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What It Means to Be a Socialist
What It Means to Be a Socialist
Chris Hedges gave this speech Sunday at a Santa Ana, Calif., event sponsored by the Green Party of Orange County.
We live in a revolutionary moment. The disastrous economic and political experiment that attempted to organize human behavior around the dictates of the global marketplace has failed. The promised prosperity that was to have raised the living standards of workers through trickle-down economics has been exposed as a lie. A tiny global oligarchy has amassed obscene wealth, while the engine of unfettered corporate capitalism plunders resources, exploits cheap, unorganized labor and creates pliable, corrupt governments that abandon the common good to serve corporate profit. The relentless drive by the fossil fuel industry for profits is destroying the ecosystem, threatening the viability of the human species. And no mechanisms to institute genuine reform or halt the corporate assault are left within the structures of power, which have surrendered to corporate control. The citizen has become irrelevant. He or she can participate in heavily choreographed elections, but the demands of corporations and banks are paramount.
History has amply demonstrated that the seizure of power by a tiny cabal, whether a political party or a clique of oligarchs, leads to despotism. Governments that cater exclusively to a narrow interest group and redirect the machinery of state to furthering the interests of that group are no longer capable of responding rationally in times of crisis. Blindly serving their masters, they acquiesce to the looting of state treasuries to bail out corrupt financial houses and banks while ignoring chronic unemployment and underemployment, along with stagnant or declining wages, crippling debt peonage, a collapsing infrastructure, and the millions left destitute and often homeless by deceptive mortgages and foreclosures.
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Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed the Role of Fossil Fuels in Global Warming Decades Ago
Oil giant Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research in the 1970s, and then, without disclosing the findings of its scientists, worked to manufacture doubt about the scientific consensus of its own research.
A groundbreaking investigation shows how the company’s top executives were warned of possible catastrophe from global warming, then led efforts to block solutions.
InsideClimate News explains:
At a meeting in Exxon Corporation’s headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world’s use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.
“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.
It was July 1977 when Exxon’s leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.
A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon’s Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles. Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.
“Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed,” Black said, in the written summary of his 1978 talk.
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VIDEO: Noam Chomsky: Markets Aren’t ‘Democratic’— They Radically Restrict Choice in Important Ways
VIDEO: Noam Chomsky: Markets Aren’t ‘Democratic’— They Radically Restrict Choice in Important Ways
In this short clip from a History Channel documentary, the renowned linguist and activist explains how markets actually bring out the worst in humans by turning us into people “dedicated to maximizing individual gain, not social concern.”
VIDEO: Chris Hedges on the Big Lie of Neoliberalism and the Very Real Threat of a President Trump
VIDEO: Chris Hedges on the Big Lie of Neoliberalism and the Very Real Threat of a President Trump
Chris Hedges doesn’t spare Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders in this wide-ranging take on the big swindle of neoliberalism and his warning for the future in the hands of a “rapacious oligarchic elite.”
Hedges made his statements during a speech he gave in Toronto on Sept. 3, drawing from his newest book, “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” as well as from his Aug. 30 Truthdig column, “The Great Unraveling.”
Some particularly good lines from Hedges’ speech include these well-taken points: “Every promise made by the proponents of neoliberalism is a lie,” “The left is still alive … barely,” and “Democracy, especially in the U.S., is a farce, vomiting up right-wing demagogues such as Donald Trump, who has a serious chance to become the Republican presidential nominee—and perhaps even president.”
Find out how Hedges views our country’s current predicament, as well as Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, in the video below (via YouTube):
Spy Chief’s ‘Unusual’ Contact With Military Official Raises Concerns About Intelligence Manipulation
Spy Chief’s ‘Unusual’ Contact With Military Official Raises Concerns About Intelligence Manipulation
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. (Partnership for Public Service / CC BY 2.0)
James Clapper—Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence—is said to be in what a former intelligence official called frequent and “highly, highly unusual” contact with a ranking junior intelligence officer who sits at the center of a growing scandal over rosy portrayals of the Pentagon’s war against Islamic State.
Clapper’s interlocutor—Army Brig. Gen. Steven Grove, head of U.S. Central Command’s intelligence wing—is said to be implicated in a Pentagon inquiry into manipulated war intelligence.
Spencer Ackerman reports at The Guardian:
In communications, Clapper, who is far more senior than Grove, is said to tell Grove how the war looks from his vantage point, and question Grove about Central Command’s assessments. Such a situation could place inherent pressure on a subordinate, sources said.
Knowledgeable former officials are doubtful that Clapper directly intends to manipulate intelligence. And they do not say that the director of national intelligence – who apologized to his Senate overseers in 2013 for publicly misleading Congress on the scope of domestic surveillance – ordered Grove or anyone else to change the command’s assessment of the war.
But one former intelligence official said Clapper “has to be careful of the Cheney effect, going over to the CIA and how does that affect people” – a reference to pressure felt by CIA analysts before the 2003 Iraq invasion to portray Saddam Hussein as posing a more dire threat than he actually did, following then Vice President Dick Cheney’s direct interaction with far more junior analysts and officials. …
More than 50 intelligence analysts, both those within Central Command and their seconded Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) colleagues, have registered complaints about manipulated or skewed data, the Daily Beast reported on Wednesday. Analysts object to internal portrayals, said to come ultimately from Grove and Ryckman, of a war proceeding better than Isis’s persistent hold over large swaths of Iraq and Syria suggests. The existence of the Pentagon inquiry was first reported last month by the New York Times. …
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Oil Giants Crush California Bill Aimed at Reducing Gasoline Use
The oil industry has derailed an environmental bill in California designed to reduce gasoline use by up to 50 percent by 2030.
The Guardian reports:
Senate president pro tempore Kevin de Leon announced on Wednesday that he would amend the bill, SB350, to drop the petroleum provisions. It will be changed in the assembly’s natural resources committee as soon as Thursday to deal only with increasing the state’s renewable electricity supply and boosting energy efficiency in buildings through retrofits and upgrades.
With only two days left in the legislative session, “we could not cut through the million-dollar smokescreen created by a single special-interest with a singular motive and a bottomless war chest”, he said in a statement.
The Western States Petroleum Association – a trade organization representing petroleum companies including Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil, said in a statement that the fuel provisions were “arbitrary and infeasible”, but with that portion of the bill deleted, “we can move forward and work together on other climate change efforts”.
SB350 has been the focus of an intense media and lobbying campaign by petroleum interests in recent weeks.
Read more here.
VIDEO: German Lawmaker on Why Wars Led by the U.S. Are at the Root of the Refugee Crisis
VIDEO: German Lawmaker on Why Wars Led by the U.S. Are at the Root of the Refugee Crisis
Annette Groth, a member of the German Parliament, recently returned from a trip to Hungary, where she saw thousands of migrants stranded at the Budapest train station. “What is the root for this massive migration?” Groth asks. “It is war, it is terror, and it is the former U.S. government who is accountable for it.”
Speaking to “Democracy Now!” from Stuttgart, Germany, Groth outlines the ways in which Western governments are to blame for the crisis.
—Posted by Roisin Davis
The Real Enemy Is Within
If you are not dedicated to the destruction of empire and the dismantling of American militarism, then you cannot count yourself as a member of the left. It is not a side issue. It is the issue. It is why I refuse to give a pass in this presidential election campaign to Bernie Sanders, who refuses to confront the war industry or the crimes of empire, including U.S. support for the slow genocide carried out by Israel against the Palestinians. There will be no genuine democratic, social, economic or political reform until we destroy our permanent war machine.
Militarists and war profiteers are our greatest enemy. They use fear, bolstered by racism, as a tool in their efforts to abolish civil liberties, crush dissent and ultimately extinguish democracy. To produce weapons and finance military expansion, they ruin the domestic economy by diverting resources, scientific and technical expertise and a disproportionate share of government funds. They use the military to carry out futile, decades-long wars to enrich corporations such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. War is a business. And when the generals retire, guess where they go to work? Profits swell. War never stops. Whole sections of the earth live in terror. And our nation is disemboweled and left to live under what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Libertarians seem to get this. It is time the left woke up.
“Bourgeois society faces a dilemma,” socialist Rosa Luxemburg writes, “either a transition to Socialism, or a return to barbarism … we face the choice: either the victory of imperialism and the decline of all culture, as in ancient Rome—annihilation, devastation, degeneration, a yawning graveyard; or the victory of Socialism—the victory of the international working class consciously assaulting imperialism and its method: war. This is the dilemma of world history, either-or; the die will be cast by the class-conscious proletariat.”
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Canada Clears Way for Ecuadorean Case Against Chevron Over ‘Amazon Chernobyl’
Canada Clears Way for Ecuadorean Case Against Chevron Over ‘Amazon Chernobyl’
A protestor shows his black painted hand as he carries an Ecuador flag to protest against Chevron and the oil contamination in Ecuador’s Amazon region during a joined global demonstration in Madrid, Spain, in 2013.. (Andres Kudacki / AP)
Canada’s Supreme Court ruled Friday that Ecuadorean villagers can go after Canadian assets of the US-based oil major Chevron. The lawsuit has been one of the most bitterly contested environmental cases in history, involving a contamination that environmentalists have dubbed the “Amazon Chernobyl.”
From Al Jazeera:
The plaintiffs, who include about 30,000 villagers and indigenous people, decided to go after the energy giant’s assets in Canada, Brazil and Argentina after the company contested a ruling by Ecuador’s highest court to pay $9.5 billion to clean up the contamination site.
Communities in the Lago Agrio region of Ecuador allege that Texaco, which was acquired by Chevron in 2001, dumped some 16 billion tons of oil and toxic waste in the Amazon rainforest as a cost-saving measure between 1964 and 1992, Telesur reported. That’s 80 times the amount of oil spilled in the 2010 British Petroleum Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, the Latin American news website added.
Ecuadorian villagers and indigenous communities affected by the contamination allege that it has resulted in illness and death, Telesur reported in June, and that they are still suffering the consequences of Texaco’s actions.
Plaintiffs claim that Texaco attempted to hide the dumping by covering nearly 1,000 oil pits with vegetation. People eventually built homes over some of the pits, and began coming down with mysterious illnesses, it is claimed.
“It has been 33 years … and I never knew that this was a covered pit,” local resident Serbio Curipoma told Telesur.
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