Tag Archives: ecology

Madagascar needs special protection from capitalist destruction

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Madagascar is a special part of the world, and its ecological destruction is going to mean the extinction of life for many species if the world continues to allow that to happen. Instead of spending all that money on war, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the US and Western European countries would ante up some with those war monies and use them to help the poverty stricken country of Madagascar begin to protect some of the world’s most precious habitat. Nature being preserved is much more important that the US government’s pretend ‘war on terror, which actually is producing more terrorism than eliminating terrorism being used as political tactic. The lemurs certainly would appreciate it if they got some help! Lemurs sliding towards extinction.

What do ‘we’ stand for?

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An ‘Anonymous’ reader says that he/ she has had trouble figuring out just what Not My Tribe writers seem to be for. I personally find that hard to believe since we all the time have already patiently explained most of what we support and don’t support, yet here we aim to please so I will briefly list out a few items that are generally what I, at least, am for.

Internationalism, instead of US nationalism. Peace, instead of US militarism. Justice for all, instead of only justice bought by the dollar for the rich and denied to the poor. Respect for all cultures, nationalities, sexual orientations, and for both sexes and the poor… not disrespect for those who are deemed inferior by the monied classes. Democracy, not dictatorship of the business community over the working classes. Ecology, not capitalist pillage of the environment and capitalist over production of trash not really needed to live decent and fulfilled lives. Jobs for all guaranteed with decent incomes, not constant economic insecurity for most people on the planet. Decent medical care and educational systems, not medicine for profit making and schools that indoctrinate and create ignorance.

Let’s stop here, shall we, Anonymous? So you have called us negative and hateful more than a few times. What is it about the above political agendas you actually disagree with and why?

Shouldn’t Mother Nature be valued and not just raped by Big Business?

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It’s close to Mother Nature Day and the following is a brief Marxist answer by John Bellamy Foster to this question about the corporate value of nature under a capitalist world economy controlled by international corporations.

‘The claim that Marx believed that nature was a “free gift” to humanity is a statement that one hears over and over, but is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. All the classical economists — Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Say, J.S. Mill, Marx — referred explicitly to nature as a “free gift.” It was part of classical economics and was inherited by neoclassical economics. Neoclassical economists, even mainstream environmental economists, still include this same notion in their textbooks.
 
Marx, however, was distinctive in that he was writing not about economic laws in general but about the laws of motion of capitalism as a historically specific system, and from a critical standpoint. He therefore argued, quite correctly, that nature was treated as a “free gift” FOR CAPITAL. Its non-valuation was built into capitalism’s law of value. He argued that while under capitalism only labor produced (exchange) value, that this merely reflected the distorted character of the system, since nature, he insisted, was just as much a source of real wealth (use values) as was labor.’

One can read more from this interesting interview with John Bellamy Foster here @ The Ecology of Socialism.

What, are the Chinese trying to mimic ALL our energy-sector screwups?

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So they matched our Corporate Mining Accidents-waiting-to-happen-and-guess-what-they-do with similar ones by similar causes and similar results, and using Imported American industry analysts who also work for BP, Exxon Mobil, Massey Energy, The Peabody, etc…
Now, they’ve got a BP-esque Oil Spill in the Yellow Sea. Is it caused by their “socialist” supposedly publicly owned Nationalized Oil industry, now brought to its dying knees by the New Economy Capitalist Oil industry? Either one, of course, run under the supervision of the American and British Oil well, refinery and shipping Industry Experts who also work for BP, Exxon-Mobil, Massey Energy…
The Rule of Three seems to have been pretty damned consistent in all of these lately, too, so maybe we can expect the Fully Capitalized Russian Oil Slick on the (deepwater) horizon?

But not only are the Oil and Mineral extraction scams “safe as safe can be” they’re also supposed to be vital for the survival of our economy.

I always considered the massive food shortages that would be caused by the destruction of the ecology either directly through toxic pollution or “indirectly” through Carbon Dioxide, and artificially manipulated Ecologies using chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides… I always thought that was kind of sort of like, you know, similar to NON Survival. I would muse and wonder who writes the Energy Company propaganda but then, it’s an in-house thing. They might farm out the spewing of such propaganda to Fox and AP and CNN etc… but the in-house writers produce the scripts the “independent” media are paid to mouth for them.

The Governors of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida…

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Are taking sides with the Oil industry above all others. What a surprise.
The Oil companies can afford to eat the loss from a moratorium. Far better than WE can afford to eat oil. If they’re so damned worried about “their” workers they should have compensated them better, provided them with better workplace safety and had a contingency plan for disasters. As it stands now, they’ve been taking the Corporate Welfare and putting it into the pockets of their major shareholders and their political servants. If they’re worried about the lost wages of “their” workers, dip into some of that Corporate Welfare money and compensate “their” workers. Unless and until they do, they have no business bitching about anything.
We, The People have been subsidizing the destruction of the water WE drink, OUR air, OUR food, for far too long and it’s time the Corporate BigPigs put something back. The 5% at the top of the income scale, the Parasite Class, have more money than ALL the Working Class have combined.

BP spends Billion Pounds advertising how much good they’re doing.

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I saw the commercial once today already. Just that one instance on every for-profit network in America must have cost a pretty Billion.
I didn’t time it, perhaps if I looked it up on youtube or BBC? But there’s not much point. It was much longer than your usual commercial. A thirty second slot at the Super Bowl costs $3 million on to be broadcast one time on one network. Granted that’s in an exceptional circumstance. Typically, more people tune in to the Super Dooper Incredible Bowl to watch grown men hit each other and throw a ball around, than the number who would watch an inauguration or a state funeral of any president or ex-president.
“News Stories” are considered to be in-depth if they last a whole minute. So the jackass CEO of BP is promoting through a pictorial essay a wondrous scene where BP is sponsoring all these sharply dressed volunteers in pristine clothing (Yeah, right! you go traipsing through any corner of a bayou for ten minutes and see how clean and photogenic your clothes and face are going to be) setting booms, giving birds a bath, and I would swear to the Lord God who made us all that some of those pictures of grateful animals being rescued were recycled from other oil spills.

And not putting in images of those far more numerous animals that can’t be saved. Telling us to Be Patient, Be Positive, Be Polite, Be Proud, Better Pray, (ahem)

And no mention of the idea that BP is fighting not to minimize the ecological damage, but to keep their damned oil well going. Not to plug it, but to fix it so they can go merrily along syphoning oil from extremely dangerous places, syphoning money from everywhere, and those places that won’t let them name their own extremely small fees for pumping the oil out from under the third world sands of the Local Political Entity, pumping the “Defense” departments of every NATO country especially ours for Corporate Welfare in the form of Murder, Threats of Murder, and Endless Occupations, using the blood and money of the “disposable people”, those of us they only pander to in commercials like the current one, then relegating us to anonymity and irrelevance once they get their nasty Capitalo-Fascist way AGAIN.

I might be wrong, but God-Damn if I’d apologize for overstretching, I’m pretty sure this commercial is being locally tailored for other nations as well. The closest the Capitalo-Fascists at BP and the boardrooms of all their fellow travellers in the Oil and Coal and Defense and other shadow-government Corporations have ever gotten to giving a shit about the opinions of the people they’re robbing. And Killing.

They’re not just killing the animals and plants in the Gulf and everywhere else they’ll have an Oopsie! Moment.

The realization is growing that the oceans they’re casually discarding for their profit and nobody else’s, are an irreplaceable part of our food supply. As hough our species actually owned the food chain. Then there’s the breathable air and the rapidly already changing climate. The climate that brings us water for our other food supplies and air for us to breathe. Gone or Going Fast.

They’re paying buffoons to deny their role in Global Warming even as they’re making often hostile and warlike claims to the new oilfields they’ll gain by the melting of the polar ice cap.

We’ve fucked up the ecosystem so badly that we’ll get a bonus chance to do it again

And to get to that point, they’ve gone beyond a normal desire for self preservation, to embracing Self Destruction. It would be impossible for people with their resources, including engineers and other scientists, to NOT realize that they, too, will be taken out when they destroy the Earth. It wouldn’t Be Possible for them to actually believe the bullshit they’ve paid the low-life Liars at Fox News to propagate for them.

It could be a turning point, maybe. Exxon Valdez could have been a turning point. The stock market crashes each could have been a turning point. The non-existence of WMDs in the Oil Corporation Warz for Profitz could have been a turning point.

BP, Meet Agatha

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As in, the first named storm of the season. So far, 12 killed in Guatemala. Oh, and we were duly informed that the Top Kill maneuver failed. If it’s any consolation to us they didn’t wait two weeks to tell us that. A bit of further consolation, such as it is, this poisoning of the ocean has the potential to end America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. NATO as a whole, too, because the rest of the NATO countries are facing budget crisis and crises, the first shared and the second individual, country by country case by case. The core of it isn’t socialized medicine or public welfare programs. The core of it is NATO itself, with the NATO mission of buying more expensive equipment, hiring more soldiers and not fighting one single God-Damn war that isn’t strictly for the benefit of the Wealthiest individuals on the planet. No wars of Defense, no wars for Freedom, or Nation Building, all that is window dressing, sham, frosting on a cake that’s baked from the mortal remains of the Imperialist Manifesto. A manifesto that’s written in not one document, nor book… but the death records of hundreds of millions of people, civilian, military, or militant, the ones described in 1916 as “The Great Fallen”.

The Great Fallen was made a slogan to memorialize one particular battle, that was neither at the beginning nor the end of the Imperial Meat Grinder. It counts only those fallen by gunfire in pitched battle. Not those killed by the plagues unleashed, one after another, the famines, also known as “Recessions, Depressions” and (my personal favorite, that used by the richest themselves) “Bubbles and Adjustments.” Oh, the market is going through one of it’s periodic correction cycles.
That’s great news for those who have vast wealth, but for the people who put that vast wealth in their pockets, it’s a tragedy reduced to numbers and statistics.

Now, we come to a point in history where there’s a perfect storm. An economy that’s been kicked out from under the entire world, the ecology that underpinned it so mangled and twisted it would be unrecognizable to Audubon, the greedy quest for More Money has now trashed one of the last places on Earth that HAD a chance to be redeemed.

Those who 6 weeks ago were screaming that the new restrictions to try to save that very niche of the environment would “put an end to sport fishing in the gulf”… and condemning every member of the government who even dared to use the words Environmental or Ecology in policy statements, no similar level of vilification for Their Corporate Masters now that their Corporate Masters have blown off not just sport fishing, but Commercial Fishing, and in a not surprising outcome, might kill or alter the balance of algae in the ocean that produces oxygen. Oxygen which is an anti-greenhouse gas. People who breathe regularly might recognize the term Oxygen as well. Less Oxygen, perhaps more Methane from the decaying remains of life in what used to be a living segment of the ocean, just another “Adjustment”. More numbers to add to The Great Fallen.

And to add to the Perfect Storm, starting with one actual storm named Agatha.

BBC Headline: BP to decide

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BP to make decision on ‘top kill’ plan to stem oil leak uhh… Yeah. Like they’re in a position to dictate terms. If they really ARE in a position to dictate terms then we, the people of the world, are well and truly screwed. (I was going to say “fucked” but then that would be potty mouth) I realize that “The Crown” has a large investment in BP as well as the BBC. They also have a large investment in the continuing occupation and attempted subjugation of Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Gaza and coming soon to a War Theatre near you, Iran. The term “calling the shots” almost applies, it’s really an artillery term for the person who looks to see where the shells have hit and tells the cannoneers, essentially firing blind from their perspective (deaf, too) to adjust the angles of the gun-barrels to hit the targets more precisely. The “targets” being “Human Beings” a point that I compel myself to make at every opportunity.
But who gets to “call the shots”?

Either side could logically use “OUR Troops” as pawns in this as easily as they use them as Pawns in the War. Which, incidentally, is being fought on behalf of (mostly) the Oil Industry. It wouldn’t bother me overmuch if the Emissaries of The Crown (Queen Bess2, speaking on behalf of British subjects) get all huffy and threaten to pull their part of NATO out of the Occupation. Not that they would do it any more than the behind-the-curtain puppetmasters in Washing Tundy Sea would. Plugging the hole is what needed to be done no later than a month and a half ago, before the well blew up. BP has been allowed to muck about pretending to try to stop the Killer Well but on their terms, which simply were that they would keep the bastard in production. Screw that.

They need to call it a loss. The U.S. government needs to tell them “NO” to several issues, and never mind the Killer Wails that will come up from the mouths of the British and from the BP supporters here in America.
No, you can’t salvage the production of the well.
No, you can’t drill there again, ever.
No, you can’t keep your OTHER poison dispensaries working in OUR waters, the waters that really support the entire life-support Ecosystem of the planet, thus belong to Every Son or Daughter of Adam on the face of Earth.
You no likey, we no givey damn you no likey.

They’ve already got the Corporate Suck Morons in the Tea Party movement and their sponsors and organizers at Fox News uptight about raising the arbitrary cap on liabilities given to corporations. “Yes, we can do trillions of dollars worth of damage but our liability is limited at less than a tenth of a percent of that” $750 million, was it, or did I mentally add a digit? Either way it’s obscenity.

This arrogant attitude BP and The Crown are assuming is like a declaration of war. Not against their Corporate Partners in Washington, or indeed against the people of the United States. It’s against the people of the entire World.

Can’t Trust Goobers, part 2: Lettuce Spray

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Another outbreak of e-coli in lettuce traced so far back to farms in Arizona.
This is very nearly the scenario from summer before last, with tomatoes and Jalapeño peppers. That was blamed on Illegal Aliens pooping in the fields. Had to be “illegals” you know, because American Citizens, not only doesn’t our shit stink, it’s impossible for it to be toxic as well. Which segues neatly into the Other, More Likely, scenario:
in the dry southwest most of the arable land and with irrigation, is near the cities, for one reason only. Several in fact, but WATER is king in the desert. Since every available supply of water has more human habitations around it than it can adequately support, the cause of e-coli and other Intestinal Nasties probably would be the Deregulated, Privatized, “free” Market Sewage Treatment measures in the neighboring townships.

Naaahhhh… couldn’t be thousands or hundreds of thousands of people pooping through a really shoddy sewage treatment system, it has to be maybe a hundred seasonal farm workers pooping in the fields. Even though the “treated and sanitized” water would be sold to the highest bidder.

As to do the farms treat “their” workers like a big stinky pile of poo, and don’t provide facilities or adequate drinking water, well, some do and some don’t. I mean, how DARE those Washing Tundy Sea liberals tell us how to run our farms and treat OUR wetbacks?

Between Iraq and a Hard Place, Slave Labor + Corporate Welfare = Warfare

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Since all available national resources are being called in to fight what’s the worst unnatural disaster and getting worse, to smite us in a long while, it pays to recognize one huge fact. The equally Corporate Welfare To The Oil Industry wars against Afghan and Iraqi people (for Corporate Profit-not “freedom”) and the beneficiaries of this hastily pulled in Public Largesse, an Oil Corporation, BP, which presumably has more corporate money available than the entire U.S. Government does, is “big-assing” us on the subject of actually having to eventually repay the U.S. and State governments…

Like Exxon-Valdez being blamed on the actions of one employee, who was imprisoned, and saddled further with a debt that’s in the hundred billion dollar range, leaving the Creditors to twist in the wind (Exxon to fishermen: don’t blame us, we ain’t paying you a thing, F.O.A.D.)

It pays, however little, to realize that the main reason for the lack of Federal Funding is the Corporate Welfare given to several of the Largest and Wealthiest entities in THE FRACKIN’ WORLD, MON!!! including the very expensive for actual taxpaying citizens, as opposed to Tax-Dodging Corporate “citizens”, Wars of Conquest which benefit exactly Whom? Why, the same Oil Companies, like BP, who are expecting the underfunded Federal Government to clean up their little oopsie. And are already filing briefs countering the expected bill coming their way.

How very DARE those Peasants demand that we pay for the damage we do?

They’re also deploying Texas and Louisiana Inmate Unpaid Slave Laborers to fight the damage. Sweet, eh? The ultimate use of Slavery for the benefit of the Ultimate Slave Corporations. If there’s any payment made to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, or the Louisiana counterparts, the Slaves ain’t gonna get any of it, not an extra bean on their plates. Same as always.

Happy Earth day, to us!

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Four decades in the making, and at the FIRST Earth Day suggestions were made to stop destroying Earth. Which, since any habitable Other Planet is decades in the future, and Earth happens to be our ONLY life support mechanism until then, and the destruction could kill Earth long before then…

At the First Earth Day, Public Transportation was touted. Since then, the SUV has taken over the roads, the roads have been expanded, still not enogh to satiate the Single Passenger Car Monster. The Oil and Coal industry fight very hard against public transportation, call it “socialism”.

There’s a growing industry in Solar Power, which the Oil and Coal industries, and the automakers, sick their TeaBag attack dogs on any possibility of Government assistance in the advancement of the technology. While and at the time lining up every budget cycle, or as they call it “Feeding Time”, sticking their fat corporate snouts in the Welfare Trough.

Disposable packaging was a newer technology, only a few decades old. Now that has mushroomed, (mushroom is a good image, it’s the fruiting carpophore of Mold, if you will: the Flower of Decay) as have Disposable Everything.

Earth might have given herself a gift in the form of increased vulcanism. Since “our” political leaders can’t pull themselves away from the Corporate Welfare Trough or grow any kind of Spinal Fortitude to stop the Oil and Automobile and Disposable Toxins industries from killing our planet, at least it will slow down Global Warming. Maybe long enough for them to get their fat porky Collective Arse in gear.

Mama Nature is doing for us what we should have been not-too-damn-greedy to do for ourselves.Not being a killjoy, I hope,

We do need to inject a LOT of righteous anger into the discussions today. Not Aggressive Violent Whiny Tantrums like the Tea-Bags throw, but a similar level of energy.

Remind the “conservatives” that the root of their name is “conserve”. Not, you know, wasting everything in a hedonistic orgy of greed.

The ecology is the very root of our economy.

Fell not one more forest tree!

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old-growth-forests-1620-1990
OLD GROWTH FORESTS. Sure we need lumber but we now need forests yet more. Two hundred years of industrial exploitation of the planet and now most of the forests are gone, and what remains are scraggly, sickly remnants that are not supportive of any remaining natural wildlife. Still, the slaughterhouse ‘forestry’ approach continues to bulldoze them down. The goal?

Well there is no goal, no sanity, no intelligence in all this. The only desire is that the forestry companies be allowed to do their final cash out on the Nature that hangs on. Ecologist GEORGE WUERTHNER in his comments Who Will Speak for the Forests? elaborates on this sad situation and the blindness of many who continue to advocate for what they consider to be scientific approach to the remaining pockets of semi Nature that still exist.

There are alternatives since very little actually has to be built out of wood. That hard wood floor I now walk on could have been built out of other materials. That house could have used something other than wood for its structure. That toilet paper you (and i guess me too) wipe your ass on could have come from something other than wood products. That idiotic newspaper you have in your hands, just didn’t need to be so full of utter trash and so over sized. It takes a personal commitment on your part to not support an economic system built on the total wasting of Nature for the System to be changed. Where is that commitment?

Shell Oil’s Green shell game

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shell gameShell Oil claims to be Green, Green, Green! Corporate Green is more like it though, yet that did not stop the oil company from running advertisements in recent years that included a picture of an oil refinery, with chimneys producing flowers and a headline that read “Don’t throw anything away — there is no away”.

See Shell Recycling Adverts “Misleading” -Watchdog about that nonsense.

But there is yet more to the Shell Oil Green Shell game it is playing with the public. Let’s visit Nigeria where Shell Oil is a big player in energy production there , shall we? There we find Shell Oil wasting billions upon billions of dollars of the world’s precious and declining energy supplies, all in a way that brings back personal memories of Mobil Exxon for me!

My dad worked for Mobil Oil and living in Texas as a kid, I remember all those gas flares from the refineries and oil fields. Nigeria’s gas profits ‘up in smoke’ Yep! In Nigeria Shell Oil has gas flares going big time, all without seemingly much of a care in the world about it, too. It’s a Hell of a way to be playing ‘Green’ company, is it not?

Shell Oil is almost as Green as the US military is! Hey, the two of them go together even! Shell Oil and the Pentagon both playing a shell game with the public about supposedly being Green! Don’t buy it. Don’t buy any of the corporate wave of pretending to be Green. They just simply or not and never will be either. And neither will the Pentagon ever be Green either…

Dying Planet

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Even as the corporate media brags about how our ‘civilization’ can now visualize planets in other solar systems, the real news is at home on our Dying Planet. butterfly Even the bugs are dying off, along with the mammals, fish, plants, and everything. Insecticide! An ecological disaster that will affect us all. Nobody seems much to care as we have a society that has now embraced suicide as norm. And everybody says they are so happy!

A Sustainable No Growth Society needed immediately

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mother natureWe are told that the only way out of economic collapse is to restart ‘the economy’, and without that we face a grave crisis. But isn’t that just plain wrong? To restart ‘the economy’ is to restart the destructiveness to Nature, or rather to just renew it. Actually, what is needed to prevent economic collapse and the Death of Life on Planet Earth is to begin a Sustainable No Growth Society immediately.

I think that all of us instinctively know that this is absolutely true, but we have no leading societal institution advocating such so we think that it is nothing more than a Utopian dream of sorts to want the Return of Nature. We then pinch ourselves and fall back asleep once again.

How sad to have such little self confidence, is it not? Our capitalists hate Nature and only want to use it to make personal profits., and they simply do not care about the costs to all of us. They consider themselves the great pragmatists, and so seemingly do the great mass of the followers of The Rich.

Capitalism needs constant growth of Nature’s destruction to survive. People need Nature to survive. Nature needs people against Capitalistic growth to have a chance. What’s your response to Nature’s needs?

We are just wiping out primates

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Ernest Cline One of the most disturbing things about lifestyle vegetarians and the group PETA is that they consistently distract people from paying attention to the real dangers to animals on this planet. They want to fight about whether one should have a hamburger or not and often engage in tactics that are just plain stupid.

They consistently seem to have a fetish about ‘liberating’ animals from cages, for just one example. It puts them in the news but not in a great way when they go about ‘freeing’ other people’s animals. I don’t like animal abuse by science either, but that is not the main threat facing animal life on this planet.

And just several weeks ago, local animal rights people were out in front of the KFC on Nevada doing their parade as big chickens! Really now, I just don’t think they are going to move people on the plight of chickens in this cruel hard world we live in. Will they show up at Petco and Petsmart some time soon to protest the mistreatment of fish there? Oh the horrors of selling feeder fish!

Meanwhile, there hardly is any animal rights movement at all to stop the animalcide of multiple species around the planet. The movement to protect natural areas where these animal species reside is quite separate from the PETA gang’s general activities. It is the Environmental Movement that does this work and not the animal rights gang.

The simple fact of the matter, is that if people are treated right on this planet, then so will animals as a whole. It doesn’t really do to single out the treatment of animals as the big issue above all else, it just makes one look rather silly. However that is not the case in regards to animalcide. When animal and plant biodiversity is destroyed, then all plants, animals, humans, are threatened at one and the same time.

At the top of our list of issues involving animals has to be the fact that Primates ‘face extinction crisis’. We are definitely talking about dangers to ourselves here and animal rights activists would do themselves and animals a favor by concentrating on this sort of major issue, rather than the chickens at KFC or the primates in cages over at the University’s labs. They would do us all right by doing that, and by stopping being media hounds through silly and poorly thought out activism.

American government and business refuse to take any measures to conserve energy

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All American businesses are trying to pose themselves as being respecters of the environment, energy efficient, and Green, and so is the Federal Government and Pentagon, too. However, even a cursory examination of policies by these organizations show that American government and businesses, at all levels, simply refuse to take any major measures to reduce energy consumption by our country.

Big Business controls government in our country, which can scarcely be considered a democracy due to this business control. We are a corporate plutocracy instead. So, at this time, it is really in corporate hands to control major government policy regarding energy use. What are the needed measures in this country to reduce energy use? These measures are never mentioned or talked about, simply because Big Business and corporate Big government do not want to implement them.

To reduce energy use in the future, government would have to take major steps to change previous and current urban planning and transportation policies. A federal zoning policy would have to be instituted that would make it impossible to stretch out construction of our cities over huge expanses of land as they are stretched out now. Also, measures would have to be taken to push back our overly extended cities into more manageable arenas of human activity. As we can see, corporate government has no plans to do any of this, even though doing it is necessary to reduce energy use.

Too much energy is used in getting people to work, and allowing them to try to escape our ugly cities. Many of our cities are quite frankly pure hell to live in. There is little escape from noise pollution, few clean public spaces of any real beauty, and a boring monotony in our public space. Our cities are making people ill, and most try to escape the cities as much as they can afford. That uses up a lot of fuel.

Simply investing in a really functioning public transit around our country would take a tremendous federal commitment to change the energy inefficient system of public transport we are presently saddled with. There currently are ZERO signs that any of big business and government agencies at almost all levels see any need to change their behaviors, and hence ours. There is nothing on the books other than continuing to fund huge amounts of pavement stretching into infinity.

This is not the time (nor do I have the time now) to discuss the many ways that energy policy must be redirected. Simply enough to just say that American government and Big Business, contrary to how they project themselves in their propaganda, are not interested in taking any measures to conserve energy use in a real manner. They are lying to us when thy talk about being Green. They are ignoring our needs, and are destroying the word for future generations all because they simply want to keep making money in the same old manners they have grown accustomed to. To reduce energy use, our cities must be made into livable places, which most are not.

The Longest Walk is in DC this weekend

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THE LONGEST WALK has reached Washington DC after successfully completing its continent-wide demonstration in favor of Native American rights. The press has largely ignored this event even as they wrote about how the Canadian government had issued an official apology to its own Native American peoples for the injustices done to them. We need to take drastic action to stop destroying their lands. We are doing too little too late.
Longest Walk SF-DC 2008

Worldwide Transportation Strikes are the first signs of an economic earthquake ahead

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All around the planet the working class is beginning to stir once again in mass. What is driving this awakening is the effects of rising gasoline prices, as workers engaged in transport feel the first crunch of declining world supplies of petroleum.

Taxis drivers, bus drivers, truckers cannot keep charging the same rates for their services as their costs for gasoline shoot sky high. Security tightened as fuel protests turn violent And the general public is beginning to panic as they see basic consumer goods become too costly and out of reach.

Let’s face it, much of capitalist production is extremely inefficient, wasteful, and wrongly directed. Now, the world will begin to pay the true price for capitalism’s destruction of nature’s reserves of oil, clean water, and fertile agricultural soil . As a result, all that seemed so timeless and stable in our world is crumbling today into the sands of time.

How are we to get around without the petroleum the oil firms got us addicted to? World society now looks like a heroin addict who’s lost his supply. Look out on our stretched to the limit US suburbs. Everything is built wrong. Ouch!

Are they leaping from buildings yet? It’s time to pay the piper…

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Here in Colorado, watching the world economic meltdown is a little like watching a horrible storm coming our way. We see the terrible whether predictions on TV and in the paper, but it has yet to truly hit us and our neighbors still… Wall St. braces for thousands of pink slips But down on Wall Street, many fine paying jobs are going down as the billionaires jockey for position to profit off the misery and the inevitable fallout coming from the eating of little fish by the bigger.

Are they leaping from the top stories of the Manhattan sky scrapers yet? The world hunger riots have already begun, as have the resource wars. This time is different though. There is less and less of nature to loot, so this is not just a downturn of the normal capitalist business cycle. Planet Earth is in a big mess.

We sat around twiddling our thumbs too long while the big boys ran all over the world. There is a big price to pay for having played stupid so long. It’s coming time to pay the piper. Good bye ’50s forever.

Food riots, economic sustainability, and the historical economic rate of growth

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foodAs the world moves toward recession/ depression, dragged down by the bursting US bubble economy, food riots are beginning to occur in multiple locales around the planet. The inflation rate in 2007 for food staple prices has been around 40%. See WFP food aid costs up “dramatically” in past weeks for the figure. The world population is currently growing at something less than 2% per year.

The annual world population growth rate reached its peak in the late 1960s, when it was at 2% and above. The rate of increase has therefore almost halved since its peak of 2.19 percent, which was reached in 1963, to the current 1.15%.

The annual population growth rate is currently declining and is projected to continue to decline in the coming years, but the pace of the future change is uncertain (1). Currently, it is estimated that it will become less than 1% by 2020 and less than 0.5% by 2050.

See world meter population information from where these percentage figures were copied.

So what is the historical capitalist economic rate of growth? That is the rate of growth needed for capitalism to not go into an economic down spin, and that necessary percent of growth is considered to be about 3% by most economists.

Note that this rate of growth needed in GDP is actually higher than the rate of population growth. In other words, even without a growth in world population capitalism needs to continually increase production to maintain the numbers of jobs given to the workers, or employment of them. However, it is this increasing production of goods (most of them quite unnecessary goods) that is decimating the ecology of the planet, and not mere population growth alone.

What we have is a world economy that is not feeding the world’s population adequately, is not maintaining the world’s ecological stability, not providing employment security, and yet is still expanding, which without that expansion in production of goods it would go into an economic crisis of increased world unemployment!

When rates of annual capitalist expansion of GDP go below the average annual rate of economic growth by capitalism, that is called an economic depression, and leads to world political instability, such as we had in the ’30s. That is the ebb in the capitalist business cycle, as opposed to the peak.

The increasing number of riots and upheaval around the world due to the rising world food prices, is simply the first signs that capitalist economic activity is not meeting major human needs once again.

Do you even feel secure right here in the US? Enough said then. The capitalist business has you in its clutches, and in fact, has us all in its clutches as it tears the planet’s ecology apart. It would be impossible to make this monster economically sustainable. It just isn’t. And that’s no matter how many solar panels Fort Carson might install, or ‘green’ companies you might invest in.

Resource Wars of the future and now

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Why is it that none of the US and its power allies in Western Europe want to get out of their occupation of Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan, and even are planning to extend the fighting into more and more countries? Who are the true enemies as seen by the US rulers? Is it just Iraq and Afghanistan who are the principals involved from the point of view of the Rumsfields, Rices, Bushes, and Cheneys, not to mention the Obamas, Clintons, Gores, and Carters? What is the true reason for this fighting?

Many reasons have been offered up, including saving us from WOMD, bringing democracy to the Arab world, and liberating women, amongst others. Critics of the fighting, tend to say that the reason is to bring a police state to America, and to build up the companies of the military-industrial complex, who are always looking to max out their profits. I find none of the reasons just listed thoroughly convincing by themselves, though ordinary Americans have found all of these reasons to be in effect to some degree or other.

Most of the commentary about these wars centers on Iraq, and to a lesser degree Afghanistan. But there is a much wider field of combat that is mostly absolutely neglected by our intellectuals and press, since they cannot seem to bring themselves to see the war in other areas that is underway. Occasionally, some tidbit of news drops forth from the press in regard to Pakistan, Somalia, Gaze, and Lebanon, but these places are mere min or extensions of the Iraqi conflict in the minds of Americans. However, the elite think tanks and the Pentagon see much of this conflict quite differently than the Average Hometown Joe and Average Hometown Jane, and the talking heads that dish out the constant flood of misinformation about everything.

Believe it or not, but the ruling powers that run our European and assorted English speaking countries are worried about the ecology of Planet Earth. In short, they simply do not see enough to go around in the years ahead, and like the selfish thugs that the rich are, there is no plan to attack this problem with a shared vision that includes the lower classes, as well as themselves. Surprised?

When the rich look on a map, they see billions upon billions of lower class rabble that may get increasingly out of hand, as world resources begin to diminish. They see it better to grab 100% control now, than to wait until their response is purely defensive (from their point of view). Many of ‘the rabble’ actually habitat ares that have many of the scarce resources the rich of the planet hope to grab control over. They live in China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, and Pakistan to name just a few of the countries that are ‘loose’ from the point of view of the US government.

Two countries stand out amongst this group of countries with huge populations, for the nuclear weapons they still have from when they were ruled by Marxist-Leninist oriented leaderships. Those 2 countries are China and Russia, who now are impoverished (for the average citizen living inside their borders) capitalist societies. The US is the principle market population for world sales, and does not want to give up this position at all. But it is if current trends continue without any military conflict being forced on China and Russia by the US.

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are an opening battle in a world wide Resource War, that the Powers running it think will go on for a 100 years PLUS. They have a rational viewpoint of where they are from their point of view, and it is crazy to oppose them as they see it. It is for all of us to decide who is crazy and who is not?