Here at esnl, we regard the Ron Cobb as the greatest editorial cartoonist of the 20th Century. We first encountered his unique style a razor-sharp insight in the late Los Angeles Free Press on moving to California in the fall of 1967. If the mark of a great artist is a body or work transcending time and place, he certainly made his mark, as exemplified in the timely offering for nearly 60 years ago:
What if the current, and global, wave of protests of Israel’s slaughter of the innocents in Palestine is a symptom of something deeper, a systemic malaise afflicting the West’s<
Consider the following from Gareth Fearn, a British academic whose research includes a deep focus on the politics of of austerity and the transition to cleaner energy sources, writing in the London Review of Books:
There is a refusal by liberals to accept accountability for the world they have created, through their support for wars in the Middle East, their acceptance of growing inequality and poverty, cuts to public services, glacial action on climate change and failure to create secure and meaningful jobs.
This could be a moment for significant reform, but it would require a challenge to at least some sections of capital. Changing university funding models means taking on Wall Street. Arms companies rely on US defence spending and its military interventions or proxy wars. Action on climate change means losses for fossil fuel companies, whose owners often fund the conservative right.
Liberals in the US and across Europe have decided they do not want to take on this challenge. Their latest wheeze is to de-risk investment in the hope that it will revitalise stagnating economies, while doing what they can to see off any challenge from the more progressive left. That means heavily policing and demonising protests, working with the right to undermine candidates and parties that do seek to challenge capital (and the status of liberal parties), and more generally polluting the political sphere with bullshit to blur the lines of accountability – as when the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, insinuated that the protests at Columbia were instigated by ‘external actors’, or a Princeton administrator allegedly fabricated stories about threats made to staff.
Liberalism has two core components: the protection of property rights and a notion of negative freedom grounded in human rights and political checks and balances. What we are now seeing in the US (and the UK, and elsewhere in Europe) is the defence of the former at the expense of the latter. Political leaders and university managers are undermining not only free expression but the role of the academy in holding political decisions to account. Large sections of the news media are engaged in holding the public to account rather than politicians. And, perhaps most fundamentally, the ballot box offers a choice only between the degree of authoritarianism and economic dysfunction available to voters. If this situation persists, not only in the US but across the world, then occupying a university building will seem like a picnic when compared with what may be coming down the road.
This is the first in a series of essays
Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again.
But what he wants is to make America great again for the plutocratic elite, while stripping the rest of us of any opportunity for the rest of us to live a peaceful, harmonious life of tolerance, free from the avaricious intrusiveness of always-tracking, all-hearing, ever-nudging mind-colonizing apparat of the corporate/state panopticon.
Note the headline omits the “again” part of his slogan, because the world he envisages is that of the county the way it was when he was born, at the very start of the post-World War II Baby Boom generation and before the modern Civil Rights, voting rights, and women’s rights movements caught fire.
It happens that I know that world quite well. Trump was born 16 June 1946, five week before I was born. Two other Presidents were born with weeks of Trump, George W. Bush on 6 July 1946, and William Jefferson Clinton 19 August 1946.
The world we arrived in saw an America at its peak, the world’s only nuclear power [the first Soviet nuke was detonated 25 August 1949] and the only major industrial nation with factories and other infrastructure untouched by the crisis, save for Pearl Harbor and Alaska’s Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska [yes, there actually was an invasion and occupation of American soil between 11 May 1942 and 19 August 1943, a fact often neglected from American history classes].
My, how things gave changed.
In 1946, the richest Americans paid nominal maximum tax rate of 91 percent, enabling the federal government to launch major spending programs of education, infrastructure and other public benefit programs.
Rates remained high throughout the administration of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and plunged during the Republican Ronald Reagan years,
So what was the net effect of this drive to spare the poor rich? The uber-wealthy, the folks so envied by mere tyros like the Man Who Would Be President Again, are now paying taxes at a lower rate than a school teacher. a janitor, or a cocktail waitress.
Take a look at this, from the New York Times via Common Dreams:
In addition, in the Boomer world in which our three Presidents were raised the U.S. also taxed large inheritances at a healthy rate, a policy now hedged by vastly expanded exemptions:
Another major sector experiencing a major fiscal blessing has been the corporation, with taxes on earnings slashed dramatically since those days of the :great America worshipped by Trumpeteers:
The benefits to corporations were predictable:
The net result of all this high stakes tax jiggering is a massive shift in the tax burden from corporations to individuals:
And who has befitted most from all this Congressional largess?
We bet you can guess:
The net impact of cuts and to corresponding CEO pay packets has become so severe that in many cases XCEOs pocket more money than their firms make in profits.
Here are some examples, captured graphically by Inequality.org:
CBS News reported in 2019 that “CEO compensation rose 940% from 1978 to 2018, compared with a 12% rise in pay for the average American worker during the same period, according to the Economic Policy Institute.”
And when in the following year some corporations, acting in part over public outrage over reports of the pay disparity chasm, announce CEO salary cuts, the measures often turned out to be a bit of cosmetic bait-and-switch, as the Institute for Policy Studies noted in a 15 March 2021 analysis: presented to the Senate Budget Committee:
More than 500 publicly held U.S. companies announced cuts to their CEO’s base salary in 2020. These moves garnered considerable positive press coverage, but they had a negligible impact on pay levels since straight salary makes up on average only 10 percent of executive compensation packages.15 Some of the early proxy filings make this clear. A.O. Smith CEO Kevin J. Wheeler, for example, took a 25 percent salary cut while enjoying a 36 percent increase in his overall compensation. At Whirlpool, CEO Mark Bitzer accepted a 25 percent trim on his base salary.
And as the report notes:
We can and must do better, as a nation, than accept a corporate business model that creates prosperity for the few and precarity for the many. And we can’t afford to wait for corporations and their shareholders to solve this problem. Corporate boards have shown us — over a decade ago in the financial crash and over the last year with the pandemic — that we cannot rely on them to do the right thing when it comes to CEO pay.
Most Americans agree, according to an April 2022 SRSS survey of a cross section of the American public which asked “Do you think most CEOs of America’s largest companies are compensated too much, too little, or about the right amount?”
Too much, declared most folks allegiant to both the red and the blue [;And just how the hell did the Grand Old Party become the red party?; Marx must be spinning in his grave.
As federal funding for states shrinks with the impact of tax “reforms,” states and local governments are forced to resort to so-called regressive taxes, such as the sales tax, to make up for the shortfall.
A regressive tax is one exacted at the same rate for all, as opposed to, say, an income tax, where rates increase as earnings in crease. Therefore, the regressive tax hits hardest on the poor, as illustrated in this chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:
So let’s make America great for people who aren’t trust fund tycoons, Harvard graduates, and trust fund nepo babies,and start be re-instituting taxes on the wealthiest.
Then we’ll look at ways to spend it.
Posted in Class, Corpocracy, Deep Politics, Economy, Governance, History, Labor, Law, Politics, Poverty, Uncategorized, Wealth
Fro, Bernie Sanders, interviewed by the Guardian:
“Yeah, of course the oligarchs run Russia. But guess what? Oligarchs run the United States as well. And it’s not just the United States, it’s not just Russia; Europe, the UK, all over the world, we’re seeing a small number of incredibly wealthy people running things in their favour. A global oligarchy. This is an issue that needs to be talked about.”
Posted in Class, Corpocracy, Deep Politics, Geopolitics, Organized crime, Politics, Poverty, Socialism, Wealth
Labor leader, radical, Socialist, presidential candidate: Eugene Victor Debs was a homegrown American original. He formed the American Railway Union, led the Pullman strike of the 1890s in which he was jailed and emerged a dedicated Socialist. An idealistic, impassioned fighter for economic and social justice, he was brilliant, eloquent and eminently human. As a “radical” he fought for women’s suffrage, workmen’s compensation, pensions and Social Security all commonplace today. Five times the Socialist candidate for president, his last campaign was run from federal prison where he garnered almost a million votes.
— From his entry in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Hall of Honor
No figure in American history better exemplifies the role socialism once played in American politics than Eugene V. Debs, whose role in the labor movement began with his time as a railroad fireman.
Shoveling tons of coal into the fireboxes of the massive steam engines that moved endless cars caring the raw materials and finished produced of American industry products and raw materials of industry and agriculture and kept people on the move in a vast and growing land.
As a union organizer he learned political skills he would then use to run for office, both as a successful legislative candidate and as presidential candidate, including one run from a prison cell after his incarceration for opposing America’s participation in the First Word War.
But today we focus on a unique work, a critique of America’s first grand film spectacle, D.W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation.
Griffith’s film, a Southerner’s paen to the “heroic” role of the Ku Klux Klan in defeating the North’s efforts at Reconstruction of the defeated South following the Civil War, is filled with execrable racist tropes and praises the lethal violence deployed against freed slaves attempting to claim their promised equality.
Debs took on the film in a letter to the editor of his hometown paper, the Terre Haute, Indiana, Post, which the editor ran as a standalone article in the paper’s January 1916 edition under the headline “Debs Says Local Elections Bad as Ones in Big Movie”:
The merits of the spectacular drama The Birth of a Nation excite bitter comment whenever it is presented. There is no question that it is a wonderful production, that many of its scenes are tense and thrilling, and that there is much in the play to approve and commend, but if the author’s studied purpose was to insult the black race and to revive and intensify the bitter prejudices which grew out of the war, he could not have better succeeded. It would be passing strange if the colored people did not protest against certain shocking features of the drama as doing them and their race grossest injustice.
If it be absolutely essential to the play to present those harrowing rape scenes, then why not round them out in their historic completeness and show the dissolute sons of the plantation owner ravishing the black daughter before her parents’ eyes?
For every white woman raped in the South by a black fiend, a thousand black women have been seduced and outraged by white gentlemen; but no hint of this is given in the series of pictures composing The Birth of a Nation. It is only the black brute that is guilty according to this and all other stories written about the Negro by Thomas Dixon, the author, who also calls himself a minister of Christ.
Four Million Mulattos
There are four million mulattos in this country, most of whom were born out of wedlock and all of whom have a white father or grandfather, and these white gentlemen are ready to fight at the drop of the hat for “white supremacy” and against “nigger equality.”
The pretended reverence for Lincoln in the play does not at all square with the facts of history. Lincoln was hated with a savage hate by the slaveowners of the South and it was this ferocious hate that culminated in his assassination. The reverence now shown him on the stage is a convenient mask behind which the same blind hate may vent itself upon the unoffending Negro.
Let it not be overlooked that all our histories have been written by white men and that Negroes had no hand in them. They simply had to take what was given them, but even at that there is no denying the fact that from the time the Negroes were first stolen from their native land by white slave-traders, whom it would be flattery to call brutes, until the last law disfranchising them in the South was put into effect and the last “Jim Crow” car put into commission to attest their standing as livestock, the whole history of the treatment of the Negro race is one of shameless exploitation and degradation, for which the white race can never atone in time nor eternity.
If the black people today could tell their story about The Birth of a Nation, it would be replete with scenes infinitely more cruel and damning than those based upon Dixon’s novel and flashed upon the screen to conceal the white man’s crimes behind the Negro’s misfortune.
Klan Glorified
The Ku Klux Klan are glorified in these pictures as spotless knights, the personification of chivalry and honor, and the audience applauds madly as they dash to the rescue of some imaginary white victim of a black fiend, but care is taken not to portray any of the outrages perpetrated upon defenseless, unoffending Negroes by these same lawless nightriders.
The pictures showing the scenes about the polling places of election day, under Negro domination, are especially calculated to subject the Negro to ridicule and contempt, and the white audience never fails to attest its appreciation by its sneers and cheers.
It’s true such election scenes with their black sluggers and their sodden corruption are disgraceful and revolting, but how much more disgraceful and revolting are they than the election scenes which have occurred in and about Terre Haute during the last few years — scenes in which the sluggers were white, instead of black, and insulted white ladies instead of black wenches; scenes unspeakably low and vile as everyone will admit who bore witness to them? How would it do to make pictures of some of these and travel through the South with them, flashing them upon a screen to show the Negroes in that section what an eminently respectable thing an election is when dominated by white men and by what pure and incorruptible methods the will of the people is expressed in a civilized white community?
Whites Also to Blame
If the white race has demonstrated its “superiority” in any one thing, it is in its politics and elections, and if Negroes should be disfranchised, the evident purpose of Dixon’s pictures, because of their disgraceful conduct at the tolls, then by the same token white men should also be stripped of the ballot and driven from the polling places.
The cheap commercial statistics exhibited at the close of the play to show the progress made by the Negro race is but a weak attempt to excuse the wanton insults heaped upon that race. Intelligent Negroes will not be deceived. The progress they have made is mainly due to themselves. They owe little to the white race as a whole, save their exploitation and degradation.
Let the colored people learn how to depend upon themselves, how to do for themselves, and to win their own way in the world. When they cut loose from the grafting politicians that use them as pawns in the political game and reward one of their number with a spittoon cleaning job in recognition of their race, and stand together; when they begin in earnest to educate themselves and to develop their minds and do their own thinking, they will then command the respect of the white race and of the world, but not before.
Debs’ essay attracted the attention of another remarkable figure, one of the first and perhaps the greatest of America’s early black journalists, Ida B Wells, whose heroic efforts to document lynchings of black Americans remain an iconic chapter in the history of the American press:
Born into slavery, Wells knew first-hand the viciousness of racism, and the terrorism employed to prevent black Americans from their aspirations for equality under the law.
For more on Debs, here’s a little documentary created in 1979 by another socialist who would later make runs at the White House, Sen. Bernie Sanders:
Swiss psychiatrist and disillusioned Freudian Carl Gustav Jung, pondering how people often turn their backs on ideals once espoused to become the opposite of their previous aspirations, coined a term for the phenomenon: Enantidromia, which he defined as “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.”
Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, no two ideologies were more violently opposed than internationalist communism and ultranationalist fascism, accounting for at least 30 million Soviet and Nazi German deaths in World War II alone.
Given those massive losses, it would be hard to predict that as of today, the country that spilled so much blood destroying the fascist Nazi empire would become today’s embodiment of the very evil they once shed oceans of blood to destroy.
But today, in a Russia headed by a man who once served in the anti-fascist organs of state security, fascism has emerged yet again, embodied in its President, ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin.
Just call it a textbook case of entantidromia,
Alexander Motyl, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and a New York native born to Ukrainian immigrants, makes the diagnosis in this essay from The Conversation. an plain language academic journal published under a Creative Commons license:
Yes, Putin and Russia are fascist – a political scientist shows how they meet the textbook definition
When Vladimir Putin unleashed an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the Ukrainian media, public and policymakers almost unanimously began calling the Russian president and the state he leads “rashyst.” The term is a hybrid of a derogatory moniker for Russia – “rasha” – and “fascist.”
Ukrainians did so for two reasons. First, they were countering Putin’s absurd insistence that the Ukrainian authorities – including Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – were Nazis and that Ukraine needed to be “de-Nazified.” Since Ukraine’s tiny number of right-wing extremists are about as influential as the Proud Boys in the United States, what Putin really had in mind was Ukrainians with a distinct Ukrainian identity. De-Nazification thus meant de-Ukrainianization.
Second, Ukrainians were drawing attention to those features of Putin’s Russia that indicated that it was fascist and thus in need of “de-Nazification.” Putin’s Russia was aggressive, anti-democratic and enamored of Putin himself. Unsurprisingly, his Russia’s resemblance to the regimes built by Mussolini and Hitler had not gone unnoticed by Russian and Western analysts in the last decade or so.
Few policymakers, scholars and journalists listened, however, as the term fascism struck many as too vague, too political or too loaded to serve as an accurate description of any repressive regime. Having written about Putin’s Russia as quasi- or proto-fascist already in the mid-2000s, I know from personal experience that few took my claims seriously, often arguing tautologically that Putin had constructed a “Putinist” system.
But as a political scientist who studies Ukraine, Russia and the USSR empirically, theoretically and conceptually, I believe Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine suggests that a reconsideration of the term’s applicability to Russia is definitely in order.
Defining fascist states
But, first, a brief foray into the classification schemes that social scientists like to use, which most people find incomprehensible.
Classifications are essential for good social science, because they enable scholars to group political systems according to their shared features and to explore what makes them tick. Aristotle was one of the first to divide systems into those ruled by one, those ruled by a few and those ruled by many.
Contemporary scholars usually classify states as being democratic, authoritarian or totalitarian, with each category having a variety of subtypes. Democracies have parliaments, judiciaries, parties, political contestation, civil societies, freedom of speech and assembly, and elections.
Authoritarian states rest on the state bureaucracy, military and secret police; they usually circumscribe most of the features of democracies; and they typically are led by juntas, generals or politicians who avoid the limelight.
Totalitarian states abolish all the features of democracy, empower their bureaucracies, militaries and secret police to control all of public and private space, promote all-encompassing ideologies and always have a supreme leader.
Fascist states share all the features of authoritarianism, and they may also share the features of totalitarianism, but with two key differences. Fascist leaders have genuine charisma – that ephemeral quality that produces popular adulation – and they promote that charisma and the image that goes with it in personality cults. The people genuinely love fascist leaders, and the leaders in turn present themselves as embodiments of the state, the nation, the people.
The bare-bones definition of a fascist state is thus this: It is an authoritarian state ruled by a charismatic leader enjoying a personality cult.
Seen in this light, Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile and the Greece of the colonels were really just your average authoritarian states. In contrast, Mussolini’s Italy and Xi Jinping’s China are clearly fascist, as were Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR. Fascist states can thus be on the right and on the left.
‘Dismantled’ democratic institutions
Putin’s Russia also fits the bill. The political system is unquestionably authoritarian – some might say totalitarian.
Putin has completely dismantled all of Russia’s nascent democratic institutions. Elections are neither free nor fair. Putin’s party, United Russia, always wins, and oppositionists are routinely harassed or killed.
The media have been curbed; freedom of speech and assembly no longer exists; and draconian punishments are meted out for the slightest of criticisms of the regime.
A hypernationalist, imperialist and supremacist ideology that glorifies all things Russian and legitimates expansion as Russia’s right and duty has been both imposed on and willingly accepted by the population.
War is worshipped and justified by the state’s mendacious propaganda machine. As the brutal invasion of Ukraine shows, war is also practiced, especially if it is directed against a people whose very existence Putin regards as a threat to himself and to Russia.
Finally, secret police and military elites, together with a corrupt bureaucracy, form the core of the political system headed by the infallible Putin, who is the undisputed charismatic leader glorified as the embodiment of Russia. One of Putin’s minions once noted that “if there is no Putin, there is no Russia!” There’s a striking similarity with French King Louis XIV’s assertion, “L’état, c’est moi” – “The state is me” – and Hitler’s “One people, one empire, one Führer.”
Fascist states are unstable. Personality cults disintegrate with time, as leaders grow old. Today’s Putin, with his bloated face, is no match for the vigorous Putin of 20 years ago.
Fascist regimes are overcentralized, and the information that reaches the supreme leader is often sugarcoated. Putin’s disastrous decision to invade Ukraine may have been partly due to his lacking accurate information about the condition of the Ukrainian and Russian armies.
Finally, fascist states are prone to wars, because members of the secret police and generals, whose raison d’etre is violence, are overrepresented in the ruling elite. In addition, the ideology glorifies war and violence, and a militarist fervor helps to legitimate the supreme leader and reinforce his charisma.
Fascist states usually prosper at first; then, intoxicated by victory, they make mistakes and start losing. Putin won decisively in his wars in Chechnya and in Georgia, and he appears to be headed for defeat in Ukraine.
I believe Putin’s fascist Russia faces a serious risk of breakdown in the not-too-distant future. All that’s missing is a spark that will rile the people and elites and move them to take action. That could be an increase in fuel prices, the development that led to a citizen revolt in Kazakhstan earlier this year; a blatantly falsified election, such as the one that led to riots in autocratic Belarus in 2020; or thousands of body bags returning to Russia from the war in Ukraine.
Posted in Culture, Deep Politics, Europe, Extremism, Geopolitics, Governance, History, Intolerance, Journalism, Law, Media, Military, Politics, Uncategorized, Warfare
From Deutsche Welle, military/industrial opportunism at work:
With the third year of the COVID pandemic well underway and as the second year of the Biden administration commences, Americans are becoming less trusting of traditional authority figures, a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
Trust of scientists and the military remains relatively high, although core support for the military drop the most sharply of all groups, while confidence in journalists, business executives, and politicians nears rock bottom.
From the report:
Americans’ confidence in groups and institutions has turned downward compared with just a year ago. Trust in scientists and medical scientists, once seemingly buoyed by their central role in addressing the coronavirus outbreak, is now below pre-pandemic levels.
Overall, 29% of U.S. adults say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public, down from 40% who said this in November 2020. Similarly, the share with a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests is down by 10 percentage points (from 39% to 29%), according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
The new findings represent a shift in the recent trajectory of attitudes toward medical scientists and scientists. Public confidence in both groups had increased shortly after the start of the coronavirus outbreak, according to an April 2020 survey. Current ratings of medical scientists and scientists have now fallen below where they were in January 2019, before the emergence of the coronavirus.
Scientists and medical scientists are not the only groups and institutions to see their confidence ratings decline in the last year. The share of Americans who say they have a great deal of confidence in the military to act in the public’s best interests has fallen 14 points, from 39% in November 2020 to 25% in the current survey. And the shares of Americans with a great deal of confidence in K-12 public school principals and police officers have also decreased (by 7 and 6 points, respectively).
Large majorities of Americans continue to have at least a fair amount of confidence in medical scientists (78%) and scientists (77%) to act in the public’s best interests. These ratings place them at the top of the list of nine groups and institutions included in the survey. A large majority of Americans (74%) also express at least a fair amount of confidence in the military to act in the public’s best interests. Roughly two-thirds say this about police officers (69%) and K-12 public school principals (64%), while 55% have at least a fair amount of confidence in religious leaders.
The public continues to express lower levels of confidence in journalists, business leaders and elected officials, though even for these groups, public confidence is tilting more negative. Four-in-ten say they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in journalists and business leaders to act in the public’s best interests; six-in-ten now say they have not too much or no confidence at all in these groups. Ratings for elected officials are especially negative: 24% say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in elected officials, compared with 76% who say they have not too much or no confidence in them.
With trust in leading institutional leaders plunging, it’s no wonder that populism flourishes. . .
Posted in Corpocracy, Education, Governance, Journalism, Medicine, Military, Police, Politics, Religion, Science, Sociology, Uncategorized
From Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, writing on the trucking chaos north of the border for The Tyee, in which he also reveals that much of the funding for the protest hails from the U.S. side of the border:
Welcome to the mining republic of Canada where dysfunction and disinformation accumulate daily like waste in a leaky, toxic tailing pond.
Over the last two weeks Canadians have not only been served a master class on the dismal quality of our political leadership but a pointed lecture on how to destabilize a democracy.
It is clear now that a highly organized group of militants — some with military and counterinsurgency experience — have mobilized incoherent popular frustrations created by the pandemic to shield their goal of undermining a democracy and overthrowing a government they don’t like. Many of these militants hail from Alberta and the west.
The protesters talk about individual rights and freedoms but no one talks about responsibilities and that’s how democracies fail.
They are aided by the internet, foreign funds and perhaps foreign players (the whole “freedom convoy” movement has the stink of covert Russian involvement). As they occupied Ottawa, they presented a hard face composed of a phalanx of diesel trucks and a soft face made up of rock music, fireworks, kids and hot tubs.
And people defecating on doorsteps.
Posted in Culture, Extremism, Governance, Politics, Protests
After four years of Trump and the radicalization of the Republican Party, this comes as no surprise.
From Gallup:
From their report:
Nearly six in 10 Americans, 58%, are dissatisfied with the level of immigration into the U.S. today, while 34% are satisfied. This marks an eight-percentage-point increase in dissatisfaction since last year and a return to the 2019-2020 range.
The 58% dissatisfied includes 35% of all Americans who would prefer that immigration be decreased, 9% increased, and 14% who want levels kept the same. Last year, those dissatisfied were about equally as likely to favor an increase as a decrease, but now the predominant view among the dissatisfied is for less immigration. The proportion who want less immigration has nearly doubled from 19% in 2021 and is well above where it was in 2019 (23%) and 2020 (25%). At the same time, calls for more immigration into the country have dropped.
Posted in Ethnicity, Intolerance, Politics, Sociology
During our decades of work in community journalism, much of our work focused on the role of developers in the political realm.
One thing a reporter quickly learns is that people who develop real estate for profit exploit the dreams of politicians and buyers to cloak their own dreams of wealth to win approval of their projects. [That real estate developers are also the leading contributors to election campaigns also plays a significant role.]
The same is true when it comes to selling their complete developments.
And at a time when anxieties about climate change and environment degradation reign, what better way to sell developments to the rich that by enshrouding them with a mantle of green?
Consider the following from the Dutch Public Broadcasting service VPRO:
Program notes:
Climate change warnings are leading to large investments in conservation and wildlife management in Africa. But the ambition to guard nature and animals increases social inequality and creates green apartheid.
Bram Vermeulen is in Hoedspruit. This small town on the edge of South Africa’s Kruger Park has been transformed in a short time into a five-star resort, full of restaurants, souvenir shops and real estate agents selling a big promise. For relatively little money you can buy land and luxury villas here, amidst nature and wildlife. A paradise for those who can afford it. But what lies behind this green dream?
A Dutch entrepreneur is among the property developers marketing the ‘Out Of Africa dream’, particularly to Dutch buyers.
An African farmer breeds the animals needed to fill the game parks for hunting and pleasure; from rhinos to sable antelopes. And a militarized anti-poaching unit guards the green paradise we all want so badly.
But on the edges of the town, things are brewing. The staff who work at the resorts are tucked away in a slum. And there appear to be land claims on the land where the private game parks and resorts are springing up.
Thousands of black South Africans are demanding back the land they were driven from during apartheid. The land on which the Dutch entrepreneur is building is also being claimed.
Meanwhile, the private anti-poaching unit that guards the parks and resorts is embroiled in a war with crime syndicates that want to sell the horns of killed rhinos to the Far East for a lot of money.
Posted in Crime, Governance, Law, Medicine, Politics
As we’ve noted many times before, we are killing the Amazon rainforest, one of the most unique and diverse environments on the planet, and home to dozens of indigenous tribal groups.
While the Amazon rainforest had long been called “the lungs of the planet” for its ability to capture carbon through plant respiration, that role is now in danger.
A study by 18 international scholars [$32 to read for non-subscribers] published in the 14 July 2021 edition of Nature, the world’s per-eminent scientific journal, reaches a stunning conclusion: Part of the Amazon note emits more carbon that in captures, and fire is the culprit.
Here’s the summation, emphasis added:
Amazonia hosts the Earth’s largest tropical forests and has been shown to be an important carbon sink over recent decades. This carbon sink seems to be in decline, however, as a result of factors such as deforestation and climate change. Here we investigate Amazonia’s carbon budget and the main drivers responsible for its change into a carbon source. We performed 590 aircraft vertical profiling measurements of lower-tropospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide at four sites in Amazonia from 2010 to 2018. We find that total carbon emissions are greater in eastern Amazonia than in the western part, mostly as a result of spatial differences in carbon-monoxide-derived fire emissions. Southeastern Amazonia, in particular, acts as a net carbon source (total carbon flux minus fire emissions) to the atmosphere. Over the past 40 years, eastern Amazonia has been subjected to more deforestation, warming and moisture stress than the western part, especially during the dry season, with the southeast experiencing the strongest trends. We explore the effect of climate change and deforestation trends on carbon emissions at our study sites, and find that the intensification of the dry season and an increase in deforestation seem to promote ecosystem stress, increase in fire occurrence, and higher carbon emissions in the eastern Amazon. This is in line with recent studies that indicate an increase in tree mortality and a reduction in photosynthesis as a result of climatic changes across Amazonia.
And an ever new study reveals that microscopic atmospheric particles can trigger declining rainfall totals in the Amazon.
A haven for ecological and cultural diversity
So why is Amazonia so important, besides its role as a carbon sink?
Consider this, from the World Wildlife Fund [WWF]:
The Amazon is a vast biome that spans eight rapidly developing countries—Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname—and French Guiana, an overseas territory of France.
The landscape contains:
▪ one in 10 known species on Earth
▪ 1.4 billion acres of dense forests, half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests
▪ the 3,977-mile-long Amazon River, the second-longest river on Earth after the Nile
▪ 2.6 million square miles in the Amazon basin, about 40% of South America
The Amazon contains millions of species, most of them still undescribed, and some of the world’s most unusual wildlife. It is one of Earth’s last refuges for jaguars, harpy eagles, and pink river dolphins, and home to thousands of birds and butterflies. Tree-dwelling species include southern two-toed sloths, pygmy marmosets, saddleback and emperor tamarins, and Goeldi’s monkeys. The diversity of the region is staggering:
▪ 40,000 plant species
▪ 2,400 freshwater fish species
▪ more than 370 types of reptiles
There is a clear link between the health of the Amazon and the health of the planet. The rain forests, which contain 90-140 billion tons of carbon, help stabilize the local and global climate. Deforestation releases significant amounts of this carbon, which is having negative consequences around the world.
Uncontacted tribes at risk, too
In addition to the vast array of plants and animals endangered by deforestation, the Amazon basin is also home to a wide array of indigenous tribal groups, manyu of which have had little contact with modern civilization.
From Native Languages of the Americas [links to individual tribes at the website], a list of known tribes:
In addition to known tribes, ethnologists believe that the Amazon still holds tribes which have yet to make contact.
And they are in danger, as Reuters reported in December:
Deep in the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest area containing isolated and uncontacted tribes is under increasing threat from illegal logging and gold mining, advancing coca plantations and drug trafficking violence, a new report warns.
An undetermined number of indigenous people that could number several thousand inhabit a vast swathe of forest twice the size of Ireland that overlaps the Brazil-Peru border.
Their longhouses in jungle clearings have been spotted from planes but encounters with outsiders or clashes with invaders are anecdotal.
In the most comprehensive study to date of the so-called Javari-Tapiche corridor, a Peruvian indigenous organization says the world’s largest number of uncontacted people are in danger. Anthropologists have recorded groups crossing to Brazil looking for food, metal utensils and clothing to the south of the corridor, reportedly moving away from violence in Peru.
Beefing up deforestation
While mining and logging pose considerable dangers to the rainforest and its inhabitants, as the WWF reports, feeding the global demand for beef is the leading driver of deforestation in the Amazon basin:
Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation. Alone, the deforestation caused by cattle ranching is responsible for the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions. Beyond forest conversion, cattle pastures increase the risk of fire and are a significant degrader of riparian and aquatic ecosystems, causing soil erosion, river siltation and contamination with organic matter. Trends indicate that livestock production is expanding in the Amazon.
Brazil has 88% of the Amazon herd, followed by Peru and Bolivia. While grazing densities vary among livestock production systems and countries, extensive, low productivity, systems with less than one animal unit per hectare of pasture are the dominant form of cattle ranching in the Amazon.
And in Brazil, one company dominates, a Brazilian agroindustrial giants which just happens to dominate the U.S. meat market as well.
From Wikipedia:
JBS S.A. is a Brazilian company that is the largest meat processing company [by sales] in the world, producing factory processed beef, chicken and pork, and also selling by-products from the processing of these meats. It is headquartered in São Paulo. It was founded in 1953 in Anápolis, Goiás. As of 2017, the company had 150 industrial plants around the world
In addition to its Brazilian operations, JBS also ranks as the leading meant supplier in the U.S., having acquired Swift & Company, Pilgrim’s Pride, Smithfield Foods’ beef operations, the prok business of Cargil, as well as Mexican and Brazilian operations of Tyson Foods, Inc.
More from Bloomberg on the company’s impact on the Amazonian rainforest:
Understanding how Brazil’s beef industry and rainforest destruction are inextricably intertwined reveals a truth that JBS doesn’t acknowledge: As the region’s biggest beef producer, its supply chain is also among the biggest drivers of Amazon deforestation the world has ever known. While marketing itself as a friend of the environment, JBS has snapped up more cattle coming out of the Amazon than any other meatpacker in an industry that’s overwhelmingly to blame for the rainforest’s demise. It has helped push the world’s largest rainforest to a tipping point at which it’s no longer able to clean the Earth’s air, because large swaths now emit more carbon than they absorb. Late last year, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments and financial institutions—including JBS investors—made ambitious green commitments to drastically alter their business models to save the environment. With Amazon deforestation at a 15-year high, JBS is a case study illustrating how difficult it is to keep such promises.
For more than a decade, JBS has committed to ridding its supply chain of animals born or raised on deforested land. Bloomberg analyzed about 1 million delivery logs that JBS accidentally posted online to show just how far its footprint has reached into the Amazon in that period. A 10-day trip into the heart of Brazil’s cattle country put on full display how easily and openly cows from illegally cleared land flood supply chains. JBS says it sets the highest standards for its suppliers, but it’s using a greenwashed version of an animal’s origin and working within a legal system so full of loopholes that prosecutors, environmentalists and even ranchers themselves consider it a farce.
Asked to respond to this article, JBS said “it has no tolerance for illegal deforestation.” The São Paulo-based company added that it “has maintained, for over 10 years, a geospatial monitoring system that uses satellite imagery to monitor its suppliers in every biome” in Brazil.
On a positive note, Reuters reported in December that six major European supermarket chains have announced they will stop all beef imports from Brazil.
For more on the role of Big Beef in the plunder of the Amazonian read Beef, Banks and the Brazilian Amazon. a December 2020 investigation by Global Witness.
Fires accelerate ecological catastrophe
Published in the open source academic journal Remote Sensing last month, “Fires Drive Long-Term Environmental Degradation in the Amazon Basin,” a study by team of Brazilian and French scholars, offers an alarming look at the acceleration of ecological destruction wrought by the most commonly employed means of forest “clearance”:
In recent years, the frequency and intensity of fires have increased worldwide, especially during dry years. Globally, fires and deforestation are the main causes of biodiversity loss in the tropics], and the expectation is that without, a reduction in the present disturbance rates, undisturbed forests will have entirely disappeared in large tropical humid regions by 2050. In the Amazon, the use of fire is the fastest, most efficient, and least expensive way to clear a forested Amazonian agricultural frontier area and is often employed in protected areas, such as conservation units (CUs) and indigenous lands (ILs). Ranchers, farmers, miners, and land grabbers all employ this practice. A recent study that determined different types of fires that occur in the Amazon showed that deforestation fires are fires in areas that have been previously cleared and can invade standing forests; their drivers and positive feedbacks can lead to more fires in the region. Such fires lead to the release of a significant amount of GHGs [greenhouse gases] into the atmosphere.
In the Amazon region, fires are ubiquitous at the end of the dry season (September-October), but have often worsened in years of extreme drought (i.e., 2005, 2010, and 2015). Anomalously dry years are associated with tropical seas surface temperature anomalies; high temperatures and low humidity provide favorable conditions for the rapid spread of fires. These extreme-drought events have the potential to destabilize large areas by reducing rainfall and thereby increasing the risk of forest death, which could, in turn, lead to the further intensification of regional droughts as a result of vegetation loss. A warmer and drier climate can lead to the mortality of plant species adapted to wetter climates, as well as a decrease in water recycling in the central part of the Amazon Researchers forecast a possibility of doubling of the burned area south of the Brazilian Amazon in the coming decades]. This projection is in accordance with the scenarios proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which are based on global numerical models] that indicate increased environmental degradation in the near future. Indeed, the Amazon ecosystem has been identified as a region with the highest vulnerability index in ecosystem function, particularly in areas of large-scale forest degradation and fragmentation.
The great Brazilian land grab continues
Just as White settlers and corporations swallowed up land belong to indigenous tribes in the U.S. starting with the arrival of the first settlers [who were brought over from Europe to populate corporate-owned colonies, encouraged and assisted by an expropriating monarchy] so too the Amazon is being grabbed up with the aid of a government headed by a very bigoted Right-wing populist.
So show does it work?
Consider the following from three University of Florida scholars – Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, graduate student Fellow and doctoral candidate in Geography; Cynthia S. Simmons, Professor of Geography; and Robert T. Walker, Professor of Latin American Studies and Geography – and published in The Conversation, an open source online academic journal written in everyday language:
The great Amazon land grab – how Brazil’s government is turning public land private, clearing the way for deforestation
Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they sell in a private auction.
Outrageous? Yes. Unheard of? No. It happens routinely and with increasing frequency in the Brazilian Amazon.
The most widely publicized threat to the Amazonian rainforest is deforestation. Less well understood is that public lands are being converted to private holdings in a land grab we’ve been studying for the past decade.
Much of this land is cleared for cattle ranches and soybean farms, threatening biodiversity and the Earth’s climate. Prior research has quantified how much public land has been grabbed, but only for one type of public land called “undesignated public forests.”
Our research provides a complete account across all classes of public land. We looked at Amazonia’s most active deforestation frontier, southern Amazonas State, starting in 2012 as rates of deforestation began to increase because of loosened regulatory oversight. Our research shows how land grabs are tied to accelerating deforestation spearheaded by wealthy interests, and how Brazil’s National Congress, by changing laws, is legitimizing these land grabs.
How the Amazon land grab began
Brazil’s modern land grab started in the 1970s, when the military government began offering free land to encourage mining industries and farmers to move in, arguing that national security depended on developing the region. It took lands that had been under state jurisdictions since colonial times and allocated them to rural settlement, granting 150- to 250-acre holdings to poor farmers.
Federal and state governments ultimately designated over 65% of Amazonia to several public interests, including rural settlement. For biodiversity, they created conservation units, some allowing traditional resource use and subsistence agriculture. Leftover government lands are generally referred to as “vacant or undesignated public lands.”
Tracking the land grab
Studies have estimated that by 2020, 32% of “undesignated public forests” had been grabbed for private use. But this is only part of the story, because land grabbing is now affecting many types of public land.
Importantly, land grabs now impact conservation areas and indigenous territories, where private holdings are forbidden.
We compared the boundaries of self-declared private holdings in the government’s Rural Environmental Registry database, known as CAR, with the boundaries of all public lands in southern Amazonas State. The region has 50,309 square miles in conservation units. Of these, we found that 10,425 square miles, 21%, have been “grabbed,” or declared in the CAR register as private between 2014 and 2020.
In the United States, this would be like having 21% of the national parks disappear into private property.
Our measurement is probably an underestimate, given that not all grabbed lands are registered. Some land grabbers now use CAR to establish claims that could become legal with changes in the law.
Land grabs put the rainforest at risk by increasing deforestation. In southern Amazonas, our research reveals that twice as much deforestation occurred on illegal as opposed to legal CAR holdings between 2008 and 2021, a relative magnitude that is growing.
Large deforestation patches point to wealth
So who are these land grabbers?
In Pará State, Amazonas State’s neighbor, deforestation in the 1990s was dominated by poor family farms in rural settlements. On average, these households accumulated 120 acres of farmland after several decades by opening 4-6 acres of forest every few years in clearings visible on satellite images as deforestation patches.
Since then, patch sizes have grown dramatically in the region, with most deforestation occurring on illicit holdings whose patches are much larger than on legal holdings.
Large deforestation patches indicate the presence of wealthy grabbers, given the cost of clearing land.
Land grabbers benefit by selling the on-site timber and by subdividing what they’ve grabbed for sale in small parcels. Arrest records and research by groups such as Transparency International Brasil show that many of them are involved in criminal enterprises that use the land for money laundering, tax evasion and illegal mining and logging.
In the 10-year period before President Jair Bolsonaro took office, satellite data showed two deforestation patches exceeding 3,707 acres in Southern Amazonas. Since his election in 2019, we can identify nine massive clearings with an average size of 5,105 acres. The clearance and preparation cost for each Bolsonaro-era deforestation patch, legal or illicit, would be about US$353,000.
Legitimizing land grabbing
Brazil’s National Congress has been making it easier to grab public land.
A 2017 change in the law expanded the legally allowed size of private holdings in undesignated public lands and in rural settlements. This has reclassified over 1,000 square miles of land that had been considered illegal in 2014 as legal in southern Amazonas. Of all illegal CAR claims in undesignated public lands and rural settlements in 2014, we found that 94% became legal in 2017.
Congress is now considering two additional pieces of legislation. One would legitimize land grabs up to 6,180 acres, about 9.5 square miles, in all undesignated public forests – an amount already allowed by law in other types of undesignated public lands. The second would legitimize large holdings on about 80,000 square miles of land once meant for the poor.
Our research also shows that the federal government increased the amount of public land up for grabs in southern Amazonas by shrinking rural settlements by 16%, just over 2,000 square miles, between 2015 and 2020. Large ranches are now absorbing that land. Similar downsizing of public land has affected Amazonia’s national parks.
What can turn this around?
Because of policy interventions and the greening of agricultural supply chains, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell after 2005, reaching a low point in 2012, when it began trending up again because of weakening environmental governance and reduced surveillance.
Other countries have helped Brazil with billions of dollars to protect the Amazon for the good of the climate, but in the end, the land belongs to Brazil. Outsiders have limited power to influence its use.
At the U.N. climate summit in 2021, 141 countries – including Brazil – signed a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. This pledge holds potential because, unlike past ones, the private sector has committed $7.2 billion to reduce agriculture’s impact on the forest. In our view, the global community can help by insisting that supply chains for Amazonian beef and soybean products originate on lands deforested long ago and whose legality is longstanding.
Time is running short.
Posted in Agriculture, Banksters, Climate, Corpocracy, Development, Environment, Ethnicity, Finance, Food, Governance, Intolerance, Latin America, Nature, Politics, Resources, Science, Uncategorized, Video
Plastics, developed only in the last century and widely used only after the end of the Second World War, have become ubiquitous in our everyday lives.
Indeed, it’s getting hard to find things that don’t contain plastic, and if they do, odds are they’re packaged in containers may with plastic.
Indeed, as I write o, I do so on a plastic keyboard looking at a plastic-encased monitor, sipping coffee from a plastic-topped cup while wearing a robe made of plastic microfibers.
Do what’s wrong with this picture?
We begin with a public service announcement from the Plastic Pollution Coalition:
First, some background, via the National Academy of Science:
The plastics industry began in the early 1900s when the first synthetic plastic was created in the U.S. Since the industry began, annual global plastic production has exploded from some 1.5 million metric tons in 1950 to 359 million metric tons in 2018. The cumulative production of plastic surpassed eight billion metric tons worldwide, and it is expected to further increase in the coming decades. Plastics cause pollution at almost every stage of their lifecycle, starting with the use of fossil fuels for their production.
And while they add convenience to our fast-paced lives, plastics may also be killing us.
From Norwegian SciTech News:
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of chemicals from plastics can leach into water under natural conditions. This water may contain substances that we know are toxic under laboratory conditions, says Martin Wagner, an associate professor at NTNU’s Department of Biology.
Wagner is part of a research group that has investigated how ordinary plastic products leach chemicals into the water under natural conditions.
The plastic we surround ourselves with contains up to 20 000 different chemical compounds. Many of these chemicals are toxic under laboratory conditions, but so far we have known precious little about how harmful this plastic is for us.
These chemicals wouldn’t pose a danger to us if they stayed bound to the plastic and weren’t released into the environment. But we may not be so fortunate.
All plastics leach chemicals
“We examined 24 common plastic products over ten days to see if they leached chemical substances into water under natural conditions. We then examined the water for chemicals and toxicity,” says Wagner.
All of the products leached chemicals into the water. Several of the substances have potentially toxic effects.
Oxidative stress was associated with 22 of the 24 plastic products that leached substances into the water. This can damage cells and cause inflammation and chronic disease.
Thirteen of the products leached antiandrogens, which can affect men’s fertility.
One of the plastic products leached oestrogens that can affect fertility in women and men.
Plastics leach very differently
A single plastic product could leach up to 8700 different substances into the water. However, the amount of chemicals leached into the water varied greatly for different types of plastics. One product could release anywhere from 1 to 88 per cent of the assorted chemicals it contains.
The research group was able to identify with certainty only a small proportion – about 8 per cent – of the substances that leached into the various water samples. This means we still know very little about the effects of the rest of the chemicals.
Much more leaching than suspected
“Our research shows that plastic products leach many more chemicals than we previously knew about,” says Wagner.
Humans and other animals are far more exposed to various substances from plastic than we’ve previously known.
We know that some of these chemicals are toxic under laboratory conditions. Plastics used for wrapping food and for drinks are perhaps of particular concern.
“This study shows us that humans and other animals are far more exposed to various substances from plastic than we’ve previously known or than is reflected in Norway’s current health guidelines and health policy,” says Wagner.
All but one of the products that were screened came from Germany, but there is no indication that these plastics are any different in Norway.
Zdenka Bartosova, a staff engineer in NTNU’s Department of Biology, was also part of the research group. NTNU researchers collaborated with the Goethe-Universität and the Institute for Social-Ecological Research, both in Frankfurt am Main.
New studies reveal that one class of so-called forever chemicals linked to a wide range of physical ailments, are ubiquitous in our environment.
They’re called forever chemicals because they don’t degrade, remaining dangerous for decades and even centuries.
From the Guardian:
Many of the world’s plastic containers and bottles are contaminated with toxic PFAS, and new data suggests that it’s probably leaching into food, drinks, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, cleaning products and other items at potentially high levels.
It’s difficult to say with precision how many plastic containers are contaminated and what it means for consumers’ health because regulators and industry have done very little testing or tracking until this year, when the Environmental Protection Agency discovered that the chemicals were leaching into a mosquito pesticide. One US plastic company reported “fluorinating” – or effectively adding PFAS to – 300m containers in 2011.
>snip<
But public health advocates say new revelations suggest that the compounds are much more ubiquitous than previously thought, and fluorinated plastic containers, especially those used with food, probably represent a major new exposure point to PFAS.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used to make products like clothing and carpeting resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and can accumulate in humans.
The chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts, kidney disease, decreased immunity and a range of other serious health problems.
Plastic pollution’s polar penetration
Plastic contamination pervades in the world’s oceans and waterways, and now it’s even embedded in the ice caps of the North and South Poles.
From Utrecht University:
Polar regions are regarded as some of the last areas on Earth that are pristine and relatively untouched by human influences. Yet, both North and South polar ice appear to contain significant amounts of nanoplastics, or plastic particles smaller than a micrometre in size. Nanoplastics may cause toxic effects in organisms, but since they’re difficult to measure, the worldwide extent of nanoplastic pollution remained unclear until now.
Using new methods to measure nanoplastics, an international team of scientists have now identified nanoscale plastic particles in ice samples from Greenland and Antarctica. The samples were derived from 14-meter-deep ice cores from Greenland and sea ice cores from Antarctica. Researchers from Utrecht University, the University of Copenhagen and the Université Libre de Bruxelles were involved in this study.
Earlier studies had already suggested that nanoplastic can be carried over distances by wind and water currents. Still, the research team were surprised to find substantial quantities in their samples.
Now we know that nanoplastics are transported to these corners of the Earth in these quantities. This indicates that nanoplastics is really a bigger pollution problem than we thought, said Dušan Materić, lead author of the study. In an earlier study, using the same techniques, his team identified nanoplastic particles in samples from the Alps.
Pollution dates to 1960s
Although Materić’s team are the first to identify nanoplastics in polar ice, their results show that nanoplastic contamination has been taking place for decades.
Our data suggest that nanoplastics pollution is not a new problem, said Materić.We are only now becoming aware of it, because we have recently developed the right method to measure it. In the Greenland core, we see nanoplastics pollution happening all the way from 1960s. So organisms in that region, and likely all over the world, have been exposed to it for quite some time now.
Different types of plastic
The teams identified several types of nanoplastic particles in polar ice. The most prominent nanoplastic type was polyethylene, which accounted for more than half of the particles. In the Greenland ice core, the team also found significant amounts of nanoparticles originating from tyre wear. The amount of nanoplastic particles appears to differ between the North and South ice core samples. The Greenland ice contained 13.2 ng/mL on average, whereas the Antarctic Sea ice contained 52.3 ng/mL.
Constraining sources
Given the large range of areas in which nanoplastics have now been identified, Materić and his team urge for more research into its toxicity and the extent of the pollution. The presence of nanoplastics in polar ice samples most likely involves a combination of complex processes that carried the particles. This could include both atmospheric and marine transport, (re)emission, deposition and ice incorporation.
Further studies are clearly needed to better constrain the source of theses contaminants to the polar regions.“
A short summary of key findings from the report itself:
More on the implications from the Guardian:
Half the nanoplastics in the Antarctic ice were PE as well, but polypropylene was the next most common, used for food containers and pipes. No tyre particles were found in Antarctica, which is more distant from populated areas. The researchers took samples only from the centres of the ice cores to avoid contamination, and tested their system with control samples of pure water.
Previous studies have found plastic nanoparticles in rivers in the UK, seawater from the North Atlantic and lakes in Siberia, and snow in the Austrian alps. “But we assume the hotspots are continents where people live,” said Materić.
The researchers wrote: “Nanoplastics have shown various adverse effects on organisms. Human exposure to nanoplastics can result in cytotoxicity [and] inflammation.”
“The most important thing as a researcher is to accurately measure [the pollution] and then assess the situation,” Materić said. “We are in a very early stage to draw conclusions. But it seems that everywhere we have analysed, it is a very big problem. How big? We don’t know yet.”
And now for a musical break, featuring a prescient piece of music from Jefferson Airplane, released 45 years ago today:
Industry’s seven generations of willful ignorance
Plastic manufacturers have long known of their products’ harmful effects, yet have spent countless dollars in fighting any effort to regulate their filthy business.
From the Center for International Environmental Law [CIEL], a brief look at what they knew and when they knew it:
Plastics are pollutants of unique concern, as they do not break down quickly and accumulate in the environment as more is produced. Scientists first became aware of the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean in the 1950s, shortly after the introduction of oil-based plastics in consumer goods. The chemical and petroleum industries were aware of, or should have been aware of, the problems caused by their products by no later than the 1970s.
“Unfortunately, the answer to both when the plastic industry knew their products would contribute to massive public harms and what they did with that information suggests they followed Big Oil’s playbook on climate change: deny, confuse, and fight regulation and effective solutions,” says Steven Feit, CIEL Attorney and lead author of Fueling Plastics.
The plastics industry has opposed sustainable solutions and fought local regulations of disposable plastic products for decades, even as evidence of the plastic crisis continues to mount. While the industry acknowledges the problem, plastics producers often take the position that they are only responsible for plastic waste in the form of resin pellets and that all other forms of plastic waste are beyond their control.
“The narrative that consumers bear primary responsibility for the plastics crisis is a public relations myth perpetuated by the petrochemical industry,” continues Feit. “Consumer changes on their own won’t solve the plastics crisis, as hundreds of billions of dollars from the petrochemical industry are being poured into new plastic production. We need a global, binding treaty that regulates plastic pollution throughout its lifecycle, from well head production to ocean waste.”
Plastics linked to yet another disease
We’ve written extensively about plastics and their suspected role in a host of physical and psychological ailments, and now there’s yet another ailment in which plastic is the key suspect.
From Norwegian SciTech News:
Microplastics — tiny pieces of plastic less than 5 mm in length — are everywhere, from bottled water to food to air. According to recent estimates, people consume tens of thousands of these particles each year, with unknown health consequences. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology found that people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have more microplastics in their feces than healthy controls, suggesting that the fragments could be related to the disease process.
The prevalence of IBD, which includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is rising globally. Characterized by chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, IBD can be triggered or made worse by diet and environmental factors. Microplastics can cause intestinal inflammation, gut microbiome disturbances and other problems in animal models, so Faming Zhang, Yan Zhang and colleagues wondered if they could also contribute to IBD. As a first step toward finding out, the researchers wanted to compare the levels of microplastics in feces from healthy subjects and people with different severities of IBD.
The team obtained fecal samples from 50 healthy people and 52 people with IBD from different geographic regions of China. Analysis of the samples showed that feces from IBD patients contained about 1.5 times more microplastic particles per gram than those from healthy subjects. The microplastics had similar shapes (mostly sheets and fibers) in the two groups, but the IBD feces had more small (less than 50 μm) particles. The two most common types of plastic in both groups were polyethylene terephthalate (PET; used in bottles and food containers) and polyamide (PA; found in food packaging and textiles). People with more severe IBD symptoms tended to have higher levels of fecal microplastics. Through a questionnaire, the researchers found that people in both groups who drank bottled water, ate takeaway food and were often exposed to dust had more microplastics in their feces. These results suggest that people with IBD may be exposed to more microplastics in their gastrointestinal tract. However, it’s still unclear whether this exposure could cause or contribute to IBD, or whether people with IBD accumulate more fecal microplastics as a result of their disease, the researcher say.
And the U.S. is the world’s biggest culprit
From United Press International:
Plastic waste of all shapes and sizes permeates the world’s oceans. It shows up on beaches, in fish and even in Arctic sea ice. And a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine makes clear that the United States is a big part of the problem.
As the report shows, the United States produces a large share of the global supply of plastic resin — the precursor material to all plastic industrial and consumer products. It also imports and exports billions of dollars’ worth of plastic products every year.
On a per capita basis, the United States produces an order of magnitude more plastic waste than China — a nation often vilified over pollution-related issues. These findings build off a study published in 2020 that concluded that the United States is the largest global source of plastic waste, including plastics shipped to other countries that later are mismanaged. Advertisement
And only a small fraction of plastic in U.S. household waste streams is recycled. The study calls current U.S. recycling systems “grossly insufficient to manage the diversity, complexity and quantity of plastic waste.”
Just how does the U.S. stack up compared to all other countries?
The graphic from the National Academy of Sciences report spells it out:
And then there’s the COVID plastics problem
From Higher Education Press, via EurekaAlert!:
[T]he pandemic has increased the generation of medical waste by 18%–425%. It is estimated that the daily output of COVID-19 related medical waste in the world has increased from 200 tons per day in February to more than 29000 tons per day in September during 2020. Secondly, in the long term, the demand for personal protective equipment will continue to grow. Moreover, the lockdown, isolation, quarantine and other measures have greatly reduced the volume of commercial waste in cities, especially in tourist cities, some of which have been transformed into domestic waste.
The spread of COVID-19 has also changed residents’ consumption behaviors. People are more willing to use online shopping and food delivery services during the pandemic than before. As a result, it may lead to an increase in the amount of disposable plastic waste, which seems to conflict with the previous plastic restriction policies and should be paid attention to. In addition, the implementation of lockdown and isolation policies could have led to a certain amount of food waste, but meanwhile, it may also help people improve the consciousness of reducing food waste.
The pandemic has led to a surge in medical waste, which may far exceed the available capacity of the management system. Therefore, it is necessary to update the strategies and plans for emergency medical waste treatment during and after the pandemic. Many countries have adjusted or updated their emergency waste management policies under the attack of COVID-19, from which China could learn valuable experiences, such as establishing a comprehensive disposal system of medical waste combining centralized disposal with on-site emergency disposal, for example, mobile treatment equipment and industrial kilns for medical waste disposal.
And it’s not just plastic trash
Even the production of plastics produces massive amounts of global warming chemicals.
From the Natural Resources Defense Council:
Our addiction to plastic also has negative impacts on the climate. A recent report showed that plastic production contributes to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions at every point in its life cycle. The process of drilling for plastic’s source materials, oil and gas, leads to methane leaking and flaring and is often combined with clearing forests and wetlands that otherwise would have sequestered carbon. Refineries where crude oil is turned into plastic make up one of the most greenhouse gas–intensive industries in the manufacturing sector. And “cracker plants”—which break, or “crack,” ethane molecules, a component of natural gas, into the chemical building blocks of plastic products—are energy intensive and highly polluting. In 2015 a mere 24 of these ethane cracker facilities in the United States had the combined carbon output of 3.8 million passenger vehicles. And the recent fracking boom, resulting in a surplus of oil, is fueling a subsequent rise in cracker plants, too. That’s bad news for our carbon reduction goals: if plastic production continues unabated, its greenhouse gas emissions could reach 1.34 gigatons per year by 2030—equal to adding nearly 300 new coal-fired power plants—even as the need to curb global climate change becomes more urgent.
A malady diagnosed decades ago
A 2017 report from the Center for International Environmental Law reveals that scientists and manufacturers knew of plastic problems seven decades ago, with companies qquickly adopting a “blame the consumers” line:
Plastics are pollutants of unique concern, as they do not break down quickly and accumulate in the environment as more is produced. Scientists first became aware of the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean in the 1950s, shortly after the introduction of oil-based plastics in consumer goods. The chemical and petroleum industries were aware of, or should have been aware of, the problems caused by their products by no later than the 1970s, according to the report.
“Unfortunately, the answer to both when the plastic industry knew their products would contribute to massive public harms and what they did with that information suggests they followed Big Oil’s playbook on climate change: deny, confuse, and fight regulation and effective solutions,” says Steven Feit, CIEL Attorney and lead author of Fueling Plastics.
The plastics industry has opposed sustainable solutions and fought local regulations of disposable plastic products for decades, even as evidence of the plastic crisis continues to mount. While the industry acknowledges the problem, plastics producers often take the position that they are only responsible for plastic waste in the form of resin pellets and that all other forms of plastic waste are beyond their control.
“The narrative that consumers bear primary responsibility for the plastics crisis is a public relations myth perpetuated by the petrochemical industry,” continues Feit. “Consumer changes on their own won’t solve the plastics crisis, as hundreds of billions of dollars from the petrochemical industry are being poured into new plastic production. We need a global, binding treaty that regulates plastic pollution throughout its lifecycle, from well head production to ocean waste.”
The Koch brothers do their bit
One American family joined the exalted ranks of America’s richest plutocratic dynasties whilst, amongst other things, firing up their oil pipelines and refineries refineries to spew forth an ocean of the complex compounds essential to conjuring up plastic.
Brothers Charles and now-deceased David Koch symbolize the dangerous intersection of wealth and political extremism.
From the Guardian:
Charles and his late brother David were second-generation extremists. Their father, Fred, was not only one of the founders of the John Birch Society, which famously accused President Dwight Eisenhower of being a “tool of the communists”. He also helped the Nazis construct their third-largest oil refinery, which produced fuel for the Luftwaffe – although you would have to read Jane Mayer’s brilliant book, Dark Money, to learn that particular detail.
In 1980, David Koch was the Libertarian candidate for vice-president. The party’s modest plans included the abolition of “Medicare, Medicaid, social security (which would be made voluntary), the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”
The Koch ideology is classical libertarian, meaning that while they oppose almost all regulations affecting businesses, their funding has supported immigration rights and pro-choice organizations, the latter opposed by their own Catholic church.
The Kochs have funded some of the most extreme pro-Republican fundibng groups, as the New York Times noted in its 23 August 2019 obituary for David Koch:
Since the 1970s, the Kochs have spent at least $100 million — some estimates put it at much more — to transform a fringe movement into a formidable political force aimed at moving America to the far right by influencing the outcome of elections, undoing limits on campaign contributions and promoting conservative candidacies, think tanks and policies.
>snip<
Still, he and his brother acknowledged roles in founding and contributing money to Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing advocacy group that was widely reported to have provided logistical backing for the Tea Party and other organizations in election campaigns and the promotion of conservative causes.
Among the groups they supported was the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative state legislators and corporate lobbyists. Alec, as the group is known, drafts model state legislation that members may customize for introduction as proposed laws to cut taxes, combat illegal immigration, loosen environmental regulations, weaken labor unions and oppose gun laws.
A November report from Fortune notes the massive funding the Kochs provided for Trump’s congressional hallelujah chorus:
Through Americans for Prosperity, they got over 400 members of Congress to sign a pledge to vote against climate change legislation that does not include equivalent tax cuts. In California, they were influential in rolling back emission regulations, and between 1997 and 2018 they spent $145,555,197 financing nearly 100 groups that attacked climate change science.
Following the 2011 Supreme Court Citizens United decision, the Kochs spent nearly $200 million to elect Republicans who said that they would not pass any new environmental regulations.
“We did not create the tea party. We shared their concern about unsustainable government spending, and we supported some tea-party groups on that issue,” [Charles] Koch wrote in an email to Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Belkin on Friday. “But it seems to me the tea party was largely unsuccessful long-term, given that we’re coming off a Republican administration with the largest government spending in history.”
The Kochs are also major players in the climate change denial business.
To conclude, a word of advice
To conclude. we offer up a clip from The Graduate, released the same year as Jefferson Airplane’s “Plastic Fantastic Lover,” in which the newly graduated Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, receives some advice for the future from a businessman:
Posted in Climate, Commerce, Corpocracy, Environment, Food, Governance, Health, History, Law, Medicine, Music, Nature, Politics, Science, Video
You’ve seen the image countless times, the image of a resolute woman flexing her muscles.
Asked to give her name, you’d no doubt respond, “That’s Rosie the Riveter.”
And you’d be wrong.
She’s Naomi Parker Fraley, and she wasn’t even a riveter, but a lather operator at an aircraft plant at Alameda Naval Air Station on San Francisco Bay in California, and the image was painted for commission by plant operator Westinghouse Electric by Howard J. Miller from a color photo published in the Oakland Post Enquirer on March 25th 1942. That’s a Westinghouse badge she’s wearing on her collar.
Had you asked anyone during World War II what Rosie looked like, the image they’d have invoked would’ve been this, created by Norman Rockwell for the cover of the 29 May 1943 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, one of the nation’s most popular magazines:
Mary Louise Doyle, Rockwell’s Rosie was a telephone operator, rather than an arms worker, and lived near Rockwell’s home and studio in Arlington, Vermont, where she posed for the painting, in a pose inspired by Michelangelo’s depiction of the prophet Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, The artist added the muscles, ham sandwich, and the copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on which he feet repose:
She of the radiant muscular self-confidence was inspired by a song immensely popular amongst a nation of fearful folk engaged in war of absolutes against two highly motivated authoritarian empires.
But with many prime working age men volunteering for or drafted into the military, armaments manufacturers were forced to turn to women to fill jobs in their rapidly expanding production plants. And that challenged traditional views of the “proper place” for women in labor force.
Instead of or in additional to filling their roles as “housewives” and service workers [i.e. maids, receptionists, telephone operators, waitresses, and department store staff], women were taking high-paying industrial work, a traditionally all-male domain.
An editorial cartoon inspired by Rockwell’s Rosie [note the unruly coiffure and the riveting gun in her pocket] reveals the angst in America’s heartland:
And while women in war production plants loved their jobs, and fully 86 percent of women in industrial plants survey by the U.S. Department of Labor in 1944 said they planned to keep their jobs after war’s end, expectations that for, for most, would be dashed to dust after the war’s end:
While societal pressure drove many women from their lucrative and unionized jobs, another factor was the Selective Service and Training Act of 1940, which mandated employers to give rehire returning service members.
Combined with the post-war economic slowdown and the closing of many defense plants, working women found themselves either back in the home or taking lower-paying service jobs, mostly non-union.
While women had comprised 37 percent of the U.S. workforce in 1945, as History.com notes:
By 1948, the percentage of women in the U.S. workforce dipped to 32.7 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, this despite a poll taken in the last few years of the war that suggested between 61 to 85 percent of women wanted to remain in their jobs when the war was over. The men may have prevailed at the time, but there was no turning back to a world before the war. In the ensuing decades, women took up ideological arms to battle for their rights, including equality of pay, opportunity, and treatment in the workplace.
Anne Montagne, founder of Thanks! Plain and Simple, an organization associated with the American Rosie Movement, laid out the dilemma to the Washington Post: “You know, they said about the men, ‘How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’ What I say about the women is, ‘How ya gonna keep ’em knitting with yarn after they’ve seen Lockheed?’”
Rosie had become an anachronism, recalled occasionally when the radio played the 1943 song that had inspired Rockwell’s painting:
It was Second Wave Feminism that brought Miller’s poster back into public consciousness, as Sarah Myers, Assistant Professor of History at Saint Francis University and G. Kurt Piehler, Associate Professor of History at Florida State University write in a report for The Conversation, an open source academic journal written in conversational English:
[B]y the early 1980s, feminists were looking for images from the past that they could reclaim as a symbol of female empowerment. They may have considered the Rockwell painting. But unlike Rockwell’s work, the less-famous Westinghouse poster wasn’t under copyright. It also didn’t contain a veiled reference to the war: “Mein Kampf.”
In the post-Vietnam era, feminists wanted an image of a woman that was visually appealing but not necessarily pro-war. In addition, compared with Rockwell’s painting, the woman in Miller’s poster is not as overtly working-class and could easily be manipulated to support a wide range of activist causes.
In the end, the message feminists wanted to send with the image wasn’t the original message of the poster. Miller’s poster, like most of the Rosie propaganda, was supposed to be a call for men and women to work together for the duration of the war out of patriotic duty.
But because they were still grappling with widespread job and wage discrimination, feminists simply wanted to use Rosie to show that women could perform the jobs traditionally held by men just as well, if not better. The slogan “We Can Do It!” was originally about winning the war. But it’s now meant to suggest women can do anything they put their minds to.
The red bandana-wearing Rosie was feminine-looking and attractive, bold but not too confrontational. In other words, the image was a safe, malleable advocate, one that continues to be deployed today.
We suspect the choice of Rosie’s had an implicit class bias as well.
Rockwell’s Rosie was exuberantly working class, with her wild mane and dirty face, hands, and arms, that very masculine wristwatch, and all those buttons, revealing an intense and immediate engagement with her work, while Miller’s Rosie is distinctly middle class, as were many of the Second Wave feminism’s most media savvy “leaders,” the one’s most often quoted in the news.
As for that copy of Mein Kampf, a quick trim can eliminate it, just as the Norman Rockwell Museum has done on their own website.
Miller’s Rosie, unlike Rockwell’s, is carefully made up, with bright lipstick fastidiously clean hands, and eyelashes brushed with makeup. And with her hair gleaming and immaculately coiffed, without the bandana, she could easily have staffed a makeup counter at Macy’s.
While Rockwell’s image was widely circulated during they war, Miller’s image lasted a mere two weeks at a few Westinghouse plants.
But today in is Miller’s image that thrives.
In sum, today’s Rosie is the gentrified image.
From the New York Times, based on a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based on data from Varieties of Democracy Institute, another indication that the United States is teetering on the brink of a precipice [click on the image to enlarge]:
From their report:
[T]he United States is quite alone among the ranks of perniciously polarized democracies in terms of its wealth and democratic experience. Of the episodes since 1950 where democracies polarized, all of those aside from the United States involved less wealthy, less long-standing democracies, many of which had democratized quite recently. None of the wealthy, consolidated democracies of East Asia, Oceania, or Western Europe, for example, have faced similar levels of polarization for such an extended period.
Only two other episodes come close. First, France briefly reached pernicious levels of polarization during its 1968 political crisis, when student protests and union strikes pushed France’s government to the brink of collapse. However, the unrest faded within a few months and the temperature of politics quickly returned to a more normal level with the signing of the Grenelle Accords and the holding of legislative elections in June 1968. The other episode was in Italy between 1971 and 1978, when levels of polarization were just shy of pernicious as the country faced a surge of violence from far-right and far-left terrorist groups. Italy eventually depolarized as the major political parties agreed to jointly address the violence, law enforcement cracked down on terrorism, and public support for extremist movements faded. Italy has been repolarizing in recent years, however, and reached pernicious levels in 2020. Yet neither Italy nor France reached levels of political polarization as high as the United States’ current levels for as long a period. There are no peer analogues for the United States’ current political divisions—and the track record of all democracies does not provide much consolation.
This status as an outlier could stem from a number of features that make the United States both especially susceptible to polarization and especially impervious to efforts to reduce it. One such feature is the durability of identity politics in a racially and ethnically diverse democracy. The United States is not the only such democracy—Brazil and India are large multiracial and multicultural democracies also suffering pernicious polarization, while Canada and Australia are increasingly multicultural but without such levels of polarization. Yet the United States is perhaps alone in experiencing a demographic shift that poses a threat to the white population that has historically been the dominant group in all arenas of power, allowing political leaders to exploit insecurities surrounding this loss of status.
Second, institutional characteristics likely contribute to the sustained severe polarization in the United States. Binary choice is deeply embedded in the U.S. electoral system, creating a rigid two-party system that facilitates binary divisions of society. For example, only five of twenty-six wealthy consolidated democracies elect representatives to their national legislatures in single-member districts. Like the United States, these countries tend to have two-party dominant systems; however, most have also seen new parties rise over the last two decades, a development that has not been mirrored in the United States.
Another institutional factor is the unique combination of a majoritarian electoral system with strong minoritarian institutions in the United States. The Senate is highly disproportionate in its representation, with two senators per state regardless of population, from Wyoming’s 580,000 to California’s 39,500,000 persons. The practices of the Senate also give individual senators unusual authority to single-handedly hold up presidential nominations or debate on legislation, while the filibuster rule enables the minority party to block consideration of legislation that would have a majority vote in favor. These contribute to government gridlock and fuel public disapproval of Congress. Finally, the disproportionality of Senate representation translates to disproportionality in the Electoral College—whose indirect election of the president is again exceptional among presidential democracies.
A third factor contributing to the seemingly entrenched political polarization in the United States is the three-decade-old trend of partisan sorting, in which the two parties reinforce urban-rural, religious-secular, and racial-ethnic cleavages rather than promote cross-cutting cleavages. With partisanship now increasingly tied to other kinds of social identity, affective polarization is on the rise, with voters perceiving the opposing party in negative terms and as a growing threat to the nation. Voters also tend to follow cues from party leaders about policy positions and there is greater homogeneity within parties, impeding the kind of cross-party coalitions common in the past. With such perceptions of threat, voters are more willing to tolerate or even embrace antidemocratic actions by their leaders.
Partisan sorting and rising polarization create a pernicious logic of zero-sum politics that incentivizes behavior undermining democratic institutions and norms. The final year of Donald Trump’s presidency saw the president and his party fuel a false narrative to discredit the electoral process, attempt to overturn the presidential election, and refuse to disavow political violence. All of these factors impede attempts to overcome pernicious polarization and portend an ominous future for American democracy.
And if that’s not bad enough, consider this from Newsweek:
In the biggest indication that he plans to run for president again so far, former President Donald Trump called himself the 47th president during a recent golf outing.
A video posted on Yeshiva World News’ Instagram on Wednesday, showed Trump and a group of people on a golf course, which was identified in the video as Trump National. As Trump sets himself up for a shot, a member of the group noted that the 45th president of the United States was “first on tee.”
“Forty-fifth and 47th,” Trump responded as he turned around.
Trump’s comment was met with applause and excitement from the rest of the golfing group. One person said, “I love it.”
Here’s the video:
Marketeers are already selling all sorts of Trump 2024 paraphernalia, ranging from yard signs, license plate frames, mugs, shirts, wristwatches, and hats to all manner of flags and even ammo clips. Christmas tree ornaments and swim trunks. Here’s Walmart’s flagging contribution:
Posted in Corpocracy, Culture, Deep Politics, Extremism, Politics, Sociology, Video
As any reasonable soul knows, big money, mainly from rich corporations and their owners [and, remember, banksters are corporations too] buys elections, imperiling the very notion of “free” elections, and any effort to restrain them runs into fierce oppositions from the politicians they buy,
In last month’s Chilean presidential elections, corporateers did their best to ensure the charismatic socialist Gabriel Boric went down in flames.
But Boric won, and one innovative effort by supporters foiled one of the cleverest gambits we’ve seen by the plutocratic class to rig the vote, as Andrés Arce and Bruno Dobrusin report for Jacobin:
The two candidates, José Antonio Kast and Gabriel Boric, represented opposing views on the process. Kast — a supporter of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship and representative of a far-right, radicalized version of the government of outgoing president and billionaire Sebastián Piñera — declared his opposition to the constitutional rewrite, while the socialist Boric firmly supported it. If the ultraright candidate won, the executive power would be a fierce enemy of the constitutional process, while if the left-wing candidate won, the executive power would become an ally.
Since the coup against Salvador Allende’s socialist government in 1973, Chile has been a laboratory for neoliberal policies, chief among them privatization and austerity. Transportation has been no exception, with private bus companies assuming responsibility for transporting large areas of the country. As these companies blatantly boycotted the December 19 election, many Chileans hypothesized that Piñera’s government was colluding with them to prevent pro-Boric voters from reaching the polls and to improve Kast’s chances of victory.
Proponents of the constitutional process responded quickly. Before them was a real chance to rewrite the 1980 document that enshrined neoliberalism in Chile, and they refused to lose it due to the boycott. Through WhatsApp groups, social media campaigns, and word-of-mouth chains, activists organized rides to the polls in the metropolitan areas of Santiago, Valparaíso, Concepción, and Antofagasta. Left-wing mayors from neighboring cities sent buses to the affected areas to counter the effects of the boycott.
Nice to see the good guys won one for a change!
Posted in Class, Community, Corpocracy, Latin America, Noteworthy, Politics
The arrival of COVID in all its varieties has laid bare another pandemic, one far more dangerous than a mere virus. It is, of course, the pandemic of raptor capitalism, that virulent plague of hyperconcentration of wealth that has infected the entire planet with wealth inequalities never before seen in the history of Homo sapiens.
Inequality Kills: The unparalleled action needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID-19, an important new report from the international charity Oxfam, reveals the impacts of COVID in its social dimensions in starkly clear language and images.
While the COVID virus may be indiscriminate in its choice of human hosts, the vast majority face massive hurdles its victims face, ranging from lack of access to health care, lost income, and the collapse of the middle class to increased spousal abuse.
But one group has fared very well indeed during pandemic time, as the report notes:
In July 2021, the world’s richest man launched himself and his friends into space in his luxury rocket while millions were dying needlessly below him because they could not access vaccines or afford food. Jeff Bezos’ own iconic Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” moment will forever be more accurately quoted: “I want to thank every Amazon employee and customer because you guys paid for all of this.” The increase in Bezos’ fortune alone during the pandemic could pay for everyone on earth to be safely vaccinated.
The world’s small elite of 2,755 billionaires has seen its fortunes grow more during COVID-19 than they have in the whole of the last fourteen years—fourteen years that themselves were a bonanza
for billionaire wealth.
This is the biggest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began. It is taking place on every continent. It is enabled by skyrocketing stock market prices, a boom in unregulated entities, a surge in monopoly power, and privatization, alongside the erosion of individual corporate tax rates and regulations, and workers’ rights and wages — all aided by the weaponization of racism.
Consider this graphic from the report:
More from the report:
The gap between rich and poor nations is now expected to rise for the first time in a generation. People who live in low- and middle-income countries are around twice as likely to die from COVID-19 infection as people who live in rich countries.
That at least 73 countries face the prospect of IMF-backed austerity risks worsening inequality between countries, and every type of inequality within countries. Women’s rights and progress toward gender equality will be hit hard by these austerity measures, amid a crisis that has already set back the goal of achieving gender parity by a whole generation to 135 years, when previously it was. What makes this situation even harsher is that women in many countries face a second
pandemic of increased gender-based violence — while, as with every crisis, having to absorb the shock of a mountain of unpaid care work that keeps them trapped at the bottom of the global economy.
The cost of the profound inequality we face is in human lives. As this paper shows, based on conservative estimates, inequality contributes to the deaths of at least 21,300 people each day. Every four seconds, inequality contributes to the death of at least one person.
We leave the last word to America’s greatest living editorial cartoonist, created to accompany an excellent post by Chris Hedges at Scheerpost:
Posted in Cartoons, Class, Corpocracy, Deep Politics, Economy, Governance, Health, Labor, Law, Politics, Poverty, Resources, Uncategorized, Wealth
We’ve polluted the air, water, land, and seas so deeply that our very futures are in grave danger, and unless we act soon, the cumulative impacts of our chemical addictions may reach a tipping point beyond which lies a very bleak future indeed, warns a stunning new report from an international panel of scientists.
And we continue to invent new compounds, many of them so-called “forever chemicals,” creations immune to breakdown and certain to remain in our environment for millennia to come.
Central to the crisis confronting us is the usual suspect, rampant, rapacious capitalism, eager to wring new profits from creating patented compounds unleashed on an unsuspecting world without rigorous and costly testing, thanks to connivance of government officials swayed by lavish corporate campaign funding.
In 1935, America’s premiere chemical company began a major advertising push that would continue for for 47 years, a campaign we well remember thanks to thousands of advertising exposures in magazines and newspapers and on radio and television while we were growing up in the 1950s:
[Former company president Irénée du Pont, coincidentally, was named by retired MarineCorps Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler as a leader of a foiled 1933 fascist-inspired, business-led coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt.]
There can be no doubt that chemical corporations have a long history of environmental pollution, and we spent several years during our time at the Berkeley Daily Planet documenting the sad historyof chemical pollution by Big Chemistry on the shores of San Francisco Bay.
In a global economy dominated by fossil fuel corporations, Big Tech and all its highly toxic compnents, and Big Agra [now largely owned by chemical companies], mountains of cash are funneled to politicians who fight regulatory efforts, the road ahead is fraught with peril.
But unless we gain control of these corporate monsters, the world our children and grandchildren will inherit will be a grim and ravaged place.
More on the study from The University of Stockholm’s Stockholm Resilience Center:
OUT OF CONTROL: For the first time, an international team of researchers has assessed the impact on the stability of the Earth system of the cocktail of synthetic chemicals and other “novel entities” flooding the environment.
The 14 scientists conclude in the scientific journal Environmental Science and Technology that humanity has exceeded a planetary boundary related to environmental pollutants including plastics.
“There has been a 50-fold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950. This is projected to triple again by 2050,” says co-author Patricia Villarubia-Gómez from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Plastic production alone increased 79% between 2000 and 2015, the team reports.
The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals and other novel entities into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.
There are an estimated 350,000 different types of manufactured chemicals on the global market. These include plastics, pesticides, industrial chemicals, chemicals in consumer products, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals. These are all wholly novel entities, created by human activities with largely unknown effects on the Earth system. Significant volumes of these novel entities enter the environment each year.
“The rate at which these pollutants are appearing in the environment far exceeds the capacity of governments to assess global and regional risks, let alone control any potential problems,” says co-author Bethanie Carney Almroth from the University of Gothenburg.
The research fills an important gap in analysis of “planetary boundaries”.
In 2009, an international team of researchers identified nine planetary boundaries that demarcate the remarkably stable state Earth has remained within for 10,000 years – since the dawn of civilization. These boundaries include greenhouse gas emissions, the ozone layer, forests, freshwater and biodiversity. The researchers quantified the boundaries that influence Earth’s stability, and concluded in 2015 that four boundaries have been breached. But the boundary for novel entities was one of two boundaries that remained unquantified.
This new research takes this a step further.
The researchers say there are many ways that chemicals and plastics have negative effects on planetary health, from mining, fracking and drilling to extract raw materials to production and waste management.
“Some of these pollutants can be found globally, from the Arctic to Antarctica, and can be extremely persistent. We have overwhelming evidence of negative impacts on Earth systems, including biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles,” says Carney Almroth.
Global production and consumption of novel entities is set to continue to grow. The total mass of plastics on the planet is now over twice the mass of all living mammals, and roughly 80% of all plastics ever produced remain in the environment.
Plastics contain over 10,000 other chemicals, so their environmental degradation creates new combinations of materials – and unprecedented environmental hazards. Production of plastics is set to increase and predictions indicate that the release of plastic pollution to the environment will rise too, despite huge efforts in many countries to reduce waste.
The researchers conclude that current increasing trends of chemical production and release put the health of the Earth system at risk. The authors call for actions to reduce the production and release of pollutants.
“We need to be working towards implementing a fixed cap on chemical production and release,” says Carney Almroth.
“And shifting to a circular economy is really important. That means changing materials and products so they can be reused not wasted, designing chemicals and products for recycling, and much better screening of chemicals for their safety and sustainability along their whole impact pathway in the Earth system”, adds Sarah Cornell from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Posted in Agriculture, Climate, Corpocracy, Deep Politics, Development, Economy, Energy, Geopolitics, Governance, Health, Law, Nature, Politics, Resources, Science
eats shoots 'n leaves 
