Q: How many Chicago School economists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. If the lightbulb needed changing, the market would have already done it.
Anyone concerned with democracy should be worried that the seam between Wall Street and the government is almost invisible.
Interesting. So, when I repost things from MSM or Counter-punch, and then put in my own blur — “Oh these white devils, these MAGA Gestapo-wannabe’s, these Hitler-adoring fellows and gals,” that’s it for Fuck-You-And-the Horse-You-Rode-into-Town-On Facebook.
There is so-so much crap on Fuck-You-Book, and the lies, and the hundreds of millions of pure unadulturated manure and bile, on people’s pages, on their comments.
Now, those algorithms pull up words like “Hitler” or “Nazi” or Goebbels” or “SS” or what have you, and then, banned from posting.
DURING AN internal presentation at Facebook on Wednesday, the company debuted features for Facebook Workplace, an intranet-style chat and office collaboration product similar to Slack.
On Facebook Workplace, employees see a stream of content similar to a news feed, with automatically generated trending topics based on what people are posting about. One of the new tools debuted by Facebook allows administrators to remove and block certain trending topics among employees.
The presentation discussed the “benefits” of “content control.” And it offered one example of a topic employers might find it useful to blacklist: the word “unionize.”
I have been in this war for decades. Fucking age 63, and I can tell you at age 13 I was fighting against abuse of power, racists, pigs in school, coaches, sports teammates, my Army Regular Old Man, the entire project that is white supremacy. I am not kidding, one half a century.
I fought the players on my own football teams, my wrestling teams. I fought the assholes who were on dive boats I was helping get certified. I have fought every big-shot asshole boss, and here I am, one foot in the grave, really — that economic grave.
Does it wear me down? To be honest, no. I am never surprised, but I am always saddened and pissed off at the level of colonized minds within the framework of who I have had to deal with daily:
fellow reporters
fellow teachers
fellow adjuncts
fellow social workers
bosses
administrators
public officials
students
military (I was a college instructor at military bases, in programs)
publishers
readers
You get the picture. Daily. The amount of stupidity, fear, genuflection to almighty dollar, almighty god, almighty boss, almighty corporation, almighty political party, almighty country, almighty men/women in uniform, almighty military industrial complex, almighty superficial consumerism, almighty Holly-Dirt, almighty nothingness, almighty value of zero.
Many others I know and communicate with daily also know this. They might call it living in the Matrix, or worse, in some parallel Dante Hell Universe.
Banned from Facebook, Deplatformed from Linked In, blocked from commenting over at Off-Guardian, and on and on and on, that’s my pedigree. The unholy bastards and bitches of penury, two-bit dominions, two-bit power games.
Then to see this human stain and his human stain of a spouse —
You know the world is not right when these fuckers are the masters of the universe —
You get the picture. Human stains. All of them, yet, they dominate the news, dominate politics, dominate the economy, dominate the celebrity culture, dominate the trajectory of society, dominate us.
And they all are sociopaths, and now, the flip of an algorithm switch, and you get banned from Linked In and shut down from Facebook.
And for what? DO we incite violence by stating, No Blue Lives Matter? DO we incite war when we say, All Billionaires should be frog marched to the gallows? DO we get our hands slapped when we point out the Nazi and Hitleresque tenancies of so-called leaders, like those here, United Snakes of America, Hungary, Philippines, Brazil, and, well need I say more?
This is another human stain, former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan. In October 2008, as the Bush-Obama financial crisis was in full gear, Greenspan testified before the House Oversight Committee. He was questioned by the committee’s chair, Democratic Congress member Henry Waxman.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Dr. Greenspan, you had an ideology, you had a belief, that free, competitive — and this is your statement: “I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We’ve tried regulation. None meaningfully worked.” That was your quote.
You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.
But if I may, may I just finish an answer to the question previously posed?
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality —-
ALAN GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right. It was not working.
ALAN GREENSPAN: That it had a -— precisely. No, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I’ve been going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Dr. Greenspan, you had an ideology, you had a belief, that free, competitive — and this is your statement: “I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We’ve tried regulation. None meaningfully worked.” That was your quote.
You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.
But if I may, may I just finish an answer to the question previously posed?
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality —-
ALAN GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right. It was not working.
ALAN GREENSPAN: That it had a -— precisely. No, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I’ve been going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.
And, I mean, I think that we’ve been beguiled by markets. We understand prices, or we think that we understand what’s going on when we’re faced with a price. But, in fact, we miss a great deal about how the economy operates, if we believe in prices. And we’ve come to believe that the only way we can value things is by sticking them in a market. The trouble is, of course, as we’ve seen through this recession, that markets are a tremendously bad way of valuing things, tremendously fickle, and systematically unable to put — to actually incorporate a great deal of what we find valuable.
You know, just to put some flesh on those bones, think about the price of a hamburger. I mean, you know, if you go to your local burger joint, you will find, what, a $4 hamburger. But researchers in India did some calculations a few years ago looking at what would happen if we started to include the environmental costs that are part and parcel of the production of that hamburger. If, for example, that burger is produced on land that once used to be rainforest, well, then you’ve lost the rainforest, you’ve lost the ecosystemic services that that rainforest provides, you lose the carbon, you lose the biodiversity. And all of a sudden, when you start imputing those environmental costs, it turns out that the price of a hamburger should be nearer $200 rather than four. And that, of course, is just one element of the costs that are squeezed out of our food and pretty much everything else.
But sticking with that hamburger for a moment, I mean, if that hamburger is consumed in the United States, then the chances are that the tomatoes on that hamburger will come from southern Florida, where, since 1997, over a thousand people have been freed from conditions of modern-day slavery and where the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, of tomato pickers in southern Florida, have been campaigning for a living wage for quite some time. And, of course, the cost of slavery doesn’t feature in that hamburger, either. And that’s, of course, just on the production side.
Of course, there are consequences to the cost of consuming junk food. And in the United States, one in five healthcare dollars is now spent on taking care of someone who has diabetes. And the rise of diabetes, in no small part, is related to the fact that we don’t pay the full costs of the way we consume when we buy our food. Of course, we pay those costs in the end. But the corporations that sell us that food are able to exclude those costs out of the price. And it’s important for us to have new ways of valuing things other than the market.
Raj Patel
So this all begs the question of what is the value of Google and Facebook? Think hard, now. When the spooks and FBI and the other spies are packed in a sweaty van with their greasy fingers on the revolver, the tape-recorder, the cameras, while spying, the new spy, the new peeping Tom, the new weaponized anti-democracy tool is that algorithm, that Peter Thiel, that F/Zuckerberg, those Google Boys aned Apple Pukes.
That Facebook is marketing Workplace as having built-in labor union suppression tools comes at a time when more and more Americans are likely using Facebook to organize.
A recent memo to employers, first reported by The Intercept, warned that the coronavirus pandemic has sparked widespread support for labor unions, and that online networking tools have become a powerful vector for organizing campaigns.
Employers have long attempted to stifle lawful workplace organizing by monitoring social media. One study of the phenomenon found that between June 2009 and April 2011, the National Labor Relations Board received about 100 charges that employees had been fired or disciplined due to online posts, largely on Facebook, around labor organizing.
Charles Eisenstein, summarizes the crossroads that we face:
“For a long time, we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, COVID has gifted us a reset.
“A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that COVID has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing or a renewed desire to come together . . .
“The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of COVID-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place . . . Already we can feel the power of who we might become.”
Cognitive dissonance, echo chambers, mutually exclusive polar opposites . . . . There are myriad of web sites and news feeds and even so-called “juried” journals where in the end, the answers to what is happening now globally are not being debated in a public forum or with people with no ax to grind, not skin the game (capitalism’s) and with only investigative interests at heart. That is an entire book’s worth of discussion not for this forum/blog now!
I used to spend time over at Off-Guardian, and there, sure, you get lots of skepticism about just how bad the novel coronavirus is, just how Draconian and lockstep the lock-downs have been, just how planned the global meltdown and the global unrest (George FLoyd, etc.) they are.
The problem over at Off-Guardian is that there are KeyBoard/Bored warriors, making case after case of their devil advocate stance as I am sure white middle class men of UK, USA, Canada. The entire site was set up as a response to some (or is it all now) of the Guardian’s coverage of all things cultural, political, geopolitical economic and environmental.
It is easy to be “banned” from commenting on their comments board, as I have been. I have been attacked, spit upon (with names, labels, etc.) and thrown to the commentators’ little clique of like minded, like thinking assholes.
It’s fun to just go after some of the contradictory crap at the Off-Guardian, and when they run a story, from some outlier nurse turned journalist (sic) or some virologist who doubts everything out of the mouths of CDC, WHO, mainstream medicine, well you see the holes in their writing and then the barrage of commentators (some are I am sure regular posters to pump up the veracity of the articles the Off-Guardian chooses to run or chooses to write).
You’ll get an article that points or hints at a novel coronavirus that was part of a bioweapons experiment, either accidentally or intentionally let go, then in the same article, how the virus is not a virus in fact, and that the deaths in Black American communities like warehouses and in prisons, well, that it is all caused by something else.
Maybe too much Red Bull. Or they are in bad shape, already primed for death without a novel coronavirus to blame. The writers at Off-Guardian are entitled, arrogant, and under all of that layer upon layer of supremacy is the little racist.
Like I have stated before — of course this epidemic-pandemic has already been in the works as a study guide, as a scenario, and we know who the actors are tied to Big Pharma, Google, Bloomberg, Gates, WHO, and the like, including USA military labs, and those in other countries in concert with USA, and then those in CHina attempting to find an antidote for anything the USA will unleash to kill Chinese, and not just the Chinese Economy.
Then, while the Off-Guardian Ayn Randians, or those who purport to be gigantic minds and bastions of individualism and in-the-know leaders of thought, blather about Gates and Democrats and neoliberalism, they nary go on attack against the GOP and Trump.
It is a waste of my time to even go there, and the fact they do not post my comments, well, that says it all about them.
My research into “pay for success” over the past three years made it clear that health and behavioral health data would be used to fuel the growth of “social impact” finance around the world. Over the past three weeks, however, it has dawned on me that it will also likely be used as a tool of social control. As populations become more volatile with the roll out of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, digital quarantine will be a powerful method of regulating economic systems and human bodies.
Covid 19: Why Hindi belt is not asking any questions?
By PRAMOD RANJAN
In February 2020 media began reporting the spread of a new virus in the world and it soon became the prime topic of discussion among us colleagues. I visited the website of the World Health Organisation (WHO) for authentic information on the issue.
That was the time when we used to say jokingly that handshakes would soon become history and that we would have to greet each other with a Namaste. At that time, who knew that the day was not far off when we would be penalised for not wearing face masks?
That was the time when we used to discuss the justification for and the pros and cons of installing biometric machines for recording attendance. At that time, who knew that the day was not far off when installing a spy app would be made compulsory for all? Who knew that let alone biometric machines, we would soon allow ourselves to be subjected to surveillance of many kinds?
I have legions of friends and they include journalists, social activists and academicians working in the Hindi belt. But barring a few, none of them is even remotely concerned about the long term implications of the current goings-on.
In one city, cameras equipped with face-recognition technology have been installed on the roads. In another, drone cameras are being used to keep an eye on the citizens.
Why are skeptics and questioners in such a short supply in the Hindi belt? In fact, even our language reflects our tendency of keeping mum, of not asking questions. There are very few words in Hindi that can express the dangers inherent in such totalitarian surveillance? Has this anything to do with our culture?
A new disease made its appearance; it was declared an epidemic and soon we were bombarded with so-called ‘scientific facts’ and ‘expert opinions’. We immediately confined ourselves to our homes without caring to explore the sources of this bombardment and their objectives.
We were told that this is happening all over the world. But in the age of the Internet, we did have the means to discover that nowhere on the earth were the citizens subjected to such draconian restrictions.
The claim that India is a ‘Vishwaguru’ (teacher of the world) finds the greatest resonance in the Hindi belt with some worthies basing their claim on Vedic philosophy and others on Buddhist teachings. But why none of us got up and said that we shouldn’t follow other nations blindly?
We were told that this disease is fatal and we accepted it without demur. We did not care to find out the number of deaths due to TB, pneumonia, malaria, chamki bukhar (acute encephalitis syndrome) etc in the Hindi belt. According to one estimate, 5-7 lakh persons die due to these diseases every year in the Hindi-speaking states.
We were told that this disease is highly contagious. But why are we ignoring the fact that its R factor (rate of infection) is one-fifth of that of TB. We were told that a large number of persons are dying of Covid. Why we didn’t try to explore out how many people around us have died of the disease and how many were killed by the lockdown?
We were told that this disease is dangerous because it is caused by a virus and has no cure. Why it didn’t occur to us that chamki bukhar and Japanese Encephalitis, which kill hundreds of children from poor families in the Hindi belt, are also viral diseases and have no cure. Chamki bukhar is such a dangerous and mysterious affliction that we still do not know for sure what causes it. It afflicts thousands of children of 1-15 years age group in the Hindi belt and hundreds of them die within a few days of contracting the disease.
The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of Covid 19 is less than three per cent while the death rate of these fevers is 30 per cent. What prevented us from asking that why these diseases are not taken seriously. Is it because most of their victims are the Dalits, the Backwards and the poor or because pharmaceutical companies cannot hope to make a fast buck from them? Why are we not asking whether it is true that the Government of India hides the actual number of deaths from diseases like malaria and cholera, which kill the poor?
Why are we not asking why deaths due to pneumonia, influenza and cardiac arrest are being added to the Covid 19 death toll? What is the objective of this fudging of figures?
We are being told that everything is being done as per the guidelines of the WHO. Why are we not asking how credible the WHO is? Isn’t it true that WHO has been charged with protecting the interests of Big Pharma?
In this context, it would be relevant to quote from en email of my friend Riyaz-ul-Haq, who is a research scholar in Germany. He drew my attention to the fact that “The apathy of WHO etc. towards the diseases stalking the poor countries is that the Western nations have, more or less, managed to control those diseases and eliminate their causes. Due to availability of potable water, adequate food and nutrition to their citizens, diseases like cholera and TB are no longer problems for these nations. Healthy lifestyles and robust healthcare systems are an added advantage. Even malaria and AIDS are no longer major problems for these nations. But they are sacred of the diseases that they cannot control. SARS and Covid 19 strike fear in their hearts because they have no way of combating them. As Western countries dominate the world, their priorities become global priorities. No wonder Covid has been proclaimed as a danger for everyone. Once the West manages to come out with a vaccine or a cure for Covid, they would be least concerned about who contracts this disease and who dies of it….Covid is now an affliction of America and Europe. Till it was causing deaths in China, it was of little consequence to them.”
Why are we not asking the question as to why this problem of the European and American nations has been thrust upon us? Isn’t it odd that while action is being taken against those spreading so-called ‘infodemic’ on social media, the media organizations that selectively publish what the WHO says are being spared.
For the past four months, WHO is holding daily press briefings on Covid 19. The event is held online. Sitting at their Geneva (Switzerland) headquarters, WHO officials answer the questions from journalists all over the world. The briefings are beamed on various social media platforms of the organisation. On the occasions when WHO director general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at these briefings, our media organisations reported it in detail with unconcealed glee.
On March 30, an Indian journalist (his name could not be heard clearly due to network issues) told WHO officials, “You must be aware that India, as part of its lockdown, is witnessing (an) unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the form of the movement of migrants from one part of the country to another. I do understand that you do not like commenting on individual countries, but this is an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. What would be your advice to our government?”
That was the period when reports and visuals of what the hapless poor migrant labourers were going through was sending waves of shock and dismay through the country. Lakhs of labourers, including children, old men and women (many of whom were pregnant), had begun trekking to their homes thousands of miles away. Borders of states were being sealed to stop them. Thousands of people wanted to travel to their native villages from different cities but the police used force on them. It seemed as if the country was on the verge of a civil war.
WHO officials could not resist answering the question about this migration. Its Executive Director Michael J. Ryan supported the imposition of lockdown but also said that it could be strict or lenient depending on the specific needs of a country and that the human rights of the people should be respected under all circumstances. After Ryan’s reply, Dr Tedros said in an emotional tone, “I am from Africa and I know many people actually have to work every single day to win their daily bread. Governments should take this population into account… I come from a poor family and I know what it means to always worry about your daily bread and that has to be taken into account. We’re not seeing it as an economic impact on a country (or) as GDP loss. We have to also see what it means to the individual in the street… it’s not about India; it’s about any country on earth.” Indian media did not give any space to this opinion of the WHO.
Dr Margaret Chan, the current WHO DG, has spoken aggressively against tobacco deals between governments and tobacco companies.5 This is to be expected of the WHO DG, given that tobacco continues to be a major cause of morbidity and mortality, and that the WHO Africa and Eastern Mediterranean regions, particularly, are at risk for increasing smoking prevalence in the coming decade.6Smoking increases the risk of a person developing latent tuberculosis, active tuberculosis, and recurrent tuberculosis, and also increases the death rate from tuberculosis. It has been estimated that if smoking prevalence was reduced by 1% per year down to zero by 2050, then 27 million cases of smoking-related tuberculosis deaths would be avoided.7 By making deals with the tobacco industry that may well increase smoking prevalence in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Government is, therefore, jeopardising its tuberculosis-control programmes.The vote for the next WHO DG should not be a vote for Ethiopia, or for Africa, but it should be a vote for the most appropriate candidate for WHO DG. Given the aforesaid issues, I believe that Tedros is not the right candidate that WHO needs to take it forward.I am the Director of the non-governmental organisation Africa Tobacco-Free Initiative. I declare no other competing interests.
But after this statement, the Government of India got cracking and the WHO was pressurized to refer to the steps taken by the government to mitigate the economic problems facing the people due to the lockdown. Resultantly, at its press briefing on April 1 2020, WHO chief Dr Tedros referred to the relief package announced by the government – full five days after its announcement on March 26. Tedros said, “Prime Minister Modi has announced a $24 billion US dollars package, including free food rations for 800 million disadvantaged people, cash transfers to 204 million poor women, and free cooking gas for 80 million households for the next 3 months.” In answer to a question by India Today’s Ankit Kumar, Michael Ryan said that it would be a little early to assess the results of the lockdown in India but “it has made a really huge attempt to limit the impact of the shutdowns on the people who are most at risk”.
The next day, all the Hindi-English news platforms prominently carried the story that the WHO has showered praises on Prime Minister Modi and appreciated the steps taken by him to contain the spread of coronavirus. Many news channels, while reporting the WHO statement, also said that “PM Modi and a team of specialists are working without a break for containing corona virus. The PM has announced the 21-day lockdown at the advice of the team. The PM is working for 17-18 hours every day. Even the WHO has praised India and PM Modi for their campaign against corona.”
The same media outlets had refrained from publishing the advice of WHO asking the countries to protect the human rights of the people.
After lockdown ruining the economies of many countries, the WHO is now saying that it had never advised lockdowns!
Our government miserably failed to assess the impact of lockdown on a country like India with its vast population of poor people, most of whom are daily wage earners. Then, what is the guarantee that its other directives are well thought out and efficacious?
Countries like Sweden, Japan, Tanzania, Belarus, Nicaragua and Yemen either did not go for lockdown at all or imposed restrictions that had the least impact on the liberty of the people. Why India did not tread this path?
Why are we not asking that when many countries haven’t made wearing of face masks compulsory and when there is no evidence to indicate that not using masks would lead to a faster spread of the disease, then on what ‘scientific grounds’ has our government made wearing masks mandatory for the people. Is the coronavirus a nocturnal organism? If not, why has our government imposed night curfew? Shouldn’t we ask the government to come out with the scientific basis of its decision? Why does the government want that the people should continue to cringe in fear? Are we living in a nanny state?
You say that you cannot bank on the people of India, who are illiterate, illogical and anarchic. They are not civilized like the Europeans are. But what evidence do you have to support this view? Isn’t it true that the people had significantly curtailed their visits to public places even before the countrywide lockdown was put in place? Is it not true that hundreds of trains had to be cancelled for want of passengers? Wasn’t this ample proof that people of India are disciplined and reasonable? Then, where was the need to crush them under a draconian lockdown?
We should definitely ask under which law has our basic right to know the truth been abrogated.
Why are we not asking what relationship does Indian Council of Medical Research have with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation?
On 10 April 2020, Ben Parker, editor and co-founder of The New Humanitarian, a Switzerland-based website asked a question during the WHO briefing on Covid 19. The question was about Bill Gates. The alacrity with which WHO officials answered the question was, of course, worth taking note of. But more importantly, the questioner’s credentials indicate how stories favouring Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are being planted in the media.
Bill Parker asked, “We’re seeing a lot of rumours and conspiracy theories around the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, vaccines and a digital identity project called ID 2020. My question is, are you tracking the new ingredients in the misinformation out there?”
Answering the question, Michael Ryan said that they were very pleased with the support Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had given to them and would look into the platforms that Parker mentioned. He added that the WHO was working with a number of digital companies to counter misinformation.
Dr Tedros, in a detailed answer to the question, showered fulsome praises on Gates. He said, “I have known Bill and Melinda for many, many years now….these two human beings are amazing….Having people like Bill and Melinda with big hearts to support humanity is something we should cherish. I would like to assure you during this COVID situation (that) their support is really big and we’re getting all the support we need. Together we believe we can turn the tide….The world recognises their contribution and they deserve our respect and appreciation.”
A Google search on the questioner Ben Parker reveals that his The New Humanitarian which “puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world” is, mainly financed by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is its biggest donor. In return for it, Ben Parker is busy ‘fact-checking’ on various platforms right from Twitter to his website. Not surprisingly, his so-called fact-checking always shows the Gates’ in favourable light.
This is the same person who, just six months before the outbreak of the pandemic, organised a series of four role-playing simulations of a corona pandemic with very high-ranking participants. Event 201 was a simulation of a corona pandemic conducted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University in October 2019.
In India too, amid this so-called epidemic, many ‘fact-checking’ institutions financed by foreign sources have sprung up. We should ask ourselves why untruths and half-truths, masquerading as ‘facts’, are floating on social media. Is only the government responsible for it or are we ourselves signing away our freedom –and voluntarily accepting slavery?
Translated by : E. News[Pramod Ranjan’s interests lie in subaltern studies and development of modernity. Sahityetihas Ka Bahujan Paksha, Bahujan Sahitya Ki Prastavna, Mahishasur: Mithak Evam Paramparayein and Shimla Diary are among the books penned by him. Contact: ±919811884495, janvikalp@gmail.com]
Ahh, this is so much more conplicated and evil than just lSARS-CoV2 lock-down. Centuries, man, and just the past 50 years. Monsanto, PFA’s, plastics, aerosols, black soot, aromatic particulates, mercury in the food, air, water . . . lead too, and, oh that glowing Chernobyl and Fukushima . . . depleted uranium . . . mass incarceration, open air prisons like Palestine, and the malpractice of medicine, pharma, ag, education, law . . . . Oh that structural violence, those dirty waterways, the shit and scum in babies’ formula.
To survive and thrive we will have to shut down the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. We will need to close down the world’s bio-warfare labs (like the ones at Wuhan, China and Fort Detrick, Maryland), wet markets, intensive confinement farms, and wildlife trafficking that lie at the root of COVID-19.
To avoid future pandemics, to stop the spread of antibiotic resistance and the food- and environment-related chronic diseases that are now reaching epidemic levels (cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, pulmonary deterioration), and that constitute a major co-factor in COVID-19 deaths, we will have to eliminate factory farms (the perfect breeding grounds for disease and pandemics) and industrial food production, transform the diets and eating habits of the population and drastically reduce air pollution. This means moving from chemical- and energy-intensive industrial agriculture, transportation, utilities and manufacturing to re-localized green and regenerative practices. It means putting an end to the deforestation, habitat destruction, economic exploitation, globalized trade wars and geopolitical belligerence that threaten us all.
There are some things that can’t be the truth even if they did happen. — Chapter Two, Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey
Sometimes you gotta pull rank.
First, though, the evidence of the shit-hole country that it always has been:
A lady in Newport, OR (pop. 8,000) had the fellow who used to cut her lawn stay in lock-down. She wasn’t getting anyone to come out during the lock-down.
One, then two warnings from the infamous “ code” inspector for the City of Newport.
Dang, these overpaid Little Eichmann’s. She got a $1,000 fine in the mail for “dangerously tall, fire-hazard prone, vermin-producing unwieldy wolf grass.” Yep, during Oregon’s lock-down. Yep, lady on fixed social security income. Hosed down by another $60-K a year Brownshirt, err, bureaucrat. A thousand dollars she doesn’t have.
Start a GoFundMe to pay off the city folk? Nah.
Next, the homeless and just recently-house citizens in Portland are experiencing high levels of PTSD-times-10 with Oregon militarized cops blasting the air with loud sound bursts out of speakers, with helicopters overhead, with the tear gas bangs and pops. The George Floyd greeting party of the Gestapo.
And for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, the police’s crowd control tactics may be especially traumatic.
‘Loud, unexpected, and disorienting experiences can trigger these reactions and increase one’s experience of PTSD symptoms,’ said Dr. Trisha Vinatieri, supervisor for the PTSD Clinical Team at the Veteran Affairs Portland Health Care System.
Close to 40% of unsheltered people in Multnomah County (who were not in transitional housing or emergency shelters) reported dealing with PTSD, according to the 2019 Point-In-Time Count, and more than 11% were veterans.
The PTSD Clinical Team works with individuals who have experienced situations involving non-lethal crowd control. Vinatieri noted an overall uptick in referrals recently, although the cause for this is undetermined.
‘I will say that the providers on our team have shared that many of the veterans with whom they work are finding the current events, namely George Floyd’s murder, to be very triggering and upsetting,’ she said.
At a Portland City Council meeting Wednesday morning, Commissioners Chloe Eudaly and Jo Ann Hardesty both expressed concerns about the Portland Police Bureau’s use of the compound 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, also known as tear gas, on protesters during the middle of a pandemic.
‘We know that it causes respiratory distress,” Hardesty said. “And we know that as we see more and more people showing up to protests, those people are putting their health at risk, and that risk is going to be exacerbated by tear gas and other chemical elements. We have an obligation to find out what the impact of those chemical weapons are on protesters, especially at the height of a pandemic.’
My friend who owns a small healthy and variously bio dynamic restaurant in the county where I live in is taking it one day at a time. He’s got $14,000 on his credit card.
“The landlord can’t be paid the $2000 a month. Now, the insurance company is banging on the door. But we do not have the money.”
He has stayed open since the Oregon shut down of restaurants, with revenues down by 80 percent. IN Oregon, in the county I live and work in, Lincoln, we have not gotten into Phase Two lockdown. We have the highest unemployment rate of all Oregon, at way over 26 percent.
“I guess from my point of view – and from other people’s points of view from other places I’ve lived and worked in, including in Europe, wine and cheese are essential services. Before coronavirus and now.”
The entire supply chain, the vendors and growers and producers and truckers, all of it, including the harvesters (he has guys and gals on boats who bring him the crab and oysters and fish) is in the bind. The corona capitalism bind.
My buddy is wearing a mask, and his small bistro-like place has been set up for the six foot viral distancing rules. He constantly cleans surfaces, his own hands, menus with disinfectant made by 2 Towns Cider House (Corvallis).
He sends me to a New York Times piece on Plum, a restaurant that closed – after 20 years in the biz.
I am not going to suddenly start arguing the merits of my restaurant as a vital part of an “industry” or that I help to make up 2 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product or that I should be helped out by our government because I am one of those who employ nearly 12 million Americans in the work force. But those seem to be the only persuasive terms — with my banks, my insurers, my industry lobbyists and legislators. I have to hope, though, that we matter in some other alternative economy; that we are still a thread in the fabric that might unravel if you yanked us from the weave. […]
The concerns before coronavirus are still universal: The restaurant as we know it is no longer viable on its own. You can’t have tipped employees making $45 an hour while line cooks make $15. You can’t buy a $3 can of cheap beer at a dive bar in the East Village if the “dive bar” is actually paying $18,000 a month in rent, $30,000 a month in payroll; it would have to cost $10. I can’t keep hosing down the sauté corner myself just to have enough money to repair the ripped awning. Prune is in the East Village because I’ve lived in the East Village for more than 30 years. I moved here because it was where you could get an apartment for $450 a month. In 1999, when I opened Prune, I still woke each morning to roosters crowing from the rooftop of the tenement building down the block, which is now a steel-and-glass tower. A less-than-500-square-foot studio apartment rents for $3,810 a month. […]
I cannot see myself excitedly daydreaming about the third-party delivery-ticket screen I will read orders from all evening. I cannot see myself sketching doodles of the to-go boxes I will pack my food into so that I can send it out into the night, anonymously, hoping the poor delivery guy does a good job and stays safe. I don’t think I can sit around dreaming up menus and cocktails and fantasizing about what would be on my playlist just to create something that people will order and receive and consume via an app. I started my restaurant as a place for people to talk to one another, with a very decent but affordable glass of wine and an expertly prepared plate of simply braised lamb shoulder on the table to keep the conversation flowing, and ran it as such as long as I could. If this kind of place is not relevant to society, then it — we — should become extinct.
So, my buddy in Newport has no idea what will happen. His catering gigs at wineries have dried up. His work on an amazing eating experience near one of the most beautiful spots on the planet has been thwarted. He had been open one year then the bat virus hits. Does he believe in the lockdown or what to do about this “social distancing”?
“Look to be honest, with the George Floyd rebellion, I at times wish the entire country would burn down. I mean the entire capitalist state where a few control the rest of us. But I still put my faith in the governor’s orders, her team of people looking at the facts, the numbers, the figures.”
Of course, that Oregon governor is only as good as the state of support in the state, or the support in the region and support from the federal system. All have faltered, and that Trump Monster, well, I know some lefties defending the detritus, no matter what he does. They attribute his pussy grabbing and racism and misogyny and hatred of all people below (sic) him as deep state conspiracy.
We have a system of unemployment insurance where people get a constant busy signal, constant dead end on the computer, when filing for unemployment. Eight weeks with crickets. No checks, no insurance money, no money to pay the rent, and food donations if lucky.
This is the underdevelopingd country Manfred Max-Neef talks about.
Well, it’s a metaphor, but a metaphor that originated in a concrete experience. I worked for about ten years of my life in areas of extreme poverty in the Sierras, in the jungle, in urban areas in different parts of Latin America. And at the beginning of that period, I was one day in an Indian village in the Sierra in Peru. It was an ugly day. It had been raining all the time. And I was standing in the slum. And across me, another guy also standing in the mud — not in the slum, in the mud. And, well, we looked at each other, and this was a short guy, thin, hungry, jobless, five kids, a wife and a grandmother. And I was the fine economist from Berkeley, teaching in Berkeley, having taught in Berkeley and so on. And we were looking at each other, and then suddenly I realized that I had nothing coherent to say to that man in those circumstances, that my whole language as an economist, you know, was absolutely useless. Should I tell him that he should be happy because the GDP had grown five percent or something? Everything was absurd.
So I discovered that I had no language in that environment and that we had to invent a new language. And that’s the origin of the metaphor of barefoot economics, which concretely means that is the economics that an economist who dares to step into the mud must practice. The point is, you know, that economists study and analyze poverty in their nice offices, have all the statistics, make all the models, and are convinced that they know everything that you can know about poverty. But they don’t understand poverty. And that’s the big problem. And that’s why poverty is still there. And that changed my life as an economist completely. I invented a language that is coherent with those situations and conditions. Source.
I am part of this ground-truthing exercise (remember, I am pulling rank on the people writing over at places at Off Guardian or over someone like Paul Craig Roberts and the like).
You see it’s easy to do since I am reading a lot of KeyBoard/Bored warriors showing their true racist colors, again, this idea of white supremacy. It isn’t always a robe and white pointed hat or tattooed dude on a Harley with Trump’s (or Reagan’s or Bush’s) face scrawled all over the candy-painted gas tank.
To be truthful, I am seeing a lot of great pithy stuff from white people from Klanada, United Snakes of America, and Eunuch Kingdom
Whiteness is a default standard; the background of the figure-ground analogy from which all other groups of color are compared, contrasted, and made visible. From this color standard, racial/ethnic minorities are evaluated, judged, and often found to be lacking, inferior, deviant, or abnormal. Because Whiteness is considered to be normative and ideal, it automatically confers dominance on fair skinned people in our society. Whiteness would not be problematic if it weren’t (a) predicated on White supremacy, (b) imposed overtly and covertly on People of Color, and (c) made invisible to those who benefit from its existence. Seen from this vantage point, Whiteness is an invisible veil that cloaks its racist deleterious effects through individuals, organizations, and society. The result is that White people are allowed to enjoy the benefits that accrue to them by virtue of their skin color. Thus, Whiteness, White supremacy, and White privilege are three interlocking forces that disguise racism so it may allow White people to oppress and harm persons of color while maintaining their individual and collective advantage and innocence. Source.
You know as I stated in a previous DV, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. I am observing more and more cognitive dissonance and hyper- contradictory discourse and mass white man/woman guilt confusion. Albeit there are smart folk on these sites, and yes, again, let’s drum roll this –
Yes, Trump is part of the continual criminal enterprise before, during and after his POTUS run
Yes, the policies of Obama et al, from Gorge Washington to this pussy grabber, are about domination, getting one or million things up on your competitor. It is about destroying your competitor as if he or she is your enemy.
Yes, the Anglo-Saxon and the whites of Hispania and the others in the history of emporium have all been in the game to steal, to murder, to dominate, to extract, to control, to burglarize land, resources, people and cultures.
Trump is that in the form of an Adderral fiend, in the form of a pussy grabber, in the form of an outright racist.
Obama knew what he was doing, and he is part of the same ugly state, deep or shallow, that Trump loves and believe in.
The FBI has always been a force of bad.
Not sure what the guys like Paul Craig Roberts do in their daily lives, but my daily life is working with hundreds of people in a non-profit program I am helping run that gives my participants each a measly $840 unconditional cash transfer for a social capital project.
Of course, all billionaires should be outlawed, and we should be collectivist and communist in our dealings with man, woman and child.
The communities across the land must have full control of the things and corporations and programs coming into their neighborhoods.
Yes, a little bit of lead is bad for the baby, so regulating lead to a certain “acceptable level” is the very definition of capitalism.
Externalities are part and parcel the cost of doing business.
Collateral damage is both economic speak, military speak, education speak, all sorts of groups’ speak.
My participants in the program are sucking wind, big time. Recall the unemployment rate in Lincoln County. Recall we are in lock-down Oregon. Recall that there are no safety nets, no free clinics, no free day care centers, no free good banks, no MASH tents for dentistry, no roaming vans with smart and caring social workers and therapists to help people get through.
Pulling rank means just calling a spade a spade. Is this a plan-demic? Of course it is. Is it an accidental release of a messed-with bat virus? Most probably. Is the lock-down draconian? Yes. Do we self quarantine for a virus that now is no longer going away, one we have to “deal with” unlike the SARAS-CoV?
Here’s the problem – I understand the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the power of Gates and GAVI and Davos and the Rockefellers and Bloomberg and Thiel and Google and the rest of them, including the mom and pop killers, Jeff Bezos.
I understand what the controlled opposition is. I understand the New Black is Green, that most everything in Western Civilization has been co-opted by, colonized by, hacked by the masters of the universe who do business in that big ass business round-table – the complex, not just the matrix.
Think Military, Pharma, Real Estate, Law, Education, Ag, Oil, Mining, Media, Prison, Banking, Insurance, AI, retail, Digital, Entertainment, Propaganda Complex. There may be commas in the foregoing, but think hyphens, or slash marks. Think how intertwined capital is with the powers that make a killing in all these arenas just listed.
Yet, especially over at the Off Guardian, but elsewhere, I have KeyBoard/Bored and mouse heroes just attack and hitting the jugular on the Deep State, on Neoliberals, on Democrats, and the Billionaire class, yet in the same long piece, there is zero discussion about Trump also being another version and iteration of the perversions of Power-Money-PR spin-Propaganda-Neofascist Patriarchy.
I ground truth, and that pulling rank means those people I know who are still in Peru, Mexico or other countries who are journalists and real activists I listen to. When they say large warehouses or small mountain towns and/or large cities in Peru and Mexico are seeing more and more deaths by this virus, I have to go with them and not some KeyBoard/Bored hero who will tell me that the numbers are just not there to prove coronavirus is not just the same as seasonal flu.
Right. So, all those seasonal flu’s killed as many Peruvians as are being killed now? It’s cognitive foolishness.
It’s almost cognitive dissonance and intellectual dissociative behavior.
I know vaccines are some bad hombres, real culprits in so many issues tied to learning disabilities, chronic illnesses and allergies and almost everything from IBS to ADHD. Not just the mountains of stories and evidence on such a single killer and maiming shot like Gardasil, AKA HPV vaccine. I am talking about my buddies from the Vietnam war, and those from the Gulf Wars. I have seen those ailments not just attributed to Agent Orange, but to the forced vaccinations that were administered to them as part of their duty to wear the uniform.
And the entire society is now reverse engineered. Area 51 and F/Zuckerberg, a cyborg of the 11th generation.
I’ve noticed that over at Off Guardian, you can also get on their shit list – I think some of my “comments” have been blocked, and, not because I am fomenting revolution. The riot act is dropped on a whole crap load of people these days.
Ground truthing is big time, and how can a Paul Craig Roberts (seen on the pages of Dissident Voice a few times) or KeyBoard/Bored Warriors at Counterpunch or Off Guardian really get down and dirty when they’ve really not been in the trenches. I mean, no offense, but we have this Paul Craig Roberts, and we are supposed to bow to him (like some many did for Ron Paul) because he seems to be an outlier for the very administration that brought us their versions of deep state and supply side economics. Here, PCR – Wikipedia thumbnail:
Paul Craig Roberts is an American economist and author. He formerly held a sub-cabinet office in the United States federal government as well as teaching positions at several U.S. universities. He is a promoter of supply-side economics and an opponent of recent U.S. foreign policy. Wikipedia
He was born April 3, 1939 in Atlanta,. His political affiliations is Republican Party. His education include University of Virginia and Georgia Institute of Technology. Should I be impressed, and for DV or any other so-called dissident outlet, he seems very off the wall in terms of what could be a loose vision for progressive magazines/blogs.
And he has tons of accolades by Forbes, by Stanford, by supply-side economists. He is a living legend in many circles tied to the Hoover Institution. Good old conservative American Pie —
During 1981-82, he served as assistant secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department’s Meritorious Service Award for “his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy.” From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff, where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.
My point is they never really talk about or articulate the positions of the homeless, the near-houseless, the 80 percent of Americans who have a whopping 8 percent of the so-called wealth, compared to the One Percent and 19 Percent, who have that whooping 40% and 52 percent of wealth.
These KeyBoard/Bored heroes or PCR are not just one trick ponies, no, because they seem to be at the vanguard of fighting for the small guy, for believing in human agency, in our individual liberties. But we know that capitalism is not about individual freedoms or collective freedoms, but rather about the dog-eat-dog realities of predatory-casino-parasitic-disaster Capitalism, based on the collective actions of a small group of mostly white men deciding the fates of the rest of the world.
Rape, rapacious destruction of people, culture, ecologies, nature, societies.
I understand the entire gambit that is now — and was in the works for decades — this the new abnormal of telemedicine, teleeducation, telefinance, telegovernment, teleschool, telesocial work, telework. Was this SARS-CoV2 the perfect storm? Was the George Floyd the perfect matching to ignite a many head rebellion in the streets?
Is George Soros behind everything, behind all the actions in the streets? The Russians? Ahh, when you read the KeyBoard/Bored Heroes they are some of the brightest and smartest people on earth, don’t you know, and their word is God’s, or The Word. Entire essays on how COVID-19 is “just another flu,” and how all the numbers have been cooked.
Christ, I am a communist and atheist and deep systems thinker, and I am a journalist and social worker and educator and creative writer, and the reality is, we can have SARS-CoV2 which is something more virulent than the SARS-CoV. We can understand the deeply broken global population of chronic illness plagued citizens, all the hypertension, the pre- and post- diabetics. How much do we need to know about the polluted grains (Round-up), polluted rivers, polluted soils, the polluted air? How much do we need to know about the virulent bacteria and viruses locked in the hell-holes that are CAFO’s? How much do we need to know about the wet-bulb temperature going up in major population centers, or about the ground ozone, or the heat island effect, or the plastic in all species, or the nano-particles, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or the total surveillance society of now and the future?
Because we have that, all these KeyBoard/Bored heroes prognosticating, dropping these incredible essays on sites like Off-Guardian, et al, well, the world is so much safer, more defined, and makes more sense, no?
Ground-truthing means I work with homeless and PTSD veterans and adults with developmental disabilities and foster youth and Pk12 students; with inmates, with released inmates, with gang-influenced youth, with elderly in lifelong learning programs.
I remember this one 24-hour period in Portland. I was working at $12 an hour as an activities director for a program for adults with developmental disabilities. It was also housed in a memory care facility. I had just taken 12 clients in a bus (I was the licensed bus operator) to a sturgeon center on the Columbia. People who had various levels of cognition. Various ages. Some were in wheelchairs. Several needed help with toileting. One had a colostomy bag that spilled, and here I was, cleaning her up and putting in a new bag.
Right after that gig, I rushed to teach a literature class at a college. I then rushed to a meeting of social workers who were organizing a union. After that, a later meeting of people working on cleaning up the Columbia River. Made it home to quickly gobble food and then cranked out a magazine piece for another gig – a piece on the Hanford facility. Before shutting down the laptop, I was packing to head out to the Tri-Cities to get more information on the death mile near Hanford. I also interviewed the offspring of people who were lured to the Hanford site to do the building and janitorial work. Mexican-Americans and African-Americans.
An entire part of the Tri-Cities where the people of color lived. Segregation 101, and they are still there, on the other side of the proverbial railroad tracks.
Then back on the road, rushing to my gig with adults with learning disabilities, with developmental disabilities. I was going to help one get a job interview at a Burger King wiping tables and sweeping up. A job three times a week, for 12 hours a week, pulling down $120.
Irony, huh? Me, with my three fancy college degrees, getting $12 an hour, helping a forty-year-old woman living with Downs Syndrome get a $10 an hour job at a fast-food chain from hell.
Can this be, this cognitive dissonance that those KeyBoard/Bored Gurus writing all these fine essays and commentary blurbs about knowing for sure how the Matrix is built, how it all ends up in the post-Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Look, I am all about thought experiments, all about people spreading their proverbial intellectual wings by prognosticating, by going against the grain, by following the many conspiracies of our Star Chamber masters, for sure.
I really do. I might be part of that a bit. But the reality is I have to make money, I have to do real patsy journalism, I have to do reading gigs for a new book, and I have a propensity for embedding myself into community, for sure.
I relate better to poor people with no college degrees, with lives mired in the dysfunction that is America – bad parents, mean hombre parents, rapists daddies, drug-using parents, drug-offering parents, vacant parents, mean as cuss parents-siblings-boyfriends — than with professionals or managerial classes. I have more to relate to with drop-outs, military mess ups, substance abusers and those in recovery, than a hundred PhD’s. Really.
I sort of get acid refluxy reading this stuff from armchair warriors, those KeyBoard/Bored heroes who have every last bit of evidence that the SARS-CoV2 is one big choreographed, contrived, concealed scam.
Have at it, KeyBoard/Bored Warriors, labeling me as dead, stupid, naïve and so off base I must be colonized by The Man; and editors, you too, have at it de-platforming blokes like me who get on your faux radical sites and then find ourselves arrowed-down/thumbs-downed by dozens of readers of the comments.
For now, Dissident Voice has been kind, and the writing here is more akin to my way of at least entertaining conflicting and oppositional ideas without me feeling I am going to be bombed with hate and ire and denigration.
Citizens United and Authorization for Use of Military Force, and on and on — the fleecing of America, the world, US Murder Inc.
Amazing that the country is in this spasm of revolt, tied to the most recent murder by cop we get to see live taped on TV. As if this was the only moment in the past 400 years of this country’s syphilitic policies of Indian Removal, Land Theft, Land Burning, Rape, Collective madness.
You betcha we broke Starbucks and Well Fargo windows in Occupy Seattle. During the WTO protests. You betcha I put gallons of sugar into bulldozers’ disease tanks when I was a kid trying to stop the rape of the Sonora desert. Of course some of us did bring over people in our pick-up trucks from Mexico, fleeing whatever criminals, some USA, out of Guatemala, Salvador. Of course you have to do this.
I am reminded of all the work the Black Panthers did. I am reminded of all the dissents murdered by FBI/CIA/USA hit men.
I am reminded of Barbara Lee. Here pre-Fuck-You-Book, against the lone vote against the Democrats and Republicans who gave Bush the power that now Obama and Trump got:
Here’s a selection of more typical fare—a depressing glimpse at the ugliest side of America against Barbara Lee’s lone no vote to murder in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“You should have been in the Trade Towers you anti-American Bitch. Drop dead!!!”
“You do not stand alone in evil—you stand with Bin Laden & Hitler & Judas.”
“Your treachery rivals that of Jane Fonda’s infamous visit to Hanoi. We haven’t forgotten Jane, and we won’t forget you.”
“To the Dishonorable Barbara Lee: You should strap yourself to the front of the first cruise missile launched. You should be put on trial for treason and punished to the full extent of the law.”
“You are a dog. Not even an American dog, a black mutt.”
“Perhaps you should be rounded up and held as a sympathizer with the terrorists. You are a disgrace.”
“Regarding your lone dissent, the terrorists used God as an excuse. Is it true ‘God’ helped you make your decision, too? Congratulations on using terrorist mentality! You represent people, not God. If you can’t handle your job, go work in a church. You will never be re-elected.”
“Hey Barb, do us all a favor and find another country to live in, like Pakistan! Maybe after being forced to hide your face in public and maybe after having all your freedoms stripped from you, you will come back and support this government and our president!”
“Black people across America have come together to be as one with their fellow Americans—are you so out of touch, by being the lone voice you have done nothing for the African American cause. May you reap what you sow.”
“I hope you get voted out of office and that you and your family lives the rest of your lives in shame. It doesn’t matter if military action stops terrorism or not. The terrorists are going to hit us anyway, so we might as well try.”
“What if Arabs killed 5,000 people in Oakland? I’d say too bad. I would tell my congressman not to support you and your sorry constituents.”
“Go to hell you communist! I hope your constituents remember this come election time!”
“Do you think this somehow sets you apart or makes you special? It does not… It shows the entire country, and most especially the people of your district, what a frivolous, self-centered person you are… You crass, selfish politician.”
“Why am I not surprised that this stupid woman is the LONE DISSENTER? Whassamatter? Not enough blacks killed in this tragedy to fire up your emotions? You are a disgrace to your constituents and your race. you should be dragged to the Pentagon and made to dig for bodies in the rubble. Get real!! This is WAR, honey, not a garden party! I pray for you and may God have mercy on you.”
“If you don’t like America, GET OUT! We’ll be better off without you.”
That encompasses the prevailing message Lee received from the American majority. From the Atlantic magazine.
This is why we have a looting, continuing criminal enterprise on steroids, after the September 11, 2001 “planned demolition” of those buildings. Imagine the theft of trillions and trillions from USA coffers for military. For the inside jobs. For the con men in Leer Jets and Brooks Brother’s underwear.
The final draft of the AUMF was just 60 words long:
That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
Note that President Eisenhower would not even answer Mamie Till’s call for an investigation in the torture and murder of the boy, 14 years old.
I have been understandably working hard on many projects. The idea that the coronavirus is all that it is, that the Gates’ and Bloomberg’s and the drug makers, all of them, have clean hands, is absurd. That the sock on the face is a way to stop a virus, that too is lunacy. I remind people that those shots of scientists working with/on viruses are in MOON suits for a reason:
I understand why governors don’t really know what’s up, and this lockdown fury and the anti-lockdown furor are upsetting a lot of paradigms. I understand that this is in many ways a Plan Demic. I have written about this on and on and on.
Then Gates said this:
However, the next threat may not be a flu at all. More than likely, it will be an unknown pathogen that we see for the first time during an outbreak, as was the case with SARS, MERS, and other recently-discovered infectious diseases. [SARS and MERS are both coronaviruses]
At the Munich Security Conference last year, I asked world leaders to imagine that somewhere in the world, there is a weapon that exists – or that could emerge – that is capable of killing millions of people, bringing economies to a standstill, and casting nations into chaos. Source.
Linsey McGoey, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, UK, and author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy, is profoundly skeptical of philanthropy as a whole, claiming it can actually sometimes harm democracy in the long run: “Philanthropy can and is being used deliberately to divert attention away from different forms of economic exploitation that underpin global inequality today” she told MintPress News.
The new ‘philanthrocapitalism’ threatens democracy by increasing the power of the corporate sector at the expense of the public sector organizations, which increasingly face budget squeezes, in part by excessively remunerating for-profit organizations to deliver public services that could be delivered more cheaply without private sector involvement.”
We know about 5G and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We know know know that the world will shift quickly now with the plandemic — tele-schools, tele-med, tele-jobs, and the Internet of Things, more AI, more jobs lost through robots and automation. We know that the Universal Basic Income is a way to hold people under the bigger and bigger thumb of big brother, who is the Gates types, the billionaires, the entire mess of Capital controlling the small town all the way up to entire regions, countries and continuing criminal enterprise systems like the World Bank, Israel, USA, G-7, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, all the parts to the Military-Ag-Chem-Pharma-Oil-Media-Ed-Law-Prison-AI-Surveillance-Insurance-Real Estate-Finance-Banking COMPLEX.
Gates, Bezos, Bloomberg, Dell, and countless multimillionaires and their billionaire masters are making the deals now with coronavirus lockdown/re-lockdown on the minds of a frightened population, who believes that 6 feet distancing keeps the Ebola or the SARS-CoV-2 or H1N1 or what have you away from you. A sneeze is 100 mph, 25 feet man.
This is a broken country, and was way before the demented and sick Trump came in — oh Reagan was a queen racist, and he was mentally infirm like Biden and Trump and so many others. There is no test for people getting into administrations, getting jobs running the government at THAT level. To be a fisheries biologist, yes, I need a resume, education, experience, deep-deep interviewing. But to be the ambassador to Bhutan,, I don’t even have to know how to find it on a map.
This is pre-Trump, pre-George Floyd. This is it, folks. We bombed and murdered the Middle East, and that was USA, black, brown, Asian, Native American, White, Mixed Race, LGBTQA, heterosexual, Jew-Muslim-Christian.
That this is a Black Lives Matter issue, well, we had murders of how many black leaders? I am not a fan of the Southern Poverty Law Project, but here: CIVIL RIGHTS MARTYRS
Trump played a role in the controversy, spending $85,000 to take out a newspaper ad calling for the teenagers’ executions.
“BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE,” the ad said
Ava DuVernay, the director of the new Netflix series, has spoken out about Trump’s part in the controversy. Although the show is a drama, DuVernay chose not to cast an actor as Trump and instead used video clips of him speaking.
For example, DuVernay opted to use a clip of Trump saying he would “love to be a well-educated black” in a television interview, with responses from the show’s characters, rather than re-staging the entire scene.
“The decision was to just have him in as needed and to let him speak for himself through clips, which we use very judiciously. I found that whatever he had to say wasn’t as fascinating or interesting to me as what the men had to say,” DuVernay said at the beginning of June.
And on Tuesday, in response to Trump’s comments, The Wrap reported that DuVernay said she was unsurprised by the response, except that it took so long for Trump to say anything about it.
“There’s nothing that he says or does in relation to this case, in relation to the lives of five people of color, that really has any weight to it or truth to it,” DuVernay said at a screening of the series. “It’s not our reality, it’s not truthful. We already know this, so it’s kind of like, why do we keep banging our head against the wall about it? I’m surprised it took him so long. I was waiting every day to get a tweet.”
Here’s what this motherfucker did when? This was 19 motherfucking 89. 31 years ago.
Former US president Jimmy Carter told the New York Times in a 1989 interview:
We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers – women and children and farmers and housewives – in those villages around Beirut. … As a result of that … we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful. That is what precipitated the taking of our hostages and that is what has precipitated some of the terrorist attacks.
Colin Powell has also revealed that he knows better. Writing of this same 1983 Lebanon debacle in his memoir, he forgoes cliches about terrorists hating democracy: “The U.S.S. New Jersey started hurling 16-inch shells into the mountains above Beirut, in World War II style, as if we were softening up the beaches on some Pacific atoll prior to an invasion. What we tend to overlook in such situations is that other people will react much as we would.”
The ensuing retaliatory attack against US Marine barracks in Lebanon took the lives of 241 American military personnel.
Well, I’d like to propose a radical solution to anti-American terrorism – stop giving terrorists the motivation to attack America. As long as the imperial mafia insist that anti-American terrorists have no good or rational reason for retaliation against the United States for anything the US has ever done to their countries, as long as US foreign policy continues with its bloody and oppressive interventions, the “War on Terrorism” is as doomed to failure as the war on drugs has been.
If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize – very publicly and very sincerely – to all the widows and orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce to every corner of the world that America’s global military interventions have come to an end. I would then inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but -oddly enough -a foreign country. Then I would reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims and repair the damage from the many American bombings, invasions and sanctions. There would be more than enough money. One year’s military budget in the United States is equal to more than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That’s one year.
That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.
Thanks to a reader of Dissident Voice and going to one of my blogs, paulhaeder.com, a reader sent me these comments below, the crux of which my failure to attribute the artist to three of the photos I took in British Columbia years ago while attending the Summer Sustainability Course at the university in Vancouver, UBC.
I want to put those images of Bill Reid’s work — amazing carvings, as large as a VW bug, at the BC Museum of Anthropology, an amazing place I visited on the off hours of that week-long green course I was at.
“The Raven and the First Men sculpture was commissioned by Walter and Marianne Koerner for the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, in Vancouver, British Columbia, where the sculpture is currently on display.”
Absolutely remiss of me, and in my zeal to photograph and to post, I failed to attribute the magnificent artist who created these moving and universally deep carvings. My Bad, for sure.
I have been in many many countries and taken a million photographs and when they are utilized in more traditional journalism pieces, I make sure the place, the art, the people, the land are attributed.
In no way am I part of some cultural appropriation game, and the reader’s email prompted me to reflect on own space now on the Oregon Coast, in a house in Waldport, on land that the Siletz Tribe once traveled through and hunted and considered/consider sacred.
I was at the devil’s punch-bowl, just down the road — and I have written about that place. Ironically, under some salal and covered up and now with tons of idiotic scratch marks, there is a plaque that announces that the very spot the tourist — me, that day — was standing on was once a traditional and long-used beach for Siletz clamming and mussel collecting.
This federal piece of land, used to entice travelers to the edge of the Pacific down to the small beach near the geological feature that spits in and out the tides of our coast line.
The indignity of the plaque way out of the view of most tourists because it is a bit of a climb down over rocks to get to it.
And that is the rub in Turtle Island, how degraded the history of the original people’s and Indians is in both countries. I have lived in BC and my mom and her parents lived in Powell River (grandparents came from Scotland and Ireland to Canada).
So before the European settlement in the area, the land was inhabited by Coast Salish peoples of the Tla’amin Nation and was used as a landing spot for gold prospectors coming from Vancouver Island who were drafting the Fraser River in order to find quick riches prior to the creation of the Cariboo Road.
Throughout Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, California, Washington, Oregon and other places, I have experienced the clear agnotology being alive and well — erasing of memory, erasing of facts, the creation of fiction, i.e. this place was nothing, or empty or savage before the white race plowed into this land (and all the other lands around the world).
“Agnotology is the study of willful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favor
It comes from agnosis, the neoclassical Greek word for ignorance or ‘not knowing’, and ontology, the branch of metaphysics which deals with the nature of being. Agnotology is the study of willful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favor.
“I was exploring how powerful industries could promote ignorance to sell their wares. Ignorance is power… and agnotology is about the deliberate creation of ignorance.
I will follow through on a much more thorough and reverent piece on just where we are in Klanada and the United Snakes of America when it comes to the original peoples, the indigenous, the first nations, the Indians.
But thanks to Susan T. for getting a hold of me. Mea culpa. Long live the Haida. Long live artists.
Comment: I liked many of your photographs. I am wondering why you did not attribute the carvings that I think are by Bill Reid, a Haida Gwaii artist, to him. The ones about the origin of humans.
Comment: I just finished watching a documentary about Robert Davidson and Haida Gwaii and art etc. Watching that, I thought once or twice how you have a photograph of a carving by Bill Reid, the Raven and the first men, but you only have your name on it as the photographer. You did not attribute that work of art to the artist. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/bill-reid. I am puzzled as to how and why you would do that. Haida people have struggled to save Haida Gwaii and to save themselves. It seems almost like violence to show a photograph that you took and attribute the photograph to yourself, but ignore the artist who did the carving.
Who was Bill Reid?
“Joy is a well-made object, equaled only by the joy of making it” – Bill Reid, 1988
Bill Reid (1920-1998) was an acclaimed master goldsmith, carver, sculptor, writer, broadcaster, mentor and community activist. Reid was born in Victoria, BC to a Haida mother and an American father with Scottish German roots, and only began exploring his Haida roots at the age of 23. This journey of discovery lasted a lifetime and shaped Reid’s artistic career.
The Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art was created in 2008 to honour his legacy and celebrate the diverse indigenous cultures of the Northwest Coast. Bill Reid infused Haida traditions with his own modernist aesthetic to create both exquisitely small as well as monumental work that captured the public’s imagination, and introduced a timeless vocabulary to the modern world.
Reid became a pivotal force in building bridges between Indigenous people and other peoples. Through his mother, he was a member of the Raven clan from T’aanuu with the wolf as one of his family crests. Raven is known as a mischievous trickster, who also plays an important part in transforming the world. Many of these traits matched Bill Reid’s personality. In 1986, Reid was presented with the Haida name Yaahl Sgwansung, meaning The Only Raven.
The inspiring and beautiful story of famed Haida artist Robert Davidson in a documentary by Vancouver’s Charles Wilkinson. Born to a “vanishing race,” Robert became a key figure in the fight for survival of his people, a fight that deeply impacted Western culture.
I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for or against. — Malcolm X
by Paul Haeder / May 27th, 2020
Caught with their proverbial pants down? The blustery conversations tied to corona virus, lockdown, Trump LLC, Pelosi and Comp., and the failed state that is the USA are to be expected.
It is a country of nanosecond attention spans.
A country with amnesia in vitro.
A country that has sacrificed future and future-future generations for the all mighty dollar.
Dog-eat-dog?
Survival of the fittest (or in the reverse Darwinism, survival of the least fit, the least smart, the least humane, the least human).
Yeah, sure, trolls abound in the social media morass. The putridity of a buffoon on one local Facebook page can be tiring.
The King Rat in High (he is high, by all accounts of his Adderall sniffing) Office is a troll, yep.
CEO, the Apprentice Blob, the guy who made head of CBS orgasmic during the last run-up to the POTUS election – “I might not agree with Mister Trump’s politics, but Donald Trump is really-really good for business.”
The bottom line is money for nothing. With Corona Capitalism, it’s money for the bail-out queens and kings – corporations. Wall Street is bullish. Studdly, in fact.
Make that 40 million unemployed. In USA, but we know that figure is so much higher using the other Bureau of Labor stats. Like U3, U5, U6 and UB-40!
Protective mask shaming by the trolls, including King Rat Donny, and then mask illiteracy by the masses.
Yes, those valiant cloth masks with coffee filter inserts, hmm, vanity, for sure. We know the physics of a sneeze – 23 feet and a 100,000 microbes spread out in one big let-go.
Yet we have these Disneyland parameters — elbow greetings and six foot circle jerks. Social distancing is the racist caste system of India, and now, alas, we have meme after meme, two bit prognosticator yammering about what it means to be, well, self-quarantining.
Call it lockdown, and it then becomes a policing issue. It always has been a policing issue — for the 80 percent. Fines, regs, fees, tolls, levies, penalties, triple penalties, interest, laws, measures, arrests, convictions. prosecutions.
If you question the myriad of narratives spewed by left and right of the manure pile called USA politics, then, well, you suffer ire, de-platforming.
Called a Trumpie or Republican or Money First American if you dare question the entire idea of forced lockdown without forced government and private industry supporting people in real time; and without forced collective safety nets for food, health care, social services during this tsunami of destruction these lockdowns and falsifying narratives daily.
You gotta be consistent, the old American way, right? No counter-intuitive thinking, no systems thinking, no whole picture thinking, right?
So many “duh moments,” that each and every duh thing said by left and right of the political center dung pit are just too numerous to mention or answer.
This is no joke – United States of Amnesia, maybe on a daily diet.
Weren’t we warning about the military industrial complex in the 1930s by the general, Smedley Butler and War is a Racket? I get hammered for being a conspiracy nut, that how could there be a deep state, how could there be the big lie in such a big bad diverse country? How can I say a vaccination ID chip program could be real?
Right:
In 1934, a colossal claim reached the American news media: There had been a plot to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in favor of a fascist government. Supposedly in the works since 1933, the claims of the conspiracy came from a very conspicuous and reliable source: Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated war heroes of his time. Even more unbelievable were his claims of who was involved in the plot – respected names like Robert Sterling Clark, Grayson M.P. Murphy, and Prescott Bush. While news media at the time mocked Butler’s story, recently discovered archives have revealed the truth behind Major General Butler’s claims. Source!
When was The Jungle written? A century and change ago, and of course, the meat industry is so-so cleaned up?
Decades after Upton Sinclair exposed the horrors of meatpacking, radical labor organizing transformed the industry into a bastion of worker power. Now, a century later, after decades of union-busting and the coronavirus decimating workers throughout the industry, the meatpacking industry is back to The Jungle. Source!
Try that argument with trolls on F/Zuck-err-berg or anywhere. Then you have that fourth grade level thinking King Rat, Adderall Donny, until whack a mole is more than some child’s game. It’s the SARS-CoV-2 plan, it’s the diplomacy of this Clear and Present Danger, United of Snakes? Did I say, William Blum?
This book could be entitled: Serial chain-saw baby killers and the women who love them.
The women don’t really believe that their beloved would do such a thing, even if they’re shown a severed limb or a headless torso. Or if they believe it, they know down to their bone marrow that lover-boy really had the best of intentions; it must have been some kind of very unfortunate accident, a well-meaning blunder; in fact, even more likely, it was an act of humanitarianism.
For more than 70 years, the United States convinced much of the world that there was an international conspiracy out there. An International Communist Conspiracy, seeking no less than control over the entire planet, for purposes which had no socially redeeming values. And the world was made to believe that it somehow needed the United States to save it from communist darkness. “Just buy our weapons,” said Washington, “let our military and our corporations roam freely across your land, and give us veto power over who your leaders will be, and we’ll protect you.” Rogue State, William Blum
Point and counterpoint
So, all the evidence of USA bioweapons work, all the machinations by more than 13,000 scientists working on US programs for DARPA, Plum Island, Fort Detrick, University of North Carolina, et al, none of that counts? Doesn’t matter who might agree with the minutiae. Grand conspiracy to mess with coronavirus, and great work on bat viruses. We know that the USA is the free world’s biggest gangster, and we can go on and on about the toxins unleashed, the Japanese prisoners captured in bioweapons facilities and brought to the USA. Along with those Sieg Heil missile boys.
Does it matter if there are many opposing and counterpointing ideas? Can we not maybe entertain the idea that the USA (with help from UK and Israel) might be concocting viruses or chemicals for infertility or bombs that kill people but keep buildings in tact? Depleted uranium shells? Goo that burns the skin off the bodies. Agent orange was not just a defoliant for exposing the heroes who fought the great American menace in their land. The McNamara and DOW papers state that agent orange (Your grandson’s Round-Up weed killer) would be something of the gift that keeps on giving. Papers reveal the idea was to ruin the rice crop of Vietnam. Contaminate the soil for generations.
Oh, that Round-Up Ready America. The media, the police, the finance, the insurance, the real estate, the hedge funds, the legal eagles, the university system, the chemical-fumigant-herbicide-pesticide purveyors. Big Pharma, Big Med, Big Private Prison. Big big big and too big to take on, fail, and frog march to the gallows.
Yet, this compliance for lockdown, even now, May 27. I live on the coast of Oregon, near Newport.
No industry, no shipping lanes, no stagnation, no burning coal or burning anything really, yet my mean greenie weenie acquaintances are still putting their Zoom Doom out there for environmental programs.
I have a new book – all my readings cancelled because of Corona Capitalism. But now, no light at the end of the lockdown tunnel. All those libraries? Outside parking lots, hell, I will stand away with bullhorn and read and talk.
Let the people sit outside, even with their vanity masks. The cleanest air in the world, and it circulates in an open house every ten minutes – completely new air in a house. Outside? Nope!
Tele-Zoom, man. These white great hopes, the middle and upper middle classes, they love the Zoom Doom. Tele-marketing turned into tele-ed, tele-med, tele-sex, tele-retail.
All these congealing ideas coming out now, with the absurdity of a fourth world country like USA. No clinics in every neighborhood. No dental care. No regulating polluters to not pollute zero emissions or toxins. All this colonizing of higher and lower education by the MBA’s and profiteers and for-profit investment vehicles.
All this racism and racist policies and the one hundred percent of Native American treaties broken by Uncle Sam.
I live here in Lincoln County, and the Siletz tribe has the big casino. Big attraction for addicts. But what is a disenfranchised tribe to do?
Even after all the theft and rapine, the Siletz Tribe in the 1820s was given a million acres, yet those white devils we praise as the great wagon trains of the Oh Pioneers, like a coronavirus, came into the Oregon Territory, and over time, all those deeded acres disappeared. The tribe now has 3,600 acres – fractured to be sure – in its sovereign name.
I have friends who do some amazing things looking at the numbers game, the To Die With Corona or Not to Die. You betcha being skeptical of Gates and Vaccine Purveyors and Alex Azar and Fauchi and the Surgeon General and Trump LLC, you bet, best way to be. Davos, Rockefeller, the pandemic planning way before Dec. 2019.
You betcha.
Unfortunately we are in some contradictory and counter-intuitive times. Yes, coronavirus, in it’s novel form, is worse than the H1N1 or Swine flu. Two times? Three? Hmm.
Locking down healthy people without safety nets — and we know ALL the safety nets necessary for closing down the economy and day to day life, and schools – is insane.
So are meat packing plants and Amazon warehouses. So are the freaks dictating that private companies do not have to report sick employees with coronavirus. So is a country without test. So is a country that still rams its military whores into other parts of the world, still keeps those weapons deals going, yet this pathetic country can’t even amass MASH tents and hearts and minds soldiers (without weapons) to be part of the so-called coronavirus mitigation.
I read a lot as well as work a lot, and gain of function for DNA and RNA tweaking of viruses should never be allowed. But then never should there have been a patent given on seeds.
This is all pre-dating the Adderall Addict in Chief. Predates his scum lording in the Oval Office.
You can hate Donald Trump on so many levels and see him as a felon (in a long line of American president felons) and still not believe the Russian Investigation.
You can doubt lockdown and still decry armed racists and their white breed from going to state capitals with fully loaded AR-15’s.
You can decry Zoom and Facebook and parse the Fourth Industrial Revolution and rail against Internet of Things and AI and self-driving cars, and 5G, and still have pure science background in biology and ecology.
You can attack the Planet of the Humans for its total lack of embracing the reality that the majority of the world – non-white, thank god – is doing many things to fight against green capitalism, carbon markets, REDD, and the other tricks of the capitalists. You can hate Michael Moore for being a multimillionaire. You can doubt Bill McKibben and tire of the Naomi Klein getting gazillion minutes of air time on the Soros Show, Democracy Now, and endless copy on the Intercept.
Yet, you can still embrace Bowling for Columbine, Shock Doctrine, The End of Nature, and rail against Green as the New Black.
It’s possible to think the lockdown is absurd on one level, and that business as usual is absurd, too.
You can be for universal health care, universal public education, for nationalizing (people-izing) industries, ending the billionaire class and still be for retail, mom and pop’s, good food, good weed and great wine.
Communists are for democracy and for the people’s rights over all rights of the business and investing class. Yes, the world is global and so is weather and so is the water cycle, winds, precipitation, and culture. Yes, we need to relocalize, but we need deep-deep ecology with deep-deep cultural survival.
Yes, peasant culture and collective enterprises, and looking at workers own their work and the industries, and yes, ending perpetual wars, any walls against people’s freedom of moment, well, call this neo-communism, or Marx-taken-to-the-next level, or Utopian?
But instead we argue whether cruise lines should come back, the value of a hair salon, and what about air traffic?
So many of the long-in-the-tooth conservative democrats I mingle with here on the coast have shit to say about the chronically homeless, the chronically one-paycheck from hell, the very people who hammer their roofs, flip their halibut steaks, clean granny’s bedpans, and the like.
They are glad the air is cleaner (that’s a big fat joke) and that air travel is curtailed. It is lockdown, and the rich still travel, and these conservative democrats who vote “green” are glad all that wasteful Disneyland travel is gone . . . while they still shuttle themselves to grand-kids across the land, go to their language immersion schools in Cuernavaca or Tibet.
Bring back the spotted owl, but screw the people. The dichotomies, the trolls on both ends, the split society, the false balancing of issues, the I-know-I-am-right pukes on all sides of the manure pile, well, they are Making America Great Again (that was Reagan’s line 40 years before another mentally-challenged foe is in the Oval office).
You see this was all predicted – shit, how many books and articles and even movies have been produced discussing a virus or other bacterial outbreak? And yet, this was not seen coming?
The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason. ― Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era
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Researcher Alison Hawver McDowell: “A new global economic apparatus is being laid down that is profoundly anti-human. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will dispossess people from their means of survival and replace “work” with robots and AI. Through UBI and pay for success data surveillance the masses become batteries for predatory financial deals and the data extracted from them will be used to advance the Singularity.” Source.
*–*
The FOIA document, obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), was produced by a little-known U.S. government organization called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). It was created by the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and its official purpose is “to consider the methods and means necessary to advance the development of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States.”
The NSCAI is a key part of the government’s response to what is often referred to as the coming “fourth industrial revolution,” which has been described as “a revolution characterized by discontinuous technological development in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, fifth-generation telecommunications networking (5G), nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and quantum computing.” Source
How do we get Americans off their high horses? Those Earth Day people I have associated with who will continue to Zoom Doom their groups, now that this is the new normal – “Oh, so easy, just open up that laptop, sit back, sip chamomile and listen to those cool scientists and naturalists without having to strap in a car and driving someplace.”
This is a time of idiotic calls for a universal basic income while not making calls to create good work, that is, grow legions of people in paid-volunteer work, community-based work; real community-based schooling; clinics in each neighborhood; gardens and food distribution in all neighborhoods. Cancelling the billionaire class. Worthy public transportation that reaches the outskirts and is 24/7. Universal Basic Bum’s Income My Ass.
That UBI (not UB40) is based on the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Disruptive Economies and Viral Economic and Digital models.
You know, self-driving cars, buses and trucks? Who said this was okay? And those jobs? Oh, yeah, we shall be locked up in cubicle mini-apartments and forced to receive our digital crypto currency monthly to pay for capitalism on steroids.
Foolish. And yet, the Andrew Yang’s and others call for this stupidity?
How about social security increased, total publicly funded health care, state banks, cooperative utilities, true safety nets and creative organizations and self-organizing communities and agricultural based intentional communities and real work.
There is a shit-ton of work to be done. Micro-homes built, foster homes visited, retirement communities to be built and energized.
But the masters of the universe and those other oddities want what? Get your pay, with your vaccination chip approved. All data and all history captured in the span of a human hair.
Some of us do not want the Trump World, the Biden World, the Gates World, the Naomi Klein World, the Goldman Sachs World, the World Bank World. Some of us imagine narratives and viewpoints that do not fit some consistent, packaged, inside-the-dreadful-lines of left-right (not really left, but right-super right) politic correctness.
It doesn’t take a million PhD’s in plethora of fields to define what works, what might work, what isn’t working, and how it works. This is common sense, and yet, we have prognosticators, idiots with Microphones and Makeup yammering pure nothingness.
I have had deeper conversations with old men halfway in their dementia while withdrawing from a weekend of meth than with a majority of people I also associate with. Or used to associate with.
Because the new normal allows for more and more sculpted venues, more Skype-up-your-ass and Zoom Doom sessions. “You can join BUT if we notice any derogatory language and counter spin, we shall pull the proverbial plug.”
The “I can’t breathe” yet again is the comment for a generation, for generations. Emblematic of the entire bullshit world of Cop Capitalism, the Police State Mentality of Bezos, Gates, F/Zuckerberg and any of the other Google and Digital Demigods.
How many times are we going to be subjected to the Blue Plague and the Green Plague – The Police State and the Finance State?
And yet, this is it for USA? Not an outcry and complete shut down of the country and the Fox News drumbeat with yet another hit-man cop running free. This cop, one of the Biden VP pick’s boys:
As Chief Prosecutor, Klobuchar Declined to Bring Charges Against Cop that Killed George Floyd; While serving as Minnesota’s chief prosecutor between 1999 and 2007, Klobuchar declined to bring charges against more than two dozen officers who had killed citizens while on duty – including against the cop that killed George Floyd, Alan Macleod, May 27, 2019
So how do we have conversations now when the distance unlearning is taking hold not only for overpriced higher education (what idiocy is this when kids get to leave home, leave hometowns, end up on a bricks and mortar campus and end up spending 75 percent of their time in their dorms or apartments with on-line miseducation?) but for public schools.
Troll after troll want the end of childhood, they want the four horsemen of the apocalypse to come riding into their AR-1 and Glock-infested neighborhoods. They think and believe their Jesus was a Duck Dynasty aficionado. These cretins are cretins, easily flushed out in MAGA America.
It’s the greenie weenies, the ameliorating, the corrective ones – the straight democratic ticket lovers, the Hillary supporters, the ones blaming Nader, Stein and others for the victories of what they deem the more evil of the lesser evils.
Back to the future means we have Noam Chomsky again railing and lecturing us to believe his wonderful genius and vote with noses held by backing Biden over Trump. Whew, the new Hitler, uh? Is that so, Trump? Hmm, more bumbling misuse of the language and symbol.
Funny world, man, funny world. The entire mess is co-opted by the death star that is capitalism one all 12 cylinders or sputtering away in the throes of death.
Evil begotten country, evil penetrating imperialism, evil perversions of humanity, the cancer that is consumerism, the virus that is waste/waste/waste. Disease treatment so throw out preventative cures.
Until we are in Oregon, with busy signal for weeks at the unemployment office. Boosted prices at the grocery store. Entitled versus poor, and yet the poor seem entitled to believe in Yankee Doodle Dandy and their Stars and Bars.
A Truth Commission
Since the early 1990s the people of South Africa, Argentina, Guatemala, Chile and El Salvador have held official Truth Commissions to look squarely in the eyes of the crimes committed by their governments. There will never be any such official body to investigate and document the wide body of Washington’s crimes, although several unofficial citizens’ commissions have done so over the years for specific interventions, such as in Vietnam, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq; their findings were of course totally ignored by the establishment media (whose ideology is a belief that it doesn’t have any ideology).
In the absence of an official Truth Commission in the United States, this book is offered up as testimony.
Washington, DC/ May 2005/ Rogue State, William Blum
And so we do this on our people, no? Care homes, workers in confined working operations, the elderly, the physically compromised. Ya think Bill and Melinda and his cronies aren’t thinking about eugenics?
Right.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people in care homes have been dying in droves.
Why is this happening? Is it simply because older adults are very vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 and therefore it’s not unexpected that many would succumb?
Or do care homes deserve the lion’s share of the blame, such as by paying so poorly that many workers have to split their time between several facilities, spreading the virus in the process?
Alternatively, could medical experts and government bureaucrats, with the full knowledge of at least the top tier of government officials, have created conditions shortly after the pandemic struck that contribute to the high death tolls while engendering virtually no public backlash against themselves?
This article shows that the third hypothesis is highly plausible. The people who created the conditions may be unaware of, or oblivious to, their implications. But it’s also possible that at least some of them know exactly what they’re doing.
After all – seeing it from an amoral government’s point of view – the growing numbers of elderly are a big burden on today’s fiscally strained governments, because in aggregate they’re paying much less into the tax base than younger people while causing the costs of healthcare and retirement programs to skyrocket.
Living modestly in the forestland of Lincoln County, David Peltier believes in breaking the cycle of poverty and ending isolation
by Paul Haeder / May 21st, 2020
David Peltier lives on his property on forestland in Lincoln County, Ore. (Photo by Paul Haeder)
Out of the blue, an email:
Paul, I’ve been reading your stuff on the homeless situation, and I wanted to get a hold of you. Here’s my phone number. I have been involved with the homeless community for many years in Lincoln County. I’d like to talk.
David Peltier, 65, hails from Milwaukee, Wis. Anyone living and traveling from Yachats to Depoe Bay might recognize him peddling his bike along Highway 101.
In a nutshell: He’s still in command of his faculties, he can marvelously recall a collection of experiences and stories on a path less well worn, and he is the steward of 30 acres just north of Waldport.
Originally published in Street Roots: A periodic column profiling unconventional Oregonians who push the boundaries of social order.
He’s been on the Oregon Coast for almost two decades, living in a 1984 Pace Arrow, 23-feet of “luxury” with no electricity or running water.
Last year, the Lincoln County sheriff ordered him to evict five individuals barely making it from his property.
A couple, with the wife going through cancer treatments, started off in a tent on his land but then moved up to a motor home. Other narratives like the couple’s are rooted to Peltier’s land.
However, the code enforcers and Lincoln County Planning Department stepped in.
Peltier, like hundreds of others in Lincoln County, has seen our county fall into one crisis after another crisis before the coronavirus lockdown. The collateral damage includes low-paid service workers, single parents, aging people unable to afford rent and few who could afford buying a home somewhere not as expensive as those in our neck of the woods.
Sheltering hearts know it takes a village (or a county)
Homeless, underemployed, disabled, medically fragile, psychologically vulnerable and veterans all pay the price of an economic system that not only leaves them behind, but puts impediments in their survival, Peltier said.
He called it punitive functionality. Then there are those who cook our food, change the bedding in hotels, devein shrimp and hammer nails who are one paycheck away from living in their vehicles.
Emergency shelters are critical components of an effective crisis response system that moves them to transitional housing and in many cases away from home precarity. Peltier has been advocating for a permanent transitional living system to support his brethren for more than four decades.
We talk about what social scientists call “rough sleepers” who occupy public space and how so many dictates of social control over their lives — and their destinies — are Orwellian.
“Dancing to the beat of a different drummer” is a lightweight way of defining Peltier’s life. He’s traveled across the U.S., Ireland and parts of Europe. We swapped perspectives on the relationship between distinct forms of social control including “regulation” and “criminalization” of street populations, as well as those who just fall into homelessness because of some crisis, trauma or significant emotional event.
Hearts, minds and hearths
I worked in Portland with many agencies to assist people living on the street. The high number of prohibitions on homeless folks using public spaces to lie down, to perform personal hygiene like washing and showering, and store personal belongings is chilling. The built environment in many cities is designed to be less conductive to these “undesirable” (yet human) activities.
Add to that the surveillance and policing of targeted areas, and we have a situation where people who need all these safety nets get nothing but harassment, fines and jail.
I met Peltier at his forestland during this insane time of lockdown that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has brought to Oregon. He gave me a tour of his 25,000 trees, and he pointed to a few stands of cedar. Peltier knows this property like the back of his hand. He’s been on it for 18 years.
Labeling Peltier with terms like “quite a character” and “eccentric” wouldn’t be an insult.
My dedication to this column is to find people who set down roots (or spread out roots); have unusual narratives (pasts); and who have incredible journeys (continuous) through this cacophony we call life on spaceship Earth.
Judging a book by its cover might propel the average person observing Peltier entering Ray’s grocery store in Waldport for a few items to label him “homeless” and “oddball.”
“I’m a people person, and I like to see people happy,” he said.
David Peltier was been ordered to evacuate the people he allowed to live on his land in Lincoln County.Photo by Paul Haeder
We were looking at three abandoned camper trailers on his land. It’s zoned for forest conservation, but Peltier would like to see that designation fall away to allow him to circle a few trailers and build some microhomes to give homeless people a chance at a roof over their heads, a dry bed and some respite from street life.
Collector
In some ways, Peltier and I are alike; we’ve run into many interesting, and in some cases “famous,” people in our lives. Time and again, during my interview, David explained intersections with interesting, mindful and intellectual minds.
He took me on his travels to Harvard University, where he audited a class from Professor Gene Sharp — who was inspired by Gandhi and founded the Albert Einstein Institution to advance the study and use of strategic nonviolent action as an alternative to violent conflict.
Sharp’s first book, “Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power: Three Case Histories,” inspired Peltier to dig deeper into the land movement in India.
I touched a few photos of the young Peltier, in places like Greenwich Village, on his motorcycle, and he showed me a few old posters confirming his travels and travails. A book by Sharp was signed: “To David, a pacifist and humanist warrior in arms.”
Four decades later, Peltier is right on point: “I believe in cooperative communities. Intentional communities with tiny houses and intergenerational connectivity. Young people want to farm.”
We both articulated this new-old paradigm of getting off the destructive path of consumerism and casino capitalism. He sees 3,000-acre communities that are biodynamic, with learning and healing centers tied to community-based ethos, one that includes all the biotic and geological community.
One of three abandoned RVs scattered across 30 acres of property in Lincoln County owned by David Peltier.Photo by Paul Haeder
One way to solve the precarious housing and food security issues raging like wildfire across the land would be thousands of these agrarian communities where serious, deep Native American and global Indigenous learning could be coupled with many forms of the digital realm.
He ventured into another influence — Vinayak Narahari “Vinoba” Bhave — who was a spiritual leader, considered the first nonviolent resister to the Britishers in his country. He was a reformer of Independent India who initiated, Peltier explicates, what became the Bhoodan movement.
Peltier was jazzed about the idea of this Indian persuading wealthy landowners to willingly loan small shares of their land to people. He traveled across India convincing landowners and landholders to give small parcels to the downtrodden. Over a span of 20 years, more than 4 million acres of land was shared across the country through this movement.
Too many rich, too many heartless rich
“I’ve been homeless. More and more, poverty is becoming prevalent in the country. The wealthy need to step up to the plate and help. People need land and a way to live closer to food, nature,” Peltier said.
Breaking the cycle of poverty and ending isolation are components of Peltier’s ethos. He also understands that simple things like warm healthy food and a clean bed can do wonders to turn people around. “It’s not rocket science.”
We both agree that turning this country around is the only way forward, to not only protect the growing number of vulnerable people, but to strengthen the nation.
“There are almost a thousand billionaires in the U.S.,” Peltier said. (The U.S. remains the country with the most billionaires, with 614, followed by greater China, including Hong Kong and Macao, with 456, according to Forbes’ 2020 count.)
“We are at a critical point, not only in Lincoln County, but in the country. Poverty and homelessness are symptoms of sick political and economic systems,” he said.
Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain.
– Russell Means
Peltier talked about a young woman and her 3-year-old who lived in a small trailer on his property. “She lost housing in Seal Rock. She had suffered a stroke and sepsis. A lot of single parents like her are in similar situations.”
He illustrated how the homeless are hidden people:
“If you were driving up to Newport and saw a little girl on the side of the road crying, most anyone would stop and offer assistance. However, those same people don’t stop, don’t see those homeless people.”
One of three abandoned RVs on David Peltier’s land in Lincoln County, Ore.Photo by Paul Haeder
I checked out a letter Peltier wrote to the editor, published Dec. 5, 2019, in the biweekly newspaper, Newport News Times. He wears his heart on his sleeve:
Our community enjoys great wealth, and yet many people struggle and suffer. Our community must have a warming shelter so that we can save lives. We have many people who have medical needs, housing needs and employment needs, and we still have no warming shelter in south Lincoln County.
Our cold weather is here. January is our tough month. I am asking for a donated house so that we can assist a family, or a veteran, or a disabled person or even an elder.
I will work for donations and I will staff this shelter. A donated house can allow us to actually help people. We can obtain a tax-deduction for the donor. We finally have a nonprofit that is willing to advance our cause.
I attended recently the Lincoln City Planning Commission meeting in city hall. This is for a conditional use permit for the Lincoln City Warming Shelter/Chance Inc., which is run by some very dedicated people — Sharon Padilla and Amanda Cherryholmes.
Unfortunately, the warming shelter was closed with 18 days still left on the agreement during the cold wet weather. Additionally, Lincoln County has no plans for a shelter opening up in the fall of 2020.
I am part of the Working Group on Homelessness Taskforce working with more than three dozen stakeholders on the very real issue of lack of housing, lack of leadership for allowances for car camping, and the big elephant in the room: no homeless shelter for the entire county. Many attending these meetings (before the lockdown) expressed both exasperation and passion about our county’s homeless.
Peltier ventured back into his life during the interview: He was a kid growing up in Milwaukee. His father was a lawyer for Miller Brewing Co., and he called his mother “an Irish beauty who was bipolar.”
He told me he rode the rails short distances starting at age 7. He’s hitchhiked to California. He was part of the June 12, 1982, Mobilization for Survival — a 1 million-plus gathering in New York City against nuclear proliferation.
Here’s 27-year-old Peltier hanging with Pete Seeger; Peter, Paul and Mary; Jackson Browne; James Taylor. He stayed at the Maryhouse (part of the Catholic Worker Movement to support the homeless). He talks of hearing Dorothy Day speak. He’s met Dolores Huerta who worked with the United Farm Movement and Cesar Chavez.
On David’s pretty threadbare Facebook page, he lists on his “about me” the following:
I’m a frumpy middle aged over educated curmudgeon … lol
University of Wisconsin at Sundara Ecology
Former Grunt at CONTRUCTION
Studied Ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison
Studied Biology and Cooperative Development at University of Wisconsin
Studied Peaceful social change methods at Harvard University
Went to Whitefish Bay High School
Lives in Waldport, Oregon
From Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin
Those formative years logged at the University of Wisconsin, a hotbed of intellectualism and political activism, including protests against the Vietnam War, cemented in him his liberal politics.
He told me he could recall several campus demonstrations headed up by Karleton Armstrong, who, with three others, blew up the ROTC armory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Aug. 24, 1970. It was a protest against the university’s research connections with the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. The four perpetrators went underground, and three eventually resurfaced, tried and convicted for the death of a university physics researcher and injuries to three others.
Open hand — antidote against hard-fisted policies
For Peltier, his life is embedded in nonviolent protest and helping vulnerable people through outreach and direct support. He’s embedded in nonviolent social change, and he considers himself a catalyst of sorts in getting nonprofits going. He helped with the funding drives for Arcata House (established in 1991) in Humboldt County, Calif. Its mission is tied to the foundation of housing as a human right.
This dovetails with Peltier’s life philosophy, and he knows he is in a place of precarity himself. He has no political power in the community and holds no great wealth. He owns no vehicle and depends on the Waldport Library to access the internet.
Who he is and how he lives are counterintuitive to almost everything this country espouses as successful and deems legitimate under capitalism.
“We humans can be magical. We can do great things,” he said. “I’m out in the world all the time. I think like the aboriginal people of Australia who say they are never lost in their walkabouts.”
“The Irishman,” as Peltier calls himself, gravitates toward so many world cultures, but still he returns to Native American wisdom and history. He met Russell Means in South Dakota, one of the big actors in the American Indian Movement. He also met Phillip Deer, a Muscogee Creek, who was the spiritual leader for the movement.
During my life, I have had the opportunity to meet great people and bring them to my community college classrooms. Winona LaDuke was just one of many I befriended.
Having done substitute teaching in K-12 districts in three states, I know people like Peltier and others are needed agents of change and catalysts of learning in the public school system.
Unfortunately, our teach-to-the-test and Google Chromebook-dominated public schools would never have the intestinal or intellectual fortitude to have speakers like Peltier come to campus.
Even on a public community college campus in Spokane, where I taught in 2008, when LaDuke opened a talk with her tribe’s benediction — “Aaniin Ninda-waymuganitoog” (hello my relatives) — her presence ruffled some feathers.
Shortly after LaDuke spoke, stating, “In the end, there is no absence of irony: The integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures,” two white faculty members stood up, mumbled, “We don’t need to hear more white male bashing,” and bolted out of the room.
No electricity, running water, but memories galore
Peltier takes all this sort of chaos and patriarchal meanness in stride and realizes he has more hope than most fighting for the homeless. He has worked for 54 years of his life, much of that doing construction and cement work. He realizes that few people would see him as successful under the constraints of how Americans define accomplishments.
That’s OK with him.
Look, I know if you stick me in any town in the U.S. without a dime and nothing but the clothes on my back, in a week’s time, I will have money and housing.
Those are lessons all K-12 students should learn and hear. But no public school principal or superintendent would allow such a character on their campus. The irony is not lost on Peltier.
Instead of a punitive approach, we have to be proactive. It’s a human right to have housing. What better lesson to engage young people in that belief.
Food, shelter and caring for your neighbor, imagine that in the school system, beginning in kindergarten all the way through to graduation.
I’m already a rich man: I have land. I have a great family. I have a great education. I am a white male of privilege. I know we have to turn around our country.
The irony of this quote from the Dustin Hoffman movie, The Graduate, is not wasted on Duane Snider:
“One word: plastics.”
That was Benjamin Braddock, just graduated from college, sitting in a swimming pool. Giving him advice on gaining the American dream, the neighbor’s statement says it all. Today? Hedge funds? Flipping houses? Coronavirus repossessions?
For Duane, that one word: artwork.
We’re sitting on the back porch of his brand-new Adair home on a third of an acre on the high land of Waldport. He and his wife Linda are proverbially happy, fat and sassy in this new iteration of their lives.
He went to Benson high school, when it was an all-male segregated school. It was during the Viet Nam, at the height of the draft.
Just a few weeks earlier, Duane and I ran into each other on the beach near the Alsea River emptying out into the Pacific. Loons and eaglets started the conversation, and quickly Duane recognized me by my by-line for this newspaper. He had purchased a piece of art from one of the people I have featured in Deep Dive – Anja Albosta, artist and environmental refugee from Yosemite see Dec. 16, 2019, “Art in a changing climate”).
Duane’s 68, and his wife — originally from Sonora, CA — is 67. Duane’s work life is quintessential drudgery millions of Americans called working stiffs have face. In his case, 39 years working at one place, grinding optics for an optical service in Portland. It was for Duane 20 years in a hostile work environment where his boss bullied him. There was no real upside to the job — a repetitive job tracing lenses and frames and low pay.
He conveys to me that for more than a decade was highly depressed, even suicidal.
I could see the Ross Island bridge. Daily, I would look out the window and fantasize jumping off it. Even planning out in my mind how I’d have to aim my fall just right as to hit the bike path just to be sure”
Alcohol and drug abuse were a big part of his life, but to his credit Duane’s been clean in sober going on three decades. His addiction to substances was eclipsed by another addiction – art collecting. He’s been a fixture in Portland’s art scene for decades — a gallery gadfly, and someone who ended up with smart and strategic ways of appreciating art and purchasing it.
He’s a veritable encyclopedia of Who’s Who of the Oregon artworld.
It’s not so unusual Duane would have gained this proclivity for art appreciation and deep regard for art’s role in society as something bigger than commerce, industry and day-to-day drudgery of commercialism.
When he was a youngster, he studied guitar. He was good enough to end up switching over to classical guitar in the style of Andres Segovia. He’s taken a master class from the best – Christopher Parkening. That was 1975.
I knew I was going to have to take a vow of poverty if I was going to try and pursue being a musician.
Duane’s father was a union baker and not very involved in the boy’s life. For the just-turned-18-year-old Duane, his cohorts were going to be drafted but he was talked into enlisting. “A friend said the Navy, since it wasn’t the Army. Anything but the Army. But that was nuclear submarine duty and I was claustrophobic. There was no way I was going on a submarine.” Instead, he ended up in the Air Force. He even tried the conscientious objector route.
Military life was short-lived when he was drummed out as a 4-f. They found traces of codeine in his drug test. “Ironically, I had done all sorts of party drugs.” It wasn’t the LSD he dropped they discovered, but the codeine the psychedelic from which it was titrated.
Music Out, Optics In
“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.”
― Baruch Spinoza
He was homeless for a few months. Coming back from Lackland AFB, Duane ended up working with the crippled children’s division of OHSU. He took a second master guitar class at Berkeley. “I knew poverty was going to be a regular part of my life. I wasn’t that good. I took classes with trust fund babies. Money wasn’t an issue for them.”
Here’s where things really get prescient – “I had a poster of Picasso’s Old Guitarist on my apartment wall in Portland. I was studying with extraordinary musicians. I wasn’t about to spend 10 or 15 years in poverty.”
The Old Guitarist was painted in 1903, just after the suicide death of Picasso’s close friend, Casagemas. Picasso was deeply sympathetic to the plight of the disenfranchised and downtrodden. He painted many canvases depicting the poor, sick, and outcasts of society. In fact, Picasso was penniless during 1902.
It’s an amazing painting in the style of El Greco. That moment for Duane Snider turned into a life passion – sacrificing part of his soul in that daily grind in order to enter another world: one that was rarefied, filled with the passions and creativity of artists just like Pablo Picasso. Except his art ersatz it was Portland based.
When he returned from Berkeley, he ended up in a friend’s parents’ house. He applied to Portland Community College, talked to a counselor, told her he wanted to find a steady job, one that was reliable. “I wanted something recession and depression proof. Optician fit the bill.” He ended up taking psychology and philosophy classes awaiting the term to start for his major.
He grabbed a job at a lab his second term. He parlayed that into a full-time gig at Columbian Bifocal. The first 20 years it was a family run place, and the last 19 years it ended up as one of 17 labs for Hoya, a Japanese investment group.
Good benefits, steady work, and a bully boss. “We hated each other. It’s amazing I survived.”
He hands me a DVD of an Oregon Public Broadcasting special featuring Portland art collectors. Duane is profiled. He laughs, recalling how he had read about the great philosopher Spinoza’s life as a lens grinder. What was good for the father of rationalist and deductive reasoning had to be fine for Duane Snider’s life.
Not so ironically, the dust from lens grinding led to Spinoza’s early death from tuberculosis.
The amazing number of artists Duane has met propelled him to write essays on art for a local art rag – NW Drizzle. Here’s what he penned in 2005, as he emphasizes he was “just coming out of a four-year bout of suicidal depression.”
“When I gave up the guitar, I couldn’t give up my need for a place to put my passion. It seems natural that my passion migrated toward the visual arts. Giving up playing music meant letting go of a sizable part of what I thought was my identity. My search for a new sense of self played a major role in pushing me toward the idea of collecting.
That’s when I started learning that the real value of art is not determined by the price on the sticker, but by the strength of the connection between the viewer and the object of interest.”
Deeper Dive in the Mind of a Collector
Early-20th-century philosopher Irwin Edman gives a remarkably simple bit of insight into what art offers us in everyday life:
“Painters speak of dead spots in a painting: areas where the color is wan or uninteresting, or the forms irrelevant and cold. Life is full of dead spots. Art gives it life. A comprehensive art would render the whole of life alive.”
Duane Snider is the embodiment of turning life into his own art project:
“Instead of using pigments and a canvas to make an artwork, I told myself that I would turn my life into a conceptual art piece to create a lifestyle that’s sustainable and comfortable,” tells me twice: once on the beach on our first meeting in Waldport and then up at his new 1,900 square foot single level home.
The beauty of my own life-force is I get to get under people’s layers, follow the act of serendipity, and then sculpt with words conceptualized, philosophized narrative. Story.
In the middle of a beach with harbor seals sunning along their haul out on Bay Shore, two very different guys run into each other and start a deep conversation. I am a radical social worker and revolutionary writer (some couldn’t tell that from my regular gigs as a newspaper and magazine) and educator. Marxism is more than just a conceptual point in economic history for me.
Here is Duane Snider, saying he too is a Marxist, but emphasizing he was dealt a hand of capitalism’s cards, so he successfully learned to play the game within those constraints. He tells me he feels guilty for getting he and his wife Linda down here on the coast with zero debts and a custom home that is paid off.
I reassure him that he is kosher with me, and no one should begrudge he or his wife this little slice of paradise.
The dream in Waldport was germinated 36 years ago. They purchased a home in Portland (Richmond District) for $48,000. That was 1984. Thirty-two years later they pulled up stakes in Portland with a $517,000 sale price. No permanent lines of credit needed. He even got their nest egg out of the market and put into cash two years ago. “I saw this coming.”
He didn’t predict the SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak, but he did see a faltering Stock Market.
“He leads me beside still waters, he restores my soul.”
His tutelage in art began at a most unlikely place – Menucha which was an estate created by the Meiers of the Portland department store fame. Near Corbet in the Columbia Gorge, Menucha (Hebrew for rebuilding, restoring and renewing) hosted camps for youth.
According to the website: “In 1950, First Presbyterian Church of Portland purchased the property from the Meier family, who were pleased to see it dedicated as an ecumenical center, a gift in perpetuity to communities of people from around the world.”
Duane began collecting art before he ended up buying the Portland house. The art bug drilled into his consciousness when in 1967 he went to a high school arts camp at Menucha. His parents always took off for Reno and Vegas during summer vacations, and they opted to put the young Duane in a summer camp.
That was serendipitous. He told me that he had never been to an art gallery until after high school. He met Jackie West who ran Graystone Gallery in the Hawthorne District. “I went inside and I was looking around the half gallery/half store. It was an old house. Actually, it became part of the Oregon Potters Association. My eyes landed on this water color. It was as if time stopped.”
He ended up purchasing his first piece, a hyper-realistic water color of an iris by Kirk Lybecker.
Duane emails me a couple of his essays in NW Drizzle – “Embarking on a journey of discovery: The life-affirming qualities of art” & “Art’s true value: Aesthetics vs. commerce.” In his essays he reiterates how art came to save him and how collecting became a true emotional and spiritual line to the artist, to the art. Here is one passage:
“The gallery from which I bought my first artwork made the sale because the gallery owner made an effort to make the pricing and sales process as transparent as possible. She gave me a short but thorough explanation on how galleries set prices. She explained that great art comes in all price ranges, as does mediocre art. That’s when I started learning that the real value of art is not determined by the price on the sticker, but by the strength of the connection between the viewer and the object of interest.”
He launches into several iterations of how art — the actual object — is more than what it is in your hand or on the wall; that it is something that “holds great value for us as individuals and for all cultures of the world.”
Red is the Color of Egalitarianism
Duane and I talk about the friction and dichotomy between the highfalutin rich “patron of the arts” and the middle-class view of art – we need the rich folks to support the arts, but we also need to invest in regular people getting original artwork in their homes. “Conceptually, I am a Marxist working in a capitalist system.”
That means he wishes our society from top to bottom was more egalitarian.
Duane Snider has no angst when it comes to what a thinker like Michael Parenti might say about capitalism: “It’s the powerful who write the laws of the world– and the powerful who ignore these laws when expediency dictates.”
We met the first time during a voluntary social distancing because of the cornonavirus, and then shortly afterward when the state of Oregon pushed more draconian measures to shut down business, interactions, meetings, and public gatherings.
Then we shift to all the artists he knows, has known and will know. He has over 200 works of art in his home, most of them on display. I had to look through some of the windows from the outside to view many fine works on the couple’s walls.
His goal is to have the collection donated to a non-profit like Art in Oregon, whose motto is “building bridges between artists and communities.” The engine there is to get businesses to purchase and show art, and for there to be that bridge between the artist and the community.
Duane is less an enigma than he is kind of Every-man. He puts on several hats – he knows most of the gallery owners in Portland, is friends with the director of the Portland Art Museum, spent time with Dennis Hopper and Danny Glover, and finds solace watching a warbler feed from his new backyard.
“I connect with anyone who knows what arts is. We need to get young people into discovering our unique art. Unfortunately, unique objects are under threat in the digital age.”
He repeats how he played the hand that was dealt him. He came from a working-class family. He himself was poor and homeless for a time. He learned the value of art through “figuring out the game you have to play to survive, to be comfortable.”
No contradictions there, and Duane Snider would smile at one of Karl Marx’s doozies: “The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.”
Q & A in a Nutshell
Paul: Why have the world’s super powers and despotic regimes always deployed the bombing of museums, cultural landmarks, and looting the arts and important symbols of a country’s artistic and historical (archaeological) output?
Duane: The easiest way to destroy a society or a culture is to destroy its art treasures. When you take that away, you take away their history and sense of identity. Also, historically, art has huge inherent value because of its ability to offer meaning to people beyond those of the culture that produced it. Also, unique and rare art objects that are considered beautiful and meaningful are valuable because they are rare or unique.
Paul: Riff with this — “So here we are in the 21st century. The forward march of labour ended some time ago. How do today’s artists portray poverty? Interesting question – for perhaps wealth has never been more raw and obvious in the art world. This is the age of the diamond skull. Compared with the compassion of a Caravaggio or Van Gogh, contemporary art really does seem to take the rich collector’s view on life. Where’s our Luke Fildes? For images of economic injustice in today’s art you probably have to look outside the gallery world.”
Duane: In general, most artist don’t even address the issue in today’s market. Social commentary is more aligned with journalism and documentary efforts. Much of the art market doesn’t want art that shines a light on social inequities of the darker side of our culture. There are huge exceptions of course in museum installations and high-end art by big named artists, and there is a lot of art that is beautiful, but not pretty that skirts around the big issues but doesn’t show up in fine art galleries. Photography is the most common place to find imagery of social injustice because of the connection to journalism. The sad fact is that most art is a commodity and with that comes the necessity for broad acceptance of work for it to be marketable. How many Diego Rivera’s do you see out there these days?
Paul:. If you could do your youth and high school years over again, would you? Yes, why and how? No, why?
Duane: When I was in my forties and fifties, I wished I could have changed a few things, but now, not so much. I suffered some in getting here, but it turned out well enough that there is little I am not grateful for, on a personal level. I am comfortable and largely free of any feelings of guilt. What should I change? I don’t know.
Paul: Tell the average consumer and retail-loving American why art is valuable to them and to our society especially now in 2020?
Duane: Art is one of the last places we have where we can freely explore our identities and the meaning of the lives we inhabit, where we can express ourselves in simply possessing and object or identifying with a performance experience. Art offers insight into who we are, how we are unique, and what we believe in. Art gives us context for understanding the content of our lives. How do you put a dollar value on that? For way too many Americans, money is what they look to for those answers. What a shallow existence that is.
End Notes — I talk with Duane a lot, and I have met him a few times on the beaches near Waldport. He and I have this sort of “out on our own Covid-19” relationship. We talk long and hard about the failure of capitalism. The failure of Western nations to move aside and not only give back what they’ve stolen but for complete reparations.
The quandary is I work three gigs. I lost $39K in a measly retirement account because of the perverted whims of the masters of finance on Wall Street. That chunk is a huge push back on my life.
My spouse is out of work because of despicable management in her job that laughed at the idea of washing hands and who constantly berated my spouse, who is a professional with 20 years in her field.
We have tried for more than 8 weeks to get her unemployment — she’s worked like since she was 14 years old, paying into this muck. The state of Oregon is a joke. Those Zoom motherfucking meet-ups by politicians at the state level and locally are what I can only characterize as infantile, disconnected to real struggle, and bizarre.
Duane Snider won’t disagree, and he repeats how he feels guilty for setting himself up with a paid-for-home and some money in the bank and his social security, along with his wife’s.
I assure him that his sacrifice in life — working 39 years hating the job, hating himself for some of that time, and his deep depression larger issues with substance abuse, well, man, he respects artists, and he wants art to be shared by the masses.
He is quick to deride the “business of the art world,” where the artists are literally screwed and art is a trading commodity. He loves each piece he has, and we go over each one. He knows the artist for each piece and for those he purchased at openings, he spent time talking with each artist.
Pieces he bought in group shows, he went ahead an hunted down the artist. He touches the images with his vision, his heart and his intellect.
Capitalism destroys people, and sometimes eat eats at the soul and sets a course of disengagement, resentment and a dog-eat-dog retribution. It creates people who say, “I have mine, and screw everybody else.” It is a violent system — just the act of sending in Sheriff deputies to homes, parading the evicted and foreclosed upon citizens to the squad car, well, what sort of violence does that breed? What sort of lived and relived trauma will that have not only on the parents but the children?
That mentality is seeped in all of them at the proverbial top — Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Trump, Obama, the entire lot of them.
Imagine how many presidents have failed to pardon Leonard Peltier? Thinks of the structural violence of bailing out banks and Wall Street while taking SNAP away from families. Imagine a society where people have no health care, and the shit coverage they have is so violently mean and expensive, they opt not to go to the for-profit hell that is modern US medicine.
Duane is all there, in the fight in heart and mind. I see his artwork addiction has both magnificent and something deep inside, where he is finding some landing pad for his emotions, and all those years where he was about to jump off the Ross Island bridge.
I wonder if he’ll ever get that image from Portland — maybe I’ll head out from the coast to my old stomping grounds and shoot it and mess around in Photoshop and give it to him before more evolution unfolds in each other’s lives.
That’s communism — no expectations for the things given, and no bullshit competition to trade up whether it is material things or ideas and discourse.
Duane’s learned the lexicon of Marxism and has played his cards in a mean as cuss Capitalist system. I repeat that good commie’s love their wine, their music, food and art. Not as a bourgeoisie thing, but as a tribute to the enduring nature of struggle and persistence, even in the most horrific gulags and dungeons.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
It doesn’t take a lockdown to pull from some of us humanists the universality of how deep the emotional, cultural, societal, economic and spiritual divide is between the have’s and have’s not.
As we move from “top” to “bottom” in the daily stories of how these forced social distancing measures, draconian business closures, far-reaching travel bans and the like are affecting lives, we need to have more humanistic ways of parsing out the realities of the homeless, or in the case of people from Guatemala, the homelandless.
There are many reasons Guatemalans have come to this county, crossing that borderline without the proper Gestapo paperwork and billets for the own lives.
The stem of the immigration tide to an area usually starts with one family or one group of cohorts ending up in a place like Newport and loving it as a new promise, a new start, maybe a new homeland. For a time, there were seasonal jobs in the fishing, hospitality and salal harvesting arenas.
Most Guatemalans get here with very little. Some have children in schools. Many do not speak Spanish, let alone English.
In many ways, coming from Huehuetenango and other places where violence is prolific, Guatemalans thought they’d be happy with the chance “to make it” in the USA since back in their native land the per capita annual income for lower economic groups is $1,619. Add to this challenge of more than two dozen Mayan languages spoken in that part of Mesoamerica and none spoken here.
A Tales of Two Cities, Many Cultures, Infinite Mentalities
For many, watching daily TV-YouTube-Facebook antics of Trump and Company, Hollywood perversions, other rich and famous, and even run of the mill policy makers “deal” with their seclusion and isolation makes the blood boil. Lovely gardens, three triple-wide fridge/freezer combos full of Whole Foods delectables; manicured lawns for croquet surrounding terra cotta pools; superfood smoothies laced with plethora of vitamins and herbs; soaking in Clorox-laced bathtubs and tips on how to dose one’s body with ultraviolet showers.
As we go further and further down the food chain and feeding trough, one more week of lock-down can parlay into more than ennui and cabin fever: for millions, one more week is less food, more anxiety, fear of the unknown, downright depression and suicidal tendencies.
Being homeless in a Time of Covid highlights how unhealthy, psychologically-stressing, and legally-precarious these days are. There is no social distancing when six or seven people share a campfire, a can of beans and smokes.
Now imagine that homelessness is coupled with the state of being homelandness.
“There should not be a question of legal or illegal immigration. People came and immigrated to this country from the time of the Indians. No one’s illegal. They should just be able to come.”
— Linda Ronstadt
Guatemalans might be staying four-families-to-a-beat-up-RV on the Oregon Coast, but not speaking English, appearing like “the other” and having not only no cash reserves but also zero confidence in accessing local (and governmental) food and financial aid add up to be literal hunger.
Social Justice Starts with Who You Associate With!
Ironically, I use singer Linda Ronstadt’s quote “declaring there are no illegal aliens” because after my family moved to the US from stints in the Azores, Germany, France and UK, we ended up in Tucon, Arizona of all places.
I learned how to make tamales and mole from aunts and cousins of Linda’s. She even swept into one of these kitchen forays and planted a kiss on my forehead. Que lindo. Un chico hippie blanco haciendo tamales con mis tías (How cute. A white hippy boy making tamales with my aunties.)
Her brother Peter was Tucson’s Police Chief when I was a reporter there and in southern Arizona. His policies were virtually hands-off on immigrants, with or without papers.
I’ve been on this battle line for social justice in Latin America since age 19, when I was active as a student journalist and activist against US military aid to El Salvador and Guatemala. Then, a few years later, I was working in Southern Arizona as a reporter for a small newspaper group owned by a family. The two dailies — Bisbee Review & Sierra Vista Dispatch — and a few other weeklies were run by two quirky brothers. My stories often times were front page doozies.
It was a crazy time for a young newspaper journalist: In the morning covering the Bisbee rose club, and then five hours later, on the scene covering the drug tunnel found connecting Agua Prieta with Douglas. Funky stories about fence-jumping turquoise pirates getting into abandoned mine shafts at the Copper Queen open pit, to covering one of the deepest exploratory oil wells our near Tombstone. Drug-running, gunrunning, and nuts and bolts county planning and zoning. I interviewed Jesse Jackson when he came out to our neck of the desert to help settle down the Cochise County Sheriff Department going after a group of African Americans they were serving papers on.
Google: The Miracle Valley shootout and a confrontation between members of the Christ Miracle Healing Center and Church (CMHCC) and Cochise County law enforcement and Miracle Valley, Arizona.
Kick-ass stuff for a reporter, having just gotten back from a year in Scotland and Europe, part of a trip to be a writer after spending four years at the University of Arizona, the college daily, and the school’s lab newspaper in Tombstone (The Epitaph).
Just a few months after Europe, I was part of the newsgathering brethren penning these sorts of headlines: “Salvadorans Fight Over Urine . . . 14 Border Crossers Die in Arizona Desert, Organ Pipe National Monument.”
That was July 5, 1980. I was 23 years old.
Crossing Borders, Crossing Philosophical Lines
I was in the thick of things journalistically, working with literally homeless-homelandless people, some individuals spending thousands of dollars to coyotes to get them across that bullshit borderline. Earlier, in my senior year of high school, I had met Chileans living in Tucson who were here through the good graces of activist miniseries. Because of these adults’ leftist college activities, union membership and outspoken positions against rightwing despotism and violence — the Pinochet years – many were imprisoned, and some lost loved ones and comrades to the general’s death squads.
Eventually, I ended up in the Highlands of Guatemala, and along the US-Guatemala border. More than 200,000 Guatemalans were murdered in the dirty wars, a system of genocide fed by the USA and its “foreign” policies and School of the Americas at Fort Benning.
Then, in El Paso two years later, I was a graduate student at the University, I worked with refugees at Ruben Garcia’s Annunciation House and wrote some stories for both the El Paso Times and the now defunct El Paso Herald-Post on the good work at Ruben’s sanctuary.
I taught college classes in prisons and also part of a college program for children of migrant workers.
My tutelage in covering varying levels of homeless and homelandless was fast and furious!
Fast-forward, and I skim through many years in activism — revolutionary social work, education, environmental journalism, more. I worked with adults living with developmental disabilities for United Cerebral Palsy of Southern Washington and Oregon, with Foster Youth teens as case manager for Life Works NW, and with homeless veterans and their families for the Salvation Army.
Oh yeah, I was with Portland’s Big Kahuna of homeless and addiction services — Central City Concern — as an employment counselor.
I was working with people I consider to be brothers/sisters/comrades – “detritus” the rich, the beautiful people, mainstream and even social services folk might call them. Or I’ve heard “the dregs of society,” “bottom of the barrel,” and from those a bit more evolved on the human scale, “those disenfranchised humans.”
In every case over the decades, I worked with people who either had no home (prison, transitional housing, foster homes are not homes) or who were looking for a better home than their dangerous and precarious situations beheld.
Many moons have passed, and, lo and behold, I have been on the Oregon Coast with my spouse since December 2018, after going toe-to-toe with the “Starvation Army” in Beaverton on some really corrupt leadership decisions and dangerous situations in which these poverty pimps put both the clients and staff.
One thing led to another. I was quickly working as a substitute K12 teacher in Lincoln County; I created my own column in the arts and entertainment rag, Oregon Coast Today; wote for the Newport News Times (now it’s pro bono because of dropped ad revenues); and, now, going on one year, manage for both Lincoln and Jefferson counties an anti-poverty program for Family Independence Initiative.
I am working with low income households in a state-supported social capital research project. Families or individuals living in Lincoln and Jefferson counties receive $840 each for a year to do monthly 10-minute “journaling.”
Love and Death in a Time of Panic-Demic!
Things have changed since the SARS-CV-2, as the non-profit I work for as a 1099 contractor is now distributing (and helping other non-profits distribute) $32 million in places like Chicago, Boston, Seattle and Detroit. These are cash assistance lump sums: so-called unconditional cash transfers. Starbucks a la Schulz has thrown in with a $500-per-person Covid fund ($6 million total) for King County; and other cities like Boston, Chicago and Detroit are having FII move millions of bucks for each household to receive a $2,400 cash transfer.
My months working with families, face to face, at various places like the housing authority’s Ocean Spray Family Center in Newport, and the libraries throughout the county, as well as Homeless Education Literacy Project, have put me front and center close to my roots in Mexico and Central America.
I have talked to many immigrants who have come from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
There is an underground labor network, shadow economy, cash under the table mode of work. There are people who are supporting Guatemalans with translators and help navigating the school systems for their children.
Earth Day 2020 Zoomed
I am also involved in the American Cetacean Society and other movements in the county tied to Surfrider beach clean-ups and the legal process of banning aerial spraying of agent orange-like herbicides onto clear-cuts. I was asked to be a speaker on the Zoom Earth Day 2020, and in that planning, it was obvious to me I was back with what I term Greenie Weenies/Meanies.
I was told that “putting a downer” on the Zoom Earth Day event would be a no-no. This is the sort of group-think silliness and reckless false hope I have been dealing with since, err, I was 13 living in Paris with my mom and sister while my US Army old man was in Vietnam shooting brown people.
Then, a day after that April 22 event, I end up talking to Ginger Gouveia, who is working with Guatemalans, who are homeless and precarious, AND starving in Lincoln County. Thanks to the deadly combination of Obama-Trump-ICE-Racism-Lockdown.
This is really what ecological social justice is about. Nothing in the current mainstream and big green environmental movement in the USA gets the class divide, the power of poverty to tear at the soul of a country, the globe.
And to cut into our Guatemalan neighbors’ souls.
Here’s Ginger’s letter to me:
“I am writing to you as a member the group, Acompañar Relief Fund. We are concerned citizens who are seeking donations on behalf of immigrants who have lost their jobs and do not qualify for any assistance. All of whom have been hard working asylum seekers with families. Our focus is on providing as many families as we can with some food assistance.
Since starting this fundraiser, we have been grateful for the generosity of our community, friends and families. The need is GREAT and our goal is to be able to include as many families as possible. This population will not recover for many months and will not receive any financial assistance, no stimulus check and no unemployment. We are looking for ways to continue providing some support for as long as this financial disaster continues.
This week we were able to give $60, or gift cards, as well as rice and beans and some Masa to 20 families. The families with the greatest need are being referred by agencies working with them.
Sincerely, Ginger Gouveia, Acompañar Coordinator”
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” – Karl Marx
Marx’s quote is taken out of context. He did see religion like opium which of course benefits for the sick and ailing — it reduces people’s immediate suffering and provides them with pleasant illusions giving them the strength to carry on.
Almost all Guatemalans coming to USA, Oregon and Lincoln county place religion as both panacea and strength, community and spiritual sustenance. In the past few years many unaccompanied minors and women with children from Central America have been crossing the border (at a rate of 180,000 per year). These are Mayans. Not the gringo Latin Americans. These are the Native Americans.
University of Oregon Professor Lynn Stephen has documented threats of violence, extortion, and torture against children and indigenous Guatemalan women whose husbands leave to go north:
“They’re leaving them in vulnerable, unprotected positions in communities. If you don’t have a male protector, women and children may become marks.” Hundreds have ended up in Lane County and many others are in the Portland area.
“This is when it’s most amazing when it’s young people who are 15, 16, 14, deciding on their own to leave. My youngest son is 16. I can’t imagine what it would be like for him to make the journey,” Stephen said.
These are cautious people, and the people working with refugees do not want to be named or identified in this anti-immigrant climate.
Gangs in Guatemala keep tabs on the new arrivals: harassment and extortion are common for the families back home when the gangs find out money is being sent to Guatemala by those working and living in the US.
Living close by, worshiping together, and being part of the shadow economy is how Guatemalans in Oregon survive, and thrive. Forming their own churches and then creating that kind of community is commonplace.
Right now, in Lincoln County, there isn’t enough support coming in to support Guatemalans. Churches are asking for help, per Ginger’s plea for donations.
No proporciona ningun beneficio en EUA….
That was the public service announcement mantra under the Obama Administration – USA does not provide any benefits.
U.S. pressure on Mexico to interdict refugees was pulled back for a few years and so many refugee workers have seen a new wave of Central Americans coming to Oregon. Many of those that got political asylum are still in Oregon.
They set down roots, enroll kids in schools, become part of the fabric of our towns and cities. With the lockdown and pandemic hitting the world and here in Lincoln County, our Central American homelandless brothers and sisters are struggling. These are valuable humans on their own accord, but invaluable as part of our community.
A while back, I read a letter to the editor of the NewportNewsTimes railing against Oregon Coast Community College nominating an undocumented as Student of the Year. He was Guatemalan. He spoke eloquently at the podium why he came here and how he wanted to better his life.
The letter writer bashed this young person’s character. He brought up the old canard of having no papers is breaking the law. He called it a slap in the face to all the students who go to the college who were here “legally.” He felt the Guatemalan college graduate should not have been recognized!
In the end, we all are so-called illegal aliens – those with no Native American roots. That includes all the slaves forcefully brought to these shores. All those Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English armies and any number of people who immigrated here, either with paperwork or without.
All uninvited guests with no preapproval and passports given to them by the great First Nations tribes.
No one asked the Confederated Tribes of Siletz if the pioneers could come rushing into Oregon to steal their ancestral land.
It is 2020, a year that beguiles us all. Certainly, many of us five decades ago had 2020 vision about what would happen under predatory-parasitic-casino-disaster-neoliberal-neocon capitalism. Yet now, in this 21st Century, there is obvious myopia and, worse, enabled blindness when it comes to really deal with this pandemic fairly, justly: it takes a village, state and country to raise a community, and the same to deal with pandemics.
I learn everyday from Guatemalans, including one of the country’s poets.
First, here are some Guatemala proverbs that say it all in a few words each –
Better to eat beans in peace than to eat meat in distress.
Do not bear ill will toward those who tell you the truth.
Everyone is the age of their heart.
It’s not the fault of the parrot, but of the one who teaches him to talk.
There’s no ill that doesn’t turn out for the better.
Your true enemy lives in your own house.
Better yet, a poem by Guatemala’s most famous poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967: Miguel Angel Asturias. According to The Review of Contemporary Fiction, “Asturia was a man who believed deeply in maintaining Native American culture in Guatemala, and who championed those who were persecuted. His literature was critically acclaimed, but perhaps not always appreciated. As an artist, his complexity is such that readers and critics often shy away from his elegant beauty.
Monkey Planet: Moore Misses the Message of the Book
criticism of the documentary, Planet of the Humans
by Paul Haeder / April 27th, 2020
The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what is happening are left with few visible avenues for environmental action other than purely personal commitments to recycling and green shopping, socially untenable choices between jobs and the environment, or broad appeals to corporations, political policy-makers, and the scientific establishment–the very interests most responsible for the current ecological mess.
― John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment
I am getting plethora of greenie weenies or others imploring me to watch the the Michael Moore executive produced Planet of the Humans. “You have to watch it. We are screwed. Oh my god. I never knew all this stuff about 350.org.” It was directed, filmed (partly), edited and written by Jeff Gibbs.
In so many ways, it is a derivative flick, a coming to Jesus moment (several hiccups) by Gibbs. This is not good film making (the music is dull, and in some parts, downright spacey) and not good writing. But, on the heels of Trump, Obama, the green porn movement, the fake New Green Deal by AOC, Sanders and other sheepdogs (not the true ecosocialist New Green Deal – by a long shot), and the Spring Break Congress, and the totality of perversions that embodies the political/K-Street/Military/AI/Finance-Investor Class (sic), anything goes, I suppose, to go after the money factories that fuel the so-called American environmental movement. [Louis Proyect’s look at the two new green deals from AOC/Sanders, and that from Howie Hawkins and Ecosocialists. Proyect writes a blog, The Unrepentant Marxist and also administers the Marxmail discussion list.
Reading decent stuff on the various social-indigenous-cultural-ecological heroes, and reading good poetry, philosophy, fiction, well, a million times more impacting for some of us than a thousand documentaries, most of which are in the can, out the window, in the news, on the talk shows, at the film festivals, and, then, a thousand more documentaries in the making.
Munduruku people hold signs with slogans like “Dam Kills!” during a protest of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in front of the Ministry of Mines and Energy in Brasilia, Brazil, on 11 June 2013. Munduruku and other indigenous Brazilian people are protesting the dam, currently under construction, which will disrupt their way of living through deforestation and flooding, as well as attacks against and murders of natives by construction workers and loggers. Credit: EVARISTO SA/AFP/Getty Images
Social change (the good kind, not the Inconvenient Truth or Waiting for Superman kind) will not happen on Netflix, in the cyber world of YouTube, or managed by wannabe filmmakers.
I am also having a bit of acid reflux digesting this flick, The Planet of the Humans, in a time of SARS-COV-2 lock-down (that’s a prison term folks) and a time of compliant humanity sticking to the mainstream science view of coronavirus.
Pay for success finance deals will be well served by the global vaccine market that is being advanced through Gates’s outfit GAVI. Vaccine doses are readily quantifiable, and the economic costs of many illnesses are straightforward to calculate. With a few strategic grants awarded to prestigious universities and think tanks, I anticipate suitable equations framing out a healthy ROI (return on investment) will be devised to meet global market demands shortly.
Hello everyone. Welcome to “Many Waves, One Ocean Cross Movement Summit.” I’m Alison McDowell, a mom and independent researcher in Philadelphia who blogs at wrenchinthegears.com. I started my activism around public education, first fighting standardized testing, then ed-tech, and eventually realized the push by global finance to turn everything into data for the purpose of digital surveillance and profit meant I had to expand my work beyond schools and start digging into the global poverty management complex.
I organize with the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, an independent anti-poverty group that is led by the poor and does not take corporate or foundation money. We’ll be marching on the Democratic National Convention on July 13 to take back the 67 cents of every government dollar spent on war and occupation. We are demanding it be used care for the poor here at home. Check us out and consider joining us in the streets of Milwaukee!
People have been led to believe the purpose of these goals is to address poverty and avert climate catastrophe. As a mother who lives in a city of deep poverty and who works at a public garden, I believe those are admirable goals. It is imperative that we address wealth inequality and begin to heal our planet.
But as a mother who has been researching innovative finance, emerging technologies, and racialized power, I also know there is more to the story than is being told in the media. And so today I will outline how powerful interests are using the Sustainable Development Goals to mask their plans to remake the world as a digital panopticon. What follows is a story of social entrepreneurship, greed, and technological authoritarianism. Its foundations are built on our nation’s history of racial capitalism, eugenics, and the rise of technocracy. — Vaccines, Blockchain and Bio-capitalism
Nathalie Butt and her team found a significant correlation between the number of environmental defenders killed in a country and the country’s levels of corruption, civil and criminal justice, fundamental rights, and government control. More environmentalists were killed (larger circles) in countries with lower rule of law (ROL) scores (lighter blue). Credit: Nathalie Butt
A little hard to stomach this new flick, Planet of the Humans, as I am out of work on two of my gig jobs, and the other job is about getting cash assistance to households where I am best face to face with them, but alas, this hysteria, this complete breakdown of common sense and urgency for just decent masks and gloves (free of course), has caused the healthy to be lock-downed. Police state? You betcha. Surfers are getting tickets for surfing on our beaches.
Daily, the human toll of this lock-down stupidity in Oregon is real. Yet, like compliant children, the greenie types, the so-called environmental movement types, and the pro-science-is-our-savior liberal types will not stand for any challenge to their narrative – we must lock-down until 2022, according to Harvard scientists. So, the democratic governor, Kate Brown, implores us to lock-down, threatens us with tickets, and, oh, 84,000 new unemployment claims in the state, and I am not getting through that bureaucracy, too stupid to not-fail! No dole for me and thousands of others.
Deaths by the millions in the coming months with this lock-down — globally. Not from the novel most-probably weaponized or at least messed-with bat virus, but from poverty, starvation, and lack of medical care for all the other illnesses and diseases and ailments hitting humankind.
Nor is the toll on Gibbs’ mind in this flimsy flick. And don’t get me wrong — there is obvious issues with solar panels, wind turbines, and biomass. However, passive solar and convection solar on roofs throughout the sunny places, good. Biointensive ag, good. Communism as we see in Cuba (even under the pressures of USA’s perversion of war capitalism and all the other casino-parasitic-disaster-predatory capitalism hegemony), GOOD. The entire “green” movement with the billionaires and the others at the helm, Bad. And, yes, after this YouTube flick hit the airwaves, the sons of bitches just went gaga over it, and that too is a separate essay —
This shit is bad, really. More the multi-millionaire, the slob, and now this dude Gibbs with his YouTube shit (again, stretching all boundaries — this is not a film, not a documentary, not anything but, an attack on who? Capitalists? Chevy Volt? The Solar Power engineers? Duh, no solutions will come from digital slide rules and buttoned down technologists and the like. So, with his goofy “bombshell,” will Gibbs be coming out ASAP with attacks on the Kochs, Citizens United, Capitalism, and the rest of these freaks — competitive enterprise institute? I doubt it, so, maybe a little Trojan Horse here to give these felons and murderers in the billionaire class and the extraction industry class another leaping off point to attack land defenders, wipe out the majority of people (of color) on planet earth who want not only the brakes put on the despotic regimes working to steal their land-water-minerals-fossil fuel-forests-water-crops, but to colonize their bodies with forced vaccinations and indentured servantry.
On 22 May 2018, a group of roughly 20,000 environmental protesters marched toward a Sterlite Copper mining plant in Tamil Nadu in southern India. The plant was linked to soil, water, and air pollution in the area. State police killed 13 protesters in what was the largest massacre of environmental defenders in 2018. Credit: Mksr2020, CC BY-SA 4.0
Back to reality in my neck of the woods:
We have some Guatemalans up here on the Oregon Coast. Workers. Families. Some are not literate in English or Spanish. No more hotel cleaning gigs, dishwasher gigs, working in the forest collecting salal gigs.
These families are afraid to go to the food banks (big, gangly and some mean-looking white folks there collecting and handing out food) and afraid of any social services agencies. You know, deportation, put in lock-down in containment dog kennels a la ICE. Now that’s a fun prospect for a bioweaponized or laboratory-induced novel coronavirus.
Some of have been yelled at by our fine upstanding white original illegal aliens: “Chinks … you brought this corona over to us. What are you still doing here?”
These are Guatemalans!
The Wrong Sort of Green, is also the wrong sort of agriculture, and the wrong kind of medicine, wrong kind of education, wrong kind of law, wrong kind of computing, wrong kind of carceral state, wrong kind of, well, you get the picture. It’s all wrong because of capitalism. Yet, this movie goes right to us, the rest of the world included, as a cancer. As over-consuming, over-populating, over-reaching, you know, the Population Bomb language of “sterilize the masses” folk.
Bad, bad, bad. Crackpot, crackpot, crackpot.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Or dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.
These are nice words for this superficial, sound-bite, dumb-downing thing of a movie.
On the 50th earth day anniversary we get to view it. It might get some stuff right – the fake green-renewable movement, but it gets the major stuff wrong: Capitalism has run amok, not the other way around. The hordes have not run amok against the good of capitalism, but have been colonized, co-opted, delegitimized, stolen from, used as a large populace of Guinea pigs for the economic syphilis that is Capitalism.
And the underlying message is population control. They great white hope of Michael Moore and I guess Jeff Gibbs is really the underpinning of the flick – and no credence is given to the millions upon millions of people fighting this bastardization of humanity, of life, called Western Capitalism. There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of groups that Gibbs could have put front and center who are local, indigenous, part of the peasant movement, others, who are real forest protectors and water protectors and life protectors.
Making fun of the alternative energy folk is like shooting fish in a barrel. And, the underlying message, the grace note here, is that because all humans and cultures are alike (NOT) we as one species (debatable) are a cancer, all in it for me-myself-and-I. Just way too many of us.
Just the way this flick opens up says it all. The documentary poses the stupid question: How much time do you think the human race has? You know, man-woman-child person on the street quippy takes.
Gibbs is at a solar festival (in the beginning, and then at the end of this flick) and makes fun of the band not getting the solar energy power when the clouds open and rain shuts down this system and they have to go back to the electrical grid.
Jump to Obama and Van Jones and Al Gore. To the white race, Richard Branson. Then 60 Minutes is clipped in. Have we been here before with this sort of documentary making? Come on, do I have to list the other hundreds of documentaries that follow this script?
Then onto Michael Bloomberg. Sierra Club. Bill 350.org McKibben. Segue to “making fun” of the Chevy Volt, electric cars, wind turbines, biomass, etc.
Throughout history, greed has proven to be lethal. Greed and justice cannot co-exist.
The premise that “greed can save us” is void of all ethics. It stems from either desperation or denial, or perhaps both combined.
Perhaps McKibben’s 350.org/1Sky partner – Climate Solutions (who McKibben praised/promoted in a recent article) – will soon see their wish list of “sustainable aviation,” biofuels and carbon offsets morph into a global reality. 350.org/1Sky partner Climate Solutions was a key player in the creation of 1Sky – an incubator project of the Rockefellers, who are pushing/funding REDD (the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program) and many other false solutions that ensure power and monetary wealth remain exactly where it is – in the hands of the few.
Of course, James Hansen’s magic wand (which Hansen himself sometimes refers to) will be most imperative for such false solutions to succeed in cooling the planet and stopping the eradication of most life on Earth.
Do we reject biofuels, carbon offsets, the greenwash and delusional concepts like “sustainable aviation”? Or do we reject these false solutions only when promoted directly by industry and government? If we do reject false solutions outright, why do those who claim to seek climate justice turn a blind eye when our “friends” and “partners” support these false solutions that we must fight against? — Why I Refuse To Promote Bill McKibben
Wouldn’t it be nice to see the warriors in this Gibbs’ frame: How many indigenous people have been murdered in the past 20 minutes? Land defenders. The people of the earth who are less than 7 percent of the population but are in 80 percent of the jungles and rain-forests and mangroves, deltas, islands.
So, this fellow, Gibbs, in 2020 when this documentary was released, came to the conclusion recently that the green energy revolution isn’t going to work? Really? This has been posited for more than 20 years easily.
Twenty five minutes into this sad sack of a movie and it’s whites, man, mostly males (one female anthropologist), and it’s just more declaiming the green energy folk – and no one ever in the ecosocialist movement saw solar panels and wind turbines and ethanol as green or efficient or, hmm, localized and social just. But you think an ecosocialist is interviewed? Nope!
After 30 minutes in, no great people who have studied, looked at and been on the front lines of the biggest elephant in the room: “It is easier to see a world without people than without capitalism.”
Fredric Jameson’s famous quote, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” should have been posited at the top of the documentary.
Do you believe there can be a better world, localized, scaled down, tied to human rights and indigenous wisdom than a world without consumerism, capitalism?
Or, better yet, the questions –
What is parasitic capitalism? What is predatory capitalism? What is disaster capitalism? What is casino capitalism?
Then, sure, another question:
What is the cost to humanity, to those billions in the world not part of the Western White Tradition of Neoliberalism-Neoconservativism-Colonialism-Slavery, that the military industrial complex unleashes to the world?
Nah. This is just a gotcha sort of film – at least it is as I am concurrently listening and watching it while also writing this critique. Okay, 42 minutes in, and one lone voice thus far, Richard Heinberg, who I interviewed 14 years ago on my radio show in Spokane, is briefly interviewed. Sound bite. His book, Peak Everything is pretty self-explanatory. He doesn’t tap into the civil society, to peasant and agrarian movements. He just tells us later on he goes to bed frightened, scared.
Whew. Peak Humanity psychosis!
That slogan captures about how Western thinking can imagine a world without humans before they can fathom any world without capitalism. And, to be fair, the masters of the universe hope for more AI, more ways to make humanity useless, more ways to kill work, kill human learning and sharing. A world without the majority of the people AND WITH surveillance and AI-Crypto Capitalism. There you go!
What is “capitalist realism? The almost global sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Most of the billionaire class, most of the millionaire class, most of the people who believe in capitalism, capitalism lite, capitalism with a green smile, they are prepared for their world without people – Bill Gates and his cronies, setting the globe with his vision of massive sterilization and massive, err, vaccinations.
At minute 46, Planet of the Humans has given us more white guys and one white female anthropologist saying there is “not enough for the world,” for those billions outside this white great white way.
Looking at the numbers – and they are terrified, in Gibbs’ rendition, that the world is at 7.4 billion people, and it took hundreds of thousands of years for Homo sapiens to hit 750 million – this is the movement. Computer modeling, projections, Dystopia, but never-ever a clear-eyed look at the reason for malnourishment and disease and suffering – the few haves and the lots of haves not. An honest look at this would really get to the cutting-edge thinkers here – just the bloody neo-tribal writer, Daniel Quinn, looks at leaver and giver society in his books featuring an ESP-abled gorilla named Ishmael.
I’m already into the flick less than an hour, and Gibbs is seeking mental health help. Climate change trauma, analysis paralysis, something. He brings in another great voice of psychology, some social psychology professor, at Skidmore College. Gibbs sets it up – The republican side believes there is an endless supply of fossil fuels, and OUR side believes the world will be saved with solar panels. Why is that?
This is it, man, them – the GOP and industrialists and Trump and Tea Party and Neo-Nazis – and us – the other side, wanting green energy and technology to get us off fossil fuel and climate change. Bingo. This is such a silly adventure in one man’s sad fear of himself – Jeff Gibbs (where’s millionaire, Hillary-adoring, the Russians are Coming, Holly-dirt Michael Moore, man, when we need a really foolish guy for a heck of a lot of laughs?). Professor Sheldon Solomon believes that people are just biotic life. That is the key to these guy’s thought process saying we as a species (all of us) have a disbelief in mortality, that this can’t be, so we just keep on with our suicidal behavior.
Jameson’s quote is often used to show how capitalism has limited the horizons of our imagination.
We don’t think of civilization as indestructible, but we do seem to think of the free market as indestructible. This, it is sometimes said, is the result of neoliberalism: as both traditionally left-wing and traditionally right-wing parties in Western countries developed a consensus that markets were the only way forward (“there is no alternative”), more and more people came to hold narrower and narrower views of the possibilities for human society. Being on the right meant “believing in free markets and some kind of nationalism or social conservatism” while being liberal meant “believing in free markets but being progressive on issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation.” Questions like “how do we develop a feasible alternative to capitalism?” were off the table; the only reasonable question about political intervention in the economy became: “should we regulate markets a little bit, or not at all? – “The left should embrace both pragmatism and utopianism” — Nathan J. Robinson
It as if this Jeff Gibbs just came out from a deep hole – I have been teaching this shit for more than two decades; showing students this embedded energy truth, this lifetime/life-cycle analysis of products, , this green washing PR job, this green porn marketing bait and switch. Poverty pimping, man, and Green is the New Black. It’s still pimping and prostitution at a very high price.
You give the capitalists, the military industrial complex purveyors, the multimillionaires like that piece of political dung Al Gore the microphone, and then you give the billionaire class, the BlackRock class, the IMF, the forced vaccination and eugenics masters the microphone, or Clinton, Hollywood, and the Massive Messed up Mainstream Media any benefit of the doubt, and here we are.
All those white male/ white female people featured on this Planet of the Humans in the end are talking about population control, and, shoot, that says it all, now does it not?
Now, finally, a real person, a real human, Vandana Shiva, comes onto Gibbs’ stage 1:09 hours into the flick – where she gets to give a micro dose of a rejecting biomass and biofuels, emphasizing how the biggest crisis of our times is shifting our minds to give power to illusions – green capitalism – replacing fossil fuels to this so-called renewable biomass energy production, which is green capitalism, which is green pornography. She gets about 20 seconds of air time. That’s it!
“Her honesty was refreshing.” That’s it for Gibb’s commentary on Shiva, caught on camera at some Earth Day event. This is Vandana Shiva, academic, scientist, humanist and leader in fighting for billions of people subjected to the GMO lies. A warrior against toxins. If that isn’t patriarchy and patronizing and, well, malarkey, the white man doing the white people’s film song and dance, then I do not know what is.
I’ll quote Shiva here:
The “green economy” agenda being pushed in the run-up to Rio+20, or the Earth Summit, to be held in June, could well become the blueprint for the biggest resource grab in history, with corporations appropriating the planet’s green wealth and biodiversity. These corporations will take our green wealth to make “green oil” for biofuels, energy, plastics, chemicals — everything that the petrochemical era based on fossil fuels gave us. Movements worldwide have started to say no to the “green economy” of the “one per cent”, because an ecological adjustment is possible and it is taking place. This adjustment involves seeing ourselves as part of the fragile ecological web, not outside and above it, and immune from the consequences of our actions.
Ecological adjustment also implies that we see ourselves as members of the earth’s community, sharing its resources equitably with all species and within the human community. Ecological adjustment requires an end to resource grab and privatisation of our land, biodiversity, seeds, water and atmosphere. It requires the recovery of the commons and the creation of “earth democracy”.
The dominant economic model based on resource monopolies and oligarchy is in conflict not just with ecological limits of the planet but also with the basic principles of democracy. The adjustment being dictated by the oligarchy will further strangle democracy and people’s freedom of choice. Sunil Bharti Mittal, one of India’s industry captains, recently said that “politics is hurting the economy and the country”. His observation reflects the mindset of the oligarchy, that democracy can be done away with. Green Greed – Seeds of Injustice, By Vandana Shiva
So, Gibbs goes back to gotcha land – exposing the hypocrisy and duplicity of Richard Branson, the Al Gores, then Michael Bloomberg. No thanks. Not worth my time. More flashy nothing. We know Greta T. and Bill M. and Naomi K. are all false gods, the wrong kind of green.
Cory Morningstar, Wrong Kind of Green, is a warrior for social justice, ecological justice, for a sane look at how these greenies continue to cite “it’s a global overpopulation problem” causing climate change and ecosystems collapses. She just posted the Planet of the Humans on her website. However, this is her caveat –
WKOG caveat: Industrial civilization is destroying all life on Earth. Human destruction of biodiversity is not created equally: “Yet tribal peoples are the best conservationists and guardians of the natural world, and 80% of our planet’s biodiversity is found in tribal territories.” [Further reading: The best conservationists made our environment and can save it, Stephen Corry ] Human population is often identified as a problem because it strains the world’s resources and pollutes. [1] The first and most efficient way to address over consumption is to reduce consumption in the North is to a) redistribute the resources, (all arable land, etc.) to the Global South, to sustain those in the Global South, and b) phase out the production of all superfluous consumer products that harm life and biodiversity. [Further reading: Too Many Africans?, July 11, 2019 An analysis of population growth that accounts for the vast differences in consumption across class and region is critical in examining the worldwide environmental crisis
The top 8.5 per cent of the people own over 83 per cent of global wealth, whereas the share of the bottom 70 per cent is barely 3 per cent. The top of the pyramid is even steeper – the net worth of the top 200 wealthiest individual (at $2.7 trillion)69 is the same as that of the bottom 3.2 billion people or half the population of the whole world! Significantly these wealthiest individuals of the world were able to increase their wealth in spite of the financial crisis. According to a recent Oxfam report, in spite of a global reduction of wealth the top 100 billionaires have been able to increase their wealth by 240 billion dollars in 2012.70 These super rich, incidentally, also include individuals who have been lobbying for reduction and control of third world population and funding major programmes towards it. The state policies and the policies of international bodies seem to be aligned with the interests of the rich and powerful. These Ultra High Net worth (UHNW) also wield immense political power.
Best yet, listen to Vandana Shiva again. This is the stuff that matters now, not a cataloging of the bad green movement, the shilling of wind farms and solar arrays and biofuels. All of this, like fossil fuels and wars and everything else that is externalized because of capitalism, all of this is subsidized by our capital, our taxes, our lives, our labor. That sports stadium? Simple thing, man. Chavez Canyon, a great working community in LA, was destroyed because the New York Dodgers moved to LA. Chavez Canyon was a place where Mexicans lived, creating their own community, their own social capital, their own roads and support systems. But the city gave the Dodgers the key to the city, gave them everything. The payoff? It’s all about the game, man. Low wage jobs, parking lots, traffic, and obscene profits to pajama-clad players and their masters – the owners and managers and collective investors.
Take it up a notch or two – the Mississippi is polluted and toxified because of industrial farming. The delta in Louisiana is polluted, and that plume of toxins goes out hundreds of miles into the Gulf of Mexico. The shrimp are polluted, all the life is polluted. Those Iowa corn syrup farmers and soy feed tenders, well, think of the warnings – “If pregnant (or wanting to be) don’t drink the well water. Don’t live on a farm. Stay away from the crop dusters. Be prepared to bury your family members who stay as they drop lie flies from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, diabetes, heart anomalies, cancers and more. The gift that keeps on giving – pesticides, fertilizers, fumigants, vast piles and huge ponds and polluted rivers of blood, entrails, crap from industrial animal feeding, growing, butchering operations.
The multiple crises of climate insecurity, energy insecurity, and food insecurity create an imperative and an opportunity to transcend the limits of the mechanistic-industrial-capitalist paradigm that has been systematically shrinking our potential even as it peddles progress.
The paths out from this crisis are not being blazed in the boardrooms of the global corporations who dominate our world today and are largely responsible for crimes against nature and humanity. Industrialization of food and agriculture has put the human species on a slippery slope of self-destruction and self-annihilation. The movement for biodiverse, ecological, and local food systems simultaneously addresses the crises of climate, energy, and food. Above all, it brings people back into agriculture and reclaims food as nourishment and the most basic source of energy. New ways of thinking and acting, of being and doing, are evolving from the creative alternatives being employed in small communities, on farms, and in cities.
It is this renewable energy of ecology and sharing, of solidarity and compassion, that we need to generate and multiply to counter the destructive energy of greed that is creating scarcity at every level – scarcity of work, scarcity of happiness, scarcity of security, scarcity of freedom, and even scarcity of the future.
Climate chaos, brutal economic inequality, and social disintegration are jointly pushing human communities to the brink. We can either let the processes of destruction, disintegration, and extermination continue unchallenged, or we can unleash our creative energies to make systemic change and reclaim our future as a species, as part of the earth family. We can either keep sleepwalking to extinction or wake up to the potential of the planet and ourselves. — Vandana Shiva
We’ve been here before with Naomi Klein, with Al Gore, with DiCaprio, with Ted Danson, Daryl Hannah, the rest of the goofballs. Gibbs is not really doing much new here, really – The Wrong Kind of Green has been extrapolated and parsed for decades, and for him to waste this opportunity to go for the actual jugular of the cause – capitalism, western dominance in banking, structural adjustments, austerity, structural violence, economic hits, more – delegitimizes his whole thesis.
But there are also other social forces engaged in the process of resistance to the capitalist onslaught on the environment: for instance, the indigenous communities. This is another very important contribution of this book: to show that indigenous communities—direct victims of the capitalist plunder, a global assault on their livelihoods—have become the vanguard of the ecosocialist movement. In their actions, such as the Standing Rock resistance to the XXL Pipeline, and in their reflections—such as their Declaration at the World Social Forum of Belem in 2009—“they express, more completely than any other group, the common survival interest of humanity.” Of course, the urban population of modern cities cannot live like the indigenous, but they have much to learn from them.
Ecological struggles offer a unifying theme around which various oppressed constituencies could come together. And there are signs of hope in the United States, in the vast upsurge of resistance against a particularly toxic racist, misogynist and anti-ecological power elite, and in the growing interest, among young people and African Americans, in socialism. But a political revolutionary force, able to unify all constituencies and movements against the system is still lacking. Review by Michael Löwy, “From Marx to Ecosocialism” if the book Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism by Victor Wallis
Alas, the best way to end the pain, to stop the rabid raccoon, I suppose, is to euthanize it. So much is wrong with Gibbs’ take on this eco-challenge. He is late out of the gate when looking at the life-cycle analysis of solar, wind and biomass. He is coming out of a deep long sleep? The documentary is not compelling. The executive producer, Michael Moore, is highly problematic. He is a capitalist, a millionaire, part of celebrity culture, and he is part of the problem not the solution.
It all rides on the back of the minister, Thomas Malthus, in his 1798 essay on population.
Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
For Gibbs and the others he decries in the greenie weenie controlled opposition movement, they see the enemy is us, the people, or those with lesser pedigrees and more melanin. Why not just go after capitalism, and the inverted totalitarianism of Corpocracy. What about those corporations, that sticky class exploitation, how industry is set forth, and what about war? Gibbs blames all the people.
Oh, well, so many will tell me, “Paul, why don’t you write, film, edit, produce your own goddamned movie”? Sure enough, uh? I normally would not go to a movie like this, or get it from the Internet. I was only prompted by the number of emails from friends and acquaintances who just had to tell me to see this Anti-Earth Day flick. I didn’t learn anything from it substantive-wise, but I am wondering what the bearing witness for newbies to this green washing/green pornography will do with all this information about how bad solar and wind are. How bad the green groups are. How big the billions are that fund the controlled opposition and the narrative. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you? We all are colonized? We all live in the matrix? We are all co-opted by capital?
In the end the movie is more than benign. It fools us, the viewer, into a false solution, false narrative, and false causation. But my time is up, and totally bored with the concept behind this movie and how it now is generating this hoary call for, what, to watch the bloody movie? The real heroes are dying in their jungles and forests. From coffee to copper, from bananas to bitumen, from rubber to rhinos, the rapacious Western World is eating future generations from the inside out.
People just want their forty acres and a mule. Their cooperative farms. They water and their soil. They want a few light bulbs. They want their great grandchildren’s lives back. They are done with the great white hope, the saviors, the industrialists and the investors (sic).
Outbreak zones meanwhile are no longer even organized under traditional polities. Unequal ecological exchange—redirecting the worst damage from industrial agriculture to the Global South—has moved out of solely stripping localities of resources by state-led imperialism and into new complexes across scale and commodity. Agribusiness is reconfiguring their extractivist operations into spatially discontinuous networks across territories of differing scales. A series of multinational-based “Soybean Republics,” for instance, now range across Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. The new geography is embodied by changes in company management structure, capitalization, subcontracting, supply chain substitutions, leasing, and transnational land pooling. In straddling national borders, these “commodity countries,” flexibly embedded across ecologies and political borders, are producing new epidemiologies along the way.
For instance, despite a general shift in population from commoditized rural areas to urban slums that continues today across the globe, the rural-urban divide driving much of the discussion around disease emergence misses rural-destined labor and the rapid growth of rural towns into periurban desakotas (city villages) or zwischenstadt (in-between cities). Mike Davis and others have identified how these newly urbanizing landscapes act as both local markets and regional hubs for global agricultural commodities passing through.36 Some such regions have even gone “post-agricultural.”37 As a result, forest disease dynamics, the pathogens’ primeval sources, are no longer constrained to the hinterlands alone. Their associated epidemiologies have themselves turned relational, felt across time and space. A SARS can suddenly find itself spilling over into humans in the big city only a few days out of its bat cave. — COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital by Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace
Emerging from one of the most generative collaborations in the ecosocialist tradition, this collection of essays by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark represents a critical step forward in theoretical development and recovery, with immediate relevance to contemporary political movements and debates. Foster and Clark beautifully reveal the power of historical materialism to lay bare the connection between ecological degradation, speciesism, and social domination, and therefore the necessity of a struggle that does not artificially isolate in theory and practice what is joined in reality. This is a book for serious activists seeking to understand the world in order to change all of it that needs changing, so that every living being on earth may not only survive, but finally, be free. —Hannah Holleman, author of Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism
Long recognized as leading theorists of ecomarxism, Bellamy Foster and Clark here extend their “metabolic rift” paradigm to an impressive range of issues, including gender, food, British eco-imperialism in Ireland, “alienated speciesism,” the theory of value, and the meaning of work. The result is a powerful case that capitalism is inextricably bound up with the robbery of nature and constitutes the paramount obstacle to life on Earth as we know it. —Nancy Fraser, New School for Social Research; author, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis
Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle (1963) concerns a group of astronauts, including journalist Ulysse Merou, and their voyage to a planet in the star system of Betelgeuse (the year is 2500). They land to discover a world where intelligent apes are the Master Race and humans are savages: caged in zoos, used in laboratory experiments and hunted for sport. The story of Ulysse’s capture and his subsequent struggle to survive, and then the climax as he returns to Earth and a horrific final discovery is gripping and fantastic. Yet the novel is also a subtle parable on science, evolution, and the relationship between man and animals. Again, the master race theme is part of Boulle’s own background in the secret service fighting against the Axis powers in WW II as part of the Free French. He wrote the more famous book, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1952). This flick, Planet of the Humans, is antithetical to that altogether (master race indeed), and in some sense, the lack of people of color speaking about a better way to get through this climate-capitalism chaos is sort of reflective of Gibbs’ own blind-spot to stick to the white technologists and the white people in the green capital movement.
Finally, I have had to dis-enroll in several list-serves, so called green and climate change list serves, because of the great white old lady and old man thought police and the moderators who believe attacking an ideology that many hold true is a persona attack on the actual members of the list serve.These are people who for the most part are cozy — in their paid-for homes, near the beach, with whatever money they have coming in from SS and investments and pension, or what have you. Lecturing people about playing nice, or to not be too accusatory, or to stop being so negative on Earth Day 50th anniversary. These are the people who have cemented their own fates in a world of “Gaia is responding to the coronavirus.” They believe there is a new time coming, that this virus and total environmental catastrophic are signs of a “new beginning. It might be tough for a few decades, a few hundred years — famine, murder, pillage, disease, etc. — but it is Gaia speaking, man, and we all need to look for a new beginning, a loving world, a giving world, and this climate change and now the bioweaponized world of viruses and vaccines are signs, man, from mother-female earth. The great big mamma in the sky. Don’t you feel it as you walk outside and see more birds congregating on the shore now that people are locked inside? Don’t you feel the new beginning? Can you imagine the new world, the new world order, the new enlightenment? Sure, there will be sacrificed people due to climate change, due to the pollution, the famine, but we are ready for the new beginning. Imagine, the world will soon be less people and more harmonious. Less people, good, and more poor people in those other sad countries, bad. Don’t you feel it, Paul, the new Eden? The new homo sapiens? Don’t ya feel the materialistic world melting away? And then all of us holding hands (well, holding hands via Skype and Zoom until the masters like Bill Gates, et al give us permission to stop the lockdown) in a new Garden? Can’t you just see it over the horizon? Can’t you just feel it?”
Paul Haeder, Author 