The Path to a Livable Future: Or Will Corporations Trash the Planet?
Tom Dispatch – October 24, 2021 – Noam Chomsky and Stan Cox
https://tomdispatch.com/the-path-to-a-livable-future/
There is indeed a path to a livable future. There are ways to have responsible, sane, and racially just policies. It’s up to all of us to demand them, something young people around the world are already doing… The economic system of the last 40 years has been particularly destructive. It’s inflicted a major assault on most of the population, resulting in a huge growth in inequality and attacks on democracy and the environment… There are serious barriers — the fossil-fuel industries, the banks, the other major institutions, which are designed to maximize profit and not care about anything else… We now have a struggle. It can be won, but the longer it’s delayed, the more difficult it’ll be… The longer we wait, the more we’ll betray our children and our grandchildren. Those are the choices. I don’t have many years; others of you do. The possibility for a just and sustainable future exists, and there’s plenty that we can do to get there before it’s too late.
Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction
The Guardian – October 30, 2021 – George Monbiot
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitalism-is-killing-the-planet-its-time-to-stop-buying-into-our-own-destruction
Human civilisation relies on current equilibrium states. But, all over the world, crucial systems appear to be approaching their tipping points. If one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse. This is what happened during previous mass extinctions… You might expect an intelligent species to respond to these signals swiftly and conclusively, by radically altering its relationship with the living world. But this is not how we function. Our great intelligence, our highly evolved consciousness that once took us so far, now works against us… The great political transition of the past 50 years, driven by corporate marketing, has been a shift from addressing our problems collectively to addressing them individually. In other words, it has turned us from citizens into consumers. It’s not hard to see why we have been herded down this path. As citizens, joining together to demand political change, we are powerful. As consumers, we are almost powerless.
‘This Is an Emergency’: Oxfam Says Rich Nations’ $100 Billion Climate Pledge Not Good Enough
Common Dreams – October 25, 2021 – Andrea Germanos
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/10/25/emergency-oxfam-says-rich-nations-100-billion-climate-pledge-not-good-enough
“It is unacceptable,” he said, “that poorer countries that have done little to cause the climate crisis are being forced to take out loans to protect themselves from surging climate disasters like droughts and storms.”… Time is running out for rich nations to build trust and deliver on their unmet target. This raises the stakes in Glasgow where wealthy governments must agree to more stringent reporting standards, on ensuring climate finance is directed to the right places and on a plan beyond 2025.
What Big Oil knew about climate change, in its own words
Informed Comment – October 29, 2021 – Benjamin Franta
https://www.juancole.com/2021/10/about-climate-change.html
As I reviewed my findings back in California, I realized that before San Francisco’s Summer of Love, before Woodstock, the peak of the ’60s counterculture and all that stuff that seemed ancient history to me, the heads of the oil industry had been privately informed by their own leaders that their products would eventually alter the climate of the entire planet, with dangerous consequences… Back in 1979, Exxon had privately studied options for avoiding global warming. It found that with immediate action, if the industry moved away from fossil fuels and instead focused on renewable energy, fossil fuel pollution could start to decline in the 1990s and a major climate crisis could be avoided. But the industry didn’t pursue that path. Instead, colleagues and I recently found that in the late 1980s, Exxon and other oil companies coordinated a global effort to dispute climate science, block fossil fuel controls and keep their products flowing… Will the world experience the global catastrophe that the oil companies predicted years before I was born? That depends on what we do now, with our slice of history.
This Movement Is Taking Money Away From Fossil Fuels, and It’s Working
The New York Times – October 26, 2021 – Bill McKibben
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/climate-change-divestment-fossil-fuels.html
On Tuesday, a little less than a week before the start of the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, activists announced that the fossil fuel divestment campaign has reached new heights. Endowments, portfolios and pension funds worth just shy of $40 trillion have now committed to full or partial abstinence from coal, gas and oil stocks. For comparison’s sake, that’s larger than the gross domestic product of the United States and China combined… The influence of money in politics is clear on energy legislation — and when we can weaken the biggest opponents of climate action, everything gets easier. Divestment has helped rub much of the shine off what was once the planet’s dominant industry.
Climate Change Is an Infrastructure Problem. A Map of Electric Vehicle Chargers Shows One Reason Why
Next City – September20, 2021 – Paul N. Edwards
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/entry/climate-change-infrastructure-problem-map-electric-vehicle-chargers-shows
[The] uneven, limited charging infrastructure is one major roadblock to rapid electrification of the U.S. vehicle fleet, considered crucial to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. It’s also a clear example of how climate change is an infrastructure problem – my specialty as a historian of climate science at Stanford University and editor of the book series “Infrastructures.”… Over many decades, the U.S. has built systems of transportation, heating, cooling, manufacturing and agriculture that rely primarily on fossil fuels… Minimizing future climate change and its most damaging impacts will require transitioning quickly away from fossil fuels and moving instead to renewable, sustainable energy sources such as wind, solar and tidal power. That means reimagining how people use energy: how they travel, what and where they build, how they manufacture goods and how they grow food.
The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Leaf Blowers
The New York Times – October 25, 2021 – Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/opinion/leaf-blowers-california-emissions.html
The gasoline-powered leaf blower exists in a category of environmental hell all its own, spewing pollutants — carbon monoxide, smog-forming nitrous oxides, carcinogenic hydrocarbons — into the atmosphere at a literally breathtaking rate. This particular environmental catastrophe is not news. A 2011 study by Edmunds found that a two-stroke gasoline-powered leaf blower spewed out more pollution than a 6,200-pound Ford F-150 SVT Raptor pickup truck.
EU’s Biggest Pension Fund to Dump $17 Billion in Fossil Fuels
Bloomberg – October 26, 2021 – Alastair Marsh
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-26/fossil-fuel-divestment-supported-by-investors-with-39-trillion
Europe’s biggest pension fund, ABP of the Netherlands, has joined a growing number of investment managers blacklisting fossil fuels as the finance industry gives in to pressure from activists and customers alarmed at the prospect of a climate catastrophe caused by carbon emissions. ABP said Tuesday it will divest 15 billion euros ($17.4 billion) worth of fossil-fuel assets by early 2023. The fund said it doesn’t expect the decision to hurt long-term returns and added that the move will allow it to unveil a more ambitious CO2 reduction goal next year. The announcement underpins the speed with which the investment industry is turning its back on oil, gas and coal, with 1,500 asset managers overseeing a combined $39.2 trillion now committed to offloading such holdings.
Climate Emergency Includes the Threat of ‘Nuclear Winter’
Reader Supported News – October 27, 2021 – Norman Solomon
https://www.rsn.org/001/climate-emergency-includes-the-threat-of-nuclear-winter.html
The threat of nuclear war has not receded. In fact, the opposite is the case. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been moving the “Doomsday Clock” ever closer to cataclysmic midnight; the symbolic hands are now merely 100 seconds from midnight, in contrast to six minutes a decade ago. A nuclear war would quickly bring cataclysmic climate change. A recent scientific paper, in sync with countless studies, concludes that — in the aftermath of nuclear weapons blasts in cities — “smoke would effectively block out sunlight, causing below-freezing temperatures to engulf the world.” Researchers estimate such conditions would last for 10 years. The Federation of American Scientists predicts that “a nuclear winter would cause most humans and large animals to die from nuclear famine in a mass extinction event similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.”… At the same time that the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases have continued to increase, so have the dangers of nuclear war. No imperatives are more crucial than challenging the fossil fuel industry and the nuclear weapons industry as the terrible threats to the climate and humanity that they are.
To Avoid Armageddon, Don’t Modernize Missiles—Eliminate Them
The Nation – October 19. 2021 – Daniel Ellsberg and Norman Solomon
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/eliminate-nuclear-missiles/
The single best option for reducing the risk of nuclear war is hidden in plain sight. News outlets don’t mention it. Pundits ignore it. Even progressive and peace-oriented members of Congress tiptoe around it. And yet, for many years, experts have been calling for this act of sanity that could save humanity: Shutting down all of the nation’s intercontinental ballistic missiles… Frank von Hippel, a former chair of the Federation of American Scientists and a cofounder of Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security, wrote this year: “Eliminating launch on warning would significantly reduce the probability of blundering into a civilization-ending nuclear war by mistake. To err is human. To start a nuclear war would be unforgivable.”
The US should cut the military budget to fund Build Back Better programs
The Guardian – October 30, 2021 – Emma Claire Foley
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/30/america-should-cut-pentagon-budget-fund-build-back-better
The Pentagon has come to expect reliable, generous financial support that keeps them prosperous. Doesn’t the American public deserve the same?… The Pentagon budget is the one area where massive, long-term government spending is not only considered totally normal, but suggestions to change the status quo are still mostly balked at. Negotiations over the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act are also ongoing, and the contrast between the range of alternatives being seriously considered is striking.
A Reminder That Democracy Is Fragile
Reader Supported News – Dan Rather’s Facebook Page – October 24, 2021
https://www.rsn.org/001/a-reminder-that-democracy-is-fragile.html
I believe, however, it is too easy to chalk these voter suppression efforts to mere hatred or bigotry, though those currents are certainly at play. But I don’t think the lines of demarcation are as clear as they were during the Civil Rights movement. As with back then, this is about power, raw power. But it is a power based on a view of the country that is more complex than race, although race certainly plays a part. It is about a belief that we should hew to only one vision of America, a vision that those on the far right of the political spectrum define as patriotism. It is an America where old social orders largely remain intact, where a view of what society is and should be passes through the most conservative of lenses. Those who had firmly felt themselves in the majority see this America slipping away. Rather than evolve and modernize, they would rather retrench with a steel-eyed political calculus: if you can’t win a majority of voters, you must construct a system that allows for minority rule.
Jan. 6 Protest Organizers Say They Participated in ‘Dozens’ of Planning Meetings With Members of Congress and White House Staff
Rolling Stone – October 24, 2021 – Hunter Walker
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/exclusive-jan-6-organizers-met-congress-white-house-1245289/
As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.
Multilevel Marketing Scams Expose Capitalism’s Foundational Lie
Jacobin – October 23, 2021 – Luke Savage
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/multilevel-marketing-scam-lularoe-pyramid-scheme-capitalism-myth
Pyramid schemes aren’t a corruption of capitalism — they’re a microcosm of how the class system arbitrarily creates winners and losers while falsely promising opportunity for all… Markets are not ultimately even terrains of competing entrepreneurs where rewards are distributed based on hard work and social value. By design, they are quite literally pyramids in which a small few at the top dominate the vast majority at the bottom — a fact that is no less the case when the purchase or sale of goods and labor occurs free of outright deception or fraud. The system isn’t built such that everyone can become a boss, owner, or entrepreneur, and plenty will spend their working lives toiling mainly to enrich someone else. This simple and elementary truth has always been hiding in plain sight
Why you should teach your kids about different religions
The Washington Post – October 25, 2021 – Kristen Mei Chase
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/10/25/teaching-kids-world-religions-cultures/
Whether or not your family engages in a specific religious practice, it’s important for children to understand the history and cultural implications of all religions, which are, of course, complicated… There’s a lack of education about other religions — not necessarily the theology, but from a cultural, historical and sociological point of view. “Exposing students to a bird’s-eye view of what religion is and how it functions in our society helps them learn respect for other peoples’ behaviors and choices,” Blanchard says. Such respect is important if we want to continue to live in a society that supports religious freedom, she adds. Religion is intimately attached to cultural identity for the majority of people in the world, so by not teaching children about multiple religions, we’re not fully educating them about cultures, many of which they may encounter while living in such a diverse society as the United States.
Israel advances plans for 3,000 new homes in West Bank settlements
BBC News – October 28, 2021
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-59062909
On Tuesday, US state department spokesman Ned Price told reporters that it was “deeply concerned” by the Israeli plans. “We strongly oppose the expansion of settlements, which is completely inconsistent with efforts to lower tensions and to ensure calm, and it damages the prospects for a two-state solution,” he said.
US Coalition Calls on Biden to Denounce Israel’s Crackdown on Palestinian Rights Groups
Common Dreams – October 29, 2021 – Kenny Stancil
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/10/29/us-coalition-calls-biden-denounce-israels-crackdown-palestinian-rights-groups
“A threat against the Palestinian human rights movement is a threat against movements for social justice everywhere,” nearly 300 U.S.-based civil society groups told Secretary of State Antony Blinken… In their letter to Blinken, the coalition points out that “smearing the promotion and defense of human rights as ‘terrorist’ activity is a dangerous, well-worn tactic of authoritarian regimes and a shameful political maneuver to undermine the vital work of these organizations.”
The indisputable harm caused by Facebook
The Washington Post – October 26, 2021 – Ishaan Tharoor
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/26/indisputable-harm-caused-by-facebook/
Facebook and the other apps it owns, including WhatsApp and Instagram, are now increasingly seen through the prism of the harm they appear to cause. They have become major platforms for misinformation, polarization and hate speech… In recent days, The Washington Post began publishing a series of reports based on internal documents from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. The documents were reviewed by a consortium of media outlets and, according to Haugen, disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission… The Facebook Papers “are astonishing for two reasons,” wrote the Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance. “First, because their sheer volume is unbelievable. And second, because these documents leave little room for doubt about Facebook’s crucial role in advancing the cause of authoritarianism in America and around the world. Authoritarianism predates the rise of Facebook, of course. But Facebook makes it much easier for authoritarians to win.”
Do You Facebook?
Steady – October 26, 2021 – Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner
https://steady.substack.com/p/do-you-facebook
The revelations coming out about Facebook are shocking, but also not really. They continue to confirm the worst suspicions of many, that in a drive for profit at all costs Mark Zuckerberg has pursued a policy that harms health and safety, broadly defined. From stoking hate, to undermining democracy, to spreading lies about Covid and vaccines, Facebook has played a key role in making our world more dangerous. It appears that the alarm bells for what was happening were ringing loudly from inside the company, as employees saw algorithms built to maximize engagement pushing users to increasingly extreme, lie-filled, and rage-inducing content.
Some fast-food items contain plastics linked to serious health problems, new report shows
The Washington Post – October 27, 2021 – Laura Reiley
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/27/fast-food-phthalates-plastics/
Food items sold by fast-food chains are heavily processed, packaged and handled, providing more opportunities to come into contact with these phthalates and plasticizers. The researchers collected food-handling gloves from many of the restaurants, which also tested positive for these chemicals. While identifying sources of the chemicals was not part of the study, the researchers hypothesized that the concentration of these chemicals was because phthalates and replacement plasticizers exist throughout the food supply chain, with food coming into contact with packaging and food-handling gloves, as well as processing equipment such as industrial tubing and conveyors.
New Build Back Better Framework a Historic Step Forward
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – October 28, 2021 – Sharon Parrott
https://www.cbpp.org/press/statements/updated-parrott-new-build-back-better-framework-a-historic-step-forward
While a larger package would have produced more significant change in important areas, that should not take away from the tremendous gains that this legislation would deliver… The package currently includes important immigration provisions that would allow millions of people without a documented status who have lived in the U.S. for many years to register to become lawful permanent residents, enabling them to work and live without fear of deportation. These provisions would improve the lives of millions of our neighbors and community members… The investments rest on sound evidence and build on effective programs and policies, but many have been considered politically unattainable for years.
What You Might Have Missed in the Build Back Better Bill
The American Prospect – October 29, 2021 – David Dayen
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/building-back-america/what-you-might-have-missed-in-the-build-back-better-bill/
The bill is teeming with hundreds of programs, which in some cases crowded out the bigger priorities.
Build Back Better
Heather Cox Richardson website – October 29, 2021
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-29-2021
Republicans are frustrated in part because Biden and the Democrats are remaking the nation. After forty years in which lawmakers rolled back government action, the Democrats under Biden are investing again in the American people. In his remarks about the Build Back Better plan on Thursday, Biden noted that for most of the twentieth century, we invested in ourselves, and that investment in our families and children, including through education, was key to our prosperity and international standing… Under Biden, the Democrats are replacing the Republican ideology of the past forty years, which focused on individual liberty and cowboy diplomacy, with a plan to invest in our people and to cooperate with other countries. This return to principles that ushered in our most prosperous years hardly seems like a good reason to curse the president.
Cowards, Not Crazies, Are Destroying America
The New York Times – October 28, 2021 – Paul Krugman
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opinion/republicans-vaccines.html
When we talk about the G.O.P.’s moral descent, we tend to focus on the obvious extremists, like the conspiracy theorists who claim that climate change is a hoax and Jan. 6 was a false flag operation. But the crazies wouldn’t be driving the Republican agenda so completely if it weren’t for the cowards, Republicans who clearly know better but reliably swallow their misgivings and go along with the party line. And at this point crazies and cowards essentially make up the party’s entire elected wing… The falsehoods that are poisoning America’s politics tend to share similar life histories. They begin in cynicism, spread through disinformation and culminate in capitulation, as Republicans who know the truth decide to acquiesce in lies.
A Retiring Democrat Places Blame for Paralysis in Congress
The New Yorker – October 28, 2021 – Jane Mayer
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/tears-from-a-democrat-as-paralysis-grips-congress
The growing need to please big campaign donors, Yarmuth pointed out, has played a huge part in democracy’s breakdown. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, in 2010, which struck down most restrictions on campaign spending, enormously increased candidates’ reliance on rich and often politically extreme outside groups and contributors… For someone like Yarmuth, who passionately believes that government can do good, the perilous state of American democracy is stunning. “I’d like to think that January 6th was an aberration,” he said, “but I know that it wasn’t.” What bewilders him, though, is what is driving this transformation. “The amount of anger that is in the country right now surprises me,” he said, “because it doesn’t seem to be based on anything real.” In fact, he feels that government can not only work—it can make an enormous difference, as seen in congressional legislation targeting the COVID-19 pandemic.
How Public Health Took Part in Its Own Downfall
The Atlantic Magazine – October 23, 2021 – Ed Yong
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/10/how-public-health-took-part-its-own-downfall/620457/
Public health began to self-identify as a field of objective, outside observers of society instead of agents of social change. It assumed a narrower set of responsibilities that included data collection, diagnostic services for clinicians, disease tracing, and health education. Assuming that its science could speak for itself, the field pulled away from allies such as labor unions, housing reformers, and social-welfare organizations that had supported city-scale sanitation projects, workplace reforms, and other ambitious public-health projects. That left public health in a precarious position—still in medicine’s shadow, but without the political base “that had been the source of its power.”… If anything, the pandemic has proved what public health’s practitioners understood well in the late 19th and early 20th century: how important the social side of health is… The field in the late 19th century was not a narrow scientific endeavor but one that stretched across much of society. Those same broad networks and wide ambitions are necessary now to deal with the problems that truly define the public’s health.