Paul Haeder, Author

Its most basic material activity is a war against the living world, and as life is destroyed, the war must spread. The spread is not just geographic, though that is both inevitable and catastrophic, turning biotic communities into gutted colonies and sovereign people into slaves. Civilization penetrates the culture as well, because the weapons are not just a technology—no tool ever is. Technologies contain the transmutational force of a technic, creating a seamless suite of social institutions and corresponding ideologies. Those ideologies will either be authoritarian or democratic, hierarchical or egalitarian. Technics are never neutral. Bright Green Lies 

Go here, look at the choices, and go to Raj Patel. Here. My interview of the fellow, who is just out with another book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

Just take the time and hit that link above and listen to yours truly talk with him a long time ago — 57 minutes worth on my old radio show. Five down on the list.

He’s on Democracy Now, talking about a new book, and the concept is that Capitalism has caused for 600 years biotic, spiritual, physiological, economic inflammation. The diseases of Predatory/Casino-PayDay Loan Capitalism, the perversion of a few elites controlling not just the gold and shekels, but futures of billions of people. They do this through inflammatory methods, through the process of weathering us, especially the poor and blacks in this country, and elsewhere.

They are more than just felons, these whites, who enlist a few Uncle Toms and Tio Tacos and others from other racial groups and ethnic and national origins. They are perversions of humanity. Those several million years of evolving as hunters and gatherers, before the death spiral of civilization occurred at the Fertile Crescent moment when pastoralists and others were then locked out of their traditional lands. Those human skills and traits we have to relearn. Call it New Neo-Tribalism. Forced to dance for food, or fornicate for food, that’s what the controllers did. Whatever these elites believed then was their God Given right to dominate “the tribes,” the First Nations, the Original Peoples.

With the seeds of money and armies, with Empire in their eyes beginning with the Romans, sure, and now, the flagging deplorable nation of USA, we have seen the wanton destruction of our own DNA through the ages of Industrial and now Digital imprisonment.

Here is one big take on how destructive and suicidal Capitalism is:

There are so many topics and realities that are hitting planet earth and human kind in a rapid pace way, like the Gatling Gun of 2021:

But instead, every system is in decay, and most of that decay has been orchestrated recently and at the dawn of Capitalism and with their royal perverts called the Barons — Robbers and the Murderers and the Rapists and the Despoilers. Pick a country, and then go back and see how perverted the British Empire was, or Leopold, and what he did in the Congo, or the French in Viet Nam. Just be smart enough to know what epigenetics is, how generational trauma and generational learned and adapted and biological methods of murdering ecosystems, cultures, indigenous populations, languages, and tribes and families is carried forth, on and on and on. This system of elites controlling, of a few corporations (financial institutions, i.e. banks like JP Morgan Chase or financial Mafiosi, like BlackRock and Blackstone) dominating, search on your own to learn how those people at the top and the middle managers are indeed the spawn of their forefathers’ disease of murder-rape-despoilment-theft-occupation-colonization.

Raj Patel and I talked about his book, the Value of Nothing. That is the rub, no, how capitalism puts no value on the most valuable things, like family, community, health, welfare, nature, trees, wetlands, mangroves, coral reefs, meadows, savannas and such. Well, the value capitalists put on those places and things are tied to extraction, and the thievery and extortion and the scorched earth warring capitalism which is consistently unfolding on society after society.

The disease is the systems of oppressions and control, and the learned helplessness and forced and planned/perceived obsolescence. Fear wins out, for sure, since the pitchforks and tar and feathers should have been rolled out in the millions of gallons and in the tens of millions in terms of those garden tools to end the murdering and the thieving and the raping.

Propaganda wins out, too. Neil Postman wrote a book that was published in 1992 which is more relevant now than ever: Technopoly

Neil Postman calls technopoly. In his 1992 book Technopoly, Postman defines it as a “totalitarian technocracy,” characterized by “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.” It embodies the arrogant sense of solutionism in technological innovation, man’s new theology, under current industrial civilization. Making problems, as the authors here show, the industrial human’s use of technology, also including biotechnology, has been destructive, rather than restorative, toward the living world. (Source)

Then there is Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis:

And so it goes, so many people left with no tastebuds in their mouths, because they are not conscious of the stink and the feces fed to them from the elite, or their captives, like a Biden or Trump, who is no elite, but a billionaire none the less.

For now, I could rant for hours, yet here, a poem, with more meaning to some, but truly to me, at this moment, than all the manure piling up each nanosecond as time is dictated by the morass of media run by the beady-eyed ones, the perverse, and you know their names if you do a Forbes 1000 search of those companies’ heads, or the Forbes look at the 2,700 billionaires. Each one is less than human, and quickly, even the millionaires and multi-millionaires who might have had half a soul, they too are greedy and now looking at us all as useless breeders, eaters, breathers and doers.

From yours truly,

Grandfather Told Me to Watch for Crows – By Paul Haeder

centimes, coins collected near Saint Germaine en Laye

old butter crock, near sagging shed, my stash

all those bike rides through cobbled rain

baguettes and batards for the family

boulangerie runs for mom, big pot of marinera

salad, and the pan, bread of life

I kept the change

+–+

old lady gave me croutons

to feed ducks, but the crows came

followed me home on my Junker bike

three speeds me racing through town

up hills where crows lifted easily

I spread the crunchy bread particles

crows tipped down for a munch

spoke French in their caw-caw language

+–+

the coin cache was once-a -week seemingly

fewer and fewer, so I moved the crock

to my window, outside, where snails,

escargot fist-sized mother of all snails,

climbed the slick ceramic at dew hours

snails I collected for my sister’s garlic

concoction, we celebrated the gourmands of Paris

+–+

I looked for crows at French school, and when

famille took the VW bug to the Rivera, three Kids,

mom spoke French, the old man German speaker, too

I watched crows at the docks, crows cracking open clams

crows at cemeteries my sister took me to with her Kodak

the black birds, those crows, smarter than the street cats

and mangy dogs kicked around by angry butchers

crows somersaulting for sinew, entertaining port-sipping

old fellows and grannies three sheets to the wind

+–+

those centimes were diminished by a factor of 10

the crows, I observed, took one, and returned

with bits and pieces of marble from the quarry

a jigsaw puzzle of amazing marble on the roof

above my bedroom, the exchange from me

the sucker and the corvids, full of French pennies

somewhere where the murder ended bird dusk dives

+–+

I spoke with a PhD at UW, in Seattle

gift of crows was his lecture

crows that would shit on a husband’s

black Mercedes, and bring bras to the lady’s

kitchen geranium planters

but that black Audi – old man squirting birds with hose

old lady gifting crow with meats and dry cat food

and even if they moved cars around, the shit plunged onto the old

man’s car every morning, the sign, and bras from distant

clotheslines throughout Copenhagen, lifted as bird gifts

to the kibble- gifting Danish lady

+–+

in West Texas, I drove like a bat out of hell

all the time, late, on this dirt road to the prison job

where I taught, my old jacked up Toyota pick-up

filled with books and essays, and the crows at one bend

where chili and onion trucks peeled out

where corn kernels spilled from grain trucks

my first near collision, one crow, ducked, as I traveled

over his road perch, and I stopped, he looked around

kept pecking at corn, and again, and again

one or two crows, ducking, as I drove over

for an entire semester, I skimmed over them

they laughed, caw cawing in border Spanish

+–+

I was in Arizona, no more centime-stealing corvids

but now Hopi and Navaho buddies, aunties’ legends of crow:

wisest of birds, at first colored white, friends of buffalo

caw-caw-caw overhead when hunters

with sharp spears and arrows came to kill

buffalo stampeding and tribes starving

so one day, a young hunter dressed as a buffalo

mingled with the herd, then

crows came, “caw-caw-caw, hunters are here”

all buffalo stampeded except the one

crow landed on the boy buffalo’s shoulder,

“caw caw, leave or you’ll be killed”

and the boy grabbed him

and the tribe wanted to do something with white crow

so they tied his feet to a stone, burned him, but the straps

burned through, and crow lifted, now singed, black

+–+

Or, Snow Owl’s version: How Crow Gave Fire to the People

When the Snow Spirit did appear, all the people and animals were freezing and a messenger was selected to go up to kijilamuh ka’ong, The Creator Who Creates by Thinking What Will Be. The messenger was to ask The Creator to think of the World as being warm again so that they would not all freeze to death.

Rainbow Crow was chosen to go and he flew upward for three days. He got the Creator’s attention by singing beautifully, but even though he begged the Creator to make it warm again, the Creator said He could not, because He had thought of Cold and He could not unthink it. But He did think of Fire, a thing that could warm the creatures even when it was cold. And so He poked a stick into the Sun until it was burning, and then gave it to Rainbow Crow to carry back to earth for the creatures. The Creator told Rainbow Crow to hurry before it burned all up.

+–+

I sang the dirge under breath as a dozen

crows tiptoed, paraded around dead brother crow

in a parking lot near a beach, and I held cars

at bay, asked my friend to stand in their way

to have them circle away from the funeral

corvid ceremony, a delight for me

those ideas I grasped, when I read,

 Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Frans de Waal said, “Are we open-minded enough

to assume that other species have a mental life?

Are we creative enough to investigate it?

Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition?

 Those three are involved in everything animals do;

hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.”

+–+

hang gliding years ago off Steptoe Butte

the wheat of the Palouse like a choppy

verdant sea, my glider new to me, circling

and turning, to extend the ride…

two crows, near my glider’s leading edge

right off my tip, cawing and cawing

then with flick of tails, down, turned

upside down, at my right wing tip

gliding with me, then, above, behind

upside down all the way as if to say, “nothing doing

polyester and aluminum helmet head slow poke”

+–+

the crows are there in ancient-new battles

men and children and women

exploded apart, or just left whole with death

concussions, and dogs come from the shadows

crows swooping, hopping from body to body

shiny buttons from uniforms gouged away

the eyes of those facing heavenwards

pulled out by grandfather crow

taken whole, taken to another place

huge brambles where piles of orbs

are pushed up, toward heaven

+–+

crows holding séances

waiting for the last glimmer to milk over

devouring what is left of sight

vision, some hope or love

some human frailty at the hour of death

fear and turmoil, eyes crow eat

as if to take souls forever into them

+–+

each new crow generation galvanized

to the dead humans

alive again, toward heaven, as a gift of crows

clownish and smart

devilish and forgiving

crows and their shiny objects

tricks like tobogganing down hills

or getting drunk on fermentedpyracantha

fire thorn berries gobbled up

just to see what it’s like to be human 

sad in our cups, forever believing

we are above when in fact

we are here, with the crows