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Category: Neoliberalism

  • Biden Embraces Autocracies and Deteriorating Democracies to Challenge China

    The Biden administration
    opened its second Summit for Democracy this week with a panel featuring India’s Narendra Modi and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. As the leaders of their countries, both have pursued similar forms of exclusionary nationalism.

    Indeed, both
    Modi and Netanyahu were—as they spoke—facing political crises at home in response to their attempts to permanently sideline democratic opposition.

    This was a seemingly discordant note with which to begin a democracy conference. Even so, it is very much in keeping with what the Biden administration means when it says that the United States is fighting a global battle for democracy against autocracy. Understanding the counterintuitive meaning of Biden’s slogan is important both to see why this framing is so powerful among American leaders and why it is so dangerous to the health of global democracy.

    The administration’s interpretation is best captured in its
    2022 National Security Strategy:

    The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision [of a free, open, prosperous, and secure world] is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy. It is their behavior that poses a challenge to international peace and stability—especially waging or preparing for wars of aggression, actively undermining the democratic political processes of other countries, leveraging technology and supply chains for coercion and repression, and exporting an illiberal model of international order. Many non-democracies join the world’s democracies in forswearing these behaviors. Unfortunately, Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) do not.

    The salient division in the world, then, is not between democracies and autocracies but between countries that support the existing international order and the two autocracies—China and Russia—that are seeking to reshape it in illiberal ways.

    But this raises some awkward questions:

    One: Which side are autocratic U.S. allies on if, like Saudi Arabia and UAE, they wage wars of aggression, undermine the democratic political processes of other countries, and use technology for repression?

    Two: Which side are democratic countries on if they support China’s efforts to reshape the international order? This is quite common, because many of the things that China does to “tilt the global playing field to its benefit” are things that poor countries—democratic or not—must do
    if they are to achieve economic development.

    Three: Which side is the U.S. on? Because the U.S. violates the rules-based order and engages in coercion on a regular basis. Leaving aside a long list of examples under earlier presidents and looking only at the Biden administration, the U.S. is currently
    incapacitating the world trade dispute resolution system; supporting Russia’s argument that it can exempt itself from any economic agreement (in this case, throttling Ukraine’s trade) merely by invoking national security; building a comprehensive blockade on Chinese businesses’ access to certain advanced technologies; seeking to destroy China’s most successful private multinational company, Huawei; and maintaining an extraterritorial sanctions regime that has done terrible damage to Iran’s economy.

    The United States welcomes as client states outright autocracies like Saudi Arabia or Egypt and deteriorating democracies like India, Israel, and Italy in order to turn back the huge threat that administration officials think a powerful China poses to the principle of democracy itself.

    So the particular list of allegations against Russia and China, which
    does not apply equally to both countries, also fails to clearly distinguish the “democracy” team from the “autocracy” team. But the Biden administration has a deeper rationale in mind. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” Ultimately the United States welcomes as client states outright autocracies like Saudi Arabia or Egypt and deteriorating democracies like India, Israel, and Italy in order to turn back the huge threat that administration officials think a powerful China poses to the principle of democracy itself.

    What is the nature of that threat? Often the administration accuses China of exporting its authoritarian model in the form of surveillance technology—technology that companies in the U.S. and allied states
    also sell. Or they highlight China’s campaign to change “democratic norms” at the United Nations. For example, China has sought to elevate collective rights, such as the right to economic development, to the same level as individual rights.

    Members of the Biden administration have
    argued that such a goal would dilute individual rights and empower autocratic states to speak in the name of their people. This perspective, however, is not shared by the overwhelming majority of democratic developing countries. They stand on this issue and many others alongside their authoritarian counterparts, against the opposition of the rich democratic countries. In U.S. political culture, the interests of wealthy countries are often represented as the interests of democratic countries.

    Beijing also rejects the “universal values” that the U.S. champions and seeks
    respect for “the diversity of civilizations,” including those that do not recognize liberal democratic rights and freedoms. The Biden administration has a point here—China does seek to overturn the rhetorical dominance that liberal values have enjoyed in recent decades—but the presence of numerous autocrats and aspiring autocrats in U.S.-led coalitions is eloquent proof that liberal rhetoric does little to restrain authoritarians.

    Finally, Biden has
    made the point that if Chinese authoritarianism is stable and prosperous while U.S. democracy is dysfunctional and stagnant, democracy will lose its appeal around the world. But it is hard to find examples of this happening in practice. China’s recent history of Party-state rule sets it apart from most other countries, making it unpersuasive as a model. And third countries are perfectly capable of valuing partnership with China without losing faith in democracy. In a 2022 survey of African leaders, China was preferred over the United States (46% to 9%) as a partner on infrastructure development; yet the U.S. was chosen over China (32% to 1%) when it comes to cooperation around governance and the rule of law.

    The idea that a popularity contest between two powerful countries is what determines the choice of political regime in other countries is, in any case, both implausible and insulting.

    Why, then, is the idea that China poses a potentially existential threat to democracy so widespread in Washington? Because over the last two decades, the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism (“free markets and free individuals”)—which underwrote the narrow concept of democracy that drove the Third Wave of democratization and supplied the intellectual foundations for the U.S. political elite in recent decades—has disintegrated at home and abroad.

    This ideology’s loss of legitimacy is a global phenomenon, but in Washington it was experienced as the outcome of a series of increasingly disastrous setbacks for U.S. economic and military aspirations, starting with the dotcom crash and 9/11, ramifying through the failures of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Iraq War, and the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, and culminating in the 2008 global financial crisis and the Great Recession.

    The sense of crisis only grew over the following decade as previously marginalized political currents represented by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders suddenly posed a serious challenge to the political status quo in the United States.

    For mainstream American political leaders, the three essential parts of the post-Cold War global system—U.S. military hegemony, free market globalization, and a specifically neoliberal vision of democracy and human rights—were inseparably interwoven

    For mainstream American political leaders, the three essential parts of the post-Cold War global system—U.S. military hegemony, free market globalization, and a specifically neoliberal vision of democracy and human rights—were
    inseparably interwoven. Now referred to in Washington as the “rules-based international order,” a challenge to any part of the package is considered an attack on the whole, and American leaders are particularly sensitive to such challenges given the fragility of the whole system.

    Today’s China,
    though a product of that very system, was also the most prominent country to reject liberal democracy and U.S. hegemony. And in the years since 2008, it has been a step or two ahead of other countries—in some ways constructive and in some horrifying—as every country moves beyond the system. So even though China has been little involved in the specific U.S. failures of the last two decades, it nonetheless stands in as a symbol of all the setbacks that U.S. power and ideology have faced.

    Though China’s success within the “rules-based international order” has
    given it a major stake in sustaining and shoring up significant parts of the system, that success has also made China far more powerful than more antagonistic countries like Russia or North Korea. Because Washington sees China as both hostile and powerful, the image of a menacing China offers a shared focus for U.S. leaders that could overcome the debilitating partisan divisions afflicting the country’s governance—a point that Biden has made many times.

    So it’s true that the Biden administration does not see the world as divided between democracies and autocracies. But it
    does see the world as divided between democracy in the abstract—understood to be the same as U.S. military and economic power and the alliances supporting it—and autocracy in the abstract, represented by the only peer competitor facing the United States, China.

    This emerging consensus in Washington is driven by insecurity and defensiveness rather than a serious analysis of the
    real forces endangering democracy around the world. As such, U.S. leaders have neglected the single most important question: is international conflict and geopolitical bloc formation likely to nourish democracy—or will it strengthen in every country the most threatening authoritarian political currents, namely militarism, nationalism, and nativism?

  • It Almost Happened Here: The Business Plot, Money Creation, And The Capital Order

    What power actually fears is that their carefully crafted illusions will go up in smoke.

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • The World Needs Just Green Trade, Not ‘Free Trade’



    The global economy hit a new milestone in 2022 by surpassing $100 trillion. This expansion, which has experienced only the occasional setback such as the 2020 Covid shutdowns, has been accelerated by trade. The world trade volume experienced 4,300% growth from 1950 to 2021, an average 4% increase every year. This linked growth of the global economy and international trade took off in the 1980s as governments embraced the project of globalization, which prioritized the reduction of barriers to trade such as tariffs.

    The mechanism by which globalization spread throughout the world, the key strand of its DNA, has been the “free trade” treaty.

    “We’ve had 30 years of free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties,” points out Luciana Ghiotto, a researcher at CONICET-Argentina and associate researcher with the Transnational Institute. “They’ve created this enormous legal architecture, what one friend of ours calls the ‘corporate architecture of impunity,’ which has spread like grass and gives legal security and certainty to capital. It has nothing to do with the protection of human rights or environmental rights.”

    Indeed, among the many problems associated with the expansion of world trade has been environmental degradation in the form of land, air, and water pollution. More recently, however, attention has turned to the more specific problem of carbon emissions, which are largely responsible for climate change. According to the World Trade Organization, the production and transport of goods for export and import account for 20-30% of global carbon emissions.

    Embedded in many of the treaties governing trade and investment are clauses that give corporations the right to sue governments over regulations, particularly those addressing the environment and climate change, that adversely affect the expected profit margins of those businesses. These investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions have a “chilling effect on the regulatory system because governments, worried that they will be sued, decide to delay reforms related to climate change,” points out Manuel Perez Rocha, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. “There have been several cases around the world where companies were able to defeat regulatory changes that favor the climate.”

    Trade rules that privilege corporations over the environment are particularly influential in the realm of agriculture, which is an extractive industry no less powerful than mining.

    “The global system of trade and investment contributes to the monopoly control by just a few transnational corporations over fossil fuel-guzzling agribusiness, whose products are often transported thousands of miles before they reach a dinner table,” relates Jen Moore, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. “At the same time. the system has been decisive in making the lives of millions of small-scale farmers more precarious, undermining their role as a better alternative to mass monoculture operations.”

    Carbon emissions are not the only byproduct of the agribusiness that global trade sustains. “There’s also methane emissions,” adds Karen Hansen-Kuhn, program director at the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy. “A lot of methane comes from meat production. Nitrous oxide, which is 265 times more potent than carbon and stays in the atmosphere over 100 years, results from chemical fertilizers.”

    These perspectives on global trade—and more environmentally sound alternatives to the “free trade” model—were presented at a December 2022 webinar sponsored by Global Just Transition project of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South.

    The Rise of “Free Trade”

    Throughout the modern era, states throughout the world protected their domestic economies through tariffs on foreign goods and restrictions on foreign investment. Behind these protective walls, states helped local farmers and businesses compete against cheaper imports and deep-pocketed investors.

    But states that depended increasingly on exports of cheap industrial goods and surplus food—aided by transnational companies eager to boost their profits—lobbied for the reduction of these barriers. Arguments for “free trade,” traditionally linked to the presumed benefits of globalization, emerged within the most powerful economies in the nineteenth century, but it was more recently, in the 1970s, that states and international institutions dramatically revived this discourse under the banner of “neoliberalism.”

    “When we talk about the circulation of capital, we’re talking about trade,” explains Luciana Ghiotto. “That is, import and export for states and the circulation of thousands of vessels and planes for the transport of commodities all around the world. One of the aims of capital is to make that circulation faster, simpler, and easier. Who would not want to make trade easier or faster? Well, the state.”

    Faster and more efficient trade, while more profitable for corporations, also has meant a number of negative consequences for states such as job loss among domestic producers. Because of the wide array of free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties now in force—and the power invested in international bodies to enforce these agreements—states have lost many of the tools they once used to protect or develop national industries.

    The spread of the free-trade orthodoxy has had a major impact on the energy industry, which has in turn pushed up carbon emissions. Ghiotto points to the efforts of fossil-fuel corporations to protect their investments in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as a primary motivation to negotiate an Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) in the early 1990s, which guaranteed a free trade in global energy markets. The ECT was originally signed by 53 European and Central Asian countries. Today, another 30 countries from Burundi to Pakistan are in the queue for membership.

    “The ECT is actually a treaty made specially to protect fossil fuel Industries,” Ghiotto continues. “It’s already been used by investors to protect their investments in the face of state policies. But that was 30 years ago. Now, because of the global climate crisis, states are pushing for other kinds of regulations that are jeopardizing the investments of these corporations.”

    Energy companies have taken states to dispute settlement in 124 cases, with around 50 against Spain alone because of its reforms in the renewable energy sector. Companies “have used the ECT as a legal umbrella in order to increase business and profits, or simply to protect their investments against state regulation,” Ghiotto adds. Italy, for instance, instituted a ban on offshore drilling only to be hit by a suit from the U.K. energy company Rockhopper. In November 2022, the ECT arbitration panel ordered the Italian government to pay the company 190 million Euros plus interest.

    “Investors in the mining and oil sector have launched 22% of the claims against Latin American states,” she reports. “There was the big case of Chevron against Ecuador. But there have been others. For instance, Ecuador had to pay a $374 million penalty to the French oil company Parenco after the state changed some clauses regarding the amount of taxes the company had to pay in order to give back some of the revenues to the Ecuadorian people.”

    Agriculture and Climate Change

    Global food production generates 17 billion tons of greenhouse gasses every year. That’s about a third of the 50 billion tons of such gasses emitted annually. The production of beef and cow milk are the worst offenders, largely because of the methane that’s released by the animals themselves. But other major contributors include soil tillage, manure management, transportation, and fertilizer.

    “Along with Greenpeace and Grain, our institute has been working with scientists to think about how increased fertilizer use is affecting climate change,” Karen Hansen-Kuhn reports. “Fertilizer use has been increasing all over the world. It’s a key part of Green Revolution practices. The scientists we worked with found that the use of nitrogen fertilizer, bringing together the natural gas and the energy used in production along with transportation and the impacts in the field, amounts to more than 21% of emissions from agriculture, and it’s been growing.”

    According to a map of excess nitrogen per hectare of cropland, countries like China, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Venezuela are using more nitrogen for fertilizers than the crops can even absorb. “This excess contributes to more emissions and causes other problems, for instance with run-off into waterways,” she continues. “The incentives right now in the agricultural system are for extreme overproduction, especially around commodity crops, like corn, soybeans, and wheat, which require these cheap chemical inputs.”

    Many of these commodity crops are produced for export. Netherlands is the world’s second-largest exporter of food; China is the second-largest importer of food but also the sixth larger exporter. The challenge is to continue to feed the world while reducing the use of so much fertilizer. “Many countries are advancing important agroecological solutions like crop rotation, using plants that fix nitrogen in the soil, and doing more composting,” Hansen-Kuhn adds. “These techniques are under the control of farmers, so they don’t rely on imports or trade in these chemical inputs.”

    Another strategy, embraced by the European Union, has been to use trade rules to reduce the carbon content of imports and exports. “In Europe, they are currently in the process of finalizing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism,” she reports. “The CBAM mostly applies to things like aluminum, steel, and cement, but fertilizer is part of it as well. A lot of firms in Europe are modernizing their plants so they’ll be more energy efficient. And they say they need protection in order to do that. Under this plan, fertilizer imports coming from other countries that don’t have the same environmental standards would be subject to a fee tied to the price of carbon.”

    In theory, the CBAM would push exporting countries to raise their environmental standards and/or make their fertilizer production more efficient. “Maybe these plants will become more efficient,” she adds. “But maybe some firms will just decide to produce fertilizer in other countries. Or maybe in cases where a country has two factories, it will just export from the efficient factory, and there’s no change in emissions.”

    On top of that, the CBAM will affect countries very differently. “Most of the fertilizer imports into the E.U. come from nearby countries like Russia or Egypt,” she continues. “But some imports come from countries like Senegal, where the fertilizer exports to Europe amount to 2-5% of their entire GDP. So, the CBAM would be a huge problem for such countries. And there’s nothing in this initiative that would give countries the technology they need to make changes. In fact, there are strong incentives against that in the trade deals. The CBAM provision specifically says that all of the resources generated by the carbon fee will be kept internally to foster the transition within Europe.”

    Although CBAM may make European trade greener, it may also widen the “green gap” between Europe and the rest of the world. “We need a transition to agroecology, but what we’re getting in the trade deals lock in new incentives to continue with business as usual,” Hansen-Kuhn concludes. “If we look at the renegotiated NAFTA, there’s a new chapter on agricultural biotechnology that streamlines the process for approving both GMOs and products of gene editing. There are also restrictions on seed saving and sharing. And this new NAFTA will probably be the model for other agreements like the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.”

    Action at the Global Level

    Civil society organizations have been pushing for a legally binding treaty at the U.N. level to make business responsible for human rights violations and environmental crimes connected to their operations.

    “Since the U.N. is made up of states, the more industrialized countries who can invest in the world are opposed to such a binding treaty,” Luciana Ghiotto points out. “In the United States, Canada, and Japan, we’ve seen debates about holding companies responsible for human rights violations throughout the production chain. It’s a relatively new political process. But it’s an example of civil society organizations putting a question of human rights and environmental rights at the center of discussion.”

    Efforts at the international level are very complicated, Manuel Perez Rocha concedes: “For instance, the World Bank has the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) through which corporations can sue states.” He recommends a more regional approach. “We have proposed a dispute resolution center for Latin America that countries could use after pulling out of ICSID. “Unfortunately, most progressive countries have not embraced this,” he reports.

    One of the challenges to persuading governments to embrace these alternatives is corruption. “There’s a tremendous circle of corruption,” he adds. “We’re talking here about the revolving door where public officials who negotiate these treaties then become private lawyers or counselors or board members of the corporations who are lobbying for their adoption. This corruption helps explain why governments sign these treaties even if they’re going to be sued.”

    He points as well to the issue of access to critical minerals needed in the green energy transition. “The Biden administration is trying to combat fossil fuels at the cost of communities that live around the deposits of critical minerals like lithium and cobalt,” Perez Rocha explains. “There are a lot of concerns among native populations about how to make this transition to a so-called clean economy without violating human rights and destroying the environment.”

    Trade has been a mechanism to make deals around these minerals. “These efforts at near-shoring and friend-shoring have been ways to control the supply chains around minerals and metals,” notes Jen Moore. “The United States in particular but also Canada have made themselves clear: to be identified as a ‘friend’ is to have an FTA or a bilateral investment treaty.”

    There have been other actions at the global level related to climate issues and jobs. For instance, the United States brought action against India in the WTO in 2014 over domestic content provisions in its effort to boost solar energy. India returned the favor two years later over similar domestic content provisions in state-level solar policy. “The WTO deemed both rules illegal,” Karen Hansen-Kuhn recalls. “In the United States, the programs continued, I don’t think any changes were made. But when we think of a just transition, it has to be about not just reducing emissions but about creating jobs.”

    Resistance to Business as Usual

    Resistance to the corporate-friendly trade architecture has come from many corners of the globe. “From the perspective of my work with mining-affected people,” Jen Moore reports, “there’s been a rise in resistance from farmers, indigenous peoples, and other communities facing the detrimental Impacts of this highly destructive model of capitalist development that’s been accompanied by violent repression and militarization and often targeted violence against land and environment defenders.”

    For example, after buttressing the fossil fuel status quo for three decades, the Energy Charter Treaty is no longer unassailable. In November, the German cabinet announced that the country would withdraw from the ECT. It joins a number of European countries—Italy, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Slovenia, and Luxembourg—that have made similar announcements. “In times of climate crisis, it is absurd that companies can sue for lost profits from fossil investments and compensation for coal and nuclear phase-outs,” points out the deputy leader of the parliamentary group of the Greens in the German parliament.

    The treaty has a surprise for countries that want out: signatories withdrawing from the ECT are still bound by the treaty for 20 years. There’s also a related problem involving the provisions of other trade treaties.

    “European countries are pushing to update treaties with Mexico, Chile, and others to include clauses like the investor-state dispute mechanism, which also allow energy corporations to sue governments,” notes Manuel Perez Rocha. “This is nothing short of neocolonialism being exercised against countries on the periphery.” In response, he urges the “strengthening of national judicial systems so that companies will feel more protected by national systems and not pursue options at the supranational level.”

    The backlash to the ECT is nothing new. “The system has created a lot of resistance and critiques since practically day one,” Luciana Ghiotto adds. “I was raised in the spotlight of the battle of Seattle in 1999 against the WTO and the struggles against the Free Trade Area of the Americas.”

    Karen Hansen-Kuhn agrees that it’s necessary to claim victories. “Civil society helped weaken the ISDS system,” she notes. “With the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, massive opposition to ISDS was a major reason it fell apart..”

    Another form of pushback comes from the field itself. “On our website, we’ve started tracking the adoption of agroecological approaches, which are not just about the inputs but instead look at the fuller picture including food sovereignty, namely each community’s right to choose the food systems it wants,” Hansen-Kuhn continues. She points to Mexico phasing out GMO corn, which relies heavily on the pesticide glyphosate. The government made that decision because of input from civic movements. After objections from the U.S. government, Mexico backtracked somewhat on that commitment by applying the phase-out only to corn for human consumption.

    “Mexico is making some concessions, for example allowing GMO for animal feed, but otherwise it’s standing firm despite enormous pressure,” she concludes. “That’s not a complete transition to agroecology, but here’s a country deciding that it will make a change in a food system regardless of what the trade deals say.”

    “It’s important to recall the totality of the system supporting corporate control around the world,” Jen Moore says. “Sometimes it feels like we make only piecemeal attempts to go after it.”

    Manuel Perez Rocha agrees. “We need to discuss alternatives from different perspectives, which would put an end to the patriarchal, neocolonial capitalist system,” he suggests. “But while we strive for a utopian vision, we also should discuss more realistic, more feasible, and more concrete alternatives. For instance, companies can sue states. Why shouldn’t states have the right to sue companies? Affected communities should also have access to dispute resolutions. We should eliminate the privileges of foreign investors, like the ‘national treatment’ clause, that tie governments down in their efforts to promote local, regional, and national development.”

    The Global South has begun to develop a unified voice in the debate on a just energy transition. “In Latin America, we have said that there is no new green deal with FTAs and bilateral investment treaties,” Luciana Ghiotto reports. The region has seen the rise of a number of dynamic organizations from the rural activists in Via Campesina to various indigenous movements and feminist movements articulating a feminist economy. Meanwhile, certain countries have taken the lead. “In its constitution, Ecuador prohibited entry into any international agreements that include international arbitration that compromises the country’s sovereignty,” she adds. “The new neoliberal government is struggling with dozens of lawyers to find a way around it, but they still can’t.”

    Another example of successful resistance is the growth of the climate justice movement, which goes well beyond environmental protection and has linked activists across struggles from economic justice and human rights to agroecology and post-growth economics.

    “After the disruptions of the last couple years, we can come together more in person,” Karen Hansen-Kuhn notes. “Movements require building relationships in person. We need to come together to build these alternatives.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Enraging Workers, Macron Bypasses Parliament With ‘Nuclear Option’ on Retirement Age Hike



    Amid protests against French President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular plan to overhaul the country’s pension system, his government on Thursday chose the “nuclear option,” opting to use a constitutional procedure to force through reforms, including raising the retirement age from 62 to 64, without a vote in the lower house of Parliament.

    While the proposal passed the Senate, the upper chamber of Parliament, 193-114 Thursday morning, “reports indicated that the ruling party, which lost its overall majority in elections last year, was a handful of votes short” in the National Assembly, which led to an emergency Council of Ministers meeting about triggering the Article 49.3, Le Monde explained.

    After announcing the government was invoking executive privilege, French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne “faced scenes of anger and unrest in the National Assembly,” reported Politico. “Far-left lawmakers belonging to the France Unbowed party booed and chanted the national hymn the Marseillaise as far-right National Rally MPs shouted ‘Resign! Resign!’”

    Using the controversial procedure to push through the plan is risky for Macron—founder of the Renaissance party—because it allows members of Parliament “to submit motions of no-confidence within 24 hours,” Politico added. “While the government has survived motions of no-confidence in recent months, the stakes are much higher this time around. If a majority of MPs vote in favor of a motion, Borne’s government would be forced to resign.”

    While multiple opposition groups in Parliament may respond with no-confidence motions, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party has already pledged to do so.

    “It’s a total failure for the government,” Le Pen told reporters of the Article 49.3 decision, calling for Borne’s resignation. “From the beginning, the government fooled itself into thinking it had a majority.”

    Socialist Party chief Olivier Faure also criticized the approach, saying that “when a president has no majority in the country, no majority in the National Assembly, he must withdraw his bill.”

    Fabien Roussel, head of the French Communist Party, declared that “this government is not worthy of our Fifth Republic, of French democracy. Until the very end, Parliament has been ridiculed, humiliated.”

    MP Rachel Keke of the leftist party La France Insoumise stressed that “what the government is doing makes people sick of politics. It should improve people’s lives, not destroy them.”

    Former French presidential candidate and MP Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who launched La France Insoumise, tweeted: “It is a spectacular failure and a collapse of the presidential minority. United unions call for continued action. This is what we are going to focus on.”

    French trade unions have led national demonstrations and strikes against the overhaul since January. While protesters were oscillating “between rage and resignation” earlier this week, they filled the streets of Paris on Thursday, and “the leader of the CFDT labor union, Laurent Berger, announced there would be new protest dates,” according to Le Monde.

    The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) said in a statement that “this reform is unfair, unjustified, and unjustifiable, this is what millions of people have been asserting forcefully for weeks in the demonstrations, with the strike, and in all the initiatives. These massive mobilizations are supported by a very large majority of the population and almost all workers.”

    “The only response from the government and employers is repression: requisitions, police interventions on workplace occupations, arrests, intimidation, questioning of the right to strike,” the confederation added. “We won’t let it happen! What the CGT denounced as unfair yesterday is even more so today! This can only encourage us to step up mobilizations and strikes, the fight continues!”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Public Universities Run on Underpaid Labor. Now Grad Workers Are Fighting Back.

    The public university is at a tipping point, says Manasa Gopakumar, a fifth-year graduate worker in the Philosophy Department at Temple University in Philadelphia. Since last January, Gopakumar and other graduate workers in the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association (TUGSA) have organized around significant issues affecting them, including pay, health care, paid parental leave…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ‘It’s Not an Accident, It’s a Crime’: Thousands March for Justice After Greek Train Disaster



    Tens of thousands of people marched throughout Greece on Wednesday—amid a nationwide walkout organized by labor unions and student associations—to demand accountability and reforms in the wake of the country’s deadliest train disaster, which has been attributed to austerity imposed from abroad.

    The February 28 crash that killed 57 people and injured another 72 has sparked public outrage over the deteriorating quality of the rail network. As Reuters reported, “Striking workers say years of neglect, underinvestment, and understaffing—a legacy of Greece’s decade-long debt crisis—are to blame.”

    “Greece sold its state-owned railway operator, now called Hellenic Train, to Italy’s state-owned Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane in 2017 during its debt crisis,” the news outlet noted. “The sale was a term in the country’s bailout agreements with the European Union and the Washington-based International Monetary Fund.”

    More than 40,000 workers and students hit the streets of Athens, where they chanted “murderers!” and “we are all in the same carriage.” Demonstrators in Greece’s capital and largest city also waved signs reading, It’s not an accident, it’s a crime” and, “It could have been any of us on that train.”

    Another 20,000-plus people rallied in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city. Meanwhile, near the scene of the train collision in Larrisa, protesters declared, “No to profits over our lives!”

    The demonstrations coincided with a daylong strike called by trade unionists. Greece’s largest public sector union participated in the work stoppage, disrupting a wide range of transit services, while a teachers’ union made clear that “it’s not the time to fall silent.”

    Rail workers, for their part, “have staged rolling, 24-hour strikes since Thursday, bringing the network to a halt,” Reuters reported. “The workers say their demands for improvement in safety protocols have gone unheard for years.”

    Police have responded to protests held across Greece since the disaster occurred with violent repression.

    Many of the roughly 350 passengers aboard an intercity train that collided with a freight train while traveling on the same track—including 12 victims—were university students returning to Thessaloniki from Athens.

    The stationmaster was arrested hours after the crash and is facing felony charges for disrupting transport and endangering lives.

    “You feel angry because the government did nothing for all of those kids,” 19-year-old Nikomathi Vathi told Reuters. “The public transport is a mess.”

    The main rail workers’ union has vowed to “impose safe railways so that no one will ever experience the tragic accident at Tempi ever again,” adding that “we have an obligation toward our fellow humans and our colleagues who were lost in the tragic accident.”

    Leftist former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis this week accused the Greek government of trying to “cover-up the real causes of our railway tragedy… by bypassing parliamentary scrutiny and appointing arbitrarily its own three-member investigative committee—on which, remarkably, they included a gentleman who oversaw the botched privatization of our railways—not to mention the prime minister’s pronouncement that the cause was human error.”

    Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leader of Greece’s conservative government who is up for re-election this year, orginally blamed the crash on human error before apologizing Sunday and “acknowledging that decades of neglect could have contributed to the disaster,” Al Jazeera reported.

    Hours after the collision, former Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis resigned. Mitsotakis appointed one of his closest allies, George Gerapetritis, to replace him.

    At a Wednesday morning press conference, Gerapetritis said that he understands why people are angry, apologized for the crash and promised to identify its causes, and announced that rail services are being suspended until at least the end of March while the government conducts a safety review.

    “No train will set off again if we have not secured safety at the maximum possible level,” said Gerapetritis. Greece’s new transport minister said the government plans to invest in upgrading infrastructure and hiring more staff.

    According to Al Jazeera correspondent John Psaropoulos, the press conference raised “more questions than answers” and is likely to make “the families of the victims even angrier.”

    As the news outlet reported:

    “First of all, we’ve learned that some of the automated systems that should have been in place throughout the Greek network, were in fact operational on the night of the accident in Larissa station,” said Psaropoulos.

    He explained that an automated optimal route selection for the train would have been possible, but was not used.

    “Secondly, it also doesn’t answer why two additional station masters who should have been on duty until 11:00 pm took off at 10:00 pm without permission. Thirdly, it does not answer why the train was about 15 minutes late in leaving,” he added, explaining how all these things contributed to the collision.

    “It suggests enormous problems in the operation and training of personnel,” said Psaropoulos.

    E.U. Railway Agency executive director Josef Doppelbauer told Euronews on Wednesday that his organization repeatedly warned Greek authorities of the need to shore up rail safety prior to the deadly crash.

    Despite years of warnings from regulators and the provision of funding to modernize the country’s railway network, Doppelbauer said, Greek officials failed to fully implement an automated rail traffic management system and other recommended changes. If they had, he added, the disaster likely would have been averted.

    European Commission (EC) President Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to provide technical support. Gerapetritis was set to meet with Doppelbauer and other transportation experts from the bloc later on Wednesday.

    Varoufakis, who served as Greece’s finance minister in 2015 when the “troika”—the EC, the European Central Bank, and the IMF—rammed through a devastating “structural adjustment” program, balked at Leyen’s offer, arguing that she helped bring about the crisis in the first place.

    The EC was part of the unelected troika that “railroaded the Greek government into the botched privatization that caused the tragedy,” he noted. “Keep your assistance dear Ursula. We have had enough.”

    Last week, the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), which was co-founded by Varoufakis, argued that “the E.U. has blood on its hands.”

    The deadly collision “has further brought the negligence and corruption of the Greek government under scrutiny, and rightly so,” the group said. “However, the role of the European Union in the tragedy cannot go unmentioned either, as it was the E.U. and its institutions who forced Greece to sell off public utilities for a pittance to private—and in the case of the railways, bankrupt and incompetent—companies.”

    Erik Edman, spokesperson of the European Realistic Disobedience Front (MeRA25), a left-wing Greek political party founded by Varoufakis, denounced the E.U.’s posturing after it lowered its flags to half-mast on Friday to symbolically pay tribute to the victims of the crash.

    “The architects of the permanent impoverishment of the Greek state and the disastrous privatization of its public property are lowering their flags today,” said Edman. “The EC were the brains behind the haphazard privatization that forced the Greek state to sell the entirety of its national railways to the bankrupt (!) Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane for—I kid you not—a measly 45 million euros.”

    “They view demonstrations, such as those by Greek rail workers, as backward unionists opposing the efficiency of privatization,” Edman continued. “People who had been warning of an inevitable accident as a result of underinvestment. Their colleagues had been injured in past years, and now.”

    “They constantly praise the corrupt government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis as a ‘success story,’” he added. “So, they should either stand by the policies they’ve been supporting and keep the flags up, or take them down and put them away in shame. Anything else is hypocrisy of the worst kind.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • ‘The Movement Has Spread’: Strikes Across France Aim to Block Macron Attack on Pensions



    Hundreds of thousands of French workers walked off the job Tuesday and marched against the government’s effort, led by neoliberal President Emmanuel Macron, to raise the nation’s retirement age from 62 to 64.

    For the sixth time this year, French unions organized strikes and rallies to protest Macron and his legislative allies’ deeply unpopular attack on pension benefits. Police anticipated between 1.1 million and 1.4 million participants at more than 260 demonstrations nationwide. Laurent Berger, secretary-general of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor, estimated, based on initial figures, that Tuesday’s protests were the biggest since mobilizations started in mid-January.

    “The strike has begun everywhere,” said Eric Sellini of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), which urged people to “bring France to a halt.”

    “If Emmanuel Macron doesn’t want France to come to a standstill and a dark week for the energy industry, it would be better for him to withdraw his reforms.”

    Energy workers impeded fuel deliveries, transit workers shut down most services, teacher walkouts prompted the closure of many schools, and garbage collectors’ ongoing work stoppage has led to a build-up of trash. Meanwhile, BBC News reported that “there will be calls to extend the strikes to include power generation” in the coming days.

    Thirty-eight-year-old activist Sarah Durieux, part of a massive, largely family-friendly crowd in Paris, told The Associated Press, “To see so many people today gives me hope.”

    “The movement has spread because to defend workers’ rights means defending a social model based on solidarity,” she added.

    Unionized workers blocked the exits to all eight oil refineries in mainland France on Tuesday, striking fear in Thierry Cotillard, president of Les Mousquetaires retail chain, who warned that “if the refineries are blocked we could run out of petrol by the end of the week.”

    It is unclear how long the blockades will last. But Emmanuel Lépine, leader of a trade union representing refinery workers, said last week that the aim is to “bring the French economy to its knees.”

    Prior to Tuesday’s actions, labor leader Sébastien Ménesplier declared that “if Emmanuel Macron doesn’t want France to come to a standstill and a dark week for the energy industry, it would be better for him to withdraw his reforms.”

    As BBC News noted Tuesday, the campaign so far “has caused little damage to the economy, and the bill is proceeding through parliament.”

    The legislation, discussed last month in the National Assembly—where members of the New Ecological and Social People’s Union, a leftist opposition coalition, tried to derail debate by proposing thousands of amendments—is being considered in the Senate this week. A vote on the final version is expected later this month.

    “Unions and the left know time is running out before the reform becomes a reality—which is all the more reason for them to up the pressure now,” BBC News observed.

    Macron and his supporters have called the proposed changes “essential,” citing projected budget deficits. But union leaders and left-wing lawmakers have stressed that parliament could bolster France’s pension system—without raising the retirement age or increasing the number of years workers must contribute before qualifying for full benefits—by hiking taxes on the wealthy.

    “The mobilizations will continue and grow until the government listens to workers.”

    “The job of a garbage collector is painful. We usually work very early or late… 365 days per year,” Regis Viecili, a 56-year-old garbage worker, told AP. “We usually have to carry heavy weight or stand up for hours to sweep.”

    Trash collectors’ early retirement age would be raised from 57 to 59 if the reform proposal is enacted.

    “A lot of garbage workers die before the retirement age,” said Viecili.

    A record 1.3 million people took part in mass demonstrations against the legislation on January 31. At subsequent protests, the number of people hitting the streets—while still in the hundreds of thousands—began to decrease.

    According to BBC News, “Union leaders now believe rolling strikes are their best hope of success.”

    Citing CGT secretary-general Philippe Martinez, AP reported that unionized workers “will decide locally” on Tuesday night whether to engage in open-ended strikes.

    A majority of French citizens support the ongoing strikes. According to an opinion poll conducted recently by the French survey group Elabe, two-thirds of the public supports the movement against the government’s planned pension changes in general, 59% back efforts to bring the country “to a standstill,” and 56% support rolling strikes.

    Martinez said in an interview Sunday that unions “are moving up a gear.”

    “The mobilizations,” he predicted, “will continue and grow until the government listens to workers.”

    Xavier Bregail, a 40-year-old train driver in northern Paris, told AP on Tuesday that “the government will step back only if we block the economy.”

    “The subject behind this is inflation, soaring food and energy prices,” he added. “I just want to live decently from my work.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Standing Together: Resisting the New Normal

    The US wanted Russia to attack Ukraine. So says Robert H Wade, professor of Global Political Economy at the London School of Economics. And then it brought in its wide-ranging sanctions regime in response. According to renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersch, the US subsequently blew up the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.  

    The result is that Europeans are experiencing an energy crisis, and Germany in particular faces deindustrialisation. The Ukraine situation is not just a NATO proxy war with Russia. It is also a trade and energy war inflicted by the US on Europe.  

    Although the impact of the war is acutely felt by Europe, inflation continues to increase across the Western countries, including the US, and their economies are in crisis. 

    While the sanctions and war are having an inflationary impact, they serve as convenient cover for the effects of a massive increase in ‘quantitative easing’ that occurred in late 2019 and in 2020. The US Federal Reserve created almost a fifth of all US dollars ever created in 2020. According to economist Professor Richard Werner, central banks around the world also pumped more money into their economies during this period. He concludes that central banks are largely responsible for the inflation we now see. 

    Financial markets were collapsing in October 2019, and the crisis reached a head in February 2020 with a massive crash. Prior to COVID and then under cover of this bogus public health crisis, trillions of dollars were pumped into the economy and lockdowns were imposed to prevent an immediate hyperinflation shock. The global economy was shut down.  

    Much of the inflation currently being experienced is a result of this. COVID lockdowns were not a cause of economic collapse. They were a symptom of it. A temporary band aid for an imploding neoliberalism that now requires a radical restructuring of economies and societies. 

    And that restructuring is brutal. Neoliberalism has been on life support for some time and has resorted to various strategies (expansion consumer credit, speculative finance, debt, etc) to keep it alive. But these strategies have to a large extent run their course.   

    In response, we are witnessing a controlled demolition of large parts of the economy and a shift towards authoritarian governance to deal with the growing resentment and dissent that governments fully expect. While lockdowns can be regarded as extraordinary monetary policy measures for addressing short-term inflation risk, they also did much to accelerate the restructuring of economies, not least by closing down small independent businesses.  

    The effects of the current sanctions regime on Russia may be regarded as an extension of this restructuring. We must not assume that the people implementing the sanction policies were too ignorant to see what the outcome would be for the Western economies.  

    So, for ordinary people, what’s the end game? 

    Soaring inflation means your money will lose value. Your savings could evaporate. And rising interest rates will intensify hardship – both for ordinary people and for businesses. Increased interest rates in a debt-ridden economy could well precipitate economic collapse.  

    Enter central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). It seems likely that these will eventually be brought in as part of a new monetary system. When people have lost almost everything (the WEF mantra – own nothing and be happy), many might well be desperate enough to want a (programmable) digital universal basic income from the government.  

    But this – in the longer term – would lead to a digital prison: your carbon credit score and social credit score linked to your ability to use your digital currency, your freedom of movement and so on. 

    The fiat currency system is dying. De-dollarisation is now underway and the US’s longstanding partner – Saudi Arabia – is turning to China and accepting non-dollar payment for oil. 

    The world is increasingly trading in currencies other than the US dollar. Global US hegemony rests on the dollar being the world reserve currency. This is coming to an end.   

    What CBDCs will base their value on remains to be seen. A return to a gold standard perhaps. But the strategy appears to involve a process of economic restructuring (or demolition) leading to the impoverishment of populations then the rollout of CBDCs.  

    COVID was an accelerator that saw entire populations cajoled into submission thanks to a crisis narrative. Integral to the plan is the eventual imposition of digital IDs. 

    Whether it is immigration, war, food shortages, fear of pandemics, potential cyberattacks, climate emergency or some other crisis narrative, one way or another, circumstances will be manipulated to engineer the introduction of digital IDs – precursors to CBDC servitude. A servitude linked to ‘smart’ city surveillance technology, net zero ideology and 15-minute de facto lockdown cities. 

    Can this be prevented? What can ordinary people do? 

    We can, for instance, grow our own food (if we have access to land), use farmer markets, boycott the retail giants and cashless stores, use cash whenever possible, create our own credit unions and so on. But to act in unison, it is essential that we come together and do not feel isolated in a world in which division is encouraged.

    Many instinctively knew from the start that there was something seriously amiss with the COVID narrative and the lockdowns. But the vast majority of people – at least at the beginning of the COVID exercise – went along with the narrative. Dissenters tended to feel isolated and came together online. As the weeks passed, they began to attend protests in person. 

    At these gatherings – the speeches aside – it felt uplifting simply to be in the company of like-minded people. But after the protests, many returned home and were again surrounded by friends, family and colleagues who still kept faith in the narrative and the relentless media propaganda.  

    COVID might have receded into the background at this point, but the end goal is clear. That’s why it remains important to continue to stand together – in person, in solidarity. From small acorns, movements grow.  

    With this in mind, Fifi Rose, who helped initiate the A Stand In The Park movement in the UK, describes as a non-hierarchal people’s collective of autonomous groups, tells an inspiring story on a recent edition of the Locked & Loaded podcast with Rick Munn on TNT radio.  

    The podcast shows how one man’s resistance – which involved standing alone in a Sydney park for weeks on end – helped create a growing global movement based on face-to-face interaction. 

    The post Standing Together: Resisting the New Normal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Three Women Discover the Americas’ Best Kept Secret: Nicaragua!

    The Alliance for Global Justice sent out an invitation to apply for “Women In Nicaragua: Power & Protagonism” Jan. 7-16, 2023.  How did this nation close the gender gap by 80% in just 15 years? Three women who had met in the Green Party decided to find out. We were accepted as delegates on the brigade and flew in from California, Florida, and Virginia.

    From the Sandino International Airport, it’s a short ride to Casa Benjamin Linder, a charming retreat graced with hammocks, a hot tub, and inspiring murals. Linder was a young engineer and activist, the first US citizen killed by US funded Contras in 1987 while bringing electricity to mountain villages. We stayed in the Rita Clark room, named for the mother of Jill Clark-Gollub who volunteered expert simultaneous translation.

    Our first briefing began with BREAKING NEWS. According to a Gallup Poll, Nicaraguans are among the happiest people on earth! Despite being in the second poorest nation in the hemisphere, 73% always feel at peace, nearly twice the global average and first worldwide. Why? Read on!

    Nicaragua has 6,733,761 people on 130,373 sq km with 153 cities/towns.

    Becca Renk, our gracious tour guide, is from the US and has lived in Nicaragua for 20+ years, raising her children there while working with the Jubilee House Community and Center for Development in Central America. Our packed agenda went without a hitch thanks to her skills and the spirited cooperation of 19 fellow delegates, aged 10 to 80 from diverse walks of life.

    Day 1: San Pablo Apostle Community Church. We attended a service and lunch with parishioners. Adjacent to the church is their school, and the Hugo Chavez soccer fields.

    We saw churches everywhere. There are frequent religious processions. Freedom of religion is alive and well in Nicaragua. Liberation Theology was a crucial ally in the 1979 Sandinista Popular Revolution. However, in allying with elites and US capitalists, some traditional, dogmatic Catholic leaders brutally persecuted those who helped the poor and bucked the system. Their corruption surfaced again in the failed coup of 2018.  222 lawbreakers (including some former Sandinistas who were proven to have sabotaged the government via roadblocks, murder and even torture) were tried, convicted, imprisoned, and recently released to the US.

    Historic National Park. We took in spectacular views of the city from the foot of a giant metal silhouette of Augusto Sandino, Managua’s most famous landmark, atop a volcanic hill so high that it’s visible from all over the city. This was once the site of the Casa Presidencial where Sandino was lured for a peace conference, a ruse. Shortly after he drove out the occupying US Marines, Somoza (trained in the US) had him killed in 1934. The Somozas then ruled brutally for 42 years. The Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) inherited a broken nation in 1979, yet accomplished much when in office, but Ronald Reagan’s Contra War killed ~50,000 people. Contras committed far more than 1300 terrorist acts (with CIA help) so, in desperation, voters elected right-wingers in 1990 who falsely promised peace. Before departing, Sandinistas erected the towering silhouette. (Sixteen years of neoliberalism then ravaged the nation, so the FSLN was re-elected in 2006.)

    National Museum & Park. Sunshine! Becca made a cart vendor’s day by treating us all to ice cream. Many historical displays, statues of heroes, and amazing art. Sandino is the national hero, father of the Revolution. Nicaragua also honors many other brave martyrs including FSLN co-founder Carlos Fonseca and poet Ruben Dario.

    Day 2: Ciudad Sandino. Still one of the poorest communities, it’s a far cry from the cow pasture where over 12,000 Hurricane Mitch survivors were dumped, each family allotted a sliver of land and a big plastic sheet. The neoliberal government provided no other aid and stole donations. Thirty people shared a latrine. (Becca’s first foray in Nica was building tents there.) Thanks to the FSLN, they now own small homes with plumbing, electricity, and paved streets, like other Nicaraguans.

    Nueva Vida Clinic. Neighborhood clinics are Nicaragua’s first level for basic care. This clinic also provides dentistry and pre-teen/teen counseling with info on reproductive and other care.

    Hospitalito & Casa Materna Ciudad Sandino. The maternity wing houses pregnant people in their final pre-delivery weeks. They’re given nutritious meals, prenatal care, training opportunities, and safe delivery as they’re adjacent to the hospital. A midwife or family member may accompany them. A Casa Materna is popping up in nearly every town, so maternal and newborn fatality rates have plummeted. Between 2006 and 2021 there was a 55% reduction in infant mortality, 61% reduction in early childhood deaths, and 66% reduction in maternal mortality. US mortality is much higher, the highest of rich nations and worsening! Misplaced priorities?

    Maternity leave is 90 days, plus any accumulated vacation time and 28 days pre-delivery. Two hours/day is allotted for breast feeding on the job. Children getting free lunch and, if needed, breakfast helps working parents as well as the kids, yet some elites complain of “entitlements.” Family Code 870 requires each parent to do their share at home, but property is generally in women’s names because women are still usually in charge of child rearing.

    Almost all paid work is unionized in Nicaragua. Over lunch, healthcare workers described their union, proudly passing around a big book, their signed collective bargaining agreement delineating details such as vacation and how raises are determined. Patient satisfaction counts! Motto: Hospitality & Warmth. They put the hospitality back in “hospital!” Nurses and doctors take ample time to listen, sometimes making house calls on motorcycles.

    CTCP Union Hall. We met with leaders of the largest union in Central America. The National Workers Front consists of nine federations. Union leaders are 60% female. Most trained at the Trade Union Institute of Cuba. They network with unions all over Central America.

    Poets, artists, and crafts makers join the Union of Self-Employed Workers as well as lottery ticket sellers, motorcycle taxi drivers, childcare providers, money changers, market and street vendors, and domestic (aka neighborhood) workers who proudly call themselves “peasant revolutionaries.” Ignored by governments worldwide, their hard work is respected and protected here. Flor Avellan, union leader, said, “This union is an example for the world. We’re forging our own destiny. Tell US workers we’re proud of our good government. Go back and inform your people, so the Revolution can continue despite media lies!”

    A union leader poet added, “We’ve won people’s hearts. Nicaragua has a plan to end poverty and develop human potential. Our most important resource is humans with open hearts who transform consciousness. You’ll find peace, love and solidarity here. Welcome!” Unions adopted a Zulu motto: UBUNTU (All of us or none.) Dues are 1%.

    Strengthening Nicaragua via unions is enshrined in the constitution. The right to be in a union, collective bargaining, and participation in upper government are guaranteed. A union rep said they are mostly Marxist Leninist “not theoretically but forged in the struggle” because many who sought rights under neoliberalism were fined, imprisoned, or worse.

    Human rights are a wise investment. $2 billion, 57% of the national budget, funds forty social programs for poverty reduction, free healthcare, and education.

    Day 3: Velez Paiz Hospital, a huge ultra modern facility. We met the Minister of Health (a woman), a top doctor and Director of the hospital (also a woman. 39 but looks 20!) It has everything that US hospitals have, and garden views from patients’ rooms. No one is turned away (even foreigners) but folks are encouraged to try local clinics first.

    Minister of Health. An annual census identifies malnourished kids who are visited to ensure healthy diets. Parents are taught to discourage junk food. There are health fairs in every community, 1000 weekly! We turned confiscated drug trafficking vehicles into 67 mobile clinics!

    For vaccination we are #1 in Central America, #4 in the Americas, using primarily vaccines from Cuba or China. Palestinian doctors taught us cleft palate surgery. Cubans taught eye surgery.

    US sanctions do hurt. “We may not have a lot, but we do a lot with what we have.” Now, we must do more with less. But we planned ahead and got technology and other help from Japan and China. Medical workers use boats and/or horses to serve remote communities, with ethnic respect (e.g. squatting for childbirth.) Neoliberals banned indigenous medicines, now supported.

    In 2021, Nicaragua’s economy actually grew by 10+%! Nicaragua weathered the pandemic admirably with far fewer deaths per capita than in the US and without locking down but taking common sense measures. One of our delegates got Covid on the flight over. She moved to a hotel to quarantine. We had dined and bussed together, so we were exposed. The Ministry of Health recommended that we each take 18 mg ivermectin that day and the next for prevention, prescriptions not needed. (Ridiculed in the US, ivermectin won a 2015 Nobel as an anti-parasite for humans. It’s also an effective anti-viral.)

    After the delegation, several delegates stayed to further explore. On a tiny island (pop. 750), one fell and broke her wrist. Clinic staff bound it and gave pain meds. The next day, on a larger island (pop. 5000), a hospital had an x-ray machine and a doctor recast it. Cost? Free! Paperwork? She just showed her passport. Now, back to Day 6…

    Parliament. The National Assembly is in the former Bank of America skyscraper. Six female Assembly members spoke of being empowered by their “good government.” The Representative of a remote Caribbean area, whose motto is “Love for Mother Earth,” gave a moving speech. Her district now has highways and a bridge to connect this formerly neglected region.She never dreamed it would take hours, instead of days, to reach Managua.

    Interest free loans – no usury! Equal starting salaries for equal qualifications regardless of gender. Raises depend on punctuality, effectiveness, continuing ed, seniority, etc.

    Denise Aragon (Education and Environment sectors) mused, “Overseas, they call us lawbreakers but we adhere to our constitution. It protects natural resources and Mother Earth which must not be seen as a source for profit. Take this message home -There’s life in Nicaragua! We love the Earth. Our government works day and night for peace, women beside men, not ahead or behind. Empire cannot succeed against us!”

    Additional Gleanings

    The current coalition and reconciliation government is primarily Sandinista but includes several parties. FSLN holds 70% of 91 seats. 4 branches: Executive, Legislative, Judicial, Electoral. By law, 50% of political candidates are female. No corporate campaign funds!

    Their Direct Presence Model means Representatives must go out and engage the citizens. A priority this year is education re the constitution.

    “We’ve been attacked throughout history by imperialism. For sustainable prosperity despite interventions, we emphasize the legal framework for national protection, understanding, and dialogue for peace and development. We assert our right to independence and self-governance against foreign infiltration or technical disturbance that would infringe on the People’s right to self-determination.”

    Progress on many fronts is on-going. Protagonism of the People is official policy. 94% of economic entities are in the “popular economy,” micro to medium sized family biz and co-ops, with free training, so the nation isn’t dependent on transnational corporations. Hunger was eradicated. Nicaragua is 90% food self-sufficient. That’s resilience!

    174 new fire stations! Clinics and pharmacies abound. Pharmacies don’t sell make-up, candy or junk food. Many prescription drugs that are unaffordable here are OTC there. Illiteracy was 53% in 1979, 10% by 1990, and rose again during neolib years, now it is just 4%. “Fists raised, books open!”

    Multilateralism. Peanuts, sesame, and coffee are exported. International treaties are negotiated with mutual respect. “We trade north and south, with Asia and Africa, so we have economic resilience.” Another motto: Prosperity through Peace.

    The Secretary of Climate organizes Angels of Peace Who Love Our Earth! No privatization of water, a fundamental right. Smoking, plastic bags and single use ware are discouraged. Hot showers aren’t needed in this tropical heat. Conserve electricity and paper! They pull recyclables from trash after collection, pending further development.

    The goal is 100% clean energy by 2030. Already, in the 98+% of homes that have electricity, 70+% is renewable: geo-thermal from volcanoes, hydro-power, solar, wind, biomass.

    Minister of Women. A brilliant young woman, Jessica Leiva, is leading her nation. Her office publishes many pamphlets to empower/educate re legal rights. Topics include zero tolerance of abuse and climate change. This government foresees climate crisis misery and plans mitigation, particularly for rural women who’ll be disproportionately harmed. Coffee was served in ceramic mugs. On the walls were dynamic political posters and photographs of sheroes.

    Rural women lead the way in the agricultural sector and in learning technology. A Childcare With Tenderness program helps prevent violence at home. Only Nicaragua and Argentina offer a class in Gender Rights & Equity.

    Most women now delay motherhood. They love being #1 in Central America for women’s equality (#7 worldwide, per the WEF, above the US.) Initially, some men were resentful, but as consciousness was raised, resistance became cooperation.

    Vice President Rosario Murillo, the Attorney General and the head of the Supreme Court are women. Women are a majority on the Executive Committee. They have an equal voice and do assert themselves. Law #648 gives women absolute equality so they can develop in social, economic and political arenas. Law #779 bans violence against women which can lead to prison, even life for hate crimes.

    All levels of government being 50% female is only fair. Of course, some women have been corrupt historically including Pres. Chamorro. The Chamorro clan are heartless mercenaries, convicted of misappropriation of funds and conspiracy to undermine national integrity. Former guerrilla Dora Tellez allied with them in recent years. With a long, documented history of US collaboration, she organized violent roadblocks in 2018 and was convicted of inciting foreign interference after breaking the terms of amnesty.

    Salvador Allende Pier. What a sunset! Restaurants, lovers strolling on paths or snuggling under cozy cabana palm frond umbrellas, kids’ playgrounds, and in bright lights across a hill: NICARAGUA AMA LA PAZ (Nicaragua Loves Peace.)

    With its many trees, Managua is Central America’s greenest capital. Rosario added brightly colored towering tree sculptures, illuminated at night via LED’s, “Trees of Life.”

    Day 4: Gloria Quintanilla Cooperative, Carazo. Illiterate, abused women who “had nothing” organized to acquire land formerly stolen by Somoza. They grow most of their organic food and fed us while describing paths from despair to empowerment. “Baby after baby after baby, we felt like animals before. Now, we often know more than the engineers who advise us. We are community leaders, health brigadistas! We don’t take vacation, but our work is therapeutic. Agroecology is a lifestyle.” They create unique seed jewelry to sell. We toured their coffee, vegetable and spice gardens in the forest. We hiked to their new school and well. As the sun set over the mountains, neighborhood youth played futbol.

    Day 5: Skills to Save Lives, Matagalpa. We spent the morning and lunched with women/girls in the organization. Teens rescued from abuse sold jewelry they had made. A 90 year old Chicana nurse, Dorothy, came in 1985 and knew she was “in the right place. After the dictator’s defeat, the soul of Nicaragua came alive!… The Revolution begun forty years ago is not over. This is the Promised Land. Anything is possible here. I hope you’ll take home a bit of Nicaragua’s spirit, which joins the spirit of Black and Latinx liberation movements in the US. We are all one!”

    Matagalpa police station. Officers don’t carry guns on beats. 40% of police are women. Law #510: you can get a gun if you adequately explain why you need it. Annual gun violence deaths are 7/100,000. (12.2/100,000 in the US.) Nicaraguans don’t fear police but appreciate them. No blue code! Corruption (rare) is prosecuted. Police motto: Proactive Protection.

    A women’s police force works with the national police and Ministry of Women to protect women. This Province has 18 women’s police stations. Prioritized crimes under law #779 (protection of women), including intimidation and failure to pay child support, get immediate responses and expedited trials. Complaints may be made via phone or online.

    The success of their “Break the Silence to Stop the Violence” is becoming known internationally. Imprisoning violent people sends a clear message. Violence isn’t tolerated. Police or doctors who tended to a victim often testify in court, which suffices, so a victim need not relive the crime. This government is sensitive to victim trauma.

    “We favor conflict resolution and mediation when possible, rather than time-consuming trials. There are rehabilitative practices and education in prison. We have the smallest economy in Central America, with the lowest police and military budgets. There have been no mass shootings here. Under the FSLN, there’s been only one kidnapping, and the culprit is in prison.” (Not counting 2018 kidnappings by CIA supported coup perpetrators, who failed due to people’s heroism and police taking to the streets with the people.)

    The FSNL honors international human rights treaties including CEDAW. “Our revolutionary institutions were based on those rights. So we have real democracy, not fake democracy like in so many nations.”

    Day 6: FEM Fundacion Entre Mujeres, Esteli. We met with proud women, comfortable being productive/self-sufficient. Newbies join self-help groups, learn skills, and take on projects such as bee-keeping, viniculture, creation of jewelry and piñatas. “Gender is a cultural construct.”

    FEM headquarters has a lovely courtyard. Walls are adorned with gorgeous paintings. The hall boasts an altar to Mother Nature and a panoramic view. After dinner and discussion, Becca’s daughter treated us to Nicaraguan folk dancing.

    Las Diosas (The Goddesses.) We visited the FEM processing compound in the countryside. “Solidarity groups that visit us strengthen us – collaboration for the world we know is possible! Rather than the capitalist model of exploitation, our products are ‘life giving.’ We want to contribute richness in the world, not take to get rich. Our goal? Restore life! A collective, non-competitive approach is needed.” They grow/process coffee for export on their permaculture farm. They make fertilizer, selling what they don’t use. At the end of our visit, we reveled in toasts with hibiscus flower wine. FSLN has their backs and these women have the backs of more women (and now some men, too) – 2,000 and growing!

    Day 7: Esteli Museum. Prehistoric fossils, petroglyphs, pre-Columbian art, and displays re the Revolution and s/heroes. Somoza bombed Esteli, a Sandinista base, three times.

    On our way back to Managua we saw many road projects. Building highways and paving dirt roads truly improves quality of life.

    Associacion de Trabajadores del Campo (Association of Rural Workers) School. Panel discussion with an international law expert, Sofia Clark (experience in Rwanda, South Africa, Haiti, Latin America), Camilo Mejia, and a union leader.

    Clark spoke of her work in Haiti. She listens to Democracy Now to know what US progressives are hearing. She keeps hoping Amy Goodman will awaken and tell the truth re imperialism. “New forms of fascism are spreading around the world. There’s a blurring between private and public entities.

    “Nicaragua has often been a test case. Nicaragua used UN regulations to defend itself in 1984. It’s different now. MRS, a right-wing group that split from the FSNL, had US help for the 2018 coup attempt. Earlier, MRS had published a full page ad for a new FSNL platform, which seemed ok except for its ulterior, hypocritical motive of funding opposition/destruction. We’re dedicated to the ‘have nots,’ which makes the ‘haves’ uncomfortable.”

    Why do so few confront the US and call out its illegal actions? The peace dividend was lost. By the 1990s, the US was inventing media. (Information war!) “Gorbachev wanted to join NATO. The world changed with the war in Yugoslavia when NATO was not used defensively but offensively to expand eastward. The Ukraine war is no surprise. Fake news? What about news that’s never reported!”

    Mejia is a Nicaraguan whose family moved to the US, whereupon he joined the military due to the economic draft. He was imprisoned for going awol when he “saw the horrors inflicted in Iraq, like horrors the same aggressor inflicted on the Nicaragua of my childhood… Most of the world now opposes imperialism. Almost every nation is rising up against neoliberal control. But left-wing friends from the 80s now often fall for the State Dept narrative and are no longer allies.” He suggested we learn to identify fake color revolutions. “Targeted governments tend to support the people, like Venezuela providing millions of homes for the poor. Is there land reform? Free healthcare and education? If there are drugs/crime, were they brought there by the CIA?”

    Afterwards, buffet with fab revolutionary music and dancing!

    Day 8: Play day! San Juan de Oriente, a town famous for its artisans. A renowned potter, Pedro Guerrero, enthralled us with a demonstration in his studio.

    Laguna de Apoyo, Resort on a crater lake. Food, drinks, music, sun, swimming! After relaxing, we went to a big market that was bombed in the 80s. Jen’s quest for a FSLN t-shirt was a success. And it’s green!

    Masaya Volcano National Park & Museum. We met unionized park rangers, officials, and office personnel, all enchanted by the FSLN. After dark, they took us to the rim. We peered into the crater to see red bubbling lava rising from Pacha Mama’s core.

    Late night dinner. The workers presented each of us with a big bag of goodies: postcards, calendar, map, edible treats, hand painted wooden bird, corny straw hat which they INSISTED we wear for a photo.

    Day 9: Adios! Hugs for our amazing comrades. As Delegate Mukasa, who had coined the term “Black Power” decades ago, often says: Ni se rinde; ni se vende! Hamas! Never surrender or sell out!

    CONCLUSION 

    After decades defending themselves from three evils – capitalism, colonialism, paternalism – no wonder a verse in the FSLN theme song refers to the US government as “enemy of humanity.” With the FSLN prevailing since 2006 and surviving the 2018 coup attempt, people’s well-being steadily improved. Still poor by bourgeois standards, cost of living is 48% less than in the US. Rent is 83% less. No one is destitute, hungry, or homeless. Healthcare and education are free.

    How DID they achieve so much so fast? First, they elected “good government” that puts people first. Laws were changed so that women and other formerly marginalized people are empowered and lead. Education and well-being are prioritized at every level. The Caribbean legislator had told us she never dreamed she’d be in the federal government. “We’re building Paradise!” The Declaration of Mother Earth and Declaration of Human Rights are in the Constitution. The Sandinista government is enacting the US Green Party’s Ten Key Values. We three Green women feel renewed hope for the world, as do working class and other caring Nicaraguans who are proud of progress. That’s why they’re among the world’s happiest people. Adelante!

    What are they up against? “The US appears to be destined by Providence to plague the Americas with misery in the name of freedom,” Simón Bolivar in 1829, nine years before Nicaragua became the first Central American nation to declare independence. In 1912, the US sent 2500 Marines and has continued attempts to dominate even via terrorism. The US has overtly invaded Nica 14 times. (Goddess and the CIA only know how many covert actions.)

    The financial, military, “intelligence,” media and political power of US hegemony is unprecedented. Recall the Iran-Contra debacle? Congress cut funding for such foreign meddling, so Oliver North arranged illegal weapons sales to Iran to fund Contra brutality against Sandinistas and allies who fought for self determination. They even killed teens who were merely suspected of dissidence. Exhausted by atrocities, fearing a US invasion like in Panama, and falling for campaign promises of peace, voters elected neoliberals in 1990.

    Daniel Ortega stepped down, but not away. Neoliberalism was clearly a disaster so he was re-elected in 2006, again in 2011 by 63%, and by a landslide in 2016. After the delegation, Phoebe traveled another week and asked all kinds of Nicaraguans what they think. Freedom of speech is alive and well! People didn’t hesitate to tell a stranger that they dislike Daniel and Rosario. Phoebe agrees that having his wife as VP seems like nepotism, but even those who dislike the couple admitted to liking the progress the FSNL has accomplished. Election protectors had assured us that the elections were fair. When asked what they voted for, people said “peace, our country, the people.” Viva Nica!

    Addendum 1: WHAT TO DO

    1. Endorse this statement affirming Nica’s sovereignty & achievements by emailing: NicaraguaAdvocacymoc.liamgnull@krowteN, providing full name, organization (if any), & whether you’re signing as an individual or for an org.
    2. Travel! Witness! Report! Staying with people who’ve lived there for decades provides a clearer picture and credibility. The US State Dept discourages travel there, implying it’s not worth seeing and dangerous. But Nica simply poses the “threat of a good example.” It’s the safest country in Central America. We return here to tent cities, hunger, exorbitant healthcare, mass shootings and frequent violence. Food, lodging, massages, zip lining, medicines etc. are inexpensive in Nica. Medical care is free. Upcoming tours.
    3. Educate via letters to editors, podcasts, radio call-ins, panel discussions. Wear buttons etc. to spark questions/discussion. Present to clubs and faith congregations. Keep abreast by subscribing to Nica Notes.
    4. Organize events re the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine in December 2023.
    5. Lobby and protest. Remind Representatives and friends that the International Court of Justice ordered the US to pay reparations to Nica (which Reagan refused) due to a CIA scheme to mine its harbors in 1984. Remind them that the NY Times and WaPo exposed a CIA training manual for Contras promoting crimes against humanity and assassination of elected officials. Defense of sovereignty is ongoing. Capitol Hill: 800-826-3688

    Addendum 2: MORE INFO because “If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcom X

    1. The Delegation report has hyperlinked stats and photos of delegates.

    2. Margaret Flowers‘ interviewed our translator Jill Clarke: Nicaragua is Run by Women with a Revolutionary Feminism

    3. Jennifer, Phoebe, & Delegate Erica Caines, report via zoom for Alameda County (Oakland/Berkeley) Green Sunday 5 PM PST March 12, recorded, eventually posted on You Tube. Meeting ID: 895 5984 4652. Find your local number.

    4. Our tour guide Becca’s article on the people’s church in Nicaragua.

    5. Why 222 Nicaraguan Criminals Were Deported & Why They & Others Lost Their Citizenship

    6. Reconciliation Does Not Mean Forgetting in Nica by our translator, Jill

    7. Nicaragua’s ‘Political Prisoners’ Would Be Criminals by US Standards

    8. From Nicaraguan revolutionaries to US embassy informants: How Washington recruited ex-Sandinistas like Dora María Téllez and her MRS party

    9. U.S. takes its employees home. Jill discusses the latest in Nicaragua which made headlines re transfer of a plane full of convicts who participated in criminal acts during the US-backed 2018 failed coup

    10. Why I Had to Go There by Erica Ryan

    11. Video – Calls grow for cessation of hostility against Nicaragua

    12. The heinous instrumentalization of human rights against Nicaragua 

    The post Three Women Discover the Americas’ Best Kept Secret: Nicaragua! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US and EU Groups Call for ‘Ceasefire’ on Trade Challenges to Climate Policies



    A coalition of more than three dozen progressive advocacy groups based in the United States and the European Union on Monday implored E.U. policymakers to stop pursuing challenges to the Inflation Reduction Act and urged governments on both sides of the Atlantic to start prioritizing decarbonization over corporate-friendly trade rules.

    “As part of any E.U.-U.S. transatlantic sustainable trade initiative, we urge the E.U. to refrain from challenging the IRA with trade instruments. And we call on the U.S. and E.U. to commit to a Climate Peace Clause to protect climate policies around the world from trade disputes, as well as to make good on climate financing and green technology transfer to countries in the Global South,” says a letter sent to the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council.

    The letter comes as European Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis travels to Washington, D.C. for meetings this week with top U.S. officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai.

    Amid an ongoing disagreement over North American electric vehicle manufacturing incentives, renewable energy tax credits, and other green provisions in the IRA, Dombrovskis plans to “negotiate better outcomes for the E.U.,” according to Politico, just as the U.S. Treasury Department prepares to release “a list of criteria for what qualifies as a free trade agreement, potentially making more countries eligible to receive tax credits under the IRA,” which was passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Joe Biden last August.

    “Countries desperately need to enact bold climate measures and cannot allow outdated trade rules to get in the way.”

    The letter’s 41 signatories—including the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the Transnational Institute, and other civil society organizations representing millions of people—noted that “at the most recent meeting of the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council, the Global Trade Working Group announced its intent to embark on a transatlantic sustainable trade initiative.”

    Melinda St. Louis, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said Monday in a statement that if the U.S. and the E.U. are serious about this, “they first need to commit to ‘do no harm’ by refraining from attacking one another’s climate legislation.”

    While the IRA “was far from the comprehensive legislation needed to address the urgent climate crisis,” states the letter, “it was the result of a difficult compromise negotiated in a narrow but historic window of political opportunity and is a critical step that the U.S. has taken to meet its climate commitments.”

    Despite this, the E.U. “claims that the structure and the domestic content requirements of tax incentives for electric vehicle, electric battery, and renewable energy production offered through the IRA violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules,” the letter continues. “And it has repeatedly threatened to refer the matter to the WTO Dispute Settlement Body, attempting to force the U.S. to change this law. The E.U. even publicly complained about the incentives before the bill had passed, potentially threatening passage of the important legislation, which passed by the narrowest of margins.”

    “Time is running out to meet our climate commitments,” it adds. “Investments in green jobs and production of green products will be needed to usher in the clean energy transition the world needs,” and that requires “adapt[ing] the rules to accelerate a just transition.”

    “Will the Biden administration stand up to these trade threats and implement the law as intended to create green jobs and boost manufacturing in the clean energy economy?” asked St. Louis. “And will they commit to supporting other countries as they enact their own bold climate policies?”

    Fabian Flues, a trade campaigner with PowerShift Germany, insisted that there is no other reasonable choice.

    “This is simple: climate action has to take precedence over trade rules,” said Flues. “The E.U. would do the fight against climate change a huge disservice if it challenged the Inflation Reduction Act in trade tribunals. Instead, the E.U. should increase its efforts to pursue a genuine ecological and fair industrial policy. Such efforts must be accompanied by increased climate financing and green technology transfer so that countries in the Global South don’t lose out from increased climate action in the U.S. and E.U.”

    According to the coalition:

    As advanced economies and major current and historic emitters of greenhouse gases, it would be a powerful step for the U.S. and E.U. to agree to a Climate Peace Clause—a binding commitment by these governments to refrain from using dispute settlement mechanisms in the WTO or other trade and investment agreements to challenge each other’s climate policies. Not only should the E.U. refrain from using trade rules to challenge the IRA, but both should commit to refraining from challenging other countries’ policies meant to hasten the green transition. This would set an example and create the much-needed space for governments to adopt and maintain the climate policies needed to create green jobs and meet their commitments under the Paris climate agreement.

    Such an agreement between these two powers must also include climate financing for countries in the Global South and the sharing of green technologies, as outlined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris agreement, to support/contribute to climate solutions that are truly sustainable and equitable for all. This will be necessary to support the clean energy transition in countries that cannot afford similar subsidy-based incentives. A true transatlantic collaboration to address catastrophic climate change, and related global social, health, and biodiversity crises, will entail supporting—rather than undermining—green industrial policies on both sides of the Atlantic. Further, we must work together to meet commitments for financial support and technological transfer to developing countries and to transform inequitable global structures in order to facilitate a just transition for all.

    This is not the first time labor and environmental groups have demanded that policymakers stop impeding sorely needed climate action by weaponizing global trade rules. As Biden hosted French President Emmanuel Macron just before a December meeting of the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council, activists held a protest outside the White House to denounce the leading role that Macron has played in fostering E.U. opposition to the IRA.

    On the same day, the Sierra Club and the Trade Justice Education Fund published an analysis outlining the need for a Climate Peace Clause.

    As the groups’ research explained, North American production requirements were key to securing the political support needed to enact the IRA, but progress on creating green jobs and slashing planet-heating pollution remains at risk of being derailed by Investor-State Dispute Settlement complaints and other objections filed at neoliberal trade institutions.

    As Trade Justice Education Fund executive director Arthur Stamoulis said Monday, “Countries desperately need to enact bold climate measures and cannot allow outdated trade rules to get in the way.”

    “By committing to not challenge other nations’ climate initiatives as violations of old trade rules,” Stamoulis added, “the United States can simultaneously encourage countries to take more ambitious climate action and better defend its own climate-focused industrial policy.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • The Dawn of Austerity

    An interview with Clara E. Mattei, the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • No More Charter Schools in New York State

    Since 1998 charter schools in New York state have deprived under-funded public schools of billions of dollars and greatly enriched the private interests that operate these segregated schools.

    Not surprisingly, poor academic performance, regular school closings, corruption, scandal, and controversy have been the norm in the crisis-prone charter school sector in New York State for the past 25 years. It has been the norm nationwide for 32 years.

    As expected, promoters of these outsourced schools governed by unelected private persons remain relentless in their efforts to expand and multiply charter schools. There is just too much profit at stake for neoliberal forces to abandon school privatization.

    Like her predecessor, Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, supports funneling public school funds to more deregulated charter schools. When she presented her budget at the State Capitol in Albany on Wednesday, February 1, 2023, Hochul announced that she will eliminate the limit on the number of charter schools allowed to open in New York City.

    This means that, “An estimated 100 additional charters could be up for grabs citywide as a result of the proposal, though Hochul would keep a statewide cap at 460 operators. Roughly 275 charter schools currently operate in NYC.” Approximately 360 charter schools are currently open and operating statewide.

    Charter school promoters in New York City and their media representatives like the New York Post and even the New York Times, have been hankering for years from more charter schools in the City. They have been relentless in their quest to seize as much public funds and property as possible. They continually use their enormous wealth, power, and privilege to influence key decision-makers at all levels of government to fulfill their narrow aims. They do not care about the public interest and hide behind the veneer of high ideals to conceal their self-serving interests.

    Not surprisingly dozens of legislators and many public school advocates have come out in opposition to such privatization. The public does not benefit from raising the cap on the number of charter schools allowed to operate in New York City, especially since there is evidence that enrollment numbers and enrollment targets are actually declining in New York City charter schools.

    The public increasingly sees these oversold schools as nothing more than pay-the-rich schemes masquerading as “the last best hope for low-income minority kids.” In reality, charter schools close every week across the country, leaving many parents, students, and teachers out in the cold. So much for “free market” education.

    Education in a modern society must not be commodified. It must not be commercialized and handed over to private interests intent on maximizing profit. Education is not a business. The profit motive has no place in modern education. Cashing in on kids is not a good model for education.

    Education in a modern society based on mass industrial production is a collective human responsibility, without which society could not move forward. Such a massive and critical enterprise cannot be left to chance, it cannot be left to the law of the jungle or a survival-of-the fittest ethos. The “invisible hand” is not pro-social; it ensures winners and losers. Such outmoded arrangements only ensure greater chaos, anarchy, and violence in education—something the public does not need and the economy does not benefit from. Indeed, with even more charter schools in New York City problems will only multiply for all schools, including charter schools themselves. Competition lowers quality for everyone, not the other way around.

    All should unite in opposition to more charter schools in New York State (especially New York City) and defend the right to education. Public school funds belong to public schools, not schools that claim to be public but are in fact privatized and marketized schools that strive to maximize profit at the expense of kids.

    More charter schools in New York City and beyond will not benefit education, society, the economy, or the national interest in any way. Privatization of vital social programs injures society while concentrating more public wealth in fewer private hands, increasing instability, and lowering quality.

    The post No More Charter Schools in New York State first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Shifting Baseline Disorders: Only the One Percent is Bad

    But for now, let me repeat: the world’s richest 85 individuals do not have the same amount of accumulated wealth as the world’s poorest 50 percent. They have vastly more. The multitude on the lower rungs—even taken as a totality—have next to nothing.
    — Michael Parenti

    Funny stuff seeing the MoveOn outfit go after ONLY the one percent who are tax dodgers, tax sheltering criminals:

    Sign the petition: Don’t let House Republicans undermine the IRS for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

    Republicans are trying to cut $80 billion in recent investments designed to strengthen the IRS and its ability to crack down on millionaire, billionaire, and corporate tax cheats through the Inflation Reduction Act.1 In other words: As per usual, Republicans want to issue handouts to their wealthy donors and leave working families in the lurch.

    In 2019 alone, the richest 1% of households evaded $163 billion of the total of unpaid or underpaid taxes that year. When we allow the ultrawealthy to evade paying their fair share, we place that responsibility on regular working people. Donald Trump’s recently released tax returns are a clear example of this corruption and greed. His returns expose overseas bank accounts and manipulative real estate evaluations that effectively allowed him to dodge taxes. This is exactly why Democrats included funding for the IRS, to ensure there were people within the agency that would hold the wealthiest people in this country accountable. We cannot allow the GOP to tank our efforts to lessen the tax burden on the working class.

    Fun stuff, you know, since we are getting close to USA shooting nuclear weapons, utilizing the dirty tricks of CIA and false flags and dirty bombs. You know this country’s history, yet the Democrats, the MoveOne outfit, is going for the One Percent.

    You know, since these companies are as honest as a nun (not). Imagine, the amount of US taxpayer money paying for fraud, crimes, endless and meaningless and worthless reports, hearings, white papers, investigations, stalling tactics, cover-ups, PR spin, all of it, including the dirty, polluting, community-breaking externalities of these corporations. And how many of these corporations have GOVERNMENT contracts in the hundreds of millions and billions?

    How many dual-income earners in the Five percent — $208,000 x 2 – $416,000 yearly income — have trouble sending their kids to Yale and Harvard, uh?

    The book, Dream Hoarders tells a picture of those Five and Ten Percenters and the Twenty Percenters x two incomes ($97,000) = $195,000. But here, the irony, at the most elite-sucking, exceptionalist outfit locally, Aspen Institute:

    Now, now. I have a 77-year-old fellow with all sorts of medical operations under his belt driving a bus, me as his monitor. There are older people driving school buses where I live, one aged 81. You know, high winds, in a tsunami zone, earthquake zone, king tides, ice, fallen trees, fallen power lines, rain rain rain. You know, that precious cargo — children — and we get $19 an hour, with three cameras on board, a tablet that marks our stops and time, and, well, you can imagine the lack of trust this huge corporation has in us, the lowly guys and gals. Precious cargo my ass!

    Truckers in the world, got .06 (cents) a mile in the 1960s. And when you are owner-operator, you pay pay pay for expenses, upkeep, maintenance and more. In the old days, the idea was to get to New York from Portland, Oregon, as quick as possible with that load of seafood. One fellow told me he took ZipLock baggies with him to urinate on that 72-hours, one-way from Oregon to NYC. And, the pills. The uppers. Keeping awake.

    This is, alas, Capitalism with a capital “c” for corruption, collusion, chaos, criminality, contraband, crassness.

    But alas, MoveOne is going after the One Percent, because of course, all those Five Percenters working for the One Percenters in high level jobs, all those 10 Percenters who are hoarders and vote to not have an extra percentage of tax put upon them, all the Eichmann’s and Faustians, all of them, love the idea of becoming rich and famous too, or just rich. They think being part of the 80 Percent is a crime against their egos and sensibility.

    There is only so much of the good money to go around to the One Percent and up to the 19 Percent, right? Just talked to a 51 year old who gave me a ride back home since my ride was indisposed in Newport. I had to get to the bus driving gig. I stopped someone coming from the hospital, and he gave me a lift. He grew up in Toledo, Oregon, and had a year’s worth of wages saved up for Oregon State University, but he opted to work. As a lineman for the local central utility district. His brother went to college, and even called him a loser. Just a few years ago, the brother apologized to this man, who has worked 32 years for this company, and he said he’s making $150,000 a year as he is in management. The brother never got that income with his college degree.

    Yes, there have to be options for young people. Yes, everyone needs to go to a cool college, for history, for the arts, for writing, for sociology. Yes, there should be contruction courses in college. Yes, there should be a way to get those who might have a proclivity for hands-on high IQ stuff to get that hands-on education, but all junior and senior high school students should be exposed to Oceanography, Orwell and Organic farming. In addition to, Reading and Writing, but also, learning what soil is and is not. What a forest is. What the jet stream is, and what weather is and is not. Hands down, the only way humanity is going to solve the crimes of capitalism and the savagery of capitalism and the barbaric acts of the One Percent and maybe another 5 percent, is to arm ourselves with thinking, caring, community-driven people.

    Out here in Rural Oregon, we have those rugged (sic) individuals looking for acres and a place to put some chickens and cool motorcycles and jungle gyms on, and a place AWAY from humanity. Imagine that.

    Some of those homes I pass by in the rural landscape are 6,000 square foot lodges that would look like they fit in Aspen or Jackson Hole.

    Here it is, then, the shifting baseline disorder. Up is down, and somehow, Nazi History is Okay History. Ukraine is a country with a violent and racist history, and now, worse than ever. But these kids and these linemen, well, they do not want to know about THAT.

    As we drain the tax coffers for Zelensky, for all those military industrial complex big boys and little ones.

    This is fact — Russia-Soviet Union beat the Nazi’s then:

    The Battle That Changed the Course of WWII: 80th Anniversary of the Soviet Victory at Stalingrad

    On February 2, 1943, Nazi forces trapped in the ruined city of Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) by the Soviet Red Army surrendered, marking the end of one of the bloodiest and most intense battles in history – the Battle of Stalingrad.

    During the course of this battle, Soviet forces managed to trap a substantial force of Nazi soldiers inside the very city the latter wanted to capture. The Soviet’s also managed to repel all attempts by the rest of the Nazi war machine to relieve their trapped comrades, and to finally break the enemy’s will to resist.

    This triumph allowed the USSR to seize the strategic initiative and effectively turn the tide of the entire World War II, paving the way for the eventual defeat of the Nazi Germany a little over two years later. (source)

    You’d never know that istory talking to linemen or bus driver or high school teacher or city council or …. And youth in college or in high school who will never get to read this article and discuss: “How a Network of Nazi Propagandists Helped Lay the Groundwork for the War in Ukraine”

    A mass grave of Red Army soldiers, executed on orders from Franz Halder, at Stalag 307 near Dęblin, Poland.

    Don’t let MoveOn fool you — Liz Warren maybe a super capitalist, but that means she is for great wealth misdistribution, great land exploitation, the Monroe Doctrine on steroids, and of course, money, missiles and mush for Ukraine.

    Michael Parenti — Peeling back those Shifting Baselines!

    The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me.  I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.

    How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States. (source)

    Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent  maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?

    Hundreds of millions live in debt even in “affluent” countries like the United States. They face health care debts, credit card debts, college tuition debts, and so on. Many, probably most who own homes—and don’t live in shacks or under bridges or in old vans—are still straddled with mortgages. This means their net family wealth is negative, minus-zero. They have no  propertied wealth; they live in debt.

    Millions among the poorest 50 percent in the world may have cars but most of them also have car payments. They are driving in debt.  In countries like Indonesia, for the millions without private vehicles, there are the overloaded, battered buses, poorly maintained vehicles that specialize in breakdowns and ravine plunges. Among the lowest rungs of the 50 percent are the many who pick thru garbage dumps and send their kids off to work in grim, soul-destroying sweatshops. (source)

    The post Shifting Baseline Disorders: Only the One Percent is Bad first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Massive Inequality Is a “Concerted Elite Class Project,” Says Heather Gautney

    In 1956, the famed sociologist C. Wright Mills published The Power Elite, a blistering critique of concentrated political, economic and military power in the United States. The book influenced many protest movements of the 1960s and has inspired radical scholars and activists ever since. Now, in 2023, Heather Gautney is continuing Mills’s project of analyzing and mapping out elite power in the U.S.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Noam Chomsky: Right-Wing Insurrection in Brazil Held Strong Echoes of January 6

    The right-wing riot and insurrection led on January 8 by followers of Brazil’s incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro had strong echoes of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters. Like Trump supporters’ mob attack on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., the January 8, 2023, insurrection in the capital city of Brasília grew out of weeks of protests by supporters of an incumbent…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As Universities Submit to Neoliberalism and Fascism, Workers Must Fight Back

    We are witnessing the rise of a unique brand of U.S. fascism, which has once again reared its ugly head and has made higher education one of its primary targets. This fascist attack on the university is made possible by the longstanding neoliberal withering of its institutions, which now rely mostly on underpaid contingent workers. The disempowerment of university labor runs hand-in-hand with a…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • More and More Boys are Coming Home from School with Behavior Sheets!

    Yah, I am training to be a school bus driver. I’ve written about it in previous pieces, and that’s First Student, a foreign outfit in 49 states, 7 Canadian provinces, and it’s an equity firm out of Belgium. Bidding on school district transportation contracts far and wide, and alas, this Belgium company is getting paid by guess who?

    USA and Canadian taxpayers footing the bill and reaping the poor services. This is what they call the public-private arrangement, again, what is a low level form of socialized payola for private companies while the taxpayer is screwed. As if the public and our governments and our states and our  national funding can’t take care of OUR own children’s food, education, and transportation needs: we have to go to a private equity fund to handle schools shuttling. How long will I last is a crap shoot, since this is it for Lincoln County — no luck getting past interviews for county, city and state jobs as a case manager or services coordinator, even though there is that great 10 million shortfall of men dropping out of the workforce.

    Oh, shit, I’m almost 66, with too many college degrees and a resume way too long to get very far.

    Ahh, I’m also a social worker, educator, writer, journalist and even someone in urban and regional planning, but I can’t get past the interview stage. Missing men, well, there are many reasons for this new phenomenon. In the uncritical thinking USA, we will not get much deep analyses, though, just plain black and white rationales.

    *****

    The gender gap in college enrollment has been growing for decades and has broad implications for colleges and beyond: a loss of enrollment revenue, less viewpoint diversity on campus, and fewer men in jobs that require some college education. Some academics want to make clear that just because women outnumber men in college it doesn’t mean that gender-equity issues no longer remain.

    This collection of Chronicle articles features news stories, analysis, advice, and opinion essays, including several articles that sounded a warning years ago. It also looks at how some colleges are trying to draw more men of all backgrounds — and help them succeed once they get there.

    Section 1: Why Don’t Men Go to College?

    Section 2: How Can Colleges Draw More Men?

    Section 3: Deconstructing the Gender Gap

    Don’t get me started on the nanny state, the reverse sexism, the anti-feminism bullshit female empowerment. Don’t get me started on the battle of the sexes, and don’t get me started on the sheeple aspect of education, social work, and nonprofit work. Don’t get me started, man.

    I can go down a thousand rabbit holes or warrens, but the thing is I come back out, revitalized, smarter, and, sure more pissed off. This is the state of the world, under capitalism. A Belgium company in the USA and Canada is monopolizing on school transportation. No union shop, $19 an hour here in Lincoln county where home prices and gasoline and food are outrageous and where other districts might pay more per hour.

    Again, it’s a bunch of older folk, mostly women, driving buses at age 67, 71, 78. What the hell is that about?

    I have also been a substitute teacher in this district, and I’ve written about that too: “Take Down this Blog, or Else! No job interview, no job offer, targeting by city, county, state honchos, watched by the pigs, shadowed by all the sub humans.” Of course, I was and still am mad as hell at my banishment teaching, and can’t accept it, or take it. Even writing this will get me scrutinized by those overlords of the HR subhuman species who spend countless millions of dollars a year on software applications that do snazzy background checks, credit checks, employment checks, reference checks, drug checks, and of course, in my case, Google Scans/Checks, looking for any anti-this or anti-that diatribes or even plain old inverted triangle journalism.

    Let’s scoot over to the issue of the failing male, the males in the womb, those just out of the womb, and then the developing baby, child, kid, teen and we end up with 355 million Americanos and a shit load of chronic illnesses for EVERYONE, including the poor child, babes in the woods. The top ten:

    What are the 7 main types of learning disabilities? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that developmental disabilities occur among all ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups. Children from ages 3 through 17 frequently have one or more developmental disabilities, such as:

    • ADHD
    • Autism Spectrum Disorder
    • Cerebral Palsy
    • Hearing Loss
    • Intellectual Disability
    • Learning Disability
    • Vision Impairment
    • Developmental Delays

    In particular, psychology professionals should study these seven learning disabilities:

    • Auditory processing disorder. …
    • Language processing disorder. …
    • Nonverbal learning disabilities. …
    • Visual perceptual/visual motor deficit.
    • Types of Learning Disabilities

    • Dyscalculia A specific learning disability that affects a person’s ability to understand numbers and learn math facts.

    • Dysgraphia A specific learning disability that affects a person’s handwriting ability and fine motor skills.

    • Dyslexia A specific learning disability that affects reading and related language-based processing skills.

    Related Disorders

    • ADHD A disorder that includes difficulty staying focused and paying attention, controlling behavior and hyperactivity.

    Young child playing in children's ball pit.

    • Dyspraxia A disorder which causes problems with movement and coordination, language and speech.

    So here we are at, now, in a society with so many epigentic, developmental, gestational, chromosomal and neuro disabilities. So many youth are faced with a lifetime of struggle, even before crawling, and then in pre-K and then K12, and then as adults. If this were a socially just society, there would be trillions spent on finding out the causes and effects and then the effects as new causes for new effects on the individual gestating, and what it is that makes this such a prevalent issue in our Western Society. Schools are warehouses, for sure, and the school to prison pipeline is not some goof-ball concept. We’d be looking hard at the chemicals, the stressors, the mother and father and their own stressors. All the toxins in air, water, food, drugs, including EMFs, and just the lack of nutrition, the fatty liver disease in 1/3 of folk, and the failing sperm counts in men since 1950, and, well, the discussion of who is that village that takes to raise a child.

    Everything in capitalism is ANTI-health, ANTI-human, ANTI-Learning, ANTI-community engagement. More and more children, and yes, mostly boys, are monitored in the classroom, those prisons, and the effect or affect is that there is little significant learning and developing going on inside the school and their brains. They are a nerved up/out or nervous wreck, and they are watched and graded and sent home with behavior reports.

    Now is the time to pity the child. Our children, and of course, all those children hit with the wagers of war, the wagers of sanctions, the wagers of economic and health and food sanctions. Depleted uranium or lead in the pipes. All of those realities also tie into the flagging mental health, the growing pressures put upon mother, father, child, grandparents, the lot of them in education, et al.

    This is the sickness of America:

    In solidarity with Cuba, leaders and activists of all Left and democratic parties of India welcomed Aleida Guevara in Surjeet Bhavan.

    To a packed hall, Aleida said that it is one thing to talk about an economic blockade and quite another to live under that blockade.

    She narrated how no country was ready to even give easily available medicine for a five-year-old child only because of the fear of America. In spite of not being a milk producing country, Cuba supplies one litre milk daily for all children and the aged, by importing it from New Zealand which is expensive because of the high transportation costs.

    They were forced to buy milk from far away New Zealand, as their northern neighbour, US is not ready to trade with Cuba. The sixty years of illegal and inhumane US blockade has taught Cuba to spread humanism through sending doctors to wherever they were in need. Cuba is just 90 kilometres away from the mighty imperialist super power US. Even then it can’t be defeated since it believes in the scientific principle of people’s unity and those who are united can never be defeated. “El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido” (The people united, shall always be victorious). She said Cuba took arms for peace and defending their motherland. She asserted that Cuba believes in standing up for equality against any kind of barbarism in the world. Thanking the people of India for always standing with Cuba, she said that the people of Cuba will always treasure this solidarity and value it immensely. (source)

    Milk, man, and the United Snakes of America is so so powerful, going after children far and wide. You know, Cuba never attacked the USA, never went to war, and alas, this is the power of the dirty capitalists, war mongers and some sick psychopaths. Medicines, medical equipment, air conditioners, food, and energy. This is the way of the rat, the USA RATON.

    The entire psychiatry and psychology and sociology of oppression is what runs modern Western society. There are no right ways now to raise children, to support families, and to build community. It’s all about the private sector sucking up as much as the public sector can regurgitate to this thieves. While the children suffer, and while the entire shooting match is toast as we in a culture of pollution and gestational crimes and constant bombardment of children with poisons —  from those in the plastics, chicken nuggets, lawn sprays, all the off gassing, all those artificial flavors — find it harder and harder to survive all the death traps that we know this society is unleashing at an earlier and earlier age.

    We are in an age of behavior adjustment, brainwashing, mind control, sinister Stockholm Syndrome, general anxiety disorders created by social media and generalized hatefulness from the legislators and two-bit politicians. Checked out or challenged just looking at a book, we are in the new normal of trillion$ for the pigs of war, for SWAT teams, for the opposition to beat us down, to implode the family, to eradicate the human and humane family. These kiddos come onto the bus with behavior plans, with their little classroom check slips for the parents to mull over at home.

    Oh, what is enlightenment? “Behavior charts and similar public shaming methods don’t teach self-regulation. They mainly harm vulnerable learners.” The following is pretty light weight compared to the scenes I have been enmeshed in as a substitute teacher in special education and blended classrooms. Believe me.

    Mr. Hill stops reading aloud to his 4th grade students and turns to Anisa. “Anisa, you’re off task. Change your clip. I asked you once and you are still digging in your desk. Walk over and change it now.”

    Anisa stands and walks across the classroom. Several of her peers make condescending comments under their breath. Anisa moves her clip from green to yellow and returns to her desk and puts her head down. Her nonverbal behaviors indicate that she’s angry, hurt, and frustrated.

    A few minutes later, Josh raises his hand. Mr. Hill calls on him and Josh responds, “Anisa is off task again.”

    Mr. Hill looks at Anisa and says, “Again? Please change your clip to red. One more problem and it will be another call home. You have to learn to pay attention.” (Source: Tear Down Your Behavior Chart! Lee Ann Jung Dominique Smith)

    Read the book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

    Freire gives the term “freedom” a specific meaning: it is the freedom to critically question and change the world. In other words, a person is free when they are able to understand and change their own conditions.

    For Freire, education and oppression are connected, since education can be used either as a tool for oppression or as a method  of liberation from oppression. Freire distinguishes between a pedagogy (a way of practicing education) that serves oppressors, and one that helps oppressed people understand and change their society. According to Freire, “freedom” (the freedom to critically question and change the world) requires people to gain a new understanding of how reality works. Changing the dominant understanding of history is a key part of this process. Freire sees education as useful not just for individual growth, but also for achieving social change. To expand on this point, he discusses social change as a necessary tool to achieve freedom and overthrow oppression. Within Freire’s framework, systems of oppression try to prevent radical social change so that they do not lose power. Throughout Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire draws heavily on the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—especially the concept of dialectics. A “dialectical” way of thinking starts with a “thesis” (an initial idea or proposition) and an “antithesis” (an idea that opposes or contradicts the thesis), and the interaction of these two ideas creates a “synthesis,” or a new idea that reconciles the conflict between the two original ideas. (some clipped notes)

    *****

    Feeling the burn yet, the absolute oppression instilled in the greatest country and system the world has ever seen?

    Get a little primer on exactly what capitalism and inflation and the systems of Milton Friedman are all about here:

    Hudson: Since the Democrats took power in the 1990s under Clinton, they’ve stopped the anti-monopoly regulation. They’ve stopped the antitrust laws from being enforced, and you have a great concentration of monopolies, and they can raise prices for whatever they want, as much as they want. For agricultural goods, the distributors have simply raised the prices without paying the farmers and the dairy farmers any more.

    So when you say that inflation is only a monetary phenomenon, what Milton Friedman is saying is, “Don’t look at the power structure. Don’t look at how markets are structured. Don’t look at monopolies. Don’t look at how the wealthy corporations are inflating [prices]. Look at something that we can blame on labor.”

    The inflation that Milton Friedman talks about — and you just mentioned my old boss’s boss Paul Volcker — is wages. So when the Federal Reserve talks about inflation, they say, “It’s really wages rising.” Well, we know that wages have not risen anywhere near as fast as the cost of living, so that can’t be the reason — that wages are rising.

    But if you can claim that inflation is only caused by labor making too much money and hurting other workers as consumers, then you have the Federal Reserve able to come in and say, “We’ve got to have a depression. We’ve got to have unemployment. We’re going to raise interest rates because we want more unemployment to increase the reserve army of the unemployed so that wage earners will be so desperate for a job that they’ll work for less. And if only they worked for less, then prices will come down, if somehow the companies are going to lower their prices because they can pay their labor less.”

    The pretense is that it’s all labor’s fault.

    We are all on this behavior and consequence chart. We, that is, the 80 Percenters who have 8 percent of wealth in the USA, compared to the Point Zero Zero One Percent, the One Percent and 19 Percent holding 92 percent of the money-power-possession chart. We mustn’t act up, mustn’t question the boss, mustn’t wonder why the oppressors are our neighbors, the ones our taxpaying work funds, or why so many Americanos believe this is it for Nirvana — the USA, greatest invention in human kind since the wheel.

    Oh, those progressives are capitalists to their bones:

    Liz Warren shifted from supporting Medicare for All to advocating a two-phased approach intended to build support for a single-payer model (in which the federal government would provide health insurance for every person in the U.S.), by first creating a federally based plan to compete with private insurers and expanding access to Medicare. Elizabeth Warren Says She’s ‘a Capitalist To My Bones’ And Positions Herself as FDR’s Heir

    And that is THAT capitalism —

    “Inflammation is the body’s appropriate response to damage, or the threat of damage,” says Rupa Marya, a physician and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. “We’re learning that the social structures around us, the environmental, political structures around us, are tuning the immune system to sound out the full range of inflammation.” Raj Patel adds that “capitalism primes bodies … for sickness.” (“Inflamed”: Dr. Rupa Marya & Raj Patel on Deep Medicine & How Capitalism Primes Us for Sickness)

    Imagine that, all those children, and I am not talking about those with allergies, with multiple chronic illnesses, including diabetes and asthma, caught in this vice which is CAPITALISM.

    Daily, we are oppressed, and as the digital oppressors get more powerful, everything about us will be transhumanist, and we will be abiding by retinal scans, saliva analyses, galvanic skin response tests, and then the body will be the internet of physiology, the absolute bot world of nano things controlling the entire human experience, and that’s not just heart rate and BP, but thoughts.

    Below, I find these on the bus floors much of the time. The children leave them in their desks at school. They are on the playgrounds with orange peels wrapped inside. Oh, the behaviorists. The mind benders. The psyops, the dead-end Americans, paying for the tools of Nazi War, and now, how many teachers are talking about the Doomsday Clock to their high schoolers, just to broach the issue?

    Hell, people do not talk about Ukraine and the pimping of weapons of child-killing in public or at the workplace. These bosses, like the Belgium First Student honchos, send memos out on what can and cannot be said during election A or election B at the workplace.

    And we wonder why so many neuro-normal (sic) people are checked out. Trauma: The Science of Stuck – Britt Frank, baby, trauma!

    This is Startup to Storefront, and on today’s episode, we are unpacking the science of how to get unstuck. It’s no coincidence that that’s also the title of the book written by our guest today: author, psychotherapist, and trauma specialist, Britt Frank. Britt knows a thing or two about getting unstuck, as she has battled everything from meth addiction to sexual abuse. She emerged from that trauma with a new outlook on life, a Master of Social Work degree, and a desire to help others overcome their own hurdles. These hurdles vary from individual to individual, but when it comes to entrepreneurship, it’s not uncommon for someone to put up a mental blockade that prevents them from moving forward. Getting over this mental blockade that inhibits you from progressing forward is what we are dissecting today.

    In today’s episode we discuss:

    – Why you don’t need every friend to be a best friend

    – How Covid didn’t create a mental health crisis, it just exposed the one we already had

    – The power behind changing your why’s to whats. So roll up your sleeves and let’s start the process of getting unstuck.

    The Science of Stuck – Britt Frank,

    The post More and More Boys are Coming Home from School with Behavior Sheets! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Havana Declaration Outlines Vision for Building Just World Economy



    Delegates to the Havana Congress on the New International Economic Order—a gathering organized by the Progressive International and attended by more than 50 scholars and policymakers from 26 countries across all six inhabited continents—agreed over the weekend on a declaration that outlines a “common vision” for building an egalitarian and sustainable society out of the wreckage of five decades of neoliberal capitalism.

    “The crisis of the existing world system can either entrench inequalities,” the declaration asserts, or it can “embolden” popular movements throughout the Global South to “reclaim” their role as protagonists “in the construction of a new world order based on justice, equity, and peace.”

    Delegates resolved to focus their initial efforts on strengthening the development and dissemination of lifesaving technologies in low-income nations.

    “Delegates agreed that a key priority must be to secure science and technology sovereignty.”

    This decision comes one year after Cuban officials announced, at a press conference convened by the Progressive International (PI), their plan to deliver 200 million homegrown Covid-19 vaccine doses to impoverished countries abandoned by their wealthy counterparts and Big Pharma—along with tools to enable domestic production and expert support to improve distribution.

    It also comes as Cuba assumes the presidency of the Group of 77 (G77), a bloc of 134 developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where “the combined crises of food, energy, and environment” are escalating, PI noted.

    “What is the common vision to guide the Global South out of this crisis?” the coalition asked. “What is the plan to win it? What is the New International Economic Order for the 21st century?”

    “After two days of detailed discussions about how to transform our shared world, delegates agreed that a key priority must be to secure science and technology sovereignty,” PI general coordinator David Adler said Sunday at the conclusion of the Havana Congress. “From pharmaceuticals to green tech, from digital currencies to microchips, too much of humanity is locked out of both benefiting from scientific advances and contributing to new ones. We will, as today’s declaration calls for, work to build ‘a planetary bloc led by the South and reinforced by the solidarities of the North’ to liberate knowledge and peoples.”

    Speaking at the January 12 ceremony during which Cuba ascended to the G77 presidency, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla emphasized the need for coordinated action across the Global South on science and tech, arguing that “scientific-technical development is today monopolized by a club of countries that monopolize most of the patents, technologies, research centers, and promote the drain of talent from our countries.”

    The G77 Summit on Science, Technology, and Innovation, scheduled for September in Havana, seeks to “unite, complement each other, integrate our national capacities so as not to be relegated to future pandemics,” said Parrilla.

    During his speech on the first day of the Havana Congress, meanwhile, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called for a new non-aligned movement to “end the legalized robbery of people and Earth fueling climate catastrophe.”

    Read the full Havana Declaration on the New International Economic Order:

    The Havana Congress,

    Recalling the role of the Cuban Revolution in the struggle to unite the Southern nations of the world, and the spirit of the 1966 Havana Tricontinental Conference that convened peoples from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to chart a path to collective liberation in the face of severe global crises and sustained imperial subjugation;

    Hearing the echoes of that history today, as crises of hunger, disease, and war once again overwhelm the world, compounded by a rapidly changing climate and the droughts, floods, and hurricanes that not only threaten to inflame conflicts between peoples, but also risk the extinction of humanity at large;

    Celebrating the legacy of the anti-colonial struggle, and the victories won by combining a program of sovereign development at home, solidarity for national liberation abroad, and a strong Southern bloc to force concessions to its interests, culminating in the adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO);

    Acknowledging that the project of decolonization remains incomplete, disrupted by concerted attacks on the unity of the South in the form of wars, coups, sanctions, structural adjustment, and the false promise that sovereign development might be won through integration into a hierarchical world system;

    Emphasizing that the result has been the sustained divergence between North and South, characterized by the same dynamics that defined the international economic order five decades prior: the extraction of natural resources, the enclosure of ‘intellectual property,’ the plunder of structural adjustment, and the exclusion of the multilateral system;

    Recognizing that despite these setbacks, the flame of Southern resistance did not die; that the pursuit of sovereign development has yielded unprecedented achievements—from mass literacy and universal healthcare to poverty alleviation and medical innovation—that enable a renewed campaign of Southern cooperation today;

    Stressing that this potential for Southern unity is perceived as a threat to Northern powers, which seek once again to preserve their position in the hierarchy of the world system through mechanisms of economic exclusion, political coercion, and military aggression;

    Seizing the opportunity of the present historical juncture, when the crisis of the existing world system can either entrench inequalities or embolden the call to reclaim Southern protagonism in the construction of a new world order based on justice, equity, and peace;

    The Havana Congress calls to:

    • Renew the Non-Aligned Movement: In the face of increasing geopolitical tensions born from a decisive shift in the global balance of power, the Congress calls to resist the siren song of the new Cold War and to renew the project of non-alignment, grounded in the principles of sovereignty, peace, and cooperation articulated at the 1955 Bandung Conference, 1961 Non-Aligned Conference, 1966 Tricontinental Conference, and beyond.

    • Renovate the NIEO: To accompany the renewed non-aligned movement, the Congress calls to renovate the vision for a New International Economic Order fit for the 21st century; a vision that must draw inspiration from the original Declaration, but also account for the key issues—from digital technology to environmental breakdown—that define the present conditions for sovereign development; and to enshrine this vision in a new U.N. Declaration on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

    • Assert Southern Power: The Congress recognizes that economic liberation will not be granted, but must be seized. As the original call for a New International Economic Order was won through the exercise of collective power in the coordinated production of petroleum, so our vision today can only be realized through the collective action of the South and the formation of new and alternative institutions to share critical technology, tackle sovereign debt, drive development finance, face future pandemics together, as well as coordinate positions on international climate action and the protection of national sovereignty over the extraction of natural resources.

    • Accompany Cuba in the G77: The Congress recognizes the critical opportunity afforded by Cuba’s presidency of the Group of 77 plus China to lead the South out of the present crisis and channel the lessons of its Revolution toward concrete proposals and ambitious initiatives to transform the broader international system.

    • Build a Planetary Bloc: The Congress calls on all peoples and nations of the world to join in this struggle to definitively achieve the New International Economic Order; to build a planetary bloc led by the South and reinforced by the solidarities of the North, whose peoples recognize their obligation to resist the crimes committed in their names; and to bring the spirit of this Havana Congress into the communities that we call home.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Your Money or Your Life

    The function of government itself once it’s privatized is to make money for the donor class, which is basically the financial class and the monopoly class that finance creates.

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • For Every $1 Gained by a Bottom 90 Percenter Since 2020, a Billionaire Got $1.7M

    While the vast majority of people were struggling to stay alive and weather economic instability during the first two years of the pandemic, the world’s richest 1 percent were thriving as the proportion of new global wealth they were capturing soared to new heights, a report reveals. Over the past decade, the global top 1 percent has taken about half of all new wealth — an already extremely high…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Andrew Tate: a biproduct of neoliberalism – not someone helping young men

    The Canary‘s multimedia producer Curtis Daly has been watching events surrounding Andrew Tate in recent weeks.

    Falling-down the rabbit hole

    As Sky News reported on 14 January, the latest developments are that:

    Romanian authorities have seized several luxury cars from influencer Andrew Tate’s villa as part of a criminal inquiry into alleged human trafficking that led to his arrest. The cars, which included a Rolls-Royce and a BMW, were taken from Tate’s villa in Voluntari on the outskirts of Bucharest and transported by police to a secret warehouse. The self-proclaimed misogynist was arrested in the capital on 29 December, on charges of being part of an organised crime group, human trafficking and rape. His brother Tristan and two Romanian women were also arrested. They have denied wrongdoing.

    As Daly notes in his latest video, it’s clear that Andrew Tate’s target audience is young straight men. This demographic, coincidentally, is also the most likely to fall down the far-right rabbit hole. In an age where the idea of gender – of femininity and masculinity – is becoming more fluid, the counter culture which has been pushed by the right is extreme, toxic masculinity. The vulgar misogyny that’s on display finds itself split between Andrew Tate fans who think that it’s a way of picking up women, and those who use the hatred of women as a front for being unsuccessful with them – also known as ‘incels’.

    In a world of misinformation – a combination of ultra masculinity, a rejection of modern identity, and being promised that this behavior somehow attracts women – it’s plausible that some young men find this appealing.

    Andrew Tate: a neoliberalist biproduct?

    So, in his latest video Daly argues that Andrew Tate is a biproduct of neoliberalism – not someone helping young men. As he notes, Andrew Tate is exploiting the false idea that being a man is somehow being erased. However, he also has an economic incentive to push this kind of narrative:

    Young men with low self-esteem are actually great for him. He manipulates them and sells them an idea – making a profit off people’s misery. Andrew Tate’s biggest business venture is ‘Hustlers University’ – which users can sign up for, which in turn will miraculously make them rich.

    It’s just one big scam – the business is essentially his personality. His persona of leaning into ‘anti-wokeness’ and his extreme misogyny appeal to made-up fears surrounding sex, gender, alpha males and beta males, coupled with a get-rich-quick scheme that promotes selfishness and extreme individualism.

    Sounds familiar in any way? Andrew Tate is quite literally a model by-product of neoliberalism.

    Watch Curtis Daly’s full video via YouTube below – and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button while you’re there.

    By Curtis Daly

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • American Healthcare System

    I have a newly-discovered health problem, where during the day, my blood pressure readings are quite normal, or we might even say somewhat on the low side, 105-65. During the night, when I am sleeping, however, the very same indicators are just too high, 168-92.

    My doctor, a very dedicated physician and caring human being has no idea why. She has asked around, but the responses have been few, and certainly not very encouraging. To be honest, most doctors don’t know the answer, and as far as the patients, how many of them do you know, that measure and record their blood pressure readings while they are asleep? We have tried different types of blood pressure medication, and I have rejected some for their harsh side-effects (skin bruises or cancer). The results have not been any different. Both myself and my doctor are aware that, unless we achieve some success, the final result could be a heart attack or a stroke for me, which neither one of us wants.

    What should we do to find the answer? Quite obvious, further research, consultation, and testing. 

    The problem is our physicians are often overworked and have no more time than 15 minutes (or 20 per patient), for the really good ones. In order to satisfy the neo-liberal system’s appetite for more profits, they are every day given a bigger list of patients assigned to them. To the blood-thirsty CEOs of insurance companies and healthcare outfits, their earnings are never sufficient. In my case, I volunteered to do some further research on my own, but my physician has already indicated to me that she will not be able to satisfy her quota, if we continue down the same path, and I don’t blame her. It’s her job that’s on the line.

    What I described to you is just one of the destructive aspects and outcomes of this neo-liberal system of “profits before the people”. Each aspect is alone capable of bringing the system down to its knees. There are many more components that define the characteristics of the broken system. From the greed and desires of the drug companies for a bigger bottom-line, to the victimization of the public every year in order to sign them up, often for no reason at all, with a different insurance network — we are all set up for the big fall. Yes, the invisible hand of the neo-liberal capitalism might eventually adjust itself, but when and at what price? Just look at the healthcare industry’s statistics on COVID-19: number of people lost, the private sector’s profits.

    No worries, down the road to perdition, but is America going to be great again!?

    The post American Healthcare System first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Martyn Bradbury’s 17 editorial ‘no go’ zones for the NZ media

    COMMENTARY: By Martyn Bradbury

    The Daily Blog gongs
    THE DAILY BLOG’S 2022 INFAMOUS MEDIA GONGS

    Last month The Daily Blog offered its New Year infamous news media gongs — and blasts — for 2022. In this extract, editor and publisher Martyn Bradbury names the mainstream media “blind spots”.

    Graham Adams over at The Platform made the argument this year that the failure of mainstream media to engage with the debates occurring online is a threat to democracy.

    With trust in New Zealand media at an all time low, I wondered what is the list of topics that you simply are NOT allowed to discuss on NZ mainstream media.

    Here is my list of 17 topics over 30 years in New Zealand media:

    1. Palestine: You cannot talk about the brutal occupation of Palestine by Israel in NZ media. It’s just not allowed, any discussion has to be framed as “Poor Israelis being terrorised by evil angry Muslims”. There is never focus on the brutal occupation and when it ever does emerge in the media it’s always insinuated that any criticism is anti-Semitism.
    2. Child Poverty NEVER adult poverty: We only talk about child poverty because they deserve our pity. Adults in poverty can go screw themselves. Despite numbering around 800,000, adults in poverty are there because they “choose” to be there. The most important myth of neoliberalism is that your success is all your own, as is your failure. If an adult is in poverty, neoliberal cultural mythology states that is all on them and we have no obligation to help. That’s why we only ever talk endlessly about children in poverty because the vast majority of hard-hearted New Zealanders want to blame adults in poverty on them so we can pretend to be egalitarian without actually having to implement any policy.
    3. The Neoliberal NZ experiment: You are never allowed to question the de-unionised work force that amputated wages, you can never question selling off our assets, you can never criticise the growth über alles mentality, you are never allowed to attack the free market outcomes and you can’t step back and evaluate the 35-year neoliberal experiment in New Zealand because you remind the wage slaves of the horror of it all.
    4. Class: You cannot point out that the demarcation line in a capitalist democracy like New Zealand is the 1 percent richest plus their 9 percent enablers vs the 90 percent rest of us. Oh, you can wank on and on about your identity and your feelings about your identity in a never ending intersectionist diversity pronoun word salad, but you can’t point out that it’s really the 90 percent us vs the 10 percent them class break down because that would be effective and we can’t have effective on mainstream media when feelings are the currency to audience solidarity in an ever diminishing pie of attention.
    5. Immigration: It must always be framed as positive. It can never be argued that it is a cheap and lazy growth model that pushes down wages and places domestic poor in competition with International student language school scams and exploited migrant workers. Any criticism of Immigration makes you a xenophobe and because the Middle Classes like travelling and have global skills for sale, they see any criticism of migrants as an attack on their economic privileges.
    6. Hypertourism: We are never allowed to ask “how many is too many, you greedies”. The tourism industry that doesn’t give a shit about us locals, live for the 4 million tourists who visit annually. We are not allowed to ask why that amount of air travel is sustainable, we are not allowed to ask why selling Red Bull and V at tourist stops is somehow an economic miracle and we are certainly not allowed to question why these tourists aren’t directly being taxed meaningfully for the infrastructure they clog.
    7. Dairy as a Sunset Industry: We are never allowed to point out that the millisecond the manufactured food industry can make synthetic milk powder, they will dump us as a base ingredient and the entire dairy industry overnight will collapse. With synthetic milks and meats here within a decade, it is time to radically cull herds, focus on only organic and free range sustainable herds and move away from mass production dairy forever. No one is allowed to mention the iceberg that is looming up in front of the Fonteera Titanic.
    8. B-E-L-I-E-V-E victims: It’s like How to Kill a MockingBird was never written. People making serious allegations should be taken seriously, not B-E-L-I-E-V-E-D. That’s a tad fanatical Christian for me. It’s led to a change in our sexual assault laws where the Greens and Labour removed the only defence to rape so as to get more convictions, which when you think about it, is cult like and terrifying. Gerrymandering the law to ensure conviction isn’t justice, but in the current B-E-L-I-E-V-E victims culture it sure is and anyone saying otherwise is probably a rape apologist who should be put in prison immediately.
    9. The Trans debate: This debate is so toxic and anyone asking any question gets immediately decried as transphobic. I’ve seen nuclear reactor meltdowns that are less radioactive than this debate. I’m so terrified I’m not going to say anything other than “please don’t hurt my family” for even mentioning it.
    10. It’s never climate change for this catastrophic weather event: Catastrophic weather event after catastrophic weather event but it’s never connected to global warming! It’s like the weather is changing cataclysmically around us but because it’s not 100 percent sure that that cigarette you are smoking right now is the one that causes that lump inside you to become cancer, so we can’t connect this catastrophic weather event with a climate warming model that states clearly that we will see more and more catastrophic weather events.
    11. Scoops: No New Zealand media will never acknowledge another media’s scoop in spite of a united front being able to generate more exposure and better journalism.
    12. Te Reo fanaticism: You are not allowed to point out that barely 5 percent of the population speak Te Reo and that everyone who militantly fires up about it being an “official language” never seem that antagonistic about the lack of sign language use. Look, my daughter goes to a Māori immersion class and when she speaks Te Reo it makes me cry joyfully and I feel more connected to NZ than any other single moment. But endlessly ramming it down people’s throats seems woke language policing rather than a shared cultural treasure. You can still be an OK human being and not speak Te Reo.
    13. Māori land confiscation: Māori suffered losing 95 percent of their land in less than a century, they were almost decimated by disease and technology brought via colonisation, they endured the 1863 Settlements Act, they survived blatant lies and falsehoods devised to create the pretext for confiscation, and saw violence in the Waikato. Māori have lived throughout that entire experience and still get told to be grateful because Pākehā brought blankets, tobacco and “technology”.
    14. The Disabled: Almost 25 percent of New Zealand is disabled, yet for such a staggeringly huge number of people, their interests get little mention in the mainstream media.
    15. Corporate Iwi: You can’t bring up that that the corporate model used for Iwi to negotiate settlements is outrageous and has created a Māori capitalist elite who are as venal as Pākehā capitalists.
    16. Police worship: One of the most embarrassing parts about living in New Zealand is the disgusting manner in which so many acquiesce to the police. It’s never the cop’s fault when they shoot someone, it’s never the cop’s fault when they chase people to their death, it’s never the cop’s fault for planting evidence, it’s never the cops fault for using interrogation methods that bully false confessions out of vulnerable people. I think there is a settler cultural chip on our shoulders that always asks the mounted constabulary to bash those scary Māori at the edge of town because we are frightened of what goes bump in the night. We willingly give police total desecration to kill and maim and frame as long as long as they keep us safe. It’s sickening.
    17. House prices will increase FOREVER! Too many middle class folk are now property speculators and they must see their values climb to afford the extra credit cards the bank sends them. We can never talk about house prices coming down. They must never fall. Screw the homeless, scre the generations locked out of home ownership and screw the working poor. Buying a house is only for the children of the middle classes now. Screw everyone else. Boomer cradle to the grave subsidisations that didn’t extend to any other generation. Free Ben and Jerry Ice Cream for every Boomer forever! ME! ME! ME!

    You’ll also note that because so many media are dependent on real estate advertising, there’s never been a better time to buy!

    Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury is a New Zealand media commentator, former radio and TV host, and former executive producer of Alt TV — a now-defunct alternative music and culture channel. He is publisher of The Daily Blog and writes blogs at Tumeke! and TDB. Republished with permission.

  • The First US Onslaught to “Weaken” Post-Cold War Russia

    The first post-cold war assault on Russia by the West began in the early 1990s well before the expansion of NATO. It took the form of a U.S.-induced economic depression in Russia that was deeper and more disastrous than the Great Depression that devastated the U.S. in the 1930s. And it came at a time when Russians were naively talking of a “Common European Home” and a common European security structure that would include Russia.

    The Disastrous Russian Depression Resulting from Western supervised “Shock Therapy.”

    The magnitude of this economic catastrophe was spelled out tersely in a recent essay by Paul Krugman who wondered whether many Americans are aware of the enormous disaster it was for Russia. Krugman is quite accurate in describing it – but not in identifying its cause.

    The graph below shows what happened to Russia beginning in the early 1990s as a result of the economic policies that were put in place under the guidance of U.S. advisors, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, perhaps the foremost among them. Sachs describes his contribution here. These policies drive an economy abruptly from a centrally planned economy with price controls to an economy where prices are determined by the market. This process is often described as “shock therapy.”

    The plot shown above is from the World Bank (The link is here.) in accord with the standards set by the World Bank under the policies of Creative Commons.

    The plot shows that, upon the onset of “shock therapy” in 1991, the economy of Russia crumbled to 57% of its level in 1989, a decline of 43%! By comparison the U.S. economy in the Great Depression of the 1930s fell to 70% of its pre-Depression level, a decline of 30%. The life expectancy dropped by roughly 4 years in Russia during that period. Poverty and hopelessness became the norm. From my experience, few Americans know of this, and fewer still understand its magnitude.

    “Shock Therapy” Applied to Poland Did Not Result in Prolonged Depression. Why?

    The data for Poland are also shown for comparison in the chart above. Why? Because “shock therapy” was also carried out in Poland beginning two years earlier than Russia, in 1989. A glance at the graph above shows the striking difference between the two and the graph below reinforces that view. Below the real GDP’s for both Russia and Poland normalized to a value of 100 for the first year of their transitions to a market economy are shown in a 2001 IMF staff paper by Gerard Roland, “Ten Years After…Transition and Economics.” (China is also included by Roland. One lesson is that China moved to a market economy without “shock therapy,” did so with astonishing success and without putting itself at the mercy of the largesse of the U.S.)

    Roland, Gérard. “Ten Years after … Transition and Economics.” IMF Staff Papers 48 (2001): 29–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4621689. Figure 1. Cited by Krugman here.

    It is immediately clear that Poland went through a brief downturn lasting two years but recovered quickly, unlike Russia which continued in a slump for 16 years. Why the difference between the two? A big part of the answer is provided by economist Jeffrey Sachs who was in the forefront of advisors for the transitions in both countries and hence is a man who knows whereof he speaks. As Sachs put it in an interview here on DemocracyNow!, he was present during a “controlled experiment” where he could observe what led to such different outcomes. He says:

    I had a controlled experiment, because I was economic adviser both to Poland and to the Soviet Union in the last year of President Gorbachev and to President Yeltsin in the first two years of Russian independence, 1992, ’93. My job was finance, to actually help Russia find a way to address, as you (the interviewer, Juan Gonzalez) described it, a massive financial crisis. And my basic recommendation in Poland, and then in Soviet Union and in Russia, was: To avoid a societal crisis and a geopolitical crisis, the rich Western world should help to tamp down this extraordinary financial crisis that was taking place with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union.

    Well, interestingly, in the case of Poland, I made a series of very specific recommendations, and they were all accepted by the U.S. government — creating a stabilization fund, canceling part of Poland’s debts, allowing many financial maneuvers to get Poland out of the difficulty. And, you know, I patted myself on the back. ‘Oh, look at this!’

    I make a recommendation, and one of them, for a billion dollars, stabilization fund, was accepted within eight hours by the White House. So, I thought, ‘Pretty good.’

    Then came the analogous appeal on behalf of, first, Gorbachev, in the final days, and then President Yeltsin. Everything I recommended, which was on the same basis of economic dynamics, was rejected flat out by the White House. I didn’t understand it, I have to tell you, at the time. I said, ‘But it worked in Poland.’ And they’d stare at me blankly. In fact, an acting secretary of state in 1992 said, ‘Professor Sachs, it doesn’t even matter whether I agree with you or not. It’s not going to happen.’

    And it took me, actually, quite a while to understand the underlying geopolitics. Those were exactly the days of Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and what became the Project for the New American Century, meaning for the continuation of American hegemony. I didn’t see it at the moment, because I was thinking as an economist, how to help overcome a financial crisis. But the unipolar politics was taking shape, and it was devastating. Of course, it left Russia in a massive financial crisis that led to a lot of instability that had its own implications for years to come.

    But even more than that, what these people were planning, early on, despite explicit promises to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was the expansion of NATO. And Clinton started the expansion of NATO with the three countries of Central Europe — Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic — and then George W. Bush Jr. added seven countries — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic states — but right up against Russia…

    The Neocons at Work, Carrying Out “The Wolfowitz Doctrine,” the Latest Expression of the Post-WWII U.S. Drive for Total Global Domination.

    It is quite clear that the goal of the United States was not to help Russia but to bring it down, and Sachs correctly links that to the US quest for global hegemony first set forth in the months before Pearl Harbor and reiterated by the neocons who are now its champions. Among them Sachs mentions Paul Wolfowitz whose “doctrine” sums up the goals of the post-Soviet era with the words:

    Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.

    We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

    What better way to achieve this goal than to reduce the economy of Russia to a basket case? Sachs draws a direct line from the Great Russian Depression of the 1990’s and early 2000’s to the expansion of NATO, the U.S. backed coup of a duly elected President in Ukraine in 2014 and on to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, also designed to “weaken” Russia. The hand of the US was at work every step of the way.

    NYT’s Krugman Fails to Discuss the Hand of the US in the Great Russian Depression – not part of the Narrative That’s Fit to Print.

    In his article Krugman describes the difference in outcomes between Poland and Russia but he does not describe different factors that distinguish the two countries and might serve as causes of the different outcomes. Sachs points out one such cause which he witnessed firsthand.

    Krugman makes no mention of Sachs’s experience which Sachs himself has discussed repeatedly in interviews (like the one quoted for example, here) and in various written accounts going back to 1993 and a lengthy account in 2012 wherein he describes the lack of aid from the West as his “greatest frustration.” Sachs’s account is no secret and certainly a competent economist would know of it.

    Certainly there were other factors contributing to this tragedy which Sachs himself discusses here. But there is no doubt that the actions of the US and the West were critical factors in the Great Russian Depression. An understanding of this goes a long way in making sense of events leading up to the present moment of U.S. proxy war in Ukraine and the brutal sanctions imposed on Russia. This understanding, however, does not fit the narrative to which the NYT confines itself – and its readers.

    The post The First US Onslaught to “Weaken” Post-Cold War Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We’ve Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?



    When the president of the poorest, most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invoked in the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we’ve reached Peak Zelensky.

    It’s a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media’s shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, “Methinks the media doth hype too much.”

    Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity.

    Let’s remember that before ascending to his country’s presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky’s greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I’m not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I’m not joking.

    Now, he’s Europe’s George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.

    Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.

    Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn’t want you to know.

    The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.

    In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?

    Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.

    In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine’s electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?

    The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.’s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

    Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don’t. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?

    On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, “Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo.”

    Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.

    That’s more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn’t even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.

    Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.

    The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.’ imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.

    France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.

    Macron suggested in a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. “We need to prepare what we are ready to do…to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.”

    Scholz was even more specific. In an article in Foreign Affairs he declared, “We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe.”

    This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.’s maximalist position before the start of the War, that Russia’s security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.

    Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In a Wall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, “Our focus is…to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.”

    Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.’ earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken’s opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.

    Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.

    Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It’s the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: “The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis.” Ding. “Contestant #3?” “Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?”

    A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn’t have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.

    Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin’s highest priority and what he asked for–and was denied–in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.

    U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland—some of the best in the world—for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.

    Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they’ve constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.

    Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let’s be honest, often abused–since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.

    Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s “State of the Planet” Message Revisited

    Imagine being confined to a space the size of a car’s interior in the pitch blackness of outer space for three days. Your spacecraft is the Apollo 14 Command Module “Kitty Hawk,” returning from the moon. In order to maintain thermal balance, the module will rotate 360° every two minutes, as the sun, the moon and stars, 10xs brighter and 10xs more prevalent, come into view repeatedly every 120 seconds. For Edgar Mitchell, NASA Lunar Module Pilot of the Apollo 14 moon mission in 1971 it was mesmerizing, inspiring universal connectiveness, a transcendental shift.

    Other astronauts have experienced the Overview Effect, a cognitive shift when viewing the planet from outer space, an awe-inspiring transcendental state, overwhelming, often overpowering emotions sometimes accompanied by an ingenious realization of a surging connectiveness of people, the planet, the universe, all pulled together at its origin, a molecule.

    This essay discusses Mitchell’s State of the Planet message as well as his tireless efforts to understand universal connectiveness and including special mention of the reality, or not, of UFOs, as described in his book: From Outer Space to Inner Space (New Page Books, 2022).

    Dr. Edgar Mitchell (1930-2016) MIT ’64, US Naval officer, test pilot, aeronautical engineer delivered A Letter Message about the State of the Planet to his colleagues of the Board of Advisors of Visionary Alternatives, insisting on the importance of educating people about the true state of the planet, to wit:

    It is imperative that adults and children are made acutely aware of this situation. Only a global grassroots effort can hope to grab the attention of our political, economic and institutional leaders. We, as a planetary society, need to generate the appropriate attention to these critical problems now through our individual economic and political choices before it is too late. Unfortunately, many people are not yet convinced of the need for economic restructuring.

    Hmm.

    Many of my colleagues and I believe that our global civilization is on an economic path that is environmentally unsustainable, one that is leading us toward economic decline and eventual collapse… Our global situation is incredibly challenging today because of the adoption of the western economic model (e.g., materialism, consumerism, and throw-away mentality) throughout much of the developed and developing economies of the world.

    Mitchell listed critical planetary boundaries under siege: (1) rapid population growth beyond sustainability: 1 billion in 1804, 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1960, 8 billion in 2022; (2) degradation of life-sourcing ecosystems; (3) excessive resource depletion such as shrinking forests; (4) eroding soils; (5) failing freshwater resources; (6) more frequent crop-withering heat waves; (7) collapsing fisheries; (8) expanding desertification; (9) frequency of extraordinary powerful storms; (10) shrinking natural resources; (11) melting glaciers.

    Six years following the passing of Edgar Mitchell, the onset of the 2020s has witnessed considerable, in many cases unprecedented, outbreaks of every item on his list, exceeding planetary boundaries but much worse and much sooner than he thought possible. He was convinced that the only solution to collapse of planetary ecosystems would be a “massive global grass roots educational effort” to inform people how to move “our planetary society onto a sustainable path.”

    Hopefully, his personal mission to inform the public and offer suggestions for how to move forward will continue by way of his foundation to expose the most threatening situation of the 21st century, which is a nearly out of control climate system that is broadly ignored for its true reality and impact.

    Moreover, he called for “the need for economic restructuring.” Mitchell likely recognized the multitude problems with neoliberal capitalism. He implies that neoliberalism should be tossed in favor of a better system, for example, Herman Daly’s Steady-State Economy that recognizes a dependence upon the biosphere for all materials and energy and disposal of waste in harmony within planetary boundaries. Neoliberalism does the opposite by overusing, abusing, ignoring boundaries as if they do not exist. Thus, the planet becomes nothing more than a vehicle for private wealth creation, but for whom?

    Still, there are some hopeful signs. One brilliant idea is Elizabeth G. Boulton’s Plan E: “After COP27. What Are The Options? An Introduction to Plan E.”

    Elizabeth G. Boulton, PhD, Australian National University and MA/Climate Policy, University of Melbourne is a former army major in the Australian Defence Force, having served in East Timor (1999) and Iraq (2004) and logistics work in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan. She was a lead research officer at army headquarters.

    Kitty Hawk’s Fiery Return from Outer Space, 1971

    In a flashback from a long time ago, 51 years ago on February 5, 1971, Kitty Hawk was hurtling at 17,500 mph, burning through Earth’s atmosphere at up to 2700°F, bringing home astronauts Edgar Mitchell and Alan Shepard from a 9-day roundtrip to the moon. Mitchell had experienced a lifetime-changing event, an epiphany, an inner connection to “the nature of consciousness.” He’d never be the same person.

    With a background in astronomy from Harvard and MIT and educational depth in science, he came to the profound realization that molecules in his body and the molecules of his spacecraft and the molecules of his spacecraft partner, Commander Alan Shepard, were prototypes and perhaps manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. This was a visceral experience brought on by overwhelmingly powerful feelings of “bliss” and “ecstasy” like he’d never previously experienced.

    “The sensation was altogether foreign. Somehow, I felt tuned into something much larger than myself, something much larger than the planet in the window. Something incomprehensively big.” (From Outer Space To Inner Space, p. 69)

    “I saw how my very existence was irrevocably connected with the movement and formation of planets, stars, and galaxies — the ineluctable result of the explosion of an immensely hot and dense dot at the center of the universe billions of years ago. Or, if quasi-steady state theorists are correct, as it now appears they may be — the ineluctable result of continuous matter creation in super clusters of galaxies,” Ibid, p. 81.

    Today, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched Christmas Day, December 25, 2021, which orbits the Sun at one million miles away from Earth, dramatically and powerfully expands upon the same continuous matter creation that Mitchell discussed in his book. JWST cruises throughout L2, the second sun-Earth Lagrange point, which allows it to always stay in line with Earth while it orbits the Sun.

    In time, Edgar Mitchell came to understand that the “stories” told to us by science of who we are were perhaps wrong, and “stories” told to us by religion about who we are were also perhaps wrong. This led to an awareness of the nature of consciousness as an answer to who we are in our universe, a much broader canvas than taught in science and religion.

    As a prologue to recognition of the nature of consciousness, his studies taught that 500 years ago an early adherent was Rene Descartes, who claimed we have body and mind of the physical, but the spiritual belongs to a different realm of reality that doesn’t interact. Thereafter, it wasn’t until the 19th century when Max Planck’s theory established pillars of quantum mechanics that something was found missing from equations of existence in a broad sense.

    According to Mitchell’s book, consciousness is what the quantum world is all about. A practical example: Mother and father go out for dinner and leave little Johnny-junior home with the babysitter. Halfway thru dinner, mom jumps up, something’s wrong with Johnny at home. She calls home and is told Johnny fell out of this highchair and bumped his head, screaming bloody murder. Mom knew that because of quantum entanglement. We call this behavior intuition or a sixth sense. It is a fundamental property of nature.

    According to Mitchell, 40 years of study taught him that consciousness exists throughout all of nature and matter, and it begins with a quantum property of particles together that subsequently separate from each other but maintain a correlation regardless of where they go. or nonlocality, meaning that it happens faster than the speed of light. Therefore, the speed of light is not a fundamental aspect of consciousness and propagation of consciousness.

    According to Mitchell, when describing our universe, rather that mention of matter and energy, which come from Newtonian physics, we must describe the universe as matter, energy, and awareness, adding this fundamental to nature that we did not know and appreciate until the 20th century.

    Dr. Mitchell founded Noetics Foundation to investigate consciousness, ongoing for 38 years, eventually coming up with a quantum hologram. “The universe is self-organizing, intelligent, creative, trial and error interactive learning participatory informationally nonlocally interconnected evolving quantum system.” (Source: Edgar D. Mitchells’ Consciousness Presentation, University of Advancing Technologies induction into the Leonardo DaVinci Society for The Society of Thinking, 2011)

    We are part of the living intelligent universe and cannot be separated from it. It’s all interconnected with the entire system. We are all matter that comes from the basic energy source we refer to as “zero-point energy field.”

    The Quantum World is the most basic information system that we know of, and we live in it. It was here before our solar system developed.

    “Energy, we know is the foundation of all matter; information is the foundation of knowing. Both were present at the moment of creation, whether in a big bang, or in a continuous process of creation in galaxies. It is likely that just as energy produced the physical structure that we recognize as waves and particles, in our macro-world, the seeds of consciousness were also present to produce awareness and intentionality,” Ibid, p. 196.

    The Afterword of From Outer Space to Inner Space recognizes the Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded by Mitchell, as approaching its fiftieth anniversary, acknowledging Edgar Mitchell’s contribution to “a better understanding of consciousness and its capabilities.” As a result, concepts like the mind-body relationship, the role of spirituality in healing, and the mental and physical benefits of meditation, once considered laughable, have gone mainstream.

    Of more than casual interest, the postscript to the book is entitled — It’s Time to End the UFO Coverup. As a boy, Edgar’s family lived in Roswell, NM, the site of the July 1947 UFO incident: “That incident involved the alleged crash of a UFO, possibly two, and their retrieval by the Army Air Force, along with their occupants,” p. 263.

    Some years after his Apollo flight, Mitchell went back to Roswell and met old-timers who had been involved in Roswell events in 1947. One person was with the sheriff’s department and went to the crash site to supervise traffic in the area. Another person was an officer at Roswell Air Force Base where the crash debris and dead aliens were taken. For many years, the locals had been silenced by military authorities, but now they told their stories.

    Interestingly, one of the locals was Jesse Marcel, Jr. the son of Major Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer who was one of the first military personnel to the scene. He brought home pieces of the crashed UFO to show family members the remarkable structure of indestructible material, which he claimed, “was not of this Earth.” One item fascinated young Jesse. It was a small beam with purple-hued hieroglyphics inscribed on it. (Source: “Roswell Author Who Said He Handled UFO Crash Debris Dies at 76,” Guardian, August 28, 2013)

    Another local that Mitchell talked to was a family member of the local funeral home that provided coffins for the dead at the crash site.

    “I have had additional confirmation from very high-ranking members of several governments that UFOs are real, and that ETs have made contact with Earth. I am not at liberty to disclose the names of my informants, but they are from European nations, including the UK. Their sources of knowledge: Their own militaries’ studies of the subject… So, why does the coverup continue?” p. 265

    Meanwhile, according to a recent LiveScience article — “US Military Reports ‘several hundred’ UFO Sightings in 2022, Pentagon Officials Claim” — “UFO reports from U.S. military personnel are flooding the government’s new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). The U.S government’s brand-new UFO-tracking office has been open for half a year, but business is already booming.”

    Of special interest is an article entitled “Wild New Paper Suggests We Could Detect Gravitational Waves From Alien Megacraft.” ScienceAlert highlights a public benefit research institute named Applied Physics that announced a potential breakthrough in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) via the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory’s ability to detect gravitational waves from accelerating astrophysical sources, possibly detecting an “extra-terrestrial mega-technology” such as a “Rapid And/or Massive Accelerating spacecraft.”

    “I am persuaded, utterly, and completely, that we are being visited by extraterrestrials.” (Edgar Mitchell)

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  • The Perils of Pious Neoliberalism in the Austerity State

    Reference photograph: Sandinistas at the Walls of the National Guard Headquarters: ‘Molotov Man’, Estelí, Nicaragua, July 16th, 1979, by Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

    Reference photograph: Sandinistas at the Walls of the National Guard Headquarters: ‘Molotov Man’, Estelí, Nicaragua, July 16th, 1979, by Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

    The International Labour Organisation’s Global Wage Report 2022–23 tracks the horrendous collapse of real wages for billions of people around the planet. The gaping distance between the incomes and wealth of 99% of the world’s population from the incomes and wealth of the billionaires and near-trillionaires who make up the richest 1% is appalling. During the pandemic, when most of the world has experienced a dramatic loss in their livelihoods, the ten richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes. This extreme wealth inequality, now entirely normal in our world, has produced immense and dangerous social consequences.

    If you take a walk in any city on the planet, not just in the poorer nations, you will find larger and larger clusters of housing that are congested with destitution. They go by many names: bastis, bidonville, daldongneh, favelas, gecekondu, kampung kumuh, slums, and Sodom and Gomorrah. Here, billions of people struggle to survive in conditions that are unnecessary in our age of massive social wealth and innovative technology. But the near-trillionaires seize this social wealth and prolong their half-century tax strike against governments, which paralyses public finances and enforces permanent austerity on the working class. The constricting squeeze of austerity defines the world of the bastis and the favelas as people constantly struggle to overcome the obstinate realities of hunger and poverty, a near absence of drinking water and sewage systems, and a shameful lack of education and medical care. In these bidonvilles and slums, people are forced to create new forms of everyday survival and new forms of belief in a future for themselves on this planet.

    Neighbourhood residents and other guests participate in a popular bible study in Petrolina, in the state of Pernambuco, 2019. Reference photograph sourced from the Popular Communication Centre

    Reference photograph: Neighbourhood residents and other guests participate in a popular bible study in Petrolina, in the state of Pernambuco, 2019. Sourced from the Popular Communication Centre (Brazil).

    These forms of everyday survival can be seen in the self-help organisations – almost always run by women – that exist in the harshest environments, such as inside Africa’s largest slum, Kibera (Nairobi, Kenya), or in environments supported by governments with few resources, such as in Altos de Lídice Commune (Caracas, Venezuela). The Austerity State in the capitalist world has abandoned its elementary duty of relief, with non-governmental organisations and charities providing necessary but insufficient band-aids for societies under immense stress.

    Not far from the charities and self-help organisations sit a persistent fixture in the planet of slums: gangs, the employment agencies of distress. These gangs assemble the most distressed elements of society – mostly men – to manage a range of illegal activities (drugs, sex trafficking, protection rackets, gambling). From Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl (Mexico City, Mexico) to Khayelitsha (Cape Town, South Africa) to Orangi Town (Karachi, Pakistan), the presence of impoverished thugs, from petty thieves or malandros to members of large-scale gangs, is ubiquitous. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the favelados (‘slum dwellers’) of Antares call the entrance of their neighbourhood bocas (‘mouths’), the mouths from which drugs can be bought and the mouths that are fed by the drug trade.

    Bishop Sérgio Arthur Braschi of the Diocese of Ponta Grossa (in the state of Paraná) blesses food that Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) donated to 500 families in need, 2021. Reference photograph: Jade Azevedo (MST-Paraná)

    Reference photograph: Bishop Sérgio Arthur Braschi of the Diocese of Ponta Grossa (in the state of Paraná) blesses food that Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) donated to 500 families in need, 2021, by Jade Azevedo.

    In this context of immense poverty and social fragmentation, people turn to different kinds of popular religions for relief. There are practical reasons for this turn, of course, since churches, mosques, and temples provide food and education as well as places for community gatherings and activities for children. Where the state mostly appears in the form of the police, the urban poor prefer to take refuge in charity organisations that are often connected in some way or another to religious orders. But these institutions do not draw people in only with hot meals or evening songs; there is a spiritual allure that should not be minimised.

    Our researchers in Brazil have been studying the Pentecostal movement for the past few years, conducting ethnographic research across the country to understand the appeal of this rapidly growing denomination. Pentecostalism, a form of evangelical Christianity, emerged as a site of concern because it has begun to shape the consciousness of the urban poor and the working class in many countries with traditionalist ideas and has been key in efforts to transform these populations into the mass base of the New Right. Dossier no. 59, Religious Fundamentalism and Imperialism in Latin America: Action and Resistance (December 2022), researched and written by Delana Cristina Corazza and Angelica Tostes, synthesises the research of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Brazil) working group on evangelism, politics, and grassroots organising. The text charts the rise of the Pentecostal movement in the context of Latin America’s turn to neoliberalism and offers a granular analysis of why these new faith traditions have emerged and why they dovetail so elegantly with the sections of the New Right (including, in the Brazilian context, with the political fortunes of Jair Bolsonaro and the Bolsonaristas).

    Participants of a march and vigil organised by the Love Conquers Hate Christian Collective light candles during a prayer with believers of various faiths in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, ‘joined together for the same values: life, liberty and the defence of human dignity as Christ taught us’, they declared. Reference photograph by Gabriel Castilho

    Reference photograph: Participants of a march and vigil organised by the Love Conquers Hate Christian Collective light candles during a prayer with believers of various faiths in Rio de Janeiro, 2018, by Gabriel Castilho.

    In the 19th century, a very young Karl Marx captured the essence of religious desire amongst the downtrodden: ‘Religious suffering’, he wrote, ‘is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’. It is erroneous to assume that the turn to forms of religion is merely about the desperate need for goods that the Austerity State has not been willing to provide. There is more at stake here, far more indeed than Pentecostalism, which has earned our attention, but which is not alone in its work in the slums of the urban poor. Trends similar to Pentecostalism are visible in societies that are dominated by other religious traditions. For instance, the da’wa (‘preachers’) of the Arab world, such as the Egyptian televangelist Amr Khaled, provide a similar kind of balm, while in India, the Art of Living Foundation and a range of small-time sadhus (‘holy men’) along with the Tablighi Jamaat (‘Society for Spreading Faith’) movement provide their own solace.

    What unites these social forces is that they do not focus on eschatology, the concern with death and judgment that governs older religious traditions. These new religious forms are focused on life and on living (‘I am the resurrection and the life’, from John 11:25, is a favourite of Pentecostals). To live is to live in this world, to seek fortune and fame, to adopt all the ambitions of a neoliberal society into religion, to pray not to save one’s soul but for a high rate of return. This attitude is called the Life Gospel or the Prosperity Gospel, whose essence is captured in Amr Khaled’s questions: ‘How can we change the whole twenty-four hours into profit and energy? How can we invest the twenty-four hours in the best way?’. The answer is through productive work and prayer, a combination that the geographer Mona Atia calls ‘pious neoliberalism’.

    Members of the Gullah community in Georgia (United States) participate in a ‘ring shout’ during a service in a ‘praise house’, ca. 1930s. Reference photograph: Doing the Ring Shout in Georgia, photographer unknown, sourced from the Lorenzo Dow Turner Papers, Anacostia Community Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

    Reference photograph: Doing the Ring Shout in Georgia, ca. 1930s, photographer unknown. Sourced from the Lorenzo Dow Turner Papers, Anacostia Community Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

    Amidst the despair of great poverty in the Austerity State, these new religious traditions provide a form of hope, a prosperity gospel that suggests that God wants those who struggle to gain wealth in this world and that measures salvation not in terms of divine grace in the afterlife but in the present balance of one’s bank account. Through the affective seizure of hope, these religious institutions, by and large, promote social ideals that are deeply conservative and hateful towards progress (particularly towards LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and sexual freedom).

    Our dossier, an opening salvo into understanding the emergence of this range of religious institutions in the world of the urban poor, holds fast to this seizure of the hope of billions of people:

    In order to build progressive dreams and visions of the future, we must foster hope among the people that can be lived in their daily reality. We must also recover and translate our history and the struggle for social rights into popular organisation by creating spaces for education, culture, and community in which people can gain better understandings of reality and engage in daily experiences of collective solidarity, leisure, and celebration. In these endeavours, it is important not to neglect or dismiss new or different ways of interpreting the world, such as through religion, but, rather, to foster open-minded and respectful dialogue between them to build unity around shared progressive values.

    This is an invitation to a conversation and to praxis around working-class hope that is rooted in the struggles to transcend the Austerity State rather than surrender to it, as ‘pious neoliberalism’ does.

    Reference photograph: The March of Daisies (Marcha das Margaridas), a public action in Brasilia in 2019 involving more than 100,000 women, by Natália Blanco (KOINONIA Ecunumical Presence and Service). Sourced from the ACT Brazil Ecumenical Forum (FEACT).

    In February 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, went to the town of Maarat al-Nu’man and beheaded a seventy-year-old statue of the 11th century poet Abu al-Alaa al-Ma’arri. The old poet angered them because he is often thought of as an atheist, although, in truth, he was mainly anti-clerical. In his book Luzum ma la yalzam, al-Ma’arri wrote of the ‘crumbling ruins of the creeds’ in which a scout rode and sang, ‘The pasture here is full of noxious weeds’. ‘Among us falsehood is proclaimed aloud’, he wrote, ‘but truth is whispered… Right and Reason are denied a shroud’. No wonder that the young terrorists – inspired by their own gospel of certainty – decapitated the statue made by the Syrian sculptor Fathi Mohammed. They could not bear the thought of humanity resplendent.

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  • Another Charter School Abandons Parents, Students, and Teachers

    Charter schools close every week, leaving many parents, students, and teachers out in the cold. Even worse, these “free market” schools governed by unelected private persons often close with no warning to anyone, leaving everyone blindsided.

    Charter schools typically close for poor academic performance, corruption, or mismanagement, and it is common for all three to occur simultaneously.

    The average person often wonders how such a thing is possible and allowed to happen in the first place. How can there be so many outsourced schools that open and close regularly? Why is such chaos and anarchy permitted? Who thinks this is positive and healthy?

    The latest charter school to close abruptly and leave everyone stunned is Placer Academy Charter School in Rocklin, California. No one saw the closure coming. The disturbing announcement from the school came out of nowhere. “The abrupt closure plans leave the families of more than 200 students wondering where to turn on such short notice,” reports KCRA Channel 3. Echoing the sentiments of other parents who were stunned by the surprise announcement, one parent, Wendy Jenkins, said, “I could not believe it was real and I started to cry. We just kept reading it [the sudden closure notice] and reading it over – hoping we weren’t reading what we were seeing … the school was closing, and we were only going to have four days to find another fit.”

    In the coming weeks and months, more charter schools will fail and close across the country, leaving even more parents, students, and teachers feeling violated. This pattern has not changed in over 30 years.

    Nationally, a lengthy 2020 report from the Network for Public Education (NPE), “Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures From 1999 – 2017,” showed that a staggering number of charter schools closed just a few years after they opened, displacing more than a million students. The real numbers are higher. Indeed, 5,000 charter schools have closed since their inception 31 years ago. That is an astounding number given that there are only 7,500 charter schools in existence today. And according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 235 charter schools closed just in the 2019-20 academic year. On average that is more than four charter school closures per week. A textbook example of “free market carnage.”

    Most of the students cast off by these segregated schools will return to their public schools, which accepts all students at all times and usually has more nurses, more experienced teachers, better employee retirement plans, stronger programs, and more resources than deregulated charter schools. Even in their chronically-underfunded condition, heavily-vilified public schools generally offer more than charter schools.

    So far, the neoliberal narrative that “public-schools-are-failing-and-evil-and-you-need-to-get-your-kid-into-a-privately-run-charter-school-immediately” has resulted mainly in greater profits for charter school owners, while lowering the level of education and culture in society. By funneling public wealth into the hands of narrow private interests, charter schools have also harmed the economy and undermined a modern nation-building project.

    People reject the idea that the only choices available to them are public schools methodically set up to fail by neoliberals, or privately-run deregulated charter schools created by the same neoliberals in order to get richer under the banner of high ideals. The public rejects this false dichotomy and condemns neoliberals for their destructive actions.

    All should unite to oppose the commodification of education and to defend the right to education so that every child has free and easy access to world-class, publicly-governed public schools.

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  • Multiple Breadbasket Failures as Radicals Stop Private Jets

    Global warming is taking a big bite out of the planet. Unprecedented severe droughts dry up major commercial waterways and extreme conditions have either diminished or partially decimated many crops in the US, Europe, China, Australia, the Indian subcontinent and throughout regions of Africa.

    This article explores the impact of “multiple breadbasket failures” as defined by UN research. As well as a discussion of angry radicals that stop private jets, thus challenging in direct fashion a source at the pinnacle of climate issues, discussed in the final 7 paragraphs.

    But first: (1) What will stop global warming? (2) Will global warming get worse even as countries go to net zero by 2050, which will continue adding CO2 every year for the next 27 years? (3) Therefore, does net zero by 2050 imply loss of commercial waterways like the Danube and loss of major water reservoirs like Lake Mead, both of which nearly failed in 2022? (4) Is net zero by 2050 a ruse?

    The UN-sponsored Conference of the Parties COP annual get-togethers have punted on any kind of serious diminishment of fossil fuel emissions, as the fossil fuel industry itself is cranking up big time by planning to spend well over $1T to develop more oil and gas, which, in turn, ultimately brings on severe droughts that destroys crops and bleeds commercial waterways of navigability as reservoirs hit dead pool status.

    It’s an endless circuitous spectacle of insanity in pursuit of elusive infinite economic growth bumping up against planetary limitations, as we currently use 1.5 more biocapacity than the planet can regenerate (Global Footprint Network).

    It’s also a guaranteed losing proposition, but who really cares is the problem. If it were otherwise, meaning if world leaders really cared, then there’d be all kinds of worldwide coordinated Marshall Plans funding renewables, climate restoration, refreezing the Arctic, etc. but that’s not the case, not even close.

    More than 80% of the world’s population lives in countries that are currently running ecological deficits, using more resources than the ecosystems can regenerate. Meanwhile, global warming is hammering that deficit hard and harder via soaring drought conditions around the world.

    According to the World Economic Forum’s coverage of drought conditions, a new UN study claims drought frequency and duration has increased by nearly a third since 2000. A 33% increase on a biomass as large as the planet in only 20+ years is almost impossible to phantom. How is it even possible in such a short timeframe? (Source: “Droughts are Getting Worse Around the World,” World Economic Forum, August 2022)

    The Drought in Numbers 2022 Report concludes: “Sustainable and efficient agricultural management techniques are needed to grow more food on less land and with less water, and humans must change their relationships with food, fodder and fibre – moving toward plant-based diets and stemming the consumption of animals,” Ibid.

    Stop Eating Animals helps resolve many ecosystem issues.

    UN researchers refer to global warming’s damage to major growing regions as “Multiple Breadbasket Failures.” They know, as we all know, unless global warming lessens soon, meaning real soon, multiple breadbasket failures will get worse. “A study of global hotspots of heat stress due to climate change showed areas of Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia and North America (40–60 degrees N.), which include the major grain producing areas of the world, as being particularly vulnerable.” (Source: Anthony Janetos, et al, “The Risks of Multiple Breadbasket Failures in the 21st Century: A Science Research Agenda,” Boston University, March 2017)

    The risks are well defined: Only 23% of total cropland in the world accounts for most of total global cereal production of three major crops, i.e., maize (70%) wheat (69%) and rice (85%) according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, Statistics Division. The Rub: Those producing areas are the most exposed or most “particularly vulnerable.”

    The impact of devastating drought and food vulnerability is nowhere more prevalent than the Horn of Africa where tens of millions of people are up against the wall with 9,000,000 animals already dead, a result of 60 months of terrifying brutal drought. It is an example of global warming-enhanced drought conditions gone bonkers, at its worse. According to Dr. Deepmala Mahia of CARE International, 50,000,000 people are “one step away from starvation.” (Source: “Hunger Crisis in Horn of Africa Grows as Drought Persists,” Voice of America News, VOA, September 23, 2022)

    Imagine being one of fifty million one step away from starvation. This represents a gruesome global warming-enhancement story that unfortunately the world choses to ignore as thousands of furrowed brows of global leaders and high-ranking bureaucrats and climate scientists gather annually at UN-sponsored COPs to discuss how bad climate change was in previous years… but do nothing meaningful enough to resolve it.

    Meanwhile, global warming has turned ferocious and mean-spirited like never before. The trend is ominously right around the proverbial corner until and unless a massive worldwide coordinated campaign stops fossil fuel dead in its tracks. It’s impossible to sugar coat the devastating impact of fossil fuel emissions.

    Scientists are now discussing a new Era of Climate Change-Driven Simultaneous Food Supply Failures: The UN World Food Programme has warned that climate change is now the driving force behind global hunger. For example, extreme temperatures starting in March of 2022, and lasting for weeks, badly damaged India’s rice crop, which is 40% of the world rice trade. Vegetable yields in parts of India were down by 50%. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s floods reduced the rice harvest by 30%. Pakistan is the world’s fourth largest exporter of grain.

    Gernot Laganda, Director of Climate at the United Nations World Food Programme: “Climate change is an important driver in the current increase in global hunger. Right now, 345 million people are facing acute food insecurity – which is an increase from 135 million since 2019.” (Source: “Scientists Warn of Breadbasket Failure Because of Climate Change,” Deccan Herald, Sept. 5, 2022)

    In only three years’ time the number of people facing “acute food insecurity” has ballooned by 200,000,000, up 150%. At 345 million it’s the size of the United States. It’s little wonder that mass migrations have become brazen constant features of the Northern Hemisphere. People turn desperate, move to new territory, encounter pushback by sadistic white supremacists, especially in the former colonial empires of Europe and America and all hell breaks loose in local communities that heretofore were stable and quiet, peaceful no longer.

    Acute food insecurity has not hit the US, yet. Americans generally ignore the issue, but as a precursor to a tough challenging future, global warming hit US crops hard: (1) corn at its lowest yield in 10 years (2) hard red wheat the smallest since 1963 (3) Texas cotton farmers walked away from 70% of their crop because of paltry harvest (4) California’s rice harvest down 50%. The problem is more widespread that it appears on the surface, as drought has hit 40% of the US for the past 100+ weeks, according to USDA’s Brad Rippey: “Precisely where that 40 percent shifted over time, meaning different swaths of the country’s agricultural land have been affected at different times, spreading pain and difficult choices geographically and by crop.” (Source: “The Summer Drought’s Hefty Toll on American Crops,” Washington Post, Sept. 5, 2022)

    It is only too obvious that climate change madness must be reigned-in, or the future will turn very dark. As things stand, according to a McKinsey study, 2023 could witness a grain deficit of 60 million tons. (Source: “The Grain Shortage Caused by Global Food Crisis Could Correspond to the Annual Nutritional Intake of up to 250 Million People: McKinsey,” Helsinki Times, August 25, 2022)

    According to McKinsey, the pandemic of 2020 increased the price of grain, and “since then, drought-induced harvests have increased prices even more. With the ongoing war in Ukraine, there is a risk of a food crisis, which may become the most serious so far in the 21st century,” Ibid.

    According to the International Panel on Climate Change, IPCC: “Future projections in global yield trends of both maize and wheat indicate a significant decline; these declines can be attributed to the negative impacts of climate change arising from increasing greenhouse gas emissions.” (Source: The World’s Food Supply is Made Insecure by Climate Change, United Nations – Academic Impact)

    Declining crop yields effectively reverse the impact of the storied Green Revolution, aka: The Third Agricultural Revolution of some 50-70 years ago which saw dramatic increases in crop yields and production. Whereas a couple of generations later we’re going backwards, but the global population of 3 billion in 1960 has exploded to 8 billion today. Astonishingly, we’ve added 5 billion people during one lifetime! Whew! Meanwhile, global warming’s impact of less crop yield in the face of nearly triple population numbers has grave implications.

    The IPCC effectively researches and informs world leaders of the risks of climate change, as UN Secretary-General Guterres exclaims: “We are losing the fight of our lives.” In fact, they do a decent job of exposing risks. So, where’s the disconnect and failure to do something about the well-known death trap of fossil fuel emissions?

    The origin of the death trap is the economic system of neoliberal capitalism that focuses on profits and growth above all other considerations, oblivious to the health of crucial life-supporting ecosystems and certainly unruffled about global warming. Notably, and obvious for all to see, it generates a tiny flock of fabulously rich people that have nearly gained control over much of the world order. Therefore, maybe the answer to the current upside/down climate system is to upend the upside/down socio-economic system that in fact perpetuates fossil fuels at any costs towards an elusive infinity of growth. After all, that tiny flock basically controls the media, as well as holding major influence over the direction of UN-sponsored COPs. Thus, they have a certain level of control over the ultimate direction of fossil fuel usage or renewable energy sources as a replacement. Therefore, the ultimate question for the future direction of the planet’s climate system, and by extension, its food supply is whether neoliberal capitalism is so impregnable as to be immovable. If its iron-fisted grip over the socio-economic system cannot be broken, then the climate system is destined to break apart worse and ever worse and even worse under neoliberalism’s relentlessness push for elusive infinite growth. Significantly, it’s getting to be very expensive.

    What can be done beyond than tens of thousands of people meeting at world forums like the UN-sponsored COPs for climate change and biodiversity but without appreciable results? Meanwhile, the tiny flock of super wealthy are convinced “the market will bail us out.” After all, this is all they know. Ergo, in its infinite wisdom, the unfettered forces of neoliberal capitalism will solve the problem of global warming via human ingenuity. But unfettered neoliberal capitalism is what got us into this mess in the first place, and frankly it seems to like it.

    Moreover, they proclaim, grinning from ear to ear, we’ve got all-powerful clean fusion, which sparked for the first time ever only recently, creating more energy output than energy input for a mere fraction of a second. Yeah, maybe, but that’s likely off in the future by a few decades. Stop grinning!

    There is something else at work, something that goes well beyond 40,000 well-intentioned climate delegates at COP27 and all the other COP flops of the past 30 years, and its chutzpah is just starting to show enough influence over the masses to incite profound change in the direction of the infamous world order.

    Recently “700 self-described climate rebels breached the chain-link fence surrounding Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the world’s third-busiest hub for international passenger traffic, on November 5.” (Source: Christopher Ketcham & Charles Komanoff, “The Shutdown of ‘Luxury Emissions’ Should Be at the Center of Climate Revolt,” The Intercept, December 13, 2022)

    As it happened, bolt cutters pried open metal fences and ladders propped up against the 9-foot fence, as 700 rebels poured onto the tarmac to surround and effectively ground private jets for 6.5 hours, until police laboriously peeled the throng away.

    As reported from the scene, “The superrich have got used to polluting as they please with a total disregard for people and planet, and private jets are the pinnacle of these luxury emissions that we simply cannot afford,’ Jonathan Leggett, one of the activists, told us,” Ibid. 

    “For reasons both symbolic and practical, the climate movement must strike not just at pipelines and mines, but also at obscene wealth,” Ibid.

    “At the nexus of consumption and wealth sits luxury carbon. Which is why the Schiphol action was so strategic… The justification is unarguable. Large personal fortunes feed carbon consumption and make a mockery of programs to curb it. As well, the surplus wealth of the superrich is probably the lone source of capital that can finance the worldwide uptake of greener energy and also pay for adaptation where it’s most critical,” Ibid.

    “A few days after the Schiphol revolt, climate activists under the banner of Scientists Rebellion disrupted operations at private airports in four U.S. states and a dozen other countries,” Ibid.

    The world is stirring towards outright demands for radical change for the betterment of everybody. Stay tuned.

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  • It’s the Water, Stupid! It’s the Infrastructure, Stupid!

    Stripping Uncle Sam of His Protective Lies and Taboos

    Yes, it’s difficult for people to think it’s dry in Oregon, along the coast, along the Central Coast range. But it is, and it’s wet in the winter, too. Breweries, shrimp industries, hotels, they use a lot of fresh water.

    But the reality is clear — America is so dysfunctional, that those trillions thrown at billionaires and military et al., well, not for the people, by the people, because of the people. Remember, this story about Newport, around 10,000 folk, with a swelling of 20,000 or more visitors during any fun given weekend of summer beach activity, is also your story in San Francisco or Boise or Hope, Arkansas. The very debilitating aspect of predatory capitalism is tremendous — so your flagging infrastructure should be our flagging infrastructure, and it all should be taken care of by taxing billionaires, millionaires and ending war economies and the Complex.

    Lower Big Creek Reservoir is one of two leaking reservoirs that supply water to Newport. A large earthquake would wipe them out. Even a smaller one would likely rupture the concrete supply lines. Now the City of Newport is considering building one big safer dam on the same sight so they don't have to keep pumping water out of the Siletz River.

    The earthen dam is failing, and will fail completely, with some earthquakes that will hit our coast. This is the reality anywhere in the USA — wildfires, tornadoes, dust storms, droughts, blizzards, deluges, heat waves. We have money for trillionaires, for the mercenaries of Military-Pharma-Chem-Mining-Ag-Oil-Energy-Media-Education-Medical-Legal-Prison-Education-AI-Surveillance-Mining-Finance-Banking Complex, but not $$ for a few million-dollar water tank, or a $20/$80 million dam for Newport, which will also give water security to other places around Newport for which we call this area “home.”

    We are a third world, banana republic —

    On a recent visit to the upper dam, Newport city manager Spencer Nebel pointed to a large pipe sticking out of the facility. He explained how crews just fixed one leak there and said it will need more work next year.

    “(I) hate to make this kind of investment here for a facility that we’re planning to replace,” he said. “But it is a legitimate safety concern. And the security of the system is critical for the community and for the folks that live downstream.”

    Now the city plans to build another, concrete dam halfway between the two older ones.

    “So if we can build a higher dam and build a bigger basin, that’s going to reduce our reliance on the Siletz River, which is a really important environmental consideration here,” Nebel said. “And we’ve been working closely with the Siletz Tribe.”

    Historically, Pacific Northwest tribes have often not been supportive of government-built dams, because of their propensity to block fish runs. But Robert Kentta with the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians said pumping water out of the Siletz River every summer is really bad for salmon, lampreys, crayfish and river mussels.

    “We had the lowest flows that I can remember and I’ve lived here for nearly 60 years,” Kentta said. “It was scary low and scary warm. It was like bathwater, and we’re just not used to those kinds of temperatures in our river.”

    Kentta said a new, larger dam and reservoir on Big Creek would mean more water could stay in the Siletz River and more fish would likely survive. (Source)

    In this broken land, where the coroporations have huge lobbying outfits, huge industry coalitions, have huge organized protection rackets, we the people are up shit creek since living in the USA is all about paying for it, paying for water, air, all of it, through regressive and quadruple taxation. Through taxes, fines, code violations, penalties, late fees, pre-fees, tolls, service charges, disposal charges, recycle fees, surcharges, add-ons, restrictions, eminent domain, externalities, we are left to the devices of elected officials and state agencies and this hyper-competition looking for grants, lobbying bucks, pork barrel.

    Oh, those hog blood-shit-guts-urine lagoons —

    Lagoons of Pig Waste Are Overflowing After Florence. Yes, That's as Nasty as It Sounds. - The New York Times

    Oh, those feedlots —

    Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars, says expert | Food | The Guardian

    Oh, those thousand-plus chemicals —

    Beginning in 2019, the EPA stopped releasing crucial toxics reports. Even agency staffers have a hard time accessing them.

    Oh, those oil companies —

    Disperstants used by BP for oil spill didn't do much

    Oh, those tornados —

    Photo gallery: Tornadoes leave trail of damage through Lawrence, Linwood, Bonner Springs and Clay County | The Kansas City Star

    Oh, those wildfires —

    Most destructive California wildfires in history: Camp Fire tops the list - ABC7 San Francisco

    Oh, that Guantanamo —

    Oh, America, the Banana Republic: Nearly 40% of Americans Live in Constant Risk of Catastrophic Explosion or Poison Gas Exposure – People of Color, the Poor, Schools, and Medical Facilities at Even Greater Risk!

    So we are here, with the most broken society ever, as we have smug lockdown forced vaccine (sic) pro-incarceration people advocating all manner of illegal, unconstitutional and inhumane measures, and yet, and yet — never holding the billionaires who are war-pandemic-planned-demic profiteers accountable. It is ugly, that Biden thing, all his Neoliberal War Hawk Handlers, all the same old same old. Embarassing to see the Republicans in their racist zeal hold onto their KKK robes, and singing Dixie in their million-dollar bathrooms.

    Here’s that coronavirus map, well, the one that should be part and parcel in this bullshit manic narrative:

    Common Ways People Die Too Young Around the World - ATTN:

    Those drug overdoses, man —

    opioid-epidemic_1600 - Futurity

    It’s the war profiteering, man, and the trillions shipped to war lords, mining lords, Zionist lords, ag lords, chemical lords, all those lords of punishment-theft-disease-pollution-societal collapses

    The post It’s the Water, Stupid! It’s the Infrastructure, Stupid! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.