Gangs of America outlines the deliberate undermining of legislatures by corporations
Guardian columnist George Monbiot hardened his view on Corporate Feudalism on December 6th, writing that under the onslaught of the placeless, transnational capital McDonald’s exemplifies, democracy as a living system withers and dies.
Monbiot joins the ranks of Ted Nace, Noam Chomsky and other thinkers who have recognised that corporate subversion of the democratic process is at the heart of our modern malaise.
Where as most commentators study events of the last decade or so in an attempt to identify the source of citizen dissatisfaction with democracy, Ted Nace, points to the deliberate campaigns waged by Corporations in the nineteenth century to harness the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution to grant themselves power to cross state boundaries without approval of state governments. As a result of this campaign the railway barons were born creating the financial institutions of the twentieth century and the underpinnings of the unsustainable financial system that drains the pockets of ordinary citizens and the state that should represent them.
None of this is news to socialists who have followed Marx’ analysis of capitalism over roughly the same period. Ironically, the mantra of neoliberalism, that capital should be free, is the very concept at the heart of the nineteenth century critiques of capital, Marx included.
French economist Thomas Picketty became the rock star of his industry with his book Capital, that irrefutably proved that wealth trickles upwards and the gap between rich and poor increases in the absence of intervention by governments.
An analysis of Picketty’s book and rise to fame is available from The Economist.
Monbiot’s piece can be found at the Guardian where he writes weekly.
Other articles on Corporate Feudalism from The Cage, The Generator and Monbiot are available at TheGenerator.News
The first war crime committed in any war of aggression is against the truth Michael Parenti
In 2015 the US imposed penalties on Volkswagen for emission violations of more than $13b. In revenge the EU imposed a $14.5b fine on Apple for unpaid taxes. The US now seeks penalties of $14b against Deutsche Bank for its part in the 2008 bubble. Shuttlecock? David Hungerford
As the Philippines braces for its second major typhoon in five days, a Canadian glacier spawns a giant iceberg and eastern Australia mops up from a record wet spell, climate scientists can pick from a world of weird weather for the evidence that global warming is under way. Peter Hannam
HOW CLOSE IS WAR? Each item indicates escalating and deliberate provocation by the US.
Pics of US jets painted in Russian colours
Photos showing US jets being painted Russian colours suggest plans to conduct false flag attacks in Syria and blame them on Moscow.
Obama to discuss bombing Syrian military positions
Direct US military action in Syria, including airstrikes on Syrian military, radar and anti-aircraft bases, as well as arms depots, striking Syrian government forces could result in a direct confrontation between the US and Russia. Is Obama totally out of control?
RAF Pilots Ordered To Shoot Down “Hostile” Russian Jets Over Syria
As the US officially enters the Yemen military campaign, the UK appears willing to precipiate a catalytic event from which there is no going back. With relations between Russia and the West at post-Cold War lows and deteriorating fast, RAF pilots have been given the go-ahead to shoot Russian military jets when flying over Syria and Iraq, if they are endangered by them. The development comes with warnings that the UK and Russia are now “one step closer” to being at war. The Syrian government invited the Russians, but not the British – well!!!
As US politicians and pundits have fun talking tough about Russia and demonizing President Putin, they are missing signs that Moscow isn’t amused and is preparing for actual conflict,
Putin Throws Out the Old Nuclear Rules, Rattling Washington
Washington and Moscow used to keep arms control separate from other crises around the world. But that era is over and the next president will have to decide how to deal with it.
War between US and Russia Could Be Sooner than Later
Barely noticed in a virtual media blackout are at least a half dozen significant developments that all indicate a nuclear war at any time. In response Russia has been preparing its citizens for potential nuclear war. 40 million Russian citizens, that’s near one-third of the nation’s total population, just completed an unprecedented nuclear war defence drill. Moscow ordered all Russian citizens, diplomats and students traveling, working or studying abroad to immediately return home. Members of Russia’s diplomatic corps were threatened with career demotions should they refuse to comply.
As tensions between Russia and the US have spiked over Syria, relations between Moscow and Washington – already at their lowest since the Cold War over the Ukraine conflict – have soured further in recent days as the US pulled the plug on Syria talks and accused Russia of hacking attacks. The Kremlin meanwhile has suspended a series of nuclear pacts, including a symbolic cooperation deal to cut stocks of weapons-grade plutonium.
Washington has escalated its global economic war against major economic rivals and no longer confines itself to peripheral economic countries, but has declared trade wars against world powers that include Russia, China, Germany, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba and the Donbas region of Ukraine. There is an increasingly thinner distinction between military and economic warfare.
NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by US intelligence
The motivation of the hacker was concern over Hillary Clinton’s disregard of national security secrets when she used a personal email and consistently lied about it. NSA has all of Clinton’s deleted emails, and the FBI could gain access to them. No need for Trump to ask the Russians for those emails, he can just call on the FBI or NSA to hand them over.
This campaign is driven by a deep and bitter divide: whether to risk war with Russia, or not. Not since 1860 has a presidential election been affected by a basic divide between a War Party that is tremendously strong (Its candidate is Hillary Clinton, with Wall Street and Big Oil among its constituents) while Donald Trump speaks for a faction that sees the risk of war as just too dangerous.
Rodrigo Duterte interview: Death, drugs and diplomacy
“We have three million drug addicts, and it’s growing. So if we do not interdict this problem, the next generation will be having a serious problem. If you destroy our young children, I will kill you. That is a very correct statement. There is nothing wrong in trying to preserve the interest of the next generation.”
Osama bin Laden surely died happy. He devoted the last third of his life to creating animosity between the West and Islam and to driving a wedge between Saudi Arabia and the US. Today, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey are all estranged. And, as an unexpected bonus, so is Israel. The US is making enemies all over the Muslim world. And every day millions pay homage to the memory of Osama as they remove their shoes to pass through metal detectors and are stripped of their dignity by body-imaging devices at airports. Americans are less secure, less prosperous, and less free than as this century began. In life, Osama was transformative. In death, he continues to shape the world he left behind.
US Military Operations Are Biggest Motivation for Homegrown Terrorists
A secret FBI study found that anger over US military operations abroad was the most commonly cited motivation for individuals involved in cases of “homegrown” terrorism, and identified no coherent pattern to “radicalization,” concluding that it remained near impossible to predict future violent acts.
Hurricane Sandy-level flooding is rising so sharply that it could become normal
The US is already in the grip of significant environmental changes driven by warming temperatures. An analysis of past storms and models of future events as the planet warms has shown that Sandy-like floods have become three times more common in the New York area
Millions Face Hunger by 2030 Without ‘Deep Transformation’ of Agriculture:
Over 120 million people could be forced into extreme poverty by 2030 as a result of climate change on small-scale food producers. Abrupt changes would make adequate adaptation almost impossible with major declines in crop yields and increasingly high and volatile food prices. “In the longer run, unless measures are put in place to halt and reverse climate change, food production could become impossible in large areas of the world.” The report cites diversifying crop production, better integration of farming with the natural habitat, agroecology, and “sustainable intensification” as strategies to help small-scale farmers adapt to a warming world. The report notes that subsidies for fertilizers and pesticides hinder the progress of more sustainable, organic farming.
Spiders can ‘tune’ their webs to sound out plucky potential mates
“They’re able to very closely change the tension of their webs … This means they have a mechanism for directly controlling both the tension and the stiffness of their silk fibres. [These mechanisms] allow them effectively to tune their web’s properties so that they can control how sensory information is getting to them in the middle of the web.”
The hitless of the Empire reads like a catalogue of illustrious world leaders: from Patrice Lumumba (Zaire), Mohammad Mosaddegh (Iran), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Sukarno (Indonesia), Juvénal Habyarimana (Rwanda), Salvador Allende (Chile) to Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), Al-Basheer (Sudan) and Fidel Castro (Cuba), to name just a few. Some were directly assassinated; others were ‘only’ toppled, while only a handful of ‘marked’ leaders actually managed to survive and to stay in power. There were several grave crimes committed by almost all of them include: defending the vital interests of their nations and people, refusing to allow the unbridled plunder of natural resources by multinational corporations, and standing against the principles of imperialism. Simple criticism of the Empire has also been often punishable by death.
Rodrigo Duterte interview: Death, drugs and diplomacy
“We have three million drug addicts, and it’s growing. So if we do not interdict this problem, the next generation will be having a serious problem. If you destroy our young children, I will kill you. That is a very correct statement. There is nothing wrong in trying to preserve the interest of the next generation.”
One month before the presidential election of 2008, the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama campaign a list of its preferred candidates for cabinet positions in an Obama administration. This list corresponds almost exactly to the eventual composition of Barack Obama’s cabinet.
Coral biologist Charlie Veron: the rise and fall of the Great Barrier Reef
Threats caused by humans, accelerated climate change and ocean acidification, have put the reef on the brink of complete collapse. He said, “it is unstoppable. If we wipe out coral we wipe out the life of the oceans”. This is symptomatic of everything we do. Its time to plan for the unthinkable.
‘Island of despair’: Australia intentionally torturing refugees on Nauru
The cache of evidence details allegations of recurrent self-harm and attempted suicide, children being hit by teachers and threatened with machetes by peers, deficient medical care and persecution akin to that which refugees had fled in their homelands. The offshore processing regime was “explicitly designed to inflict incalculable damage on hundreds of women, men and children” as an act of deterrence, by isolating them “on a remote place from which they cannot leave, with the specific intention that these people should suffer harm”. Amnesty International said it had interviewed 62 refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru, and more than a dozen current or former contract workers who delivered services on behalf of the Australian government,
The Real Purpose Behind the “Liberation” of Mosul?
When Mosul falls, Isis will flee to the safety of Syria. But what then? The entire Isis caliphate army could be directed against the Assad government and its allies – a scenario which might cause some satisfaction in Washington
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Philip Adams is interviewing Brooke Hamilton in repeat as I type. Listen here. They are discussing the theft of wealth by those running the neo-liberal agenda. Both broadcasters keep referring to “the one percent”.
One percent of the world’s population is 70 million people. There are many more millionaires than that in the world, so the 70 million wealthiest people in the world represent a serious pile of gold bars but they are not the ones calling the shots.
The one per lakh, on the other hand, is the 70,000 people who control wealth beyond what you or I can imagine. A lakh is the Vedic name for our 100,000.
In the number system used across South Asia, the next order of magnitude that gets a name is the Crore. The Crore is ten of our million, or 100 lakh, it is written, 1,00,00,000. The Vedic system uses commas ever two orders of magnitude after the first three.
The one per crore, then, is the 700 people who actually control the wealth. The Rothschilds, the British Royal Family and so on. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have probably made it into this particular elite, the oil sheiks and major arms dealers will be in there as well.
The Cage, therefor has decided to talk about the one per crore and the one per lakh when appropriate and use the one percent when we specifically want to refer to the very wealthy 70 million who are stinking rich, but who are really just ordinary people with a lot of money.
The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, abbreviated as CETA, has attracted broad criticism this week following an impassioned piece by George Monbiot in the UK Guardian.
The treaty is promoted by its Canadian and EU backers as a key to opening cross Atlantic trade and therefor increasing wealth. Its critics point out that allowing global corporations to sue governments whenever government policy threatens their projected profits, it effectively hands over control of policy to the private sector.
Monbiot describes this as the end of governing in the interests of the people. In other words, the end of democracy as we understand it.
Many existing trade agreements include such clauses. Canada has paid $170 million in compensation to American corporations under the first seven years of the North American Free Trade Agreement and Mexico $240 million.
One “Trade Treaty” after another – and we have to stop them all
Corporate lobbyists and their captive governments try to wear down our resistance with one trade treaty after another.
* A private corporate tribunal has supremacy over sovereign government legislation. For example, the tribunal could fine an elected government whose legislation, environmental protection and other social policies would reduce corporation profits.
* Similar in the banking sector, monetary policy would be dictated by Wall Street
* Agriculture policy would have been dictated, especially with regard to GMOs and ag-subsidies. Monsanto and the like would have had free access and no government could pass legislation prohibiting genetically modified seeds.
* Standards for health and nutrition would be limited so they do not reduce profits.
* Labor laws would be weakened to US standards which have virtually no protection for workers.
CETA treaty is equivalent to the land treaties illiterate African chiefs were induced to sign in the 19th Century.
The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) allows any corporation to sue governments. It threatens to tear down laws protecting us from exploitation and prevent parliaments. Like TTIP, CETA threatens to lock in privatisation, making renationalisation or attempts by cities to take control of failing public services impossible. Like TTIP, it uses a broad definition of investment and expropriation to allow corporations to sue governments when they believe their “future anticipated profits” might be threatened by new laws.
Intellectual Property Rights And Free Trade Agreements
a group of highly concentrated transnational corporations in the knowledge industries such as pharmaceuticals, high-tech, and entertainment pack so much lobbying clout that they can convince the governments of the industrialized world to bully developing countries to “harmonize” their copyright, patent and trademarks laws into a global intellectual property regime.
People are lazy. With television you just sit – watch – listen. The thinking is done for you
Roger Ailes
A Manifesto for The Platform
There is a deep despair growing among good people as Trump promises to dismantle seventy years of Social Justice reforms and Environmental Safeguards. We have struggled and devoted our lives to implement worthwhile policies over our lifetimes, and they could be gone in a trice. I sense a forlorn hopelessness growing among us. Instead, The Platform offers an alternative. The Manifesto does not aim at concentrating all our efforts on fighting the polluters. We accept that so much heating is now built into the system that it does not matter what we do we will still suffer massive sea level rise and droughts, food scarcity and deaths. The Manifesto offers the positive message that we can make life better now and in the future, and that we, the people of Good Will, can succeed at this. The Manifesto for Our Platform offers the promise that we can do something, in place of succumbing to numbing despair.
Trump demands list of Civil Servants who worked on Climate Policy under Obama. “This action should not be viewed in isolation, The Trump transition team is teeming with individuals with a proven history of attacking climate scientists and undermining climate science. Several members now overseeing federal agencies have harassed scientists based on their research and have long signaled a desire to dismantle federal climate science research.”
Skepticism about Michael Flynn’s fitness for the position of national security adviser appears to be growing as more media outlets are paying closer attention to his (and his son’s) core beliefs about the world. Such scrutiny also appears to be more relevant since President-elect Trump may be relying more heavily on Flynn than on the CIA or other government intelligence agencies for his own assessment of world events.
Trump will use the media to sugarcoat, falsify, distract, intimidate, glorify and massify the millions of people who believed, once upon a recent time, that he would “Make America Great Again.” As the profiteers of Wall Street and the war hawks blend with the corporate statists, the super-confident Trump is telling us what their products will be like and that he’ll be their salesman. If you think all this sounds predictable, there are going to be more than a few “black swans” (to use Nassim Taleb’s best-selling book title) coming over the horizon. It is time to mobilize as citizens in the Paul Revere mode.
The December 19 Electoral College Vote : Anti-Trump Coup Attempt Underway?
Trump won 306 Electoral College votes to Hillary’s 232, her’s heavily concentrated in the northeast, mid-Atlantic and west coast. He won 30 states to her 20 – 270 EC votes needed to be elected. It would take 37 electors, from states he won, to deny him their vote, thereby throwing the process to House members to elect the president.
Methane levels over the Arctic Ocean were as high as 2436 parts per billion on the afternoon of December 5, 2016, with most rising from the water. Pre-industrial level was ~720 ppb and each molecule is 20 times more potent than C02. Add that up!
CEFC backs 270MW Sapphire wind farm, in vote of confidence for merchant market
A consortium between Vestas and Zenviron will deliver the project, with Vestas supplying and commissioning the turbines, and Zenviron delivering the balance of plant. TransGrid will build, operate and maintain an on-site substation connecting the Sapphire project to the national energy grid.
The startling rise in oral cancer in men, and what it says about our changing sexual habits
Oral cancer jumped 61% from 2011 to 2015. HPV infects cells of the skin and the membranes that lines areas such as the mouth, throat, tongue, tonsils, rectum and sexual organs. Transmission can occur when these areas come into contact with the virus. HPV is a leading cause of cervical, vaginal and penile cancers. Younger men are more likely to perform oral sex than their older counterparts and to engage with more partners.
A Drive To Save Saharan Oases As Climate Change Takes a Toll
From Morocco to Libya, the desert oases of the Sahara’s Maghreb region are disappearing as temperatures rise and rainfall decreases. Facing daunting odds, local residents are employing traditional water conservation techniques to try to save these ancient ecosystems.
Only one-quarter of all consumption is by individuals. The rest is taken up by industry, agribusiness, the military, governments and corporations. Even if every one of us made every effort to reduce our ecological footprint, it would make little difference to overall consumption. If the lifestyle actions advocated really do keep our culture around for longer than it would otherwise, then it will cause more harm to the natural world than if no such action had been taken.
The people of Saudi Arabia have long accepted the bargain imposed by the founding king, Abdul Aziz al-Saud, in which they are disenfranchised but acquiesce in political powerlessness as the state provides them with security and a comfortable life. Now they are being asked to do more for themselves while the government does less, regardless of the price of oil.
Congress Votes To Give Jihadists Anti-aircraft Missiles
The Senate passed a bill that puts every American who travels by plane at risk. It is among the stupidest pieces of legislation ever written – to provide shoulder-launched ground-to-air missiles to lunatic jihadists who will undoubtedly use them to take down American or Israeli jetliners. The argument that these Islamic militants are fully vetted is complete nonsense as both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have repeatedly shown. Rebel groups “have entered into battlefield alliances with the affiliate of al Qaida in Syria formerly known as al Nusra to render the phrase ‘moderate rebels’ meaningless.”
One of the answers to Trump, Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Salvini, Duterte, Le Pen, Farage and the politics they represent is to rescue democracy from transnational corporations. It is to defend the crucial political unit that’s under assault by banks, monopolies and chainstores: community. It is to recognise that there is no greater hazard to peace between nations than a corporate model which crushes democratic choice
A degree by degree explanation of what will happen when the earth warms
At 2C temperature increase the hot European summer of 2003 will be the annual norm. Anything that could be called a heatwave thereafter will be of Saharan intensity. Even in average years, people will die of heat stress.
Beyond 2C billions of people will face an increasingly tough battle to survive. To find anything comparable we have to go back to the Pliocene 3m years ago. There were no continental glaciers in the northern hemisphere (trees grew in the Arctic), and sea levels were 25 metres higher than today’s. In this kind of heat, the death of the Amazon is as inevitable as the melting of Greenland.
Between 3 and 4C the summers get longer as soaring temperatures reduce forests to tinderwood and cities to boiling morgues. Temperatures in the Home Counties could reach 45C – the sort of climate experienced today in Marrakech. Droughts will put the south-east of England on the global list of water-stressed areas, with farmers competing against cities for dwindling supplies from rivers and reservoirs. Air-conditioning will be mandatory for anyone wanting to stay cool and the abandonment of the Mediterranean will send even more people north to overcrowded refuges in Scandinavia.
Between 4 and 5C it will be an entirely different planet. Ice sheets have vanished from both poles; rainforests have burnt up and turned to desert; the dry and lifeless Alps resemble the High Atlas; rising seas are scouring deep into continental interiors. Even in Canada and Siberia summers may be too hot for crops to be grown away from the coasts. When temperatures were at a similar level 55m years ago in the early Eocene, alligators were living in the Arctic.
Between 5 and 6C at the end of the Permian, 251m years ago, 95% of species were wiped out. That episode was the worst ever endured by life on Earth, the closest the planet has come to ending up a dead and desolate rock in space. On land, the only winners were fungi that flourished on dying trees and shrubs.
Arctic Warming at Least Twice as Fast as Rest of World
Much of this melt was almost certainly driven by the record warm Arctic temperatures seen during 2016. And according to NOAA, this year shattered all previous high marks for Arctic heat by a big margin — hitting 3.5C warmer than 1900. Overall, this rate of warming is at least twice as fast as the rest of the globe.
Change in the Arctic this year was unlike any ever seen, scientists say
The annual Arctic Report Card documented air and sea-surface temperatures are higher, sea ice is sparser and more fragile and ocean waters absorbing more carbon, thus changing their chemistry to more acidic levels, while warming tundra is now expelling more carbon than it is drawing in from the atmosphere.
