Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Who is the biggest climate change villain?

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

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Who is the biggest climate change villain?

Click here to access article by Jonathan Cook from his blog.

Here is an exclusive the Guardian has held back from its readers for 26 years. It is finally published on its pages today.

In 1991 the Shell oil company produced a half-hour film, Climate of Concern, for showing in schools and universities, that set out the dangers of climate change, apparently with unnerving accuracy. The Guardian calls the film “prescient”.

The paper makes the point that Shell knew from scientists precisely what havoc our addiction to oil would wreak on the planet. Despite its own warnings, Shell carried on extracting oil regardless.

But the Guardian misses the real story, probably because the villain of the piece is less Shell and the major oil companies than it is the Guardian and other liberal media.

The use of the word "liberal" is often confusing to people, and I think that this is deliberate. Keeping ordinary people from understanding the illegitimate system they are plagued with is important to maintain the ruling class and their system of capitalism. Thus confusing words, which are often nice sounding words, are used along with confusing concepts and disinformation to hide the reality of an illegitimate system that produces so much extreme inequality as well as a host of other problems.

Liberalism (in the classic sense) was adopted by early capitalists to describe the ideology of their system. Current usage is a derivative of that old term and is now used to describe well-indoctrinated people in capitalist ideology (classic liberalism) whom owners of media hire to contain and deflect dissent into harmless channels in the interests of the ruling capitalist class. The Guardian is one such "liberal" media company. Such people function essentially as sales people for the capitalist ruling class. The word is also used to describe people who believe the themes, information, and values issued by such corporate media sources. Typically such themes currently emphasize social identity rights (equality of opportunity to be wage slaves regardless of sexual orientation, religion, immigrant status, color, etc), expanding voting and other civil rights, and "human rights" of people in foreign lands.

In this article Cook exposes how the Guardian kept secret a very important article written about 25 years ago that warned about the relationship between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming. Because the capitalist system is so dependent on cheap fuels, the report had to be suppressed.