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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

The media and political establishments are diddling while the planet burns.

Are we really supposed to take their games seriously as humanity veers ever more dangerously off the environmental cliff?

In 2008, James Hansen, then head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and seven other leading climate scientists reported that we would see “practically irreversible ice sheet and species loss” if the planet’s average temperature rose above 1°Celsius (C) thanks to carbon dioxide’s (CO2) presence in the atmosphere reaching 450 parts per million (ppm).

CO2 was at 385 ppm when this report came out. It was “already in the dangerous zone,” Hansen and his team reported. They warned that deadly, self-reinforcing “feedbacks” could be triggered at this level. The dire prospects presaged included “ice sheet disintegration, vegetation migration, and GHG [greenhouse gas] release from soils, tundra, or ocean sediments.”

The only way to be assured of a livable climate, Hansen and his colleagues warned, would be to cut CO2 to at least 350 ppm.

Here we are eleven years later, well past Hansen’s 1°C red line. We’ve gotten there at 410 ppm, the highest level of CO2 saturation in 800,000 years. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s latest climate report reflects the consensus opinion of the world’s leading climate scientists. It tells us that we are headed to 1.5°C in a dozen years. Failure to dramatically slash Greenhouse Gassing between now and 2030 is certain to set off catastrophic developments for hundreds of millions of people, the IPCC warns.

The IPCC finds that we are headed at our current pace for 3-4°C by the end of century. That will mean a planet that is mostly unlivable.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Barack von Obamenburg, Herr Donald, and Big Capitalist Hypocrisy: On How Fascism Happens

November 17, 2018

Barack von Obamenburg, Herr Donald, and Big Capitalist Hypocrisy: On How Fascism Happens

Caravan of Lies

Never underestimate the disingenuousness of top U.S.-American politicos. They truly have no shame.

Notice how little the fascistic president Donald Trump has to say any more about the big bad Central American Caravan that was supposedly menacing the United States with a great criminal “invasion”?

The U.S. military “heroes” sent down at great taxpayer expense to “defend our border” will be missing Thanksgiving with their families thanks to this fake threat to “national security.”

Gee, what happened? It was all a dog-wagging, white-nationalist ruse!

The bogus peril was transparently concocted by the neo-Know Nothing president to rally his “blood and soil” electoral base for the midterm elections.

That’s standard, crudely duplicitous procedure for the pathological liar Trump, who has spent years casting doubt on the reality of global warming (a “Chinese hoax”) even as he has built walls to protect his golf courses from rising seas resulting from the climate crisis he has acted as president to exacerbate.

The malicious racist family-separator and Arpaio-pardoner Trump is so used to falsifying fact and canceling reality that he may not even have known he was doing it when he called his and fellow Republicans’ arch-plutocratic, deficit-boosting tax reduction for the wealthy few a “middle-class tax cut” that was going to “cost me a fortune.”

How did he come up the other day with the bit about the people who don disguises to vote multiple times.

Orange Truth Crush is a funny guy. He’s aregular laugh riot. He’s a one-man caravan of canard.

Just ask Frederick Douglass.

“To Tend to This Garden of Democracy”

Then there’s Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, a more elegant and polished kind of liar.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate of Class Rule: Common(s)er Revolt or Common Ruin

September 7, 2018

Climate of Class Rule: Common(s)er Revolt or Common Ruin

Photo Source r. nial bradshaw | CC BY 2.0

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

– Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1848

“A Level of Criminality Almost Hard to Describe”

The great orange dumpster fire Donald J. Trump’s part in the reigning United States media-politics horror show is to distract the populace from the lethal pillaging of the commons behind the scenes. The leading left thinker Noam Chomsky put it very well in an interview last March:

“Trump’s role is to ensure that the media and that public attention are always concentrated on him. So every time you turn on a television set, it’s Trump; open the front page of the newspaper: Trump…. So every day there’s one insane thing after another and then, you know, he makes some crazy lie….and the media looks at it and says “No, [not true]’…But meanwhile he’s onto something else and then you go to that…”

“And while this show is going on in public, in the background the wrecking crew is working…systematically dismantling every aspect of government that works for the benefit of the population. …In the case of global warming, it’s almost indescribable. Not only has the U.S. pulled out – uniquely alone in the world – from the international efforts to do at least something about it. But, beyond that…the Trump Administration is going out of its way to increase the threat. Listen to his State of the Union Address, the only phrase about global climate was to talk about ‘our beautiful clean coal,’ the worst polluter there is…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Corporate Media: the Enemy of the People

August 18, 2018

Corporate Media: the Enemy of the People

I detest the malignantly racist, sexist, narcissistic, and authoritarian pathological liar and bully Donald Trump on many different levels, and I share none of his sick world view, but the corporate media really is, well (to use Trump’s recurrent phrase), “the enemy of the people.”

Here below is an essay I first published (on the venerable radical Website ZNet) in the late summer of 2015. It is a longer version of a talk I gave (with the help of a translator) in Havana, Cuba in April that same year. It was written from a Marxist and international socialist and anti-imperialist perspective and not at all from a Trumpian, white-nationalist standpoint.

It struck me that it might be worth re-publishing this essay (which was written as Obama’s final term was winding down and many of us expected him to be succeeded by the “lying neoliberal warmonger”Hillary Clinton and did not yet take seriously the specter of pre-fascistic Trump presidency) in the light of recent bizarre developments. “Liberal” CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, the Washington Post and much of the rest of the corporate news establishment are standing up against Trump in defense of blood-soaked U.S.-imperial spy-masters, surveillance chiefs, liars, and assassins like former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – and in defense of the supposedly noble imperial project that these and other current and former top U.S. intelligence and military operatives on Herr Trump’s security clearance “Enemies List” have long “served” in pursuit of what CNN and MSNBC talking heads absurdly call (no joke) “speaking truth to power.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump’s Trade Tantrum: On Tipping Points and Authoritarian Peril

June 29, 2018

Trump’s Trade Tantrum: On Tipping Points and Authoritarian Peril

Photo by Graham C99 | CC BY 2.0

The Tangerine Tosser’s triple trade tiff – with China, the European Union, and the United States’ NAFTA partners (Canada and Mexico) – has the potential to spark an American and global economic meltdown. Classic signs of a coming collapse have been evident for some time: wage stagnation for the many alongside skyrocketing wealth for the ever more absurdly opulent few (three of whom now possessbetween them the same net worth as the poorest half of the U.S. populace); colossal accumulated corporate, government, student loan, and credit card debt; rampant surplus and “fictitious” capital devoted to speculative rather than productive investment; capitalist profits far beyond real economic growth; wildly unsustainable stock market values (artificially buoyed by debt and corporate buybacks); the deregulation of financial markets and institutions.

As the astute Goldman Sachs veteran and financial commentator Nomi Prins noted last January, “There will be a tipping point – when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds. Leverage is a patient enemy.”

The next financial “correction” could cut deeper than the last one, “the Great Recession.” That’s because, as Prins argues in her latest book Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, “there is no Plan B” this time. Interest rates can’t fall any further.

Collusionwas written before Trump started making good on his protectionist promises, which could tighten the noose. The more immediate economic blowbacks are clear: the withering of foreign markets for U.S. agricultural exports (thanks to retaliatory foreign tariffs); rising prices (thanks to U.S. tariffs) for capital goods and intermediate inputs that U.S. producers purchase from foreign countries (China especially); the loss of U.S. jobs as corporations that make goods in the U.S. seek to circumvent retaliatory tariffs abroad by shifting production to foreign countries (Harley Davidson recently announced that it has decided to do precisely that).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rotten to the Heart: Authoritarian Chickens Roosting at Home

June 8, 2018

Rotten to the Heart: Authoritarian Chickens Roosting at Home

Photo by T toes | CC BY 2.0

Yes, He’s Awful

Much of what liberals say about Donald Trump and the chilling political moment the Trump presidency represents is true enough.

Trump really is the arch-authoritarian malignant narcissist that liberals say he is. Trump thinks he deserves to rule the nation like an absolute monarch or some ridiculous Banana Republic dictator. He believes he’s above all the law, consistent with Louis XIV’s dictum L’etat, C’est Moi (“the state is me”). The notion that Trump can pardon himself from any crime really is the height of imperial arrogance.

Trump really does value nothing but the advancement of his own wealth and image. There is no person, no principle, no higher loyalty he is not willing to sacrifice on the altar of self.

Trump really is the almost perfect embodiment of venal malevolence that liberals say he is. The idiotic military parade Trump has scheduled for the next Veterans Day is an exercise in proto-fascistic, Mussolini-like imperial-presidential self-adulation.

This racist and sexist beast befouls the nation and world with his ghastly, eco-cidal presence. The sooner he draws his last undeserved breath, the better for all living things (or maybe not: Mike Pence could be worse).

The Authoritarian and Inauthentic Opposition

Fine, but why does this despicable, orange-tinted insult to common human decency occupy the White House? He holds the most powerful office in the world because the Democratic Party has long been and remains what the late liberal-left Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin called the Inauthentic Opposition. “Should Democrats somehow be elected,” Wolin prophesied in early 2008, they would do nothing to “alter significantly the direction of society” or “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. …

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony

May 15, 2018

The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony

Commentators on both right and left bemoan the decline of American global power under Donald Trump, but is that such a bad thing? asks Paul Street in this commentary.

There are good reasons to bemoan the presence of the childish, racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump in the White House. One complaint about Trump that should be held at arm’s-length by anyone on the left, however, is the charge that Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. global power—to the erosion of the United States’ superpower status and the emergence of a more multipolar world.

This criticism of Trump comes from different elite corners. Last October, the leading neoconservative foreign policy intellectual and former George W. Bush administration adviser Eliot Cohen wrote an Atlantic magazine essay titled “How Trump Is Ending the American Era.” Cohen recounted numerous ways in which Trump had reduced “America’s standing and ability to influence global affairs.” He worried that Trump’s presidency would leave “America’s position in the world stunted” and an “America lacking confidence” on the global stage.

But it isn’t just the right wing that writes and speaks in such terms about how Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. hegemony. A recent Time magazine reflection by the liberal commentator Karl Vick (who wrote in strongly supportive terms about the giant January 2017 Women’s March against Trump) frets that that Trump’s “America First” and authoritarian views have the world “looking for leadership elsewhere.”

“Could this be it?” Vick asks. “Might the American Century actually clock out at just 72 years, from 1945 to 2017? No longer than Louis XIV ruled France? Only 36 months more than the Soviet Union lasted, after all that bother?”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Time is Running Out: Who Will Protect Our Wrecked Democracy from the American Oligarchy?

March 21, 2018

Time is Running Out: Who Will Protect Our Wrecked Democracy from the American Oligarchy?

Photo by Joe Schueller | CC BY 2.0

There’s been an interesting debate over the years about the relation between capitalism and democracy, for example, are they even compatible? I won’t be pursuing this because I’d like to discuss a different system – what we could call the “really existing capitalist democracy,” RECD for short, pronounced “wrecked.”

— Noam Chomsky, 2013

It’s incredible. Here we are fifteen months into the horrific, arch-plutocratic right-wing Donald Trump presidency and still the United States (U.S.) has done nothing to protect its elections and its broader political culture from the vicious oligarchs who have subverted U.S. “democracy.”

The 2018 mid-term Congressional elections are only months away. Major party primary races are in full swing right now. Is the nation really going to stand by twiddling its thumbs while more U.S. elections and the nation’s politics are hijacked by kleptocratic interlopers and the treasonous politicos who collude with them? Time is running out!

No, I’m not talking about Russian hackers, schemers, and bots.

Sorry, this isn’t MSDNC, I mean MSNBC.

I’m talking about something monumentally more powerful than Russia when it comes to influencing U.S. politics and policy. I’m referring to the U.S. oligarchs and their highly-placed agents and allies, who make sure that there is no “great [U.S.-of] American democracy” for Russia to subvert.

“Beyond Plutocracy”: The Permanent Political Class (PPC)

Just what grand U.S. model of American popular self-rule and sovereignty is there for Russia to undermine?

It doesn’t exist.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Someone Tell a Reporter: the Rich are Destroying the Earth

March 2, 2018

Someone Tell a Reporter: the Rich are Destroying the Earth

“I Said Why? They Said They Didn’t Know”

Let history record that on Wednesday, September 6^th, 2017, 14 days after climate change-fueled Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas and 4 days before Hurricane Irma hit southern Florida, the climate-denying President of the United States Donald Trump went to North Dakota to deliver a “tax reform” speech before hundreds of workers and managers at a major oil refinery. The president made comments so senseless and stupid that one must read them twice to believe they were uttered:

“I…want to tell the people of North Dakota and the Western states who are feeling the pain of the devastating drought that we are with you 100 percent — 100 percent. (Applause.) And I’ve been in close touch, numerous times, with our Secretary of Agriculture, who is doing a fantastic job, Sonny Perdue, who has been working with your governor and your delegation to help provide relief. And we’re doing everything we can, but you have a pretty serious drought. I just said to the governor, I didn’t know you had droughts this far north. Guess what? You have them. But we’re working hard on it and it’ll disappear. It will all go away.”

Then Trump got into the real eco-cidal meat of the matter – the de-regulation of energy and the lifting of restrictions on fossil fuel extraction and burning:

“We’re getting rid of one job-killing regulation after another. We’ve lifted the restrictions on shale oil. We’ve lifted those restrictions on energy of all types. We’re putting our miners back to work. We’ve cancelled restrictions on oil and natural gas. We’ve ended the EPA intrusion into your jobs and into your lives. (Applause.) And we’re refocusing the EPA on its core mission: clean air and clean water. (Applause.).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Burning Earth Bears Witness in California

December 9, 2017

The Burning Earth Bears Witness in California

Photo by Glenn Beltz | CC by 2.0

Watching the first ten minutes of the “Public” (Petroleum and/or Pentagon?) Broadcasting System (“P”BS)’s NewsHour two nights ago, I was overcome by a sense of the surreal. The first news item was the Insane Clown President’s (ICP) idiotic (if base-pleasing) announcement that the U.S. embassy in Israel will at some point be moved from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. NewsHour host and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Judy Woodruff announced a special segment on this story later in the broadcast.

The next story was the coming likely resignation of the centrist corporate-Democratic Party pain-in-the-ass Al Franken from the U.S. Senate in response to cascading allegations of sexual harassment and weirdness. That too was to receive a special segment, the CFR’s Woodruff assured viewers.

Then came a brief yet hair-raising report showing homes burning and enflamed mountains looming over motorists in southern California, just outside Los Angeles. The wildfire footage was breathtakingly dystopian.

There was no special segment scheduled for the pre-apocalyptic California wildfires, which were taking down mansions in opulent Bel Air and forcing tens of thousands to evacuate.

How, I wondered, was this not the top story?

A correspondent writes me from Central California today (Thursday morning):

‘Climate apocalypse’ is accurate. I live on California’s central coast. Ojai and Ventura surrounded by fires. Carpenteria being evacuated. Lompoc and Santa Barbara covered in ash. White ash floating everywhere in central California.”

In The New York Times today:

Southern California is fighting a renewed onslaught from the wildfires menacing greater Los Angeles, with emergency crews contending with brisk winds, steep terrain and fatigue from days of relentless work.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Study History?

May 7, 2017

Why Study History?

As liberal Democrats for the most part, United States historians have no doubt been having a field day with Donald Trump’s recently reported clueless comments on United States history. The president’s moronic take on the nation’s past was front-page news last Tuesday in liberals’ and academics’ favorite newspaper, The New York Times. Times reporters Peter Baker and Jonah Engel Bromwich told readers about Trump’s historical idiocy, seen in the president’s:

+ Suggestion that Andrew Jackson had been “really angry”about the Civil War, which did not break out until 16 years after his death.

+ Assertion that the Civil War could have been prevented by smart policymakers who should have just gotten together and cut a deal.

+ Apparent belief that the great 19^th century Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass is still alive.

+ Apparent surprise at learning that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.

+ Putting up a golf course plaque marking a Civil War battle that never happened.

The Times quoted Princeton “presidential historian” Julian E. Zelizer, who thinks that “Presidents should have some better sense of the nation’s history as they become part of it.”

Historian Paul Starobin told the Times that “Trump seems almost uniquely ill equipped to process history, whether because of his lack of empathy, his allergy to complexity, or his tendency to keep distant from anything that might carry the whiff of defeat…History is not tidy. Trump likes tidy. He likes slogans. History doesn’t offer any.”

So, yes, Trump is a dummy about American history, too. I could almost hear the sneers and chuckles across the faculty rooms in academic history departments from coast to coast.

United States of Amnesia

Great, but once they’re done laughing at Dunce Cap Donald, the nation’s academic historians might want to reflect on the broader and unsettling historical ignorance that stalks the United States – and their own roles in enabling it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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