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

Thursday, February 17, 2022

Posts that I especially recommend for Thursday, February 17, 2022

Michael Rectenwald returns to discuss the ESG Index or "woke capitalism" as a selection mechanism or demarcation device to delineate which businesses are onboard with The Great Reset and punish those who are not compliant. It is effectively a Social Credit System for companies, feeding investments toward the compliant while starving dissident firms, competition, and industries. This sets up the possibility for doing to companies what is being done to individuals in Canada right now, de-banking them and freezing their assets, and is totalitarian in nature. This global government combines the worst of both systems (capitalism and [state-bureaucratic] communism). We discuss the WEF Young Global Leaders program, the threat posed by the people who don't see COVID1984 for what it is, resistance, and parallel structures. [my insertion]
 
My brief commentary follows: 
 
The "woke" strategy in the title is only the latest strategy to sustain the transnational capitalist ruling classes. The (unnamed) interviewer suggests (08:57-10:23) that we patronize his sponsor which is only another capitalist short-term scheme. The interviewer and his guest, Rectenwald, are confused by years of propaganda and indoctrination regarding Russian "communism" during the Stalinist years after the destruction of the development of real socialism by capitalist invasions of Russia (see this and this) in support of the White Army. The White Army wanted to continue Russia's participation in WWI and were capitalist oriented. These invasions resulted in a Stalinist bureaucratic group taking control of the Soviet Union. 
 
The interviewer identifies himself as a conservative (meaning a capitalist conservative which I interpret as old-fashioned capitalists), but he and Rechtenwald are really anarchists as well as old-fashioned capitalists who believe that any government during this concentration of capital is necessarily corrupt. Both do not understand that the establishment of historical capitalism necessarily evolves into fascist capitalism that we see today, and that we saw in Germany and Japan in the 1930s. Trying to establish parallel democratic institutions is not the answer, real socialism in which we, ordinary people, are the ruling class in which the class system itself will disappear.
 
I don't pretend to know what the conditions are like in China or Russia. But I know that Covid-19 is real, and many multi-system nations are dealing with it they best they can, and certainly better than many capitalist nations.
China’s infrastructure drive directly jeopardizes the West’s current “international order” under which Western hegemony is maintained by denying nations infrastructure, stability, and prosperity. This is why the United State through its “Build Back Better World” and now the EU through its “Global Gateway” are posturing as if they plan on competing with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, but upon reading the fine print, are clearly planning to simply roll it back and maintain the status quo. 
 
My reaction: With Berletic's use of the "West", he means the de-facto US/British/Zionist Empire. I, after many years of research, produced this explanation for the rise of another capitalist empire much like Germany's Nazi empire and Japan's Empire. And this post, which explains how the ruling capitalist class has engaged in a long-range conspiracy to rule the world after WWII, was recently supported by a book from a University of Columbia (USA) professor in a book entitled Tomorrow the World
  • Davos and the Purloined Letter Conspiracy by F. Robert Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook. My reaction: This is a recent development is only a part of the long-range goal to obtain global control by the control "freaks" of the de-facto US/British/Zionist Empire.
Read those words again. “No oversight from Congress or the courts.” Essentially, US citizens are expected to trust the CIA to restrain its operations on its own volition. No one would, or should, accept such terms, especially from an organization such as the CIA with a proven track record of dissembling when it comes to telling the truth (as former CIA Director Mike Pompeo noted, in April 2019: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment”).
 
It is already law that protects the highly secretive CIA which functions as the operation agency of the capitalist ruling class used to destabilize foreign governments and to manipulate our own population. This bill was passed after the staging the "9/11" contrived event to shock with fear the population of the USA. Fear is the weapon they've used frequently on the general population to pass such legislation. This was also demonstrated in the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, and now the covid pandemic. Before those events, there was always the threat from the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation.
China’s infrastructure drive directly jeopardizes the West’s current “international order” under which Western hegemony is maintained by denying nations infrastructure, stability, and prosperity. This is why the United State through its “Build Back Better World” and now the EU through its “Global Gateway” are posturing as if they plan on competing with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, but upon reading the fine print, are clearly planning to simply roll it back and maintain the status quo.
 
The West means the de-facto US/British/Zionist Empire which is striving for Empire's hegemony over the world (see this, which is supported by a Columbia professor in his recent book Tomorrow the World).
The planet is heating at an alarming rate. We need to raise the albedo, reflect the Sun’s heat, draw CO2 out of the atmosphere and reduce acidity in the oceans. It’s a tall order. Peter Wadhams and Ye Tao argue the case for different methods of geoengineering, and for restoring the acid/base balance in the oceans.

Peter advocates both #MarineCloudBrightening and Direct Air Capture. While Ye’s #MEER reflection project works with mirrors, particularly on farms, where increased shade would save water and cool crops in the escalating heat and droughts to come.

Both Peter and Ye recommend farming #oysters and using their shells to recover the acid/base balance of the ocean, while host, Dale Walkonen, recommends ending industrial animal agriculture. These solutions would be very powerful in restoring Earth’s natural systems, both on land and in the sea.
 
My reaction: Ye Tao of Harvard University is the author of the conceptualization of the mirror reflection project (see this), and thanks Guy McPherson (at 32:50) for the inspiration to come up this solution. But this solution requires the wealthy nations to put forth enormous investment in mirrors and their installation. I don't see any discussion of this solution from the leading capitalist ruling classes whose wealth and power is based on profits. Thus, I don't see this solution as feasible in the short-term unless the wealthier nations converted to socialism in the limited time remaining. The wealthier capitalist nations might employ this method in desperation at a last stage of the global warming crisis, but it will be too late.