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http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/17/bolivian_president_evo_morales_on_climate
AMY GOODMAN: Just before we went to air today, I interviewed Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president. He was re-elected in a landslide victory earlier this month. On Wednesday, Evo Morales called on world leaders to hold temperature increases over the next century to just one degree Celsius, the most ambitious proposal so far by any head of state. Morales also called on the United States and other wealthy nations to pay an ecological debt to Bolivia and other developing nations.
AMY GOODMAN: President Morales, welcome to Democracy Now!
PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Thank you very much for the invitation.
AMY GOODMAN: You spoke yesterday here at the Bella Center and said we cannot end global warming without ending capitalism. What did you mean?
PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Capitalism is the worst enemy of humanity. Capitalism—and I’m speaking about irrational development—policies of unlimited industrialization are what destroys the environment. And that irrational industrialization is capitalism. So as long as we don’t review or revise those policies, it’s impossible to attend to humanity and life.
AMY GOODMAN: How would you do that? How would you end capitalism?
PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] It’s changing economic policies, ending luxury, consumerism. It’s ending the struggle to—or this searching for living better. Living better is to exploit human beings. It’s plundering natural resources. It’s egoism and individualism. Therefore, in those promises of capitalism, there is no solidarity or complementarity. There’s no reciprocity. So that’s why we’re trying to think about other ways of living lives and living well, not living better. Not living better. Living better is always at someone else’s expense. Living better is at the expense of destroying the environment.
AMY GOODMAN: President Morales, what are you calling here—for here at the UN climate summit?
PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Defense of the rights of Mother Earth. Read the rest of this entry »
Today, Democracy Now! reported that two major records have been broken in 2009 – Wall St. profits ($35.7 billion in the first half of the year), and the number of Americans going hungry (50 million). These two seemingly unrelated tragedies immediately suggest a common solution – carve up the bloated hulks of Wall St. swine and serve them up to the American people!
On Tuesday, the NY Comptroller’s Office released a report showing that “broker-dealer operations of New York Stock Exchange member firms earned a record $35.7 billion in the first half of 2009.” Through September, $22.5 billion in profits were reported from the four largest firms alone —Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase. These are the same banks who got bailed out by the Federal Government last year – which means that taxpayers like you and I paid for these creeps’ bonuses.
Not coincidentally, these obscene profits were recorded at the same moment that the Department of Agriculture released a report showing that “nearly 50 million people — including almost one child in four — struggled last year to get enough to eat” (as written in the Washington Post on Monday). While the economy has been in the tank and unemployment has surpassed 10% officially, food prices have been skyrocketing, and so millions more Americans are being forced to go without needed nutrition.
Why isn’t it a coincidence? Because the crooks who sent global markets into a freefall last September, causing millions to lose their homes and jobs, have been rewarded for their bad behavior with preferential treatment from Uncle Sam. These Wall St. piggies have been gorging themselves on trillions of U.S. Federally approved dough, while regular folks struggle to pay the rent or put food on the table – without so much as a measly health care reform bill to give hope to their deteriorating condition. Now 1 out of every 4 of our kids are going hungry while the government subsidizes the very stock market slimeballs responsible for creating the trouble to begin with.
“Where’s OUR bailout?” struggling folks are wondering, as they see food prices climb and jobs shipped overseas by the day. 50 million folks are wondering where their next meal is gonna come from… and it’s time to entertain innovative, cost-effective proposals, even if they may seem exotic.
Well it turns out there’s one way to solve this problem without tapping the Treasury for so much as a penny!
It would bring down the cost of high-protein, high-quality food, providing much-needed nutrition to the hungry.
It could create high-paid and unionized manufacturing jobs, right here in the U.S. of A!
It would be environmentally friendly, dolphin-safe, and carbon-neutral (although there may be some associated methane emissions after the plan is implemented).
Best of all, this solution would remove the parasitic, bonus-hungry, pyramid-scheming, derivative-trading, regulation-gutting, President-advising, economy-wrecking, bailout mongers from the picture, allowing the American people to determine our economic future democratically!
And it’s so straightforward even Timothy Geithner could understand it:
Eat the Rich!
[alex, Nov. 19]
below is the transcript from Democracy Now!’s interview of Robert Scheer on these 2 unprecedented reports and what they mean for the economy: Read the rest of this entry »
Very well-spoken article poking fun at our enigmatic president, who continues to flirt with both of the groups who brought him to the Big Dance: the corporate/financial elites who paid for his campaign, and the millions of progressive Americans who mobilized and turned out the vote.
Inspirational words, impressive moves, and boyish good looks have kept the two suitors enamored thus far, but at some point Barack’s going to have to choose his partner for the slowdance. So far he’s been sipping punch with the bankrolling capitalists, who have seduced him with fancy airplanes and false promises, but we, the people have to work up the courage to demand his attention if we have any hope of him coming home with us at the end of the night. And we can’t hide our intentions; let’s make clear that partnering with us means rejecting the system that caused this crisis – capitalism. Let’s be realistic and demand the impossible. [alex]
Fred Astaire in the White House
by Michael Brownstein
Originally published by Reality Sandwich, April 13, 2009.
“You can never awaken using the same system that put you to sleep in the first place.”
–Gurdjieff
This is an appeal, an open letter, a cry in the night: no matter how cranky it may make us to brush the stardust from our eyes, no matter how many friends we think we’ll lose by looking long and hard at what’s going on around us, let’s try to stay awake. Let’s not lose touch with what we really want for ourselves. Let’s not forget what we know about the nature of consumer capitalism: it is unsustainable and unworkable because it depends on infinite expansion in a finite world. It can only survive by a violent takeover of what belongs to others. Let’s not settle for halfway measures.
And let’s not wait for deliverance from on high.
Because the president we elected — out of so much hope for a definitive break with what came before — is not who he seems. It’s true that unlike the previous inhabitant of the White House (remember him?), Barack Obama is sane, intelligent, and mature. He’s responsive to what others think. He hopes to institute real change in education, health care, the environment.
But even with his great charisma and silver tongue, he’s a proper soldier for the system which is ravishing the planet. As he said in his inauguration speech in January, already aware of the huge financial mess he was inheriting, “We will not apologize for our way of life.”
What do these words mean? They mean that the mall-i-zation of the planet will continue. They mean that the commercialization of all of life will not stop. They mean that our massive so-called footprint will never be substantially downsized.
And they mean that the force which has erased indigenous cultures and plant and animal species, which has sullied our air and soil and water, will essentially not be called into question, no matter how many of its most glaring excesses may be curbed.
“How the Irish Became White”
by Noel Ignatiev
1995 Routledge
“It is a curious fact,” wrote John Finch, an English Owenite who traveled the United States in 1843, “that the democratic party, and particularly the poorer class of Irish immigrants in America, are greater enemies to the negro population, and greater advocates for the continuance of negro slavery, than any portion of the population in the free States.”
How did the Irish become White? By violently subjugating African Americans, according to this courageous book by Noel Ignatiev.
As a part-Irish American, learning about the injustice that some of my ancestors took part in is deeply troubling, but it’s a history that we need to explore to uncover the true legacy of mass Irish immigration to America, and more fundamentally, the meaning of “Whiteness”.
The Irish in Ireland of the early-19th Century were a revolutionary people: impoverished, agrarian, and determined to break free of the grip of England’s tyranny. But once these same freedom-lovers emigrated to the United States, a peculiar thing happened: they were faced with a society based on racial segregation and industrial capitalism. Moreover, there began a large “Nativist” movement by wealthy Protestant Anglo-Saxons who tried to restrict immigration and subdue Irish/Catholic influence in the New World.
In order to overcome these barriers, the Irish made a strategic choice: escape the bottom-rung of poverty and be accepted into mainstream US society by aggressively aligning themselves with the Democratic Party and doing everything they could to keep African Americans in slavery or otherwise out of the labor market. Thus they earned the right to be considered “White” and receive the benefits and privileges associated with that social category.
Ignatiev makes a compelling case that “When Irish workers encountered Afro-Americans, they fought with them, it is true, but they also fought with immigrants of other nationalities, with each other, and with whomever else they were thrown up against in the marketplace.” In other words, it wasn’t that the Irish were inherently more racist than any other group. Instead, the race riots when rowdy Irish attacked African Americans were largely in response to an economic condition arising in early US capitalism: Northern industrial labor markets were saturated by waves of immigrants and freed slaves competing over lower and lower wages. To secure jobs for themselves, the Irish became the hammer that pounded away at racial segregation to force African Americans out of the factories and into poverty and the ghetto.
By doing so, they also solidified the major distinction between relatively privileged sectors of the US working class and those on the bottom – “Whiteness”. Ignatiev explains: “Since ‘white’ was not a physical description but one term of a social relation which could not exist without its opposite, ‘white man’s work’ was simply, work from which Afro-Americans were excluded.” Read the rest of this entry »
A massive wave of layoffs was announced yesterday by 12 major US corporations, including Caterpillar, General Motors, Home Depot, Sprint Nextel and Pfizer. Microsoft also announced its first-ever mass layoffs of 5,000 workers. Overall, more than 75,000 jobs are being cut from the workforce after Unemployment levels were reported as 7.2% in December, the highest level in over 16 years, with no end to the bleeding in sight.
As more and more workers fill the unemployment rolls, it’s time to ask: where will future jobs come from? While government and corporate bigshots plan yet another “economic stimulus” and bailout of the banks, what long-term jobs can we realistically create right now?
Lots of answers present themselves if we look through the lens of peak oil, and start replacing our oil-based economy with a people-based economy. Instead of relying on greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels, we can tap into the power of human labor, which happens to be our greatest renewable resource.
Certainly there is a need to employ millions to weatherize homes and build and install solar panels and wind turbines (which Obama may address), but there is also a huge need to re-tool Detroit automakers to STOP producing gas-guzzling individual cars, and start making buses, trains and other forms of public transit. Bicycles are also desperately needed, so we need workers to build them and more to repair them too.
We also need lots more doctors and nurses if we make health care universally available, and social workers and therapists to help deal with the psychological trauma our population has suffered from militarism and soulless consumerism. Since many of these jobs require education and training, we need to hire lots more teachers, and we also need education to be a lot more affordable to so more people can access these kinds of careers.
Perhaps the largest gains in the job sector can be achieved by shifting food production away from mega-scale agribusinesses and fossil-fuel intensive monoculture and factory farms, towards community-based, local, organic, family farming and free-range livestock raising. By breaking up the huge corporate farms into family-size and community-size plots, we can repopulate rural America (and stop suburban sprawl), produce better, healthier food, respect animal rights, and create millions of new landowners. Simultaneously we can follow the example of Cuba and turn our blighted inner-cities into gardens, by utilizing permaculture and organic community-run agriculture, which would reduce crime and poverty in our decaying urban areas, bring quality food to places currently plagued by malnutrition, and create millions upon millions of rewarding and meaningful jobs.
How will we finance it? Simple. Disassemble the huge financial firms and multinational corporate banks whose greed caused this economic crisis and create thousands of local banks and credit unions, run by people in the community (even more jobs!) Taxing the rich would help a lot too, and we can cut tons of wasteful government spending on things like the wars in the Middle East, excessive prisons, and nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The money is right there, we just need to redirect it to things that actually help people instead of killing them.
This of course requires a revolutionary change in the economic and political structure of the United States, which means average people like you and me having control over the decisions affecting our lives, instead of remaining at the whim of wealthy elites who in the current crisis have shown themselves unable to run a lemonade stand, let alone the global economy.
[alex]
Deluge of layoffs hits U.S. economy
January 27, 2009
By Jerry Hirsch and Maura Reynolds
Scott Olson, Getty Images
A worker walks between Caterpillar earth-moving equipment at a road construction site near Joliet, Ill. The company has announced that it will cut nearly 20,000 jobs as the recession reduces demand for its products.
Companies including Home Depot, Caterpillar, Pfizer and Sprint plan to cut nearly 60,000 jobs, adding urgency to the need to agree on a stimulus plan.
U.S. companies slashed nearly 60,000 jobs Monday, adding impetus to the Obama administration’s efforts to reach agreement on a plan to pump $825 billion into the economy over a two-year period.
But it’s unclear whether even that massive influx of funding and tax cuts would be enough to get companies hiring again in the near term.
The cuts by firms including Caterpillar, General Motors, Texas Instruments, Home Depot, Sprint Nextel and Pfizer brought the total of jobs shed so far this month to 187,550, more than November or December and well over double the number of January 2008, according to employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.
Analysts believe that Obama’s strategy of pouring money into state and local governments could prevent layoffs and furloughs of public sector employees, including teachers, police officers and other government workers.
Economists have estimated that the plan will protect or create 3 million to 4 million jobs in the next two years.
But the U.S. economy lost 2.6 million jobs last year and could lose 2 million more during the first half of this year. Read the rest of this entry »
Interesting to see how second-tier nations are facing such dramatic upheaval, it seems the crisis is being somewhat deflected from the United States and other centers of global capitalism. In the long run of course, the US is LEAST prepared to deal with the energy shortage, and will crash hardest. For now though, the coronation of our new fresh president has kept the myth of American exceptionalism alive, at least for a little longer. [alex]
Riots in Iceland, Latvia and Bulgaria are a Sign of Things to Come
Our third global political column explores the start of an age of rebellion over the financial crisis – beginning in Iceland
by Roger Boyes
January 21, 2009
Icelanders all but stormed their Parliament last night. It was the first session of the chamber after what might appear to be an unusually long Christmas break.
Ordinary islanders were determined to vent their fury at the way that the political class had allowed the country to slip towards bankruptcy. The building was splattered with paint and yoghurt, the crowd yelled and banged pans, fired rockets at the windows and lit a bonfire in front of the main door. Riot police moved in.
Icelanders vented their fury at the political class's handling of the financial crisis by staging angry protests in Reykjavik
Now in the grand sweep of the current crisis, a riot on a piece of volcanic rock in the north Atlantic may not seem to add up to much. But it is a sign of things to come: a new age of rebellion.
The financial meltdown has become part of the real economy and is now beginning to shape real politics. More and more citizens on the edge of the global crisis are taking to the streets. Bulgaria has been gripped this month by its worst riots since 1997 when street power helped to topple a Socialist government. Now Socialists are at the helm again and are having to fend off popular protests about government incompetence and corruption.
In Latvia – where growth has been in double-digit figures for years – anger is bubbling over at official mismanagement. GDP is expected to contract by 5 per cent this year; salaries will be cut; unemployment will rise. Last week, in a country where demonstrators usually just sing and then go home, 10,000 people besieged parliament.
Iceland, Bulgaria, Latvia: these are not natural protest cultures. Something is going amiss.
The LSE economist Robert Wade – addressing a protest meeting in Reykjavik’s cinema – recently warned that the world was approaching a new tipping point. Starting from March-May 2009, we can expect large-scale civil unrest, he said. “It will be caused by the rise of general awareness throughout Europe, America and Asia that hundreds of millions of people in rich and poor countries are experiencing rapidly falling consumption standards; that the crisis is getting worse not better; and that it has escaped the control of public authorities, national and international.”
Ukraine could be the next to go. The gas pricing deal agreed with Moscow could propel the country towards a serious financial crisis. Russia, too, is looking wobbly. A riot in Vladivostok may have been an omen for things to come. What will happen when the wider economic crisis translates into higher food prices? Or if Gazprom has no choice but to increase domestic gas prices?
Governments have so far managed to deflect attention from their role in the crash, their slipshod monitoring, by declaring themselves to be indispensible to the solution. This may save the skins of politicians in wealthier countries who can credibly and expensively try to prop up banks and sickly industries. But it does not work in countries that are heavily indebted, with bloated and exposed financial sectors. There, the irate crowds are already beginning to demand: why hasn’t a single politician resigned? What has happened to ministerial responsibility? Who will investigate government failure?
Good questions, it seems to me, in these unquiet times.
Richard Heinberg (author of the seminal work The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies) lays out a clear program for Obama, to move the US away from its current suicidal path and towards a green economy. However, the danger may be that Obama has surrounded himself with people who are telling him to do the exact opposite of each of these recommendations. Our job, as a movement, is to move the country away from fossil fuels by blocking the construction of more death machines (coal plants, oil-guzzling cars, the military…), and by simultaneously creating irresistible alternatives. [alex]
Memo to the President-elect on Energy Realism and the Green New Deal
MuseLetter 200
December 2008 by Richard Heinberg
Executive Summary
Our continued national dependence on fossil fuels is creating a crippling vulnerability to both long-term fuel scarcity and catastrophic climate change.
The current economic crisis requires substantial national policy shifts and enormous new government injections of capital into the economy. This provides an opportunity for a project whose scope would otherwise be inconceivable: a large-scale, coordinated energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.
This project must happen immediately; indeed, it may already be too late. We have already left behind the era of cheap and plentiful fossil fuels, with a permanent decline of global oil production likely underway within three years. Moreover, the latest research tells us we have less than eight years to bring carbon emissions under control if we hope to avoid catastrophic climate change. Lacking this larger frame of understanding and action, a mere shift away from foreign oil dependence will fail to meet the challenge at hand.
The energy transition must not be limited to building wind turbines and solar panels. It must include the thorough redesign of our economic and societal infrastructure, which today is utterly dependent on cheap fossil fuels. It must address not only our transportation system and our electricity grid, but also our food system and our building stock.
Our 21st century nation’s dependence on 20th century fossil fuels is the greatest threat we face, far more so than the current financial crisis. A coordinated, comprehensive transition to an economy that is no longer dependent on hydrocarbon fuels and no longer emits climate-changing levels of carbon—a Post Carbon Energy Transition—will be the Obama Administration’s greatest opportunity to lead the nation on a path toward sustainable prosperity.
Overview: Need and Scope
As a new Administration prepares to take the reins of power, America’s economy is descending into a recession or, quite possibly, a depression. Read the rest of this entry »
On President-elect Barack Obama’s first trip to the White House yesterday to meet privately with his predecessor, lame duck George W. Bush, reportedly the first and most pressing message Obama delivered to the man in charge was “bail out General Motors.”
Cartoon by The Rag Blog
The American taxpayers are sick and tired of their money being doled out to corporate crooks like the carbon-polluting, oil-guzzling auto industry, or banks like AIG who apparently weren’t satisfied by the first two bailouts and now want another. (They apparently spent too much of their last check on trips to the spa.)
Is this really Obama’s highest priority? Giving public money to private companies that will use it to pollute the planet?
If YOU had the opportunity to sit down with President Bush for an hour and have him actually listen to you, what would YOU ask him to do?
Why not instead bail out homeowners by ending foreclosures to keep people in their houses?
Why not bail out the poor, sick, and elderly, by instituting single-payer universal health care like every other industrialized nation does?
Why not bail out Iraqis, military families and soldiers by pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq and ending a bloody occupation? (or Afghanistan, or the 100+ countries where the US military is stationed)
Why not bail out human rights by ending torture, closing Guantanamo and allowing all prisoners a trial by jury?
Why not bail out civil rights by ending anti-immigrant raids and the criminalizing of immigration?
Why not bail out students, who are suffering from the greatest debt crisis in history as education becomes increasingly unaffordable?
Why not bail out the planet, by investing heavily in renewable energies controlled by local communities, urban gardens, home weatherization and create 5 million new Green Jobs?
Barack, if you’re going to be a president worthy of the immense praise and expectation placed on you, you’re going to need to stop palling around with terroristic industry and corporate lobbyists, and listen to the people.
[alex]
Sources: Obama pressed Bush for auto industry bailout
Originally published by CNN, November 11, 2008
Jessica Yellin, Candy Crowley, CNN’s Ed Henry
(CNN) – At their private Oval Office meeting on Monday, President-elect Barack Obama urged President Bush to support billions of dollars in aid for the struggling auto industry during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress, according to three officials briefed on the meeting.
The officials said Bush privately expressed skepticism about taxpayer money for automakers on the heels of a string of government bailouts for other industries, and the president also urged Obama to help push through a free trade pact with Colombia Read the rest of this entry »
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