What to Do About It
  • Noam Chomsky – Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind
  • Obey
  • Ocean Acidification
  • Ocean Acidification in Earth's Past: Insights to the Future – James Zachos
  • Oil, Smoke & Mirrors
  • Peak mining & implications for natural resource management
  • Permian – Triassic Mayhem: Earth's Largest Mass Extinction
  • Peter Ward Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps
  • Peter Ward The Medea Hypothesis II
  • Peter Ward: The Medea Hypothesis I
  • Photographing the Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima
  • Pirate Television: Financializing America with Randy Mandell
  • Professor Al Bartlett – Arithmetic, Population and Energy
  • Professor Kevin Anderson: Real Clothes for the Emperor – Facing Climate Change
  • Rick Wolff // A Cure for Capitalism
  • Six degrees could change the world
  • Somewhere In New Mexico Before The End Of Time
  • Submedia TV
  • Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers
  • Surviving Progress
  • Techno Fix – Why Technology Won’t Save Us Or the Environment
  • Techno-Fix – Dr. Michael Huesemann interview
  • The Age of Stupid
  • The Big Fix
  • The Century Of The Self
  • The Chomsky Videos
  • The Coming Famine
  • The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
  • The Crash Course
  • The Crisis of Civilization : Full Movie
  • The Day the Earth Nearly Died
  • The Domino Effect – Overpopulation
  • The False Solutions of Green Energy – Wilbert & Foley (PIELC 2014)
  • The Flaw
  • The Fuck-it Point
  • The Long Emergency
  • The Man who Quit Money
  • The Methane Ticking Time Bomb has Struck Again…..
  • The Myth of Capitalism with Michael Parenti
  • The Myth of Sustainability – Guy McPherson
  • The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News
  • The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski
  • The Overview Effect
  • The Permian–Triassic Extinction Event [FULL VIDEO]
  • The Planet by Johan Söderberg
  • The Power Principle: (Full Length Documentary)
  • The Secure & the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World
  • The Shock Doctrine 2009
  • The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)
  • The Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin – Guy McPherson
  • There's No Tomorrow (peak oil, energy, growth & the future)
  • Threads (Nuclear War)
  • Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date
  • TOXIC: AMAZON – FULL LENGTH
  • Up & Coming Liquid Fuel Crisis by Tom Murphy
  • VICE Documentaries
  • What A Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire
  • Who's Afraid Of Machiavelli?

Notes and Documents

  • 'Conspiracy Theories' and Clandestine Politics
  • (2019) UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
  • 2019 UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services(One Million Species At Risk of Extinction)
  • American Empire and Killing Hope – The Essays of William Blum
  • An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for US National Security
  • An Anarchist FAQ Webpage
  • An Inconvenient Truth: Does Responsible Consumption Benefit Corporations More Than Society?
  • Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism
  • Averting Collapse: 6 Steps
  • “Are Humans Unsustainable by Nature?”
  • Book review of Turchin’s “Secular Cycles” and “War & Peace & War”
  • BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED
  • Burning Energy to Keep Cool: The Hidden Energy Crisis in Saudi Arabia
  • Capitalism cannot solve our ecological collapse: articles by Richard Smith
  • Capitalism's Ideological Crutches
  • Carmageddon and Karl Marx
  • Carmaggedon or Rational Discourse?
  • Charles Eisenstein Essays
  • Chatham House: Sustainable Energy Security
  • Christopher Clugston ~ Research Papers and Essays
  • Climate and collapse: Only through the insurrection of civil societies will we avoid the worst
  • Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis (2012)
  • Climate Change is Simple – We Do Something or We're Screwed
  • Climate Change: Just the Facts.
  • Consistency in American Foreign Policy
  • Could the 'Black Death' Strike Again?
  • Dangerous Climate Warming: Myth & Reality
  • Dangerous Speech Project
  • Dennis Meadows: “There is nothing that we can do”
  • Desert
  • DieOff.org
  • Dinosaur, We
  • Dispelling myths about oil
  • Dr. Steven Best – Writings
  • Drill, Baby, Drill
  • Earth may be 140 years away from reaching carbon levels not seen in 56 million years
  • Ecoglobe: Requiem
  • Edward Morbius
  • Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for photovoltaic solar systems in regions of moderate insolation
  • English version of German military peak oil study
  • Entropy and Economics
  • Eric R. Pianka: The Vanishing Book of Life on Earth
  • Fleeing Babylon
  • FOURTH NATIONAL CLIMATE ASSESSMENT Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States
  • FRACKING GONE WRONG: FINDING A BETTER WAY
  • Getting to the Nearest Star? Not in Our Lifetimes…If Ever!
  • Gleanings for an Understanding of the Endgame
  • Global Drought Monitor
  • Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism
  • Global Warming & Climate Change Myths
  • Globalization and the Emergence of a Transnational Oligarchy
  • Green Capitalism: the God that Failed
  • Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (Updated)
  • GRIFFIN: The political writings of G.S. Griffin, activist and author
  • Hirsch Report
  • How a Culture Dies
  • How Many Gigatons of Carbon Dioxide?
  • How to Avoid Population Overshoot and Collapse
  • Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
  • Humans will not 'migrate' to other planets, Nobel winner says: The 77-year-old said he felt the need to "kill all the statements that say 'OK, we will go to a liveable planet if one day life is not possible on earth'."
  • Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future
  • Implication of our technological species being first and early
  • Intentional Ignorance
  • Interview with Jay Hanson
  • Is Global Collapse Imminent?
  • Jason W. Moore: Essays
  • Johnny Reb's Freethought Website
  • Julian Cribb
  • Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II – Part I by William Blum
  • Le Monde interview with Dr Robert Hirsch from September 2010
  • Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
  • Living Dangerously: Stories of Climate Change
  • Living for the Moment while Devaluing the Future
  • Lloyd's adds its voice to dire 'peak oil' warnings
  • Looking Back on the 'Limits to Growth'
  • MARY BOOTH ON THE MYTH OF “GREEN” ENERGY FROM WOOD
  • Michael E. Mann
  • Mysterious Siberian Crater Found at "End of the World" May Portend Methane Climate Catastrophe
  • NATURAL CAPITAL AT RISK: THE TOP 100 EXTERNALITIES OF BUSINESS
  • Natural Law
  • Natural Way of Farming Masanobu – Fukuoka Green Philosophy
  • Nature’s Laws No Longer Apply…
  • Net Energy and The Economy
  • NOAA & U.S. Geological Survey Interactive Sea Level Rise Map (up to 25 ft)
  • Noam Chomsky on human extinction: The corporate elite are actively courting disaster
  • Oil and gas industry using military psyops techniques to reduce opposition to fracking
  • OilCrash.com
  • On Human Nature
  • Partnership for Civil Justice
  • Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of Global Civilization
  • Peak Oil – A Turning Point for Mankind by Dr. Colin J. Campbell
  • Peter H. Gleick : Has the U.S. Passed the Point of Peak Water?
  • Poles Threaten “Climate Chaos” from Continued Warming
  • Policy Makers Slow to Take Peak Oil Action
  • Power Point Presentation on “Corporate Globalization, Corporate Power, Free Trade, Mega Trade Agreements and the Negative Impacts of TPP” by Janet M Eaton, PhD
  • Power Shift Away From Green Illusions
  • Primitivism
  • Professor Charles Hall
  • Renewable energy – Hope or hype?
  • RENEWABLE ENERGY – THE ARGUMENT AGAINST ITS CAPACITY TO SUSTAIN AN ENERGY-INTENSIVE SOCIETY
  • Richard Reese on 'Near Term Extinction'
  • Saudi Arabia May Become Oil Importer by 2030
  • Searching for a Miracle: 'Net Energy' Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
  • Secular Cycles, Chapter 1
  • Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter planet, by Mark Lynas
  • Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
  • Stephanie McMillan's 'Capitalism Must Die'
  • TED talks – a recipe for civilisational disaster
  • The Anarchist Library
  • The Authoritarian Personality
  • The Bichler & Nitzan Archives
  • The climate threat: What our children can expect
  • The Coming Reality of Sea Level Rise: Too Fast Too Soon
  • The Consumer Trap
  • The Current Mass Extinction
  • The Damage of Current Human Activities Without Precedent in Past 'Mass Extinction' Fossil Records.
  • The Discovery of Global Warming
  • The End of Growth, Seven Years Later
  • The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
  • The evolution and psychology of self-deception
  • The Final Empire THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Final Empire: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
  • The Free Press
  • The Future of Ice Sheets and Sea Ice: Between Reversible Retreat and Unstoppable Loss
  • The Gore Vidal Pages
  • The Great Oil Swindle
  • The human brain is in Denial.
  • The Human Nature of Unsustainability
  • The Idiot's Guide To Buying A Congressman
  • The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & U.S. Policy
  • The Last Great Global Warmıng
  • The Limits to Growth (PDF scanned version)
  • The Loss of Biodiversity: a Dangerous Game
  • The Meritocracy Myth
  • The moral environment on Wall Street is pathological — money rules all
  • The Myth of the 1970′s Global Cooling Consensus
  • The myth of US self-sufficiency in crude oil
  • THE NEED FOR A NEW ECONOMIC SYSTEM: "…he feared that human society is headed for a crash."
  • The Network of Global Corporate Control
  • The New Middle Ages
  • The physics of long-run global economic growth
  • THE POPULATION PROBLEM AND SOCIALISM
  • The Power Elite
  • The Principle of Imminent Collapse
  • The Science of Apocalypse
  • The Story of P(ee)
  • The Story of Phosphorus: 7 reasons why we need to transform phosphorus use in the global food system
  • The Temptation of The Technofix (The Quest for “New Nature”)
  • The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
  • There Is No "Green" Energy
  • Thomas Homer-Dixon
  • Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar Photovoltaics
  • Tipping Towards the Unknown
  • Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question
  • Trade-Off: Financial system supply-chain cross contagion – a study in global systemic collapse
  • Twenty Premises on Industrial Civilization from Derrick Jensen
  • Twenty-First Century Collapse
  • Underminers: A Practical Guide to Radical Change
  • We Are All Madoffs
  • Wealth and Inequality – Pareto, Gini and Contingency
  • What Evolution Is?
  • Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
  • Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power
  • Why shale gas won’t end our energy woes
  • Why Space Opera Won't Fly
  • Why won't planting trees stop global warming?
  • Zygmunt Bauman

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RSS A Closer Look

  • Cookies August 17, 2025
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RSS A Prosperous Way Down

  • A really inconvenient truth August 25, 2019
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RSS Adam Curtis Blog

  • SAVE YOUR KISSES FOR ME November 30, 2012
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RSS All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

  • Jesse Jackson on poverty September 17, 2020
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  • Wendy Brown on neoliberalism and democracy September 7, 2020
  • Thomas Ferguson discusses our situation September 7, 2020
  • This way doth dictatorship lie September 1, 2020

RSS Alternative Radio

  • [Chris Hedges] Beyond the Politics of Despair February 25, 2021

RSS AlterNet

  • Trump's aversion to long flights may interfere with his vendetta against Lisa Murkowski: report March 4, 2021
  • 'What do you mean by wrong?' QAnon shaman's mom offers absurd defense of her son storming the US Capitol March 4, 2021
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RSS Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

  • Ocado pays 5p per plastic bag returned by customers March 4, 2021
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RSS Anarchist News

  • The Kronstadt Uprising: A View from within the Revolt March 4, 2021
  • Constructing an Anarchism: Encounter and Entente March 3, 2021
  • Reopening of Schools and Myanmar March 3, 2021
  • Recovering the anarchism of the 1921 Kronstadt Rebellion March 2, 2021
  • Eberhardt Press: Equipment Emergency! March 2, 2021

RSS Antony Loewenstein

  • The rise and rise of (bought and sold) suicide drones March 2, 2021
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RSS Arctic Emergency Institute

  • Declining Summer Sea Ice Threatens More than Arctic Wildlife August 25, 2012

RSS Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)

  • AMEG Strategic Plan December 8, 2012
  • Breaking the Chain November 27, 2012
  • AMEG Policy Brief September 23, 2012
  • The biggest story of all time September 1, 2012

RSS Arctic News

  • Snowstorms, the breach of the Arctic vortex and the effects of ice meltwater on the oceans February 22, 2021
  • The extreme rate of global warming: IPCC Oversights of future climate trends February 12, 2021
  • More Extreme Weather February 4, 2021

RSS Arctic Sea Ice

  • PIOMAS December 2019 December 17, 2019
  • PIOMAS November 2019 November 13, 2019
  • PIOMAS October 2019 October 14, 2019
  • PIOMAS September 2019 September 16, 2019
  • PIOMAS August 2019 August 7, 2019

RSS Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

  • NSIDC continues to investigate sea ice processing errors March 3, 2021
  • Sea Ice Processing Errors February 26, 2021
  • A lopsided January February 2, 2021

RSS Around the Coast Mountains

  • The name’s Mark… Mark BC March 18, 2014
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RSS Arthur Silber

  • Moving Interruptus, and Why Hospitals Suck July 1, 2019
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  • So Close, Yet So Far April 7, 2019

RSS Arundhati Roy

  • Modi's brutal treatment of Kashmir exposes his tactics – and their flaws | Arundhati Roy August 5, 2020
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RSS Arundhati Roy Says

  • A perfect day for democracy February 9, 2013
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  • We Call This Progress December 17, 2012

RSS ASPO – USA

  • The Energy Bulletin Weekly – 13 April 2020 April 13, 2020
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  • Peak Oil Review – 23 March 2020 March 23, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 16 March 2020 March 16, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 9 March 2020 March 9, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 2 March 2020 March 3, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 24 February 2020 February 24, 2020
  • Peak Oil Review – 17 February 2020 February 18, 2020

RSS Avedon’s Sideshow

  • I want to shake your hand February 25, 2021
  • What a way to make a livin' February 4, 2021
  • There was a stone-cold pack of lies January 19, 2021

RSS Bad Astronomy

  • Why the Director of Napoleon Dynamite Made a Movie About a Mormon Murderer
  • The Only Way to Stop Voter Suppression Bills in the States
  • One House Republican Voted for the George Floyd Police Reform Act. He Pushed the Wrong Button.

RSS Barbara Ehrenreich

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RSS BBC: Science & Environment

  • Food waste: Amount thrown away totals 900 million tonnes March 4, 2021
  • Lab-grown wood could be future of furniture March 4, 2021
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RSS Big Picture Agriculture

  • How to Stay Informed About Agriculture, Food, and Farming Issues October 15, 2019
  • Dr. Walter Falcon's 2019 Iowa Farm Report September 11, 2019
  • Agriculture Reading Picks October 31, 2018
  • The Merits of Amaranth October 30, 2018
  • Global Food and Agriculture Photos October 28, 2018 October 28, 2018

RSS Bill Moyers

  • No House Meeting Today — Potential for Riots March 4, 2021
  • Reality Check: COVID, Russia and Biden’s High Approval Rating March 3, 2021
  • Under the Radar March 3, 2021

RSS Bit Tooth Energy

  • Waterjetting 37e - Using Cavitation to disintegrate rock November 18, 2015
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RSS Brane Space

  • With New Threat On Capitol Today Reich Media Still Whines Its Right To Misinformation "Speech" Is Being Censored March 4, 2021
  • Can We Please Lose The Hysteria Over The "Baby Bust"? March 3, 2021

RSS Brave New World

  • Francophobia Among Muslims: Just Another Myth? February 25, 2021
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RSS Breaking the Set

  • Abby Martin Breaks the Set One Last Time February 28, 2015
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  • Why Are Americans Getting Their Medical Degrees in Cuba? February 26, 2015

RSS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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RSS Business Insider

  • Mark Cuban's Dallas Mavericks will accept dogecoin for tickets and merchandise March 4, 2021
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  • How to join a Zoom meeting with an invite link or Meeting ID on any device March 4, 2021
  • Here's the list of retailers, grocers, and factories maintaining mask rules while states loosen COVID-19 restrictions March 4, 2021
  • Porsche launched a pair of $10,000 electric bikes to match its $91,000 Taycan Cross Turismo EV - see both March 4, 2021
  • 104 online courses you can take for free on Coursera, from resume writing to how to be happier March 4, 2021
  • New Starz subscribers can stream shows like 'American Gods' and 'The White Princess' for only $5 a month March 4, 2021
  • Unemployment benefits will expire in 10 days if Congress doesn't pass a stimulus bill. Here's what else could expire this month. March 4, 2021
  • Fed's Powell expects being 'patient' on signs of inflation increase March 4, 2021
  • Blueland is a household cleaning startup that helps you reduce single-use plastic consumption - here's how the products perform March 4, 2021

RSS C-Realm

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RSS Cagle: Premium Cartoon News

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RSS Cassandra’s Legacy

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RSS Center For Biological Diversity

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RSS Charles Eisenstein’s Blog

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RSS Chris Hedges

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RSS Climate Central

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RSS Climate Citizen

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RSS Climate Connections

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RSS Climate Denial Crock of the Week

  • Vox: Texas Blackout a Warning for the Rest of US March 4, 2021
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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

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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

  • Suzanne Vallie – Ocean Cliff Drive March 4, 2021
  • Electricity vs. Broadband: Does History Repeat Itself? March 4, 2021
  • Skeletons in the Neoliberal Cupboard March 4, 2021
  • Biden’s Foreign Policy: No Joy in Mudville March 4, 2021
  • 25 Years of GMOs, and Some New Insights from Argentina March 4, 2021
  • U.S. Agricultural System’s Deadly Apartheid March 4, 2021
  • Biden, Team D and the Dimming Prospects of Getting Anything Meaningful Through the Senate March 4, 2021
  • The Pentagon, First, Last, and Always March 4, 2021
  • The Decades-Long Struggle Over Big Corporations and Poverty Wages March 4, 2021
  • Fire Suppression Hyperbole March 4, 2021

RSS Crooked Timber

  • The Boys Aren’t Back in Town March 3, 2021
  • Introduction:Economic Consequences of the Pandemic March 3, 2021
  • Too many choices March 3, 2021
  • Twigs and branches February 28, 2021

RSS Crooks and Liars

  • CBS Slammed For Giving Airtime To QAnon Shaman March 4, 2021
  • Gohmert Claims Pelosi, Schumer Are The Only QAnon Believers March 4, 2021
  • House Passes Major Voting Rights Bill, Setting Up Battle For Filibuster Reform March 4, 2021
  • 'Neanderthal' GOP Whines Over Mean Names From President March 4, 2021

RSS Cryptome

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RSS Culture Change

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RSS Dahr Jamail

  • Life in the US Has the Hallmarks of a “Low-Grade War Zone” September 21, 2020
  • Fracking Company Has Made It Rain Toxic Water Upon New Mexico Without Penalty September 3, 2020

RSS Daily Kos Comics

  • Cartoon: Gavin, of Chagrin Falls, USA, faces his obsolescence March 4, 2021
  • Carton: Bright future February 22, 2021
  • Cartoon: See spot run March 3, 2021
  • Cartoon: Shoots & Ladders March 2, 2021
  • Cartoon: Naked partisans March 2, 2021
  • Cartoon: The lost year March 1, 2021

RSS Damn the Matrix

  • The Day of Reckoning is nigh February 27, 2021
  • The gospel according to Jean-Marc February 27, 2021

RSS Dan Hagen

  • Santayana: Where Happiness Resides March 2, 2021
  • Helicopters on Mars, Cretins on Earth February 20, 2021

RSS Dangerous Intersection

  • Framing is Everything: Case Study of the K-Shape Economic Recovery March 2, 2021
  • Question and Answer Regarding Womxn March 2, 2021
  • The New York Times Finally Wakes Up to the Dangers and Dysfunctions of Wokeness March 2, 2021

RSS Dark Ages America

  • 420 March 3, 2021
  • 419 February 17, 2021
  • 418 February 7, 2021
  • 417 January 31, 2021

RSS David Bollier

  • Andreas Weber on Aliveness and Interdependence February 23, 2021
  • 'The New Systems Reader': Strategies for System-Change February 17, 2021
  • Jimmy Buff and the Radio Kingston Commons January 31, 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

  • Video: We Need a Collective Response to the Collective Dilemmas of Our Time November 13, 2020
  • New Book: The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles October 20, 2020
  • Video: David Harvey’s Recommended Marxian Reads September 23, 2020

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

  • Brandalism February 19, 2021
  • Cars and the Crappy Society February 16, 2021
  • Maine DOT’s Celebration February 16, 2021
  • Automakers Now Openly Admitting to Haloware Ops January 14, 2021
  • Museum of Impending Carmageddon: Piece #2 January 7, 2021

RSS Decline of the Empire

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

RSS Deep Green Resistence News Service

  • Global Ice Melt: Much Faster Than Predicted March 4, 2021
  • India’s Farmers’ Protests Are About More Than Reform — They Are Resisting The Corporate Takeover Of Agriculture March 3, 2021
  • “Interesting” Times: Capitalism Kills Everything March 2, 2021
  • The History Of Thacker Pass [Dispatches from Thacker Pass] March 1, 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

  • GOP AGs say House voting rights bill unconstitutional March 4, 2021
  • Photos show North Korea may be trying to extract plutonium March 4, 2021
  • Senators Gillibrand and Rubio introduce bill to prevent truck underrides March 4, 2021
  • Georgia's citizen's arrest overhaul clears first hurdle March 4, 2021
  • Capitol Police request extension of National Guard to protect Congress, defense officials say March 4, 2021
  • GOP Blasts Biden's Pentagon Nominee for 'Incendiary,' 'Intemperate' Tweets March 4, 2021
  • Abbott defends scrapping mask mandate: It 'isn't going to make that big of a change' March 4, 2021
  • Productivity down 4.2%, largest decline in nearly 40 years March 4, 2021
  • Murkowski votes with Senate panel to advance Haaland nomination March 4, 2021
  • Biden vows to work with Congress to 'refine' voting rights bill March 4, 2021

RSS Democratic Underground – Good Reads

  • Alejandro Mayorkas fought for refugees and Dreamers. Can he undo 4 years of Trump policies? March 4, 2021
  • QAnon has merged with white Christian envangelicals, experts say -- and the results could be lethal March 4, 2021
  • Legal Documents Show Manchin Has Stakes in Companies That Pay Less Than $15 an Hour March 4, 2021
  • "Murder Among the Mormons" filmmakers on how forgeries, faith and a salamander led to Utah bombings March 4, 2021
  • Trickle up economics works! March 4, 2021
  • The Republican Grievance Perpetual Motion Machine March 4, 2021
  • Trump, hush-money payments, and a New York City ice rink March 4, 2021
  • Chatelain: Even in Omaha, the word 'plantation' carries 400 years of 'dehumanization' March 4, 2021
  • How Marjorie Taylor Greene Won, And Why Someone Like Her Can Win Again March 3, 2021
  • BTRTN: Biden Back Better - The Political Maturation of Joe Biden March 3, 2021

RSS Democracy Now

  • Mumia Abu-Jamal Tests Positive for COVID, Prompting Urgent Call to Release Elder Political Prisoners March 4, 2021
  • Marc Lamont Hill & Mitchell Plitnick on ICC Probe & the "Palestine Exception" in Progressive Politics March 4, 2021
  • Vaccine Apartheid: Marc Lamont Hill, Mitchell Plitnick on Israel's "Indifference to Palestinian Health" March 4, 2021
  • COVID Deaths Soar in Brazil as Bolsonaro Blasts Lockdowns. Experts Warn It Will "Get Worse." March 4, 2021
  • Headlines for March 4, 2021 March 4, 2021
  • Latinx Farmworkers Risk Their Lives During Pandemic. Many Now Struggle to Access Vaccines March 3, 2021
  • Cuomo Must Go: Calls Grow to Remove NY Governor over COVID Nursing Home Cover-up & Sexual Harassment March 3, 2021
  • Asian American Communities Organize Against Rise in Hate Crimes, Say More Policing Is Not the Answer March 3, 2021
  • Headlines for March 3, 2021 March 3, 2021
  • Anti-Choice Forces Use Pandemic to Slash Abortion Access in Preview of Post-Roe v. Wade World March 2, 2021

RSS Derrick Jensen

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RSS Desdemona Despair

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RSS Desertification

  • The Great Green Wall: Implementation Status and Way Ahead to 2030 February 26, 2021
  • Round table discussion on good land governance for land degradation neutrality February 25, 2021
  • Cattle and citizens in Nigeria February 25, 2021
  • Monitoring landcover change and desertification processes in northern China and Mongolia using historical written sources and vegetation indices February 25, 2021
  • Expanding Gum Arabic production to combat desertification February 25, 2021

RSS deSmog Blog

  • UK Climate Diplomacy Staff Cut Again as Post-Brexit Links to Trump and US Deniers Strengthen November 24, 2016
  • UN Human Rights Experts Condemn Expanding Petrochemical Industry in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley as 'Environmental Racism' March 4, 2021
  • Pennsylvania Families Exposed to Unusually High Levels of Oil and Gas Industry Chemicals, Report Finds March 3, 2021

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

  • Two-State Delusion: Israel Is A Racist One State Nightmare February 28, 2021
  • Texas Catastrophe Is A Result Of Neoliberal Rot February 19, 2021
  • Discussing the failed impeachment soap opera with Anya Parampil February 17, 2021
  • US Meddles In Ecuador As Region Resists Imperialism w/ Ben Norton February 13, 2021
  • Watch the full episode of Left Bitches with Katie Halper February 12, 2021

RSS Dissent Magazine

  • India’s Muslim Journalists Are Under Attack March 3, 2021
  • Legacies of Cold War Liberalism March 1, 2021
  • The “Make Me Do It” Myth February 26, 2021
  • Future Monetary Theory February 24, 2021

RSS Dissident Voice

  • The Psychic Dangers of Infected Minds (With a Lie this Large) March 4, 2021
  • Biden, Afghanistan and Forever Wars March 4, 2021
  • Creating a Safe Space at Work for Discussing Social Justice Topics March 4, 2021
  • “Engaging the World”: The “Fascinating Story” of Hamas’s Political Evolution March 3, 2021
  • Delusions of Self-Defense: Biden Bombs Syria March 3, 2021
  • Blood for Oil March 2, 2021
  • Small Acts Can Become A Power No Government Can Suppress March 2, 2021
  • Breaching Digital Rights: India’s Platform and Media Ethics Code March 1, 2021

RSS Do the Math

  • Eclipsed, Lately September 11, 2017

RSS Dollars & Sense Blog

  • 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
  • Our November/December Issue Is Out! November 16, 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

  • Tucker Carlson reports that due to lockdowns, Kids are 10 times more likely to die from suicide than from Covid March 4, 2021
  • Covering up the origin of Covid March 4, 2021

RSS Dredd Blog

  • If The Straw Man Had A Brain February 27, 2021
  • On The Origin Of The Home Of COVID-19 - 21 February 16, 2021
  • On The Origin Of The Home Of COVID-19 - 20 February 9, 2021
  • Will Elections Cure The Disease? - 5 February 5, 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

  • Our mission November 23, 2016
  • Ecohumanist society and ecology November 23, 2016

RSS Eco-Shock News

  • Radio Ecoshock: Billion Dollar Black Out Climate Disasters March 3, 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

  • Here Are the Landmines Utah Renters Need To Look Out for in Lease Agreements March 3, 2021
  • It’s a Myth That Asian-Americans Are Doing Well in the Pandemic March 2, 2021
  • How (Un)compassionate Conservatism Failed Texas March 1, 2021
  • How Did You Sleep Last Night? Darin Mann, Salt Lake City. February 26, 2021
  • Asian American Food Aid Expands To Address Hidden Hunger During Pandemic February 24, 2021
  • ‘I Thought It Was Going To Break Me’: COVID’s Brutal Toll on Working Mothers February 24, 2021

RSS Economic Undertow

  • Repost From 2015: Pied Piper of Dumb Money January 26, 2021
  • The Arc of the Moral Universe January 13, 2021
  • Meet the New Year, Same as the Old Year January 4, 2021

RSS EcoWorldView

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RSS Empire Burlesque

  • On the Acquittal of the Murderous Thug Donald Trump February 13, 2021
  • Impeachment Cave-in: Dems Plumb New Depths of Perfidy 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

  • Chain of Command: The AWOL Descriptions of the Commander in Chief’s Role in the National Guard Non-Response on January 6
  • Federal Protective Services Looking for Terrorists on Facebook, Not TheDonald or Parler
  • The Passport and the Antifa Hunt: The Militia Counter-Stories Emerge

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

  • UK budget: coming out of COVID March 3, 2021
  • Thinking of Paddy Cullen: Prisoner of War March 3, 2021
  • Poetry: She Was Beautiful March 2, 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

  • Podcast: health, justice and the environment – the core issues February 27, 2021
  • Patrick Noble: a tribute February 27, 2021
  • 2020 Feasta Annual Report February 26, 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

  • 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
  • Arecibo Puerto Rico's Huge Radio Telescope Collapses December 1, 2020
  • Hurricane Iota Explodes to Category 5 Will Slam Central America Tonight November 16, 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

  • Mapping intersectionality: Empowering youth addressing plastics March 3, 2021
  • Pennsylvania’s Waste Disposal Wells – A Tale of Two Datasets February 26, 2021
  • California Oil & Gas Setbacks Recommendations Memo February 23, 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

  • With Gil Smart on guns, the NRA January 19, 2015
  • Gil Smart right on development February 8, 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

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RSS Global Research

  • Orwell in Disguise: US Congress Passes the So-Called “For the People Act” March 4, 2021
  • Putin Blasts World Economic Forum “Honchos” at Davos “Gabfest” March 4, 2021
  • Mumia Abu Jamal Has Congestive Heart Failure and Is COVID-19 Positive March 4, 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

  • After Championing Greener Building Codes, Local Governments Lose Right To Vote March 4, 2021
  • Interior Secretary Nominee Deb Haaland Clears Senate Committee March 4, 2021
  • The World’s Largest Intact Forest Is In Danger. Here’s How To Save It. March 4, 2021
  • The World Finally Started Cutting Climate Pollution. Now It Needs To Multiply That By 10. March 3, 2021
  • Susan Collins Will Vote For Interior Secretary Nominee Deb Haaland March 3, 2021
  • U.N. Human Rights Experts Say Environmental Racism In Louisiana’s Cancer Alley Must End March 2, 2021
  • Weekslong Water Crisis Continues In Mississippi, Hitting Black Residents Hardest March 2, 2021
  • Biden Administration Wades Into Major Fight Over Green Building Codes March 1, 2021

RSS Greenpeace Blogs

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RSS Greg Palast

  • Texas Gets Lay’d: How the Bush Family turned off the lights February 20, 2021
  • Squash The Vote: The GOP Plan to Thwart DemocracyPalast on the Bill Press Pod February 16, 2021

RSS Gregor Macdonald

  • Oil Fall December 31, 2018

RSS Grinning Planet

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RSS Grist

  • This TikTok star makes foraging a fun — and revolutionary — practice March 4, 2021
  • Report: Nobody talks about ‘global warming’ anymore March 4, 2021
  • Should I pay the true price for all the trash I produce? March 4, 2021
  • One bright side of 2020: A surge in battery storage March 4, 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

  • A Bulldozer’s American Dream March 4, 2021
  • Hamilton’s Familiar Sound March 3, 2021
  • Men I Hate: The Stasi Men March 2, 2021
  • Chaos Theory March 1, 2021

RSS Guy McPherson’s Blog

  • Tim: Sheryl Crow – If It Makes You Happy March 4, 2021
  • The Cost of Lies: Short Video March 4, 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

  • Reminder March 1, 2021
  • We Are Our Story February 24, 2021
  • Has Our Diet, and Too Many Antibiotics, Made Us More Vulnerable? February 23, 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

  • Farewell Milford Graves February 14, 2021
  • Yoga Practice – Winter 2020/21 December 29, 2020
  • I Shakuhachi – December 25, 2020: Love’s Impurities December 25, 2020
  • I Shakuhachi – December 23, 2020: Slow Reach December 23, 2020
  • Mixing Paint December 21, 2020

RSS Ian Welsh

  • Jackson, Mississippi In 3rd Week Without Water March 4, 2021

RSS Idea Explorer

  • Habitat Loss November 9, 2020
  • Marginal Hope August 24, 2020
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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

  • Call for US to End Support of Saudi-Led War
  • Tenants and Advocates Block Eviction Hearings in Santa Clara County
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  • People's Park in Berkeley Faces Greatest Danger Yet

RSS Indybay Newswire

  • US ruling class moves to remove remaining restrictions as pandemic continues to spread
  • Spring 2021 National Immigrant Solidarity Network News Alert!
  • Does Corona policy threaten our fundamental rights? Scientist warns of "creeping process"
  • End Sanctions on the "Troika of Tyranny", and Learn from the World
  • Remembrance culture and the Cold War

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

  • Thirty Years of Bombing Iraq March 3, 2021
  • Withdrawal of Tanden Nomination March 3, 2021
  • Tax Billionaires to Pay for Pandemic Recovery March 2, 2021
  • Biden Bombing Syria: “Illegal” February 26, 2021
  • Mars Mission Had 1-in-960 Odds of a Plutonium Release February 26, 2021
  • New Report Calls on Biden to Put an End to Program That’s “Not Far From Slavery” February 25, 2021

RSS International Debt Observatory

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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

  • Warehouses Are Today’s “Dark Satanic Mills” March 4, 2021
  • Jeremy Corbyn on Stan Newens and the Fight for Socialism in Our Time March 4, 2021
  • Joe Biden’s Immigration Policies Must Bring Deportees Back Home to the US March 4, 2021
  • David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep March 4, 2021
  • Labour MP Jon Trickett: “A Divided Movement Will Not Win the Next Election” March 3, 2021
  • How Bernie Sanders, an Open Socialist, Won Burlington’s Mayoral Election March 3, 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

  • President Joe Biden and the False Promises of Immigration Reform and Raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 February 20, 2021
  • The Billionaires Have Programmed Too Many of Us Into Opposing Teams February 13, 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 03 02 2021 March 3, 2021
  • Anarchy Radio 02 23 2021 February 23, 2021
  • Anarchy Radio 02 16 2021 February 16, 2021

RSS Jonathan Turley

  • LA Teacher’s Union Under Fire For Effort To Racially Classify Critics March 4, 2021
  • Behold Your Afghan Air Fleet: How U.S. Paid $549 Million For Defective Cargo Planes and Then Sold Them For $40,257 Of Scrap Metal March 4, 2021
  • “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Cheesy”: Police Cite “Cheeto Dust” In Identification For Oklahoma Burglary Suspect March 4, 2021
  • Pacific University Professor Suspended After Sharing Story About Drag Bar In New Orleans March 4, 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

  • Declining sperm counts: Nature's answer to overpopulation? February 28, 2021

RSS Lack of Environment

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RSS Law and Disorder

  • Law and Disorder March 1, 2021 March 1, 2021
  • Law and Disorder February 22, 2021 February 22, 2021
  • Law and Disorder February 15, 2021 February 15, 2021

RSS Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

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RSS Le Monde diplomatique – Open Page

  • Britain's outsourcing scandal March 4, 2021
  • In Iraq, breaking up is hard to do March 3, 2021
  • The UAE's seven emirates March 2, 2021
  • Sahel: shifting enemies, enduring conflict March 2, 2021
  • How much of a threat is Alexey Navalny? March 2, 2021

RSS Leaving Babylon

  • Even Iran is laughing at us November 9, 2020

RSS Lee Camp

  • Gov’t Secrets #31 – The F-35 Catastrophe, & How The US Doomed Africa March 4, 2021
  • Gov’t Secrets #30 – Breaking News on The Assassinations of Malcolm X and Fred Hampton March 4, 2021
  • We’re Weaponizing Outer Space – Which Is A Terrible Idea (Redacted Tonight) March 3, 2021
  • MOC #55 – Facing Prison For Fighting Injustice (w/ Lillian House) March 3, 2021
  • MOC #54 – Big Oil Is Really Scared! with Steven Donziger March 1, 2021
  • Redacted Tonight #324 – Corporate America Has Weaponized Being ‘Woke’ February 27, 2021

RSS Lee Fang

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RSS Leonardo Boff

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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.

  • Balloons March 3, 2021
  • Yawn February 26, 2021
  • A PLEA FOR AN EXISTENTIAL ETHICS OF THE ENVIRONMENT February 23, 2021

RSS Link TV – Earth Focus

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RSS Low-Tech Magazine

  • How Sustainable is High-tech Health Care? February 18, 2021
  • Vertical Farming Does Not Save Space February 17, 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

  • Thursday assorted links March 4, 2021
  • Canada: An Official Strong Recommendation for First Doses First March 4, 2021
  • My job as managing editor of the Austrian Economics Newsletter March 4, 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

  • Trump NLRB Smashed Google Guy February 17, 2018
  • Neoliberals Used to Refer to Themselves as New Democrats December 22, 2017
  • Alabama Part II December 16, 2017

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

  • 20 Years Of Media Lens: A Selection Of Remarkable Replies From Journalists February 23, 2021
  • ‘Our Indifference To Ourselves’ – Beyond The ‘Virtue’ Of Self-Sacrifice – Part 2 February 11, 2021
  • ‘Our Indifference To Ourselves’ – Beyond The ‘Virtue’ Of Self-Sacrifice – Part 1 February 10, 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: Biden’s First Act Of War Hits 3 Countries March 4, 2021
  • Media Roots Radio: The Oswald Institute of Virology, COVID-19 Origins & US Military Biowarfare w/ gumby4christ February 26, 2021
  • Empire Files: Truth Behind SNL’s Controversial Israel Joke February 22, 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

  • The Democrats Role in Distracting with Identity Politics February 22, 2021
  • At the Oxford Economics Society February 4, 2021
  • The rentier resurgence and takeover: Finance Capitalism vs. Industrial Capitalism January 27, 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

  • Biden’s Bombs March 4, 2021
  • Amos Oz – the sadistic oppression of his daughter, and of Palestinians March 4, 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

  • Review Iraqi Women, Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present March 4, 2021
  • This Day In Iraqi History - Mar 4 March 4, 2021
  • Iraq’s Oil Revenues Hit 13-Month High In February 2021 March 3, 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

  • GOP Voting Rights Act Position Falls Apart in SCOTUS Arguments March 4, 2021
  • Links 3/4/2021 March 4, 2021
  • Bad Stimulus: Government Payments to Individuals Are a Terrible Way to Solve America’s Structural Economic Problems March 4, 2021
  • Facebook and Google vs the Free Press March 4, 2021
  • RIP Gold. Killed by Bitcoin March 4, 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

  • Naomi Klein on CIA Project MK-ULTRA February 28, 2021
  • John Pilger February 21, 2021
  • Where Does The Left Go After Trump? February 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

  • January 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

  • 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
  • The worst president January 9, 2021
  • Green New Deal, Part VIII: New Zealand’s Zero-Covid-19 Strategy Shows how Politics Can Serve the Common Good January 7, 2021
  • Finding a Home for the ‘Politically Homeless’: Could a UK Version of Spain’s Podemos Party Work In Britain? December 11, 2020

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

  • Don’t Trust Your Brain, It Only Looks Real March 4, 2021
  • The Famous House in the Middle of the Loire River March 4, 2021
  • Company Sells Bottled Fresh Air for Over $100 a Bottle March 3, 2021
  • Hard to Swallow – Japanese Student Creates Delicious-Looking Stone Sushi March 3, 2021
  • Man Spends $15,500 on “Love Island” to Win Back Ex-Girlfriend, Gets Shot Down March 3, 2021
  • These Two Islands Are Just 2.4 Miles Apart, But Have a 21-Hour Time Difference March 2, 2021

RSS Of Two Minds

  • When Does This Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham Finally Implode? March 3, 2021
  • About That +6.8% GDP Forecast: Remember That GDP = Waste March 2, 2021
  • What "Normal" Are We Returning To? The Depression Nobody Dares Acknowledge March 1, 2021

RSS One Penny Sheet

  • Easy Ways for Disabled Entrepreneurs to Find Financing May 13, 2020
  • Can You Take Out A Personal Loan And Use It For Your Business? May 13, 2020

RSS One Struggle – South Florida

  • 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
  • WTF Is Still Happening? The Supreme Court is Still Capitalist October 29, 2020

RSS Orion Magazine

  • VIDEO: Dr. Imo Nse Imeh, Artist in Motion February 16, 2021
  • Five Articles to Celebrate International Day of Women and Girls in Science February 11, 2021
  • Editor’s Choice: “This Land Was Made” February 9, 2021

RSS Our Finite World

  • Why Collapse Occurs; Why It May Not Be Far Away February 25, 2021
  • Where Energy Modeling Goes Wrong February 4, 2021
  • 2021: More troubles likely January 12, 2021

RSS Pando Daily

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RSS Paul Haeder

  • American Exceptionalism: Private Wealth and Public Squalor February 23, 2021
  • The Eye of the Wolf: Measuring Myself through Death February 19, 2021
  • Dreams Outside the Hopes of the Neuronormal February 6, 2021

RSS Paul Kingsnorth – Elswhere

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RSS Paul L. Street

  • Petit-Bourgeois “Normalcy” Pining at The New York Times February 15, 2021
  • On Capitalism, Racism, Trump, and Pandemo-Fascism February 15, 2021
  • We Have a Fascism Problem February 15, 2021
  • Simon Says February 14, 2021

RSS PBD – Progressive Blog Digest

  • 46 January 21, 2021
  • HIS LEGACY January 20, 2021
  • THE END GAME January 19, 2021

RSS PeakOil.com News

  • Everything Is About To Get More Expensive. This Is Good March 3, 2021
  • Why Collapse Occurs; Why It May Not Be Far Away February 28, 2021
  • Don’t Believe the US Energy Independence Hype February 28, 2021

RSS Peak Prosperity Blog

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RSS Peak Prosperity: Daily Digest

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RSS Peak Prosperity: Featured Voices

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RSS People Before Profit Blog

  • "Blacklisted Again" Michael Berkowitz on "Trumbo" by Norman Markowitz December 10, 2015
  • A Corrected and Updated Version of The "Madness" of Donald Trump by Norman Markowitz December 9, 2015
  • The "Madness" of Donald Trump by Norman Markowitz December 8, 2015

RSS Phlegm

  • "we fight each other while it devours us" Belgium June 2017 December 1, 2017
  • West Didsbury Manchester. May 2017 December 1, 2017
  • Dulwich picture gallery. April 25th 2017 December 1, 2017

RSS Phyllis Bennis

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RSS Physicist-Retired Newsvine

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RSS Pink Tank

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RSS PlanetSave – Climate

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RSS Political Violence @ a Glance

  • The Anatomy of Backsliding: Why is Democracy Consuming Itself? March 3, 2021
  • You Can’t Get There from Here: Biden Negotiating the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict March 2, 2021
  • Digitally Fueled Civil Resistance and Repression in Myanmar March 1, 2021

RSS Popular Resistance

  • Defending Standing Rock, Combating State Repression March 4, 2021
  • Jewish National Fund Declares It Will Fund Land Confiscation In The West Bank March 4, 2021
  • Protesters Block Intersection In Support Of Jailed Indigenous Elder March 4, 2021
  • We Should Be Taxing The Rich, Not The Unemployed March 4, 2021

RSS PRN with Danny Schechter

  • The Gary Null Show – 08.15.16 August 15, 2016
  • Leid Stories – Election 2016: Primaries Deliver A Big Payday for Clinton, An Inevitable Payout for Sanders – 06.08.16 June 8, 2016
  • The Gary Null Show – 05.10.16 May 10, 2016
  • Meditations and Molotovs – 05.02.16 May 2, 2016
  • Focus on the Facts – 02.29.16 February 29, 2016
  • Warrior Connection – 02.28.16 February 29, 2016
  • Resistance Radio – Darcia Narvaez – 02.28.16 February 29, 2016
  • Meria Heller Show – 02.28.16 February 28, 2016
  • Expat Files – 02.28.16 February 28, 2016

RSS Progressive Radio Network

  • Solartopia Green Power and Wellness Hour – VOTING RIGHTS UNDER FIRE….& FIGHTBACK WITH HR-1& HR-4….PLUS DC STATEHOOD March 4, 2021
  • iEat Green – 03.04.21 – Rameshwar Das-Being Ram Dass March 4, 2021
  • Trends This Week – Corruption in Charge – 03.03.21 March 4, 2021
  • The Gary Null Show Notes – 03.04.21 March 4, 2021
  • Global Alert News – 03.04.21 March 4, 2021
  • the dr. peter breggin hour – 03.04.21 March 4, 2021

RSS ProPublica

  • The Pandemic’s Existential Threat to Black-Owned Businesses March 4, 2021
  • After a Wave of Violent Threats Against Election Workers, Georgia Sees Few Arrests March 3, 2021
  • Hours After an Employee Accused Him of Sexual Misconduct, Prominent Alaska Executive Resigns March 3, 2021
  • A Las Vegas Judge Approves $1.4 Million Payment to Wrongfully Convicted Man Who Served More Than Two Decades March 2, 2021
  • Oregon’s Logging Industry Says It Can’t Afford New Taxes. But Prices Have Never Been Higher and Profits Are Soaring. March 2, 2021

RSS Project Censored

  • Luminaries Join Peace Studies Class for Tribute to Pentagon Papers Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg March 3, 2021
  • John K. Wilson and Abby Martin March 1, 2021
  • Scholar John K. Wilson February 17, 2021

RSS Public Intelligence

  • (U//FOUO) Maryland Fusion Center Bulletin: Islamic State Propaganda Video Encourages Incendiary Attacks in the Homeland
  • Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Report: Protecting Against the Threat of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)
  • (U//FOUO) DHS-FBI-USSS Joint Threat Assessment: 59th Presidential Inauguration
  • (U//FOUO) Domestic Violent Extremists Emboldened in Aftermath of Capitol Breach, Domestic Terrorism Threat Likely Amid Political Transitions
  • Operation Warp Speed Therapeutics: Monoclonal Antibody Playbook Version 2.0
  • Asymmetric Warfare Group Study: Russian Private Military Companies in Operations, Competition, and Conflict
  • Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Mail-In Voting in 2020 Infrastructure Risk Assessment
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Russia Likely to Continue Seeking to Undermine Faith in US Electoral Process
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Some Violent Opportunists Probably Engaging in Organized Activities
  • (U//FOUO) DHS Bulletin: Violent Opportunist Tactics Observed During Civil Disturbances 26-31 May

RSS Pulse

  • “Undignified”, “humiliating”, “belittled”—BAME experience at the BBC June 13, 2020
  • How Disinformation Works April 2, 2020
  • Satis House: On a Women’s Revolution January 7, 2020