By by ice shelf

Larsen B, Antarctic

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2015/may/15/antarctic-larsen-b-ice-shelf-nasa-video  

Nature is always changing. You environmentalists and your scare tactics. Don't worry, be happy. We'll study it when we have time.

Save the sacred

Yes, it is our responsibility now.

Climate change once again, and again--and again

When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?

(John Maynard Keynes)

A perpetual motion machine for sale

Snake oil salesmen

A number of years ago I was at a global climate change conference in Washington, D.C. One day was devoted to visiting the offices of various senators and representatives. I ran into a cigarette lobbyist, a former congressman from North Carolina, who was visiting the representative from his old district who was a personal friend. We had a pleasant chat before he was ushered into the office of his friend. While we chatted, I wondered what he might have said if I'd told him he was working for a criminal enterprise. Needless to say, back then, I didn't. Probably today I would have.

The fossil fuel industry has run a similar campaign to what the cigarette manufacturers once did. It has worked for a very long time. It's about denial, deception and a belief that the public in general is easily manipulated and by in large not well informed.

How the good guys win

The  fossil fuel industry is condemning us to climate disaster

Responding to climate denial from Australia

Don't worry, fracking is good

Let's take a cruise

Obama's piecemeal policy

Want to make a movie

Global warming not slowing

Believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right 

(George Orwell)

Los Afectados 2015

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

(Hannah Arendt)

Five years ago this month the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster began in the Gulf sixty miles off the coast of Louisiana. Five years later the region is still suffering the consequences of the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

In the late 1960s the Texaco Petroleum Company got the concession to search for oil in a remote region of Ecuador. Eventually some 16 billion gallons of toxic waste were dumped in one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world, covering approximately 1,500 square miles, about the size of the state of Delaware.

I first wrote about the Ecuadorian oil field called Ispingo-Tiputino-Tamboccocha back in 2007 and again in 2012, see Los Afectados. As well, I had lived in Ecuador in the early 1970s. It is now an old story but still a new story and one that is ongoing.

A major difference, however, is that some forty years later the size of Los Afectados (The Affected Ones) has grown well beyond Ispingo-Tiputino-Tamboccocha, the country of Ecuador and the continent of Latin America.

2015

On March 4, 2014 the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said that the $9.5 billion Ecuadorian judgment was—regardless of its merit--the product of fraud, racketeering, false testimony and bribery instigated by the plaintiff and its lead attorney, Steven Donziger, with the defendant being Chevron Corp. The judge stated that Chevron did not have to pay anything. It was “unenforceable.”

Some people have referred to this case, which has been going on for some twenty years, as “never-ending litigation,” even though Chevron has some very deep pockets with considerable political influence. According to an analyst with OilPrice.com, Chevron in 2013 in the fourth quarter alone made $4.9 billion.

As of April 2015 the plaintiff expects the case to come before the Canadian Supreme Court. A Chevron subsidiary is developing the Alberta tar sands. Chevron also has assets in Argentina and Brazil, which Donziger has indicated he will go after.

The way the world is

Lost in this endless litigation, political maneuvering and money exchanging hands, the fact is that no one is disputing that a large portion of the Amazon region in Ecuador has suffered serious environmental damage along with crops, soil and water having been contaminated and people getting sick.

Above all else it is the indigenous community voices in the region that may have been drowned out. Will many of them die before there is any conclusion to this case? Will their children have to contend with the same environmental damage?

A brief story

From the plaintiff—LosAfectados

From the defendant—Chevron

From Rolling Stone: SludgeMatch: Inside Chevron's $9 Billion Legal Battle with EcuadorianVillagers

…......

About BP Deepwater Horizon: “The endless horrors of the BP oil spill”

A smoking gun: “ChelseaManning and the Deepwater Horizon Deaths”

I got mine

Was “evil” committed in Ecuador forty years ago? I suppose it depends on your point of view. Did the executives at Texaco know the difference between right and wrong back then? Did the military junta who ran the country care about what happened in the jungle?

Texaco was well aware of “best” practices. They chose to ignore them. I doubt the generals cared at all about indigenous people in the Amazon. They wanted the money. Can Chevron be held responsible for what Texaco did? The government of Ecuador “oversaw and certified” the successful completion of remediation by Texaco. Texaco became a subsidiary of Chevron in 2001. Chevron never drilled for oil in Ecuador. The case of course will play out.

The only real option is confrontation. Unless we afflict the comfortable everywhere, our actual future at the very least will be a dreary 21^st century serfdom. We are Los Afectados across the globe and ultimately we have only ourselves to blame.

So-called science: Climate change

A bit of levity regarding the minds of climate change deniers, but the ultimate consequences are likely to be anything but amusing. The question is as always how do we go about changing those minds or ignoring them completely?

You don't need to know that

Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.

(John Adams, second president of the United States)

This video came out two or three years ago, but it's telling on so many levels that it is worth looking at more than once. The reality is that it may be even more pertinent three years later. The mere “tweaking” of the system will not change anything.

Wealth Inequality in America

The U.S. is now the most unequal of all Western nations and has a lot less social mobility than Canada and Europe. In the 2014 mid-term elections the voter turnout was as low as the 1830 elections, where only white male property owners could vote. It is in the short-term interest of the plutocracy (read globally) to keep it this way.

Source: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook

Who loves you

Trans-Pacific Partnership

Trust us--it's far too complicated to explain to you. International trade benefits everyone. We understand, you don't have to. We're bringing the world together.... Do what you're told.

The authentic invasive species

Several days ago I received some material from the Sierra Club reminding me to renew my membership, which I had let lapse for a couple of years. What caught my attention however was a short letter that was included in the membership material. The letter read as follows:

“Dear Human:

Imagine that, little by little, your home was taken away from you. The forests and mountains where you once roamed freely disappeared, replaced by roads and concrete buildings.

What if politicians in suits, someplace far away, decided your fate … decided that you, your family, your friends, and neighbors had become a nuisance—a menace—to those who had invaded your home?

And so now, you must die.

Imagine these politicians rallying for your slaughter … ignoring what science has told them, encouraging citizens to hunt you down and kill you.

Imagine your family under attack. Defenseless, with nowhere left to hide, you must dodge bullets from the ground and sky, just to find food for yourself and your young children.

Imagine that, in one of these public hunts, you watched your offspring die.

Then you will know the terror that wolves face every day … and why we so desperately need your help.

After all, you and your fellow humans are the only ones who can save us. Our fate is in your hands.

So I hope you will answer this cry for help. You are our only hope. And time is running out ….”

Murder for fun, profit and prestige

The late, great comedian George Carlin once remarked that we humans can't destroy the Earth. The planet will deal with us without difficulty. I remain optimistic that after humankind vanishes (at least the current variety of Homo sapiens), the remaining life on Earth, as science writer Michael Tennesen says, “ will survive, adapt, diversify, and proliferate.”

I don't want to think that the combination of our technology, slow evolutionary development and general ignorance could actually turn our planet into an uncompromising nightmare like that offered up by the novelist Cormac McCarthy in his novel The Road.

Yet, regardless of whether or not we humans do ourselves in sometime in the future, the mind numbing misery we're inflicting on other species right now is appalling. It is conceivable that up to 50 percent of plant and animal species could have gone extinct by the end of the century. Unlike other mass extinctions, the principal cause this time will most likely be humankind. There's a reason that most scientists refer to our current geologic age as Anthropocene.

Wide areas of Asia currently, because of official corruption, greed, ignorance and even what is casually called “cultural” cuisine, are destroying plant and animal life across the planet at an astonishing rate. We humans have become like the invasive plant kudzu on steroids.

While we collectively—with some notable exceptions—have been killing and destroying most everything around us for thousands of years, it was far less noticeable before the industrial age and a global population under two billion. But now, with a population of more than 7 billion humans and increasing, we are destroying life on Earth on an industrial scale, seemingly unaware of its consequences for us.

So what ought we to do? One possibility certainly is that we may not be able to do anything in time. Fields like neuroscience and behavioral genetics have provided considerable insight in how humans think and process information and why we often do what we do ... but, the “so what” question however can't be tossed aside.

How do we confront, educate and find the resources fast enough to turn the human death cult into a manageable problem at the very least. Cowboy yahoos in the American West, clueless Chinese bourgeoisie desperate for the “bling” of ivory and other human predators are not going away anytime soon.

Maybe it does begins with trying to understand what the wolf could be thinking as he stares at his dead cub bleeding to death from the gunshot wound. Maybe we have to find better ways to talk to narcissistic Homo sapiens. Anyway, I renewed my membership in the Sierra Club. Giving up can't be an option.

For an unvarnished assessment of wildlife destruction read The Politics of Extinction. Getting angry is good but then come up with a plan. We need one right away.

Welfare queens in America

You know, they're just lazy, drug addicts, poorly educated, naturally inclined parasites.... The taker class.

The Best of American Capitalism

White America's secret, part 4

The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome.

(Andrea Tantaros, Fox News TV co-host, responding to U.S. Senate report on torture)

The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Accepting

It's the unsettling truth that may be the hardest part right now for a large portion of white America; after all, the U.S. has the oldest functioning Constitution in the world, and that might be the problem on any number of levels.

It was the brilliant James Madison, author of the United States Bill of Rights and one of the authors of The Federalist Papers who, in 1787, said, “They ought to be constituted [the nation] as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Ah, always the dangerous mob, the rabble, a consistent yet unspoken “through-line” of the United States.

Is an 18^th century document going to serve our needs in the 21^st century? Most likely not. Our social and political myths—created most certainly by white America and in particular the “minority of the opulent”--have largely remained intact for more than 200 years. The last occupying foreign army in the United States was the British during the war of 1812.

The many reasons given for not voting in the recent mid-term election represent at the very least intellectual laziness, be they offered by the “millennials,” those that just find the Republican party repugnant and of course the “disenchanted” liberals. But we've reached the point where we can probably say “so what” with some qualifications. The rot has advanced too far.

The Democratic party is a feckless relic, a hollow shell; yet, it possibly could morph into some sort of sane conservative movement, at some point in the future. The handful of genuine Democratic political progressives in the party, and they are only a handful, ought to be spending their time building a new progressive movement elsewhere.

The Republican party, the party of Lincoln, at least outside the benighted Confederacy, is really about the intentional development of an authentic, nativist, totalitarian movement, what the Europeans were familiar with in the 20^th century and that may be once again rearing its head in Europe in the 21^st century.

Black America, more than anyone else, clearly has a compelling reason to develop an organized and disciplined movement, one capable of acquiring greater political power at the national and most definitely at the local level.

The Occupy movement demonstrated that people could come together for political change with a serious moral purpose, but Occupy ultimately floundered and became a minor irritant to the kleptocracy and the political hacks that do its bidding.

We seem to have difficulty accepting the fact at the present time, but radical change is never a brief “get together” without any clear, definable objectives. To succeed, a movement has to ultimately bring in large, diverse groups of people of all ages, who aren't going away under any circumstances.

Of course it's about power, gathering it in and confronting those who refuse to give it up. Above all, it has to be unremitting and offer an understandable alternative to the status quo. This is not something done overnight nor is it a fervent wish for some messianic vision to make it happen.

An excellent time to begin is in January 2015. There will be more than enough motivation to go around. Once again from The Great Gatsby, a novel about illusion: “Americans while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” Well, we'll find out.

For an interesting documentary on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the use of police repression and the connections between what happened more than a 100 years ago and today, watch the video below.

The Wobblies: An Actual History of American Labor

IWW

Some Additional Reading and Considering Other Possibilities:

Slavery and Capitalism

The Power of Bad Ideas

America's Ownership Society

The Road to Turkdom

When History Knocks

Let's all screw the 1 percent: Thesimple move Obama could make to strengthen the rest of us

Why Poor People Stay Poor

Why so many wealthy Americans thinkthey're middle class

Big money keeping minoritypoliticians out of office, report says

Why Democrats Can't Win Over WhiteWorking-Class Voters

A scary culture change: What new lawenforcement rhetoric reveals about America

Revealed how the FBI coordinated thecrackdown on Occupy

Nine terrifying facts about America'sbiggest police force

Class warfare from above, 1865-1920

The Radical Paradox of Martin LutherKing's Devotion to Nonviolence

A Grifter For All Seasons in America:Ayn Rand

The GOP's Bad Habit

How to go California

Hens, unbound

We need to pressure the rest of the United States and across the planet. Change can happen. Non-humans--everywhere--deserve more than unremitting human cruelty.

So long 2014

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot

(Eugene O'Neil, playwright)

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

(Alan Turing, mathematician)

We live in capitalism. It's power seems inescapable. So did the divine rights of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

(Ursula K. Guin, writer)

“With a little help from my friends”

A small Christmas present for non-humans

Considering how we humans in general treat each other, it's not surprising how we deal with non-humans. But now perhaps one small step in human behavior, but much more to be done.

Argentina: Court grants orangutan basic rights

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/90400fa7a85a4802be8fbb36fededab4/argentina-court-grants-orangutan-basic-rights

White America's secret, part 3

“Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam...”

(poem and song published in 1870s)

Round em up, round them up

The 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of the American Western. It was also one of our most popular exports. Television shows like Bonanza, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, The Virginian, Have Gun, Will Travel and Maverick were among the most highly rated programs on television. I recently watched the 1959 TV pilot of Rawhide, where Clint Eastwood made his first appearance, about cowboys on a cattle drive.

It's quintessentially American … sort of. Stoic white men and go-it-alone kind of guys solve problems, protect children and the women folk and aren't afraid to use their guns, which of course are omnipresent. This view was in fact part of the West but only one small part, the part that has always been most comfortable to white people, who decided how the West “was won.”

The real story is of course much broader, much more ambiguous and oftentimes far darker, literally and figuratively, and the laconic lone cowboy was more often than not an unremarkable cog in a much bigger system. It is also about how large corporations and politicians first colluded on a large scale to plunder the resources of the West and where the ends justified the means.

The state of Idaho is sponsoring a Killing Competition on National Forest Lands. The contestants will be competing for cash prizes. The prizes go to those that kill the most wolves, coyotes and other wild life. To paraphrase Rap Brown, blood lust “is as American as cherry pie.”Yeah, it's about continued disrespect and disconnect but more important it's about mass delusion.

It's part of an old story about taming the frontier. Ranching interests today in the western states are the ones behind most of the shooting, trapping and poisoning of millions of animals. Ranchers drove the Mexican gray wolf to extinction and continually oppose any recovery efforts. Grazing on public lands has threatened or endangered hundreds of species, and thousands of miles of rivers have been polluted by livestock waste

Politicians in the western states love to talk about their Libertarian roots and how they are the “true” protectors of the environment and the authentic America. It's once again about white America making up stuff on a grand scale. No doubt many of these characters and their constituents actually believe the claptrap they utter—but why wouldn't they.

I hear the chickens are coming home

“You didn't hear about the terrorists planning to blow up the subway in Paris?” I had not. “Do you think it's safe to fly to New York”? I said I thought it was perfectly safe.

We had one of the lowest voter turnouts in years (36%) for our recent mid-term elections, terrible even by the dismal American standard, yet some $3.6 billion was spent to “buy the election.” The low voter turnout wasn't because of widespread contentment among the citizenry. But who did vote were the older, whiter, wealthier and more conservative voters. And who they voted into office at both the national and state level will guarantee all of us “interesting times” come January 2015.

I suspect the next two years will be unpleasant for a great many Americans, especially for those of us that don't want to revisit the 1950s let alone the nostalgic era of President William McKinley, 1897-1901.

“What do those people want?” “You ought to open an account in the Caymans, only the ignorant pay more taxes than they should.” “Stopping the system of dependency in this country is the most important thing we can do.” “We're the real victims.” “Next time we'll have a President who is, well, you know.”

I happened to run across a particular group of tennis players this past summer, who I ended up playing with periodically. They were white men, all over the age of 55, middle class, some of whom were retired … engineers, business types, one or two had worked in the public sector, with grown children and grandchildren. I listened to what they had to say.

They were a subset of white America but have always been an influential constituency and certain about their place in the order of things, until recently. It's about a world they know that seems to be now unraveling, difficult for many of them to comprehend. The television and radio info-entertainers tell them that, while they're in the right, they also ought to be afraid—of virtually everything. And they are resisting the inevitable changes, sometimes mindlessly.

Continued....

White America's secret, part 2

Men, women and children were piled up on that little flat in one confused mass. Blood ran like water ...

Big Foot's band was converted into good Indians.

(A soldier who participated in The Wounded Knee Massacre, December 29, 1890)

A lust for conquest had already destroyed the Great Republic, because trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.

(Mark Twain, during U.S. conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1902 )

Verscharfte Vernehmung [Enhanced Interrogation]

(The Gestapo's Methods of Examination, from a directive by the Gestapo chief, Muller, 1937)

Mohammed was also subjected to rectal rehydration 'without a determination of medical need.' Mohammed's chief interrogator described use of the process as emblematic of their 'total control over the detainee.'

(excerpt from Senate report on CIA torture, December 2014)

Um-m, before post-racial America

Approximately 20 Africans arrived in the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, but we think they were treated as indentured servants. Some supposedly achieved their freedom and became property owners. A lot of historians cite John Punch who, in July 1640, became the first official slave in the English colonies, supposedly because he decided to leave his employer before he'd finished his indentured servitude. The two white men that left with Punch had their servitude extended for a few years unlike Punch, who was placed in permanent bondage for the remainder of his life, with no rights. He became human property.

The “formal institution” of slavery was a gradual process and it took another 150 years or so before it was thoroughly and “legally” entrenched into the fabric of the entire country. Edward Baptist, professor of history at Cornell, has written an economic history of slavery, entitled The Half Has Never Been Told.

Many American history texts have portrayed slavery as a marginal system in the South, a relic of feudalism and perpetrated by a handful of landowners, with many slaves often becoming part of the slave owner’s family or variations of this relatively benign theme. I certainly have known a number of white southerners, who were far from being ignorant racist troglodytes or in any way thought slavery was “not all that bad,” but who still cling to some version of the Gone with the Wind nonsense.

The “war of northern aggression,” as some white southerners still today call the American Civil War, was not about slavery, but was about state's rights. This is a belief still offered by far too many. It is why Baptist's book is an important contribution in sweeping away the illusions of many white Americans and better understanding the very long legacy of slavery, that is far from being a relic of the past. Go to Hate Map to see where some of these groups reside at the present time.

According to Professor Baptist, America's rise to power ( and white privilege ) was very much connected to black slaves. It is a story about global capitalism and where “personal” property superseded all other rights. It most definitely was not a marginal system practiced by a few backwater southern plantation owners. In fact, Baptist doesn't speak of plantations but of slave labor camps. Think of Stalin's Gulags, North Korea's labor camps, and Nazi concentration camps. Work Sets You Free—Arbeit Macht Frei.

At the end of the Civil War in 1865 some 4 million former slaves were set free. Eight million whites in the South, overwhelmingly poor, landless and illiterate, thought of black people as competitors. White southerners were easily manipulated. By 1874 white power in the South had regained control, and the North had lost interest in Reconstruction. We had the West to now “civilize” and for some there was a lot of money to be made. Above all we now understood industrial warfare after the carnage of the Civil War..

Continued....

White America's secret, part 1

We must delight in each other, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

(“A Model of Christian Charity,” John Winthrop, leading figure in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630)

No ancient empire has risen or mouldered away within these limits. Except the red man, of doubtful origin and melancholy fate, America has no “surviving memorials of the past.”

(History of New Hampshire, George Barstow, 1858)

It would soon become the greatest mass slaughter of warm-blooded animals in human history. In Kansas alone the bones of thirty-one million buffalo were sold for fertilizer between 1868 and 1881.

(from Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C.Gwynne)

A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.

W.E.B. DuBois

Violence is as American as cherry pie.

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin [H. Rap Brown], 1960s

All a man needed was a horse, a gun and the open land, and he could conquer the world.

(attributed to U.S. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, 2014)

Vacuum domicilium

My favorite time to visit Cape Cod, the section of Massachusetts that juts out into the ocean, had always been in the fall, when the tourists had long gone and the beaches were deserted. It was the emptiness that I liked, watching the Atlantic Ocean crash onto the shore. It was easier to imagine so much.

That same ocean crashed onto the beaches when my ancestors landed in November of 1620—cold, miserable, frightened yet believing fervently in their stern religion and that they were the chosen people of God, about to establish the New Jerusalem.

To these early Pilgrims and Puritans, this New Jerusalem was deserted! It was vacuum domicilium, meaning “vacant dwelling.” It didn't fit the traditional English characteristic.”Unimproved” lands without any clear title were simply available.

Right away the views of the Indians and the Europeans regarding “property” were ultimately irreconcilable. For the newcomers, title was available for the first occupant who would clear the land, build on it, garden, farm and permanently inhabit the property. Property for Europeans meant power and virtually no one in Europe had any in the seventeenth century. And there was so much land for the taking and so few white people to take it, arguably the most fertile region on the planet. We had to be the chosen people.

Back in 2005 I wrote an article entitled A Druid Nation. I asked the question whether or not it would have been different if someone other than the Puritans had established settlements in America.

A clear duality exists in this country. My Puritan relatives were not Libertarians, contrary to some of the more fanciful views of white conservatives today. In the beginning it was about shared responsibility and community norms. It was also about obeying God's laws … as interpreted by the leaders of the community. William Jenkyn the Puritan martyr, who died in Newgate Prison in London, said that, “As the wicked are hurt by the best things, so the godly are bettered by the worst.”

While the Puritan communitarian strain pretty much dominated the settling of the “new” world, the secular influence of the European Enlightenment dominated the founding of the United States.

On Thomas Jefferson's tomb nothing is written about being the third president of the United States. What we see is that he was the author of the Declaration of American Independence, the Father of the University of Virginia and, the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom. The state, in Jefferson's eyes, had no business in proselytizing religious views.

We white people have been mixing, matching, justifying and making stuff up from the very beginning.

Continued...

Entering injun country and fighting hostiles

It's a fascinating photographic collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. In 1867 photographer Alexander Gardner became part of the survey team for the Union Pacific Railway. Gardner had once worked in New York for Mathew Brady, who had produced so many iconic pictures of the Civil War.

While part of the exhibit contains photographs of Kansas City in 1867-68, Lawrence, Kansas and other areas, other photographs depict the myriad relations between the U.S. military, white settlers and the Indians that lived in the region. These are powerful images, both poignant and hypnotic. See “images.”

In 1868 Gardner went with the Indian Peace Commission held in Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The Commission was made up of people sympathetic to Indian culture and their way of life and those that wanted a “final” solution. It was, however, the beginning of the end for the Plains Indians.

The American Civil War was over and the “frontier” was about to be opened up to European-Americans on a vast scale. We were headed for the Pacific coast. (Still one of the best accounts on how the railroad opened the West and its consequences read Richard White's book Railroaded.)

A story for all of us in injun country

This is not an American story or just another sad tale about indigenous people worldwide, although it has directly affected native populations for a long time. It's really about values, economic systems and what we're willing to consider as alternatives in the 21^st century. See 'tar sands' and accompanying video.

The U.S. military has used the expression “going into injun country” for a long time when embarking on our numerous military campaigns or entering an especially dangerous area within a country where we're usually not wanted. The problem is that more and more of us will likely be considered “hostiles” living in injun country by those few seeking some type of “final solution.”

"Change or be changed"

Think about what is being said in this video.

Economic America: A delusion wrapped in an illusion

We are the rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it.

(Frederick Townsend Martin, a member of New York's late 19^th century upper class)

Listen to your betters

I have learned how to cultivate my karma for success; a wealthy businessman told me. I've lost track of all the articles I have read on numerous sites, including Linkedin, about “making it.” Now I know how to write a resume so as to avoid age discrimination and what clothes to wear for all occasions.

So many articles on how to get rich, including pictures of beautiful people, beautiful mansions and beautiful yachts and so little time. Mark Cuban told me he gets his inspiration from reading Ayn Rand novels. There's hope. I read Ayn Rand novels when I was in college.

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.... Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow....

(Abraham Lincoln, 1864)

Mirrors and smoke

My libertarian friends are fond of reminding me that America is a republic not a democracy. I usually thank them and only occasionally ask them if a republic can be democratic. Certainly, our 18^th century Founding Fathers, a remarkable collection of human beings, were no democrats as we understand the term in the 21^st century.

For the creators of the Constitution, they did not place “democracy” on a marble stand. When they spoke of democracy they meant preventing”mob rule” and the “triumph” of passion. Alexander Hamilton once remarked during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that, “Your 'people,' sir, is nothing but a great beast.”

In the 21^st century one of our favorite Horatio Alger stories is the self-made billionaire tale. It was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda muse, that said, “You tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Our billionaires in the U.S., overwhelmingly, receive their education from elite or elitist institutions, depending on your point of view, and a large percentage have advanced degrees. (See Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census2014). It's actually a perpetuation of a class and most definitely not the enlargement of an opportunity.

It's like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.

(Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, a private equity firm, in response to the Obama administration proposal to close the 'carried interest loophole' benefiting the very rich, 2011)

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place.”

Yes, we are living in a “wonder-land.” The information is readily available. For some it might begin with Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. But there are many other sources less abstruse.

Corporate profits have risen five times faster than wages, while the middle class has not seen its wages rise in 15 years. College costs have risen 500 percent since 1985 while the consumer price index rose only 115 percent during the same period. At Harvard 11 % of the students receive Pell grants, while at the University of Texas 59% receive Pell grants.

Even with a less than perfect Affordable Care Act (hardly a radical idea in the developed world), health costs are going up, while family income is going down. The rich, well, they are “different” from you and me. They have their subsidies, which of course is a tax for everyone else.

Who loves you baby

I have seen examples of “capitalism” in a small rum shop in Barbados, in an Indian market outside of Quito, Ecuador and at a small hotel on the coast of Venezuela. In my own family there are small business owners, who employ people, pay taxes and who really do believe in responsibility beyond themselves.

With the “millennials” well on their way of becoming the new American serfs because of college debt and a broken economic system, I have wondered even more if we actually do believe in an educated citizenry, because freedom, liberty and opportunity for all is supposedly, at the very least, in our national interest.

Leaving aside for the moment secondary and primary school education, why is college tuition not paid for by its citizens? After all, we are seemingly happy to pay for the education of a professional military officer class. I suppose the question is mostly rhetorical.

Our republic is broken and nonsense about Ayn Rand and “dressing” for success are the distracting tales told by idiots and sociopaths.

The death of Sitting Bull removes one of the obstacles to civilization. He was a greasy savage, who rarely bathed and was liable at anytime to become infected with vermin. During the whole of his life he entertained the remarkable delusion that he was a free-born American with some rights in the country of his ancestors.

(The St. Louis Republic , St. Louis, Missouri, December 17, 1890)

Additional reading:

World's Richest Man Tries to Defend Inequality

Do we dare to question economic growth

North America is a crime scene: The untold history of America this Columbus day

Extinction for fun and profit

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's

(Mark Twain)

The approaching silence

It's a remarkable picture making the rounds on the internet: More than 30,000 walruses have come ashore in Alaska because of disappearing sea ice in the Chukchi Sea, an area where the oil and gas industry want to drill. This is the feeding area for the walruses and where the females give birth. A similar phenomenon is occurring along the Russian coast as well. Climate change is so inconvenient.

The depressing numbers

The World Wildlife Fund recently updated its Living Planet Report. In just two human generations half the animals are gone (10,000 representative population sampling of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish), which represents a 50 percent decline over the past 40 years.

The major causes are familiar. In addition to climate change, there is habitat destruction and loss, devastation caused by unsustainable levels of hunting and fishing—for whatever reasons—and exploitation in general. Right now between 23 percent and 36 percent of all birds mammals, and amphibians used for food or medicine are now threatened with extinction.

A house of death eaters

While the industrial slaughter of iconic animals like the elephant and the rhino is frequently in the news, less well known creature have many scientists far more worried and could have a direct and disastrous impact on Homo sapiens.

Some of us, for example, may know that the world's food production (possibly more than 60 percent) is dependent on bees and other pollinators, but how many know about the importance of the lowly worm, which turns waste into soil nutrients or that bats keep malaria rates down. It is the small, not so cuddly creatures, that may ultimately change everything for humankind, possibly much sooner than we might imagine.

http://www.takepart.com/video/2014/10/06/conservation-international-nature-speaking?cmpid=tpseries-eml-2014-10-07-nature VIDEO

Additional Reading:

What American Environmentalists Can Learn from Prime Minister Modi

'Moment of Truth' on Emissions

Germany's energy model can save the world