It would take 1,000 me’s and 1,000 hours in a week for a thousand me’s to keep up with just some of the infamy and horror that is global capitalism. Capitalism’s putrid fuel, pollution and many millions of collateral damaged souls.
War profiteering, mercenary economic war, banking billions while communities retract, the homeless swell, and the sick and dying expand are just some of the juxtaposing features of this dirty thing called Capitalism.
And, sure, parasitic, zombie, casino, cutthroat, criminal, all those words, and many other modifier, add to the cornucopia of how bad the bad is. Capitalism is hyphenated.
The entire mess is masterfully managed by monster media and handled through the machinations of the prostituted politicians.
Story after story, if you hook into some news aggregator like like Bing or Yahoo, or any of the Fox affiliated ones, Sinclair Broadcasting, what have you, all of the mush on the mass media digital world, those stories are insane.
Murders of blacks by cops, next to million dollar deals for some You Tuber; climate emergencies all over the place, against the news that mega cruise lines are going full capacity soon. Elon Musk hosting Saturday Night Live, up against 25,000 barrels of DDT leaking, near Catalina Island. Some Arizona politician is positive for “Covid-19” weeks after her two jab chemical dose, against stories of Bezos and Company making more profits in the planned-demic year, 2020 than the previous three years combined.
One of my friends keeps reminding me we are in the Matrix, or that we are in this pseudo news events timeframe.
On Main Street, the story is entirely different. According to a report from Facebook and the Small Business Roundtable, 22 percent of small businesses in the U.S. were closed in February — just one percent shy of the pandemic high, 23 percent, in May 2020.
And a new report from the U.S. Small Business Administration found that “the number of people who were self employed and working was 20 percent lower in April 2020 than in April 2019,” with Asian, Black, and Hispanic people hit the hardest. Rebuilding has been slow going, and the current number of self-employed people who are working is still 3.6 percent lower than before the pandemic.
Amazon often says that it empowers small businesses by allowing them to reach customers through its marketplace. Then again, Amazon takes a cut of those sales, and even copies the products of independent sellers when they happen to do especially well. As the world gets back on its feet, Amazon’s profits probably won’t escape the attention of regulators. Source.
I deal with things like Walter Lippman, 1922, Public Opinion, too, for the pseudo events — Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published in 1922, is the most persuasive critique of democracy I’ve ever read. Shortly after it was published, John Dewey, the great defender of democracy and the most important American philosopher of the era, called Lippmann’s book “the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived.”
As Lippmann put it, “The democratic ideal, as Jefferson molded it, consisted of an ideal environment and a selected class.” The racism and sexism notwithstanding, that environment looks nothing like ours, and the range of issues voters are expected to know something about today vastly exceeds the demands at the time of the founding.
The question for Lippmann, then, wasn’t whether the average person was intelligent enough to make decisions about public policy; it was whether the average person could ever know enough to choose intelligently. And he made the point using himself as an example:
My sympathies are with [the citizen], for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community.
You might read this and think, “Citizens don’t have to have an intelligent opinion on every issue confronting the community. Instead, they choose the party they trust to serve their interests.” On this view, citizens don’t need to be “omnicompetent,” to borrow Lippmann’s term, they just have to know enough to pick the team that represents their interests. But to do that, voters have to know what their interests are, and which party actually represents them.
There’s no vision of democracy worth defending that doesn’t assume a minimum level of competence from a majority of voters. Lippmann doubted this level of mastery was possible because citizens are too removed from the world to form concrete judgments. Consequently, they’re forced to live in “pseudo-environments,” in which they reduce the world to stereotypes in order to render it intelligible.
But there are all sorts of ways we are trapped in this cult of money-image-events-pseudo events and the planned panademic. Here,
Daniel Boorstin, in The Image, coined not just the term “pseudo-event,” but also the epithetic descriptions “famous for being famous” and “well-known for well-knownness”; he was, it would turn out, an extremely reluctant herald of postmodernism. While The Image may have arrived on the scene, chronologically, before the comings of Twitter and Kimye and an understanding of “reality” as a genre as much as a truth, the book also managed to predict them—so neatly that it reads, in 2016, not just as prescience, but as prophesy.
“The image” is, in Boorstin’s conception, both literal (pictures, photographs, etc.) and figurative: a short-hand for images’ cultural primacy, and for an approach to reality itself that is blithely Barnumesque in its assumptions. The image, strictly, is a replica of reality, be it a movie or a news report or a poster of Monet’s water lilies, that manages to be more interesting and dramatic and seductive than anything reality could hope to be. The image is the spectacle that is most spectacular when it is watched on TV. It is the press conference and the press release—the media event that finds news being created rather than simply reported. It is the logic of advertising, with all its aspiration and transaction, insinuating itself into culture at its depths and its heights. It is the public expectation, even preference, for celebrities who are manufactured, as goods and as gods, because the only thing more compelling than stars themselves is our ability to question their place in our arbitrary firmament. — Source.
Not only do we not know what history is or means, we do not care, as Huxley predicted in A Brave New World, about facts, history. “Exterminate all the Brutes” is deeper than just the heart of darkness:
The power of stupidity and consumerism, smoke and mirrors, Madison Avenue, political and national propaganda, and now Facebook and the WWW, we are left empty, with lots of images of Bezos and his new woman’s mansions, or the Michelle and Barak Obama shows on Netflix. We smell the sulfur of the devil every time we tune in and tune out, and that stench is not enough for us to find out own agency to maybe just throw one wrench (or Molotov cocktail) into the gearworks.
That sucker born every nanosecond — from the old minute !
Phineas T. Barnum once displayed, in his American Museum in New York City, the corpse of a “mermaid” that was in fact the preserved head of a monkey sewn onto the preserved tail of a fish. He once advertised a large but otherwise extremely average elephant as “The Only Mastodon on Earth.” He once “exhibited” a woman named Joice Heth as the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington (and as “The Greatest Natural & National Curiosity in the World”). He then wrote to newspapers to make a confession: Joice was not, actually, Washington’s nurse. She wasn’t even, in fact, human—but merely “a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numerous springs,” operated by a hidden ventriloquist. — Source.
Now, story after story of the SARS-CoV2 turning into CoV3/4/5/99, so, the trillions in profits from the mandatory chemical jabs, and the trillions in profits to Target-Amazon-Walmart-Safeway lockdown jitterbug, or the trillions to the military offense complex in pseudo man Biden and his Kamala “Dan Quayle” Harris. . . As the world burns, whitey is heading for Mars and the rest of the world is head down, scrolling up and down their “smart” phone bomb. The fleecing isn’t undercover anymore. It’s not accidently out in the open. It is regaled by Mainstream Media, and the rich are laughing all the way to the vaults.
Newborn jabs —
And there is no question about these experiments? No robust debate about the efficacy, the long term negative results, the who-what-why-when of it all? No precautionary principle, and this is it — No question, and the times have changed since The Image or Lippman and Benjamin: we are in a total bombardment of hyper managed lies and PR spin, all over the internet, within all channels the average bloke accesses. It is like a long-term (well, rather short since the planned-demic started) brain damaging experiment.
In late June 2001, the U.S. military was preparing for a “Dark Winter.” At Andrews Air Force Base in Camp Springs, Maryland, several Congressmen, a former CIA director, a former FBI director, government insiders and privileged members of the press met to conduct a biowarfare simulation that would precede both the September 11 attacks and the 2001 Anthrax attacks by a matter of months. It specifically simulated the deliberate introduction of smallpox to the American public by a hostile actor.
The simulation was a collaborative effort led by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (part of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security) in collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Analytic Services (ANSER) Institute for Homeland Security and the Oklahoma National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. The concept, design and script of the simulation were created by Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center along with Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of ANSER. The full script of the exercise can be read here.
The name for the exercise derives from a statement made by Robert Kadlec, who participated in the script created for the exercise, when he states that the lack of smallpox vaccines for the U.S. populace means that “it could be a very dark winter for America.” Kadlec, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and a former lobbyist for military intelligence/intelligence contractors, is now leading HHS’ Covid-19 response and led the Trump administration’s 2019 “Crimson Contagion” exercises, which simulated a crippling pandemic influenza outbreak in the U.S. that had first originated in China. Kadlec’s professional history, his decades-old obsession with apocalyptic bioweapon attack scenarios and the Crimson Contagion exercises themselves are the subject of Part III of this series. — “All Roads Lead to Dark Winter” By Whitney Webb
But my friends and family say, “Fuck it. You don’t know this time around. These are amazing scientists, blessed by the dust of stars, amazing in their genius, amazing in their scientific acumen. How can you debate the things these amazing people — many are BIPOC, remember — are inventing? You are out of your league trying to take on St. Fauci and all the others. They are not part of any experimental mass population sterilization of eugenic program. Stick to you 9/11 conspiracies’.”
You know, one can say that the rush to get emergency authorization for these hundreds of “vaccine makers,” the rush to quash any discussion on herd immunity, squashing the effects on the virus mutating during harsh lockdowns of healthy people, and, well, we can say this and that about questioning why the rush, why the new pills, why the second, third, yearly boosters, why the shot for babies, AND still not go there: .RFK, Jr. Responds to Daniel Pinchbeck: The Historical Role of Vaccines in Eliminating Infectious Disease Mortality
Or, “I THINK…AUTO-IMMUNE DISEASE CAN BE TRIGGERED BY THESE GENE-BASED VACCINES” -PROF. SUCHARIT BHAKDI
That is the grandest pseudo event, which has turned into THE event. What, Time Magazine’s person of the year, Mr./Ms. Covid . . . .
This entire North America, and now the entire plugged in, WiFi-ed loaded world is one lost horizon, full of empty calories, dead and suffocating. Just looking at the news tickertape shows, I see how the world is entertained to death: New Dystopian TV series, Roman Polanski directing another movie, a guy guilty of threats against members of congress, retiring cop who oversaw the murder of Brianna Taylor, NYC opening up, melt rate of glaciers rising, People of Color more vulnerable to pollution because of where they live, NFL draft night, Biden is getting more diverse judicial nominees, and so many other discordant headlines, again, meaningless in the scheme of daily, hour by hour lives in America or Armenia or Antarctica.
Yet the meaning is inside the message, and the message is all about distraction, about complete control of emotions, dopamine hits, the lizard part of the brain, as we scroll up and down the “smart as a master” phone.
How did we ever get to this point … to the point where, as I put it in The Covidian Cult, “instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it?”
To understand this, one needs to understand how cults control the minds of their members, because totalitarian ideological movements operate more or less the same way, just on a much larger, societal scale.
I had a job helping people get jobs. Individuals with developmental disabilities. Brain injured, too. That job ended because I sent in a bunch of grievances about hostile work environment, a supervisor who threatened me and yelled at me, and an amazing half year of the most unprofessional work atmosphere I have ever experienced!
With the Covid Madness in my state, in this county, some of these clients landed jobs as janitors/custodians in the schools in Lincoln County.
Oregon is one of those states that is full of trembling “liberals” and “holed up 2nd Amendment lovers.” The state is in an economic spiral, and like Washington State, run by the new dictators of the Democratic Party breed.
It’s the state with a history of Sundown Towns, and one that has a governor who touts herself as being bi-sexual and ready to slay those anti-LGBTQA dragons, but when it comes to the citizens of Oregon now in lockdown hell, with suicide rates doubling for young people, businesses going belly up, housing shortages, evictions on the horizon, you can just hear Kate Brown’s smarmy ameliorating.
Here’s another fascist at the Washington Post, yammering away:
The solutions to the problem of heightened risk among unvaccinated people range from very difficult to extremely easy. Very difficult: Convince unvaccinated people that — notwithstanding the general optimism — they may, in fact, be at higher risk than before. Particularly if they’re planning to be vaccinated, now is the worst possible time to let down their guard. They should continue to wear their masks, keep their distance and avoid risky situations — even as they see their vaccinated brethren enjoying their newfound freedom. Equally challenging: Require proof of vaccination (so-called immunity passports) to access places that don’t require masks and social distancing.
Easy: Everyone gets vaccinated when their number comes up. Problem solved.
This is the way of Washington State’s governor, Inslee, and our state’s, Brown.
So, fires, or, Covid Cult? This is the state of Capitalism, where criminal operations — Big Pharma — have got the ear of Gods like Fauci and the boot-lickers like our governors. All governors when it comes to the rapacious stupidity of believing in privatizing everything, throwing profits (taxpayer money) at the corporations, and then tying up the purse strings (taxpayer money, and uncollected millionaire and billionaire illegal loot) when it comes to housing and food and medical clinics for all.
The world’s largest firefighting plane has been shut down just as Western states prepare for a wildfire season that fire officials fear could be worse than the average year.
Tara Lee, a spokeswoman for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, said via email Friday that the state’s Department of Natural Resources was alerted to the shutdown of the worlds’ largest firefighting plane called the Global SuperTanker.
This is one fat example (one of a million) of the fall of the capitalist empire, that is, the fall of one million people and hundreds of communities at a time. A firefighting tanker, privately owned, costing taxpayers up to $250,000 a day. Imagine that, our fire season is now 12 months, and we are in megadrought 3.0 here, and the governors are mandating those Covid shots, but imagine this — smoke, particulates, evacuations, immolation. In this great trillion-dollar-a-year-thrown-at-the-military mighty country, we pay for one effing jet. We get fire fighters from Australia, man, and Mexico. Use prisoners to be on-the-ground hot-shots. All those jets and planes and copters, and we have one privately held jet that now is out of service.
This hubris of it all. Yes, this all ties into the Covid Cult and the trillion-dollar giveaway to the Covid War Profiteers.
Back to my Oregon, the Intel and Nike State.
Old Nike, you know that Nike, the one run by Phil Knight.
The New Rulers Of The World: Through secret filming, Pilger shows how cheap labour in an Indonesian sweatshop produces goods such as Nike, Adidas, Gap and Reebok running shoes that are sold for up to 250 times the amount received by workers, about 72p a day. Almost 70 million Indonesians live in extreme poverty, many in labour camps housing the workers, where children are under-nourished and prone to disease. Inside the sweatshops, mostly young women are crowded together under the glare of strip lighting in temperatures of up to 40°C, some doing 24-hour shifts.
Observing the parallel between modern-day globalisation and old-world imperialism, Pilger recalls that Indonesia has been “plundered by the West for hundreds of years”. Globalisation in Asia began in Indonesia, where Western governments backed dictator General Suharto after he seized power in the mid-1960s. “Within a year of the bloodbath,” says Pilger, “Indonesia’s economy was effectively redesigned in America, giving the West access to vast mineral wealth, markets and cheap labour – what President Nixon called the greatest prize in Asia.” In 1997, the World Bank had called the country a “model pupil” of the global economy.
I bring this up because, well, the people who I landed jobs for within the school system are of course exploited by the Lincoln County School District and the contractor, Sodexo. Nike or Sodexo, all those transnational and sweatshop condition loving companies are all the same — socialism for the CEOs and stockholders, capitalism (low wages, whatever the market can bear) for the workers! Profits for Nike, and hell for the foreign workers, the foreign economies, the foreign soil! Nike swoosh!
THAT Sodexo —
For around ten years, Sodexo, a French company that is one of the world’s largest multinational corporations, has provided Saint Peter’s with cafeteria food. But Sodexo does more than just provide food services to universities— they also run private prisons and detention centers abroad.
Up until 2001, Sodexo owned one of the largest stakes in the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a company that now controls nearly half of the private prisons in the United States.
After Sodexo’s ties with CCA were made public, six universities dropped their contracts with Sodexo, and continued activist pressure led Sodexo to sell its shares in CCA.
But since then, Sodexo has vastly expanded the number of detention centers it operates overseas. As of 2016, Sodexo managed 122 prisons in eight countries, including Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. They also run prisons and immigrant detention centers in the United Kingdom.
So, because of the Covid Cult, the Oregon Health Authority, and the Governor who is Ms./Mr. Kate Brown, these jobs at $12 an hour are not being filled by many job seekers (low pay) but are getting scarfed up by adults living with developmental and intellectual disabilities.
The jobs are absurd — spraying down/wiping off walls, handles, desks, everything, even on the days no students were attending classes. One of my former clients had to use a metal saw and saw off all the book baskets that are on some of the desk-table combinations. That was 34 in one day.
You know, the jumping Covid-19 Fort Detrick Virus.
Social “distancing” makes the schools create six foot lines in the sand, and then three foot separations as schools came back in full-force (sic). Still, with three feet between desks, 360 degrees around, that is, not all returning students can be accommodated in the classroom.
My clients were so hyped up, that they constantly asked me about “the shot”, “the vaccine”, and when it might be coming to the county and town near them. They asked me about my opinion about the shots. They have to wear masks on school property doing their tasks, and even going outside, as well as taking a smoke break and Rockstar drink break on a slab of land just outside the view-shed of the school. Mask madness.
My clients have been so worked up into a lather of fear, with stories saying, “Adults with Developmental Disabilities Have Three Fold Higher Risk of Getting Covid-19”; “Adults with Developmental Disabilities Have a Higher Rate of Death with Covid-19.”
The rush to get jabbed has been on, and Oregonians like my former clients rushed to the clinics and pharmacies to get something that definitely is not a vaccine. A chemical shot, sure. And, of course, they asked me about my take on things, and I had to thread the needle, balance my learned opinion with their frightened take on things.
There were teachers who used the tattletale method of complaining to my clients’ leads if a little bit of dirt was left on the floors. Some teachers resorted to their own classroom stings, putting tiny itsy-bitsy piles of sugar on desks to see if the entire surface had been wiped down.
The clients have less than 15 minutes to clean a classroom, and that can be tough with food and drink messes on floors, and all the garbage. This is the state of paranoia and Nazism.
Oh, those runners. Imagine, the extreme stupidity and compliance of Oregonians, having cross-country student athletes wear heavy masks during their runs.
Here, from a column in the Oregonian, from parents and others complaining about the Governor and his/her health authoritarians mandating masks for outdoor, even solo sports:
Thank you so much for your column highlighting the ridiculousness and dangers of masks on youth runners. As parents of a ninth grade cross country and track athlete, we have been extremely frustrated with this rule. Our child was told that if she pulls the mask down for a minute just to get some air, she will be DQ’d and possibly kicked off the team if it’s a repeated ‘offense’. We are forced to make a decision to either keep her on the team for her emotional and social well-being while jeopardizing her physical health with lack of oxygen, or pull her off the team and back into social isolation and inactivity. I feel the state is abusing our children.
So, we have Nike, with Knight funding in the tens of millions, cancer research and with that company, NIKE, doing the dirty deeds of not only employing sweatshop slavery, but supporting violent military thugs in those respective “developing south” countries. Watch John Pilger’s short documentary above.
We get to all sorts of inanities in this Covid-19 mess. More and more conversations get shut down, when someone like me questions that “I got my jab and why haven’t you” bullshit that comes out of people’s mouths — friends and foes alike, family and co-workers, too.
And those masks, man. Every teacher, student and custodian I was around did everything 100 percent wrong in terms of keeping the germ theory in place — noses exposed, sides of masks leaking, taking them off and leaving them face-out touching surfaces. People with a blue plastic mask on, running their hands through thick strands of their own hair, and then touching everything.
You know, Ebola, man. That SARS-CoV2 thing, man. Antibacterial fluids on everything, on hands 20 times a day. Masks off to chew up a Subway sandwich, but masks on for 16-year-olds running through the woods fox X-Country practice.
Yet, the trust, again, in those jabs, those companies producing those jabs —
It’s been eight months since Big Pharma executives faced a grilling by the Senate Finance Committee over their pricing decisions. But the scrutiny is far from over—and now, the committee is digging into pharma funding for patient advocacy groups, which have been known to speak in tunes that are music to the industry’s ears.
Emergent BioSolutions has faced a number of back-to-back PR crises since production issues at its Baltimore facility placed the company under intense scrutiny. The CDMO’s stock price has tumbled as a result, but it appears CEO Robert Kramer cashed out some of his shares just in time. — Source
That company, the dirty one, producing contaminated and brown sediment laced J&J “vaccines.” That one where 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 hypodermic chemical has to be dumped because of “an ingredient mix-up” at its Baltimore plant. J&J has since taken control over the facility and AstraZeneca, which was also making its vaccine there, was forced to move out.That Johnson and Johnson —
AbbVie, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Merck & Co., AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson together contributed more than $680 million to hundreds of patient groups and other nonprofits last year, according to a Bloomberg examination of data the companies sent to the Finance Committee.
The total tally more than doubled the $321 million the six companies handed out in 2015 and significantly exceeded what the industry itself spent on lobbying. In 2018, the entire pharmaceutical and health products industry—including pharmaceutical benefit managers—spent $283 million in lobbying U.S. lawmakers, according to the independent research group OpenSecrets.
J&J has faced hundreds of thousands of lawsuits over claims its products are defective.
Lawsuits point to internal documents showing J&J and its subsidiaries knew about problems with their products but sold them anyway.
In addition to individual product liability lawsuits, individual states who say Johnson & Johnson helped fuel the opioid crisis are suing the company for millions of dollars.
But all’s well, uh? Big Pharma is one of the most powerful industries in the world. The global revenue for pharmaceuticals was over $1 trillion in 2014. But nowhere else in the world do the drug and medical device industries have as much power and make as much money as in the U.S.
Six of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies for 2017 have their headquarters in the U.S. These include Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, Gilead, Amgen and AbbVie.
Back in the good old days, oh, March 2020, just 28 percent of Americans polled had a good opinion of Big Pharma. Big Pharma is the second most hated industry in America: second to none, but right behind the tobacco industry and the oil, gas and chemical industries.
Add to the criminal enterprises Big Pharma is embroiled in, it is also the biggest defrauder of the Federal Government under the False Claims Act, according to consumer watchdog group Public Citizen.
Sure, a history of fraud, bribery, lawsuits and scandals is the American way, for sure, and also, despite criminal charges and fines, no less, Big Pharma companies continue to do business. To the tune of a trillion a year, or more, in profits.
Pablo Escobar is rolling in his grave in envy.
I have had some close relationships with people in the “drug” business, and that includes Merck, when it was MSD. And a friend of my mom’s who was a Pharm D working on all sorts of research on the drugs that drug companies came out with that either did not work, or did their damage in spades.
I taught English classes in Juarez, and I toured the Johnson and Johnson twin plant and talked to workers there. Like everything else in American Capitalism, the Mexicans were treated like crap, from the fabricators to the technical engineers. The reason J & J was sited there was for the profit margin, man, low pay, no unions, no taxes, desperate Mexican women (mostly) workers, and the ability to skirt environmental and OSHA laws. Each year I went by the maquiladora, more and more security was posted outside. Photos of J&J by me (a journalist) were questioned, until a series of “no photo” signs were posted all over.
Then, of course, the Gates Foundation and Planned Parenthood. Who would have thought I’d be up against Planned Parenthood, up against Gates and Merck and the HPV vaccination?
Here, a story, mine, “Death by a Thousand Cuts: Vaccines, Non-Profits, and the Dissemination of Medical Information.” The crux of which is that I was kicked out of day two of a mandatory sex ed class for things I did not do, but for positing a few questions to the instructors. Then, the nonprofit I worked for summarily made up their mind to pink slip me. You see, I was at the training in Seattle, at the Planned Parenthood headquarters, and the nonprofit I was working for was located hundreds of miles and a state away, south of Portland, Oregon.
I asked the trainer what might happen when some of my rural clients’ parents and the young clients themselves personally just Googled “Gardasil and vaccine injuries” and then confronted me, case manager and now a sex ed trained trainer, and others with the evidence. This colonized trainer got mad, raised his voice, and stated, again, the voice of God, here, “The Jury is Out on Gardasil. It is one hundred percent safe.” Here at Dissident Voice, “My Fate as a Social Worker Sealed by a Vaccine named Gardasil.”
Just read on, and see how Planned Parenthood gets money from the Gardasil makers (Merck) and gets money from Gates Foundation for the youth vaccination (HPV especially) propaganda machine, also called, instruction.
This madness is ratcheting up, and, oh, that supposed rough, rugged, independent American is caving and caving to the most crass and simplistic propaganda. My wife’s daughter, at Oregon State University, is being bombarded (she and the entire student body, the staff, the faculty, and, yes, the food service and custodial staff) with messages, emails and bulletins — “Well, we want all of the OSU (Beavers) Family safe, and while we are not making the vaccination mandatory now, but, but, but . . . .”
Those but’s are indeed not just but’s; rather, they are mandates, as this school, like the rest of the country’s schools, mostly, will make that “deadly” shot mandatory, err, the Covid-19 shot. OSU makes students show proof of the meningitis vaccination, so Covid-19 shots are the next logical step in this Sundown law state. This list is big, and expanding as of today: What Colleges Require the COVID-19 Vaccine?
Oh, that is it, no, laws, mandates, community “standards,” what goes goes, and what isn’t allowed, isn’t allowed here. More on the Oregon racism.
Oh, I know about mandatory medical laws, mandatory medical procedures, which the Covid-19 shot is, a medical experiment procedure. Oregon and forced vaccinations, err, I mean, forced sterilizations: In 1917 the Oregon State Legislature, in Salem, Oregon, passed a bill titled, “To Prevent Procreation of Certain Classes in Oregon.” Passage of the bill created the Oregon State Board of Eugenics.
“We can and must protect our nation from insanity, epilepsy, and the varied train of abnormalities that follow in their wake.” Dr. Bethenia Adair Owens said in 1915.
Oregon’s 1923 law targeting people deemed “feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts.”
The state set up a Board of Eugenics that had the final decision over who would be sterilized. The board ordered its last forced sterilization in 1981. In 1983, Oregon’s eugenics law was repealed.
Oh, that Oregonian, still around, supporting the Governor’s forced “vaccination” and lockdown mandates —
The largest newspaper in Oregon, the Republican-controlled Oregonian, supported Eugenics and used its power to inflame public opinion. In a news article headlined “Fecund Mental Derelicts of Oregon Called Menace by State Health Official,” Dr. Floyd South, a member of the Oregon State Board of Health and the Board of Eugenics, stated on June 17, 1938, “Feeble-minded, insane, and otherwise mentally and physically incompetent persons in Oregon are reproducing twice as fast as normal persons.” He went on to state that within 200 years half the state’s population would be confined to public institutions if rigid sterilization laws were not enforced. This applied to the insane as well as “mentally weak persons.”
And, lest I leave out the “scientists” and medical experts (sic):
In 1940 Dr. Richard B. Dillehunt, dean of the University of Oregon Medical School and chairman of the committee appointed by Governor Charles H. Martin to analyze Oregon’s responsibility to the insane, wrote a series of articles for the Oregon Journal reporting his findings. He believed mental illness could be prevented by marriage laws and sterilization. He stated, “Idiots, imbeciles and morons are singularly moved by the primitive biologic impulses and spawn prodigiously. Here is a place where social groups and others might get together and make an effort: for, mark my word, with the prolificacy and multiplication of the feeble-minded, such social groups might soon find themselves on the defensive instead of in a position to help.”
Forced experimental and untested and unapproved shots, or maybe shots that have the gifts that keep on giving: sterilization, blood clot-inducing, hear attack-creating, miscarriage-providing, total immune system compromising Pizer and J&J madness.
The propaganda, the arm twisting, oh, the fancy foot PhD wording, but still, a forced chemical shot, and who knows what the medical consequences shall be (read, COVID-19 Vaccine Reactions):
Again, regardless of whether OSU implements a vaccination requirement, we hold an expectation that each of us will take every precaution to increase the level of community protection from COVID-19, which includes each of us obtaining the vaccine as soon as possible.
Sincerely, Dan Larson, Vice Provost for Student Affairs, OSU Coronavirus Response Coordinator
The unvaccinated cannot marry the vaccinated! The new normal!
I was hitting the old Ralph Nader podcast a week ago when I stumbled upon Steven C. Markoff’s book, The Case Against George W. Bush. Nader had Markoff on his podcast, and both talked about the crimes of W Bush, and even more pertinently, the lack of a criminal case against George W. Bush, as well as the crickets in the so-called liberal media (SCLM) as well in the left press concerning Steve’s book.
I quickly emailed Steve, for a copy of his book to review, and he came back at me with a PDF of this book which, as I have stated, has been iced out of mainstream media: no interviews, no reviews let alone getting Steve into a room one-on-one, or onto a Zoom call with other guests to parse his well-researched, well-quoted book on the crimes of George W. Bush.
Of course, those crimes are more than crimes of omission, or crimes of secret rendition and torture sites, or the crimes of Abu Ghraib “prison” and Guantanamo. The crime was more than just all the lies about WMD’s and Saddam murdering babies. The big crime was Bush and his Regime of psychotic sociopaths of the neocon variety completely derailing valid, active and clear intelligence that Osama bin Laden was about to make a huge fiery asymmetrical splash on the world stage.
Markoff lays out the daily briefs, the back and forth communiqués, the speeches Bush and others on his team made which all provides evidence of what “we” know about Osama bin Laden. The entire gambit goes back to the Soviet Union’s roll in Afghanistan, then with Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and leading up to the ex-governor of Texas, W Bush.
Carter Doctrine 25 years before 9/11
Unfortunately, Jimmy Carter’s man, got the Soviet Union and then USA, all tangled up in Afghanistan.
The best way for us to understand Afghanistan is to look at the record of American involvement going back four decades and to look at the record requires a reexamination of President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. From the start, U.S. policy formation surrounding Afghanistan has lived in a realm of magical thinking that has produced nothing but a catastrophe of nightmarish proportions. Brzezinski impacted the future of American foreign policy by monopolizing the Carter administration in ways that few outside the White House understand. In his role as national security advisor he put himself in a position to control information into and out of the White House and when it came to Afghanistan – to use it for whatever purposes he saw fit.
“Brzezinski was an obsessive Russia-hater to the end. That led to the monumental failures of Carter’s term in office; the hatreds Brzezinski released had an impact which continues to be catastrophic for the rest of the world.” Helmer wrote in 2017, “To Brzezinski goes the credit for starting most of the ills – the organization, financing, and armament of the mujahideen the Islamic fundamentalists who have metastasized – with US money and arms still – into Islamic terrorist armies operating far from Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Brzezinski started them off.”
The Clinton “team” briefed the incoming George W. Bush “team” before his Jan. 2001 inauguration, about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. For the younger Bush, he repudiated the evidence trail from so many intelligence sources. His eyes were on Operation Iraqi Freedom, but first called, O.I.L, which was propagated by Jay Leno incessantly after it was blurted out from the source:
On the afternoon of March 24, 2003 days after the U.S launched missiles at Baghdad to start the illegal war, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer held a press briefing. After a few minutes, a couple of sentences into the briefing, he verbally stumbled on the name of Bush’s war, stating, “Operation Iraqi, uh, Liberation.”
Calling it “Operation Iraqi Freedom” officially is just more War is Peace, Lies are Truth bullshit. And that 2001 invasion of Afghanistan ― “Operation Enduring Freedom” – is yet more of the PT Barnum spin, all catalogued in the annals of United States Central Command and U.S. Army War College.
Trail of Tears, Trails of Evidence
Markoff’s book is a straightforward record of myriad published records – taped speeches, newspaper articles/Op-Eds, sections from books, redacted memos and top secret records. As a buttress to the asymmetrical history of what happened leading up to and during the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequently all that went wrong in the Middle East, this upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11, Markoff’s book should be required reading.
But reading isn’t enough for just consuming Markoff’s book, and reading it is not enough for those of us who have been fighting the wars, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as all the others. What we need is a truth and reconciliation hearing for all those murdered in the September 11 attacks (around 3,000) as well as the countless hundreds of thousands (several million some estimates determine up to today) killed when the USA bombed and razed Iraq.
Remember that famous photo of Bush reading about a goat to kids in Florida:
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Bush was at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota County, Florida, reading “My Pet Goat.”
Oh, his dedication to inner-city first graders and listening to them recite the goat story is golden. Earlier, Bush had been on the way from his hotel to the school in his motorcade when it was reported to him a passenger jet had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. Old commander in Chief Bush believed the crash was an accident caused, perhaps, by pilot error.
That old goat, man, what a story, so much so that when Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, entered the classroom at 9:06 to tell this president a second airplane had struck the South Tower and that the nation was under attack, Bush stayed on his duff for seven more minutes, following along as the children finished reading the book.
“Class Goat”
Goat maybe an old West Point term for the man/woman graduating last in his/her class, but one famous/infamous George the Goat graduating last in the Army Academy is none other than George Armstrong Custer.
Unfortunately, the proverbial goat in America’s eyes is the million people murdered and millions more suffering because of the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. Steve’s book lays out the three legal frameworks or cases for prosecuting Bush (and solely Bush, not Bush and Company LLC) for crimes against humanity (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and Bush’s own responsibility for those several thousand who died on that fateful day, September 11, 2001.
Here’s part of a blurb on the book’s web site, Rare Bird Lit:
Steven C. Markoff presents sourced evidence of three crimes committed by George W. Bush during his presidency: his failure to take warnings of coming terror attacks on our country seriously; taking the United States, by deception, into an unnecessary and disastrous 2003 war with Iraq; costing the lives of more than 4,000 Americans and 500,000 others; and breaking domestic and international laws by approving the torture as means to extract information. While Markoff lays out his case of the crimes, he leaves it up to the reader to decide the probable guilt of George W. Bush and his actions regarding the alleged crimes.
Casualties of War — Truth, Honor, Duty to Protect
I had cut my teeth as a reporter in El Paso and elsewhere covering and following that other container ship of lies – Reagan’s crew of felons and thugs who philandered the American public with their special form of Murder Incorporated in Central America, and notably, Nicaragua. Or the illegal invasion of Panama under George H. W. Bush. Oh, those invasions, coups, clandestine bombings, proxy wars, incursions, secret operations, PsyOps.
I even ended up “down south,” in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Nicaragua running into all sorts of odd fellows in the “drugs for guns” continuing criminal enterprise involving some of this country’s more nefarious “diplomats” and “generals” and CIA/NSA scum. Oh, those yellow belly Contras, murdering civilians and bombing schools and clinics for Reagan and Company. Those freedom fighters, AKA, the biggest lying cheats in recent times in Central America, Los Contras.
And the dead horse isn’t dead, and another author, like Markoff, just couldn’t buy the bs on those Contras:
Thus, in his 2012 book, The Manufacturing of a President, Wayne Madsen claims, based upon his numerous intelligence sources, that the CIA and Mossad have both been funding these rearmed Contras, and that they have been shipping these Contras arms over both the Honduran and Costa Rican borders. He claims also that the Honduran government which came to power through the 2009 coup – a coup which the Obama Administration actively aided and abetted to unseat a leftist government which, by the way, happened to be friendly to Daniel Ortega – has been key to helping both support the Contras as well as to provide a staging ground for the covert operations to bring down the Sandinista government. In other words, Honduras is playing the very same role it did in the 1980s, and the US-backed coup in 2009 – a mere 2 years after Ortega was elected – was crucial to this role.
Of course, the Bush Family Legacy was also all written over that fiasco, and again, it was easy for me to continue my penchant for understanding how rotten the United States is as I am the son of a Vietnam War regular army veteran, who put in 31 years in uniform.
Lords of War, the Racket that is General Smedley Butler’s war warnings. Or Gary Webb, killing the messenger, the same CIA-infused Washington Post, New York Times and LA Times, to just name a few of the publications that corrupted the real work of Webb uncovering that entire drugs for guns Mafiosi. Robert Parry, deceased now, but a journalist who started Consortium News in 1994, with Webb as one of his big stories on how bad the US government is, and how bad the mainstream media has become.
So what I was seeking by the mid-1990s was some solid ground in which to plant a flag for honest journalism, rather than constantly being forced into retreat, pulled by nervous editors and producers looking over their shoulders out of fear of right-wing retaliation. From solid ground, I thought, we could produce journalism that simply assessed the facts and made independent judgments regardless of who might be offended.
In 1995, it was my oldest son, Sam, who suggested the then-novel idea of “a Web site.” I didn’t fully understand what a Web site was and Sam was no techie but he demonstrated extraordinary patience in building our original Internet presence. (Back then, there were no templates; you had to start from scratch.) We married old-fashioned investigative reporting with the new technology of the Internet and began publishing groundbreaking investigative articles.
We followed evidence where it went, even when it flew in the face of the conventional wisdom, such as our work on the 1980 October Surprise issue of whether Reagan and Bush went behind President Jimmy Carter’s back during his Iran-hostage negotiations, much the way Nixon had in sabotaging Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968.
Not only did we present our own original work but we buttressed investigations by other serious journalists, such as Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News when, in 1996, he revived Ronald Reagan’s Contra-cocaine scandal. When the major newspapers set out to destroy Webb and discredit his revelations, Consortiumnews was one outlet that took on the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.
Yes, we were outgunned. Despite showing that Webb was not only right but actually understated the problem of Contra-cocaine trafficking, we still could not save Webb from having his career destroyed and then watching the big newspapers essentially high-five each other for having helped cover up a serious crime of state.
The Three Crimes of the POTUS #43 (Secret Service called him Trailblazer)
I am not going astray here, kind reader. What Steven talked a lot about on the Ralph Nader podcast was how that same media, the So-called Liberal Press, has virtually gone silent on his book, a type of passive censorship that can eat at the soul of any author.
In reality, the “case against Bush” is the case against mainstream media/press and their close ties to not just the chambers of power, but within their “embeddedness,” inside the ranks, as well as their allegiance to and participation in the national security state’s various bureaus of hit men and hit women.
When I finished the book, I offered the book to everybody that I had quoted, which was… around ninety authors. I offered it to Condoleezza Rice, I offered it to Dick Cheney, I offered it to the [George W.] Bush [Presidential] Library. I haven’t heard from one person about the book.
— Steven Markoff stated on Nader’s show.
Interestingly, Markoff incorporates Richard Clarke’s words as a preface to this book. Clarke actually strips culpability from Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others laying the blame on Bush personally. Here, early in Markoff’s book, Clarke puts it clearly in his mind.
While I may be considered by some to be prejudiced in my judgment, there are facts that any objective observer must accept.
• First, Bush ignored warnings about the serious threat from Al Qaeda prior to 9/11. • Second, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in violation of international law, when Iraq had been uninvolved in 9/11 and offered no imminent threat to the United States. • Third, Bush authorized the use of torture and denied prisoners due process, both acts in violation of international law.
Note that in each case I say that Bush did these things, not the Bush administration. There is a revisionist school that seeks to place the blame on Bush’s vice president, Richard B. Cheney. While there can be little doubt that Cheney encouraged Bush to take many of these actions, it is not true that the president was merely a tool of a mendacious and scheming subordinate.
The evidence is now clear that Bush agreed with his vice president and knew full well what he was doing. He was an enthusiastic participant, a believer in the war on terror and the war on Iraq. It is true, however, that he did not master or manage the details of either war until the last few years of his eight-year presidency.
— Richard A. Clarke, in the Forward of Markoff’s book.
[In 1992, President George H. W. Bush appointed Richard A. Clarke to chair the Counterterrorism Security Group and to a seat on the United States National Security Council. President Bill Clinton retained Clarke and in 1998 promoted him to the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism. Under President George W. Bush, Clarke initially continued in the same position and later became the special ad visor to the president on cyber security. He left his government position prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.]
Markoff uses Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, as a touchstone of sorts. That was in 2007.
Importantly, Clarke had the necessary government background, involvement, and position to know about what he wrote. When I finished Clarke’s book, I was shocked. Could Bush have really disregarded threats of bin Laden and Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11? If so, was there a compelling reason that Bush spent his political capital and energy going after Hussein? Could it be that George W. Bush’s Iraq War was about oil?
It occurred to me that while Clarke seemed knowledgeable about terrorists, 9/11, and the run up to our 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was just one person, and his knowledge was limited to what he had personally seen and learned.
I thought that if I combined details from Clarke’s book with related information from other diverse sources with inside or special knowledge of those times and places, that combined information could produce new and clearer insights about 9/11 and the Iraq War. I then set out to find what additional facts and information were available on those and related topics.
Torture, Rendition, Yellow Cake, WMD’s
I remember protesting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales June 27, 2007, in Spokane, when he showed up to talk about his department under Bush. Many of us were there to protest publicly Gonzales and the Bush administration, for many things, including that 2002 memo written by Gonzales that said Bush had the right to waive anti-torture laws and treaties that protect prisoners of war.
Oh, the long arm of the “law” that Wednesday afternoon took a good friend down to the ground, arborist Dan Treecraft. He did nothing wrong, but Dan along with another person was arrested for public disturbance.
I was there with students of mine from two community colleges where I taught, and alas, even those two respective presidents and chairs of the department where I taught thought they had the right to tell a faculty member what he could and couldn’t do as part of a class assignment on “what it’s like to come out and protest a representative of your/our government who states torture is okay.”
Ironically, he was in Spokane to talk about “gang enforcement,” and Gonzales wasn’t alluding to the biggest continuing criminal enterprise Gang called the United States of America.
Steve’s book is a guide, a probable pathway for lawmakers, voters, and others, including the Press, to ratchet up the attention on George W. Bush the War Criminal, and to put to rest the fawning and ameliorating reputation of Bush as The Painter (sic) Friend of Michelle Obama and Ellen.
The kicker in Markoff’s book, says it all, quite damningly, but the reality is that the War is a Racket machine is a very fine tuned complex – Big Business Complex: Burger King, et al; Home Depot, et al; Mercenaries ‘R Us, et al; paint, air conditioning, roads, drywall, vehicles, depleted uranium, fuel, water, food suppliers, et all ; all those financial products, that medical complex et al; Big Ag, Big Oil, Big Chemical, Big Prison et al, all in the manner of the for-profit system that is subsidized – welfare-ized – by the US taxpayer. Insanity we have already seen in other wars, and that War on Vietnam, not enough lessons learned there? I’ve been up close and personal with that war, in Vietnam as a civilian, and as a son of a wounded regular Army officer, social worker for wounded veterans, homeless vets and their families, instructor of college writing for Vietnam veterans.
There is no urban legend attributed to those $200 hammers and $600 toilet seats and $2000 each bolts holding the shrouding of Patriot missiles. War is graft central, and how many millionaires and billionaires were created after World War I? Read General Butler’s, War is a Racket.
Evidence of Crimes as Eight Bullet Points
This shit is personal to me, as well, since I have had friends and students coming back from Bush’s wars, full of trauma, fucked up beyond repair, walking PTSD warriors with all that resentment, anger and physical outbursts, and no where to go. Here is Steve’s book, again, near the end:
Could the following quote from Payback, a book by David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, in part on the strategy of redirected aggression, explain Bush’s taking our country to war on his misleading and false premises?
“George W. Bush and his Administration were not stooges at all, but quite brilliant. They read the need of most Americans at the time: to hit someone, hard, so as to redirect their suffering and anger [from 9/11]. The evidence is overwhelming that for the Bush Administration’s ‘neocons,’ the September 11 attacks were not the reason for the Iraq War; rather, it was a convenient excuse for doing something upon which they had already decided. Their accomplishment—if such is the correct word—was identifying the post-9/11 mood of the American people, and manipulating this mood, brilliantly, toward war.”
It’s difficult to fathom the extent of the death and destruction caused by George W. Bush’s three crimes, but his legacy of death and destruction are of Olympic proportions.
An estimated 2,977 people killed by the attacks on 9/11, and thousands more injured or incapacitated that day. In addition, hundreds if not thousands have died and will die early from the toxic air from the collapse of the Twin Towers and its aftermath.
By one count, there were 4,400 United States personnel killed and 30,000 wounded in the Iraq War as of August 31, 2010; tens of thousands more wounded physically and emotionally crippled by participating in that war; millions of Americans and their families destroyed, devastated, and/or traumatized by 9/11 and Bush’s 2003 Iraq War.
As many as 650,000 deaths or more from Bush’s Iraq War, deaths that wouldn’t have occurred but for that war.
Many of our civil rights, and the civil rights of others around the world, were curtailed due to the fear created by 9/11, a fear used by some as an opportunity to weaken our liberties.
Three to seven trillion dollars in costs to our country from 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Those unnecessary trillions were and will be added to our national debt, a sum burdening our future, the future of our children, and perhaps of generations to come.
Bush’s torture of prisoners puts American soldiers captured in future wars at greater risk of being tortured.
The loss of America’s prestige and moral authority from Bush’s unnecessary Iraq War and torturing prisoners will hurt our country in the years ahead.
Sixteen different US spy agencies on September 24, 2006, concluded that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq since March 2003 has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicals— effectively increasing the terror threat in the years after 9/11—and that the Bush administration tortured detainees and that torture wasn’t effective in securing intel otherwise unavailable.
Because America invaded a sovereign country without credible reason and tortured prisoners, how can we say without hypocrisy that other countries shouldn’t do the same to other nations or to us? What moral authority do we have to tell others it is wrong to torture?
Pretty damning, and as I file this review/analysis/rant, that W is at it again, and his stupidity is the stunt, no, smart as a fox, or pet-painting war criminal?
In a People interview, the former president said he told his former secretary of state he had written for her. “She knows it,” said Bush, 74, “But she told me she would refuse to accept the office.”
Bush has been doing press to support the release of his book, Out of Many, One, which features his painted portraits of American immigrants and the stories of their lives.
He called current-day Republicans “isolationist, protectionist, and, to a certain extent, nativist.”
“Really what I should have said — there’s loud voices who are isolationists, protectionists and nativists, something, by the way, I talked about when I was president,” Bush said. “My concerns [are] about those -isms, but I painted with too broad a brush … because by saying what I said, it excluded a lot of Republicans who believe we can fix the problem.”
Shadow of War — Ghosts of the Dead
We’ll see if People magazine interviews Markoff, and gets a bit under the skin of his fine book, all 360 pages, with a decent bibliography and works cited section.
His conclusion:
Regardless of how I or others see what I submit are Bush’s criminal acts, some will continue to argue that while he wasn’t a perfect president, at least he rid the world of the tyrant, Hussein. Yes, he did, but for what reason, by what method, and at what cost?
In addition to the unnecessary deaths and wounding of thousands of brave Americans, hundreds of thousands of others died and were injured from Bush’s unnecessary Iraq invasion. The trillions of dollars Bush’s war has cost has and will continue to be added to our national debt. A debt saddling our future.
In conclusion, I believe the evidence in this book shows Bush’s three crimes were reckless, dishonest, and tragically unnecessary.
I rest my case.
Of course, there are gross inaccuracies when it comes to US-induced casualties, and the first casualty of war is truth, for sure:
Of the countries where the U.S. and its allies have been waging war since 2001, Iraq is the only one where epidemiologists have actually conducted comprehensive mortality studies based on the best practices that they have developed in war zones such as Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. In all these countries, as in Iraq, the results of comprehensive epidemiological studies revealed 5 to 20 times more deaths than previously published figures based on “passive” reporting by journalists, NGOs or governments.
Taking ORB’s estimate of 1.033 million killed by June 2007, then applying a variation of Just Foreign Policy’s methodology from July 2007 to the present using revised figures from Iraq Body Count, we estimate that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003 as a result of our country’s illegal invasion, with a minimum of 1.5 million and a maximum of 3.4 million.
[Civil protection rescue teams work on the debris of a destroyed house to recover the body of people killed in an airstrike during fighting between Iraqi security forces and Islamic State militants on the western side of Mosul, Iraq. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)]
For Markoff, it’s the lives that were destroyed by Bush. That is the echo in his words, and the ghosts of those murdered are the shadows between the lines in The Case Against George W. Bush.
Marooned, moaning harbor Seals, tears from dives Dreamt, Dungeness crabs These masked men yell “They gotta kill these fat fucking things”
Food is frivolity of human Flotsam, here staking out Rebar and footings A sunset skipping off Backs of seals, ricocheting Through prisms of blown glass Found in the tourist havens
They are in their cups Covid shots of Jose Cuervo Crab sliders dripping Mayo and butter Flocking Californians Portlanders, seeking A bender on sacred beach Salish fresh water mussels Miles from their barbeque
Fun, kites the shape of Teletubbies, gaping gray whales Eyes averted now Paranoia distilled finally The lockdowns, the Zoom Rooms, until out alone on beach Heads down, faces covered Like limping overweight Strong arm robbers Most don’t look at Canada Geese V’s, or bald eagles a mile Above, instead, praying for crabs Cold Coors closeted away Styrofoam picnics Guzzling legs, picking through bodies
They pull down mask, chug, chew Chins covered with plastic surgical Jokes, garlic salt juice flowing Eyes toward imagined beds of a thousand Crabs crawling, these boys and girls Hoping crab pots hold holy grail More slabs of marine meat Pulled and frozen, ready
For more masked men and women Trip home, cursing traffic, cussing Shit from gulls on SUVS Looking out into Pacific Praying for another cold cerveza Down the road, wishing No more Indian talk No Black lives matter The entire shit show that is Is their birth right to condemn
Flagging ancestors of first Colonizing boats Tired of so much, so many Hoping again the trip Back home leaves them Dancing to Jimmy Buffet Enough of this Indian-Black-Chinese Stuff, can’t we all just get along Around the crab fry
The role of a journalist is to question kooky and misleading narratives that have been foisted upon society, to include myriad of topics tied to Mother Nature.
I do not criticize the people personally, but there is something vitally wrong with this notice: “Central Oregon Coast’s Earth Day April 22, 7 to 9 p.m., using the Zoom link: Zoom Day, err, evening, Oregon Coast 2021.
Last year, Zoom Day for Earth streamed because of lockdown paranoia. Now, a year later, there is something wrong with holding a single day to celebrate wind, air, soil, sea, freshwater, animals and Homo sapiens.
But Earth Day has always been a day of action, celebration, confrontation and dialogue. Outside!
Tim DeChristopher, sentenced to two years in federal prison for protesting BLM land leases given away to mining, oil, pigs of capitalism.,
We expect hotel rooms to be cleaned, meals to be cooked, tables to be bussed, tanks to be filled with gasoline. We expect toilets to be unclogged and roofs to be repaired. We expect grocery stores to be open. We expect roads to be repaired.
Yet, this one day, with all the available parking lots, the overlooks to the Pacific, the beach territory, the forestland, it will be brought to you and others via Zoom.
I can direct readers to any number of articles on tech people and companies making a killing with remote streaming tools. From writer V. Blue, Engadget:
“The pandemic has us all in vulnerable positions, and some tech companies are just ethics-free enough to step in and take advantage of entire populations being held hostage by COVID-19. They see us as profitable, captive data generators while their PR departments act like they did something virtuous for the greater good. Like Zoom.
Zoom happens to be a privacy nightmare with a terrible security track record — so bad that in late 2019, EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) made an official complaint to the FTC alleging “unfair and deceptive practices.”
Rachel Carson, mother of Earth Day, wrote her seminal book, “Silent Spring” (1962) but was immediately attacked and vilified by chemical manufacturers, pesticide purveyors, and marketers of “better living through chemistry.”
It doesn’t take a concert planner to locate an outdoor area where canopies can be raised, tables unfolded and a barbeque spit dug for a real Earth Day. The cleanest and most efficiently circulated air in the world swells here on our central coast.
Moving on, here is a link to a new short animated video on global warming sent my way: “Why So Little Means So Much” . It’s about comparing 2 degrees Celsius increase in average global temperature to a fever in a child. Produced by Portland’s Metro Climate Action Team, Pat DeLaquil shepherded the project.
Paul Haeder: What was your role in producing this animated film?
Pat DeLaquil: I came up with the concept and bounced the idea around with several MCAT members using clip art. Then we developed a script where several of us contributed to editing and refining the message. Once we were happy with the storyboard and script, I placed the task on a platform called Upwork and found an artist that did motion graphics, which are much cheaper than real animation. The entire process took well over six months.
PH: Who is the intended audience for this and how does that audience access this?
PDL: We believe we have several target audiences among people who accept that climate change is happening, but don’t realize how bad the crisis can quickly get and why strong action is needed now. e believe this group broadly includes people with children and grandparents, as well as civic groups and the faith community.
PH: Explain your background in research climate change — two sentences.
PDL: I have been a leader in the commercialization of clean and renewable energy technologies for over 40 years, and for the last 20 years, I have run a small business that develops and uses models to perform policy analyses on behalf of donors, governments and the private sector to identify optimal pathways for achieving economic development and environmental goals. I have led the formation of two clean energy start-up companies and earlier led the development of two key solar energy development projects: PV for Utility Scale Applications (PV-USA) and the 10 MW Solar Two Power Tower Project.
PH: Three reasons you believe people in the U.S. still have difficulty understanding global warming, ocean warming, ice and glacial melting.
PDL: Disinformation and deliberate politicization of the issue are strategies used by the right (dominated by fossil fuel interests and their fellow corporate oligarchs). The second reason is that most people are busy with life — just making ends meet between jobs, kids, even before the pandemic, so it’s easy to ignore or deny the severity of the issue, or just hope someone does something. Third, some people in industries that rely on fossil fuels feel threatened that all this is just a plot to take away their lifestyles.
PH: What do you hope this flick will do to move policy makers/stakeholders to work on the very difficult issue of ocean level rise/inundation, extreme weather, crop failures, unlivable urban and rural communities?
PDL: We really hope that this video will motivate people who are not yet active to become more engaged in pushing their elected officials to act quickly to combat climate change.
Paul Haeder is a local author, educator and social services professional. His story collection, “Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam,” can be found at Cirque Press.
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
Definition: An ecological bridge between land and sea, wrack line.
I’ve been looking at the unimagined biological and genetic effects on planet earth caused by “better living through chemistry” capitalist mentality. While Rachel Carson’s seminal work, Silent Spring, catalogued just one aspect of the plethora of physiological effects on animal life, in 2021 we can confidently state there is so much evidence of all the pollutants, toxins, spewing gasses, pesticides, hormone disruptors, radioactive isotopes, forever chemicals, nanoparticles, fungicides, heavy metals and waste pits conspiring to completely disrupt all manner of life.
In that process of contemplating this yesterday, while railing against local older folk who will for Year Two have a Zoom Earth Day (April 22) instead of celebrating this day utilizing our amazing atmosphere and beachside waysides to bring people together, I walked the wrack line.
This is that “line” of organic material that ends up on beaches when tides go back out. It is a biologically important micro-ecosystem of seaweeds, crustaceans, shells, decaying birds and fish and mammals. This wrack line is studied by marine biologists. It provides an amazing supply of food and building components for living crustaceans.
Homo Sapiens pick through the wrack line for treasures like polished agates, whole shells, burled drift wood, and seeds from afar. These wrack lines, unfortunately, are now clogged with that deadline by-product of “better living with chemistry,” plastics. There’s other rubbish, for sure, from the by-products and by-processes of consumerism and industrialism.
There are hidden ones, like radioactive isotopes and impossible to pronounce elements added to the periodic table of elements since I was a high school student in 1973.
The wrack line is also symbolic, allegorical, since if we look deeply at all those industrial processes and all the other processes tied to a Military-Medical-Pharma-Fossil Fuel-Mining-Big Ag-AI-Surveillance-Retail-Media Complex, the fallout of negative chemical influences on humankinds and all flora and fauna are worth a billion lifetimes worth of investigations. This system is run on untold new polymers, additives, lubricants, surfactants, stabilizers, metals, organic compounds, forever chemicals, volatile organic compounds, PFAs, PCBs, resins, and other dandies as part of the sloughing off, combusting, off-gassing, leaching, reactive synergistic war on plant life, animal life, genetic life.
This is far from hyperbole, though in essay form the reader might pause and doubt some of my veracity, but the fact is that any process in this system of consumerism and capitalism ruling the land by the rich who are not held to account with highly regulated precautionary principles and do no harm ethos WILL spoil life in some form or fashion.
For an on-line newsletter like Hormones Matter (where I’ve written a few pieces a few years ago) there are synergies being studied tied to hormones, entwined to biological processes at the cellular and genetic levels within the human scape. These trillions of cells, these highly complex and fragile human systems of biology are studied with a fair mind, kind heart and open dialogue to help people mitigate, survive or reverse many of the ailments covered, all somehow tied to epigenetics and physiological deregulation and autoimmune discombobulating, to put it brutally simplistic.
The wrack line for those readers/chronic illness sufferers tapping into sources like Hormones Matter is composed of all those people struggling with their ailments and diseases, under a system of Western Patriarch and Machismo Arrogant Medicine. The wrack line in a larger sense is that proverbial line in the sand for communities far and wide attempting to provide safe water, safe food, safe products, safe air, safe housing in order to congregate as a community of caring, supporting and holistic healing.
The concept of holism, community-engagement and community- directed support for health, safety and prosperity is truly built into Homo Sapiens DNA, yet under capitalism and rampant consumerism and this highly dog-eat-dog wrecked Darwinism, it has been perverted, subverted, derailed and forcefully forgotten. Memory holed. Orwellian in it’s scope — Organic Food is Poison, Disease is Health, Community is Dangerous.
Food
Imagine the starvation in places like Yemen, and in dozens of other countries because of the strategic playbook moves of predatory, disruptive, and destabilizing capitalism. Starvation because of failed governments after wars and proxy wars. Failed crops because of soil degradation, negative weather patterns, and criminal ill distribution of wealth.
The number of countries that are forced to use the so-called green technologies Rachel Carson alluded to in her 1962 book is more than 150. GMOs, high fertilizer and pesticide inputs. Massive factory farming, concentrated feeding operations. Round-up Ready crops and sprays are just the tip of the iceberg. The economies of scale have created lakes of blood, waste, urine. The amount of pig waste that gets untreated is equal to four humans per pig.
And this stuff is collected near waterways, rivers, streams, and enters the water table and into croplands. These ponds are emptied with gizmos that spray the liquid poisons into the air, onto vast miles of cropland. Atomized death.
So even before the products get to the table, wrapped in plastic, sped along vast fossil fuel spewing supply lines, and before the hormone disrupting, and antibiotic-laced flesh gets cooked in millions of ovens, the seed of disease has already been planted throughout the land. These places of sacrifice, so-called sacrifice zones in a form of disaster capitalism, are also termed forms of environmental racism.
This system of genetically engineered transgenic foodstuffs, and this system of chemicals beyond chemicals sprays on crops, well, that is the modern food system.
The results are firmly planted in research paper, journal article, white paper, and on-the-ground ground truthing. I’ve seen in my 38 years teaching, each year, more and more nervous ticks, attention deficits, learning deficits, food allergies, mental acuity challenge, physical ailments, chronic illnesses in my students, pre-teen all the way up to adults.
Asthma, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, brain fog, emotional discombobulating regular bouts, and more. I’ve even had the “luck” to teach active military at an academy and on several military bases/posts. The amount of destroyed immune systems, as well as the toll on hearing, sight, thinking and the body, well, it’s no wonder so many utilize the socialized system of health called the Veterans Administration. I have had people show me reports of the negative effects of the forced vaccinations and medical treatments soldiers in or out of war time have been burdened with. Lots of reports of service connected disabilities, and we are not just talking tinnitus or a back injury. We are talking more than just Agent Orange. We have a suite of illnesses and diseases tied to service at or around Camp Lejuene. There is a documentary titled, Semper Fi, which I have reviewed and screened to homeless veterans at a 24 hour facility I worked in as a social worker run by that poverty pimping place of ill repute, Salvation (starvation) Army. That camp/base was a dumping ground for chemicals used to propel internal combustion machines, and to clean those machines – dumped into the water.
The result of that human forced wrack line – miscarriages, Parkinson’s, tumors, cancers, and any number of diseases. This list below for Camp Lejeune conditions is very similar to other workplace “injuries”:
It’s a small and incomplete list, and of course, the tally doesn’t include all the learning disabilities, all the attention deficits, all the allergies, all the other cancers that offspring might develop over time.
I haven’t touched upon all the genetic mutations in animals, frogs with extra legs “growing” out of their heads, or butterflies dying by the billions, or bird eggs thinning and thinning.
This is the way of our system – wrack lines from the chemical companies are equally on my mind when I walk these beaches and contemplate the billions of gallons of contaminated water from Fukushima about to be released intentionally.
The food of capitalism is industrialized, ramped up to unimaginable scales that require energy inputs, fossil fuel inputs, and massive clear-cutting and bulldozing of natural ecosystems. From industrialize coffee plantations in Vietnam, to miles of monocrop organic (sic) strawberries in California, to confined animal feeding operation to oil slicked sea.
A society that warns pregnant women to not drink the well water in those eight states that produce most of the soy, corn, chicken, beef, pig, and eggs for this country, well, if the wrack line is not absolutely warped and demonstrably upside down, then I find it difficult to give a more simple, pure example of this sickness.
Don’t drink the water or you may have a miscarriage, or you might give birth to a diseased baby? If that isn’t truth in advertisement, then I don’t know what is.
Imagine the exponentially worse conditions in Mexico, in other countries, without as robust a phalanx of groups fighting against and exposing this crime against humanity.
But the irony is there are more water defenders, crop defenders, community defenders in many Latin American countries, than in this country, per capita. There is a reason we have organizations that expose the murders of environmentalists throughout the world for attempting to hold accountable and stop so many US and transnational/global corporations in the business of creating their own wrack lines – oil, mining, cattle, swine, commodity crops, corn, sugar, and a suite of other capitalistic systems of oppressive business models and pollution creators..
Just the short elevator on Atrazine, the most widely used pesticide in our crop systems in the USA. Imagine, this is acceptable risk, allowable negative effects of this poison – “Large numbers of chemicals that are included in pesticides cause toxicity and as a result loss of neurons occurs through necrosis or by apoptosis. Such neuronal loss is irretrievable, and may result in a global encephalopathy. This is known as neuropathies.” — Just go to the research site, Beyond Pesticides–
Here, some facts about Monsanto’s Roundup:Although glyphosate should be associated with a low toxicity recent studies related to the potential toxicity of this herbicide have pointed out more evidence of the health risks .In this sense, in 2015, the herbicide glyphosate was classified as probably carcinogenic to humans. A growing body of literature points to possible, adverse environmental, ecological, and human health consequences following exposure to glyphosate and/or AMPA (its primary metabolite aminomethyl-phosphonic acid), both alone and in combination with ingestion of genetically engineered proteins.Environmental studies encompass possible glyphosate impacts on soil microbial communities and earthworms, monarch butterflies, crustaceans, and honeybees. Studies assessing possible risks to vertebrates and humans include evidence of rising residue levels in soybeans, cancer risk, and risk of a variety of other potential adverse impacts on development, the liver or kidney, or metabolic processes. — Impact of Glyphosate on Human Health: Risks and “Needs” of its Use by Maria Drumond Chequer Farah and André Leiliane Coelho.
The fact is just Genetically Modified soybeans grown in the U.S.A., Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay — accounting for 86.6% of the 11.6 billion bushels of soybeans produced globally in 2014, and nearly all global trade in soybeans and soybean-based animal feeds — have been a plague on ecosystems — terrestrial, avian, aquatic we call Mother Nature — as well as a plague on humans, children, adults and the unborn.
Indeed, more and more independent researchers are looking at Roundup as a source of dozens of ailments, from gut diseases to attention disorders. Imagine the “null” use of the precautionary principle just with this one weed killer! Multiple the number of other poisons and toxins entering the food-stream by hundreds.
Refer to the first part of this series related to the spraying of chemicals closely formulated from the precursor, Agent Orange (a mixture of equal parts of two herbicides, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D with some dioxins thrown in) — including Roundup and 2,4-dimethylheptane.
Plastic in Your Poop
The work of artist Chris Jordan on plastics and just on the consumer waste in our capitalist consumer society is amazing. His documentary, Albatross, stays with me as I walk the wrack lines on the Central Oregon Coast. I’ve walked wrack lines all over the world, and been in places where plastic bags and single-use plastic containers and bottles have destroyed ecosystems, on beaches, in harbors and along river ways. Here, on the coast, we get all manner of bits and pieces and larger trash, mostly plastics, on those wrack lines. Microplastics, well, the schools here in this county where I substituted I had the opportunity to talk about plastic bag bans, the effects of plastics on marine life, and the inevitable class giggle topic of plastic in our poop. The reality is that every person on planet earth has microplastics in their feces. We talked about plastics in everything they eat, the packaging, the clothing, in bottled water, and the soil. I showed parts of Albatross. That bit of relevant education, from a well-traveled substitute, got me banned from the school system for showing these documentaries, “for upsetting the students (customers).” For me this is yet another symbolic wrack line in my life, one of the washed up and failed education system that I might allude to in part three of this series.
As a diver, as an environmentalist, as a deep green sustainability proponent, and as a journalist and teacher and someone with a load of urban and regional planning under my belts, the reality for me is we have been at war with nature, with ourselves. Plastic is yet another symbolic manufactured element that is emblematic of our capitalism gone wild. Plastics are the thing of fossil fuels, and heavy natural gas consumption. Those fancy polymers are more than just a physical eyesore in the form of Pepsi bottles and single serving ketchup packets. This stuff is entering the blood-brain barrier, and is causing untold havoc on the human biological ecosystem. Delayed or premature puberty. Diabetes. Gut ailments. The reality is we do not know all the possible negative health outcomes of microplastics alone, as opposed to microplastics mixing with all those nanoparticles and the other chemicals coming into play in the human physiology.
Last year, I viewed on line a Remote Operated Vehicle filming the deepest part of the globe, the Mariana Trench, with ghostly images of single use plastic shopping bags floating by. It wasn’t a surprise, since I have been a scuba diver for more than 45 years. That revelation was, however, yet another cut in the 10,000 cuts of spiritual and intellectual death people like me have to steel himself from.
So, things may go better with Killer Coke, in the minds of marketers and consumers, but the reality is that if we take one thing out of the complicated web of processes and products, separate one intended or unintended consequence of the revolutions we label industrial and post industrial (Fourth Industrial Revolution is a digital one, so research that through writers like Cory Morningstar, Whitney Webb and Alison McDowell), we see that Minute Maid/Coca-Cola’s heavy use of sugar and HFCS, and their anti-labor union work in tropical countries where their oranges and other citrus crops are under armed guard, behind concertina wires and CCTV security system bring with them huge intended and unintended consequences: negative impacts to ecosystems – nature, culture, economy, communities, human health.
Again, John Muir a hundred years ago, stated it clearly —
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. — My First Summer in the Sierra , 1911, page 110.
Now, let’s reverse this adage by stating it this way – When you put in anything by itself from industrialized processes, we find it hitches onto one thing or many things in the Universe of the biological universe.”
So, those deadly Bic lighters and all those bits and pieces of plastics washing up on shore into wrack lines, or clogging rivers and wetlands and deltas, well, we can see the effects on a meta and micro scale.
Akin to global biogeochemical cycles, plastics now spiral around the globe with distinct atmospheric, oceanic, cryospheric, and terrestrial residence times. Though advancements have been made in the manufacture of biodegradable polymers, our data suggest that extant nonbiodegradable polymers will continue to cycle through the earth’s systems. Due to limited observations and understanding of the source processes, there remain large uncertainties in the transport, deposition, and source attribution of microplastics. Thus, we prioritize future research directions for understanding the plastic cycle. – Constraining the atmospheric limb of the plastic cycle
So, microplastics in poop just is the funny side of things for elementary and junior high school students. The reality is microplastics are found in the liver, lungs, spleens and other organs of humans. BPA, also known as bisphenol A, is a chemical in the production of plastics. It’s a reproductive, developmental and systemic toxicant in animal studies.
It would be naïve to believe there is plastic everywhere but just not in us, said Rolf Halden at Arizona State University. We are now providing a research platform that will allow us and others to look for what is invisible – these particles too small for the naked eye to see. The risk [to health] really resides in the small particles.
This bioaccumulation in tissues, that is, in the animals we eat, like tuna or salmon, is also part of the bioaccumulation of plastic particles in the food we eat, air we breathe, water we drink. With the Covid-19 hysteria, plastic masks, plastic everything, is now in the waste stream. As one Wall Street guru stated, “Plastics, that’s what you should invest in . . . the goofy plastic shopping bag bans is making MORE money for the plastics industry . . . more heavy plastic bags are being purchased to make up the difference.”
Disaster capitalism, and shock doctrine, which writer Naomi Klein has written about extensively, is tied to that old saw that the GDP goes up when Walmart of Amazon delivers more things to places and communities under some sort of disaster. When hurricanes and tornados hit, companies far and wide make money. Wars in the Middle East, well, the list of corporations that make money on the entire effort of war and warring, it’s huge. The disease maintenance of USA’s private for profit medical systems, whether it’s a for-profit United Health Care, or for-profit nonprofit religious hospital, makes people money. Lots of it. Poverty and disease and war are profitable circumstances for a large swath of American businesses.
The public pays for the diseases and illnesses and loss of time with family, lost wages, lost communities. We pay for the birth defects in our newborns, and we pay for the multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s in our older people. The externalities of capitalism are the various issues Hormones Matter covers when looking at diseases. The convenience of plastic bottles and pipes in our homes is the cancers of the future. Those plastics in the belly of whales, birds and albacore are the bioaccumulated toxins in our daily meals. We don’t need to study the great Pacific plastic gyre to understand how plastics break down, unseen, or subsurface. We will at some point have more plastic particles in the oceans than all the organic biomass. These are not the fictions of Ursula La Guinn or Margaret Atwood.
Weathering and Weather Proofing
This is descriptive of how to keep that house from getting peeling paint, curling roof tiles, mossed over eaves, and worn down carpets and floors. It sounds benign, too, when we look at the studies around weathering for African-Americans. For youth, we utilize ACEs — Adverse Childhood Experiences for outcomes here in Oregon as social services practitioners.
10 ACEs, as identified by the CDC-Kaiser study: Abuse. Physical. Emotional. Sexual. Neglect. Physical. Emotional. Household Dysfunction. Mental Illness.
These are what a child’s circumstances could be no fault of their own. Poverty, parent(s) with substance abuse issues, with mental health issues, with spousal abuse in the home. Of course, the more direct of these 10 on the developing child will create probable outcomes, possible lifetime issues. Pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps is an inane concept for youth presented with one or many of these areas of ACEs. Yes, poverty hurts, but if the family has sets of resilient measures and safety nets, then the negative future effects on the child with that one ACE could be actually negligible or even self-empowering.
But now that other overarching set of circumstances tied to the idea of weathering:
Repeated exposure to socioeconomic adversity, political marginalization, racism, and perpetual discrimination can harm health. This weathering has created a slew of medical issues for African Americans, especially, but other minorities like Latinx. However, the fabric of a racist society with all the heavy hand of Jim Crow and The New Jim Crow is q quilt of many death by a thousand cuts for Blacks. Quality of life diminished, but also life expectancy cut too.
In her later work, Dr. Arline Geronimus and other scientists who embraced the weathering hypothesis extended it to apply to Black adults in general, not just Black women.
For instance, a 2006 paper by Dr. Geronimus and colleagues set out to test the hypothesis that Black adults “experience early health deterioration as a consequence of the cumulative impact of repeated experience with social or economic adversity and political marginalization.”
In the NPR interview, Dr. Geronimus explained the notion of weathering using a metaphor that is in equal measure disheartening, troubling, and alarmingly true.
Referring to the activist Erica Garner, who died of complications from a heart attack at the age of 27, Dr. Geronimus said that the feelings of stress leading to such an early death are like playing a game of Jenga.
Paraphrasing the activist’s sister, she said: “They pull out one piece at a time, at a time, and another piece and another piece, until you sort of collapse. […] I thought that Jenga metaphor was very apt because you start losing pieces of your health and well-being, but you still try to go on as long as you can.” — Medical News Today
Another feature and term is the allostatic load — the repeated exposure of societal and economic stress creates a physiological response, and weathering. These are biomarkers such as cortisol levels, sympathetic nerve activity, blood pressure reactivity, cytokine production, waist-to-hip ratio, and glycated hemoglobin levels.
I’ve seen this up close and personal first-hand when I started teaching in El Paso, at community colleges and universities. I saw this in the faces and body blows and prevalence of diabetes and heart disease and asthma in the parents of my students. Many of the parents were from poverty and from racist communities in Texas. These parents were categorized as non-white Hispanics. Many were farm laborers, migrant workers. Many were cooks and maids and construction laborers.
This relationship I had with my students and their families and my friends, as well, was parlayed into more observations in Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador and Belize. The more pressures on people, on indigenous poor people, the more rapid the decline. In most cases. For Black Americans, this is a triple whammy since there are a few examples of Blacks overcoming the poverty and the heavy toll of hard work and constant Diaspora. But just because there is an Orpah or Vice President Kamala Harris, doesn’t mean anything to the Black or Latinx in constant struggle to work their bodies hard, sometimes three jobs a person, to get out of institutionalized and systemic poverty.
My friends in the Army and Air Force, African American friends, still paying the toll of a life before military service and even racism while in the armed services. This weathering is both descriptive of a general biological and mental toll on people always on the move, always going from paycheck to paycheck, always one step ahead of the repo man or forced eviction from the county sheriff.
So many of my Black colleagues in social services have told me that “this office, this job, this nonprofit, well, it’s like the old South — this is not my house.” The toll on my colleagues with the overt and covert racism was huge. Just going out into a rural area of Oregon to serve foster children clients for a Black woman was more than just nerve-racking. Seeing confederate flags in yards populated with snarling pit bulls with 2nd amendment stickers on pick-up trucks with bumper stickers stating, “This vehicle is protected by Smith and Wesson,” caused great emotional harm. I was asked many times to accompany my fellow social workers on these calls.
This higher level of sickness and weathering and death at an earlier age is not just a matter of economic circumstances. No matter how hard people in the USA want to hem and haw, “racial disparities in poverty suggested to the researchers that living in a ‘race-conscious society’ and the efforts required to cope is what causes weathering.
This leads to other factors tied to weathering in a more geographically determined way — environmental racism. The father of environmental justice is in fact Dr. Robert Bullard, an African American professor of urban planning at Texas Southern University.
His website states it succinctly what this environmental injustice/racism is:
America is segregated and so is pollution. Race and class still matter and map closely with pollution, unequal protection, and vulnerability. Today, zip code is still the most potent predictor of an individual’s health and well-being. Individuals who physically live on the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ are subjected to elevated environmental health threats and more than their fair share of preventable diseases. Still, too many people and communities have the ‘wrong complexion for protection.’ Reducing environmental, health, economic and racial disparities is a major priority of the Environmental Justice Movement.
Weathering then takes on another component — polluting industries and agricultural practices end up on the wrong side of the tracks. Exposure to massive amounts of chemicals goes right into the lap of migrant farmers and field hands. Those plastics refineries are in the low rent district of a town or city. The burden of air contamination and dirty water (think lead and Flint, Michigan) is placed more heavily on people of color.
Yet as we now know, chemicals and carcinogens are an equal opportunity killer when it comes to our food system as it is sold in grocery stores. More than 80 percent of the wheat products — bread, pasta, crackers, cereal — have Roundup in them from field spraying close to wheat harvest. We all are in one giant rotating mass experiment. The weathering of the human psyche kills us earlier, but the weathering creates by poor nutrition, poor choices, polluted choices, that is now flowing out from the Black community into many more communities.
You Are What You Eat, Drink, Read, See, Say, Dream, Do, Hope for, Plan, Listen to, Care About . . .
This is a thread to my teaching and my own life — you are what you do, or what you do not do. Replace the subheading above with the negative, and that also explains a person’s heart, hearth, health and hopes.
I used to have my college students go over the implications and deep multiplicity of concepts and research topics tied to photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D’Aluisio travels around the world and their documenting the foundational human behavior of what we eat. Their project, “Hungry Planet,” depicts everything that an average family consumes in a given week—and what it costs.
Their book “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats” in 2005, showcases meals in 24 countries.
Germany: The Sturm Family of Hamburg. Food Expenditure for One Week: € 253.29 ($325.81 USD). Favorite foods: salads, shrimp, buttered vegetables, sweet rice with cinnamon and sugar, pasta. Peter Menzel, from the book, “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.”They did follow up with a worldwide day’s worth of food.
Vietnam, The Rice Farmer Name: Nguyen Van Theo Age: 51; Height: 5′ 4″; Weight: 110 pounds Caloric value of food this day: 2500 calories
BREAKFAST: Rice noodles, 2.7 oz. (dry weight), boiled and eaten with fish sauce, 1.5 tbsp.
LUNCH: Pork loin cooked with bean sprouts and green onion, 3.6 oz. Pork back cooked with pickled mustard greens, 3 oz. White rice, 1.4 lb.
DINNER: Pork back seasoned with fish sauce and caramel sugar, 1.6 oz. Eggs, from his chickens, fried with green onion, 2.6 oz. Spinach and spinach water broth, 5.2 oz. White rice, 1.4 lb. Homemade ruou thuoc (strong rice wine with herbs), 1.9 fl. oz.
THROUGHOUT THE DAY: Green tea, 7.8 fl. oz. Tobacco, 0.5 oz. Boiled rainwater, 1.6 qt.
“In this food portrait, a pile of last year’s rice straw lies in the background. It is used as fuel to boil water in the family’s small kitchen. Cisterns collect rainwater for drinking and cooking.”
*–*
Those so-called food deserts, the neighborhoods where there are more 7-11’s, gun shops, liquor stores, PayDay loan outfits and fast-food joints than anything else, including a place to purchase green groceries and a place to learn how to cook them, that’s another project of weathering the body to fit the capitalist quick dirty buck schemes. Imagine food disparagement bills, so-called Cheeseburger bills, that prohibit media from attacking bad food and fast-food for negative health outcomes. Imagine that scenario, and it isn’t in a Brave New World, but it has been an un-brave old world of protecting polluters, whether it’s coal ash and smelters spewing in the air, or if it’s bad food, nutritional empty food, salty-greasy-sugary foods pushed down the throats of toddlers by school systems. Weathering also caused by subsidies for the big eight — soy, wheat, pork, dairy, corn, beef, poultry, canola — but nothing for the organic vegetable and fruit farmers. A decent sized organic apple costs as much as a cheeseburger, Coke and fries.
Yes, I worked in Vietnam, and yes, the mother’s milk in 1996 had 15 times the EPA’s allowable PCBs in it, thanks to the gift that keeps on giving — soil laden with those carcinogens and dioxins from Agent Orange. The places I went to were just getting snarled in dirty motorcycle traffic and more and more cars. The lifestyle became more supercharged, more consumer focused, and alas, beautiful trees would be cut down to accommodate larger and larger lorries and semi-trucks.
In the hinterland, where I also spent time with scientists from Hanoi and from the UK and Canada, I did engage with robust and personal conversations with Vietnamese, sometimes ethnic Vietnamese, in their homes, as they shared meager but tasty meals, sharing bongs of tobacco, and yes, the rice wines. Not to idealize the rural and agrarian and sometimes subsistence lives, I still know for a fact from my other travels into Latin America, there is a multitude of negative prices to pay — Faustian bargains galore — for adopting Western consumerism, lifestyles and diets. Obviously, a refrigerator is life-saving, for sure, and a fan, another lifesaver. But the rolled cigarette smoke in the air and lungs, as well as the black soot and persistent aromatic particles are more carcinogen and COPD gifts that come in a delayed package.
Weathering. Sort of the reverse weathering, far different than the weathering of Black men and women in the USA. But still, a good way to look at things broadly. That consumption of everything, from books to movies, from beer to beets, from burgers to briskets, all of it has a short-term and long-term effect on everything, inside the person’s body, all the way through the economic and environmental/cultural webs.
The Air We Breathe at Home
This sort of polemic can really never end, for in fact, there are literally entire human lifetimes of work which could easily be put into book form to the 10th or 100th power. The simplest things like soil and water are easily seen as what should be help sacrosanct, but inevitably, we see that the systems in place through industrial ag or industrial harvesting, anything on an industrial level, including such amazing practices as mountain top removal for coal, or fracked subsurface geology for bitumen, or cyanide slurry sprayed on rocks to get at gold.
Necessity, for capitalists, is the mother of invention. And the “necessary” thing (necessity to be gotten at is, of course, profits.
I remember my mother, who grew up in Canada, Powell River, the largest pulp mill in the world at the time placed there, producing megatons an hour of paper, newsprint, tissue. The town is on Indian territory, but I never knew it as a kid visiting there. What I remembered was the heavy weight of the air, that burn rotten egg smell, the sulfuric acid like sing at the back of the throat. Then the quaint town was hit with ash showers several times a day. I recall free car wash stations in several parts of town to keep the old Ford’s paint from really peeling.
Many townspeople were hit with lung diseases, eventually COPD and emphysema in their 30s or 40s. My mom was constantly having bronchitis in both lungs. Other youth also had the same problems. The giant company of course rattled off plausible deniability, citing poor genes, poor lungs, poor diets, you name it.
I could see it, touch it, taste it, smell it, and hear it, all those blasts of pollutants coming from the cookers and bleachers and peroxide vats. The proof was in the back of the throat and in the hacking up of green stuff, but again, jobs, a union, a company town ethos.
I had to really reach middle age to understand that British Columbian town, and the pre-white man history: These were Coast Salish people of the Tla’amin Nation. The gold fever created a spot for gold prospectors coming from Vancouver Island to make their was on the Fraser River for that boom or bust quick fortune.
This is leading up to that air we breathe, the stuff my daughter and stepdaughter breathe in their respective schools they attend. We are talking about dust collected and analyzed from a university revealing again, more invisible-to-the-eye gifts that keep on giving: Study.
Cell-based assays are an emerging method to quantify the total activation or suppression of hormone receptors by complex environmental mixtures of hormone-disrupting chemicals. Compared with traditional targeted laboratory approaches that measure each chemical in a mixture individually, cell-based assays of dust are inexpensive, rapid, and statistically simple to model. Hormonal activities in assays of dust also reflect the combined effects from co-exposures of all hormone-disrupting chemicals in the sample, including unmeasurable chemicals and unknown regrettable substitutes. The assays account for any mixture effects, such as when a chemical’s effect is triggered, enhanced, or reduced in the presence of another chemical.
Background: Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), organophosphate esters (OPEs), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are hormone-disrupting chemicals that migrate from building materials into air and dust.
Objectives: We aimed to quantify the hormonal activities of 46 dust samples and identify chemicals driving the observed activities.
Methods: We evaluated associations between hormonal activities of extracted dust in five cell-based luciferase reporter assays and dust concentrations of 42 measured PFAS, OPEs, and PBDEs, transformed as either raw or potency-weighted concentrations based on Tox21 high-throughput screening data.
Results: All dust samples were hormonally active, showing antagonistic activity toward peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPARγ2) (100%; 46 of 46 samples), thyroid hormone receptor (TRβ) (89%; 41 samples), and androgen receptor (AR) (87%; 40 samples); agonist activity on estrogen receptor (ERα) (96%; 44 samples); and binding competition with thyroxine (T4) on serum transporter transthyretin (TTR) (98%; 45 samples). Effects were observed with as little as 4μg of extracted dust.
This is a scientific research study of 46 dust samples from 21 buildings on a US university campus. It’s the old flame retardant sloughing off issue. Imagine, there is no evidence that flame retardants applied to all manner of things prevents fires. But we know that more than 90 percent of Americans have the retardant in their/our blood, and we know the health effects include infertility, diabetes, obesity, abnormal fetal growth, and cancers.
This study helps explain how these PFAS and flame retardants enter the body. For the initiated, PFAS first gained press as compounds in Teflon. They are utilized as part of a coating for carpets, furniture, and clothing. Even inside electronics you’ll find these PFAS. And much-much more:
Right off the bat, when baby comes out of mother’s womb, she is exposed to hundreds of chemicals, including PFAS and another species of flame retardants found in the dust — polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs. These PBDEs may have been phased out in eight years ago — after they were implicated in health issues such as infertility and thyroid dysfunction. But they are still around, in all sorts of products. Recycled plastics contain them as well. Swaddled babies wrapped in PFAS and other materials coated and sprayed with organophosphate esters.
The price of capitalism and better living/dying with chemistry is a sick and sickening society: again, just these family of chemicals cause through some very sophisticated and synergistic processes amazingly harmful things such as “impaired fetal development, obesity, decreased vaccine response, preeclampsia, testicular cancer, immune dysfunction, kidney cancer, and elevated cholesterol levels.”
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
by Paul Haeder / April 10th, 2021
Lies, Memory Hole, Circling the Managers’ Rotting Core
Scenario: Interesting how in the first three minutes of a mandatory one-on-one interview with my supervisor — no agenda, no inkling really what it would be about — she yells at me and says, “You look at me when I am talking to you. Look at me right now.”
I’m across from her in the kitchen where she decides to dress me down in, me, with a fucking face mask on, per the nonprofit’s CoV2 orders and signage, while she spews her spittle at me. Ten feet away. While she is unmasked.
Now, just what would you do, kind reader, with a manager starting off a meeting that way?
Mind you, I am taking notes, as I always do wherever I go. “Don’t look down while I’m talking to you.” She repeats this rage again.
I, of course, answer with, “I am taking notes for what appears to be a serious meeting. I’m looking down because I am taking notes.”
She is on her personal phone with the cretin boss of bosses, in his Salem office. Literally, I am 10 feet away, and four staff are just outside the swinging kitchen doors listening in. I mention that concern, and she says, “They can’t hear me.”
The woman degrades and spirals into rage, raging further and further when I am asked for input. I respond, give some pushback, criticizing her current and past demeanor, and she rages again. “This meeting isn’t about what you think I have done. This meeting concerns you and your behavior.”
I do eventually stand up, pack my bag, and head out toward the door, but not before she gets her final yell in: “Don’t you dare leave. If you do, that’s it. That’s it, don’t you leave.”
I respond with, “That’s it? What does that mean? Are you firing me?”
Her paddle pudding head retorts, “Yes, this either can be a first warning if you come back in here, or a final warning if you leave. Come back here now.” She is red-faced, yelling, and the four staff have been listening to this the entire time.
The boss of the boss calls me after I email him to immediately call and explain what just happened, and he says, “Well, we will have another meeting tomorrow after you both cool down. You both take the rest of the day off.”
He states it will be a Zoom call, as I already complained to him about why it wasn’t Zoomed before all the yelling from my supervisor. Then, he puts me on suspension, unpaid, after writing three sets of grievances.
Right to Fire You No Matter How Abusive Management is
It is legal in the U.S. for an employer to cut you loose at any moment, even if you’re doing a fantastic job.
They don’t need a reason. You can be fired for backing the wrong political candidate or the wrong baseball team.
As long as your employment isn’t covered by a collective bargaining agreement, an individual employment contract or regulations that supersede Employment at Will, you could be toast at any moment, no matter how long you’ve held your job. — “Ten Ways Employment At-Will Are Bad”
Ahh, that is it, no, the at-will, right-to-work flimflam of American capitalism. I have been in a union twice, once as a union organizer. The other time was as a community college teacher in Washington State. I even worked with adjunct faculty as an adjunct faculty organizer. Other terms for adjunct faculty include: just-in-time-professor; 11th-hour-teacher; freeway flyer; gypsy scholars; professor on food stamps.
This part-time status, where I worked at four institutions, teaching 9 classes in a one semester load, is part of the precarious nature of work. Now, more than 80 percent of classes at colleges and universities is taught by so-called adjuncts. With the planned-pandemic, colleges are cutting real professors and the other lucky tenured track folk to make room for the new normal of no more or limited face to face time. Colleges and universities are pushing for a deeper cuts to non-essential liberal arts offerings, even many of the sciences, for those more business friendly curricula. To do this, they are hiring on people who are the lowest of the lowest scabs get onto a platform like Zoom and Blackboard to teach not one, not five, not 10 classes at a time, but in some cases, many thousands of “students” (customers) in many states and many countries. MOOC’s — massive open online classes.
Working in social services — all nonprofits who poverty pimp with income streams from governmental agencies — I have run into the most corrupt and corrupting people since, a, social services is supposed to be about supporting people, putting people (clients) first, and, b, meant to incorporate a sophisticated overlay of trauma informed practices, clear communication, transparency, and, c, it’s work with people who would have otherwise been thrown on the great trash heap of America’s capitalist throw-away society pile. We are talking about me working with homeless veterans, homeless just-released-felons, almost-homeless foster youth, and adults with developmental, intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. And those with TBI and PTSD from violence, both physical and structural.
Every nonprofit I worked for fought talk of unionizing. Nonprofits have scolded workers for sharing their hourly incomes (sic). Nonprofits have put into policy no talking bad about the management edicts. These disaster capitalism folk and their boards and CFOs and CEOs and especially their HR heads, they in the end only want good PR spin, emotionally and physically wrecked workers who are compliant, grateful for a $15 an hour job, and almost complete control of the workers’ ability to face off/down power and maleficence and corruptible managers.
Despite the insistence of businesses and their lackeys that “right to work” legislation will help create jobs during the “great recession,” and despite their twisting and turning of statistical data to corroborate this story, the fact is that the “right to work” snake-oil doesn’t create jobs. What it does is puts more ammunition in the hands of employers to use against workers who dare stand up to their workplace hegemony, and helps ensure that employers go unchallenged as they slash the wages and benefits of their employees.
The solution is not, as the capitalists say, to combat the rights of workers to organize their workplaces. The solution is precisely the opposite: to allow workers not only to organize their workplaces, but the whole of society, under a system that works for the advancement of all workers. Otherwise, any “rights” workers have will be tempered and restricted for the benefit of business.
As I mentioned above, I was yelled at and threatened on a Monday, and then I sent in not one, not two, but three very detailed grievances against two managers (the one in person and the one on the phone).
The nature of and specificity included in these complaints were obviously impeachable offenses for that supervisor and her supervisor. I did refer to my younger sister (a decade younger) who has since age 22, after Northern Arizona University (BSW, 1985) matriculation as a social worker, been in many dozens of iterations as a social worker, social services manager, and case manager and case manager manager. We are talking about at-risk teens; migrant farmers; abused women; shelters; rape crisis centers; and generally, statewide social services management.
Her work has been exclusively in Arizona, another retrograde at-will, right-to-be-fired-for-anything state. She hands down told me that as a manager of 27 social workers and others, if she had talked to one of her staff that way, she would be immediately fired.
My detailed and long grievances, of course, got me sacked. It took less than four full days to investigate literally dozens of instances where this supervisor had since day one breached my confidentiality, other workers’ protected information, clients’ personal and medical information. From day one, the 68 year old woman used me as a sounding board, coming to me daily many times in the day with her exasperation and condemnations and criticisms of this or that person, much of which was more than just inappropriate gossip.
I was harassed because of my three college degrees, harassed for my efficiency as a social services practitioner, harassed because of my gender (male), harassed because of my age (63-64), harassed because I am a writer, harassed because I am anti-Trump/Biden.
It gets worse, and alas, I still have to fight the termination, the idiocy of a CEO who actually put in writing two huge lies (errors) in her sped-up termination letter.
There is an OSHA complaint filed, for unmasked people in an unventilated room when I have had to abide by those mask mandates since day one. It is not a matter of me disagreeing with almost everything tied to corona cold virus 2.0, and a matter of me being more informed than boss A, or boss B, or boss C (CEO) about masks. I put up with the bloody mask like I put up with my fucking helmet for my motorcycle.
You know the old saw — Do as I say and do as I do! Not here, amigo.
[Akindo/Getty Images]
Broken Bodies, Traumatized Brain, GAD, PTSD as the Real Pandemic
Look, when I am working with people with major histories of physical problems at birth, and the reality of being on the spectrum, having mental retardation, having cerebral palsy, Fetal Alcohol Effective Disorders, Downs Syndrome, Fragile X and any number of other issues tied to bad pregnancies, drug addicted first hours on planet earth, strokes in vitro, and the luck of genetic anomalies, I treat them as persons first, but with a truck load of knowledge on what some of those developmental and intellectual disabilities might be doing to influence my clients’ lives and my clients’ families’ lives.
But the fact is, those people in the professions around poverty pimping for the Nonprofit Industrial Complex are lowly paid, and most come from lives of trauma, physical conditions, mental dire straits, and more.
Yes, the USS (United States of Snakes) society in general is in the GAD — general anxiety disorder. Trauma is a loss of a child in a miscarriage, a death of a loved one, divorce, homelessness, poverty, incarceration, military combat. It is blunt force trauma to the head, to the body, to the soul. I get it that my fellow worker is suffering, big time.
This predatory, fleecing, disaster-ready, dirty capitalism — where all value is on making a buck, making it anyway you can, in many cases — it eats at the souls of people. Social workers and social services people come from whence they speak and how they work — many are also products of some set of significant emotional events in their own lives.
Broken people get into this umbrella of professions. Some get certified as peer support counselors, that is, people who were once on drugs, on booze, in mental dire straits, incarcerated, destroyed partially by rape or war.
“It takes a damaged person to help a damaged person.” This credo is emblazoned in the social services arenas. It is not a truism, but it is truly how these poverty pimps operate.
Given that a CEO who might be the spouse of a big bucks MD, who has some business degree, that person, even in his or her late thirties, does not only patronize his or her workforce, but treat them as children. I’ve written about the infantilization of Americans.
That has infected how an out-of-control boss just a week ago yelled at me, threatened me, and had the stupidity to think I’d stay in that unventilated room to take more of it. Her idiot boss, again, had the audacity to not intervene and call off the meeting early. I called it off by leaving.
Now, the term, Poverty Pimp, was coined by Black Panthers, who saw middle and upper middle class whites come into neighborhoods to have their feel-good moments and build their Women’s Club resumes by setting up nonprofits to take care of the poor (read, BIPOC, addicted, homeless, lowly educated, poorly represented, stuck in hoods dripping with environmental racism at their cores).
The idea is people on boards get all sorts of political perks, and the administrators and upper management get some juicy salaries running these poverty pimping programs in the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.
We know why there is poverty, environmental racism, economic inequity, poor health and education outcomes for BIPOC folk. The real pimping is the pimping inside and around the Complex. Not the Matrix, but the Military-Media-Medical-Pharma-Ag-Mining-Oil-AI-Finance-Insurance-Real Estate-Prison-Education-Lawyer-Lobby-Surveillance-Banking-Stock Trading Complex. End this Complex, and most things in USS are solved.
What befalls a poor neighborhood is systemic/economic violence and a complete septicemia of the lower classes, those of us in the 80 Percent.
Here, from a religious writer —
Last week was the first time I have ever been called a “poverty pimp” in front God and everyone—in public. It certainly got my attention!
As Director of International Child Care Ministries, I straddle two worlds—the America I call home and the 30 countries where our sponsored children live. I travel back and forth between these two worlds several times a year and experience the stark contrast between my world and theirs.
Here in the U.S., part of my responsibility is to advocate for the children at conferences, churches, and other venues. Last week at an event I had my display set up, 20 kids’ faces looking out from their brochures, silently imploring conference attendees to choose them and become their sponsors.
My accuser was an eloquent professor of African American Studies. He is offended at groups like mine who apparently profit off Africa’s poverty and perpetuate an image of black helplessness. He is concerned that African American children who view pathetic images of hungry kids on TV internalize a sense of racial inferiority. And that’s not the half of it.
He also proposed that the American Church invests energy and resources in the missionary enterprise around the world, but seems to care nothing about the problems that plague our inner cities back here at home. Why, asked the professor, can’t the Church in the U.S. direct some of its compassion to the neighbor next door? Why do we care so much about black children who live across the ocean when we are so callous toward the ones who live across the tracks?
“Every time I come to a Christian conference like this, I have to walk past three tables of poverty pimps to get into the auditorium; it makes me sick!” Ouch! — Linda Adams
So, while I work with these various human beings stuck in the vice of capitalism and under the ineptitude of government agencies, and the systemic infliction of economic, cultural, physical, intellectual and spiritual trauma on their kids and their kids’ kids, since I am a lowly paid worker, hourly, with the one goal of keeping some employer-based health care, it is really one-on-one work I do, and I get that sense of satisfaction of doing good for one person at a time. My boss’s boss’s boss is most probably rich by his/her/their workers’ standards, for sure, and like rich people this person looks down on his/her/their workers, even looking down on the bosses of the bosses.
The Very Nature of Work Inside a Dog-eat-Dog Capitalistic Cage
The lack of collective bargaining and concerted intentional organizing inside and outside of the workplace is the devil’s bargain the Fortune 1000 companies and folk like Bezos have dreamed of, and worked to concoct.
Talk of unionizing, or sharing work outside the confines of the actual nonprofit pimping outfit will get you narced on, and the HR wannabe thugs sicced on you.
“Can we do some job sharing, swapping hours, outside the confines of the management teams, away from the watchful eyes of the manager overlords?” People are so afraid of losing the $15 an hour “white collar job” and their health insurance, that they would do anything to keep both.
That also means they would lie — lie to themselves about how they might think they are valued. Lies about being allowed into and to share the master’s house. Lies against the very people who push back.
In one illiterate termination letter, the person, me, is pink slipped.
And the former staff members I will never interface with even in a small rural coastal county? They are happy they are still in good stead, happy to say goodbye to the rabble-rouser (me) or whatever shit language they might use to attack me, a kick-ass practitioner who has been wise enough to forward all those work emails from people attesting to that accolade to my private email.
But You Must Have Done Something to Provoke Them?
It’s inevitable that this sort of refrain or retort comes with it an incredible amount of patronizing and suspended belief. Supposedly progressive people have asked that question, Come on, you must of done something? It’s a pretty simple response — “It is possible that 90 percent of the people in an agency, or state, or town, or nonprofit can believe in wrong things 90 percent of the time.”
Rachel Carson, you must have provoked. MLK Jr., you must have provoked. Caesar Chavez, you must have provoked. I don’t have to fill in the blank for your own set of people who did the right things, and in doing so, went up against sacred cows and broken paradigms. They must have provoked their own assassinations, Rev. Oscar Romero or Berta Cáceres.
As is the case of this Disneyfied country, where people want to be around rich, powerful, connected and supposedly creative overlords. They want to rise up from their simple, poor or middleclass roots and get that brass ring. The prize. So they will succumb to anything, almost. Put up with abuse.
Not to equate great men and women fighting for justice, to poor schleps (see photo below) who want to gain Holly-Dirt fame and wealth.
But this is the culture, whether it is the Starvation Army, or United Way or Goodwill Industries or Google or Wells Fargo. People in America are mean as cuss, but do a fine soft shoe showing the bullshit of their exteriors. It’s what’s inside themselves that counts. Do as I say, but don’t do as I do! They know how to PR spin their “workplace” vision and mission which has been scripted from some of the most mamby pamby of thinkers, but in the end, they treat human beings — the workers — with no dignity, no fairness and a knee-jerk circling of their managerial wagons. Of course, all CEOs do not deserve their high pay. Fact. All college presidents and their battalions of dean-lets and hucksters in VP and MBA roles do not deserve their high pay, laurels and power. Fact. And, this sordid story to the tenth power below represents USA, really, and capital, money, and not just in the United Snakes of States.
But one day, if we survive, and if we put up with these psychopaths, and we shall too have our day in the shade, our laurels, our big homes and our 401-k’s. Stock options and kids getting into Ivy League Un-Schools.
Kelly Hayes, Truthout, interviewing, Sarah Jaffe, a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power.
KH: I think a lot of our conversations about neoliberalism in the media fall short, because we don’t really help people get their heads around what it is. People usually talk about privatization, but that sort of singular focus can make it seem like neoliberals are just people who think private services are better, or just want money in the private sector because they believe in the free market, but as you and I have talked about before, neoliberalism isn’t about the free market. It’s about having a well defended market.
SJ: Right.
KH: A market that’s rules and functions can’t be tampered with by the people whose exploitation the system relies on. It’s a system that protects markets from people, and even governments, who might otherwise rally against their exploitation or abuse. It’s a counteroffensive, in many ways, against the prior gains of unions and workers who rebelled under capitalism. After losing a lot of ground, bosses and politicians needed to rewrite the terrain, to better control workers, and one of the ways they have done that is by gutting public education.
SJ: And, I think one of the things that’s really important to talk about, because you know, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff’s book that people have, you know, that has gotten deservedly a lot of hype. But also, I just want to note that capitalism has always been about surveillance also, right, that like the techniques of surveilling workers, again, whether they are enslaved, or theoretically free workers, are intrinsic to this system of capitalism, always have been. And just now we’ve got better technology for it. So you can have a surveillance camera in an Amazon truck where the worker doesn’t even technically work for Amazon, but Amazon has the right to spy on them. Or, you know, the gadgets that you use, if you’re working in one of these warehouses where you literally have a thing that’s just like strapped to your arm. So the sort of bio politics of all of this stuff is really interesting. And this is where we get to, you know, the Amazon peeing in bottles stuff, Amazon workers peeing in bottles stuff. — “Work Isn’t Fulfilling Because Capitalism is a Death March,” Truthout
“There you have it — At-will, AKA at the beckon call, beckon abuse, beckon exploitation, beckon denigration, beckon injurious behavior and workplace environment. These employers are thugs, and from the top down, with their lawyers and MBAs and institutional misleadership yahoos at the executive level, the worker is doomed by this sick system. Forced vaccinations for schools, colleges, workplaces. The systems need to burn!”
Of course I am asked not to identify the person who wrote this to me. We all are being surveilled by these Stasi folk, whether we work for a governmental agency, school systems, private college, for-profit business, mom and pop lowbrow joint, nonprofit, you name it.
They (bosses, agencies, pre-employment interviewers)sign up for Google search notifications — anytime their company is named in the media or on digital platforms, they get notifications. They track what’s said about their business, corporation, nonprofit, agency, school. That is also for anyone they want to put in the search for a price, monthly rate, be it a person’s name. Like mine, hmm.
This is what these Stasi Americans want in their lives — complete control. Damage control by truth-sayers. Damage the messenger, or kill him or her with constant threats of litigation, fines, subpoenas, more. Imagine one writer, me, getting hooked into the Google Gulag, but then, what about anyone with my name? Hmm, children, siblings, spouses? This is how they play their mole game.
Below, an example of the blithe and dangerous bullshit fake journalism of the mainstream imbeciles. That the State of Oregon can force vaccinations onto people really is the issue: the state just pushes that onto the overlords running businesses or nonprofits. That’s it, no argument, hands down the policy of the land, man.
The news (sic) story below will not contain push back, and it will be vacant of civil rights thinkers/libertarians cited, will allude to no one pushing back on these Draconian measures. In fact, the story will not frame these measures as Draconian. The journalist from the Oregon paper of record (Oregonian) is already colonized and co-opted. Then you get some “law” professor (sic) from a for-profit private university pulled into the article, to come on board to yammer on. This is the new normal that’s been pretty old normal — mainstream media faking it, looking like it’s in the hunt for balance, when it’s all false balance, false and manufactured consent. The goal is to question the prevailing party-bureaucratic-company line, and question all governments’ actions. Read here:
“I think ultimately most employers would be able to require it,” said Henry Drummonds, a Lewis & Clark Law School professor specializing in labor and employment law. “But I think most employers probably wouldn’t want to require it. I think employers could first encourage and educate employees about the safety of the vaccine and the desirability of it in terms of protecting yourself and your coworkers.”
Drummonds said that at-will employment standards allow private businesses to dictate and change the terms of employment at any time and fire employees for any reason, as long as they don’t discriminate on the basis of race, gender, age or any other protected category.
In practice, this means that employers probably could require employees to receive the vaccine to remain employed or return to the office. Both the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries have released guidance stating that employers can mandate that employees get vaccinated.
Already, idiocy prevails: just recently, I witnessed a manager of a nonprofit ask her employee in front of another employee in a public place within lots of people’s earshot: “Well Rick got his vaccination. So did I. Most everyone in the company has. But John hasn’t.”
I knew this was a nonprofit this manager was a member of because I was within earshot. I offered an unsolicited response, trying to equate calling someone out in public for not having this experimental and not FDA-approved chemical shot. “How’s your BMI? You looking overweight? How’s your hypertension? You looking pink in the face? How’s your probable lung cancer? You just finished off a cigarette. Come on, shaming people for no agreeing to an untested chemical compound with that jab in the arm is unethical, and in public so I can hear your conversation?” She just clammed up and scooted her two employees away.
Imagine, fewer and fewer tough guys and gals can actually make it in USA (elsewhere too) with the power of what they can and cannot decide upon, that is, what they either want to and do not want to be injected into their bodies. Mind you, the jury is far from out on these chemical shots —
On February 27, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it had “issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the third vaccine for the prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19),” the Janssen (Johnson&Johnson) Covid-19 vaccine.
This announcement is virtually identical to the EUAs previously issued for Covid-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer-Biontech and Moderna.
In each of the EUAs, the FDA has been careful to avoid any claim that the vaccines provide protection against infection or transmission of the virus. Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have each publicly stated that the vaccines have NOT been shown to prevent infection or transmission.
All of their regulatory documents and commentary addressing the issue state clearly that there is no evidence that the vaccines affect either infection with or transmission of the virus, nor do they prevent symptoms of Covid-19 from appearing.
— Source: “Covid Vaccine Nonsense” [US-based human rights lawyer breaks down the contradictory claims of “effectiveness”, the incomplete studies and legal minefield of forced use of experimental vaccines] JP Jerome
Let’s shift to some compare and contrast between vaccine makers and cigarette makers. I just read a short but cogent article on the menthol marketing, how 45,000 black Americans die each year from tobacco related illnesses (mostly throat, tongue, and lung cancer). Talk about cool — mentholated cigarettes’ make the poisons go down easier. Everything goes down smoother with a little bit of throat deadening. And this is legal stuff. No massive “take all the cigarettes’ and Juul’s and pipes and cigars and chew cans away.” “Menthol Marketing Exposes Institutional Racism” by Michael Schwalbe, Counterpunch.
But forced vaccinations, and then this pact with the devil — at-will, zero protection: screw up and you get the pink slip bullshit about American capitalism. Sort of buyer beware, user beware, consumer beware, worker beware.
“In the long run, the solution to the ongoing global pandemic of tobacco-related disease is to abolish tobacco companies. Short of that, we now have an opportunity to significantly curtail the industry’s ability to profit from the destruction of Black lives. If Black lives matter, we must not let the opportunity pass.” — Michael Schwalbe, professor of sociology at North Carolina State University Source.
Low income, lots of working class people, workers in the developing world. Slick multimillion dollar a year ad campaigns, Slick, and scientific. Data driven. Imagine, tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. Of these deaths, 1.2 million are caused by secondhand smoke exposure. Talk about an epidemic, pandemic. You know that every rotting Southern pol and every single tobacco lobbyist and every grower and CEO, they pooh-pooh these stats. “Prove it. If it’s that deadly, then why’s it legal?”
The internet seems great at scrubbing information, but the reality is that when Ray-Gun left his criminal enterprise throne, he did some hucksterism stuff for the tobacco industry. He and Edwin Meese did a talking tour overseas to push cancer sticks.
Talk about killing people from his cold-ass grave, Reagan:
“But the industry did not launch its campaign for new overseas markets alone. The Reagan and Bush administrations used their economic and political clout to pry open markets in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and China for American cigarettes. At a time when one arm of the government was warning Americans about the dangers of smoking, another was helping the industry recruit a new generation of smokers abroad.
Asia is where tobacco’s search for new horizons began and where the industry came to rely most on Washington’s help. U.S. officials in effect became the industry’s lawyers, agents and collaborators. Prominent politicians such as Robert J. Dole, Jesse Helms, Dan Quayle and Al Gore played a role. “No matter how this process spins itself out,” George Griffin, commercial counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, told Matthew N. Winokur, public affairs manager of Philip Morris Asia, in a “Dear Matt” letter in January 1986, “I want to emphasize that the embassy and the various U.S. government agencies in Washington will keep the interests of Philip Morris and the other American cigarette manufacturers in the forefront of our daily concerns.”” Source.
Why the harangue by yours truly against tobacco in a piece about how rotting the at-will mentality of big, small and loser companies run by bigger losers than anyone following the Peter Principle 2.0 [well, the worse you are as a human, with no ethics, not character, well, you go up the ladder, food chain, corporate manure pile] can imagine forcing vaccines onto workers?
Think hard about an experimental mRNA chemical put into a syringe and then forcefully delivered to the global population. Hmm, would this have been acceptable in 2019? 2001? 199o? The year I was born, 1957?
Of course not, and yet, this is it, with people being shamed or called out for reluctance on an experimental, emergency authorized, untested chemical and DNA morphing drug being forcefully put into one’s body. Not once, but with a booster, and then, now, as the world burns, yearly or bi-yearly boosters for the “new” variants of a corona cold virus.
Here, this is science and capitalism, science/capitalism/politics, like leprosery and it’s host —
“One way the tobacco industry has manipulated cigarettes to increase addictiveness is by loading cigarettes with chemical compounds. Bronchodilators were added so that tobacco smoke can more easily enter the lungs. Sugars, flavors and menthol were increased to dull the harshness of smoke and make it easier to inhale. Ammonia was added so that nicotine travels to the brain faster.
Specifically, increasing the amount of nicotine was of paramount importance to tobacco company executives. Experts found that Big Tobacco companies genetically engineered their tobacco crops to contain two times the amount of nicotine and adjusted their cigarette design so that the nicotine delivered to smokers increased by 14.5 percent. As Phillip Morris Principal Scientist W.L. Dunn said in 1972, “No one has ever become a cigarette smoker by smoking cigarettes without nicotine.”” — Source
Bronchodilators and ammonia added? Come on, my students at UTEP were finding more dirt on big tobacco and the collusion with the FDA, keeping secret under governmental lock and key all the ingredients they sprayed on tobacco before becoming the stuff of rolled cigs, cigars, pipe filler and chew. Think of secret doses of anti-convulsant drugs, since the higher nicotine content and the other burning chemicals cause many people to get ticks, minor tremors, i.e. seizures. Best keep the seizures down and the sales up.
Shoot, this is just the minor list of smoke by-products — Nicotine (the addictive drug that produces the effects in the brain that people are looking for), Hydrogen cyanide, Formaldehyde, Lead, Arsenic, Ammonia, Radioactive elements, such as polonium-210, Benzene, Carbon monoxide, Tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs), Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
These Satan’s, these big and little Eichmann types, these Mad Men, these PR spinners, these profiteers and cancer mercenaries, come on, the story is bigger — 600 ingredients can be used in cigarettes, but the actual combustion of the cig produces over 4,000 chemical compounds. And, when burned, these cigarette ingredients mix together and create deadly substances, 69 of which are carcinogenic.
Yeah, how’s that pandemic and pandemic and pandemic on the horizon. SARS-CoV2, 3, 5? Remember, there is no outright statement that declares cigarette smoking causes cancers or any number of other co-occurring diseases or terminal cancers.
So, if Big Tobacco and Gore and Reagan and Clinton and Trump, et. al. can stump just for this singular felonious Mafia outfit, what do you think might be happening behind closed doors and inside labs and at the top of the heap tied to exactly what this experimental vaccine’s (sic) side effects might do today, next month, a year from now, etc.?
For the good of the world? The economies? For life saving ethos? You got the memo yet? You want life saving? Shit, one product, tobacco, done with, hmm, what’s that life saving factor? And how much for all the lost labor, all the flagging physiologies, all the damage, slow and fast, caused by cigs, et al? Ya think there will be a ban tomorrow?
Hmm. Now, multiply that a million fold with all the deadly chemicals and toxins and fumigants and fungicides and off-gassing crap in all manner of clothes, combustible materials, food, drinks, drugs. Then multiple one times two, and then factor up. How do these work, hmm, twelve together, the impossibility of really studying the synergistic effects of one chemical interacting with another, or a dozen or 4,000? Hmm, those 4,000 chemicals in one good Marlboro man drag, what’s the toll?
You think there are governmental and private financed studies on that?
“According to comments from vaccine scientists in September 2020 (prior to the Covid-19 EUA issuances), no vaccine had ever before been distributed on an EUA basis.
“We don’t do EUAs for vaccines,” [Dr. Peter] Hotez said, “It’s a lesser review, it’s a lower-quality review, and when you’re talking about vaccinating a large chunk of the American population, that’s not acceptable.”
Three months later, the FDA issued EUAs for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but with explicit guidance that the vaccine “has not undergone the same type of review as an FDA- approved or cleared product.””
The idea is that if there are injuries and deaths because of the experimental and untested drugs-chemicals in these shots, well, who foots the bill? Who is responsible? Hmm, in the USA, it’s the US taxpayer.
I have a friend who’s niece would not take “death by any other means ” as the last answer. She is pushing for an investigation into her father’s death after the vaccine was given to him. He was 74, healthy, but he did have aging issues, like we all do. Blood clots occurred rapidly, hmm, and, then he checked out in a stroke like manner. This is after, right after, vaccination. The county coroner will not do an autopsy, and alas, there are no watchdog agencies in our corner. A simple autopsy would be $6,000. This is a suspicious vaccine-related death, and she has now gone on-line and gotten more people to email here about similar deaths after vaccination. She can’t put it on Facebook, too long or too detailed like, so she is getting contacted through GoFundMe. She’s doing this surreptitiously. There will be no Ralph Nader’s or RFK, Jr.’s coming to her family’s aid.
Just like you can’t sue successfully the big tobacco and their technicians and chemists and MD’s and lawyers and CEO’s and the politicians and marketers for selling a dangerous product to a billion people, let alone the second and third hand smoke of these cancer sticks.
resistance is more than a PSA, and Whitey Is Still on the Moon!
by Paul Haeder / March 28th, 2021
Zoom Lockup!
There’s this Zoom thing coming round the corner, once again– Earth Day 2021. The people on the Pacific Coast, Oregon, Central Coast with no industries, winds whipping up air vortices, and air as clean as what it might be in the middle of the ocean, and yet, we have the old white folk planning for some more Zoom Doom fun.
And not only is this a Zoom Doom “same old usual suspects yakking fest,” but in fact, some local yokel and state yokel politicians get to bullshit their way through five minutes of nonsense.
The rules of Zoom like the rules of Earth Day 2021 are make nice, no contrarians, and alas, no one arguing. No criticism. Keep it upbeat and positive. Yep, we got Biden back in office — [Biden Backs Revival of His Brainchild: Plan Colombia 2.0 Set to Begin Next Month — Colombia is set to return to a massive aerial campaign of spraying Monsanto’s glyphosate across the country, a plan Biden once fought hard with his Republican colleagues to enact.]
That’s it, really, in the fake world of Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Clubhouse, Slack, and Zoom. There are a thousand major software peddlers readying the schmucks for a digital world of work, world of schooling, world of public engagement (disengagement), world of commerce, world of culture, he world of arts, music, literature, world of medicine and health care.
Earth Day 2021 . . . 2022 . . . 2030!
On the one measly day of the year for celebrating ecosystems, waves, wind, soil, beach, harbor seals, eagles, gulls, cormorants, firs, pines and grasses, the decision to take this one indoors is emblematic of the colonized minds of the, shall I say, liberal class (sic). Neoliberal or demented Democratic minds.
No use asking me to make an alternative earth day for Lincoln County, some gathering on the beach or along a river (we have limitless beaches and thousands of creeks and rivers). In a rural community, in a community based on retirement, and then making dollars from travelers clogging Highway 101, clogging hotels, restaurants, rest stops, you can’t expect any solidarity. The fact that this school system and those white collar jobs are now Zoom Rooms/Jobs, brought to us in the privacy of their closets or garages or fancy offices, that baseline has shifted big time since the lock down of a year ago.
Talk about disruptive and destructive and killer technological shifts. No plan? Right!
Earth Day is Indigenous People’s Year
Yet, on a day of earth benediction, the day of bringing some socialist political zest to the table, a day when Native Americans and First Nations should be front and center, when consumerism-commercialism should be immolated in a symbolic burning of the sales receipts around a big fire, instead we have the Visual Display Terminal (as in terminal disease terminal) as our entry point and end point. One face to the crowd on the 14 inch screen, then our three minutes of Andy Warhol fame, and then, please move on. I am not on it this year, for sure, and last year I dragged myself to the thing.
Again, no expletives, no anti-Americanism, no antiwar, anti-patriotism or anti-politician rhetoric or song or poem. Keep it quaint, upbeat, positive.
It is, of course, deja vu, and that’s how the lords of capital want it — triangulation, and fear and, well, push those outliers out. I have found in the past year, more of the jobs, gigs, people I interface/associate with, and other movements I have been a part of have turned into an “us (them) against them (me)” sick Nazi-like defamation of truth. Any critique of the one-party duopoly, any criticism of Harris or Biden, any criticism of the reality of this hegemon, USA, sick before Trump, sick during Trump, sick after Trump, and you not only get ostracized, but penalized. Stitched on Scarlet Letter A for ‘anarchist,’ red being the underpinning of what it means to be a ‘communist-socialist.’
Take the money and run — that’s the motto, and so, before introducing a short animated video about climate heating and those two degrees Celsius, we have a bit of Haeder banter.
Don’t let them fool you that 100 or so rocket launches a year (thus far on average, about to go to 200 and then 500) don’t emit much pollution and carbon dioxide in the scheme of things. How much embedded energy to mine that crap, all those wires, metals, plastics, strategic shit, and the electricity, and the transportation? All those human lifetimes expended for Whitey on the Moon, as opposed to stopping the eviscerations of the planet. Right, that isn’t doled out as carbon dioxide emissions. Off-shored, out-sourced, embedded pollution. Forget about the destabilization of those countries where this shit is illegally mined and stolen. Again, science is broken when the capitalists hire scientists to help them steal, pollute, harvest, ruin, destroy, butcher.
With that, how can we not rethink a 51-year-old poem, wisdom in a jazz bottle, Gil Scott Heron and ‘Whitey on the Moon’. The point of the song-poem runs deeper now than what Gil was alluding to then, because, if you think about cooptation, think about how many other cultures and nationalities are racing for the moon, for the red planet, the song’s updated title might be “Capitalists on the Moon.”
There’s no getting around the fact China and USA are capitalist, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (devolution) is about mastering control of the entire populations of those countries (and that is now Canada, India, EU, Japan, Australia, et al), outside the super-class of folk in the capital dictatorships.
What China or USA or UK or Japan or Musk or DoD or any of them want on the moon or mars, well, it’s not for the good of mankind, womankind, children-kind.
The inverse is the actual affect — more 5 and 6 G, more wasted and polluting energy. More rockets and blasting satellites and millions of human lifetimes spent on this project, and the outcome/outflow are less solutions for the commons here on terra firma. There will be no reversing ocean acidification or ocean inundation or blasting heat waves, or deluges or dwindling snowpack, or melting ice with these money-drenched projects of megalomania in space.
The fact is, food can be grown agro-dynamically. People can live off a much much smaller energy footprint. Industries can be owned by the people for real durable goods that last, hmm, half a lifetime or more? Public trains and trolleys and light-rail, that’s not what the Musk-DoD-China projects are about. Fisheries can’t be restored, Fukushima isotopes can’t be corralled in, human global health and universal “correct” education can never be the end product of these space flights. They are a complete and utter contradiction.
We know it, and they know it, and we the people have been bamboozled into disbelieving what we see-hear-touch right in front of us. They (masters of finance) are in it for more money, power, wealth, control.
You can have atom splitters, neutrino collectors, sunspot probes, but, again, don’t try to pull the bullshit capitalist-militarist wool over my eyes: none of that stops the toll of poverty0-hunger-war physically weathering billions of people’s lives to the point of lifespans cut down by 10 years or more compared to the stem-cell sucking, human growth hormone eating great white hopes in the Lizard Clan.
Water on mars? Asteroids with ancient ice? Club Meds in orbit? You know, none of that is for humanity.
[Drifting plumes created by the Space Shuttle Atlantis]
Alumina and black carbon from rockets can stick around in the stratosphere for three to five years. As these materials collect high above the Earth, they can have interesting effects on the air. Black carbon forms a thin layer that intercepts and absorbs the sunlight that hits Earth. “It would act as a thin, black umbrella,” says Martin Ross, a senior project engineer at the Aerospace Corporation who studies the effects of rockets on the atmosphere. That may help keep the lower atmosphere cool, but the intercepted energy from the Sun doesn’t just go away; it gets deposited into the stratosphere, warming it up. This warming ultimately causes chemical reactions that could lead to the depletion of the ozone layer.
The reflective alumina particles can also affect the ozone but in a different way. Whereas the soot acts like a black umbrella, the alumina acts like a white one, reflecting sunlight back into space. However, chemical reactions occur on the surface of these white particles, which, in turn, destroy the ozone layer, Ross says.
Diet for Parasites of Capitalism — 8 by 10 condo on Devils Island
It’s sort of like the anti-diabetes diet — cut down on white food (rice, bread, pasta, potatoes), walk more, drink water, take a few natural herbs, suck on cinnamon, get flavonoids, pig out on leafy vegetables, stop the EMF’s in your sleeping space, stop the anxiety of TV-Movies-Facebook. Or, what about the real process of land reclamation? It takes removing the trash, the toxins, and then rebuilding the soil, replanting with native plants, readjusting the land to its natural eco-state.
Simple solutions. And, it’s never going to be rocket science that helps the planet, people or others in the animal and plant kingdoms.
Don’t be fooled by Netflix, the Dystopia Stories, the Bizarre Bumbling Cop-Spy-Soldier-Super Hero soap operas. None of that is reality, and, the shortcuts that capitalism has exacted on Mother Earth, well, after more than 300 years of the trillions of lies, here we are, Whitey on the Moon, 51 years after Gil Scott Heron sang it” !!
We have a poem here It’s called “Whitey on the Moon” And, uh, it was inspired, it was inspired By some whiteys on the moon So I wanna give credit where credit is due
A rat done bit my sister Nell With whitey on the moon Her face and arms began to swell And whitey’s on the moon
I can’t pay no doctor bills But whitey’s on the moon Ten years from now, I’ll be paying still While whitey’s on the moon
You know, the man just upped my rent last night ‘Cause whitey’s on the moon No hot water, no toilets, no lights But whitey’s on the moon
I wonder why he’s uppin’ me ‘Cause whitey’s on the moon? Well I was already given him fifty a week And now whitey’s on the moon
Taxes takin’ my whole damn check The junkies make me a nervous wreck The price of food is goin’ up And as if all that crap wasn’t enough
A rat done bit my sister Nell With whitey on the moon Her face and arms began to swell And whitey’s on the moon
With all that money I made last year For whitey on the moon How come I ain’t got no money here Hmm, whitey’s on the moon
You know I just about had my fill Of whitey on the moon I think I’ll send these doctor bills Airmail special (to whitey on the moon)
To whitey on the moon Thank you
Old whitey now ready to build millions of carbon dioxide sucking machines. Old whitey ready for terra-forming on Mars. Old whitey looking to mess with the water cycle, the cloud systems, the first 15 meters of biological life on the oceans with iron shavings. Old whitey and his and her geoengineering.
Whitey is way beyond just blasting to the moon. Old whitey is messing with DNA, genetically engineering not just crops. Welcome the GMO human, a la vaccines.
It’s not such a far cry from Zoom Earth Day to Genetically Modified Humanity.
The Future of Food (2004) is an older documentary, but shit-dog, says it all, says it all:
Again, this is not some super complicated Jungian and Freudian hierarchy of needs intellectual jujitsu. Food, water, shelter, home, hearth, community, safety. Yes, art and communal education. Intergenerational and multi-diverse communities. Again, it is about eating and living, music and art, forests and savannas, mountains and valleys, rivers and wetlands, reefs and mangroves, and, well, you get the picture.
It’s not about 5 or 6 G, or about Whitey on the Moon. Many of us know that, inherently. And, many of us who are devoted followers of democracy on top and socialism as the under girder, we also are in “their house,” that is, as the African slave on Turtle Island stated, “It’s the slave master’s house I’m working in, and not one second of a day do I believe I am in my house, that any aspect of this house negro status puts me in any better position than the field slave who slaves under a hot sun, battles cottonmouths, the toil of an ox.”
The Future of Food is really the future is food!!
The reality is back to those global average rise in temperature, that so-called two degrees Celsius.
Global heating affects ecosystems that provide food.
Oceans provide people with about 20 percent of their dietary protein. Ocean acidification caused by climate change makes it difficult for thousands of species, including oysters, crabs and corals, to form protective shells, which in turn disrupts the food web.
On land, an increase of 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) would double our water deficit leading a drop in wheat and maize harvests.
Pat DeLaquil contacted me. I included him in on another piece in DV “Plastic Meets the Road and Capitalism’s Role in Climate Change” with the subtitle, Earth Day & Capitalism Like Vinegar and Oil?
Here’s what Pat stated a year ago —
What drives capitalism to extremes? Two things: this hyper-individualism of the Ayn Rand economic school which purports everyone is unique and must fight for himself or herself to acquire as much as possible. And, two, patriarchy which indoctrinates young children into believing this hierarchy of male control. This belief that males are not caring about social issues, the environment, and females are not supposed to speak their minds when confronted with this apparent destructive system.
He reached out to me just recently:
Public awareness of the climate crisis is growing but support for mitigation efforts is still insufficient to reach the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial. This is partially due to the fact that some aspects of the science, which are truly alarming for those who are able to understand them, are confusing and mysterious to many others. Humans all over the planet conduct their daily lives in temperatures that range from -50°F to over 100°F. So they are understandably confused when scientists describe the dire consequences of a further increase in Earth’s annual average temperature of only 1.8°F (1°C). The Metro Climate Action Team made this short video to help build understanding of why so little means so much!
I sent Pat a quick email with some softball questions. What follows it the Q & A to: ‘Just a short response for each one. Thanks, Paul!’
Paul Haeder: What was your role in producing this animated film?
Pat DeLaquil: I came up with the concept and bounced the idea around with several MCAT members using clip art. Then we developed a script with where several of us contributed to editing and refining the message. Once we were happy with the storyboard and script, I placed the task on a platform called Upwork, and found an artist that did motion graphics, which are much cheaper than real animation. The entire process took well over 6 months.
PH: Who is the intended audience for this and how does that audience access this?
PDL: We believe we have several target audiences among people who accept that climate change is happening, but don’t realize how bad the crisis can quickly get and why strong action is needed now. We believe this group broadly includes people with children and grandparents, as well as civic groups and the faith community.
PH: Explain your background in research climate change — two sentences.
PDL: I have been a leader in the commercialization of clean and renewable energy technologies for over 40 years, and for the last 20 years I have run a small business that develops and uses models to perform policy analyses on behalf of donors, governments and the private sector to identify optimal pathways for achieving economic development and environmental goals. I have lead the formation of two clean energy start-up companies and earlier lead the development of two key solar energy development projects: PV for Utility Scale Applications (PV-USA) and the 10 MW Solar Two Power Tower Project.
I have a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a B.Sc. in Marine Engineering from the US Merchant Marine Academy, and have authored of over 90 papers, reports, and articles on solar and renewable energy including chapters in two books on renewable energy technology.
PH: Three reasons you believe people in the USA still have difficulty understanding global warming, ocean warming, ice and glacial melting.
PDL: It’s very much like the responses we’ve seen to the pandemic. Disinformation and deliberate politicization of the issue are strategies used by the right (dominated by fossil fuel interests and their fellow corporate oligarchs). The second reason is that most people are busy with life – just making end meet between jobs, kids and – even before the pandemic, so it’s easy to ignore or deny the severity of the issue or just hope someone does something. Third, some people in industries that rely of fossil fuels feel threatened that all this is just a plot to take away their lifestyles.
PH: What do you hope this short animated flick will do to move policy makers, capitalists, businesses and national governments to work on the very difficult issue of ocean level rise, inundation, extreme weather events, crop failures, unlivable conditions in many many tropical or subtropical urban spaces.
PDL: We really hope that this video will motivate people, who are not yet active, to become more engaged in pushing their elected officials to act quickly to combat climate change.
And so another earth day, couched on Zoom (how much energy does a Google search use, how much energy for Facebook servers, how much energy for Bezos and his Global Cloud Server monopoly?).
Pat’s sincere about this short animated PSA, and he wants to do the right thing. Of course, earth day should be indigenous people’s day, farmer-land steward day, animal and ocean day. But we will continue to get “Whitey on Mars” day coming out of the voice boxes of the masters for this co-opted Bono-DiCaprio Earth Day– financial masters. That Fourth Industrial revolution, that globalized capital blitzkrieg, the eugenics of Gates and the GMO Generals, and that digital dashboard, the compliancy demanded of the majority of people on earth, all for Whitey on the Moon . . . or Mars.
The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.”
The organization of offices follows the principle of hierarchy … each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one.
— Max Weber, Economy and Society
This doesn’t infer that private companies, organizations, trade groups, corporations, lobbies are any better than the bureaucracies of government. In fact, the bureaucratic hell we all have been put through — those of us who do not go quietly into the night or roll over to show some yellow belly — consumes millions of lifetime lives, working us over through a very disgusting labyrinth of penury, penalties, prosecutions, persecutions and penal phalanx designed to wear down the innocent.
If you do not have a stable of lawyers (imagine: $2000 an hour; imagine, at least 33.33 percent plus expenses for supposed civil cases of a class action variety), or a stable of lobbyists (imagine: entire companies set up to lie, steal, block, and hide for the rich, the corporations), or a brothel of politicians (imagine: how much does it cost to run for a Senate seat) — here, Oct. 2020:
The North Carolina Senate race is already the most expensive congressional race of all time, with $265 million spent between candidates and outside groups. The Iowa Senate race has already claimed the No. 2 spot with $218 million. — Open Secrets
Those small potatoes people like you and I, those underclass, those lower classes, those less than medium wage/middle class, and all those developing world classes, and all those displaced classes, and all the farmer and laborer classes, we are set up for failure, and when we do fight, we have to empty the savings accounts just to get to the court.
I won’t go into deep detail, but my own family has a living example of this in Oregon. That person set up an LLC — limited liability corporation — when he got a job with a hospitality staffing agency back east. This agency is run by a multimillionaire, who Zooms his gig workers (all workers have to pay the money in respective states for setting up LLC’s) from his 5,000 square foot “dream home” in Vermont, the second or third one in his portfolio. Imagine, a schmuck like me assisting my family member in Oregon to set up his LLC. It cost him $100. Some of my family member’s teammates ended up getting lawyers and CPA’s to help, at a tune of, not less than $450.
The entire gig and DIY and precarious and atomized world of work, including recruiting and staffing, is full of money at the top, and worker bees at the bottom. These worker bees are usually women. Covid-19 stupidity hit, and, well, the hospitality and restaurant business caved. This company then went after the N95 mask makers, and other industries still operating during the planned-economic-demic.
So, you have I Can’t Breathe George Floyd unfolding, yet this multimillionaire white man did not talk about the national movement to stop the police murders of black people (Duh, restaurant workers are BIPOC).
The job went south for my family member. He did not make money, and got one commission check, $3,000 for hundreds of hours of work. Do the math.
Now, he looked for work, paid work, and landed a job. The problem is the Oregon Department of Revenue sent a mountain-high set of letters, warnings, bills, and then penalties. You know, some people have to try and make a living. This family member also had in his past bad nightmares from the IRS coming to his family home and taking the house over, kicking the family into the streets. He was an 11-year-old. Try another incident with a repo of a car, and other such IRS crap, and this family member just could not handle all the chaos of the bureaucracies of hate, failure to file, not knowing the codes inside and out. He expected it all to be washed out at the end of the year when he filed his taxes.
Wrong, sucker.
I helped him out, sending in thoughtful and rhetorically-magnificent letters to stop this idiocy. No go. Still, more and more late penalties.
I went to the Tax Court (logged on), and the only way to get a hearing in Oregon is to pay the charged (but incorrect) taxes and the added-on penalties. At more than $10,000 to pay the government, my family member had to dump two IRA Roth’s. So much for the savings.
Now, just to get an administrative judge to hear this, another $280 check had to be written to the state of Oregon. Think of all the work we had to do to try and figure out what the hell was going on. Over $10,000 shelled out, and here it is, waiting for forms to be filled out.
Then, on top of this, ending the LLC cost my family member, $110. That’s $100 to create a sole proprietor LLC, and another $110 to dissolve it.
My family member did not have the bandwidth to handle this. Of course, over the years the toll of medical bills, mortgage company thieves, PayDay loan thugs, school loan sharks, real estate appraisers, auto creeps, and on and on, I have had to come to the assistance of many many people. In reality, this capitalist society — call it parasitic, diseased, disruptive, poisonous — is a wasteland of fraud, scams, and downright theft. In a real society, there would be navigators for people of all ages and ilk — free legal advice, free clinics, free social workers and services workers helping cut through the avalanche of red-tape and bureaucrats who should be — along with at least the first million lawyers on earth, and first 10 million lords of war, and the first 100 million financial real estate insurance scammers should — at the bottom of the sea.
This is it for a broken society. Broken big time. And how do all those notices and penalty scare letters and authentication letters from courts and the revenue service and unemployment service and department of labor come to us in a small rural town?
Yep, through the post office … the dying USPS. That that bumbling mean as a white old man Biden can hardly muster a trickle of phlegm in his words. No groundswell of legislators (sic) and policy makers (sic) and law makers (sic) putting a stop to this evisceration after evisceration.
My family member gets the hearing, appointing me as a secondary or primary family member allowed to present “evidence.” In the first three minutes of my family member presenting evidence, it is clear the Revenue guy is a buttoned down bureaucrat on Prozac. We are talking legalese, and mentioning form x and form y to be filed, with Zeros in all the boxes, to trigger the next step of a refund for the taxes my family member didn’t owe, and then, with the waiving of penalties. My family member literally left, vomiting, and yelling.
Did the judge hear this? Yep. Did the Revenuer hear it? Yep. This wasn’t a Zoom Doom call, but I could hear some dry voices, and then, I took over and navigated the Revenuer’s promise to the judge that all fines and penalties and interests and the initial taxes would be refunded.
Luckily, the Revenuer had some humanity, and emailed me immediately, and we talked, too, on his personal phone, and he attempted to navigate me on some forms, sent them to me, and, alas, the forms did not work. He saw that, and he tried to get some workarounds, and this is where we are at:
Trauma. PTSD. Past bad-bad interaction with IRS, state code men, tax folk, cops, pigs, the entire buffet of bumbling and overpaid and inhumane people. Think of the ticket guy on the street, and the pig-cop. Try and have conversations with these “public” officials about how they live with themselves. I have, in bars. They will throw down, pull a gun, call more pigs-cops. I’ve had many a yelling match. This is the cancel culture.
We await the refund checks, and I will have to let the court know it was resolved once a check comes in, but not without more headaches after the administrative hearing. I will petition the court to charge back the $281 court fee to the state of Oregon, demanding a refund.
More letters.
And that’s where we are at — letters encoded in Digital Blockchains, on those electronic strips on the DMV license, passport, medical card, on the license plate. And that leads us to the vaccination passport, and soon, the vaccination electronic tattoo.
All app driven, all approved by the Google-Palantir-Facebook-AI masters of the universe. With those sleazy millionaire governors and sleazier senators and congressmen.
Those of us knew this was beyond 1984 and a Brave New World and Minority Report and The Jungle, more than a modern Grapes of Wrath, we knew all of this three decades ago, way before Plans for the Pandemic, shortened to Plan-demic.
The horror is looking at Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Musk, Fauci, and a million other toadies and Eichmann’s in their lizard eyes. The Agenda 2030 and Great Reset bulldozer plowing humanity is already in second gear/
Here we are, now Rutgers, looking for every person on campus to have been hit with the drug-thing in the hypodermic. Prove your worth, prove your jab(s). And anyone really looking at this bio-nano technology knows that the mRNA poison, and the entire suite of bad-bad brews, well, we can expect constant jabs.
The federal government’s assurance of vaccine supply for all Americans prompted Rutgers to make the decision, the university said in a statement.
Brian Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and executive vice president for health affairs, said the vaccine is the key “to the return of campus instruction and activities closer to what we were accustomed to before the pandemic.”
“The COVID-19 vaccines have proven to be safe and effective in preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death,” Storm said in the statement. — Source, Market Watch
And my shitty job with shitty pay and shitty respect, oh, the managers I work with are actually breaking confidentiality rules by announcing which people have gotten the jab vis-à-vis the nonprofit, and those (me) who have not. Can you believe that shit? I have to tell them if or if not, where and how and which one?
Asking same said boss what the hell is his BMI? How’s that red face blood pressure going? What the hell is going on with the heavy asthmatic breathing? Those fat-laden lunches? You sure about those? Imagine, a world where they ask, or demand, or press — “You’ve gotten the vaccine, right?”
Sure, this is the new normal, and it is their immoral code, their anti-ethics, their Scarlet Alphabet — A through Z, and many symbols stitched into the digital passport signifying the Wrong Kind of American.
My friend does recruiting for California businesses, and that fine fucked up state is requiring vaccine passports, to get to and from work. Pigs-Cops tackling you and folding you into a squad car. That’s step one. Many more steps here to this Plan-Demic takeover.
And this physics and chemistry high school teacher is so right, so vulnerable in this shit show called United Snakes of America:
Today, I would describe myself as a Marxist who thinks the Russian Revolution of 1917 was the most recent example of a working class revolution but would describe its counter-revolutionary collapse as ending in state-run capitalism. I still believe the experience of the Bolshevik party in Russia is vital to look at as an example of what needs to be built today, and there are writings of Lenin and Luxemburg that I use as a political touchstone today. However, I no longer adhere to the idea that “socialism in one country” came only with Stalin, but that you can see its beginnings under Lenin in the policies of the NEP and other changes in policies of the Soviet state under Lenin. The revolution’s fate was sealed when it did not spread to Germany shortly after the socialist revolution in Russia.
Still, I believe the only way out of the mess we are in today is another working class revolution for the establishment of socialism. But that will not take place through the ballot box. It will require mass strikes and an armed insurrection to establish it. Also, it cannot be called socialism unless working class democracy is at its center and is preserved and expanded through the course of the revolution and beyond. Overall, while I firmly believe capitalism must be dismantled, I have more questions than answers about the state of our political tradition and the process by which this mass socialist uprising will take place. Part of the reason I started “What’s Left?”, a podcast/channel I host with two friends, was to give myself an open space to investigate political questions that I am still working through.
The last year has made the prospects for revolutionary change (which were exceedingly dim before the mania around COVID started) seem even more unlikely. I have witnessed the revolutionary Left collapse behind the capitalist state and institutions through the course of the pandemic. I am exceedingly grateful for the existence of Left Lockdown Sceptics and their attempt to fashion a Left response and oppositions to the authoritarian maneuvers of the capitalist classes across the globe. This blog has been a glimmer of hope for me in what has felt like an ocean of despair. — Andy Libson
Just how long does Andy have left in the rotting K12 school system? DV readers know the real way to beating down the masters, and beating back their toadies and Eichmann’s. You’ve read my stuff until you’ve hacked up the offal of capitalism and the rotting meat percolating from the core systems of oppression and subjugation. You know my stance on K12 and higher education.
Solutions to homelessness, obesity, paranoia, fear, sickness, illiteracy, poverty, hunger? Shit, the entire community-based land-formed people-centered, ecosystem-dominating holism and complete person, from cradle to cradle. Every system checked against a true precautionary principle. Every move for 10 generations out. Every decision made for the good of the community.
Art over science. Environment over economics. Ecology over commerce. All tied into a localized economy, regionalized planning, fair use, retrenchment, and ending capitalism, here, there, everywhere.
Naïve? Shit thinking? Is believing in this warring, poisoning, thieving and murdering system of money and top owning the world better? Is that where we are — giving Musk the green light to dump satellites and space junk into orbit after orbit? Who has the right to the Moon and Mars? Just what price is that sickness, that megalomania?
Embarrassing — sick:
Read Andy’s piece. Follow his links to Alison McDowell and Cory Morningstar and Jake Klyceck!
That is the horror story after horror story — Daily, more and more sad sack humans are opting for Zoom Teaching-Medicine-Social Work-Counseling-Engagement with the lighting on the best side of the face, while every Tom, Dick, Harriet and Jane are Zooming in their Underpants.
Andy, again:
I think we need to get back to our source of power – our workplace and centers where we congregate to do work – immediately and begin figuring out how we can stop what is coming. The remote learning experience we are going through right now is not a momentary mirage of a world trying to escape COVID. What we are witnessing and participating in (as either educator or student) is the future of education that is preparing future workers for what work will be like in the coming years: remote, on a screen, mediated through data flow and transmission, overseen, monitored and directed by AI. Students are experiencing education (separated, individualized, isolated, controlled and obscure) as they will experience their future work.
Participating in remote learning today isn’t ‘safer’, it’s actually far more dangerous to all our futures. It means our lives will be more separated, more surveilled, more scrutinized and more controlled than ever before. Physical schools will be replaced with laptops and drop-in centers. Teachers will be replaced with screens and AI. Education itself will be a lifelong chase, not of learning, but of job skills so each worker can compete in a global labor market where ever-centralized capitalist centers get their pick of the litter to screen for and exploit workers not as a class but as an isolated worker connected via a screen.
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Paul Haeder, Author 