Since the United States had already successfully immunized itself from prosecution in The Hague under war crimes statutes, it is no surprise that the Land of the Free Marketeers has also immunized itself from liability to poorer countries for the damage their unfettered capitalistic plunder has caused. This refusal, according to one delegation to the summit, should be construed as a crime against humanity.
"The U.S. continued its long tradition of sacrificing survival chances of billions of people for its own ability to continue making incredible amountx of money and shirking its historical climate responsibility," tweeted Holthaus.
It should have been the tweet heard 'round the world, but it has run into a brick wall as far as the corporate media borg in the United States is concerned. Here in the Homeland, it's all impeachment all the time. Here in the Homeland, news isn't news unless it's manufactured by the corporate sponsors, for the corporate sponsors.
A scene in William Gibson's novel "Spook Country" pithily comments on pre- and post-cable and 24/7 news and entertainment.
One character explains "the artifact of preubiquitous media" to another:
"Of --?"
"Of a state in which 'mass' media existed, if you will, within the world."
"As opposed to?"
"Comprising it."Thus has the American population largely internalized the "value systems" of the oligarchs running the place and the media explaining the place to the rest of us. To be fair, the reason that most people aren't more concerned about the climate catastrophe that imminently threatens the world's poor people, and will even threaten rich people someday in the not too distant future if they don't escape to their yacht cities or outer space colonies in time, is because the world-comprising media has not properly informed, alarmed or outraged them.
If we science-acknowledging liberal folk do acknowledge the climate crisis, that rational acknowledgment and rational fear is enhanced, even subsumed, by being taught to hate the ignorant anti-science folk of the opposite party and in different sections of the country.
Case in point: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman simplistically titled his own latest effort "The Party That Ruined the Planet."
We should be angry that the Republicans are vocal climate denialists, while ignoring the fact that the Democrats reneged on a pledge to refuse political donations from the fossil fuel industry, that Barack Obama approved the export of US fracked oil the same week he signed the Paris Climate Accord, and that he appeared at an oil industry-funded think tank in Texas to brag that more oil and gas was extracted during his administration than in any other.
But look on the bright side. Obama acknowledges climate change, and even raised money for his foundation by shaking hands with teen climate activist Greta Thunberg. And all that dumb old Trump can do is bully her on Twitter! The resulting rise in your blood pressure should thereby be indistinguishable from the rise in the actual temperature.
Krugman dutifully writes:
Still, whatever the short-term political incentives, it takes a special kind of depravity to respond to those incentives by denying facts, embracing insane conspiracy theories and putting the very future of civilization at risk.
See how selectively fomenting helpless anger against the Grim Old Party not only robs us of our ability to think critically, it allows a liberal pundit like Krugman to endorse the post-ubiquitous "serious" war hawk artifact John McCain while studiously ignoring both corporate malfeasance and the "radical" proposal of a Green New Deal?Unfortunately, that kind of depravity isn’t just present in the modern Republican Party, it has effectively taken over the whole institution. There used to be at least some Republicans with principles; as recently as 2008 Senator John McCain co-sponsored serious climate-change legislation. But those people have either experienced total moral collapse (hello, Senator Graham) or left the party.
My published response to Krugman:
The destruction of the planet long preceded the emergence of the Grim Old Party. It began with the capitalist revolution which, although its birth is commonly coincident with the Industrial Revolution, really got its start with Europe's invasion of the "New World" in the 16th century, when plunder of natural resources, destruction of forests and native crops and plants and forced labor/enslavement of both native people and kidnapped Africans began with a vengeance.
Truly addressing climate change would require the overthrow of capitalism, whose sole purpose is to extract, extract and extract some more, without thought and without concern for the damages.
Getting rid of Republicans might take the edge off the catastrophe, maybe even buy us some time with 500 year floods, fires and and storms only coming once a year instead of several times a year. The US military is the biggest polluter and user of fossil fuels on Planet Earth, yet House Democrats just joined the evil Republicans in giving Trump another three quarters of a trillion dollars to wage Permawar - mere days after the Washington Post published shocking admissions from officials from the last three administrations that they have lied to the public about the "progress" being made in Afghanistan.
Without an end to unbridled militarized capitalism, whatever political party is in power is beside the point. Not for nothing are some scientists calling it the Necrocene Epoch - as in dying if not already dead.To which one fellow reader dutifully replied:
No, you're wrong about capitalism and environmental damage. Whenever the costs of destruction from economic activities are not considered there will be no effort to prevent needless damage. The enormous environmental damage done in the communists states of Eastern Europe is a clear example of non-capitalist states destructive behavior. And, please remember that even if Democrats are in the driver's seat in Congress and/or the White House, they may not be able do all that they would like to, or they would soon be out of office. We must bear this in mind and not expect them to do all that we might desire.This is another example of William Gibson's observation that we don't live in the real world as much as we consist of and in a perverted media land of enchantment. Everything is the fault of the other party or "the Russians," who deep in their nefarious little hearts are still the same Communists that the elites battled during the first Cold War.
Of course, the climate change "controversy" is not the only manufactured cult with two permissible distinct sects: the polluters who deny science, and the polluters who pay lip service to science while making "carbon pricing" their cynical alternative to meaningful action.
Another recent glaring indication of Post-Ubiquitous Media Reality is the framing of the devastating Department of Justice Inspector General report on FBI corruption into the outrage that Trump is using this report as a political cudgel with which to bully the FBI.
Pay no attention to what the report says about our chronically abusive and unlawful national police agency. Pay attention to how unfairly the corrupt Trump is using this corruption to benefit himself.
New York Times business columnist James B. Stewart, who wrote one of the many books marketing the Russiagate narrative, turned the facts right on their head in a "news analysis" in which he falsely claimed that the IG report completely exonerated the FBI - when, in fact, Inspector General Michael Horowitz said the exact opposite both in the report and in his Senate testimony.
A report can be truthful and honest, but if Trump likes it, then it magically becomes tainted on its face. Just as the imprisoned Julian Assange was smeared by the media because his Wikileaks revealed damaging information about the Clinton campaign, Stewart smears Horowitz for simply doing his job:
So much for the supposedly nonpartisan and independent office of the Department of Justice Inspector General — which, before the Trump administration, most Americans hardly knew existed. To a striking degree, Mr. Trump and his allies have turned the post into a potent weapon aimed at his supposed enemies in the federal law enforcement agencies.My published comment:
Believe it or not, it is possible to both loathe Trump and be deeply disturbed by the rogue police agency known as the FBI.
The most disturbing aspect of the report is actual evidence tampering by an FBI lawyer. An email from the CIA verifying that Carter Page had been working with them was doctored and changed to the CIA denying it had any affiliation with Carter Page, This fraudulent email was then presented to the FISA court. The FBI also withheld exculpatory evidence, such as testimony from witnesses that the Steele Dossier was "a joke" in that some of its allegations were gleaned from third hand barroom gossip.
So Trump will make political hay of this report, and he is, painful as it may be to admit, perfectly justified in doing so. The Democratic Party should rue the day it ever sided with the FBI as well as the equally rogue CIA in #Resistance, Inc. Attacking Trump from the right was never a good idea. And with the party owned and operated by wealthy donors, they will not attack him from the left.
Meanwhile, what better time than now to abolish the unaccountable and deeply anti-democratic FISA Court, which rubber-stamps nearly every single investigation requested by the FBI? We should follow up the Trump impeachment hearing the same way we did Nixon's. A truth and reconciliation reckoning would also be a great way of honoring Black activist Fred Hampton on the 50th anniversary of his assassination, a joint project of the Chicago police and the FBI.All of one (1 as in single) of my fellow Times readers "recommended" that heretical comment.
As my last example today of Gibson's media-comprised world, let's turn to Maureen Dowd, who abandoned her day job as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's besotted publicist long enough to write a fairly decent column about Trump not being the only bad guy in Washington. She noted, correctly, that regular folk are not as besotted with the impeachment narrative as the media who are manufacturing it and covering themselves covering it. She actually mentioned that it's kind of strange that former CIA director John Brennan has a gig as a Trump resistance fighter on MSNBC, given that he helped torture some folks and broke into Senate computer files which incriminated him in the torture. There's even an Amazon movie about it, making it more real still. But in keeping with the artificial binary nature of our corporate-manufactured political discourse and narrative, Dowd outlandishly positioned Brennan on the "left" as opposed to Trump's proper placement on the "right."
It was this offhand statement that I took issue with in my published comment:
"The left keens that the president is destroying our sacred institutions and jeopardizing our national security."
From where I sit, the "left" is advocating for Medicare For All, debt-free education, a Green New Deal, affordable housing as a basic human right, voting rights, and an end to mass incarceration, surveillance and war. It's the neocons and the centrists who are keening about "national security" - code for Permawar and mass surveillance. and endless financial rewards for the oligarchs running the place.
Since our political leaders don't give a fig about the security of ordinary people, they sell fear and "resistance" to Donald Trump instead, even as they gift him with his vanity Space Force, his vanity Wall, more hundreds of billions for war, and his very own NAFTA clone. Where's the outrage over his kicking almost a million people off food stamps? How about impeachment for his imprisonment and kidnapping of thousands of migrant and refugee children?
Let's face the unpleasant fact that this narrowly focused impeachment battle between the parties is pretty much a smokescreen. It helps them avoid doing anything about, even talking about. the existential crises facing the vast majority of us. Record numbers are dying prematurely because even with health insurance we can't afford medical care. Evictions are increasing nationwide, and three homeless people are dying on the streets of Los Angeles County every single day.
We are Americans. Hear us keen.
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| "The Scream" by Edvard Munch |
11 comments:
You might want to take a look at and consider adding to your links sidebar the site medialens.org, which delivers some good media criticism from a British point of view. Their most recent post (https://www.medialens.org/2019/reopening-auschwitz-the-conspiracy-to-stop-corbyn/) on the British media's hatchet job on Labour's Jeremy Corbyn is noteworthy, as the same (in style, though not specifics) is being done to Sanders, and to a lesser extent Warren, here in the U.S.
Inmates in charge of a lunatic asylum: it's an old gag sometimes made into high theater. No more is it only a joke or a framework for movies or the stage. The deeply pathological insane, we suddenly realize, are now in charge of the fate of 7.7 billion people.
Is use of the term 'insane' an exaggeration? Are the Trump gang, the DNC gang, Bolsonaro, Modi, Morrison and so many other elected or self-appointed leaders insane? Insanity is stretched out along a spectrum. Some of us will get along with a little therapy; others will have to be put in straight jackets. How crazy are the world's leaders?
There are some standard measures. Their actions at COP25 might be one indication of grave insanity. Or go back to more old fashioned measures; do they lie, steal, kill or destroy vital resources, like arable land and fresh water? Well, yes, in fact on a wholesale basis. Are they capable of admitting their errors to the neighbors they have lied to, stolen from, maimed and killed, sometimes quickly with fiendish weapons or slowly through engineered poverty? Apparently not.
If a lowly individual is irrational and violent in his or her surroundings, professional care givers restrain that individual and provide therapy. Governors at the top of many nations are similarly irrational and violent, and their reach is extends across the globe. Judging by their deeds and the ugly consequences of their rule, even to the point of herding us all to the cliff of human extinction, it's clear the political shepherds are deeply irrational. Commoners who stand by and do nothing must also be judged insane.
For a long time we believed humanity had so much more potential and was in the process of developing the frame of mind, skills and technology to surpass itself. Time to switch from yellow vests to white coats.
"All of one (1 as in single) of my fellow Times readers "recommended" that heretical comment."
That's the most depressing thing I've read all day.
Worse, those who acknowledge the science and stress climate change tend to acknowledge only the shorter term risks, as if climate change is a creeping temperature problem of a little more and then a little more. In response they push responses that seem politically possible, even if those are unlikely to do much good.
For example, the Paris Accords accepted a degree of warming that would be a major problem, and those accepting it acknowledged they probably couldn't do even that, but it is better than not trying at all.
Meanwhile, whatever heating happens is greater in the Arctic than further south, and if the heating of the Arctic goes on even to the extent expected than the Atlantic current will lose its cold and heavy salt water from the Arctic that creates the current. Arctic warming thus means European and North American ice cover far to the south, and drought everywhere.
These conditions have defined 2/3 of the time humanity has been on Earth, so it is not unreasonable to a fear return to normal.
We will need to face the whole reality, and begin to consider things like geo-engineering and/or moving human populations and agriculture on a large scale. We are not even beginning to face the whole of the science, even as we deride others for facing less of it.
"Time to switch from yellow vests to white coats." --- Jay--Ottawa
Except that these various "leaders" will never submit to treatment or restraint. So time for the enlightened amongst the populace to start setting aside a few provisions and acquiring the camo clothing, and bug-out bags with walkie-talkies, paper maps, portable solar battery chargers, and much else, appropriate for the various probabilities that lie in our futures.
Because unfortunately, it's clear from the expansion of governmental surveillance infrastructure, police militarization, gerrymandering and voter suppression, mass media news reporting biases, distortions, and limits, and the primacy of entertainment for distraction and manipulation of the people, that the structures of power have no intention of either relinquishing their power or of putting any substantial part of it to uses that would benefit the greater populace.
So that means that we cannot have any well-founded hope of substantial rational, peaceful, beneficial political and economic change. That means that things will continue as they are until either environmental/societal collapse, increased repression, and/or an unpredictable popular uprising occur. 20xx is the new 1917. We just don't yet know what year "20xx" is.
Hi Joker,
Thanks for suggesting Media Lens, just added it to the blog roll.
@ Joker
I think you're right. If I were young, I would take steps to survive by building a well-stocked retreat deep in the woods, together with a number of like-minded people, highly-skilled in growing things, fixing things, healing, and well-armed for hunting and defense of the fort.
Hang up the yellow jackets and white coats; camo is the uniform of survivalists. I've read that in light of all the looming disasters––nukes, plagues, floods, droughts, megastorms, mass emigration, the unrelenting loss of species, the scarcity of food and water especially in urban areas––survivalism has begun to go mainstream. The old, feeble and poor will be left behind to take the hit.
If world leaders continue to herd every living thing to that tipping point of catastrophe (the most likely scenario), I doubt survivalists, even the richest and best prepped, would be able to put off the last chapter of human civilization more than a generation. The last breaths of the doomed dystopia will be spent on oaths damning empty exercises like the 2015 Paris Agreement and COP25 (Madrid).
I keep asking myself:
How could all this be happening to the most intelligent primate on this planet? The evidence is clear. The thinking we developed over our two billion year evolutionary history is the cause. It will not allow us to understand what is happening.
As we evolved, we destroyed all life in our path. Our numbers however were small so our impact on the planet was small. Then with the bronze/iron/agricultural age we accelerated this destruction, now to include non life. Again our numbers were small so our impact on the planet was small. Then, with the Industrial Revolution (At the beginning we numbered about 700 million and now we are seven billion plus) we accelerated the pace; pillaging all life and nonlife, burning all of the coal, oil and gas we could find; thereby releasing enormous amounts of CO2 into the biosphere. As this was taking place, the impact on the planet became no longer small. And to make matters worse, we began destroying our forests and in doing so limiting the amount of CO2 being absorbed back. The result: Carbon dioxide levels today are beyond what they were 3/5 million years ago; well before our evolutionary beginnings. And they continue to rise with worrisome effect the heat produced is causing far more potent Methane (CH4) to bubble up in the warming Arctic. By way of a feedback loop, CH4 there could in just a few years exponentially increase global warming. We were warned of this in a 2012 World Bank report that pointed to the possibly of Arctic methane release causing a deadly repeat of an event like that of the Permian Triassic Extinction when by way of very high global temperatures almost all life on the planet was destroyed.
How can we be so naïve? Why are so many of us so blinded to this oncoming reality? The answer is in our biological/neurological evolution. We have a neurotic/psychotic cranial defect that now in this new Age is about to spell our end.
www.InquiryAbraham.com
@ Jay-Ottawa -- "take steps to survive by building a well-stocked retreat deep in the woods"
The nature of the climate change problem is such that there would not be a deep woods to which to retreat. Whatever climate change does to that particular spot, it likely would not remain deep woods in which one could grow crops.
This is an example of what most concerns me, that even those who are sincerely concerned about climate change don't really come fully to grips with the changes it means.
CounterPunch just put up an article about COP25 with one of those optional videos inserted. Because I usually get more from transcripts faster, I usually skip watching the live videos.
However, if you go to this article, skip the written report and go directly to the video where an eloquent scientist attending COP25 tells you how far along we are to civilization's last curtain call.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/12/19/biosphere-collapse/
Jay-Ottawa -- Thank you for that site. I too don't usually have the patience to listen to video, I just want to read. This video makes clear exactly why the feel-good pretense to fixing things is misleading.
However, while he repeatedly says we face a "biosphere collapse," which I think is true, he does not spell out just exactly what those words mean. That is a second area in which our activists hide from science even as they proclaim science. I don't mean that he is hiding from it, he just gave a 23 minute video interview that covered a lot of good stuff, but did not go on into more about those words he used.
That more would be a collapse of the Arctic engine that drives global heat transfer up from the equatorial regions, and shapes moisture movement. From that we'd at first get warming in the north, but that followed soon after by the opposite, by ice caps reaching south, and drought would ruin the equatorial regions as the planetary movement of moisture and heat shuts down. Would that re-start the delicate heat transfers? No, because of the atmospheric gas conditions.
This describes the planet as it has been for 2/3 of the time humans have been on Earth, so it ought not to be unbelievable nor unimaginable. It is normal, by 2:1.
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