Radical problems demand radical, not “bipartisan,” solutions. If we don’t change, the climate will. It already is changing with more rapidity than anyone dared imagine twenty years ago.
No time for Main Stream politics now, NONE AT ALL. Either we come up with radical solutions to this radical problem of Climate Change, or we swab the deck while the Corporate Elite (Republicans AND Democrats) and their aristocratic equivalents around the world, man the life-boats — Billionaires, Silicon-enhanced Women and Pure-Born Royalty first.
I don’t believe for a minute that a) humanity and all of life can sustain itself under the current system. However, the current system will use anything in its power, including Nukes and WMD, to stop the threat of even the slightest change. That’s why the whip came down in Seatle in 1999, during the halcyon days of Democrats, because the activists, however ingenuous and trusting AND unarmed, had gotten way to close to the real and only issue: accept Capitalist Civilization’s planned reduction of all living things, all wildlife into dead consumer goods, or die.
We’ve learned what damage a fist-full of Republicans can do in a few years, and it’s only marginally worse than damage done in the “good old days” by droves of Democrats.
We’ve NO TIME for Democrats! They gave up the 2000 and 2004 elections to Bush; the Democrats in Congress voted for the war and nearly every other nefarious, attack on civil rights and public assistance proposed by their Republican “colleagues” or Bush himself.
And just when were the “good old days?”
Democrats were in charge during both the Korean and Vietnamese wars, the McCarthy Period, and gave Bush nearly unanimous support after the panic unleashed by 9/11, when critical thinking, important questions and balanced observation were in order. Democrats dropped two nuclear weapons on real people, set up legislation that allowed Bush to score the “goal” of the PATRIOT ACT, not to mention killing almost a million Iraqis “softly” with sanctions. So we’re supposed to worship Roosevelt for the pennies he threw to the poor and working classes — which, like today, form a far higher, wider base of the economic pyramid than ever before or since — earning him scorn from the “business class,” though his welfare Trojan Horse effectively neutralized all “third-party threats” such as socialists and communists, from the “national debate,” which comprised, essentially, his “fire-side chats,” answered by countless letters from “citizens” voicing their opinions, which are always inspiring though irrelevant on such occasions when Power wins the battle, then generously allows you to keep your wasted farm and half-dead mule.
It might be a good idea to stop and think about things before accepting, rejecting or even responding to your next web article or blog piece, this one included (perhaps in particular).
What has this “System” called “Civilization” actually achieved beyond baubles for the very rich and famous? What has this “Civilization, now about 6000 years old and not about to change, brought to humanity? After it slaughtered and/or enslaved ALL indigenous people, Asians, Africans, Native Americans, fought a few Holy Wars after burning many “lesser” religions out of History’s prayer-book and even after “god was dead” managed two world wars in one particularly bloody century.
Here in the “land of the free,” after a bloody civil war, the chattel slave was converted into the wage slave just in time for the factories to begin “production.” See, the Civil War wasn’t about “freeing” black chattel slaves to much as ensuring the corporate wage state would be large and powerful enough to enslave YOU (if you happen to be black, that’s double-jeopardy).
For merely tinkering with the System to ensure people, in general, had at least a small income from Public Works, and social security and the rest, Roosevelt was called a “communist” and a “traitor to his class.” Meanwhile, it’s the old MLK/Malcolm X split: would MLK have gotten any concessions at all if the possibility of Malcolm X and other more militant, more violent radicals wasn’t waiting in the wings?
There were a lot of angry, desperate people during the 1930s, many of them veterans demanding rightful benefits; Communists demanding revolution; even socialists demanding permanent government sponsored food, shelter and health care (now that’s REALLY sick). According to former Marine General Smedley Butler, one of the most “decorated” soldiers in American military history and author of War is a Racket
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm , some super rich people, you know, the folks who really run America, wanted him to lead a coup against Roosevelt, turn America into a true plutocratic oligarchy.
You can get the basics about the Climate Change issue, the ultimate and only issue at this time, by reading Rand Clifford’s three-part essay, “Perspectives on a Changing Climate,” http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1898.shtml or search the WEB for any number of articles. Or if you want to go deep into the whole shebang, read Derek Jenson’s two-volume, End Game, or Lewis Mumford’s Myth of the Machine. Or read “alternative” magazines, such as this one, to get a broader perspective than Mainstream Media. I hear Mainstream Media is starting to admit, here and there, that there “may” be a problem with the Environment that sustains all life, from the Redwood Forests to the Lower East Side. There’s really not a lot one needs to know, now that there’s one issue that must be dealt with before others, though it helps to be as knowledgeable as possible, to get a sense of the facts we’re not supposed to know, facts that make it ever more difficult for the Imperial government to pull the wool over our eyes — again. But if we remain in our state of arrested development (most American minds close in what, the fifth grade? sixth grade?), another Katrina will blow by, this time taking NYC or LA with it, and FEMA will send in the Marines — or better yet, a “private” security firm — to restore order to the desperate, starving, homeless masses. Well, I hope citizens in “high risk” areas get their gats while the gettin’s good.
Again, if you want to check out the evils of the hierarchical, plutocratic, patriarchal order that we’ve called “civilization” for the past 6,000 years (Ironic: it all began in Iraq or thereabouts; can’t say THE MAN doesn’t have a sense of humor!) It’s a mind-blower, how the broad range of greed, corruption and waste, beginning from the top down in civilization, has turned 90 percent of the planet into urban wasteland and suburban sprawl. The Natives of North America lived in the same regions for at least ten thousand years; and we’ve managed to destroy 90 percent of the earth in six millennium, mostly the last 150 years of Corporate Capitalism. And America, the “New World,” soiled its own didies, perhaps irrevocably, in a mere 500 years. If even if the remaining ten percent of the “Natural World” were saved for some possible future generation who would learn to live with Nature, not against it, the struggle will be fierce; hundreds of millions, including yours truly, will die, perhaps Billions, to get the population of humans down to a sustainable level. The Native Americans, who were almost made extinct by the “American Dream,” were a model of sustainability and ecology. Again, they lived in the same regions for over ten thousand years, always replacing, in some way, what they took from the land.
Compare the at-least-ten-thousand to the “almost 500″ (really the past 150: the Industrial Revolution) and you gotta wonder: which of the “fittest” were meant to survive, or even, what exactly does the word “fittest” imply…
We’re in serious, serious trouble. “Debate” with Mainstream representatives of the Corporate/Military state was unsuccessful even in the late sixties (remember the Chicago riots, the Chicago Seven, COINTELPRO, FBI harassment of U.S. citizens?) when the business class, realizing Vietnam would ultimately be costly unless it were turned into some kind of cheap market or production site — which is exactly what happened, according to the women who work in its sweatshops) — and the Military class realizing it was not equipped to fight an “invisible” indigenous population, that it would have to take a holiday and regroup, pulled the plug on the war.
Speaking of which… I STILL see bumper-stickers urging us to “support our troops!” You think Germans and Japanese didn’t “support” their troops during WWII? What did that “support” amount to? A desire to kill Americans, if only to “get them before they got your son.” Then again, just cause they’re murdering people who posed no threat to them BEFORE they landed in Iraq (we invaded a foreign country; what did we expect, to be greeted with flowers? Oh yeah, we DID expect that, didn’t we?), and we know now what we pretended not to know before the war that Iraq had no WMD and posed about as much a threat to us as the Sandinistas allegedly posed Texas in the 1980s. It doesn’t mean that we should stop “supporting our troops,” even though some of the more faint-hearted among us might “condemn” the war itself. If we stopped supporting “our” troops, why, they might get all depressed and start reading books and smoking marijuana and learn about all the terrible things our addiction to oil is doing — the most important of which is the global climate change destroying every living thing on the planet. They might even put down their guns and stop fighting and go against ALL orders and join the surviving men women and children of Iraq in rebuilding their culture into the “cradle of civilization” it once was. As soon as that happens, who knows what’ll fall next? If their older bothers and sisters stop obeying the dictates of a deranged, psychotic “Commander-in-Chief,” who’ll eat our Aunt Jemima frozen bleached white flour waffles slathered in white corn syrup with artificial maple flavoring and caramel color, and Uncle Ben’s plantation style White-Wash rice?
What’s so horrible is that if the Iraq war ends tomorrow, and peace is declared around the globe, with all oppressors giving aid and retribution to the oppressed, and all territories shared etc. etc. we’d STILL be doomed cause someone was stupid enough to declare a war against Nature (like the war against drugs, war against smoking, war against poverty, war against racism, terrorism, ismism — wow, we’ve lost a lot of wars, haven’t we?) and kept burning the gas in greater and greater quantities and burning plants and animals to extinction, and now Nature is incomprehensibly pissed. Think about all the “odd weather” and natural disasters we’ve had in the past 20 years, then multiply it by orders of magnitude, and that’s the inheritance you’re leaving your children and, if they survive, grand children, great grandchildren, etc.
No more compromise with Corporations whose basic function is to turn life — plants, animals — into death — “products, merchandise.” We need radical action. We need a worldwide commitment to keep the population down, feed the living, and clean up. Rebuild sustainable housing, replant whatever near-gone plants we can salvage, turn this planet into something livable and beautiful, again. There will be organizers, engineers, various “officials” and plain old laborers. But even the unskilled laborers — among whom I’ll be — picking up litter, will know their work is meaningful, as opposed to upping productivity of widgets for MegaCorps so that powerful Casino called the stock market can give it a higher “earning potential” and Return on Investment (appropriately acronymed, ROI) numbers and cash Sounds like a long shot, but if humans can organize for this one 100-plus year task, perhaps the balance between humans, and nature (which means all other species and plant life) will be restored.
Of course, to reach the ideals expressed in the previous paragraph is a long shot, possibly just short of fantasy. But that’s the situation we’re in. Either the “people of the earth” take down the Current System immediately and put everything they have into cleaning the earth, air, water and planning, and creating a sustainable life, or their progeny might not survive and the last sunset humanity will enjoy will come down in about 100 years, maybe less.
I don’t believe for a minute that a) humanity and all of life can sustain itself under the current system. However, the current system will use anything in its power, including Nukes and WMD, to stop the threat of even the slightest change. That’s why the whip came down in Seatle in 1999, during the halcyon days of Democrats, because the activists, however ingenuous and trusting AND unarmed, had gotten way to close to the real and only issue: accept Capitalist Civilization’s planned reduction of all living things, all wildlife into dead consumer goods, or die.
We’ve learned what damage a fist-full of Republicans can do in a few years, and it’s only marginally worse than damage done in the “good old days” by droves of Democrats.
We’ve NO TIME for Democrats! They gave up the 2000 and 2004 elections to Bush; the Democrats in Congress voted for the war and nearly every other nefarious, attack on civil rights and public assistance proposed by their Republican “colleagues” or Bush himself.
And just when were the “good old days?”
Democrats were in charge during both the Korean and Vietnamese wars, the McCarthy Period, and gave Bush nearly unanimous support after the panic unleashed by 9/11, when critical thinking, important questions and balanced observation were in order. Democrats dropped two nuclear weapons on real people, set up legislation that allowed Bush to score the “goal” of the PATRIOT ACT, not to mention killing almost a million Iraqis “softly” with sanctions. So we’re supposed to worship Roosevelt for the pennies he threw to the poor and working classes — which, like today, form a far higher, wider base of the economic pyramid than ever before or since — earning him scorn from the “business class,” though his welfare Trojan Horse effectively neutralized all “third-party threats” such as socialists and communists, from the “national debate,” which comprised, essentially, his “fire-side chats,” answered by countless letters from “citizens” voicing their opinions, which are always inspiring though irrelevant on such occasions when Power wins the battle, then generously allows you to keep your wasted farm and half-dead mule.
It might be a good idea to stop and think about things before accepting, rejecting or even responding to your next web article or blog piece, this one included (perhaps in particular).
What has this “System” called “Civilization” actually achieved beyond baubles for the very rich and famous? What has this “Civilization, now about 6000 years old and not about to change, brought to humanity? After it slaughtered and/or enslaved ALL indigenous people, Asians, Africans, Native Americans, fought a few Holy Wars after burning many “lesser” religions out of History’s prayer-book and even after “god was dead” managed two world wars in one particularly bloody century.
Here in the “land of the free,” after a bloody civil war, the chattel slave was converted into the wage slave just in time for the factories to begin “production.” See, the Civil War wasn’t about “freeing” black chattel slaves to much as ensuring the corporate wage state would be large and powerful enough to enslave YOU (if you happen to be black, that’s double-jeopardy).
For merely tinkering with the System to ensure people, in general, had at least a small income from Public Works, and social security and the rest, Roosevelt was called a “communist” and a “traitor to his class.” Meanwhile, it’s the old MLK/Malcolm X split: would MLK have gotten any concessions at all if the possibility of Malcolm X and other more militant, more violent radicals wasn’t waiting in the wings?
There were a lot of angry, desperate people during the 1930s, many of them veterans demanding rightful benefits; Communists demanding revolution; even socialists demanding permanent government sponsored food, shelter and health care (now that’s REALLY sick). According to former Marine General Smedley Butler, one of the most “decorated” soldiers in American military history and author of War is a Racket
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm , some super rich people, you know, the folks who really run America, wanted him to lead a coup against Roosevelt, turn America into a true plutocratic oligarchy. You can get the basics about the Climate Change issue, the ultimate and only issue at this time, by reading Rand Clifford’s three-part essay, “Perspectives on a Changing Climate,”
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1898.shtml or search the WEB for any number of articles. Or if you want to go deep into the whole shebang, read Derek Jenson’s two-volume, End Game, or Lewis Mumford’s Myth of the Machine. Or read “alternative” magazines, such as this one, to get a broader perspective than Mainstream Media. I hear Mainstream Media is starting to admit, here and there, that there “may” be a problem with the Environment that sustains all life, from the Redwood Forests to the Lower East Side. There’s really not a lot one needs to know, now that there’s one issue that must be dealt with before others, though it helps to be as knowledgeable as possible, to get a sense of the facts we’re not supposed to know, facts that make it ever more difficult for the Imperial government to pull the wool over our eyes — again. But if we remain in our state of arrested development (most American minds close in what, the fifth grade? sixth grade?), another Katrina will blow by, this time taking NYC or LA with it, and FEMA will send in the Marines — or better yet, a “private” security firm — to restore order to the desperate, starving, homeless masses. Well, I hope citizens in “high risk” areas get their gats while the gettin’s good. Again, if you want to check out the evils of the hierarchical, plutocratic, patriarchal order that we’ve called “civilization” for the past 6,000 years (Ironic: it all began in Iraq or thereabouts; can’t say THE MAN doesn’t have a sense of humor!) It’s a mind-blower, how the broad range of greed, corruption and waste, beginning from the top down in civilization, has turned 90 percent of the planet into urban wasteland and suburban sprawl. The Natives of North America lived in the same regions for at least ten thousand years; and we’ve managed to destroy 90 percent of the earth in six millennium, mostly the last 150 years of Corporate Capitalism. And America, the “New World,” soiled its own didies, perhaps irrevocably, in a mere 500 years. If even if the remaining ten percent of the “Natural World” were saved for some possible future generation who would learn to live with Nature, not against it, the struggle will be fierce; hundreds of millions, including yours truly, will die, perhaps Billions, to get the population of humans down to a sustainable level. The Native Americans, who were almost made extinct by the “American Dream,” were a model of sustainability and ecology. Again, they lived in the same regions for over ten thousand years, always replacing, in some way, what they took from the land.
Compare the at-least-ten-thousand to the “almost 500″ (really the past 150: the Industrial Revolution) and you gotta wonder: which of the “fittest” were meant to survive, or even, what exactly does the word “fittest” imply…
We’re in serious, serious trouble. “Debate” with Mainstream representatives of the Corporate/Military state was unsuccessful even in the late sixties (remember the Chicago riots, the Chicago Seven, COINTELPRO, FBI harassment of U.S. citizens?) when the business class, realizing Vietnam would ultimately be costly unless it were turned into some kind of cheap market or production site — which is exactly what happened, according to the women who work in its sweatshops) — and the Military class realizing it was not equipped to fight an “invisible” indigenous population, that it would have to take a holiday and regroup, pulled the plug on the war.
Speaking of which… I STILL see bumper-stickers urging us to “support our troops!” You think Germans and Japanese didn’t “support” their troops during WWII? What did that “support” amount to? A desire to kill Americans, if only to “get them before they got your son.” Then again, just cause they’re murdering people who posed no threat to them BEFORE they landed in Iraq (we invaded a foreign country; what did we expect, to be greeted with flowers? Oh yeah, we DID expect that, didn’t we?), and we know now what we pretended not to know before the war that Iraq had no WMD and posed about as much a threat to us as the Sandinistas allegedly posed Texas in the 1980s. It doesn’t mean that we should stop “supporting our troops,” even though some of the more faint-hearted among us might “condemn” the war itself. If we stopped supporting “our” troops, why, they might get all depressed and start reading books and smoking marijuana and learn about all the terrible things our addiction to oil is doing — the most important of which is the global climate change destroying every living thing on the planet. They might even put down their guns and stop fighting and go against ALL orders and join the surviving men women and children of Iraq in rebuilding their culture into the “cradle of civilization” it once was. As soon as that happens, who knows what’ll fall next? If their older bothers and sisters stop obeying the dictates of a deranged, psychotic “Commander-in-Chief,” who’ll eat our Aunt Jemima frozen bleached white flour waffles slathered in white corn syrup with artificial maple flavoring and caramel color, and Uncle Ben’s plantation style White-Wash rice?
What’s so horrible is that if the Iraq war ends tomorrow, and peace is declared around the globe, with all oppressors giving aid and retribution to the oppressed, and all territories shared etc. etc. we’d STILL be doomed cause someone was stupid enough to declare a war against Nature (like the war against drugs, war against smoking, war against poverty, war against racism, terrorism, ismism — wow, we’ve lost a lot of wars, haven’t we?) and kept burning the gas in greater and greater quantities and burning plants and animals to extinction, and now Nature is incomprehensibly pissed. Think about all the “odd weather” and natural disasters we’ve had in the past 20 years, then multiply it by orders of magnitude, and that’s the inheritance you’re leaving your children and, if they survive, grand children, great grandchildren, etc.
No more compromise with Corporations whose basic function is to turn life — plants, animals — into death — “products, merchandise.” We need radical action. We need a worldwide commitment to keep the population down, feed the living, and clean up. Rebuild sustainable housing, replant whatever near-gone plants we can salvage, turn this planet into something livable and beautiful, again. There will be organizers, engineers, various “officials” and plain old laborers. But even the unskilled laborers — among whom I’ll be — picking up litter, will know their work is meaningful, as opposed to upping productivity of widgets for MegaCorps so that powerful Casino called the stock market can give it a higher “earning potential” and Return on Investment (appropriately acronymed, ROI) numbers and cash Sounds like a long shot, but if humans can organize for this one 100-plus year task, perhaps the balance between humans, and nature (which means all other species and plant life) will be restored.
Of course, to reach the ideals expressed in the previous paragraph is a long shot, possibly just short of fantasy. But that’s the situation we’re in. Either the “people of the earth” take down the Current System immediately and put everything they have into cleaning the earth, air, water and planning, and creating a sustainable life, or their progeny might not survive and the last sunset humanity will enjoy will come down in about 100 years, maybe less.
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