CRISIS EMERGENCY FAIL

3/20 prompted of course by covid

 see inequality --> instability (sys)

SEE MODERATION BUFFER REGULATION SCIENCE EXPERTS AGW

never waste a crisis [milton]: disaster capitalism = system fail/cascade

see doom tipping pt CASCADE

see chaos AGW 4

see systems SOCIAL SAFETY NET

SEE FASCISM AUTH 4:

[[[ aha: trump the disruptor generates chaos, --> CRISIS polarization, hype fear/anger (and inequality that drives it) and declares only he is the strong man/strict father alone who can establish law and order

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AN 3 26

Within Christianity, talk of Armageddon is especially prominent among far-right evangelical fundamentalists — many of whom are obsessed with the New Testament's Book of Revelation. Mainline Protestants and Catholics also read the Book of Revelation, but not in the obsessive way that evangelical fundamentalists and white Christian nationalists do. And they don't have the evangelical fixation on Armadgeddon and the End Times.

But in an op-ed published by The Hill on March 25, researcher John Mac Ghlionn observes that fear of Doomsday is growing among Americans who aren't necessarily End Times evangelicals.

This fear, he notes, is highlighted in a new report by the American Psychological Association (APA).

"America used to reserve Doomsday talk for the guys who stored beans in their backyard and argued about the Book of Revelation on AM radio," Ghlionn explains. "Now, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one-third of the country quietly suspects that the end will arrive before they get the chance to draw down their 401(k) plans. Historically, apocalyptic thinking had a specific address…. The end of the world was a conviction reserved for a certain kind of Christian, who awaited it with a feeling somewhere between dread and satisfaction."

Ghlionn adds, "These were the kind of people for whom catastrophe would finally settle an argument they had been having for decades. Everyone else just changed the channel and went back to refinancing their mortgages."

But now, according to the researcher, that "separation is gone."

"When the U.S. and Israel chose to attack Iran and kill that country's supreme leader, the phrase 'World War III' began trending on the phones of mechanics in Des Moines and software engineers in Austin," Ghlionn writes. "The researchers found that more than 100 million Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. This not some vague anxiety, but a concrete belief that colors how these people think about climate change, nuclear war, economic collapse, and artificial intelligence. That is your neighbor, your barista, your Uber driver, and the manager at work who just updated the remote‑work policy."

In 2026, according to Ghlionn, the "Doomsday crowd" includes not only fundamentalist evangelicals, but also, ranges from "climate activists convinced we have blown past every tipping point" to "AI researchers gaming out scenarios where the machine stops taking instructions."

"Americans have always flirted with the end of the world," Ghlionn notes. "But now, for the first time, the preppers, the prophets, the climate modelers, the AI-worriers and the geopolitical realists can all point to different dashboards flashing red at the same time."

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AN 2 26

In the wee hours of Monday, January 19, US President Donald Trump sent a now-infamous text message to the prime minister of Denmark:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America... The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you!

Trump’s brief, belligerent message (full text and analysis _{here}_) underscores a stark reality: One man is causing an acceleration of civilizational collapse.

Only hours later, at the annual gathering of world political and financial leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a general sense of fear and dread enveloped the proceedings. Even Trump’s half-hearted announcement that he wouldn’t use force to acquire Greenland couldn’t lift the gloom. The most memorable speech was that of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who began by saying:

Today, I’ll talk about the rupture in the world order, the end of a nice story, and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints... But let’s be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable...

Systems scientists have been warning for decades that the current growth-based world economic order is unsustainable, and that it will inevitably become smaller and more simplified during the remainder of the 21st century. This downsizing is likely to be messy and sometimes violent. Meanwhile, observers who focus on geopolitics have argued that the US, which built a global empire during the 20th century, is already showing signs of decline in several respects, and that China is poised to become the next global superpower, if only briefly (that is, until the viability of global superpowers is itself outworn).

What is surprising is that this unraveling of the old order is accelerating so suddenly—and doing so largely thanks to just one man. During the last couple of decades, experts on societal collapse discussed whether the “Great Unraveling” would be a slow erosion over decades or a fast disintegration over mere years. The latest evidence (including Trump’s Greenland text) tips the scales toward a faster collapse scenario.

Since this shift is being driven largely by Donald Trump, it’s natural to wonder whether international calm could be restored simply by shunting him aside. There is, after all, growing concern over Trump’s health. (His sleepiness during daytime, his slurred speech, and his frequent frustrated fumbling for the correct word—in his Davos speech he called Greenland “Iceland” four times—have raised questions about his fitness for the job). The US Constitution provides two methods for removing an unfit president: impeachment, and the invocation of the 25th Amendment. Few informed observers of the American political scene expect either of these remedies to be implemented soon. Even if they were, Trump’s actions in the past year have irrevocably undermined stability in the US and globally. If his second presidency were to end tomorrow, Trump likely will have had as decisive an influence on history as pivotal world leaders like Winston Churchill, FDR, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin.

In this article we’ll explore how and why the march toward collapse is hastening, and what this trend has to do with Trump’s failure to understand social power. We’ll also explore what individuals can do in response to increasing signs of societal instability.

Three Elements—and Three Tools—of Social Power

The conclusions about Trump and accelerating societal unraveling stated above are rooted in my studies of the nature of power (see my book Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival and its related limited-run _{podcast}_). Every large society, from ancient kingdoms to modern industrial empires, has had to master three elements of social power—i.e., the ability to get other people to do things. The essential problem for would-be leaders of large societies is to enlist the populace to fight wars, build pyramids (or other significant structures and institutions), and increase economic activity. But what motivates people? Typically, they respond to coercion, enticements, and persuasion. If these are the three elements of social power, then it follows that the three main tools of social power are weapons, money, and communication technologies. In the book I trace the development of these tools, and the social consequences of their progressive development and use.

In PowerI also point out that there are two basic types of social power—vertical and horizontal. Vertical power is top-down, exercised through threats and punishments: “You must do this, or else,” or “If you do this, I’ll give you that.” Horizontal power is mutual and cooperative: “We can do this together”; it arises through inspiration and negotiation. Democracies tend to rely more on horizontal social power, and autocracies more on vertical power; but durable large societies seem to demand both.

When we see the military of Canada (CANADA??!!) modeling war plans for inflicting maximum casualties on US troops in the event of an invasion, it’s fair to conclude that old alliances are coming unglued fast.

Trump seems reflexively to rely solely on vertical social power—the use of threats and bribes. With such means, he has taken control of the Republican Party, won the presidency twice, and dominated Congress to the point that it has become virtually inert. He has been successful largely because horizontal power relationships in the US have been under increasing strain during the last few decades for several reasons, notably fast-rising economic inequality. From one perspective, his achievements are remarkable. Trump seems to understand power better than any other leader on the national stage. But his understanding of power is one-dimensional.

Trump seems profoundly ignorant of, or indifferent to, horizontal power. He has squandered the goodwill of allies and needlessly created international enemies. Again, Carney at Davos:

The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied—the WTO, the UN, the COP—the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions: that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains... Call it what it is—a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.

Even authoritarian nations, if they’re to outlive their leader, need buy-in from citizens and allies. Chinese citizens, for example, expect stability and predictability while rapid economic growth improves their economic prospects. They also know that they will face severe penalties if they speak out against the regime, and they (mostly) willingly comply. Americans, however, thanks to Trump’s poor understanding of power, can now expect much less stability and predictability amid economic stagnation or even reversal. And many will be increasingly unwilling to comply.

Vertical Power Alone Is Fragile

Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently told *CNN*’s Jake Tapper,

...[Y]ou can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.

Trump is not the first world leader to rely almost exclusively on vertical social power. History is replete with authoritarian regimes and tyrants. Here’s an excerpt from a 3,000-year-old cuneiform text from the Assyrian Empire:

I am Tiglath Pileser the powerful king, the supreme King of Lashanan; King of the four regions, King of all Kings, Lord of Lords, the supreme Monarch of all Monarchs, the illustrious chief who under the auspices of the Sun god, being armed with the scepter and girt with the girdle of power over mankind, rules over all the people of Bel; the mighty Prince whose praise is blazoned forth among the Kings...

Pileser sounds positively Trumpian.

:{:{But vertical social power, on its own, often tends to lead to revolution, coup d-état, assassination, or war. Some historical authoritarian dynasties lasted centuries (China offers several examples}:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_of_China

:{:{ However, the lifetime of many modern authoritarian regimes has been brief (for example, }Pol Pot{ ruled Cambodia for only four years). Concentrating the power of the state in one man often makes the glue that holds the nation together more brittle. What does the future hold for Russia after Putin? Why is the post-Gaddafi regime in Libya so frail?}:

Strongmen tend to leave power vacuums in their wake, along with weakened social institutions. The fall of a strongman doesn’t always make way for a vibrant democracy; more often, it leads to chaos and a string of other short-term strongmen. In the case of Trump, the strongman is already old and (in }many observers’{ opinions) infirm. He’s }_{not overwhelmingly popular, and his likely successors are even less so. The inevitable end of Trump’s rule, whether it occurs in days or years, will leave the US far more polarized and unruly than it was in 2016 when he was first elected.}:}:

Internationally, the US system of alliances that was patiently built over seven decades has not adapted well to Trump’s style of threats and bullying. When we see the military of Canada (CANADA??!!) modeling war plans for inflicting maximum casualties on US troops in the event of an invasion, it’s fair to conclude that old alliances are coming unglued fast. And that means global peril for both peace and trade. Trump is not a solely American problem.

Power Tools as Engines of Destruction

In Donald Trump’s hands, the perennial tools of power are becoming engines of destruction.

• Weapons and coercion:From the earliest kingdoms to today’s modern states, it is men with weapons who have conquered or defended territory and countered domestic unrest. Trump’s use of the military, and threats of its use, are not just turning away allies, but also presenting his officers with intractable moral and strategic problems. Meanwhile, he is deploying troops to US cities against the wishes of governors and mayors. The possible results are explored in an article by Claire Finkelstein ominously titled “We Ran High-Level US Civil War Simulations. Minnesota Is Exactly How They Start.” Finkelstein writes, “The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.”

• Money and enticements: All organized societies gather and exert social power through their control of currencies and trade. Early in his second term, Trump announced hefty tariffs on imports from nearly all nations. While he has waffled on the percentage amount of those tariffs, they are still in effect and having a chilling effect on global commerce. In April, in response to tariffs, Canadian prime minister Carney announced that the 80-year period of American economic leadership was over. The US dollar, which has been the world’s reserve currency since 1946, is now increasingly perceived as toxic. A stampede to ditch the dollar would impoverish all who are invested in it; instead, countries seem to be quietly exiting dollar-denominated holdings. The inevitable result will be a decline in the value of the dollar and in US living standards.

• :{:{Communication technologies and persuasion: From the invention of writing in ancient kingdoms to the spread of social media and AI deepfakes in the present, communications tools have been used to induce large numbers of people to think and behave in ways leaders (or “influencers”) want them to. Inspiration, threats, promises, and warnings motivate voting, fighting, and buying. Democracies typically value science and unfettered fact-based journalism. Autocracies usually spew propaganda. The Trump administration has been labeled a tabloid presidency by Timothy L. O’Brien, who worked with Trump for the 2006 biography, TrumpNation, and who compares the president’s leadership style to tabloid magazines like the Weekly World News, with its focus on “dubious,” “trashy,” and “lunatic” stories designed to “knock readers back on their heels.”}:

The administration has attacked mainstream news outlets that have been critical of it, sometimes employing the government’s regulatory powers as a cudgel. Trump’s false claims are so frequent that professional fact-checkers are employed by mainstream print and broadcast news organizations solely to spot, count, and refute them. Meanwhile, through a combination of verbal threats and funding cuts, the Trump administration is assaulting science, medicine, culture, and education. For example, the administration no longer gathers or publishes information about climate change, including both raw data and scientific research.}:

What to Do?

As I explained at some length in a recent article (which includes lots of resources and advice), local action to build community resilience is the antidote to national and global unraveling. Notice the persistent bonds of horizontal power holding your community together and engage in activities that build social ties. Strengthen local institutions, from credit unions to food co-ops. Identify and participate in international networks of trust and mutual aid, such as the Global Democracy Coalition. And learn from people in other parts of the world who have lived through authoritarian takeovers or successfully opposed them.

Build community resilience wherever you are. My organization, Post Carbon Institute, has produced books, articles, reports, and podcasts—as well as webinars and an online course—to help, and there are other organizations working along complementary lines. Our friends at Shareable have developed a fantastic set of guides (_{Mutual Aid 101}_) for anyone interested in starting a mutual aid initiative in their own community.

Collapse is accelerating. So must our efforts to build personal and community resilience. Don’t cower in front of your screen. Get out and join with others in projects to make your town stronger and more socially and environmentally sustainable.

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icn gmail 1 265

Iran’s Regime Has Survived War, Sanctions and Uprising. Environmental Crises May Bring It Down.

BY KATIE SURMA

Decades of water depletion, dam building and repression of scientists and environmentalists have driven Iran toward ecological crises that are fueling protests rocking the country.

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POLY- META CRISIS

How to respond to societal collapse | Sarah Wilson | TEDxSydney

254,433 views Sep 22, 2025

Science and modelling shows our civilisation is in existential collapse, but what if this terrifying reality is the prod that humanity needs to live fully and in attainment again? In this provocative talk, international best-selling author and journalist Sarah Wilson explores the upside of losing what we’ve been taking for granted. Sarah Wilson is a multi-New York Times and Amazon best-selling author, podcaster, social philosopher and renegade. She is the host of the podcast Wild with Sarah Wilson and writes the popular Substack newsletter This is Precious, which has an engaged community of 57,000 subscribers.

...

Sarah is an advisor to corporations and universities on media, mental health and existential risk. She’s guest lectured for the University of Cambridge’s Sustainability and Leadership masters course and partnered with organisations such as the Climate Council, Harvard University and Intelligence Squared on campaigns...

4:52

So the International Institute of

4:54

Applied Systems recently forecast that

4:58

if we experience 3 years in a row of

5:01

temperatures of 1.5° or more over the

5:05

pre-industrial temperatures, then the

5:08

bulk of the European food bowls will

5:10

collapse. Now, I should just point out

5:13

that as of May 2025, we are well into

5:16

our second year above that 1.5 degree

5:20

threshold. The other thing is that when

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CTR STUDY EXISTENTIAL RISK

one big thing that predicts a societal collapse

Anand Giridharadas

The economist and risk researcher on how and why civilizations end, the dangers our society faces, and what comes after This is a preview. Watch the full video at https://the.ink/p/luke-kemp-on-how-so...

“The death of human empathy is one of earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall in barbarism.” Hannah Arendt. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy.” Elon Musk.

...today uh by Luke Kemp, an economist and

0:08

research associate at the Center for the

0:10

Study of Existential Risk at the

0:14

University of Cambridge, who studies

0:15

both the collapse of civilizations

...3

In general, power doesn't stay in one

5:56

domain. It tends to spill into others

5:58

and that creates what I call more

5:59

extractive institutions. basically

6:01

institutions which take more energy,

6:04

labor, and value from the common class. bunch of knock on effects...

full 30 min

https://the.ink/p/luke-kemp-on-how-societies-collapse

inequality --> oligarchy lack diverse warnings ignored

collapse differs w class, some can benefit; roman citizens shorter

goliath began on bronze age, rome, dominance hierchies, egal kids did not inherit pwr

ny law or uk commn law allows captial to move; interconnected so collapse will be global and deep;

the gt leveller stanford https://www.amazon.com/Great-Leveler-Inequality-Twenty-First-Princeton/dp/0691271844

the Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century May 20, 2025

by Walter Scheidel (Author)

:{peter turchin

Peter Turchin: "The 'Decline' of Nations: How Elite Surplus and Inequality Lead to Societal Upheaval" - The Great Simplification.

gilded age mass pop movement but also olig saw not in their interest? open democ pop assemblies

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AHA EPSTEIN IS EPISTEMIC CRISIS/ MENTAL BREAKDOWN, POLITICAL CRISIS/SCANDAL? COGNITIVE DISSONANCE; PEDO CONSPIRACY THEORIES PART OF TRUMP THE DISRUPTOR AND INFLUENCERS HE ALONE CAN OVERCOME/THE STORM OR DISCLOSE EVIL CABAL

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ODDLY FORGOT THIS CAT EXISTED TILL DOGE FAILS

AHA DOH MODERATION BUFFER REGULATION CASCADE

AN 2 25

According to the Washington Post, as many as 200,000 federal workers may be fired because of efforts by the Trump Administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to greatly downsize the United States' federal government. And the criticism of their efforts is coming not only from Democrats, but also, from voices on the right.

Former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pennsylvania), during a February 17 appearance on MSNBC, slammed Trump and DOGE for carrying out mass government layoffs in a "haphazard" way. And the next morning, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough (a Never Trump conservative and ex-GOP congressman) argued that while government "waste" needs to be reduced and the U.S. needs to balance its federal budget, the Trump Administration and DOGE are recklessly jeopardizing "food safety" and "air safety."

The Guardian's George Monbiot also fears that Trump's second term could trigger some type of major crisis.

READ MORE:George Conway: Trump’s 'pathological narcissism' is fueling 'full-scale' DOJ 'revolt'

In a February 18 opinion column, Monbiot lays out a variety of frightening scenarios and offers some tips for surviving a worst-case scenario.

"Though we might find it hard to imagine," Monbiot warns, "we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure…. A financial crisis in the U.S. would immediately become a global crisis."

Monbiot continues, "But the hazards extend much further. Musk, calling for a 'wholesale removal of regulations,' sends his child soldiers to attack government departments stabilizing the entire U.S. system. Regulations, though endlessly maligned by corporate and oligarchic propaganda, are all that protect us from multiple disasters. In its initial impacts, deregulation is class war, hitting the poorest and the middle classes at the behest of the rich. As the effects proliferate, it becomes an assault on everyone's wellbeing."

The columnist warns that undermining regulatory government agencies could make everything from a pandemic to "future climate disasters" worse.

READ MORE:'Brutal': Ex-federal prosecutor reveals why Trump DOJ’s 'illegal order' was 'so corrupt'

"As Trump rips down environmental protections and trashes federal responsiveness," Monbiot explains, "the impacts will spiral. They could include non-linear shocks to either the insurance sector or homeowners, escalating into U.S.-wide economic and social crisis. If, or when, another pandemic strikes, which could involve a pathogen more transmissible and even more deadly than COVID-19 — which has so far killed 1.2 million people in the U.S. — it will hit a nation whose defenses have been stood down."

Monbiot urges Americans — as well as residents of the U.K., where The Guardian is published — by doing a lot of networking.

"So, though there is no substitute for effective government, we must seek to create our own backup systems," the Guardian columnist advises. "Start with this principle: don't face your fears alone. Make friends, meet your neighbors, set up support networks, help those who are struggling. Since the dawn of humankind, those with robust social networks have been more resilient than those without. Yes, we also — and urgently — need national and global action, brokered by governments. But it's beginning to look as if no one has our backs. Prepare for the worst."

READ MORE:John Roberts is to blame for Trump challenge of federal courts: analysis

*George Monbiot's full Guardian column is available at this link.

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an 5 25

Educator Ross Rosenfeld tells The New Republic that Trump is exploiting so-called “emergency” powers to create a permanent dictatorship.

“The office of dictator was created in the early Roman Republic, when it granted a single person — a prominent and trusted citizen — immense power in times of emergency,” writes Rosenfeld.

And of course this power was exploited by the likes of Roman general Sulla, who used that legislative procedure to entrench himself as dictator for life. Julius Caesar later used it to permanently bring an end of the Roman Republic and mire it in a series of dictatorships.

READ MORE: 'Doesn't have a clue': GOP congressman buries Marjorie Taylor Greene in heated exchange

“A couple of millennia later, and half a world away, Donald Trump is taking steps in that direction,” he said, courtesy of complicity and courts.

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

Woodrow Wilson was the first president to formally declare a national emergency and use this additional power to prepare the nation for World War I. FDR issued three national emergency proclamations, two related to World War II. Then, in 1976, Congress passed the National Emergencies Act (NEA) giving presidents broad emergency powers. It originally included a check on that authority by reining in an emergency declaration through a vote, but the Supreme Court overturned that check in the 1983. Presidents soon made emergency declarations a well-worn tool in the White House toolbox.

Ronald Reagan used the NEA six times during his eight years in office. Bill Clinton used it 18 times. George W. Bush declared an emergency 14 times against foreign entities related to terrorism, as did Barack Obama. But since retaking office, Trump has “declared eight national emergencies in just a few short months.”

“He’s used the NEA to militarize the Southern border against ‘invasion’ and to enact tariffs against the entire world,” writes Rosenfeld. “He declared a national energy emergency, even though no such emergency exists, so that he can push through more fossil fuel permits.”

Read more:'Be quiet!' Inside the 5 most explosive moments from Kristi Noem's 'laughable' testimony

Trump coupled his NEA “emergencies” with the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to violate the due process rights of undocumented immigrants “and sentence them to a lifetime of detention in El Salvador.” Trump has considered using the 1807 Insurrection Act to use American troops to deal with a "rebellion" within U.S. borders. Presidential advisor even considered suspending habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants, depriving them of any due process rights, in defiance of the Constitution.

Suspending habeas corpus is easier with “a Congress controlled by a feeble, impotent Republican Party,” Rosenfeld said. After all, when the Roman Senate suspended due process procedures for Gaius Gracchus they conveniently “shielded themselves from any responsibility for actions taken during the crisis.”

Rahm Emmanuel once said “Never let a crisis go to waste,” and Rosenfeld says Trump and Miller have exploited “Rahm’s rule” to craft a rule of governance that deliberately creates “a continual state of crisis and turmoil, allowing the president to assume expansive emergency powers.”

READ MORE:'None of that is true': RFK Jr. gets repeatedly fact-checked to his face in tense hearing

“Crises lend themselves to authoritarian rule, and often in the aftermath it’s extraordinarily difficult to return to republican government,” Rosenfeld warns.

But what commonly comes after a dictator is another dictator, and Americans made a mistake in “putting a fascist back in office after his first attempt to overthrow the government."

Read the full TNR report here.

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an 6 23

no lnx

writing in Sunday's New York Times, global economics correspondent Patricia Cohen broke down how financial globalization proves that "almost everything we thought we knew about the world economy was wrong."

Cohen notes the stark contrast between "the world's business and political leaders'" optimistic outlook on the global economy during the 2018 "annual economic forum in Davos," to "now, as the second year of war in Ukraine grinds on and countries struggle with limp growth and persistent inflation, questions about the emerging economic playing field have taken center stage."

The columnist points to the "heady triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991," adding, "Associated economic theories about the ineluctable rise of worldwide free market capitalism took on" a sense "of invincibility and inevitability," as "open markets, hands-off government and the relentless pursuit of efficiency would offer the best route to prosperity."

READ MORE: The world economy is changing. People know, but their leaders don't

During that time, Cohen continues, "There was reason for optimism," noting, "During the 1990s, inflation was low while employment, wages and productivity were up. Global trade nearly doubled. Investments in developing countries surged. The stock market rose."

She then emphasizes, "It was believed that a new world where goods, money and information crisscrossed the globe would essentially sweep away the old order of Cold War conflicts and undemocratic regimes," but "there were stunning failures as well," as "globalization hastened climate change and deepened inequalities."

Cohen acknowledges even though "thefinancial meltdown in 2008 came close to tanking the global financial system," it wasn't until the Covid-19 pandemic, that "the rat-a-tat series of crises exposed with startling clarity vulnerabilities that demanded attention."

READ MORE: A Pride Month reminder: Corporations are not allies

Furthermore, she notes "the consulting firm EY concluded in its 2023 Geostrategic Outlook, the trends behind the shift away from ever-increasing globalization 'were accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic — and then they have been supercharged by the war in Ukraine.'"

Cohen adds:

She emphasizes, "as the dust has settled, it has suddenly seemed as if almost everything we thought we knew about the world economy was wrong, referencing a recent World Bank analysis, saying, "Nearly all the economic forces that powered progress and prosperity over the last three decades are fading," adding, "The result could be a lost decade in the making — not just for some countries or regions as has occurred in the past — but for the whole world."

READ MORE: Washington's $849 million capital gains windfall shows 'taxing the rich is a really good idea'

Cohen's article continues at this link (subscription required).

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an 5 23

https://www.alternet.org/managing-complexities-not-solving-problems/

no lnx

Our times call for managing complexities, not solving problems

April M. Short and Independent Media Institute May 24, 2023

How Paicines Ranch in California works to bring business and investment up to date with our times and closer to nature—prioritizing ecosystem health, habitat, and the sequestration of carbon through soil practices.

At first the ground squirrels felt like the enemy—a problem to be solved. They were causing major issues for the 25 acres of vineyard at Paicines Ranch in San Benito County, California, with their burrows and mounds, and their taste for fine grapes.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

“We were like, these squirrels are terrible, we must get rid of them—or at least keep them out of the vineyard,” recalls Esther Park, CEO of Cienega Capital. While Park doesn’t work directly on the vineyard, she collaborates with the team that does via the No Regrets Initiative, which is the financial and investment arm of Paicines Ranch that Cienega Capital funds.

The vineyard crew came up with a number of schemes to solve the problem of those pesky ground squirrels. That is, until they met with ecologists and learned about the many essential roles the squirrels, and the underground burrows they create, play in the ecosystem.

“While they might be annoying to us as humans, they’re actually pretty key to providing habitat to many different species,” said Avery Sponholtz, who is on the No Regrets Initiative team and director of philanthropy for the Globetrotter Foundation. (Both are interconnected with the ranch as both were created by Sallie Calhoun and work in tandem with one another.)

It’s not every vineyard that would deem the ecological role of ground squirrels as equal in value to high crop yields. But instead of looking at challenges like that of the ground squirrels as problems to be solved—which is the predominant mode of operating just about everywhere you look in today’s largely extractivist, capitalist world—Paicines Ranch is intentionally working to operate under a different mentality: They’ve taken on an intentional mindset of managing complexities rather than solving problems.

In the example of the ground squirrels, the complexity lies in the fact that support for regenerative ecosystems is a core value of Paicines Ranch’s mission. The project was founded with the aim of working with the dynamic natural world to explore ways of building healthy ecosystems while growing crops and supporting community through food. Its 7,600 acres double as wildlife habitat for “animals, birds, insects, trees, plants, grasses, springs, rivers, and much more,” notes its website.

“We realized if we’re going to hold diversity of species up as an outcome that we want to achieve, those ground squirrels are actually pretty important,” says Park.

Now, instead of trying to solve the problem of the ground squirrels, the team has shifted toward “managing the complexity of [the] ecosystem,” adds Park.

“The squirrels are not necessarily helping us achieve some of the outcomes that we want, and yet they are helping us to achieve some of the other outcomes we want. And we’re getting comfortable with not having the answers, and just doing what we can to manage the complexity of that.”

Park shared another example of how to shift into managing complexities rather than solving problems, from the investment world.

“We deal a lot with grass-fed and pastured livestock operations, and one of the things that most producers point to as being a problem for them is access to [meat] processing [facilities],” she says.

Park says the problem the livestock operations often bring up is that they need more meat processing facilities, and while there have been many efforts to try to address the problem, “most of them have failed.” Parks says this boils down to the fact that the challenge is significantly more complex than just a need for more processing.

“It’s not just that you need a processor… There are all these other factors in the ecosystem that are affecting your whole supply chain,” she says. “It’s better to think about ways to manage all of the moving parts in a way that will serve each individual business, but also to get to know the processor and their business, and also the consumers and all of the other folks who are involved.”

She shares that she helped organize an online workshop for the purpose of connecting all of the different stakeholders along the meat production and processing supply chain. Among the speakers was an experienced and successful meat processor who spoke about the real constraints they face as a business, and the conversation began “helping people get their heads around the complexity of the nature of what they’re facing, versus thinking, ‘This is the answer to solve my problem,’ because oftentimes it’s actually not.”

Holistic Management

Managing complexities—rather than solving problems—has become a theme of the work Calhoun, who owns and manages Paicines Ranch and works with Park and Sponholtz, puts into the world. In addition to her work with the ranch, Calhoun is an activist, impact investor, and philanthropic funder in regenerative agriculture who founded the No Regrets Initiative, which seeks to use a wide variety of forms of capital—human, natural, investment, and philanthropic—to effect change in the agricultural system. She says all that she does aims to improve the health of ecosystems and the communities living in them. Calhoun’s efforts are often aimed in particular at agricultural soil health and sequestering carbon in soil to mitigate climate change.

Calhoun says she was introduced to the idea of running a business centered on managing complexities via Allan Savory, a livestock farmer and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute, who came up with something called holistic management. Managing complexities is one of the key premises of holistic management.

“It was created to help land stewards—because if you are a land steward, you are inherently managing complexity, right?” says Calhoun. “[Allan Savory] makes the distinction that the systems that we create, like computers and the internet, are complicated, but we understand them. Whereas there’s a whole set of natural living systems, which are complex—and complexity means that we can’t actually understand them. If we poke them, we don’t know what’s going to happen, and so we need to respond accordingly.”

Another main point of holistic management Calhoun points to is that so many systems we operate under are focused on preventing unwanted problems, rather than managing for the wanted outcomes.

“We literally declare war on drugs, and war on terror, and war on poverty—thereby guaranteeing the continuation of all of those things, because it’s this mentality of fighting against a problem rather than thinking about what you want to create,” she says. “My ideas really started over 20 years ago from the work of [Savory], and now we’ve been able to carry that and figure out what it means in other parts of our work.”

Managing the Complexities of Our Changing World

The realities of our changing planet call for different ways of doing business, relating to success, and, generally, being in the world. We were warned that climate disasters and their strange weather would come, and now they’re upon us, causing immense collateral damage to humans and other feeling beings on this special planet of water and life. The compound horrors we’ve collectively contributed to as a species are spiraling to a scale that can feel almost as hard to wrap our minds around as the vastness of the stars, time, and the universe. Tensions and talk of war are on the rise globally, and people in the wealthiest nations on the planet are contending with cost-of-living crises, worsened in the wake of the economic fallout of an ongoing global pandemic. And things do not promise to improve anytime soon—especially not by way of business as usual. Creative, collaborative, care-based ways of relating will be necessary to weather the coming storms—literally and figuratively.

There is an opportunity in the midst of the polycrisis (as the World Economic Forumhas dubbed it) to reframe the challenges ahead as “complexities to manage” rather than “problems to solve.” This reframing can save us from becoming overwhelmed and has the potential to guide people toward more realistic ways of being and expectations. Because that’s what life is, ultimately: a series of complexities, as notes Jodie Evans, co-founder of CODEPINK.

Evans hosted a conversation with Calhoun, Park, and Sponholtz in March 2023 as part of an upcoming webinar series, and their conversation focused on just that: managing complexities in business and life.

During the conversation, Calhoun shared that the work their team does operates under two sets of guiding principles: one for soil, another for relationships....

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an 5 23 no lnx

fossil fuel executives have funded a massive, 50-year-long campaign to lie to the American people, cloud the science, and buy off Republican politicians. Untold millions will die and suffer as a result, but will their ever be one iota of accountability?

If somebody had set your house on fire, killing your child and pets, and then your city demanded that you give that somebody hundreds of dollars a year for the next decade, how would you feel?

That’s pretty much the situation of families across America who’ve lost their homes, family members, and livelihoods to wildfires, floods, extreme heat and cold, mile-wide tornadoes, bomb cyclones, heat domes, hurricanes, and drought caused by today’s climate emergency, but nonetheless have to pay taxes that subsidize the fossil fuel industry executives who helped caused it all.

For over 50 years, the top executives of that industry have known their products would produce this exact result: a crisis that is killing an average of around 7,500 Americans a year (and over a million worldwide) and promises to kill hundreds of millions within a decade or two.

But instead of doing anything of consequence to mitigate the damage of their operations, they instead funded a massive, 50-year-long campaign to lie to the American people, cloud the science, and buy off Republican politicians.

President Biden, as part of his negotiations with Kevin McCarthy, has proposed reducing the budget deficit by $31 billion through cutting about five percent of the subsidies you and I give to the fossil fuel industry every year through our tax dollars. McCarthy, in the pocket of Big Oil, has said he won’t even consider the proposal.

Famed climate scientist James Hansen is working on a paper outlining the dimensions of the disaster facing humanity at the hands of the fossil fuel industry, and it’s shocking. My friend and colleague Thomas Neuburger did a deep dive into it this week in his excellent God’s Spies Substack newsletter that’s well worth the read.

In essence, Hansen is proposing that the world will soon see both a collapse of the Gulf Stream that keeps Europe’s climate capable of growing crops and a worldwide 60-meter rise in sea levels. Possibly in our children’s or grandchildren’s lifetimes. As Thomas dryly notes in God’s Spies: “For Americans, 60 meters is about 200 feet.”

Deaths worldwide both directly from such an outcome — and from the wars that will result in the destruction of entire civilizations — will be measured in billions; here in America it’ll certainly be in the millions, and probably the tens of millions. Not to mention it speeding up the ongoing species collapse often referred as the Sixth Mass Extinction.

This is what the fossil fuel industry has brought to us, and to this day is aggressively trying to continue to sell to us. Fully aware of what they are doing.

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Last week, the World Meteorological Organization published an in-depth reportwith the top-line conclusion summarizing the damage these fossil fuel executives have already inflicted on our planet and our lives, all while funding climate denial and paying off politicians worldwide:

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“Between 1970 and 2021, there were 11,778 reported disasters [worldwide] attributed to weather, climate, and water extremes. They caused 2,087,229 deaths and US$ 4.3 trillion in economic losses.”

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The week before that, One Earth published a peer-reviewed analysis of the cost of all this damage, quantifying it by the 21 largest fossil fuel companies around the world. They concluded that those decision-making executives of the fossil fuel industry have inflicted over $5.4 trillion in identifiable economic damages on the rest of us which, instead of paying for, they have greedily converted to their own profit.

The report notes:

The “costs of anthropogenic climate change are chiefly borne by states that compensate their own citizens harmed by climate impacts or contribute to international adaptation finance, by insurance companies with regard to their insureds, and by uncompensated victims of climate change.”

In other words, the fossil fuel companies produced the global warming and cancer-causing emissions, but when people are damaged by them or the weather they are changing, government and insurance companies pay the cost.

The fossil fuel companies and their executives pay nothing, and never have. If they can keep the GOP in their pocket, they hope they never will.

Therefore, Earth One is calling for specific reparations, paid for by those companies:

“We argue that other agents bear substantial responsibility for the cost of redressing climate harm: the companies that engage in the exploration, production, refining, and distribution of oil, gas, and coal.

“The recent progress in climate attribution science makes it evident that these companies have played a major role in the accumulation and escalation of such costs by providing gigatonnes of carbon fuels to the global economy while willfully ignoring foreseeable climate harm.

“All the while they successfully shaped the public narrative on climate change through disinformation, misleading ‘advertorials,’ lobbying, and political donations to delay action directly or through trade associations and other surrogates.” (emphasis mine)

So, what can we do?

I see two possibilities, the first involving the law, and the second using the marketplace and, if that doesn’t work fast enough, the Fifth Amendment’s eminent domain provision.

First, the law:

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Article 16 of the 1992 Rio Declaration explicitly calls for fossil fuel producers to pay for the damage their products and extraction processes produce. Thus, Earth One argues, Saudi Aramco (as the largest example) has cost the world so much that they should pay $43 billion a year in reparations for the next 25 years. While that seems like a lot of money, Saudi Aramco’s revenue in 2022 was $604 billion, spinning off $161 billion in pure profit.

Most of it’s executives and stockholders are already morbidly rich; this will put nobody in the poorhouse.

But isn’t the impact of this industry on our planet so consequential that — instead of just reducing their most senior executives’ income/revenue from billions to hundreds of millions — we should actually be holding the decision makers to account?

The legislature of New York State is considering a superfund bill that would move financially in this direction against domestic fossil fuel producers; other states will probably soon follow, although none are yet law.

None, though, yet target decision making senior executives as was done after World War II with the senior executives of the manufacturer of Zyklon B and the bosses and owners of the companies that ran medical experiments in concentration camps.

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The discussion isn’t limited to the United States. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported this week:

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“As fires blaze in Alberta, Saskatchewan and B.C., new research has drawn a direct and measurable link between carbon emissions traced back to the world’s major fossil fuel producers and the increase in extreme wildfires across western Canada and the United States.”

They based that reporting on a new peer-reviewed study published the week before in Environmental Research Letters that, the CBC noted:

“[F]ound that 37 per cent of the total burned forest area in Western Canada and the United States between 1986-2021 can be traced back to 88 major fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.”

But these companies have not stopped buying off politicians, making it clear that extracting money from the ones causing all this damage and death worldwide may not be enough to provoke real change from the billionaire and multi-millionaire investors and executives making the decisions. Instead, we must motivate those executives themselves.

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Another remedy, therefore, comes from the Nuremberg principles that were created in 1950 by the United Nations after World War II. While their original goal was to prosecute Nazis and deter future genocidal actions by dictatorial regimes, they could arguably apply to today’s intentional mass murder at the hands of the world’s fossil fuel executives.

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More specifically, the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague was created by the Rome Statute on July 17, 1998. It goes beyond the “war crimes” and “crimes of aggression” defined by the Nuremberg principles and specifies both those two along with “the crime of genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”

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That last category is clarified as including:

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“[I]nhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”

The United States has never signed onto the ICC, but actions against fossil fuel executives based in the US can be brought by other signatory nations. If the effort were started outside the United States, for example, Royal Dutch Shell is based in the Netherlands, a full signatory to the Rome Statute.

As of three years ago, two US states had launched fraud investigations into ExxonMobil, although the one lawsuit by New York failed to bring a conviction (it was based on a charge that they had committed fraud against their investors).

Multiple US cities have sued fossil fuel companies for climate change damages, although there has not yet been a “breakthrough” case that could establish a precedent for others. But as damages continue to pile up and our weather becomes increasingly violent, expect more to come.

Fossil fuel companies have been following a business model since their early years in the 19th century of internalizing profits while externalizing (dumping on the public) their costs and damages.

Which brings us to a second possible solution to this crisis: nationalize the companies themselves, so their profits can be used to remedy their harms.

If ever there was an industry that merited nationalization, the fossil fuel industry is it. They manipulate prices to both enhance profits and swing elections, bribe their way through the halls of Congress, and pump out a steady stream of lies about climate change. All while pouring hundreds of billions into the money bins of their morbidly rich CEOs, shareholders, and senior executives.

America has a long and proud history of taking on companies that put profits over the public good during a time of crisis. And we could acquire controlling interest of the nation’s three largest fossil fuel players — ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips — for, according to Robert Pollin writing at The American Prospect, fewer than a half-trillion dollars.

For less than a quarter of the cost of Trump’s billionaire tax cuts we could rapidly move a long way toward saving our nation and the world from climate destruction.

All the American government would have to do is to go into the public marketplace and start purchasing the stock of each of these companies at a premium to buy majority shares in each of them. Again, the cost would be less than 1/4th of Donald Trump‘s tax cut. It could probably be done in a matter of months, possibly even weeks.

But is it even possible? Turns out that history says an emphatic, “Yes!”

During the crisis of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the country’s railroads, phone companies, and telegraph operators. He did the same with the nation’s radio networks and radio stations. All were returned to private ownership after the war, but that temporary nationalization helped get America through the crisis.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt did the same during World War II, nationalizing airplane manufacturers, gun manufacturers, over 3,300 mines, the nation’s railroads, dozens of oil companies, Western Electric Co., Hughes Tool Co., Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and even one of the nation’s largest retail outlets, Montgomery Ward. He also nationalized 17 foreign companies doing business in the US.

After FDR died, President Harry Truman continued seizing companies that were using the war as an excuse to jack up profits to the detriment of the nation. He nationalized meatpacking facilities across the country, the Monongahela Railroad Company, the nation’s steel mills, and hundreds of railroad companies.

Like with Wilson’s nationalizations, nearly all were returned to the private sector after the war was over, although it took until 1965 before all were privatized. Many had had their boards of directors and senior management replaced with people who’d put the interests of the nation ahead of their greed for profits.

In the 1970s, in the wake of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, President Richard Nixon oversaw the nationalization and transfer of 20 railroads into the newly created National Rail Passenger Corporation, now known as Amtrak.

In 1974 Congress created another nationalized entity to deal with freight rail, the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), which absorbed dozens of failing rail companies. Conrail was government held until 1987, when it was privatized in the then-largest IPO in American history.

In 1984, when the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was in a crisis, President Ronald Reagan’s administration oversaw the FDIC, nationalizing it by acquiring an 80 percent ownership share in the company; it wasn’t re-privatized until 1991, and was bought by Bank of America in 1994.

Also in the 1980s, after Reagan recklessly deregulated the Savings & Loan industry, banksters made off with billions leaving the wreckage of crushed S&Ls all across the nation.

When the government agency that insured them, FSLIC, went bankrupt itself in 1987, Reagan and Congress created an umbrella agency — the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) — to nationalize 747 of America’s S&Ls with assets of over $400 billion. Their assets were sold back into the private market in 1995 as the RTC shut itself down, having averted a 1929-style banking crisis through temporary nationalization.

When George W. Bush was handed the White House by 5 Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, the nation’s airline security system was entirely in private hands.

They failed miserably on 9/11, so Bush didn’t even bother with the normal acquisition process that would protect the hundreds of small contractors running security at airports across the nation: he simply nationalized the entire system and created a government agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to take over airport and airline security.

President Bush also partially nationalized the nation’s airlines, creating the Air Transportation Stabilization Board that traded around $10 billion in loans to airlines in crisis (air traffic collapsed after 9/11) in exchange for company stock. We (through our government) ended up holding 7.64 million shares in US Airways, 18.7 million shares of America West Airlines, 3.45 million shares in Frontier Airlines, 1.47 million shares in American TransAir, and 2.38 million shares in World Airways.

Congress had deregulated the nation’s banks in 1999 when Republicans pushed through an end to the Glass-Steagall Act and Bill Clinton signed it into law. The resulting banking system crash in 2008 forced the Bush administration to nationalize the country’s two largest mortgage lenders (they held about 40% of all US mortgages), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

The Bush administration then additionally nationalized a 77.9% share in AIG, a 36% share of Citigroup, and a 73.5% share of GMAC, forcing out GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner, who’d been a particularly terrible manager of that company and was actively lobbying against what Bush thought were America’s interests.

As President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, GM and Chrysler were on the brink of collapse. His administration created a new company, NGMCO, Inc., that nationalized the assets of GM and was 60.8% owned by the federal government.

GM was finally fully re-privatized by the Obama administration in 2013. Chrysler went through a similar process, although both the UAW and the Canadian government were part owners when it was temporarily nationalized.

Thomas M. Hanna, Director of Research at The Democracy Collaborative and author of Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States, compiled most of the data above in a brilliant paper titled “A History of Nationalization in the United States 1917-2009.”

Toward its end, he summarizes brilliantly the case for nationalizing — perhaps only temporarily — America’s largest oil and gas companies:

“In such times of political and economic crisis, policymakers of all ideological persuasions in the United States have never been hesitant to use one of the most powerful tools at their disposal: nationalization of private enterprises and assets.

“This included the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who nationalized railroads, and the telephone, telegraph, and radio industries (among others), and the Republican Ronald Reagan, who nationalized a major national bank; the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who nationalized dozens of mining and manufacturing facilities, and the Republican George W. Bush, who nationalized airport security and various major financial institutions; the Democrat Barack Obama, who nationalized auto manufacturers, and the Republican Richard Nixon, who nationalized all passenger rail service.”

Today’s climate crisis dwarfs the threat of Nazism in the 1940s, Bin Laden’s 9/11 attack, or the massive bank robberies that took place during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

It literally threatens all life on Earth.

Yet the fossil fuel industry continues to fund climate denial and lobby against any meaningful solutions, as we saw when every Republican in the Senate along with coal baron Joe Manchin killed the $500 billion investment in clean energy the Biden administration proposed in their 2021 Build Back Better legislation.

Squeals of “socialism!” and “Venezuela!” aside, we know how to nationalize industries that are working against our nation’s interests and have done it before, repeatedly.

And this time it’s not just about saving our banks or fighting a war. This time, it’s literally about saving the world.

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yikes

https://www.alternet.org/doomsday-clock-90-seconds-midnight/

an 1 23

We are living in a time of unprecedented danger, and the Doomsday Clock time reflects that reality."

That's what Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists president and CEO Rachel Bronson said in a statement Tuesday about the historic symbol being set at 90 seconds to midnight, or global catastrophe, after three years at 100 seconds to midnight.

As the bulletin's annual statement explains, the clock—created in 1947—has reached its current position due to "an exceedingly dangerous nuclear situation," largely from Russia's war on Ukraine;inadequate global action to tackle the climate emergency; a "daunting array" of biological threats, exemplified by the Covid-19 pandemic; and "disruptive" technologies enabling the spread of disinformation.

"90 seconds to midnight is the closest the clock has ever been set to midnight, and it's a decision our experts do not take lightly," Bronson noted. "The U.S. government, its NATO allies, and Ukraine have a multitude of channels for dialogue; we urge leaders to explore all of them to their fullest ability to turn back the clock."

Watch the full announcement:

2023 Doomsday Clock Announcement

While the nearly yearlong Russian invasion—with fighting over a nuclear power plant and thinly veiled threats of using weapons of mass destruction—is a primary reason humanity is now closer than ever to apocalypse, experts from across the globe emphasized that it's far from the only threat.

The Elders chair Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, stressed that "the Doomsday Clock is sounding an alarm for the whole of humanity. We are on the brink of a precipice. But our leaders are not acting at sufficient speed or scale to secure a peaceful and liveable planet."

"From cutting carbon emissions to strengthening arms control treaties and investing in pandemic preparedness, we know what needs to be done," she said. "The science is clear, but the political will is lacking. This must change in 2023 if we are to avert catastrophe. We are facing multiple, existential crises. Leaders need a crisis mindset."

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https://news.yahoo.com/nouriel-roubini-details-10-biggest-151951132.html

economist, professor, and author Nouriel Roubini speaks with Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit to highlight the 10 "megathreats" to the global economy, which include stagflation, the climate crisis, and deglobalization.

Video Transcript

NOURIEL ROUBINI: Well, we are having, like in the '70s, a number of negative supply shocks. Three of them currently. One was the COVID shock that led to a shutdown of economic activity, bottlenecks in global supply chains, reduction in the labor supply, and so on. Second one was the Russian invasion of Ukraine that had led to a spike in energy prices, food fertilizers, industrial metals. And the third one this year is the continuation of the Zero Tolerance COVID policy of China.

Those have led to a reduction in growth and increase of cost of production. And we lose monetary. And fiscal policy have caused inflation, and now, a sharp slowdown of growth. We're headed towards a recession.

However, in the book, what I point out is that the era of great moderation where growth was OK, inflation low, 2% is over. And now, we're going towards an era of what I call Great stagflationary and debt instability and crisis. On the supply side, there's not just the three negative supply shocks. In the book, I identify 11 other ones that are more medium long term. They're going to reduce potential growth and increase cost of production.

Just to be brief. First of all, the globalization and protectionism. Secondly, reshoring of manufacturing from low cost China to high cost Europe and US, French holding. Three, aging of population not only in advanced economies, but also in major emerging market like China, like Russia, like South Korea, and so on. Young people produce and save, and consume less. Older people don't produce. This save, that's inflationary.

Four, we are having restriction to migration. In the past, migration from South to North, from Puerto Rico was keeping a lid on wage growth. Fifth, we have decoupling between US and China. Six, a broader geopolitical depression. Seven, we have now climate change, that in many ways, creates a reduction in growth and increases the cost of food, of water, of energy, and fuels, and so on.

Additionally, we have other shocks. We have cyber warfare. We have pandemics that's going to becoming more frequent and more virulent because of climate change. Climate change causes more zoonotic diseases. And finally, we have a backlash against liberal democracy and populism about the extreme right and the left because there is a rise in income and wealth inequality, authoritarian, aggressive, autocrats, populist of the right.

The left are coming to power. They blame the rest of the world. And they go to war like it happened in Russia. We also weaponizing the US dollar as a tool of national security and foreign policy. That oiling system of the global International Monetary System is breaking down, and that's going to lead to more friction, more cost of production, less economic growth.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/were-in-a-new-cold-war-with-china-says-nouriel-roubini-qyyps/

https://nourielroubini.com/bio/

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aha:  tax dodge = amplifying feedback -->  inequality/ polarization --> instability --> crisis

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an 8 22

cAHOKIA MOUNDS, Illinois: I am standing atop a 100-foot-high temple mound, the largest known earthwork in the Americas built by prehistoric peoples. The temperatures, in the high 80s, along with the oppressive humidity, have emptied the park of all but a handful of visitors. My shirt is matted with sweat.

I look out from the structure—known as Monks Mound — at the flatlands below, with smaller mounds dotting the distance. These earthen mounds, built at a confluence of the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri rivers, are all that remain of one of the largest pre-Columbian settlements north of Mexico, occupied from around 800 to 1,400 AD by perhaps as many as 20,000 people.

This, perhaps the greatest in North America, rose, flourished, fell into decline and was ultimately abandoned. Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible. They engage in futile and self-defeating wars. And then the rot sets in. The great urban centers die first, falling into irreversible decay. Central authority unravels. Artistic expression and intellectual inquiry are replaced by a new dark age, the triumph of tawdry spectacle and the celebration of crowd-pleasing imbecility.

“Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum,” anthropologist writes in The Collapse of Complex Societies. “Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.”

Several centuries ago, the rulers of this vast city complex, which covered some 4,000 acres, including a 40-acre central plaza, stood where I stood. They no doubt saw below in the teeming settlements an unassailable power, with at least 120 temple mounds used as residences, sacred ceremonial sites, tombs, meeting centers and ball courts. Cahokia warriors dominated a vast territory from which they exacted tribute to enrich the ruling class of this highly stratified society. Reading the heavens, these mound builders constructed several circular astronomical observatories — wooden versions of Stonehenge.

The city’s hereditary rulers were venerated in life and death. A half mile from Monks Mound is the seven-foot-high Mound 72, in which archeologists found the remains of a man on a platform covered with 20,000 conch-shell disc beads from the Gulf of Mexico. The beads were arranged in the shape of a falcon, with the falcon’s head beneath and beside the man’s head. Its wings and tail were placed underneath the man’s arms and legs. Below this layer of shells was the body of another man, buried face downward. Around these two men were six more human remains, possibly retainers, who may have been put to death to accompany the entombed man in the afterlife. Nearby were buried the remains of 53 girls and women ranging in age from 15 to 30, laid out in rows in two layers separated by matting. They appeared to have been strangled to death.

The poet Paul Valéry noted, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.”

Across the Mississippi River from Monks Mound, the city skyline of St. Louis is visible. It is hard not to see our own collapse in that of Cahokia. In 1950, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 856,796. Today, that number has fallen to below 300,000, a drop of some 65 percent. Major employers — Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell-Douglas, TWA, Southwestern Bell and Ralston Purina —have dramatically reduced their presence or left altogether. St. Louis is consistently ranked one of the most dangerous cities in the country. One in five people live in poverty. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has the highest rate of police killings per capita, of the 100 largest police departments in the nation, according to a 2021 report. Prisoners in the city’s squalid jails, where 47 people died in custody between 2009 and 2019, complain of water being shut off from their cells for hours and guards routinely pepper spraying inmates, including those on suicide watch. The city’s crumbling infrastructure, hundreds of gutted and abandoned buildings, empty factories, vacant warehouses and impoverished neighborhoods replicate the ruins of other post-industrial American cities, the classic signposts of a civilization interminal decline.

“Just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing,” argues in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. “When people are desperate, undernourished and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.”

Pre-industrial civilizations were dependent on the limits of solar energy and constrained by roads and waterways, impediments that were obliterated when fossil fuel became an energy source. As industrial empires became global, their increase in size meant an increase in complexity. Ironically, this complexity makes us morevulnerable to catastrophic collapse, not less. Soaring temperatures (Iraq is enduring 120 degree heat that has fried the country’s electrical grid), the depletion of natural resources, flooding, droughts, (the worst drought in 500 years is devastating Western, Central and Southern Europe and is expected to see a declinein crop yields of 8 or 9 percent), power outages, wars, pandemics, a rise in zoonotic diseases and breakdowns in supply chains combine to shake the foundations of industrial society. The Arctic has been heating up four times faster than the global average, resulting in an accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and freakish weather patterns. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia are warming up to seven times faster. Climate scientists did not expect this extreme weather until 2050.

“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up,” the anthropologist Ronald Wrightwarns, calling industrial society “a suicide machine.”

In A Short History of Progress,:

Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn’t easily moved. This human inability to foresee — or to watch out for — long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.

Wright also reflects upon what will be left behind:

The archaeologists who dig us up will need to wear hazmat suits. Humankind will leave a telltale layer in the fossil record composed of everything we produce, from mounds of chicken bones, wet-wipes, tires, mattresses and other household waste to metals, concrete, plastics, industrial chemicals, and the nuclear residue of power plants and weaponry. We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder and possibility of the pristine Earth.

:{:{Calculations of humanity’s footprint suggest we have been in ‘ecological deficit,’ taking more than Earth’s biological systems can withstand, for at least 30 years. Topsoil is being lost far faster than nature can replenish it; 30 percent of arable land has been exhausted since the mid-20th century.}:

We have financed this monstrous debt by colonizing both past and future, drawing energy, chemical fertilizer and pesticides from the planet’s fossil carbon, and throwing the consequences onto coming generations of our species and all others. Some of those species have already been bankrupted: they are extinct. Others will follow.}:

As Cahokia declined, violence dramatically increased. Surrounding towns were burned to the ground. Groups, numbering in the hundreds, were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. At the end, “the enemy killed all people indiscriminately. The intent was not merely prestige, but an early form of ethnic cleansing” writes anthropologist Timothy R. Pauketat, in *Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians*. He notes that, in one fifteenth-century cemetery in central Illinois, one-third of all adults had been killed by blows to the head, arrow wounds or scalping. Many showed evidence of fractures on their arms from vain attempts to fight off their attackers.

Such internecine violence is compounded by a weakened and discredited central authority. In the later stages of Cahokia, the ruling class surrounded themselves with fortified wooden stockades, including a two-mile-long wall that enclosed Monks Mound. Similar fortifications dotted the vast territory the Cahokia controlled, segregating gated communities where the wealthy and powerful, protected by armed guards, sought safety from the increasing lawlessness and hoarded dwindling food supplies and resources.

Overcrowding inside these stockades saw the spread of tuberculosis and blastomycosis, caused by a soil-borne fungus, along with iron deficiency anemia. Infant mortality rates rose, and life spans declined, a result of social disintegration, poor diet and disease.

By the 1400s Cahokia had beenabandoned. In 1541, when Hernando de Soto’s invading army descended on what is today Missouri, looking for gold, nothing but the great mounds remained, relics of a forgotten past.

This time the will be global. It will not be possible, as in ancient societies, to migrate to new ecosystems rich in natural resources. The steady rise in heat will devastate crop yields and make much of the planet uninhabitable. Climate scientists warn that once temperatures rise by 4℃, the earth, at best, will be able to sustain a billion people.

The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into violence, magical thinking and.

The historian Arnold Toynbee, who singled out unchecked militarism as the fatal blow to past empires, argued that civilizations are not murdered, but commit suicide. They fail to adapt to a crisis, ensuring their own obliteration. Our civilization’s collapse will be unique in size, magnified by the destructive force of our fossil fuel-driven industrial society. But it will replicate the familiar patterns of collapse that toppled civilizations of the past. The difference will be in scale, and this time there will be no exit.

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aha: war is both a cause and effect of crises [and/or amplifier of chaos]; MIC and PIC are both FORCE we use to cope with disruption/instability

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IPCC 6 Guterres ups metaphors, warn ukraine war watershed extraction [//OPEC CRISIS JC GREEN BANK SOLAR DECARBON FORK ZERO]; putin invasion drives refugees [xian blonde into poland that remembers nazi wwII but still, source of instability --> alt Rt EU; also disrupts grain prices --> famine/instability worldwide/africa:

add to that weather disruption/unforseen events like nitrate dump:

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/climate-change-surge-uncharted-territory/

j little tom dispatch

consider this perhaps the strangest thing of all in our all-too-strange world: the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced essentially never leads the news. Yes, the immediate crises of our world, most recently Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, are 24/7 headlines for weeks at a time. And any set of events that sends millions of us into external or internal exile, as has become all too common on this planet of ours, should indeed be a focus of attention. But to put all of this in context, it’s estimated that within three decades up to a mind-boggling 1.2 billion human beings could be driven from their homes thanks to the burgeoning climate emergency.

Of course, climate change, as TomDispatch regular Jane Braxton Little, who still lives in the fire-devastated northern Californian town of Greenville, reminds us today, is already hard at work wrecking lives across our world. When it hits as fire or flood, as a dramatic weather disaster of some sort, the news often loves to show us the calamity at hand (and the all-too-photogenic weeping survivors). But the cause of it all, climate change itself? No such luck. The ongoing, never-ending, ever-worsening calamity that could someday simply destroy human life as we’ve known it gets remarkably little attention here (unless coal merchant Joe Manchin votes against its solution in some fashion).

Only recently the authoritative U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest devastating report, produced by 1,000 scientists, on what we’re doing to ourselves. In the midst of the Ukrainian events, it got hardly a moment’s notice. Yet its version of the news to come should have been screaming headlines, given that, if the effects of the overheating of this planet aren’t mitigated soon, by 2050, at least 183 million more people could be going hungry and that’s just to start down a long list of possible nightmares to come. At least climate change makes headlines here at TomDispatch. Today, for instance, you can learn from Little, who has experienced its effects in an up-close-and-personal way, just how we’re going to be “whiplashed” by the weather that our eternally fossil-fuel-burning societies (and the  https://tomdispatch.com/best-of-tomdispatch-engelhardt-the-biggest-criminal-enterprise-in-history/... big energy companies...Greenville, CA — Snow began falling on December 24th, big fluffy flakes that made lace on mittens before melting. Within hours it had coated the ashes, the brick chimneys that the flames had left behind, and the jagged remains of roofs strewn across my burned-out town. White mounds soon softened the look of charred cars that are everywhere, while even the scorched trees that stretch to the hilltops were coated in a forgiving winter wonder.

Any moisture would have been welcome. Over the seven months since the  destroyed Greenville and several other rural communities in California’s northern Sierra Nevada mountains, the drought that led to the flaming disaster had only deepened. October brought brief, drenching rains, but November and December were dry again. Soil that should have been moist was as desiccated as the air, while the humidity hovered just above single digits. We watched bulldozers move the dilapidated walls — what had not long ago been homes — into gigantic dump trucks in a haze of grime. Even the trees that survived had a withered look. Now, it was snowing — for Christmas! We greeted it with hearts as wide as the open mouths of kids savoring falling flakes. [linx]

Greenville, my adopted town of 46 years, had been devastated by a climate-change disaster. Sparked by the  ...https://s1.q4cdn.com/880135780/files/doc_downloads/wildfire_updates/2021/07/071821.pdf... , the Dixie fire scorched nearly one million acres, the distance, if you care to measure, from Philadelphia to New York City. On August 4th, a pyrocumulus cloud collapsed on the ridge above the tarnished old Gold Rush community where I worked, erupting into red-hot embers that fell over a several square-mile area. Trees were transformed into towering torches. Flames roared down the nearby mountain, racing through overcrowded forests left bone dry (after a century of ill-advised fire suppression) by a third year of drought. It took less than 45 minutes for that inferno to raze the historic 160-year-old downtown, including my journalism office on the second floor of the oldest building around. About 800 homes went up in flames. Over the next four months, we gathered in grief in twos and threes in the post offices and shops of neighboring towns, soothing one another.

Now, it was Christmas and snowing! We relaxed and rejoiced amid the ruins.

Little did we know that, driven by our overheated planet, we were about to be whiplashed from drought to deluge. Hotter days and hotter nights have corkscrewed our weather patterns into spiraling extremes, leaving entire regions around the world jerked from the hottest temperatures they’ve known to the coldest, from devastating fires to disastrous floods. This is uncharted territory and, scientists say, an all-too-grim preview of the future we’re creating for ourselves.

By the fourth day of non-stop snow our euphoria had waned. Electricity was flickering on and off. The Internet was mostly off. We shoveled our steps and then the paths to our cars, only to find them covered all over again. Driveways were challenging and roads treacherous (if open at all). Snow was piling up across the Sierra Nevada, the gigantic tilted block of granite that lies along the state line with Nevada.

At Lake Tahoe, 75 miles to the south, 18 feet of snow was dumped on luxury second homes, collapsing decks, and taxing municipal snow-removal crews gone soft after years of mild winters. Highway 80, the main route over the mountains, was closed for three days by storms that made December the third snowiest month on record and the snowiest December ever. Those storms catapulted the state’s precipitation to 258% of its average for that point in the year.California water officials were giddy with expectation, predicting that our three-year-old drought would be broken.

Then, of course, it ended. Precipitation of any kind simply stopped. January clocked in as the driest ever for some parts of the state, as well as most of Nevada, Utah, and western Colorado. Last month was the driest February in 128 years, according to a multi-agency partnership monitoring drought. And here’s the truth of it: if we keep letting greenhouse gases increase in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, we better get used to this sort of seesaw experience. Scientists say that, by century’s end, such abrupt transitions between wet and dry will increase by another 25% in northern California and possibly double that in southern California.

Weather Whiplash

While California may be a poster child for extreme weather events, they are occurring almost everywhere. Such wild swings from tinder-dry to inundation are known as climate or weather whiplash. What causes them is a matter of scientific speculation and the subject of much cutting-edge research, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. Some scientists cite a connection between the polar vortex, a wall of wind that circles the Arctic, and jet streams, the bands of strong winds that generally blow from west to east. As the Arctic warms — at as much as triple the average global rate — it seems to be destabilizing those jet streams and so, according to a study published in Environmental Research, provoking abnormal and extreme weather across the planet.

Swain thinks we should imagine it as a colossal tug of war involving complex atmospheric dynamics over the Pacific Ocean. Yes, he says, the world is definitely getting warmer as greenhouse-gas concentrations rise. That, in turn, means wet times will generally be wetter and dry times drier, especially in California. He’s also found emerging evidence, as he told me, of what he calls “a relatively weird” regional effect: the loss of Arctic sea ice might actually be counteracting the drying effect of the expanding subtropical zone, keeping California from becoming more arid still in a warming world.

People in my community know local weather and the land. Ranchers, loggers, and firefighters, they understand storms and seasons, soil, water, and trees in an up close and personal way. I’ve found my place among them over these years, writing about their work and their love of the landscape we share. We here in Greenville may not know anything about what the intersection of the polar vortex and jet streams or atmospheric dynamics are doing to our world, but we certainly know when our environment is off kilter. Being jerked from the drought that provoked the Dixie fire to that historic snowfall and back again has left us with little doubt: something with the weather is seriously bonkers.

The unexpected uncertainty of weather we once took for granted is spawning anxieties that add to the trauma of living through a town-destroying fire. Instead of one disaster and done, weather whiplash threatens us with disaster after disaster. Having somehow survived fire, we’ve been thrust into a deeply uncertain future. The forests we turned to for hiking, fishing, and birdsong no longer promise solace. The natural world that welcomed and kept us in this valley ringed by mountains has become unreliable. What can we trust?

A Is for Anthropocene

When it comes to weather whiplash, Australia is exhibit A for Anthropocene, the current geological epoch dominated by the human impact on the environment. Storms have been pounding that island nation’s southeast coast since late February, earning the moniker “rain bombs” for their severity. In just two days, the town of Doon Doon in New South Wales received 42 inches of rain, roughly Washington, D.C.’s annual precipitation. Flooding has killed 22 people so far, prompting Prime Minister Scott Morrison to declare a national emergency. This round of extreme wet weather follows the catastrophic bushfires of 2020 that killed 28 people and more than a billion animals, while scorching an area nearly the size of Connecticut in a fashion never before seen.

Worse yet, as we in California have discovered, the recovery time for communities between such climate disasters is shrinking. Simon Bradshaw, a researcher at the Australian Climate Council, summed things up simply enough: “New South Wales was hit hard by the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires and now it is in the grips of another climate-driven disaster.”

Then there’s Texas. During the last decade that state has reeled from one of the most significant droughts since the 1950s to a series of deluges that have rivaled any period of flooding Texas has ever experienced. Rainfall in 2011 was 25 inches below average, forcing mandatory water restrictions. Meteorologist Jeff Lindner called the heat in Houston that August a 10,000-year event. Over the 2011 Labor Day weekend, vegetation primed by that drought combined with 40 mile-per-hour winds to produce the Bastrop fire, the single most devastating wildfire in that state’s history. It burned more than 35,000 acres and around 1,600 homes, while the Tricounty fire incinerated over 19,000 acres and 100 homes.

Then the weather seesawed. By the time Hurricane Harvey made landfall at Port Aransas on August 27, 2017, the area had rocketed from drought to deluge. Rainfall for the year was nearly 30 inches above the annual average. Netherland, a city on the Gulf of Mexico, recorded more than 60 inches. The devastation Harvey wreaked affected an estimated 13 million people and included at least 107 deaths, nearly 135,000 homes damaged or destroyed (one third of the total number in four counties), and up to a million wrecked cars.

Governor Greg Abbott, a veteran climate-change denier who has threatened to sue President Biden over policies addressing the crisis, conceded that something was changing dramatically. “We need to recognize that this is going to be a new normal. A new and different normal for the entire region,” he said. [bs cya on ercot?]

Even when such weather swings don’t create disasters, they have tangible consequences. Across the American Midwest, for instance, weather whiplash is driving a decline in municipal water quality. After excessive flooding followed a drought in 2012, researchers at the University of Kansas noticed a nitrogen spike in surface waters in the area. In dry times, the nitrogen fertilizer that farmers put in their fields doesn’t go into the plants it’s intended to enrich. A 2017 study found that the nitrogen stays in the soil, which acts like a sponge, holding it in place. “But as soon as you wet it,” Amy Burgin, one of its authors, points out, “like when you wring a sponge, the nitrogen can flood into the rivers.”

Such increasingly high nitrate levels in drinking water forced the Des Moines Water Works to construct a $4.1 million nitrate removal plant that costs $7,000 a day to operate. As weather whiplash becomes ever more the norm, scientists expect surface-water nitrate spikes to occur throughout the agricultural Midwest.

Elsewhere, the changing patterns of various kinds of wildlife are only exacerbating the problems caused by weird weather. In eastern Oregon, for instance, widespread drought followed by deep snow has caused elk to move out of the hills to feed on the haystacks that are ranchers’ paychecks. Conflicts between wildlife and humans are already common enough, but climate scientists expect them to increase as droughts, floods, and fires push animals off their normal ranges and into agricultural areas.

Who Drives the Climate Train?

As I’ve learned all too personally, climate disasters are profoundly destabilizing. They can wrench communities from their roots and turn them upside down. They are also profoundly unjust. Those with the fewest resources and least responsible for the climate crisis are going to continue to bear the brunt of its impact.

And here’s the only good news: climate change is a problem with a solution.We humans created it, which means it’s solvable. That, however, would require societal and political will of a kind we simply haven’t seen yet. And that’s the bad news. We haven’t mustered anything close to enough determination to halt the relentless increases in temperature driving the weather that’s whiplashing us ever more violently. As United Nations Secretary General António Guterres put it, a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is “a damning indictment of failed climate leadership… that reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.”

Swain, the UCLA climate scientist, put it this way: “We’re on a train going faster and faster down the tracks with perfectly functional brakes. But the drivers, for whatever reasons, are choosing not to engage the brakes.”

One of the great ironies of experiencing climate-change disaster may be that we are both its victims and its drivers. We could, at least theoretically, apply the brakes of the locomotive. In our fury over the forces of destruction beyond our control — the flames that incinerate and the floods that inundate our lives — perhaps we’ll find the political will and guts to bring meaningful change, at least on a very small scale right here in my town of Greenville.

In its charred devastation, we could now choose solar power over fossil fuels. (And if so, who would blame us for feeling smug about shunning PG&E?) We could choose community gardens over imported produce. All that, however, remains a distant future for a place with a single grocery store, a gas station, and little else. But if we must spend the rest of our lives healing, we can at least invest them in empowering one another and our community in a new way. We have so little left to lose.

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IPCC 2 22 1/2 humans already affected by climate chaos guterres

UN IPCC Code red. //nukes?!  AGW

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/nuclear-risk/

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https://kpfa.org/episode/economic-update-march-4-2022/

when capitalism [democ?] is under threat, as in 1929, fascism often chosen option

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an 3 22 richard wolff

The growing disconnect between the capitalist system and the economic realities plaguing the United States is now nearing completion. On the ground, the accumulated problems of U.S. capitalism undermine its empire and challenge its very future. Meanwhile, the ever-deepening inequalities of wealth and income conjure up images of ancient Egypt’s pharaohs. Three economic crashes opening the new century (2000, 2008, and 2020) have shaken the system; so have the two wars America lost against very poor countries in the Middle East: Afghanistan and Iraq. The worst public health crisis in a century during the COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed how unprepared U.S. capitalism was and is, thereby imposing massive new human and financial costs lasting into the future.

A government that serves U.S. capitalism first and foremost borrowed trillions and enabled trillions more of new debt (corporate and household) that was used to fight long, losing wars and shore up a faltering economy. Now, after two terrible years of COVID plus an economic crash, with 3 million fewer jobs in 2022 than before COVID hit, a sharp inflation looms.Meanwhile, aided partly by profit-driven U.S. capitalists who moved their operations to China, the Asian country is now in a position where it is challenging U.S. capitalism globally.

Above the troubled ground sit two old political parties, the GOP and the Democratic Party, which are formed by and are stuck in the old political economy before all these problems accumulated into crises. From 1820 to 1970, U.S. capitalism experienced cycles, but these cycles were securely anchored in a long-term upward trend. Real wages rose every decade, at least for white workers. Recessionary downturns only interrupted the long trend up (and even then not for long). The Republican Party and the Democratic Party rarely went beyond the routine rituals of orderly contests over who deserved the credit for economic growth and who deserved the blame for the interruptions during recessions.

The one big exception resulted from the one super big interruption: the 1930s Great Depression. This shook U.S. capitalism to its core. Mobilized and led by a coalition of militant unions (CIO), socialist parties, and a communist party, the U.S. working class shifted sharply to the left. This shift won a New Deal from the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. That deal taxed corporations and the rich significantly more. It then poured much of those funds into the new Social Security system, unemployment compensation, and a massive federal jobs program. Because of the New Deal, Roosevelt was reelected three times, and was the most popular president in U.S. history. Correspondingly, U.S. corporations and those they enriched felt seriously threatened during this period.

The GOP reacted strongly. Once FDR died and World War II ended, the Republican Party took the lead to undo the New Deal. It did this by splitting the coalition (which included the CIO, socialists, and communists) from the Democratic Party and the coalition partners from one another. Anti-communism, McCarthyism, and the Cold War served as the weapons of choice for the Republican Party. The GOP succeeded partly because the Democrats offered mostly weak opposition or none at all. Postwar Democrats were largely complicit in destroying most of what the New Deal had achieved (with the help, ironically, of many of the Democratic Party’s own prewar efforts). After 1945, the White House, Congress, and state and local governments resumed orderly political contests between the GOP and the Democratic Party. Both endorsed a musical chairs type of rotation of public authority personnel between them (until this system was undone by former President Donald Trump in 2020).

The old, established leaders of both parties still do not grasp or accept that the orderly rotation of public authority personnel is now over. Unable or unwilling to critically evaluate U.S. capitalism, these leaders missed the signs leading up to the accumulation of capitalism’s problems that now overwhelms them. The Bushes, Clintons, President Joe Biden, and their ilk want the old political system to persist. After all, for them this old political system did well. But now their disconnect from the capitalist reality that ultimately controls them threatens to render them blatantly ineffective, sadly out of their element. Because they cannot or dare not criticize that reality, its increasing difficulties and resulting mass disaffection are beyond their reach with the old tools, arguments, and spins that used to work.

Given the disconnected mainstreams of U.S. politics, mass disaffection provokes escapism and scapegoating. The GOP eagerly validates many of them (anti-immigration, white supremacy, quasi-fascism, culture wars, and anti-leftism) to enlarge its voter base. The Democrats, meanwhile, try to fight the extreme forms of that escapism and scapegoating (as in “basket of deplorables”) without offering any real alternative to it. The socialism represented by politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is so soft-pedaled by them that, given mainstream media biases, it only marginally hovers at the edges of the national political conversation.

What people increasingly need is protection from a beleaguered capitalist system itself, from itsintrinsic instability(the accumulated crashes and their effects), intrinsic inequalities of wealth and income (and their effects), devastating ecological damages, and profit fetishism. But the GOP and the Democratic Party have long ago lost the ability to see or contend with any of that. They keep repeating neoliberal ideology (and its reframing of a U.S. empire as “globalization”) so often that they actually believe and are thereby imprisoned within the system.

Thus, a peculiar political theater of disconnectedness has emerged. The Republican and Democratic leaders cannot see what most of us can. They see “the big issues” as not being about capitalism. Yet what they do see and the solutions they propose will in fact be their response as capitalism’s crisis deepens. Thus, under Trump, the Republican Party has moved toward fascism. His GOP has used and will continue to use government to enforce capitalism as it totters by extinguishing what remains of unions, crushing the left, and militarizing media and culture, much as other dictators have, including Adolf Hitler in Germany after January 1933 and Benito Mussolini in Italy after October 1922. Like them, Trump has used hyperpatriotic nationalism mixed with racial superiority to justify all his actions. That is the real meaning behind Trump’s campaign slogans and his audiences’ cheers of “save America” and “Make America Great Again.” How far down the German and Italian fascist paths Trump and others like him will go depends on circumstances.

Capitalism’s crisis exists neither for Biden nor the Democratic establishment he leads, just as it does not for Trump and the GOP. The Democratic establishment defines itself over and against Trump. It is not about to go down the fascist road. It proposes instead to “protect democracy” from what Trump represents. That difference will frame many electoral campaigns in 2022 and 2024; it already does.The Democrats will “protect democracy” by “returning to the pre-pandemic normal.” The Democratic Party’s version of “Make America Great Again” is a resurrected post-World War II political economy, complete with U.S. global dominance based securely, they imagine, on a fast-growing U.S. capitalism.

Both the Republican and Democratic establishments warn their megadonors and the public that allowing the other to take political power will disrupt civil society and prevent America from becoming great again. The GOP screams that antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement will destroy white America and will result in a civil war. The Democrats counter that Trump and January 6 type “insurgents” will dissolve social peace inside the United States, provoke counteractions, and thereby lead to civil conflict. Social peace, each side insists, requires political war to defeat the other side. Neither side glimpses the absurd contradiction of its claims.

Which way U.S. politics will go depends less on the two parties or their disconnected rhetoric. What matters far more are the actualities of U.S. capitalism as the U.S. empire continues to decline and U.S. capitalism’s accumulated problems worsen. These latter factors will determine how the public views the parties’ disconnected policies. Today’s inflation offers an example of this. As a further slap in the face of the U.S. working class who have dealt with two years of economic crash plus the health catastrophe of COVID-19, inflation and the rising interest rates aimed to stop it will ultimately shake capitalism and shape politics.

How many angry working families will now sympathize with a politician who offers big changes versus a politician who offers “stay the course”? The business community wants inflation stopped. The responsive Fed will thus resort to quantitative tightening and raising interest rates. The responsive Biden will applaud the Fed. Those Fed actions can and likely will threaten jobs.So Biden must choose between the electoral risks of inflation versus those of job deterioration. That is the risky dead-end “choice” that the problems of capitalism will dump on Biden. And if 2022 proves to be the year when capitalism’s crisis breaks into the explicit open, will most Americans tilt toward Trump-type fascism or the “democracy protection” offered by the Democrats to protect themselves from capitalism’s crisis?

Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascist solutions to crises in their nations’ capitalisms did not end well. Yet today’s leading U.S. capitalists seem not to know or care about historical precedents. They continue to perform their disconnected politics comfortably, oblivious to the imploding capitalism and the resulting damage to Americans. In that, they resemble the upper classes in Russia (up to 1917), in Germany (up to 1933), and in Italy (up to 1922). The most important questions thus become whether or not and how soon a new left can emerge that targets capitalism per se, proposes an alternative system, and charts a transition to this alternative system.

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yikes  financialization combined with weather chaos?! amplifying feedback?

CFTC act

Food prices[

Institutions such as hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks^[93] have been instrumental in pushing up world food prices in the last five years, with investment in food solely as a commodity rising from $65bn to $126bn (£41bn to £79bn) between 2007 and 2012, contributing to 30-year highs. Financial institutions now make up 61% of all investment in wheat futures.

According to Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on food, there was a rush by institutions to enter the food market following the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.^[93] De Schutter told the Independent in March 2012: "What we are seeing now is that these financial markets have developed massively with the arrival of these new financial investors, who are purely interested in the short-term monetary gain and are not really interested in the physical thing – they never actually buy the ton of wheat or maize; they only buy a promise to buy or to sell.

The result of this financialisation of the commodities market is that the prices of the products respond increasingly to a purely speculative logic. This explains why in very short periods of time we see prices spiking or bubbles exploding, because prices are less and less determined by the real match between supply and demand."^[93]In 2011, 450 economists from around the world called on the G20 to regulate the commodities market more.^[93] Rising food prices over recent years have been linked with social unrest around the world, including rioting in Bangladesh and Mexico,^[93] and theArab Spring.

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aha // kazakstan? gas price led to uprising [fr macron?]

no lnx twit nice table

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/us-billionaires/

Top 10 US billionaires got $1 billion richer every day of pandemic

Jake Johnson and Common Dreams January 20, 2022

The 10 wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. have added roughly $1 billion to their collective fortune every day—or around $12,600 per second—since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed millions of people across the globe and thrown countless lives into chaos.

The billionaire wealth update comes courtesy of the progressive advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), which released an analysis Wednesday estimating that the combined net worth of the 10 richest people in the U.S. has more than doubled since March 2020, reaching $1.35 trillion this week.

"The pandemic has been very good to American billionaires, especially the top 10," said ATF executive director Frank Clemente, who noted that billionaires' pandemic profits will likely not be taxed because they consist largely of unrealized capital gains.

Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-Ore.) proposal to subject the unrealized capital gains of the mega-wealthy to taxation has gone nowhere in Congress.

"Their obscene rise in wealth—all of it potentially untaxed—stands in stark contrast to the lot of America's working families, who've struggled through almost two years of a health crisis and economic uncertainty including most recently, rising prices," Clemente said. "Chairman Wyden's Billionaires Income Tax would better align the fortunes of America's richest of the rich with the needs of average Americans."

[nice table/stats]

ATF's analysis is the latest in a series of new studies highlighting the extent to which the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the decades-long trend of soaring wealth inequality in the U.S. and worldwide.

Earlier this week, as Common Dreams reported,Oxfam International released an analysis showing that the 10 richest men in the world have doubled their combined wealth since the pandemic began. Meanwhile, the anti-poverty group noted, "the incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off because of Covid-19."

On Tuesday, a coalition of progressive organizations including the Fight Inequality Alliance and the Institute for Policy Studies estimated that a modest annual wealth tax on global millionaires and billionaires would raise $2.52 trillion dollars a year, enough money to lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty.

In an open letter published Wednesday morning, a group of more than 100 rich individuals voiced support for such a tax, warning that "history paints a pretty bleak picture of what the endgame of extremely unequal societies looks like."

"For all our well-being—rich and poor alike—it's time to confront inequality and choose to tax the rich," reads the letter, which was addressed to political and economic elites. "If you don't, then all the private talks won’t change what's coming—it's taxes or pitchforks. Let's listen to history and choose wisely."

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bannon/putin disinfo to destabilize, erode civil society to the pt --> authoritarian fascism // orban

no lnx

'To defy Trump's wishes is to defy God's plan': The scary truth about modern right-wing misinformation

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/right-wing-misinformation/

John Stoehr January 13, 2022

Death threats will change a person. During previous testimony before a Senate panel, the nation’s top infectious disease expert was calm and deferential. This week marked a break from the past. Enough is enough, apparently. Dr. Anthony Fauci was no longer in the mood.

Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas kept pressing the question of financial disclosures, implying that Fauci was benefiting from the effort to vaccinate the country against the covid pandemic.

Fauci, as head of the White House pandemic response, is a public servant. By law, he must disclose financial information. So of course he didn’t understand Marshall’s question, because his “financial disclosure is public knowledge” and has been for more than three decades.

Two things. Marshall knew this and was pretending not to or he didn’t know this, which should be embarrassing for a sitting senator. Either way, Marshall said his staff could not find the document. Well, it’s here. Ultimately, he was pandering to believers of rightwing misinformation.

READ: One sentence from the Supreme Court's ruling against an OSHA vaccine rule reveals its upside-down logic]

After a heated exchange in which Marshall kept insisting Fauci was hiding something and Fauci kept insisting he’s not – “all you have to do is ask” for the disclosure – Fauci said, “What a moron! Jesus Christ!” (He said this to himself, obviously, not realizing his mic was still on.)

Is Fauci showing us how to handle rightwingers? That’s what I asked Sara Aniano on Wednesday. She’s a Monmouth University graduate student studying rightwing rhetoric and conspiracy theories on social media. She co-authored a new report for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology analyzing QAnon trends a year after J6.

:{:{}:

}:

She said Fauci’s pushback felt good, but in the end, it probably doesn’t help. “The reality is pretty dire,” she said. Propaganda, conspiracy theory and misinformation have “already infected the population.” It’s too late even for the Washington press corps to do much about it.

The way Anthony Fauci talked to the Republicans is how everyone should talk to rightwing extremists. Am I on to something?

READ: A right-wing talking point about Jan. 6 just completely collapsed after indictment of the Oath Keepers]

Absolutely. For a lot of people on the left, Fauci's pushback was refreshing.People are tired of the pandering, and of watching misinformation be lumped into the category of “free speech.”[ = wht priv?]

While Fauci’s “moron” comment was indeed a great moment of transparency, we should also consider his ability to humanize the situation with the anecdote about his own harassment.

The left is often considered "soft” in contrast with the alleged "hard truth" attitude of the GOP. While Fauci's position is not about partisanship, anti-vaxx movements have unfortunately aligned with the right and the far-right. So it feels like Fauci is speaking for us, even though he's really speaking on behalf of everyone.

It seems to me speaking for everyone is often interpreted as soft. In other words, acting for the benefit of the common good immediately marks you as an enemy by rightwingers.

READ: DOJ unveils explosive sedition charges against the Oath Keepers for the Jan. 6 attack]

:{:{}:

}:

For a party that increasingly demonizes collectivism, it's in their best interest to continue promoting "individual responsibility,” as it works for their messaging politically. But for the extreme far-right, it's more sinister. In their minds, there is a war going on between good and evil. And if you're not on their side, their black-and-white thinking places you into the "enemy" category.

The irony is that they are actually collectivists, too, no?

I hear that a lot. In comparison to other countries, America is not a collectivist culture. In my opinion, anyone who pushes extreme nationalism here is also pushing extreme individualism.

As a leftist researcher of far-right misinformation, I admit to a certain level of bias. But January 6 marked a clear turning point in how we view partisanship, I think, and we can't discard that.

READ: Michigan Republicans who circulated fake 'Electoral College' documents are being investigated by the Jan. 6 committee: report]

Why is it a turning point? We turned from what to what?

For a lot of us studying far-right extremism and misinformation, we couldn't help but feel this collective "we told you so" when January 6 happened. For the first time, we had a visual manifestation of far-right conspiracism that wasn't limited to social media or fringe news programs. In other words, everyone saw people act on the ideologies that misinformation researchers sift through every day.

Of course, how people interpret what they saw is what's shaping their opinion now.

Which is where misinformation comes back, right?

Here's something I tweeted on the anniversary of the insurrection: “By the end of January 6, 2021, Americans were left with the most damaging relic of all: Yet another unfathomable event, born of hate and delusion, for far-right conspiracy theorists to contort into a self-serving narrative that unfairly demonizes the innocent.”

I want to cry.

A lot of us can relate to that.

To what extent is anti-vaccination about purity of blood? To what extent is anti-vaccination cover for plain old white supremacy?

It's interesting, because even if anti-vaxxers don't realize it, the "pure blood" characterization of the unvaccinated has roots to eugenics, which of course has roots to white supremacy.

But to go back to the idea of "infiltration," I think vaccine skepticism ties into that too.

Please go on.

I've been thinking about what types of infiltration the far-right finds most threatening. So far I've come up with three categories: 1) member infiltration, 2) spiritual infiltration and 3) bodily infiltration.

Member infiltration seems to stem from a fear of the "other" hiding in plain sight, trying to live among them but with heinous intentions. We see that a lot with paranoia about Antifa, the feds, Jews or journalists "posing" as patriots.

Spiritual infiltration has a lot to do with "demonic forces" among us. Satanic panic stuff. With QAnon, we see allegations of Satanic rituals in Hollywood or even reptilians wearing skinsuits to pass as humans.

Physical infiltration is a lot about co-opting "my body my choice" messaging to push back against the vaccine, which many think is the mark of the beast or a 5G transmitter or radioactive or a microchip. A lot of crossover with pseudo-science.

There is so much overlap that it's hard to make exclusive categories, but you get the idea.

We haven't talked about religion. What does your research say?

Yes, religion or spirituality is inextricable from far-right narratives overall. My thesis, currently in progress, focuses on QAnon Instagram comments in the week leading up to J6.

Rhetoric that pushes a higher power is always mixed in with far-right narratives, and overwhelmingly, that's Christianity. A lot of people who believe election fraud theories in QAnon circles genuinely think that Donald Trump was anointed by God – he is the chosen leader to usher in "the storm" and defeat the evil Democrats, once and for all.

In their minds, to defy Trump's wishes is to defy God's plan. I wouldn't say that this is ubiquitous across the right, to be clear. That's a pretty extreme version. But religion presents itself across far-right rhetoric in general, even when it doesn't involve Donald Trump.

Trump abruptly hung up on Steve Inskeep after the host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” challenged him repeatedly on the big lie? Are such challenges what a democratic republic needs?

I think Inskeep did a great job, although many were upset with NPR for bringing Trump on in the first place. Your question is a hard one. People asked the same thing during and after the 2020 election when Trump alleged fraud on TV before the ballot counting was even complete. Some networks cut his speech off, while others aired it.

Any time we platform misinformation, especially when we can see it coming, we must provide context and a good reason for showcasing it. If we can shut it down in the meantime, then yes, we should.

But if I'm being honest, I think that ship has sailed.

I don't know if it matters anymore if we cut off conspiratorial rhetoric from Trump and others when it's already infected the population.

Are you suggesting the press can’t really mitigate the spread?

Once Trump normalized discourse that was hateful, xenophobic, conspiratorial and sexist, he made it more mainstream. People who previously self-censored those thoughts felt free to not only think them, but say them – particularly on social media, where anonymity removes accountability. That hasn't really changed.

I guess my point is – the press should do what it can to mitigate misinformation, of course, but the reality is pretty dire.

There's a serious epistemological crisis going on, and that's gonna require systemic change.[// heated pod occupy sunrise guy too late to stop authoritorian, congress paralyze so only prez can at,crisis will give opening]

Again, I want to cry.

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an 11 21

click eyeballs even mainstream  media

In an article published by Mother Jones on Thanksgiving 2021, journalist Monika Bauerlein describes Americans as feeling mentally "exhausted" because of **all the bad newson top of bad news that they are being inundated with. And media outlets, Bauerlein stresses, are creating that climate of exhaustion because it is good for business.

Bauerlein, in her Mother Jones article, writes, "Are you part of the exhausted majority?.… So many people are tired of feeling like everything is a disaster, everything is at risk, and we'll never be done fighting with unvaccinated relatives over who gets to come to Thanksgiving. And tired, too, of the news. I'm a journalist who lives and breathes news, and I get tired. So many headlines that want to get your attention. So much to worry about. Democrats in disarray, inflation, the climate — it's all at 11, all the time."

Bauerlein acknowledges that "there are a lot of crises out there," but she is quick to add that the world has always had crises. The difference in 2021, she argues, is media outlets have a financial stake in promoting "outrage."

"This is obviously not the only time of crisis the world, or America, has ever been through," the journalist explains. "It is, however, the only one in which we have lived in a 24/7 media ecosystem that depends for a significant part of its business on instant reaction and instant outrage. If you've been reading Mother Jones for a little while, you know about the basic problem: Advertising revenue for publishers and broadcasters depends in large part on both quantity — clicks, eyeballs, video views — and engagement: how long you stick around, whether you share, whether you comment. And all of those metrics are juiced when content tugs at your emotions, especially fear and outrage."

Bauerlein continues, "That can take the form of sensational headlines about simple news stories, or it can take the form of opinionated hot takes. Even for newsrooms that depend less on advertising than subscriptions, as the New York Times and the Washington Post do, quick-turnaround opinion content is key in getting people to subscribe. That's why you're seeing these prestige outlets add more and more columnists and associated newsletters."

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aha: DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFT PLUS GLOBALIZATION (RELATED) CORP MFG OUTSOURCING --> EXISTENTIAL epistemic crisis THREAT/CRISIS

also surprise $ donor for his BD?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/peter-popoff/

Conning' their 'vulnerable' followers: Here's what Trump and a discredited televangelist have in common

When the Christian right invaded the Republican Party during the 1980s, Peter Popoff was among the televangelists who made millions of dollars. Popoff, a faith healer, was exposed as a major fraud — he wasn't really curing cancer patients as he claimed. Journalist Michael Siegel, in a lengthy article published by Ordinary Times on June 8, lays out the things that Popoff has in common with another con man: former President Donald Trump, explaining why their deluded followers have such a hard time accepting the truth.

Popoff and Trump are the same age: 74. Popoff was born on July 2, 1946, and Trump was born the previous month on June 14, 1946. Siegel's article is really about Trump more than Popoff, although he offers plenty of details about Popoff's embarrassing history — and Siegel stresses that when people have been conned, they are often in denial about it. Popoff still had his unwavering followers even after he was exposed as a fraud during the 1980s.

As anti-Trump and anti-Popoff as Siegel's piece is, he does more than slam them and makes a point of explaining their appeal.

Siegel observes, "One of the things that con men rely upon is a certain vulnerability…. Many are afraid of their nest eggs disappearing, which ironically, makes them vulnerable to the very people who want to rob their nests."

//CRISIS/ GHOST DANCE : According to Siegel, "Con men — whether they prey on the rich or the poor, the powerful or the powerless — look for those who are at a crossroads.Those who want a chance to get ahead. Those who fear falling further behind. Those who have lost their status and want it back. A person comfortable in their life and their finances will realize the Nigerian Prince is too good to be true. A person nervous about their finances or desperate to move up in life may think this is the chance they've been waiting for." [vid] Popoff exposed - Part 1 <br

Trump is much more dangerous than Popoff ever was, as Popoff never became president of the United States — although the Christian right movement that Popoff helped bring to the forefront of the GOP during the 1980s (along with the Moral Majority's Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., Jimmy Swaggart, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and others) has been very damaging to the country. And Trump still has millions of devotees seven months after being voted out of office and four months into Joe Biden's presidency.

Many Trump devotees, according to polls, still believe the Big Lie: Trump's false claim that he was a victim of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. And Siegel explains why they are so "vulnerable," not unlike Popoff's followers.

"The Trump election fraud claim is something far more insidious than the standard-issue 'they stole our votes'cry of the defeated," Siegel warns. "It did, after all, culminate in an open attack on the Capitol to try to overturn the election. It is a claim that is not fading but being amplified by an increasing number of Republicans, becoming a litmus test in primaries. The Republicans just ousted their third most powerful Congress-critter because she had the temerity to say that Donald Trump was full of it."

Siegel continues, "I can certainly see why grifters like Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell are making this claim. There's money to be made by promoting these claims— the Trump campaign itself pulled in a quarter of a billion dollars with this scam. But why do rank-and-file Republicans believe this. Is it because they're stupid? They're no more stupid than anyone else. Is it because they're deluded by Fox News? Most of them don't watch it. No, I think it's something more basic, something that goes back to Peter Popoff and every other con artist that slithered down the pike. It's because they don't want to believe they were fooled."

Related Articles Around the Web

• Peter Popoff, the Born-Again Scoundrel | GQ ›
• Peter Popoff Ministries – Dream Bigger ›
• Peter Popoff - Wikipedia ›

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no lnx https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/republicans-trump-reinstated/

A disturbing number of Republicans actually think Trump will likely be 'reinstated' soon: poll

New analysis finds Trump’s support among white voters is slipping

Aldous J. Pennyfarthing

and Daily Kos

June 10, 2021

I'll never understand why anyone listens to Donald Trump on any subject. He wanted to nuke hurricanes. He wanted to put alligator-filled moats along the southern border. He thinks windmills cause cancer, asbestos is swell, and exercise is bad for you. He seriously suggested pumping our bodies full of UV light and disinfectant. He thinks we have planes that are literally invisible, for God's sake!

Nevertheless, millions of Trump fans have bent their brains into pretzels trying to make his doofus proclamations sound presidential—or even marginally nonsimian (see also: hydroxychloroquine).

We've pretty well established that Trump's brain is, at best, masticated circus peanut and, at worst, Lucifer's molten boom-booms, and yet when he dry-heaves utter batshit nonsense, plenty of his fans seem all too ready to lick it up like feral purse poodles.

Case in point: Fully 29% of Republicans think Donald Trump is returning before the year is out—possibly riding in on a cloud or a flaming chariot or (more likely) a golf cart with a cupholder and custom-installed deep fryer.

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll asked survey respondents this straightforward question: "How likely do you think it is that former President Donald Trump will be reinstated as U.S. President this year, if at all?" The question was no doubt included in the poll because Trump himself has been telling insiders that he thinks he'll be back in office by August. (Narrator: He won't.)

The results? (You still have time to bail if you've had your yearly quota of frothing insanity. You're still here? Okay, gird your loins.)

Among Republicans surveyed, 17% think it's "very likely" that Trump will return to the White House this year, 12% think it's "somewhat likely," and 10% don't know or have no opinion. Taken together, this shows that two-fifths of Republicans have not yet accepted that Joe Biden won the presidency.

Of course, that wasn't the only eye-opening result. Asked whether things are going in the right direction in the U.S. or on the wrong track, only 15% of Republicans thought things were going in a positive direction, while 85% said we're veering off course. Guess 85% of Republicans prefer raging pandemics and collapsing economies to Democratic presidents.

Is this what it's like to lick hallucinogenic toads for breakfast in lieu of frosted Pop-Tarts? At some point, do you just surrender to the unreality of your environment?

Over at Civiqs, even more Republicans report they're worried; a stunning 93% of card-carrying GOPers think we're all gonna die.

If you enjoy watching Donald Trump eat the Republican Party from within, like a genetically modified tropical eyeball worm, you'll be happy to know that the Politico/Morning Consultpoll found that 80% of Republicans want to stick around so they can see him play either a major (59%) or a minor role (21%) in the party going forward. If you'd prefer he stay in Florida chucking oyster shells at flamingos from his balcony, you'll likely be disappointed by the 13% of Republicans who want him to slink away.

There's also some good news, of course. President Biden's approval rating is at 53% among all registered voters, with 28% of respondents "strongly" approving of the job he's doing, 25% "somewhat" approving, 43% disapproving, and the rest offering no opinion.

Meanwhile, 66% of registered voters want Congress to pass an infrastructure bill—so maybe we should get that done, huh?

There's still some sanity left in the world, so long as you look in the right place. And that right place is clearly nowhere in the vicinity of the right wing. I invite Republicans to hurry on back to planet Earth. The water's fine. At least it is for now—unfortunately, only 12% of Republicans consider passing a bill to address climate change a "top priority."

Go figure.

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generally this is doom node but wet baby courser correction?

421 Amanda Berekondwith

...

But let's face it: Republicans also did this to themselves.

For decades, Republicans have increasingly abandoned policy debate in favor of culture war antics, race-baiting and raw tribalism. From Monica Lewinsky to Barack Obama's birth certificate, the modern GOP has turned politics into conflicts about personality and identity, not policy. Even during the height of the debate over the Affordable Care Act — the biggest policy agenda Democrats had pushed since the 1960s — the Republicans were mired in culture war theatrics. Their response was to freak out about abortion and birth control, as well as the "death panels" nonsense, which was always a barely coded conspiracy theory about Democrats taking away health care from old white people so younger, more racially diverse people could have it. They created a political environment of style over substance because, of course, they know that they can't win debates about policy on the merits.

The result is a situation where voters think Biden is more moderate than Obama was, even though the reverse is true, simply because Biden looks and sounds like more people's idea of a moderate. Those stereotypes are racist, to be clear. As Paul Waldman of the Washington Post points out, Obama "was young, Black, cosmopolitan, hip and the hero of young people across the country," and Biden "has always been the establishment," a "folksy guy with a bottomless supply of bromides."

No wonder right-wing media has, in desperation, grasped for a bizarre conspiracy theory accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of being the "real" president.They don't know how to do oppositional politics that isn't about base racism and sexism. But it is also an increasingly losing proposition. The forces that allowed Obama to get elected in the first place — Americans growing more relaxed about racial diversity and more urbane in general — are only growing stronger as time goes by.

One line during Biden's speech Wednesday night really jumped out at a number of pundits: "Trickle-down economics has never worked." It was a notably explicit repudiation of Reaganism. But it's also likely that large numbers of Americans, especially younger Americans, have no idea what "trickle-down economics" even is or was supposed to be. Not just because it is a failed economic theory that was always nonsense, though it is that. The phrase is more so a relic from a time when conservatives used to pretend to have serious policy ideas.

"Trickle-down economics" never made sense, but it sounded smart and gave Republicans a thing they could say to voters to explain why cutting taxes and government investment would somehow lead to prosperity. But mostly, they've given up even that kind of argument in favor of screeching about Dr. Seuss and "cancel culture," hoping these tactics would distract voters from their more substantive concerns. Even when Republicans half-heartedly try to argue against Biden's policy ideas, it's through lame tactics like arguing over the semantics of what constitutes "infrastructure."

Of course, a big part of the reason that Republicans want to avoid talking policy is that, increasingly, voters can see what decades of doing things their way has done to this country.

Low taxes on corporations and rich people, coupled with low levels of government investment, did not, as promised, produce a robust economy where private interests pay for all that stuff people want and need. Instead, our roads and buildings are falling apart, health care is a nightmare, and childcare and education are unaffordable. Food is cheap, in part because it is one sector government quietly subsidizes. But as Biden pointed out in his speech last night, so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck that the economic downturn meant "nice cars, lined up for miles, waiting for a box of food to be put in their trunk."

Republicans are grumpy, extremely grumpy. Republican Senators watching the speech last night collectively looked like they smelled a fart, and not just because they were wearing masks. They're mad, not just because they know he's right. They're mad because they know he's popular and what he's saying is popular. They'll block as much of his agenda as they can and hope that voter suppression and gerrymandering do the rest. But on the merits of the argument itself? They're toast.

It's not because Biden is some super-politician. It's because Republicans spent decades making politics into a reality TV show. Now that we're facing a real crisis, the public is turning its eyes towards the comfort of a real politician who wants to do real policy. And Republicans have nothing to say in response.

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doh/belated: enough fails of right kind and magnitude (or inter-lock/ cascade) can lead to systemic failure/crisis?  texas is failure to think sys b/c we know weather chaos coming, cold as well as warm; free mkt dereg bs is reductive sys theory; naomi k says texas // to covid fail, mkt see "excess" capacity as inefficiency so no resileince to bigger shocks sys tell us are coming; me vs we, short vs long term

who said small price to pay to keep gubmint out of our business?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/green-new-deal/

Author and environmentalist Naomi Klein argued in a New York Times column Sunday that Republicans rushed to attack the Green New Deal as disaster struck in Texas because the popular push for a sweeping transformation of the U.S. energy system poses a genuine threat to the deregulated, fossil-fuel dependent status quo that left the Lone Star State vulnerable to extreme weather driven by the climate crisis.

"Texans are living through the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one that has also stood in the way of effective climate action," Klein wrote. "Fortunately, there's a way out—and that's precisely what Republican politicians in the state most fear."

Klein characterized the ongoing power, water, and food crises in Texas as the consequence of "an energy-market free-for-all" stemming from "a fateful series of decisions [that] were made in the late-'90s, when the now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically deregulate Texas' electricity sector."

"As a result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private energy companies," Klein wrote. "Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the grid and build in redundancies for extreme weather. Today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks or weatherize their infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike)."

In the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri, ordinary Texans are beginning to see the direct impact of the deregulatory push on their material wellbeing as electric companies hit them with bills topping $17,000—"a consequence," Klein argued, "of leaving pricing to the whims of the market."

Alluding to her previous work on "the shock doctrine"—a term she coined to describe how the right has exploited past disasters to force through unpopular privatization and austerity agendas—Klein noted that "large-scale shocks... become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else's expense."

"I often quote a guru of the free market revolution, the late economist Milton Friedman," Klein wrote. "In 1982, he wrote about what he saw as the mission of right-wing economists like him: 'Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."[gop sez BO cos chic guy]

The difference between past shocks such as the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis and the current emergency in Texas, Klein argued, is that "Republican ideas are no longer lying around—they are lying in ruin."

Texas' Republican Gov. Greg Abbott attacked the Green New Deal—a proposal that has not even been implemented—in an appearance on Fox News last week because he knows its promise to "create millions of union jobs building out shock-resilient green energy infrastructure, transit, and affordable housing" is "extremely appealing" to Texans as they "suffer under the overlapping crises of unemployment, houselessness, racial injustice, crumbling public services, and extreme weather," Klein wrote.

"All that Texas' Republicans have to offer, in contrast," Klein added, "is continued oil and gas dependence—driving more climate disruption—alongside more privatizations and cuts to public services to pay for their state's mess, which we can expect them to push in the weeks and months ahead." [death spiral]

As The Houston Chroniclereported last week, Republican members of the Texas state legislature are already signaling that "one of the most immediate reforms they will push for is recalibrating the state's electricity grid to ensure more fossil fuels are in that mix and fewer renewables."

But Klein contended that "unlike when the Republican Party began deploying the shock doctrine, its free-market playbook is no longer novel."

"The horrors currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of the climate crisis and the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure in the face of that crisis," Klein wrote. "So of course the Green New Deal finds itself under fierce attack. Because for the first time in a long time, Republicans face the very thing that they claim to revere but never actually wanted: competition—in the battle of ideas." twt

in recent days, as Common Dreams has reported, progressive advocacy groups such as the youth-led Sunrise Movement and Greenpeace USA have made the case that—contrary to the GOP's bad-faith attacks—a Green New Deal is precisely what's needed to help Texas equitably recover from the present emergency and build the resilience necessary to withstand future climate-driven disasters.

"Many people across the country are realizing for the first time that fossil fuels are not only polluting, they are unstable. Millions of Texans are being let down by coal, oil, and gas right now," Greenpeace climate campaigner Ashley Thomson said last Thursday.

On Monday, activists with the Sunrise Movement of Texas are expected to rally at the state capitol in Austin to demand immediate relief for struggling Texans, the resignations of Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas.), and passage of a Green New Deal that would "make our state and country more resilient to future disasters, and create millions of good union jobs in the process of transforming these necessary structures."

"Texas is the perfect example of what happens when our politicians cater to fossil fuel executives instead of the young people who have been shouting from the rooftops for years, warning of an impending climate emergency like this," said Chante Davis, a 17-year-old Sunrise Movement leader and Houston resident.

"I've survived three once in a lifetime storms in my 17 years of life," added Davis, whose family moved to Texas in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. "We need change, and the Green New Deal is the obvious, urgent solution. As our communities come together to fill the void of our government, our leaders must invest in us to provide jobs that directly address the crises we face."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/ecological-collapse/

no lnx twet

'Ecological Ponzi scheme': Dire scientific assessment warns humanity in denial of looming 'collapse of civilization'

Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams January 13, 2021

In an example to the rest of the scientific community and an effort to wake up people—particularly policymakers—worldwide, 17 scientists penned a comprehensive assessment of the current state of the planet and what the future could hold due to biodiversity loss, climate disruption, human consumption, and population growth.

"Ours is not a call to surrender—we aim to provide leaders with a realistic 'cold shower' of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future," according to the perspective paper, co-authored by experts across Australia, Mexico, and the United States, and published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science.

Co-author Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford University's Center for Conservation Biology—who has raised alarm about overpopulation for decades—told Common Dreams his colleagues "are all scared" about what's to come.

"Scientists have to learn to be communicators," said Ehrlich, citing James Hansen's warning about the consequences of "scientific reticence." Hansen, a professor at Columbia University's Earth Institute and former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified to Congress about the climate crisis in 1988.

Ehrlich was straightforward about how "extremely dangerous things are" now and the necessity of a "World War II-type mobilization" to prevent predictions detailed in the paper: "a ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health, and climate-disruption upheavals (including looming massive migrations), and resource conflicts."

:{:{}:

}:

"What we are saying might not be popular, and indeed is frightening. But we need to be candid, accurate, and honest if humanity is to understand the enormity of the challenges we face in creating a sustainable future," said co-author Daniel T. Blumstein of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a statement about the paper.

"By scientists' telling it like it is, we hope to empower politicians to work to represent their citizen, not corporate, constituents," he said in an email to Common Dreams.

The paper, Ehrlich and Blumstein pointed out, comes in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic—which, according to Johns Hopkins University, has killed nearly two million people. Over the past year, the Covid-19 crisis has provoked calls for humanity to end its destruction of the natural world to prevent future public health catastrophes.

"We're all seeing the shocks to our global systems now from Covid and the rise of authoritarian leaders," Blumstein said. "Because our current ways of life are ecologically unsustainable (we're living in an ecological Ponzi scheme), we fully anticipate more—and more deadly—pandemics in the future. We expect civil unrest, wars, and famines. We are all shaken by the likelihood of the collapse of civilization as we know it."

The new warning from scientists, Blumstein noted, cites over 150 other papers "documenting the diverse and shocking decline in biodiversity and planetary 'health' and their consequences." Among the cited sources is a World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) report that in September revealed an "average 68% decrease in population sizes of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish between 1970 and 2016."

"In the midst of a global pandemic, it is now more important than ever to take unprecedented and coordinated global action to halt and start to reverse the loss of biodiversity and wildlife populations across the globe by the end of the decade, and protect our future health and livelihoods," WWF International director general Marco Lambertini said at the time.

The co-authors—including William J. Ripple of Oregon State University, who last year led thousands of scientists in declaring a climate emergency and earlier this month led a call for "a massive-scale mobilization to address the climate crisis"—echoed Lambertini's message while also underscoring the importance of increasing awareness about what's actually needed.

"Humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth's ability to support complex life. But the mainstream is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization," the paper says.

"In fact, the scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms is so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts," said lead author Corey Bradshaw of Australia's Flinders University in a statement. "The problem is compounded by ignorance and short-term self-interest, with the pursuit of wealth and political interests stymieing the action that is crucial for survival."

The paper explains that "while suggested solutions abound, the current scale of their implementation does not match the relentless progression of biodiversity loss and other existential threats tied to the continuous expansion of the human enterprise." According to its authors, "That we are already on the path of a sixth major extinction is now scientifically undeniable."

"With such a rapid, catastrophic loss of biodiversity, the ecosystem services it provides have also declined,"the paper explains. Consequences include "reduced carbon sequestration, reduced pollination, soil degradation, poorer water and air quality, more frequent and intense flooding and fires, and compromised human health."

Highlighting estimates that the human population will near 10 billion by 2050, the scientists lay out how "large population size and continued growth are implicated in many societal problems," from food insecurity, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and an increased chance of pandemics, to crowding, joblessness, deteriorating infrastructure, and bad governance.

The paper also details the planetary impacts of dirty energy and carbon-intensive food production, and says that "while climate change demands a full exit from fossil fuel use well before 2050, pressures on the biosphere are likely to mount prior to decarbonization as humanity brings energy alternatives online."

A section on failed international goals declares that "stopping biodiversity loss is nowhere close to the top of any country's priorities, trailing far behind other concerns such as employment, healthcare, economic growth, or currency stability."

"The dangerous effects of climate change are much more evident to people than those of biodiversity loss, but society is still finding it difficult to deal with them effectively," the scientists note, while decrying "utterly inadequate" efforts by governments to even try to meet the targets of the landmark Paris climate agreement.

They further decry the recent rise of right-wing, anti-environment agendas in countries including Australia, Brazil, and the United States—which recently denied President Donald Trump a second term. Ehrlich expressed hope that President-elect Joe Biden will work to deliver on the climate promises he made as a candidate.

Biden's vow to rejoin the Paris agreement "is positive news," but "it is a minuscule gesture given the scale of the challenge," Ehrlich said in a statement.

The president-elect "is moving in the right direction," Ehrlich told Common Dreams, pointing to the selection of former Secretary of State John Kerry as his climate envoy. However, "the Paris goals are increasingly looking inadequate," and "Biden's political opportunities to do anything major may be greatly constrained," he added.

Blumstein stressed that "recycling, using less plastic, eating less meat, taking public transportation, and flying less, while all important, will simply not create the rapid change we need now to save much of the Earth's biodiversity and our lives."

According to Blumstein, "We need rapid political change."

He urged voters to elect leaders who will end fossil fuel use as well as "eliminate perpetual economic growth and properly price externalities so that the environmental costs are built into the price of a product." He also emphasized the importance of access to education and reproductive control, and the need to rein in corporate lobbying and enact campaign finance reform so politicians serve citizens' needs.

"Ultimately," Blumstein added, "we must focus on making equity and well-being society's goals—not the constant accumulation of more junk."

In their paper, the UCLA scientist and his 16 co-authors "contend that only a realistic appreciation of the colossal challenges facing the international community might allow it to chart a less-ravaged future."

It is "incumbent on experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to eschew reticence, avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges, ahead and 'tell it like it is,'" they conclude. "Anything else is misleading at best, or negligent and potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst."

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an 121 alexh

The word "fragile" is often used to describe liberal democracies, which can take an authoritarian turn and cease to be democratic — for example, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Hungary under Viktor Orbán. Journalist Felix Salmon, in a sobering article published by Axios on January 8, analyzes recent events and lays out a list of reasons why he believes that the United States' democracy is more "fragile" than ever.

President-elect Joe Biden, the Axios reporter warns, is inheriting a country that finds itself in a "state of chaotic tribalism."

Salmon explains, "Americans, who are used to being winners, now look around and see a country that can't secure its own seat of government, that struggles to distribute a vaccine, that was cyber-looted by Russia, that was half a year late with a stimulus plan both sides wanted, that can't even orchestrate a peaceful transition of power…. This is weakness, not strength. The democracy that President-elect Biden will take over is tattered, archaic, precarious."

Salmon's article was published only two days after the U.S. Capitol Building, onJanuary 6, was stormed by a violent mob of far-right extremists (including White nationalists) who were determined to prevent Congress from ratifying Biden's Electoral College victory. The mob only succeed in delaying Congress' vote, and both branches of Congress certified the Electoral College results. But the very fact that the extremists broke into the Capitol Building and ransacked it shows how much of a powder keg the U.S. has become politically. twt

salmon laments that according to a CBS News poll, big chunks of the U.S. population buy into debunked conspiracy theories and don't believe that Biden is legitimately president-elect.

"The consent of the governed lies at the heart of American democracy, but Biden will lack that fundamental authority," Samon writes. "40% of Americans and 80% of Trump voters say they believe Biden is not the legitimate winner of the 2020 election — the greatest proportion of holdouts in the history of American polling. 145 members of Congress, including seven senators, voted to throw out Pennsylvania's Electoral College votes — a move designed to hand victory to the loser of the election."

Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, told Axios, "You can't lump U.S. democracy in with Canada, Germany and Japan anymore. We're now midway between them and Hungary."

Salmon stresses that there is no guarantee that a liberal democracy will remain a liberal democracy.

"Presidential democracies — think France and Brazil — are prone to crisis at the best of times," Salmon warns. "None has lasted nearly as long as America's. It was fragile and old even before Trump was elected, burdened with an anachronistic Electoral College, a dangerously long transition between election and inauguration, and a deeply gerrymandered quilt of state and federal constituencies."

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lords of davos admit  capitalist sys fail, but just greenwash BS? naomi

reboot of agenda 21, plademic, the memes are mating /remix smoothie

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/08/great-reset-conspiracy/

...

The Great Reset is an attempt to create a plausible impression that the huge winners in this system are on the verge of voluntarily setting greed aside to get serious about solving the raging crises that are radically destabilizing our world.

So no, the Great Reset is not just another name for the Green New Deal, as many a right-winger with a digital chalkboard and an unhealthy AOC obsession is absurdly claiming. It is, first and foremost, about blocking a real Green New Deal, which most assuredly would not have the support of BP, Mastercard, the Prince of Wales, and all of the other Great Reset partners.

And yet, in recent weeks, a slew of right-wing commentators on Fox News, as well as Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs and prominent opposition politicians in Australia and Canada, have claimed to be confused about this and are suddenly giving oxygen to what was, until recently, amarginal conspiracy. Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Ben Shapiro have all been terrifying their huge audiences with claims that green socialism is about to be forced down their throats via Schwab’s Great Reset, which, they explain, is the very same thing as President-elect Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan, which is itself a thin cover for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. (Like an early fan of an indie punk band, Glenn Beck has been using his perch at The Blaze to point out that he was ranting about the Great Reset when it was just a gleam in Schwab’s eye.)

Do these people honestly think that Schwab is in cahoots with AOC and using the pandemic to put BP out of business — with the full cooperation of BP? Of course not. But President Donald Trump is on his way out, and the Green New Deal is popular — precisely because it is as far away from Davos as it could be, grounded in a polluter-pays ethos and in programs like a jobs guarantee and universal health care that enjoy broad working-class support. For right-wing politicians and the oil companies that back them, the more climate action can be conflated with an organization known for its traffic jams of private jets and its Bond villain founder, the easier it will be to resist any climate plan at all. That’s why the earliest alarmism about the Great Reset came from the Heartland Institute, ground zero of the climate change denial machine.

[Jason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party,speaks during a news conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on Friday, April 5, 2019. Kenney said he would create a C$1 billion ($750 million) crown corporation to support Indigenous resource projects including pipelines if he's elected to lead Alberta's government this month, according to an emailed statement. Photographer: Todd Korol/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesJason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party, speaks during a news conference in Calgary, Canada, on April 5, 2019. Photo: Todd Korol/Bloomberg/Getty Images

This messaging is gaining traction not because people are suckers but because they are mad — and they have every right to be. Lockdown policies have demanded months of individual sacrifice for the collective good without providing the most basic collective protections to keep families from slipping into starvation and homelessness, or to keep small businesses afloat. Meanwhile, trillions have been spent to backstop markets and bail out multinationals, and pandemic profiteering is rampant. Is it any wonder that so many find it entirely plausible that the same elites who expect them to swallow all the coronavirus-related sacrifices while they party in the Hamptons and on private islands would also be willing to exaggerate the risks of the disease to get them to the accept more bitter “green” medicine, for the common good? As that first Davos theme made clear, trust between the people and the mountaintop has been broken — and it most certainly has not been rebuilt.

For a glimpse of how all of this fits together, take a look at what is going on in Alberta, Canada, under its truly reprehensible premier, one Jason Kenney. Kenney came to power pledging to serve as a shameless valet for the Alberta oil patch, specifically its extra-fast-planet-cooking tar sands. He promised to ram through all pipelines, no matter the opposition, and create a “war room” to surveil all opponents....

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==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/climate-change

JC cmn dreams

More than 250 scientists and scholars from 30 countries have issued an open letter calling on policymakers to "engage more with the growing risk of societal disruption and collapse due to damage to the climate and environment," arguing that only then "might communities and nations begin to prepare and so reduce its likelihood, speed, severity, harm to the most vulnerable, and to nature."

The letter, a version of which appeared GUK in The GuardianSunday, comes on the heels of a pair of United Nations reports warning of the dire direction in which the planet is headed. As U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres put it: "The state of the planet is broken. Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal."

This weekend, world leaders will hold the Climate Ambition Summit 2020to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris climate agreement. After failing in the years since then to cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with that accord, the letter says, "we must now face the consequences."

While "some armed services already see collapse as an important scenario, requiring planning," the letter notes that "the topic is not well reported in the media, and mostly absent from civil society and politics," even though such collapse "is already the experience or memory of many communities in the Global South."

The U.K. arm of Extinction Rebellion shared pieces of the letter on Twitter with photos of climate activists around the world demanding urgent action:

Denouncing media coverage that "typically cites people who condemn discussion of the topic," the letter says that "ill-informed speculations, such as on foreign misinformation campaigns, or impacts on mental health and motivation, will not support serious discussion. Rather, such claims risk betraying the thousands of activists and community leaders whose anticipation of collapse is part of their motivation to push for change on climate, ecology, and social justice."

The letter continues:

People who care about environmental and humanitarian issues should not be discouraged from discussing the risks of societal disruption or collapse. That could risk agendas being driven by people with less commitment to such values.

Some of us believe that a transition to a new form of society may be possible. That will involve bold action to reduce damage to the climate, nature and other people, including preparations for major disruptions to everyday life. We are united in regarding efforts to suppress discussion of collapse as hindering the possibility of that transition.

"We have experienced how emotionally challenging it is to recognize the damage being done, along with the growing threat to our own way of life," the letter concludes. "We also know the great sense of fellowship that can arise. It is time to invite each other into difficult conversations, so we can reduce our complicity in the harm, and be creative to make the best of a turbulent future."

Signatories and supporters of the letter shared it on social media with the hashtag #scholarswarning, offering their summaries of what the letter calls for and detailing why they signed on to it.

"We're saying we must confront the real possibility of climate collapse so that we can do our utmost to avoid it," American climate scientist Peter Kalmus, a signatory to the letter, saidin a tweet Sunday. "This is as far from 'doomerism' as you can get."

In a statement, University of Cumbria professor Jem Bendell, another signatory, explained that "we come from dozens of countries and subject disciplines and perceive a resistance by the establishment to serious engagement in adapting to the increasing disruptions to food, water, health, and the economy."

"It is time to listen to the scholarship," Bendell added, "and try to reduce harm from societal disruption and even collapse."

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omfg

declares vote void in advance, camp look at electors, will not pledge peaceful trans

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/get-rid-of-the-ballots-trump-badly-bungles-a-question-on-whether-hell-accept-a-peaceful-transfer-of-power/

==

==-

trump Praises “Good Genes” of White Audience, Cites Eugenics Theory

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==

trump already ‘laid out the roadmap’ to cheat in the upcoming election: analyst

AlterNet Staff  September 23, 2020

John Heilemann, the national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, explained how President Donald Trump has already laid out his “roadmap” to cheat in plain sight for the upcoming…

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david n

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-fascism-ascends-2020-election-may-be-the-crisis-of-democracy-that-opens-the-door-to-a-coup/ ]]]

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aha/doh:  civil war is sys fail

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/second-american-civil-war/

alexh

In 2020, the United States has been rocked by everything from a deadly pandemic and a brutal recession to civil unrest in a long list of cities to fears that violent conflicts will occur either on Election Day or after the election. Journalist Matthew Gault, in an article published by Vice this week, wonders if the political divisions in the United States run so deep that the country is headed for another civil war.

Describing the unrest that has occurred this year, Gault writes, "People are marching in the streets, aligned with two ideologically distinct factions. Many of them, overwhelmingly from one side, are armed, and violence and death has resulted when these two sides have clashed. The signs of a coming conflict are everywhere."

Certainly, the U.S. has had plenty of unrest in the past, from riots and assassinations during the 1960s to the Los Angeles riots in 1992. But Gault views 2020 as especially disturbing.

"Political polarization is up, gun and ammunition sales have spiked, killers such as Kyle Rittenhouse are being lauded by their political allies, and protests are widespread in American cities," Gault explains. "Police kill unarmed people in the street, the government is polarized and corrupt, and our institutions are failing. Armed militias patrol U.S. streets."

Gault goes on to note that as if everything else that has occurred in 2020 weren't enough, Philadelphia erupted in violence the week before the presidential election following the fatal shooting of Walter Wallace, Jr. — a 27-year-old African-American man — by police.

"In the aftermath of the shooting, protestors have smashed windows and spray painted the police substation," Gault notes. "Police say 30 officers have been hurt, and one who was hit by a pickup truck has been hospitalized for a broken leg."

Gault adds, "We have a sect of the president's supporters who have vowed to show up at polling places armed. If you have a terrible and ominous feeling about all this, you're not alone. Some on the far right are talking about another civil war."

What would another civil war in the United States look like? The last one occurred during the 1860s, when Americans were still using horses to commute to work — and a great deal has changed technologically since then.

Gault explains, "According to several experts I spoke with, a new civil conflict will look nothing like the first American Civil War. It's not likely that clear sides will be drawn up with massive armies of Americans marching towards each other as drones strike from above. An insurgency is more likely — a period of sustained and distributed conflict where non-state actors carry out violence to achieve a political goal."

One of the people Gault interviewed was David Kilcullen of Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Kilcullen is worried about the United States' future, telling Gault,"The worst atrocities come from fear, not hate. Because people think they're good, and they can justify incredible atrocious violence to themselves on the basis that it is defensive….. You need a belief that some other group is encroaching on your territory."

Gault also interviewed journalist Robert Evans, known for his reporting on conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine.Evans told Gault, "We are in a state of civil war whenever, in more than one geographical location in the United States, it becomes commonplace for multiple non-state armed groups to fight each other with deadly force. When that is an occurrence that is common in more than one location in the country, that's a civil war."

According to Evans, "To most people, the idea of a second American Civil War feels more like science fiction than a possible future…. I have seen systems collapse.Everything I've seen and everything I've read over the past two years has convinced me that the United States is closer to that kind of terror than anyone is willing to admit."

Adam Isacson of WOLA — a group that promotes human rights in Latin America — told Gault that a civil war in the U.S. might resemble the one that occurred in Colombia, where the conflict didn't occur throughout the entire country. Isacson recalled that when he was in Bogotá in the early 2000s, Colombia didn't seem like a country that was in a state of civil war.

Isacson told Gault, "You realize that even in this horrible period for Colombia, for most of the country, this conflict was just something you saw on television. It doesn't really impact their everyday lives…. Collapse is not evenly distributed…. I'd say there's a real danger that (the U.S.) is going to see sustained political violence."

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we have crises when we ignore reality: covid is wakeup call: Relates to to American Exceptionalism: we are not bound by rules/history, if we run out of X we'll just use Y (or as in peak oil, frack our way out).

we do not need data/experts do not know how world works systems/  rules /laws of nature do not apply to us; // rove reality-based journalism: the story/truth is what we say it is [// magical thinking?] trump 9/14/20 ca wildfire science does not know

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yikes: emerg crisis is when experts needed most, but may be listened to least b/c cred degraded?!  also fear and anger  disable crit think [tho otoh guys eat salad after heart attack?]

// metaphor; immune sys digestive sys goes on overdrive?

aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction

terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now  self-ish vs larger complex system/ long term; also zero sum

long term means more entities,  more events thus more complexity (tho a story can simplify/screen/ change emphasis, make a pattern (even where none exists, eg qanon) thus meaning, which then acts as term screen filter to repell conflicting/anomalous/dissonance info ); but fills vacuum need, that previously would have been filled by experts/textbooks/teachers/leaders/pastors? BUT IN CRISIS ALL BETS OFF?

:{:{}:

}:

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/noam-chomsky-the-world-is-facing-the-most-dangerous-moment-in-human-history/

alex h

Born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, left-wing author and activist Noam Chomsky has seen a lot in his lifetime — from the Great Depression and World War II to the social unrest of the 1960s to Watergate to 9/11. And during an interview with the New Statesman this month, the 91-year-old Chomsky explained why he finds the events of 2020 especially perilous.

“There’s been nothing like it in human history,” Chomsky told the Statesman. “I’m old enough to remember, very vividly, the threat that Nazism could take over much of Eurasia — that was not an idle concern. U.S. military planners did anticipate that the war would end with a U.S.-dominated region and a German-dominated region…. But even that, horrible enough, was not like the end of organized human life on Earth, which is what we’re facing.”

Chomsky spoke to the Statesman before the first summit of the Progressive International, an organization founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis in response to the increase in far-right authoritarian movements in different parts of the world.

In 2020, Chomsky has been sounding the alarm about a variety of perils: climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump’s authoritarian response to the George Floyd protests. And he told the Statesman, “We’re at an astonishing confluence of very severe crises. The extent of them was illustrated by the last setting of the famous Doomsday Clock. It’s been set every year since the atom bombing, the minute hand has moved forward and back. But last January, they abandoned minutes and moved to seconds to midnight, which means termination — and that was before the scale of the pandemic.”

Chomsky has vivid memories of the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 — he was 16 at the time — as well as the Cold War, which ended with the end of the Soviet Union and the Easter Bloc in the early 1990s. And Chomsky believes that in 2020, the “threat of nuclear war” is “growing” and is “probably more severe than it was during the Cold War.” Adding to the peril, Chomsky told the Statesman, are “the growing threat of environmental catastrophe” and “the sharp deterioration of democracy.”

A key figure in that deterioration, according to Chomsky, is Trump — and other troubling examples of authoritarianism he cited range from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, who Chomsky said is “creating a proto-fascist state.”

Chomsky, the Statesman’s George Eaton notes, has “lived through 22 U.S. presidential elections” — and he pointed out that Trump has said that he might not concede if former Vice President Joe Biden wins in November.

“He’s already announced repeatedly that if he doesn’t like the outcome of the election, he won’t leave,” Chomsky told the Statesman. “And this is taken very seriously by two high-level military officers, ex-military leaders — who’ve just sent a letter to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reviewing for him his constitutional duties if thepresident refuses to leave office and gathers around him the paramilitary forces that he’s been using to terrorize people in Portland.”

==

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aha-ish:  Bannon promoted djt as disruptor, the system is sick/rigged so he will blow it up and give us something better; he will fight your enemies (the chinese, the godless commies/boomers, drain the swamp, restore American pride/dominance [coal mfg]; relatad to throw the bums out they are all crooks?  What do trumpistas think the swamp is?  they atre fine with crony capitalism b/c bizmen are tough minded, numbers-based tough realists who will be efficient and stop wasting our tax money on losers/POC lazy welfare queens.  so we should not be surprised when system crashes, because trump ppl know nothing, and are grifter rent-seekers.  all they know about gov't is how to leech off it and dump their messes on it. short term / self-ish thinking: how do I/the books look good for next qtr (or for trump the next news cycle, which is 12 hours?!)

as someone else recently observed (burn dwn hse gingrich?) gop has built in political/rhet advantage b/c willing to crash the system to maintain power. (gives them leverage in negot? BUT lost votes in gov't shutdowns?]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-derangement-syndrome-those-of-us-who-warned-america-that-fascism-was-coming-were-called-hysterical-alarmists-we-were-right-all-along/

Do you remember “Trump Derangement Syndrome?”

It was a cute phrase that likely first appeared in 2015, deployed by prominent voices across the political spectrum to demean, mock, reject, dismiss and deflect the warnings that Donald Trump was a fascist, an authoritarian and a white supremacist, not to mention a vile and dangerous human being with apparent mental pathologies who posed a massive threat to American democracy....

no lnx

Do you remember “Trump Derangement Syndrome?”

It was a cute phrase that likely first appeared in 2015, deployed by prominent voices across the political spectrum to demean, mock, reject, dismiss and deflect the warnings that Donald Trump was a fascist, an authoritarian and a white supremacist, not to mention a vile and dangerous human being with apparent mental pathologies who posed a massive threat to American democracy.

Such truth-telling patriots were called “hysterical” and “alarmist,” or told they were “out of touch” and overly “bitter” about Hillary Clinton’s defeat thanks to the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College and Russian interference. Those who first raised the alarm about Trumpism as a new version of fascism were also assured that ” the institutions were strong” and fascism could never take hold in America — and most certainly not in the form of a proudly ignorant wrestling-heel wannabe and reality-TV huckster.

When Trump won the presidential election in 2016, there were some on the left eager to dance on Hillary Clinton’s grave. A few even gave Trump the totally unearned benefit of the doubt: He claimed to oppose globalization, neoliberalism and “endless war,” and to speak for the “white working class”.

Centrist Democrats and the so-called mainstream American news media also rejected the existential threat to democracy that Trump represented. They convinced themselves, over and over, that the supposed power and gravity of the office would normalize and mature him. He was a “businessman” and a “pragmatist” eager to make deals, not an ideologue — so why worry? Trump was “brash” and “unconventional,” but America’s political institutions were strong.

The stenographers of current events and the other hope-peddlers, with their horse-race journalism, false equivalence “both-sides-ism” and obsession with meaningless controversies would not let themselves see the truth of Trump’s danger or that of his neo-fascist movement. To admit the truth about Trump would mean that the old habits of writing and thinking about American politics are obsolete. Moreover, such an admission would demand speaking truth to power in a way that many members of the mainstream news media, specifically, are too afraid to, for both professional and personal reasons.

Republicans and other members of the Trump movement used “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to bully their critics into silence. The American right celebrated drinking “liberal tears” and loved the way Trump’s victory had made Democrats and so-called progressives go “crazy.”[// to the fed art'l that mollie h etc do not defend djt cos can't but own the libs/ hit bogey[wo]men]

Trump Derangement Syndrome is weaponized language in the same vein as the myth of the “liberal media.” Both lies put Democrats and the mainstream news media on the defense. While the American right and the Republican Party (and now Trump’s neo-fascist movement) drag the issue-space further and further to the right — and have done so for decades — the “liberal media” tries to find an imaginary balance by presenting right-wing extremism as somehow a “reasonable” alternative point of view.

Trump Derangement Syndrome was also a smokescreen for Donald Trump’s wild success in advancing the agenda of the plutocrats, gangster capitalists, Christian nationalists and “Dominionists” — as well as overt white supremacists — in destroying the very idea of government itself as well as American multiracial democracy.

Of course, it was not Donald Trump’s most vocal critics who were “deranged” but his followers, enablers and allies. As I explained in January 2017, shortly before his inauguration:

It is not those who oppose Trump who are deranged, but rather those voters who convinced themselves that a plutocrat authoritarian reality TV star con man and professional wrestler wannabe with no experience in government at any level was qualified to be president of the United States.

This is America’s great national derangement. Those who stand against and oppose Donald Trump are patriots who are trying to return the country to sanity.

Now, some three months away from another Election Day, Donald Trump has finally arrived at the moment which those of us who were slurred as “hysterical” and “alarmist” have warned about for more than five years.

Last Thursday, Trump issued this now-infamous tweet:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote??? [// muslim ban "whAT'S GOIng on" = agenda/ deep state]

That same afternoon, when questioned about Trump’s threats to interfere with the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the U.S. Senate: “In the end, the Department of Justice and others will make that legal determination.” This is not true. The Department of Justice and the president possess no legitimate authority to delay or cancel a federal election.

Later in the day, Trump continued to work from the authoritarian’s playbook, attempting to pivot away from his earlier statements. During a White House press event, Trump said:

Do I want to see a date change? No. But I don’t want to see a crooked election.  What will happen in November – it’s a mess. I want a result much more than you… I don’t want to be waiting around for weeks and months.

This is a familiar strategy in which the authoritarian challenges norms and boundaries by floating trial balloons and then pretends to change his mind as a way to make the heretofore-unthinkable into something acceptable.

Trump’s most recent threats are but another crescendo in he and his servants’ efforts to subvert and eventually overturn secular multiracial democracy and the rule of law in America.

Only weeks ago Trump began deploying his own personal secret police force, hoping to enforce his will by suppressing dissent and free speech in Democratic-led cities all over the United States. The events in Portland, Oregon, are but a prelude to Trump’s national terrordome.

Trump’s own personal secret police force along with his civilian “watchdogs,” may well be used to intimidate Democratic voters on Election Day and beyond. Trump has repeatedly asked hostile foreign countries to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on his behalf. He was impeached for doing just that with his attempt to blackmail the government of Ukraine to launch a phony investigation of Joe Biden.

Trump continues to threaten senior Democratic leaders, including Biden, Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others withtreasoncharges, potential imprisonment and perhaps even execution. Former national security adviser John Bolton’s recent book includes details of Trump’s lurid fantasies about having journalists killed. According to Bolton, Trump supports imprisoning his “enemies” in concentration camps — something he is already doing with brown and Black migrants and refugees from Latin America, the Caribbean and other parts of the nonwhite world.

Donald Trump, has repeated his threats, ever since the 2016 campaign, that he will not respect the will of the American people if he loses a presidential election.

In sum, Donald Trump is not pretending. None of this is a game. He is a neo-fascist. Such observations and warnings are not hysterical. They are plain observations based on a consensus of the available facts. [also he can be prosecuted, just today info DA new charges?]

As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained in a 2017 essay at The Washington Post:

The strongman knows that it starts with words. He uses them early on to test out his plans to expand and personalize executive power on political elites, the press and the public, watching their reactions as they arrange into the timeless categories of allies, enemies and those who help him by remaining silent. Some say the strongman is all bluster, but he takes words seriously, including the issue of which ones should be banned.

Now what to do?

In a perfect and just world, the hope peddlers, professional centrists, stenographers of current events and others who maintain the boundaries of approved public discourse in America would go to the public square, prostrate themselves before the world and then beg forgiveness for how they, for years and by various means, empowered Donald Trump.

That will not happen. Instead, such voices will proclaim that they were sounding the alarm about Donald Trump years ago and are the real vanguard defenders of American democracy. In reality, such voices were enablers, far behind the truth if not actively running away it. They are now trying to position themselves on the correct side of history because their shame and failure to protect America from Donald Trump and his neo-fascist movement are so great.

In the weeks remaining before Election Day — which will certainly not be “free and fair” and when Trump’s machinations will be at their most extreme — the mainstream news media and theAmerican people must internalize the fact that the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution mean little for Trump and his regime.

Hopeful claims — or delusions — that the Constitution and state laws dictate the rules of Election Day must be viewed with extreme cynicism. Trump and his enforcers are not restrained by such arcane conventions.

If there is indeed an election on Nov. 3, Americans mUst vote against Trump in overwhelming numbers in order to force him to step down. Unless Donald Trump is convincingly vanquished at the polls, he will find some way to stay in office.

If Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr try to cancel the presidential election or interfere with it in any other way, Americans must take to the streets and engage in corporeal politics — including a national strike and other plans to disrupt day-to-day life and “business as usual” — on a scale so large that they make the George Floyd people’s uprising look like a PTA meeting.

Ultimately, those of us who warned the American people for years, sometimes on a daily basis, about this Mad King and would-be tyrant take no joy from saying, We told you so. There is no satisfaction in being correct about such a horrible thing.

On this point,Jared Yates Sexton, author of “American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People,” wrote last Thursday on Twitter:

Those of us warning that Trump is an authoritarian capable of destroying democracy haven’t been doing it for profit or attention or out of unwarranted alarmism. None of this is hard to predict. They don’t hide it at all. Stop expecting everything to be fine because “America.”

To watch American democracy, fall so ill so fast, and now to be on the verge of collapse — when such a thing could have been so easily prevented — is a world historical tragedy. SYSTEM CRASH economy, health care sys?!

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aha: trump utter fail on covid. numbers scary and undeniable (tho they try to suppress by route to DHS, swat secret police];

BLM not really subsiding, and they need it a bogeyman so trump can do Nixonian Law and Order scam; cruel irony/paradox is trump/libtards unable or unwilling to govern, so crash/crisis then gives cover for I alone am strong man who can deal with these commie degenerates who hate aMerica. [tho so far just kick blame to states [tho kemp under the bus on covid mask lawsuit?]

one of 4 horses, related to all but esp militarization, esp on climate refugee; note sub-lethal used on nat aM dapl remote ppl of color now pepperball explodes to head of activist, press lost eye?  state of exception/margin periphery comes to Portland

yikes primary 7/20 portland secret police

:{:{}:

}:

combo of militarization and criminalization (of undoc immigrant, periphery, then sanctuary city, BLM ACTIVIST AND PRESS SUB-LETHAL WEAPONS)

why did portland get hit 1st by secret police vs seattle autonomous zone?

Washington enacted a measure in June 2019 in favor of sanctuary cities, similar to California and Oregon laws which are among the strongest statewide mandates in the nation.^[186]

• Seattle^[187]

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~EJ

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04062020/trump-pipeline-sign-amid-racial-justice-coronavirus

With the nation convulsed by multiple crises, President Donald Trump returned to a favorite stand-by of his presidency—asserting his authority to sweep aside environmental restraints and speed up construction of oil and gas pipelines.

But the executive order that he signed Thursday night—the third of his presidency aimed at expediting pipelines—is destined to spur more of the type of litigation that has rendered his previous directives ineffective so far.

The White House invoked the same legal authority the president has to expedite hurricane and flood response actions to declare an "economic emergency," that requires the waiving of environmental reviews and other regulations.

"This order will be a sitting duck for the sorts of legal challenges that have been so successfully brought against other Trump environmental rollbacks," said Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. "Few developers or lenders will risk millions on starting construction in reliance on this order surviving in court."

The White House provided few details on the order before the scheduled signing at 4:30 p.m. "I can tell you it does have to do some of the permitting and energy as it relates to rebuilding this country," said presidential spokesman Hogan Gidley in a brief noon appearance before reporters.

By 6 p.m., the White House had provided no copy of the order. There was no live streaming of any signing, nor any public appearance by Trump at the White House, where workers spent the day erecting tall metal barricades around the perimeter of the complex. Outside, crowds of protestors flanked the presidential residence in one of the demonstrations for racial justice that have proliferated in cities across the nation since the police killing of George Lloyd.

Finally, after 6:15 p.m., the White House made copies of the order available. 

"From the beginning of my Administration, I have focused on reforming and streamlining an outdated regulatory system that has held back our economy with needless paperwork and costly delays," Trump said in the document. "Antiquated regulations and bureaucratic practices have hindered American infrastructure investments, kept America'sbuilding trades workers from working,andprevented our citizens from developing and enjoying the benefits of world-class infrastructure. The need for continued progress in this streamlining effort is all the more acute now, due to the ongoing economic crisis."

The president's critics were quick to point out that his order was poorly timed, since minority communities would be disproportionately affected by his move to waive theenvironmental review mandated under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). 

"Today President Trump is dealing another blow to the Black community, during a worldwide pandemic and nearly a week into nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and structural racism," said Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, in a statement. "Gutting NEPA takes away one of the few tools communities of color have to protect themselves and make their voices heard on federal decisions impacting them."

The second executive order of Trump's presidency, issued in January 2017 (after his plan to repeal Obamacare), was a directive to expedite oil and gas pipelines. In his speeches, he often repeats a line about creating 48,000 jobs in his first week in office by reviving the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada and the Dakota Access pipeline in the midwest. 

In fact, environmental opponents of the Keystone project have so far been successful in preventing its advance with legal challenges to its water permit. And although the Dakota Access pipeline was completed, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in March won a court order for a sweeping new environmental review of the project; the judge is now considering whether the flow of oil should be stopped while the review is completed.

Legal experts expressed doubt that Trump's latest order could directly affect the outcomes in the Keystone XL or Dakota Access litigation. In the future, such litigation by states and tribes may be made more difficult by rules that the Environmental Protection Agency finalized this week in response to a 2019 Trump executive order.

Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.), the highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee,said in a statement that it was clear that Trump is seeking to cut communities out of the process. 

"By allowing projects to plow ahead without public engagement or input, this executive order will fast-track projects that could tear through communities, harm air quality, endanger drinking water sources, destroy critical habitats and threaten endangered species," said Carper. "Under the guise of immediate relief, this executive action will cause long-term damage that will not be easily undone."

Legal experts noted that Trump's use of the economic downturn to invoke environmental waivers was unprecedented. "These emergency exemptions have traditionally been used for necessary fast responses to disasters, such as clearing away debris after a hurricane, or building field hospitals," said Gerrard in an email. "They have not been used as a backdoor way of creating construction jobs."

Jayni Foley Hein, natural resources director at New York University Law School's Institute for Policy Integrity, said Trump's novel legal theory could have an effect that is precisely the opposite of what the White House intends. "In a strange way, this could create more uncertainty for project developers, as their approvals will be on shakier legal footing," Hein said.

"It's hard to say if it's bluster and posturing or if it's wishful thinking or some combination," Hein said. 

But so far at least, despite his repeated efforts, Trump has been singularly unsuccessful in building pipelines with a stroke of his pen.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

OIL SPILLS/PIPELINES

POLITICS

DONALD TRUMP

PIPELINES

CLIMATE CHANGE

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trumps-american-fuhrer-fantasy-yale-psychiatrist-says-the-presidents-displays-of-false-strength-foreshadow-plan-to-question-election-results/

a Yale psychiatrist who has repeatedly sounded the alarm on President Donald Trump’s mental health warned that his “displays of false strength” foreshadow his reaction to the November election if he loses.

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine, author of the textbook “Violence,” and editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” Lee, who heads the World Mental Health Coalition, focuses on public health approaches to violence prevention and has led various think tanks that seek to “draw connections between individual, community, and societal violence, as they are interrelated.”

Lee spoke to Salon after Trump threat this week to deploy the U.S. military onto American streets to quell protests and staged a photo-op in front of a church after federal forces stormed peaceful protesters outside the White House.

“He may not start culture wars, or pandemics, but his psychological structure will occupy them and turn them far deadlier,” Lee warned in an interview with Salon.

she also about Trump’s threats, the president’s enablers and what this all means for the upcoming election. Lee stressed that she speaks only for the World Mental Health Coalition, as its president, and not for Yale.

Trump declared himself an ally of peaceful protesters on Monday before federal authorities tear-gassed protesters so he could get a photo-op in front of St. John’s Church holding a Bible. What were your takeaways from the cognitive dissonance on display?

Approximately nine months ago, I devised a formula for “translating” Donald Trump’s tweets, based on long-term, repeated, real-time testing of theories about his psychology. Part of it was that mere mention indicates a reality that is important to him and one he wishes to suppress by stating the opposite. This is not just cognitive dissonance but serious disorder of psychology: when he says he is “president of law and order,” he is actually “telling us” he is president of illegality and chaos.

This means he is no ally of “peaceful protesters” but their enemy, eager to designate them as “professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa, and others” — as he did in the next sentence. First, they are standing up for their rights, and democracy does not exist within a worldview where everyone must be an instrument of his “total authority.” Second, police brutality is something he enjoys and encourages, as when he said to a group of police officers, “When you guys put somebody in the car, please don’t be too nice.” Third, he is obviously itching for an excuse to federalize the military and step in to rescue the day. His followers have been responding to his cues and many police have been gratuitously aggressive, never mind that the protests are against police brutality.

This is how he keeps and expands illegitimate power, stays out of prison and declares himself American Führer — what he actually calls himself does not matter. A member of Congress said the president had declared war on millions of Americans and the First Amendment, and I must agree. As far as I have assessed, he declared war on reality and life itself long ago.

You’ve previously talked about Trump projecting his own flaws onto others. Was his attack on governors, decrying them as “weak,” after he retreated to the White House bunker amid protests an example of that?

Yes. According to reports, he was afraid his retreat to the White House bunker made him look weak, and hence his impulse the next day was to do the opposite. This unstable decision-making is part of what makes him mentally incapable of serving as president, as we outlined in our evaluation of the Mueller report. I have emphasized in my Yale Law School and Yale College classes that the psychology of violence is not courage but the opposite — and violent individuals’ accusations are most often “confessions” of their deep-seated fears. When they are most terrified and afraid is when they are at the greatest risk of lashing out — and the president of the United States still commands the most powerful military on the planet and its second-largest nuclear arsenal.

What do Trump’s threats to send the military into American streets tell you about where he is, with regard to the protests? Do you think this is another culture-war battle for him, or might he actually defy all modern precedent and follow through?

Civil insurrection gives him the perfect excuse to bring in “his” military, and he is priming the public to accept this nationwide. We need to look out for martial law without declaring it as such, and theft of elections by postponing, canceling or declaring them “rigged.” The method does not matter so much as achieving these ends, and mental health professionals understand the power of the mind to do this, especially when disordered and irrational. This is why I have emphasized the need for consultation with psychological experts, through impeachment or anything else. Bringing political or even legal weapons to psychological warfare will be like bringing tanks and canons to combat a cyber attack. They are simply not relevant. What we need is boundary setting, before things get out of hand, against his impulse to push ever greater psychological limits for himself and for the public.

How do we do this, when allies like Sen. Tom Cotton and Fox News host Tucker Carlson want him to get even more aggressive? What does this tell you about the president’s supporters?

We know that the psychology of the president and his supporters is not healthy, and it will only continue to attract pathology and to invite destruction. This is why I believe that the American Psychiatric Association, which not only failed in its duty to protect public health but functioned as the government’s psychiatric arm to stop independent, conscientious mental health experts from doing so — and was handsomely rewarded in the process — has acted unconscionably. It has done immeasurable damage, much like the Justice Department has done by acting as the president’s personal law firm, subverting the law it was supposed to uphold.

How do we counter this? Truth is a great antidote. After Donald Trump had Park Police and the National Guard assault peaceful protesters with tear gas, so he could walk over to St. John’s Church and have his photo-op with a Bible, without permission, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde called out his “charade.” “The President just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition … as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus,” she said.

To call out his false Christianity, his false patriotism, his caricature-like displays of false strength and ultimately his false mental capacity to be president is to draw the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.

For the past week, Americans have watched constant images of police committing violence against protesters. How does watching wall-to-wall coverage of state-sanctioned violence affect the entire country’s psychology moving forward?

We know from successful people’s movements that nonviolence is stronger than violence. Speaking up is powerful at times like this. If enough people speak the truth and do not back down, then Donald Trump’s spell over his followers will be broken. He has targeted and punished those who do that, as deterrence, but this all the more reveals his Achilles’ heel. Since the psychiatric establishment won’t do it, the Justice Department won’t do it, and the Congress won’t do it, conscientious citizens need to ready ourselves for it, psychologically and spiritually, recognizing the moment we are in.

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aha, yikes, democracy threatened by crisis eg  orban hungary ,

620 an

The battle over free speech online is a volcano that’s ready to blow

Marshall Auerback / Independent Media Institute

Donald Trump threatened to close Twitter down a day after the social media giant marked his tweets with a fact-check warning label for the first time. The president followed th...

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an 620

Ex-intelligence officials warn we are dangerously close to a complete unraveling of democracyNancy LeTourneau / Washington Mon

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omg two ~ crisis: covid and BLM

blm --> anti trump protest, loot--> shoot, "ominous force"

cohen plus macho BS, see retaliation

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-tells-mayors-and-governors-most-of-you-are-weak-during-teleconference-rant-about-unrest-you-have-to-dominate/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/listen-heres-the-leaked-audio-of-trumps-unhinged-call-with-governors-and-says-they-need-to-crack-down-on-protesters/

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global protests erupt in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters in US

Julia Conley / Common Dreams

People in a number of international cities violated bans on large gatherings over the weekend to show solidarity with protests against police brutality.

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an 620

trump can’t bail himself out by stoking white people’s fear of rioting ‘thugs’

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never waste a crisis: disaster capitalism poster child eg katrina New Orleans

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/betsy-devos-openly-admits-shes-using-the-pandemic-to-further-her-private-school-choice-agenda/

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Right-wing media irresponsibly cheered the coronavirus-related gun buying surge

05/20/20 11:06 AM EDT

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/economist-thomas-piketty-coronavirus-pandemic-has-exposed-the-violence-of-social-inequality/

...AMY GOODMAN: Well, it is a great honor to have you with us. Can you talk now about how this pandemic is likely to trigger the sharpest recession in the United States since the Great Depression, perhaps a depression? Can you talk about the long-term effects of the crisis, and perhaps what can be done to ameliorate it?

:{:{}:

}:

THOMAS PIKETTY: Right. So, you know, what I show in my new book, Capital and Ideology, is that this kind of crisis, very often in history, has a potential to change dominant views about what we should do about the economy, how we should organize our societies, the level of inequality.

So, you know, the first visible impact of the crisis is that we see the violence of social inequality. So, you know, people are not equal with respect to lockdowns. They are not equal with respect to joblessness, income loss. So, you know, you can see people who have a very small home or people who have no home, who are homeless, are in a very different situation than people who are locked down in their nice apartment or nice house.

And in terms of income support, you know, when you don’t have any wealth in saving and when you are in a very precarious labor market position, you lose your income resources very fast. And I should say that, you know, the unemployment benefit system in the U.S., in particular, is far too restrictive, and you have lots of workers who actually don’t have access to adequate income support. You have lots of people who don’t have access to housing.

And we’ve seen some of your reports, from just before, that it’s a service issue. You know, we should do more. And the U.S. government and governments around the world should do more about changing their view on what we do with housing, you know, getting urgent solutions for the people who don’t have proper housing, extending income support, making them over and beyond what we’ve been doing in the different countries.

And then we also need to start thinking about a different kind of recovery. We cannot just go business as usual with the same economic sectors again. I think it’s an opportunity to rethink about a different kind of recovery, you know, more green, more social and trying to reach a more equitable and more sustainable development model, because this is something we’ve been discussing for a long time, especially since the 2008 financial crisis. And I think, with the financing of this crisis, we are going to have to change our view about what’s a proper level of inequality in a society.

You know, we see today that all the ideologies against government action, in particular against public health systems and public investment in the hospitals, this discourse today, of course, looks very weak, given the reality of the situation. So, you know, I think this is likely to change. It has already been changed to some extent, but this needs to go much further than what we have done so far....

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27032020/coronavirus-covid-19-EPA-API-environmental-enforcement

long

The Trump administration's unprecedented decision to suspend enforcement of U.S. environmental laws amid the COVID-19 crisis throws a lifeline to the oil industry as it copes with the greatest threat to its business in a generation.

The decision, announced late Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency, comes after a detailed call for help from the industry's largest trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, five days earlier.

The EPA went further than meeting the oil industry's request—announcing a blanket policy suspending enforcement and civil penalties for any regulated entity that can show COVID-19 was the cause of a failure to comply with the law. But it is clear that a primary beneficiary will be the oil industry, which sought suspension of its obligations under consent decrees over past air and water pollution violations at its refineries, deferral of requirements on handling of fracking wastewater and a pause in reporting its greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution.

On Friday afternoon, the EPA announced a separate action to relieve refineries of their legal obligation this year to produce "summer" blends of gasoline, designed to reduce smog-forming emissions....

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420 never waste crisis

NLRB suspends unionizing amid COVID-19 crisis

Terry Schwadron / DC Report

Just as delivery personnel, medical staffers and just about everyone who has to be out in first-responder roles is raising serious questions about lacking proper protections, the federal government has…

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see icn 320 on epa etc scams

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27032020/coronavirus-covid-pandemic-agriculture-plastics-airlines-renewables-coal

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OMG more evil?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/holy-crap-this-is-insane-citing-coronavirus-pandemic-epa-indefinitely-suspends-environmental-rules/

no lnx

‘Holy crap this is insane’: Citing coronavirus pandemic, EPA indefinitely suspends environmental rules

Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1417570841 Washington, DC/USA - June 3, 2019: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler speaks at the National Press Club.]

Written by Common Dreams March 28, 2020

“The EPA uses this global pandemic to create loopholes for destroying the environment. This is a schoolbook example for what we need to start looking out for.”

The Environmental Protection Agency, headed by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, announced on Thursday a sweeping and indefinite suspension of environmental rules amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, a move green groups warned gives the fossil fuel industry a “green light to pollute with impunity.”

Under the new policy (pdf), which the EPA insisted is temporary while providing no timeframe, big polluters will effectively be trusted to regulate themselves and will not be punished for failing to comply with reporting rules and other requirements. The order—applied retroactively beginning March 13, 2020—requests that companies “act responsibly” to avoid violations.

“Outrageous. Suspending all environmental regulations indefinitely? This has nothing to do with coronavirus. This has everything to do with protecting Big Business.”

—Rep. Mark Pocan

“EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment, but recognizes challenges resulting from efforts to protect workers and the public from COVID-19 may directly impact the ability of regulated facilities to meet all federal regulatory requirements,” Wheeler said in a statement. “This temporary policy is designed to provide enforcement discretion under the current, extraordinary conditions, while ensuring facility operations continue to protect human health and the environment.”

Critics, such as youth climate leader Greta Thunberg, accused the Trump administration of exploiting the coronavirus crisis to advance its longstanding goal of drastically rolling back environmental protections.

“The EPA uses this global pandemic to create loopholes for destroying the environment,” tweeted Thunberg. “This is a schoolbook example for what we need to start looking out for.”

Cynthia Giles, former head of the EPA’s Office of Enforcement under the Obama administration, told The Hill that the new policy is “essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future.”

“It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way ’caused’ by the virus pandemic,”said Giles. “And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was.”

Holy crap this is insane: The Trump administration just waived enforcement of the EPA’s environmental rules during the coronavirus pandemic for the indefinite future. Obama’s EPA enforcement chief strongly condemned it as an abdication of duty https://t.co/5JLDjeZb5K pic.twitter.com/mTgoiCDyxP

— Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) March 27, 2020

The EPA’s order, for which the oil industry aggressively lobbied, represents the latest effort by the Trump administration to use the coronavirus pandemic to advance right-wing policies that would likely not be permitted—or would at least face greater scrutiny—under normal circumstances.

As Common Dreams reported last week, the White House is advancing an assault on public-sector unions, xenophobic border policies, and other objectives amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has officially infected more than 85,000 people in the United States as of Friday morning.

“Outrageous,” tweeted Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in response to the EPA’s new policy. “Suspending all environmental regulations indefinitely? This has nothing to do with coronavirus. This has everything to do with protecting Big Business.”

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smash and grab;

maybe redumbdent but

broadly observed that since trump has no guiding principle or ideology, he just knee-jerk reverses anything BO was for (this maybe a variant of McConnell we will make BO a one term prez even if he works for stuff we want.

parallel to smash and grab window of opportunity idea: we don't much like trump or agree with him, but his win plus control of 1 or 2 houses gives as a short time to push thru a decades old wishlist of stuff that we either wanted for ideological reasons (red meat for base evangelicals) or stuff that corps will pay us to do eg rollback regs.

spats: variant of above, the oldest most absurd thing you thot long dead comes back zombie-like like BULB bill:

Spats Syndrome

aha 1119 expansion: gop know trump will implode (or beaten or even term out?) so jamming thru decades old wishlist with Koch backing; jams thru rereg, esp environ, while McConn stalls all progressive bills, guns, protect elections...

ceo // seagull consultant, // gogo 80's M&O extract value short term then flee.

// apocalyptic end times? sounds wacky but Watts? dominionist cabinet?!

more realistically, could be matt effect death spiral: gop/tp/djt think gov't evil or at least inept and wasteful, so dereg, undermine good governance, campaign finance law, norms/inst, experts, plant swamp things to neuter caputre agencies, then fail, then claim as evidence that gov't bad.  THEN USE FAIL/CRISIS TO JAM THRU SELF-ISH STEALTH AGENDA;  minor variant of 2 santas.  HEADS I WIN "LOGIC"

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no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/coronavirus-is-shaking-the-global-economy-but-its-had-an-underlying-disease-for-a-long-time/

Why the coronavirus could be the tipping point in reshaping the global economy

[President Donald J. Trump joins the G7 Leadership and Extended G7 members as they pose for the “family photo” at the G7 Extended Partners Program Sunday evening, Aug. 25, 2019, at the Hotel du Palais Biarritz, site of the G7 Summit in Biarritz, France. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)]

Written by Marshall Auerback / Independent Media Institute March 17, 2020

The coronavirus has now gone global, and economies are in freefall. The pandemic is clearly the precipitating cause of today’s crisis, but there’s an underlying disease that has been with us for a long time: neoliberal economics. Globalized travel and trade, multinational supply lines, offshoring and overly financialized economies that have prioritized banking interests, cartels and oligarchy above all else have made a large portion of our population highly vulnerable to the effects unleashed by this pandemic.

Policymakers have a tricky task ahead of them. The virus has created a supply shock, as businesses have shut down and workers have been told to stay at home. In response, demand is plunging as a result of the lost income and the corresponding collapse in sales. That’s highly deflationary (as the bond markets are now signaling). What is required is a robust fiscal response so that workers’ incomes are protected and have adequate financial resources to get health care.

At the same time, an environment in which work and production grinds to a halt for a prolonged period to mitigate the effects of the virus likely means that goods are not being produced or delivered. This creates the conditions for hyperinflation, if not accompanied by rationing or some form of price control. Hyperinflationary eras are relatively rare, but they can occur when countries continue to pay the workers in local currency despite limited production being possible, but nominal demand continues to rise relative to real output, which is now grinding to a halt. This is the real downside of mass lockdown, and self-quarantining, if those workers continue to receive fiscal support through the duration of the crisis (as they should). But absent fiscal support (or having it largely directed to society’s top tier as occurred after the 2008 crisis), you could get depression. Get the balance wrong, then, and civil unrest becomes a real possibility in either scenario. To paraphrase Barack Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, we can’t afford to let another serious crisis go to waste.

As one might have expected, the Trump administration has proved itself fully inadequate to the task at hand. Their proposed payroll tax cut is useless to someone who is an hourly earner and where there are no wages upon which to be taxed. A better policy for our circumstances is along the lines recently proposed by Jason Furman, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration: “Congress should pass a simple one-time payment of $1,000 to every adult who is a U.S. citizen or a taxpaying U.S. resident, and $500 to every child who meets the same criteria.”

While it is good to see the Trump administration now considering some variant of the Furman proposal, it is obvious that a one-time payment isn’t going to cut it. We need to sustain income support so long as people are affected by this pandemic. Therefore, other measures should also include: 1) Moratoriums on mortgage and rental payments for the duration of the crisis (no interest rate penalties/no evictions). 2) Extensive relief for out of work employees (not just unemployment insurance). 3) An expansion of credit to small businesses to cover carrying costs so long as the economy remains in lockdown.

Likewise, the attempt at providing guaranteed sick leave to most American workers affected by the crisis so far falls dangerously short of furnishing anything close to universal paid sick leave. According to the New York Times, the Coronavirus Bill “guarantees sick leave only to about 20 percent of private-sector workers.” This comes on top of a decades-long crisis in the U.S. health care system, the world’s most expensive health care system that distributes care poorly and inequitably.

What’s most worrying about this bill is that the House Democrats caved on virtually every exemption insisted on by the White House and congressional Republicans, which should give voters a good sense of how a future Biden presidency would perform, given the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s long history of appeasing the GOP.

But the problems in the U.S. go well beyond the Trump administration, as the extent of the U.S. government’s long-term misplaced policy priorities is coming home to roost. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), for example, have thoroughly screwed up the response, first and foremost by bungling testing for the coronavirus. With the same parochial hubris of American exceptionalism that has caused our medical and health care establishment to ignore results of pharmaceutical drug tests and clinical advances from abroad, the CDC rejected the already-developed Chinese and World Health Organization tests for coronavirus and insisted on unnecessarily inventing their own test kits—which turned out to be a dog’s breakfast that delayed our all-important mass testing program by several weeks. And, of course, the testing mess is continuing because the CDC made no advance provisions for turning on adequate emergency test lab capacity during this or any other epidemic crisis. The problems of the CDC are symptomatic of a broader problem in health care, in which a private sector oligopoly largely predicated on employment and income status, and prioritizing profits over adequate public provision, has proved itself wanting.

That said, the growing appreciation of the magnitude of the health crisis is now intersecting with the political dynamics of the 2020 presidential election. This has had the fortuitous result of producing additional fiscal expansion: the Trump administration has superseded its previous paltry paid leave proposal with a new $850 billion stimulus program (though still too reliant on “trickle-down” economics, as opposed to direct economic assistance to those most in need).

What about the rest of the world?

In Europe, the responses from the relevant authorities in Brussels and Frankfurt have exposed any pretensions about the EU acting like a cohesive political bloc. Bereft of a supranational currency, national governments have been reticent to undertake forceful fiscal policy actions absent the support of the sole currency-issuing entity, the European Central Bank (ECB), even as France and Spain have followed Italy by imposing widespread lockdowns and quarantines across each country (which will require a large fiscal stimulus to offset the likely economic impact). Here’s the other problem: Their economies have been shut down in response to the coronavirus, but the lockdowns themselves are a response to decades of austerity that have starved the health care systems of adequate resources to deal with the pandemic, thereby necessitating widespread quarantines to avert an even more serious breakdown of the system.

National borders, which since 2015 have been increasingly subject to “temporary” checks (despite the Schengen Agreement), are starting to look more permanent thanks to the virus. European solidarity is dissipating as all countries scramble to find national responses to the virus. There is no longer any pretense of having a coordinated EU-wide response. It’s every country for itself, as Professor Bill Mitchell notes, quoting a German ministry publication stating that the country’s “Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy published an order on 4 March 2020 in the Federal Gazette prohibiting the export of protective medical equipment (medical face masks, gloves, protective suits, etc.).” So much for “an ever closer European Union.”

Germany has also moved to seal off its borders to cope with the coronavirus, an ironic development from a government that had humanely granted asylum to 1 million refugees a mere five years ago. Next up, a reassessment of state aid and fiscal rules? Then perhaps repatriation of critical supply lines on national security grounds?

Meanwhile, the single-currency union is fraying at the edges, as credit spreads explode again. The euro may be in its death throes, as the new ECB president, Christine Lagarde, has proved herself unready for prime time. Her botched communication triggered a bond market sell-off on March 12 when she announced: “We are not here to close spreads, this is not the function or the mission of the ECB.” Although she subsequently apologized, the damage remains. Italy’s borrowing costs are likely to soar now that Lagarde has effectively repudiated the measures of her predecessor, Mario Draghi (whose “whatever it takes” speech was widely credited with calming the eurozone’s debt crisis in 2012, thereby substantially narrowing the cost of borrowing in the distressed Mediterranean economies).

It’s all well to call for a coordinated fiscal response, but the ECB president appears unable to recognize that the absence of explicit support from the eurozone’s sole currency issuer (along the lines proposed by Draghi) is precisely what constrains the ability of the national governments to undertake the kinds of robust coordinated actions that she rightly advocates. Absent that support, these countries are all exposed to solvency risk, and the vagaries of private portfolio preferences.

Suffice to say, COVID-19 might prove to be a major tipping point, as it accelerates a paradigm shift in terms of people’s attitudes toward the EU, the role of the state and public health, the need for monetary sovereignty, the madness of austerity, etc. Even the former chief economist of the historically austerity-oriented International Monetary Fund (IMF), Olivier Blanchard, has suggested incurring budget deficits of the magnitude of those sustained by the U.S. during World War II (which went as high as 26 percent of GDP). Truly, the age of austerity is behind us.

Likewise in the UK, Boris Johnson’s budget statement of March 11 outlined the most sustained fiscal loosening seen in that country since 1992. Yet even that is unlikely to be enough, given the rapid spread of the contagion and likely collapse of economic output (which is probably going to be closer to 4-6 percent of GDP, if the 2008 experience is anything to go by). As a result, UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak has followed up the budget with an announced £330 billion to support the economy during the coronavirus outbreak, including a system of loans and grants for companies; temporary tax relief for companies in the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors; and help for the airline industry. The Johnson government is also moving to “war footing,” urging British manufacturers to make the ventilators, masks, gloves, beds, and other items health care workers and others on the front line of the crisis need, according to the Sunday Times.

Wartime analogies have understandably been invoked to convey the magnitude of the crisis and corresponding need for massive, sustained government spending to support the life and health of the population and efforts to restructure manufacturing supply chains in ways reminiscent of war economies. This is more problematic today, given the extent to which excessive offshoring has exposed our inability to ensure consistent and safe supply of anything and decades of austerity that have undermined basic social services.

On the other hand, the wartime analogy only goes so far: human capital is at risk, but physical infrastructure is not being destroyed, as in wartime. And in wartime, economic activity continues flat out, as the requisite munitions are turned out to conduct military operations. Here, workers are being told to self-isolate, and stay at home, which means a lot is not being produced.

In many respects, it is better to think of the current situation as a global economy being in a state of suspended animation: Virtually all activity has been frozen as policymakers work to contain the spread of COVID-19 and the rest of us engage in social distancing and self-quarantine at home, the major byproduct of which has been the decimation global supply chains, along with of a host of service industries, notably travel and tourism, restaurants and retailers.

The other key distinction is that unlike war, there is a definitive endpoint, the glimpses of which are slowly becoming apparent. Although now spreading across the globe, the number of Chinese cases (the original source of the virus) have trickled to a halt since first being identified late last year; that might provide us with a lead indicator in terms of duration in the rest of the world, as we scramble to find a vaccine, and level off the exponential rise in cases outside of China. But in the meantime, the coronavirus is creating an unprecedented situation where possibly half of our workforce, or possibly more, may not be able to work. The impact on economic activity is comparatively that much larger. Absent a return to production at some point, our Western economies could come to resemble Venezuelan anarchy.

It is true that the monetary authorities have responded aggressively, by cutting rates and providing access to cheap credit, especially for small business enterprises hit badly by the crisis. The U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, ECB and Swiss National Bank have all cut rates and revived the U.S. dollar swap line arrangements, a development that helped to mitigate the dollar liquidity shortage in 2009. On the other hand, easing credit conditions can only help so much when one experiences a supply shock that induces a cessation of production.

The other challenge is that the coronavirus has vividly illustrated many of the hollow claims behind the “gig economy.” Many of its celebrated “freedoms” masked the precariousness of the independent contractors most heavily exposed to this economy, notably their reliance on consumer debt, paltry wages, and the absence of any employee benefits, such as health care. In the U.S., in particular, this subsector is large and getting larger, “over 31.5 million, constituting nearly 30% of all production and non-supervisory jobs,” according to Dan Alpert, an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School.

Equally disturbing is that much of the postindustrial workforce that is in the front line of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic (in sectors such as health and elder care) is likewise in low-wage, low-benefit, insecure jobs, which not only generates increasing vulnerabilities to demand, but also mitigates the capacity of the system to limit the spread of the virus (especially when the care workers are starved of the resources to protect themselves).

Enforced isolation only provides a brief palliative against the true costs of the fraying of our social safety net brought about by decades of attacks on the working and middle class and in the long-term risks civil unrest. Growth and production do matter. As much as we might laud the sudden switch to telecommuting and working online as one of the liberating aspects of the gig economy, it is manifestly unsuitable for manufacturing, where excessive disbursement and modularization can adversely impact the production processes (the recent travails of Boeing being a perfect illustration of this phenomenon).

It is similarly unclear whether our educational institutes can adequately provide comparable results when so much teaching and research and development depends on a community of interacting minds. On top of this, there are the long-term social implications. If this were to become the “new normal,” increased atomization and anomie will likely follow, and the loneliness and meaninglessness that feed suicide, mass shootings, and drug addiction could well risk becoming a new pandemic.

There is also a risk that this virus could actually delay the transition from “rentierism” to a “national developmentalism,” as I suspect all sorts of goodies will be passed on to the rentier class under cover of dealing with the coronavirus.  That’s already happening: lots more quantitative easing has been announced, and bailouts are being rapidly targeted to industries adversely impacted, such as the airlines, but a lot less to help has gone to the people who work in those industries. Had today’s rapidly emerging depression-like economic state occurred because of another financial crisis a la 2008, it would have been less politically feasible to deploy the same policy matrix we used in 2008. So while it is laudable to see fiscal stimulus proposals growing in proportion to the growth of the pandemic, it is important to consider the distributional aspects of these stimulus measures in the months ahead. We must avoid a situation like the last crisis, where the vast bulk of the gains were quickly funneled to the top 1 percent with minimal political scrutiny, exacerbating the current situation we have today.

The inequality question will become even more germane in the U.S. if we get a Biden restoration of the status quo ante. Even as the coronavirus has exposed many longstanding weaknesses, notably our inability to make and distribute the things people need, the Democratic Party is still prone to deficit fetishism. Democrats are today being outflanked by the GOP, even its most right-wing members. Trump is finally responding to the belated recognition that his presidency is now imperiled by this crisis. But even if he loses, the indications suggest that a political reconfiguration could emerge first in the GOP, especially if it is ultimately led by a “New Deal Republican,” such as Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio. Meanwhile, the eurozone stands alone as it risks repeating the dreadful 1931 policies that exacerbated a global depression. As surprising as it might have seemed a mere six months ago, the optimal way forward might be provided by the United Kingdom if it continues in its goal of revitalizing the country via intelligent economic nationalism in which government-guided industrial policy is used to revive high-end industrial activity and redomicile a whole host of supply networks that generate highly skilled, well-paid jobs that benefit the many, as opposed to a limited number of economic rentiers. Post-Brexit, this is exactly what the UK will need, as it extricates itself from the ideological sterility of Thatcherism and the eurozone’s neoliberalism.

But the biggest takeaway from the crisis is that our societies must be immunized from the sickness of a diseased ideology that has done far more long-term damage to us than the current pandemic.

Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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nRA board member Ted Nugent: “Asian culture” is “evil”

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aha? covid accelerating, amplifying inequality?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-little-trump-cares-for-workers-and-how-much-he-values-corporate-swamp-monsters-is-now-on-full-display/

How little Trump cares for workers — and how much he values corporate swamp monsters — is now on full display

Written by David Cay Johnson / DC Report, Raw Story March 17, 2020

This article was paid for by Raw Story subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

The Trump pandemic response stimulus plan, shown first to Senate Republicans, proposes $100 billion for workers. The thin gruel Trump’s team proposes recalls famous 1980 Boston Globe headline mocking President Jimmy Carter: More Mush from the Wimp.

Donald Trump may have finally realized the coronavirus pandemic is real, but he hasn’t a clue about the price in lost wages, not to mention lost lives, that Americans workers will pay for his lethargic incompetence.

Workers would get maybe $100 billion, corporations $850 billion. Airlines would get $50 billion, half as much as workers, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told Senate Republicans.

While $100 billion sounds like a big number, its bupkis compared to the scope of the job loss problem.

American workers gross about $150 billion per week, IRS Table 1.4 shows.

Distribute $100 billion equally to the 168 million or so people who earn from $1 to more than $100 million in annual wages and it’s not enough to replace a week’s wages.

Restricting help to the bottom half of workers, who made just under $33,000 in 2018, wouldn’t be much better. Trump’s plan would not even replace two weeks of pay to the more than 83 million low-paid workers.

Trump said Monday that he expected the pandemic to continue into July and August. That would be 24 weeks, not two.

We’ve already seen the Federal Reserve jump in with help for Wall Street, where the large spoons with which bankers used to take in welfare have been replaced with giant buckets.

The Fed slashed bank borrowing rates to as little as zero while offering to trade as much as $700 billion in cash for other securities to ensure financial firms can cover their obligations. Heaven forbid the bankers set aside enough reserves to cover a rainy day or a pandemic.

Bankers first, American workers last is not a Trump era creation. But it is promoted with gusto. And it contradicts the core promise on which Trump beguiled almost 63 million people into casting ballots for him.

Trump was all about “the forgotten men and women” of America, both as a candidate and in his inaugural address.

In accepting the Republican nomination for president in July 2016 Trump declared, “The forgotten men and women of our country — people who work hard but no longer have a voice: I am your voice.”

That promise died as soon as he left the Capitol for the White House.

The man who tried to con us with his absurd claim that coronavirus was a hoax, a “foreign virus,” and that the initial first 15 coronavirus cases in America would soon be zero, and who insisted over the weekend that virus was “under tremendous control” doesn’t have a clue.

Many Americans will die because of his incompetence and denial of reality.

For the majority who survive, even with state jobless benefits, which most workers don’t qualify for, Trump’s economic stimulus is itself a hoax.

Its money aplenty for the swamp monsters Trump promised to slay and starvation wage replacement for their prey.

So maybe instead of “More Mush from the Wimp,” the smart headline would be:  Trump Feeds Workers to the Swamp Monsters.

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https://this.kiji.is/611298914282439777?c=592532205600719969

no lnx

philly inq will bunch

The Philadelphia Inquirer

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Will Bunch: 'Disaster socialism': Will coronavirus crisis finally change how Americans see the safety net?

2020/3/13 16:43 (EDT)3/14 05:43 (EDT)updated

©The Philadelphia Inquirer

Diana Hernandez has one foot in the Ivy League, where she’s an assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and another in the grittier streets of the South Bronx, the mostly working-class area where she lives. Walking down a Bronx boulevard the other day, she witnessed scenes much different from the TV news version of the coronavirus crisis, where suburbanites stuff payloads of squeezably soft toilet paper and price-gouged Purell in the back of luxury SUVs.

Instead, Hernandez wrote that she witnessed Bronx shoppers at her local Dollar Tree stocking up on bleach, a tiny four-pack of toilet paper or a three-pack of Cup Noodles — stockpiles for families that lack cash for day-to-day emergencies, let alone the uncertainties of a global pandemic. She called it emblematic of how hard the coronavirus crisis is for people living on the margins — who can’t simply work from home when their job is cleaning hospital floors or frying fast-food burgers, who can only get around on crowded buses or subways, who can’t take paid sick days or don’t have child care when their kids’ schools shut down.

“The black and brown folks who work for these corporations have to show up on their line or at their cleaning facility, because they’re taking care of the things that can’t be taken care of remotely,” Hernandez told me by phone. I’d called her after reading her op-ed on how a public health crisis has laid bare what so many have tried to ignore for so long — the many ways that the cruel inequalities of modern U.S. capitalism weigh on working people.

The public health emergency even has some lawmakers who’ve worked for decades to cut the social safety net now supporting a universal paid sick leave — at least for this one virus, if not for the 900 or whatever other things that could make workers ill — and or even funding what might be called “Medicaid for All” … people with coronavirus symptoms, so that the uninsured or under-insured will get free testing, at least.

In 2020, a liberal is a conservative who’s been exposed to the coronavirus. It was almost surreal to watch a suddenly kinder, gentler-sounding Mike Pence declare that “(w)hen we tell people, ‘If you’re sick, stay home,’ the president has tasked the team with developing economic policies that will make it very, very clear that we’re going to stand by those hard-working Americans.” Aren’t these the same people fighting in court to deny health insurance to hard-working Americans with other types of preexisting medical conditions? (Spoiler alert: Yes, they are.)

It’s fascinating to watch how a pandemic-inspired fear of the unknown — flavored by the fact that COVID-19 initially tended to spread through the things that more affluent Americans do, like travel overseas, book cruise ship vacations or attend business conferences — has finally caused at least a slight bump in awareness of the kind of problems that everyday folks, working two or three jobs in a gig economy, have been screaming about for years.

Many experts noted that America’s mad scramble to suddenly guarantee paid sick days or coverage for necessary medical procedures must look strange to Europeans, or other developed societies with a generous safety social net, where leaders don’t think the only solution to every problem is to throw more tax breaks at corporations and pray that a few dollars trickle down. The New York Times recently noted that Germany, France, Denmark and the Netherlands are among the nations where workers have a right to paid sick leave — and that sense of security, along with the knowledge that folks won’t get surprise medical bills, have dampened both the economic fallout and some of the fear from the pandemic.

On this side of the Atlantic, in the land of unfettered free-market capitalism and “rugged individualism,” things are a little different. With no federal law in place, about a dozen, mostly blue states, D.C., and about 30 municipalities (including Philadelphia, for most employers, in 2015) have mandated paid sick leave, often over the objection of business lobbyists offering dire predictions of profit shrinkage.

In arguably the most well-timed paper in the history of American academia, research co-led by a Temple University professor — and dropped by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Monday, in the heat of the coronavirus debate — found that the economic costs of paid sick leave are surprisingly low while other gains are high.

Temple economist Johanna Catherine Maclean and her two colleagues, using a treasure trove of wage and benefit data reported to the U.S. Labor Department from 2009 to 2017, when a number of state and local mandatory paid-leave laws were enacted, found workers in those jurisdictions took just two more sick days a year. There was no significant effect on business, and the researchers calculated the per worker cost at 20 cents per hours. But the workers were healthier and better off, and probably had better morale. And they weren’t making their co-workers sick when they could afford to stay home — even before the coronavirus reached America.

Maclean told me on Wednesday that “sometimes it takes a crisis” for leaders to see the benefits of something like paid sick leave, even though polls before the coronavirus showed roughly 75% of Americans support such laws. “We see this pattern,” she said, “where it takes a troubling development to rise the value of a policy change to policy makers.”

Well, yes and no. As is so often the case in today’s American oligarchy, corporations are responding faster and better to the public outcry than government. In the last week we’ve seen big businesses like Amazon and gig economy icon Uber agree to some form of coronavirus sick leave — the same kind of thing they’ve been fighting against for workers came down with, say, influenza classic, which may kill 30,000 Americans this year.

But up on Capitol Hill, GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander — even while making the concession, seemingly remarkable for a top Republican, that a bill mandating 14 days of paid sick leave in a national health emergency is “a good idea” — then blocked that good idea (which also allowed workers to accrue seven days of conventional paid sick days a year) because he believes that government and its bottomless pasta bowl of debt should pay the tab, not the industrialists who coincidentally finance the Republican Party.

The new plan from House Democrats is people-oriented — sick leave, widespread free testing, food aid and unemployment insurance — while Trump is talking typical GOP corporate welfare and tax cuts. But the pressure of a worsening crisis could be the thing — maybe the only thing, in 2020’s divided America — that leads to common ground.

There’s a notion that’s gained credence over the last decade or two — “the shock doctrine,” as named by the writer Naomi Klein, also known as “disaster capitalism” — that our modern kleptocracy uses tragedies, from natural (like hurricanes) to man-made (like, um, stock market crashes) to impose policies such as privatization of government services that the public would never go for in normal times. But can it work in reverse? Can the shock of a pandemic — and the realization that our cruel capitalist constructs have made it harder to deal with — cause a reversal of fortune?

Will the coronavirus crisis spark a kind of “disaster socialism,” to finally embrace the social safety net that’s the norm in so many other countries?

The political irony is that 2020 started out with two high-profile presidential candidates calling for the kind of radical change that would have made a public health crisis like the current moment easier for everyday Americans: Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Now Warren is gone and Sanders is on their ropes, as voters in the earlier stage of the coronavirus crisis focus less on policy and more on the kind of familiar leadership offered by Joe Biden.

But despite their flaws, the thing about Biden and, arguably, President Trump is that both men are not rigid ideologues. They have been known to bend to the moment. Trump, after all, used to be a pro-choice Democrat while Biden was a Catholic moderate of the 1970s who evolved into championing gay marriage. Today, rising to meet this crisis means embracing the security that working Americans need to pay their medical bills or call out sick or put their kid in child care. If there was ever a time for a Nixon-in-China transformation, it’s now.

And if calling this “disaster socialism” makes you politically uncomfortable, then just call simply a more humane America. But the coronavirus has exposed an underlying sickness in modern U.S. society that too many of us have tried to avoid for too long. It’s time to embrace the cure.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Will Bunch is the national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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