Shock Doctrine in action

from New Left Project. (UK) This is classic neo-liberalism in action in the UK, but it is also happening in the US.

Consumer or Citizen?

by Micki Krimmel from Shareable. 

I'm not so much interested in the speeches by former President Carter as I am in the helpful suggestions about creating sustainability contained in the last three paragraphs.

CIA without news of Osama bin Laden for almost 9 years

from Voltaire Net. This is a very concise article that makes its point very well.

The Agency and the political establishment consider him to be the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. However, again contradicting the official version, the FBI’s most wanted fugitive list does not feature OBL in connection with 9/11.

Corporate Control of Our Democracy: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

by Radhika Balakrishnan and James Heintz from The Huffington Post. 

Articles like this offer some understanding of corporate power, but provide little understanding of how degraded the so-called democratic system is in the US. Of course, liberal websites such as this have no interest in thoroughly understanding the warped US governing system because they have no interest in any fundamental change.

Roots of Sustainability

by Joe Roman, Tess Croner, Will Raap, Wes Jackson from Solutions. 

They provide an excellent historical perspective on the degradation of soils and argue for their own solutions from the 50-Year Farm Bill and those of the Worldwatch Institute's Mitigating Climate Change through Food and Land Use. 


However, I don't think that they really answer the question they posed early in the article:

When it is used and abused, soil becomes a nonrenewable resource, like fossil fuels. But there's no Big Soil, with friends and lobbyists on Capitol Hill. So how do we turn this around?

They seem to think that merely having sensible solutions will automatically transform into social policy.

Time out

How Obama can wean the country off oil without help from Congress

by Christian Parenti from Grist. 

The author supplies some excellent ideas about transitioning from fossil fuels to non-polluting energy sources. However his understanding of how our society is governed seems incredibly naive to me. 

First off, he suggests that the formal head of the US, Obama, can do this. A sensible view holds that Obama is merely an employee of the ruling class who was selected for this job of President, but which is actually only a public relations function of the Empire. If he didn't follow his employer's instructions, he would be removed one way or another. And there isn't the slightest bit of evidence that suggests Obama will do anything other than please his masters.

Secondly, to go "green" very suddenly requires extensive retooling and changes of infrastructure that is now totally designed for fossil fuel engines. Such efforts would require huge amounts of investment that would require government subsidies in various forms for a number of years. That would likely mean higher taxes that would suppress consumption of profit making junk that corporations sell to satisfy their reason-to-be--profits. So what the author is asking is that the corporate ruling class forgo profits for probably two decades in order to restore a stable climate and a sustainable world. Such an argument ignores the fact that corporations are motivated by short term profits. Most cannot see beyond the next quarter's financial statements. Their whole system of individual rewards and punishments is based on quarterly performance.

Thirdly, he concludes his article with this absurd statement:

At one level, the mad Tea Partyers are correct: government is leviathan-a monster. But it is our monster, and with proper leadership even this government in the current climate could jump-start a clean-energy revolution.

The government is not "our monster", it belongs, quite literally, to the 1%. Also, that 1% will never give working people, a "proper leadership", that is, a leadership that serves our interests. Until we grow out of these childish notions, there will be no hope for change.

The best part of his essay is when he states,

Gates explained to the Washington Post that much of what is touted as free-market innovation was born of government subsidies: "The Internet and the microprocessor, which were very fundamental to Microsoft being able to take the magic of software and having the PC explode, were among many of the elements that came through government research and development."

This was quite an admission, but an honest one. The ruling class relies a lot on government subsidies of various forms and has benefited greatly from taxpayer funded research. But then ruling classes always benefit from their dominant position and resist any changes that might reduce their benefits. 

The only real solution is to replace the current system of capitalism with a fully functioning, participatory, inclusive democratic system.

President Obama's Most Inexplicable Failure

by Melvin A. Goodman from Truthout. 

There are so many articles like this that illustrate the poor understanding Americans have of their governing system. Hence, the poverty of ideas to create real change. See the above post, and all others tagged with "Obama" for my response.

President Barack Obama has been a major disappointment to a liberal community that rallied to his call for genuine change. His administration has made no attempt to investigate the crimes that were committed by the Bush administration, including torture and abuse, secret prisons and renditions. President Obama rescued Wall Street, but not Main Street. And he has expanded the self-destructive war in Afghanistan, where there is no end in sight.

What Is the Ultimate Yachting Experience on the Mediterranean?

by Jamie Johnson from Vanity Fair. We all need to keep in touch with our fellow top 1% Americans to learn about their concerns and worries. 

How much for a private island? Which M.B.A. program has the richest grads? Who sleeps where on Air Force One? When readers ask VF.com questions, our experts are there to answer. 

Hey,You Liberal Dummies. It’s the Tenth Amendment

by James Ridgeway from his blog, Unsilent Generation. Quite a measure of sarcasm in this piece; but with mainstream media coverage so awful, it seems quite appropriate.

The mainstream press has been gushing on for months about the jobless economic recovery, when in fact, the recession never ended–just ask the people who have been on unemployment for well over a year and still can’t find jobs. The press and the pols say they’re just recalcitrant bums,too lazy to work, and all we’ve got to do is throw out the Mexicans and force our guys to pick up the broom. Maybe we can motivate the slugs by removing unemployment insurance.

solutions NASA: First half of 2010 breaks the thermometer — despite “recent minimum of solar irradiance”

from Climate Progress.

Heat waves and extremely high temperatures could be commonplace in the U.S. by 2039, Stanford study finds

by Mark Shwartz from Stanford University News. 

Exceptionally long heat waves and other hot events could become commonplace in the United States in the next 30 years, according to a new study by Stanford University climate scientists.

The Administration Double Speak on Jobs & Exports

from The Economic Populist. 

The author does not seem to understand that the system, capitalism, in an age of globalization requires the government to pursue such policies. He offers the former CEO of IBM as an alternative voice that supports national capitalist policies, but such thinking is now out of date. 

Today's capitalists are doing everything they can to erase boundaries for their activities while strenthening them in order to control working people. They couldn't care less if their workers are Hungarian. Nigerian, or Paraguayan. What they do care about is cheap labor, weak labor regulations, weak unions, weak or unenforced environmental regualtions, and strong property rights laws.

He seems to take too seriously public propaganda statements about the importance of job creation for American workers.

The most absurd thing is happening. Claiming to push exports, President Obama is planning on pushing a host of policies that are well documented to offshore outsource jobs and displace U.S. workers. On Obama's export council is Verizon, a notorious labor arbitrager. Ford, Disney, Pfizer (another notorious offshore outsourcer of advanced R&D), and Dow Chemical are also appointed.

Business Week:

    He’ll have to push new trade agreements, higher quotas for skilled foreign workers, and tougher enforcement of intellectual-property rights.

Jay Bybee's sociopathic self-absorption

by Glenn Greenwald from Salon. He comments on another sociopath that the system has produced:

That's what happens when you create a society where elites can engage in the most wretched and destructive acts with total impunity:  it engenders a blinding, empathy-free, effete sense of entitlement whereby they see themselves as the only ones who matter and their own plight as the only one worthy of consideration.  If you build a political system grounded in the premise that there's an elite caste so special and elevated that they are entitled even to hover above the laws and rules to which everyone else is subjected, the beneficiaries of that caste system are always the first to believe in its virtue.

That's what happens in any kind of class structured society. 

Time out

Rich countries set intellectual property rules in secret: What’s ours will stay that way

by Philippe Rivière from Le Monde Diplomatique. 

Rich capitalist corporations of the West are secretly attempting to secure more rights of ownership over ideas. The private ownership of economic property is the foundation of the capitalist system. Intellectual property which includes many life saving drugs, even life forms, are the latest battles being waged by capitalists to secure the benefits for them to the detriment of the many. 

This is not about individuals being rewarded for their creative efforts. Individuals mostly work in corporate settings where the corporations own, under the property laws of capitalism, everything that is produced there. Or they work in public institutions where the institution owns the ideas and inventions, and in turn sells them at bargain prices to corporations.

From their start in 2008, ACTA negotiations were held behind closed doors by an ad-hoc club of rich countries. No one knew where the negotiations were taking place and who was representing which country, let alone the contents of the text, made available to a few select lobbyists for the music, cinema and pharmaceutical sectors in the US.

Chile's Social Earthquake

by Roger Burbach from Global Alternatives. The author provides an honest update on Chilean society under the post Pinochet governments that have been touted so much in US media as a paragon of neo-liberal virtues.

The rampant ideology of the free market has produced a deep sense of alienation among much of the population. Although a coalition of center left parties replaced the Pinochet regime twenty years ago, it opted to depoliticize the country, to rule from the top down, allowing controlled elections every few years, shunting aside the popular organizations and social movements that had brought down the dictatorship.

The Chilean people seem to be way ahead of activists in the US who can't seem to imagine working outside the system to protect their communities and promote real change.

A coalition of over sixty social and nongovernmental organizations released a letter stating: “In these dramatic circumstances, organized citizens have proven capable of providing urgent, rapid and creative responses to the social crisis that millions of families are experiencing. The most diverse organizations--neighborhood associations, housing and homeless committees, trade unions, university federations and student centers, cultural organizations, environmental groups—are mobilizing, demonstrating the imaginative potential and solidarity of communities.”

 

Why Power Is Not a Dirty Word

by Frances Moore Lappé from Energy Bulletin. Although supposedly originally sourced in Yes! Magazine, this version of her article is better.

In recent decades, a revolution in our understanding of human nature has produced evidence from neuroscience to anthropology that we have all the social “wiring” needed to make the turn toward life. It turns out we’ve evolved to take pleasure in and to need cooperation, empathy, fairness, and efficacy.

Then what is preventing us from moving toward the world that almost all of us want? My short answer is that we feel powerless. We feel powerless to act on what we know.

And what robs us of power?

Yes, there has been much encouraging research findings regarding human nature and it is necessary that we think about the implications of this research for social change. This article, while inspirational, suggests mostly conventional methods to bring about social change.

...we can each press our representatives to get on board. We can make campaign finance reform a sexy, compelling issue, knowing it’s needed to move on everything from serious climate-change legislation to remaking our banking system.

If the history of the US in the past 50 years has taught anything at all, it is the futility of working through the existing political system. That is why people feel powerless. We must come up with alternative methods if we are to accomplish anything, and especially to rid ourselves of this sense of powerlessness. 

The Simpler Way model at the top right of this blog offers some constructive ideas, but we need many more. We need many more people working on alternative ideas and methods in order to harness our new understandings of human nature to the critical task of changing our societies whose ruling classes seem hell-bent on letting capitalism run us off the cliffs of climate change and environmental degradation.

The G20 Plan for Prosperity: Rubber Bullets and Shredded Social Safety Net

by Paul Jay from New Deal 2.0. The author who usually does the interviews for The Real News Network writes about his observations and significance of the recent G20 summit in Toronto.

The Toronto G-20 summit sent a message to poor and working people in Europe and North America. “You will pay for the global financial crisis through cuts to your social safety nets. There will be no taxing of those who actually caused the crisis and made fortunes in the various bubbles over the last decades.”

He also observed that it was easy for the Canadian ruling class to suspend the civil rights of Canadians. You see, these rights are always subject to be ignored at the whim of the governing classes everywhere. Laws are designed to regulate and control the behavior of working people, and any rights that they theoretically enjoy can be removed at any time.

Government for Sale: How Lobbyists Shaped the Financial Reform Bill

from Time Magazine online. 

This is an abridged version of a longer article in the magazine which I have not read, however this version is quite astonishing! I really don't know what to make of it. Here is a mainstream media corporation telling us what is all too evident, but usually covered up as much as possible.