......we have created 75 years of the world that Hitler failed to achieve.
________________________________________________________________
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/alberta-canadas-tar-sands-is-growing-but-indigenous-people-fight-back/
https://globalnews.ca/news/6832608/coronavirus-trudeau-alberta-bc-saskatchewan-energy-industry-orphan-well-cleanup/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-orphan-wells-cleanup-bill-12-1.5528257
Some of our news media are gushing about how a clean-up of a few oil wells full of destructive and poisonous water will create of vast paradise of clean water that will attract visitors from all over the world.
Yeah, sure.
What will really happen is that one of the oil companies that created this horror will get the government contract to do the cleanup. It will also do what it has always done, to demand a contract that sets up a huge payment to company executives and stockholders for being so generous as to accept the contract. It will also, as always, demand more money and concessions along the way.
This contract should be hanled to an agency created by by the Canadian government, not by an oil company which is going to demand very high profits for doing the job and which, as usual, is going to require even more of our money along the way.
Trudeau is setting up all of us to get ripped off by a greedy private company. Meanwhile, the existing companies will continue, as always, to demand ever more money from Ottawa and Alberta. Watch for Canada's Irving Oil to come up with even more demands. And watch for Ottawa to grant them.
We are all going to be hurt and hurt badly by this. That is the long history of the world's oil industries. Their billionaire owners have plundered, impoverished, sickened and murdered all over the world.
And Mr. Trudeau is going to shake hands with them. Our enemies are and always have been the Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. I hope the NDP will oppose all this - but I fear it won't.
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/global-hunger-could-be-next-big-impact-of-coronavirus-pandemic
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/21/south-dakota-covid-19-coronavirus-freedom
________________________________________________________________
Then there's Bolsonaro of Brazil, the dictator that American and Canadian governments never criticize.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/20/jair-bolsonaro-dictatorship-rally-protest-brazil-president-denounced
(In fairness, the U.S. is too busy starving Latin American children to death. And Trudeau just does what Trump tells him to do.
________________________________________________________________
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/20/jair-bolsonaro-dictatorship-rally-protest-brazil-president-denounced
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/who-coronavirus-origin-1.5539401
So much for Trump's often stated belief that China created coronovirus.
_________________________________________________________________
https://rabble.ca/columnists/2020/04/rejecting-death-instinct-pandemic-age
_________________________________________________________________
https://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/talking-radical-radio/2020/04/covid-19-shines-light-relationship-between-work-and
_________________________________________________________________
https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/views-expressed/2020/04/how-do-we-pay-pandemic-debt-tax-rich
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/coronavirus-argentina-humane-response-to-covid-19-look-like/
_________________________________________________________________
https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/dyer-beleaguered-fauci-must-stay-steer-trump-away-from-covid-19-cliff
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.thetelegram.com/opinion/local-perspectives/gwynne-dyer-covid-19-lives-vs-livelihoods-439112/
_________________________________________________________________
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/04/21/covid-19-trump-weaponizing-virus-by-intensifying-sanctions-on-iran-venezuela/
_________________________________________________________________
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/04/20/climate-change-worsening-historic-drought-in-western-us-rivaling-worst-in-1200-years/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://countercurrents.org/2020/04/u-s-oil-market-crashes-hundreds-of-u-s-oil-companies-could-go-bankrupt
Weep not for the super rich. I was born a very working class kid of the dirty thirties. As we lived in vile poverty, we also wept for the billionaires who were jumping out of windows on Wall St. Only years later did I learn that any such jumping was extremely rare - if it happened at all. The billionaires then - much like those of today - had their money hidden in overseas bank accounts. Families like the liquor smuggling Bronfmans could still build a stunning mansion in Montreal's most expensive district.
That's even truer today as big money now legally escapes paying taxes the rest of us have to pay. (nor did the slum housing where I lived have windows high enough to jump out of.) Funny thing, though. In 1939, there was no lack of money to hand out jobs in the military and to spend billions on factories that made weapons.
It's also been that way. While the kings and aristocracy of England lived in comfort and wealth, most of the population barely survived. In Ancient Rome, the very wealthy lived in luxury. The rest were so poor they didn't even get the final ceremonies of death. Their bodies, by the thousands, were simply thrown into great pits much as we use garbage dumps.
To keep the population quiet, the rich entertained them with free games of murder in the Coliseum.
We're a lot like that. And our rich would happily let us starve just as they did in the dirty thirties.
_________________________________________________________________
https://countercurrents.org/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-the-church-debate
In the U.S., there is a growing movement arguing against staying home, saying it is a right for Americans to go out and to go anywhere they want to at any time. They refuse to accept a lockdown. Yes. They believe it is a sacred right to spread disease. Donald Trump fully supports them.
_________________________________________________________________
https://countercurrents.org/2020/04/who-and-china-a-case-of-geo-political-misdirection-whos-at-fault
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-blames-china-his-own-failings/5710331
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55078.htm
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55076.htm
The U.S. has surely become the world's wackiest country.
_________________________________________________________________
https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/20/protest-showdowns-coronavirus-guns-block-traffic-pennsylvania-kansas-city/
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/04/21/opinion/canadas-murky-bailout-deal-oil-and-gas-will-cost-us-all
________________________________________________________________
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/04/17/news/david-suzuki-applying-covid-19s-lessons-climate-change
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/12/features/noam-chomsky-couple-generations-organized-human-society-may-not-survive-has-be
________________________________________________________________
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/03/24/news/covid-19-crisis-tells-world-what-indigenous-peoples-have-been-saying-thousands-year
_________________________________________________________________
https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-inaction-on-the-covid-19-crisis-seems-more-deliberate-each-day/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://truthout.org/articles/declaring-war-on-a-virus-ignores-the-neoliberal-policies-that-put-us-here/
_________________________________________________________________
I just read a book. Bad idea. Books make one think. And thinking is depressing.
The book, on it's own, is really quite good. It's "Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. " It's by George Monbiot, published in London and Brooklyn. The website is versobooks.com
Monbiot looks at the politics of our modern world - and sees dreadful failure. Most people have no clear idea of what they are voting for, and we have in general become horribly destructive.
It's not an easy read. Monbiot sees the world using a complex of many scholarly disciplines, traces the impact of what they have accomplished and can accomplish - and sees this world now has become monstrouly destructive and operating beyond any control.
That got me thinking of where we are, where we're going, and where this is taking us.
Let's take the example of Canada's oil fields in Alberta. They have been highly profitable for a tiny group of the super wealthy. But it is now becoming obvious that they are also highly destructive for all of us.
Oil made Alberta a wealthy province. But tapping that wealth is all the oil barons care about. As the oil plays out - well - they simply move out and on - and, of course, taking all the money with them. And that leaves us with the tremendous bill to clean up abandoned wells. Alberta needed a system which the people of Alberta could control. Now, the people of Alberta - and Canada - face a monster challenge.They have to clean up the poisonous lands that were oil fields.
Drilling for oil was an act of destruction. Not cleaning it will make much of Alberta dangerous and poisonous. And at best, the cleaning of that poison will take centuries, and many, many billions, even trillions of dollars.
The practice of capitalism has always been to make money - nothing else. It comes. It destroys. The local people, for a time, have decent-paying jobs (maybe). Then, suddenly, they have nothing - and will have nothing for centuries. Capitalism's whole purpose is to produce wealth for the capitalists. And if the source comes to an end, capitalism moves on. And we are left with the rubble and filth and decay.
This is true for oil all over the world - Canada, U.S., Russia, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia.... It's also true for mining all over the world. When a mine no longer produces profits, capitalists move on, leaving the people of the nation poor and in great, great danger from filth and pollution and collapsing soil and rock. Meanwhile, the local agriculture is ruined. Indeed, the world we live in is daily being destroyed with many countries that were once productive now going hungry.
Oh, and add to all that the destruction, especially of food that our world will face as climate change is happening.
All over this world rising water levels are already destroying agricultural land as our tampering (and the even greater tampering) of nature is melting the ice which will destroy millions of us.
In George Monbiot's careful analysis we have very little time to deal with all this.
He does not suggest a move to socialism. (or to capitalism.) He sees a need to bring politics down to a society made up of social and community groups, acting out of mutual concerns and interests.
I won't pretend that I understand how all this would work. (I have never lived in such a society.) But Monbiot is making me think. and that, I hope, is a good start.
___________________________________________________________
The code of capitalism is to take as much as it can - then to get out, leaving destruction and poverty and misery. We have, for a long time, accepted an economic system that destroys us.
Take a look at the world since 1945. Does it strike you as a place of progress and participation? Do you think that the U.S. political chaos (or the Canadian one) is a road to a better future - or to a future at all?
________________________________________________________________
Oh, the U.S. is now blaming migrants (like the ones from Latin America) for the trouble the U.S. is facing. Let's think. Who else blamed a group in order to stir up hatreds?
Oh. Of course. That would be Adolph Hitler who murdered millions of Jews.
And, like Hitler, Trump is using this for the great dream of almost every president in U.S. history - to conquer and rule the whole world. Sigh Heil, America.
_________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/alberta-canadas-tar-sands-is-growing-but-indigenous-people-fight-back/
https://globalnews.ca/news/6832608/coronavirus-trudeau-alberta-bc-saskatchewan-energy-industry-orphan-well-cleanup/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-orphan-wells-cleanup-bill-12-1.5528257
Some of our news media are gushing about how a clean-up of a few oil wells full of destructive and poisonous water will create of vast paradise of clean water that will attract visitors from all over the world.
Yeah, sure.
What will really happen is that one of the oil companies that created this horror will get the government contract to do the cleanup. It will also do what it has always done, to demand a contract that sets up a huge payment to company executives and stockholders for being so generous as to accept the contract. It will also, as always, demand more money and concessions along the way.
This contract should be hanled to an agency created by by the Canadian government, not by an oil company which is going to demand very high profits for doing the job and which, as usual, is going to require even more of our money along the way.
Trudeau is setting up all of us to get ripped off by a greedy private company. Meanwhile, the existing companies will continue, as always, to demand ever more money from Ottawa and Alberta. Watch for Canada's Irving Oil to come up with even more demands. And watch for Ottawa to grant them.
We are all going to be hurt and hurt badly by this. That is the long history of the world's oil industries. Their billionaire owners have plundered, impoverished, sickened and murdered all over the world.
And Mr. Trudeau is going to shake hands with them. Our enemies are and always have been the Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. I hope the NDP will oppose all this - but I fear it won't.
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/global-hunger-could-be-next-big-impact-of-coronavirus-pandemic
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/21/south-dakota-covid-19-coronavirus-freedom
________________________________________________________________
Then there's Bolsonaro of Brazil, the dictator that American and Canadian governments never criticize.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/20/jair-bolsonaro-dictatorship-rally-protest-brazil-president-denounced
(In fairness, the U.S. is too busy starving Latin American children to death. And Trudeau just does what Trump tells him to do.
________________________________________________________________
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/20/jair-bolsonaro-dictatorship-rally-protest-brazil-president-denounced
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/who-coronavirus-origin-1.5539401
So much for Trump's often stated belief that China created coronovirus.
_________________________________________________________________
https://rabble.ca/columnists/2020/04/rejecting-death-instinct-pandemic-age
_________________________________________________________________
https://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/talking-radical-radio/2020/04/covid-19-shines-light-relationship-between-work-and
_________________________________________________________________
https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/views-expressed/2020/04/how-do-we-pay-pandemic-debt-tax-rich
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/coronavirus-argentina-humane-response-to-covid-19-look-like/
_________________________________________________________________
https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/dyer-beleaguered-fauci-must-stay-steer-trump-away-from-covid-19-cliff
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.thetelegram.com/opinion/local-perspectives/gwynne-dyer-covid-19-lives-vs-livelihoods-439112/
_________________________________________________________________
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/04/21/covid-19-trump-weaponizing-virus-by-intensifying-sanctions-on-iran-venezuela/
_________________________________________________________________
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/04/20/climate-change-worsening-historic-drought-in-western-us-rivaling-worst-in-1200-years/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://countercurrents.org/2020/04/u-s-oil-market-crashes-hundreds-of-u-s-oil-companies-could-go-bankrupt
Weep not for the super rich. I was born a very working class kid of the dirty thirties. As we lived in vile poverty, we also wept for the billionaires who were jumping out of windows on Wall St. Only years later did I learn that any such jumping was extremely rare - if it happened at all. The billionaires then - much like those of today - had their money hidden in overseas bank accounts. Families like the liquor smuggling Bronfmans could still build a stunning mansion in Montreal's most expensive district.
That's even truer today as big money now legally escapes paying taxes the rest of us have to pay. (nor did the slum housing where I lived have windows high enough to jump out of.) Funny thing, though. In 1939, there was no lack of money to hand out jobs in the military and to spend billions on factories that made weapons.
It's also been that way. While the kings and aristocracy of England lived in comfort and wealth, most of the population barely survived. In Ancient Rome, the very wealthy lived in luxury. The rest were so poor they didn't even get the final ceremonies of death. Their bodies, by the thousands, were simply thrown into great pits much as we use garbage dumps.
To keep the population quiet, the rich entertained them with free games of murder in the Coliseum.
We're a lot like that. And our rich would happily let us starve just as they did in the dirty thirties.
_________________________________________________________________
https://countercurrents.org/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-the-church-debate
In the U.S., there is a growing movement arguing against staying home, saying it is a right for Americans to go out and to go anywhere they want to at any time. They refuse to accept a lockdown. Yes. They believe it is a sacred right to spread disease. Donald Trump fully supports them.
_________________________________________________________________
https://countercurrents.org/2020/04/who-and-china-a-case-of-geo-political-misdirection-whos-at-fault
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-blames-china-his-own-failings/5710331
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55078.htm
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55076.htm
The U.S. has surely become the world's wackiest country.
_________________________________________________________________
https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/20/protest-showdowns-coronavirus-guns-block-traffic-pennsylvania-kansas-city/
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/04/21/opinion/canadas-murky-bailout-deal-oil-and-gas-will-cost-us-all
________________________________________________________________
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/04/17/news/david-suzuki-applying-covid-19s-lessons-climate-change
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/12/features/noam-chomsky-couple-generations-organized-human-society-may-not-survive-has-be
________________________________________________________________
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/03/24/news/covid-19-crisis-tells-world-what-indigenous-peoples-have-been-saying-thousands-year
_________________________________________________________________
https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-inaction-on-the-covid-19-crisis-seems-more-deliberate-each-day/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://truthout.org/articles/declaring-war-on-a-virus-ignores-the-neoliberal-policies-that-put-us-here/
_________________________________________________________________
I just read a book. Bad idea. Books make one think. And thinking is depressing.
The book, on it's own, is really quite good. It's "Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. " It's by George Monbiot, published in London and Brooklyn. The website is versobooks.com
Monbiot looks at the politics of our modern world - and sees dreadful failure. Most people have no clear idea of what they are voting for, and we have in general become horribly destructive.
It's not an easy read. Monbiot sees the world using a complex of many scholarly disciplines, traces the impact of what they have accomplished and can accomplish - and sees this world now has become monstrouly destructive and operating beyond any control.
That got me thinking of where we are, where we're going, and where this is taking us.
Let's take the example of Canada's oil fields in Alberta. They have been highly profitable for a tiny group of the super wealthy. But it is now becoming obvious that they are also highly destructive for all of us.
Oil made Alberta a wealthy province. But tapping that wealth is all the oil barons care about. As the oil plays out - well - they simply move out and on - and, of course, taking all the money with them. And that leaves us with the tremendous bill to clean up abandoned wells. Alberta needed a system which the people of Alberta could control. Now, the people of Alberta - and Canada - face a monster challenge.They have to clean up the poisonous lands that were oil fields.
Drilling for oil was an act of destruction. Not cleaning it will make much of Alberta dangerous and poisonous. And at best, the cleaning of that poison will take centuries, and many, many billions, even trillions of dollars.
The practice of capitalism has always been to make money - nothing else. It comes. It destroys. The local people, for a time, have decent-paying jobs (maybe). Then, suddenly, they have nothing - and will have nothing for centuries. Capitalism's whole purpose is to produce wealth for the capitalists. And if the source comes to an end, capitalism moves on. And we are left with the rubble and filth and decay.
This is true for oil all over the world - Canada, U.S., Russia, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia.... It's also true for mining all over the world. When a mine no longer produces profits, capitalists move on, leaving the people of the nation poor and in great, great danger from filth and pollution and collapsing soil and rock. Meanwhile, the local agriculture is ruined. Indeed, the world we live in is daily being destroyed with many countries that were once productive now going hungry.
Oh, and add to all that the destruction, especially of food that our world will face as climate change is happening.
All over this world rising water levels are already destroying agricultural land as our tampering (and the even greater tampering) of nature is melting the ice which will destroy millions of us.
In George Monbiot's careful analysis we have very little time to deal with all this.
He does not suggest a move to socialism. (or to capitalism.) He sees a need to bring politics down to a society made up of social and community groups, acting out of mutual concerns and interests.
I won't pretend that I understand how all this would work. (I have never lived in such a society.) But Monbiot is making me think. and that, I hope, is a good start.
___________________________________________________________
The code of capitalism is to take as much as it can - then to get out, leaving destruction and poverty and misery. We have, for a long time, accepted an economic system that destroys us.
Take a look at the world since 1945. Does it strike you as a place of progress and participation? Do you think that the U.S. political chaos (or the Canadian one) is a road to a better future - or to a future at all?
________________________________________________________________
Oh, the U.S. is now blaming migrants (like the ones from Latin America) for the trouble the U.S. is facing. Let's think. Who else blamed a group in order to stir up hatreds?
Oh. Of course. That would be Adolph Hitler who murdered millions of Jews.
And, like Hitler, Trump is using this for the great dream of almost every president in U.S. history - to conquer and rule the whole world. Sigh Heil, America.
_________________________________________________________________
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