SOLUTIONS/ SYSTEMS

Some Tipping Points Are Already Close

One of the biggest concerns is that some tipping points, like the meltdown of alpine glaciers and near-total loss of coral reefs, will be reached even if the world meets the goals of the Paris climate agreement, said Katherine Richardson, a climate researcher at the University of Copenhagen and co-author of the commentary.

If multiple tipping points are reached, it's questionable whether emissions reductions will be enough to stabilize the climate system, she said.

"Another problem we have is that we have taken a cost-benefit approach," she said. "Economists assume high-impact tipping points are low probability events, but we may already have passed some of them—which completely changes the way we should be doing our cost-benefit analyses.

"In 2001, IPCC said not to worry (about tipping points) until there is 5 degrees Celsius warming, now they're saying 1 to 2 degrees. Economists have to stay on top of the science."

[map graf scary]

Richardson said she had just explained that morning to the Danish Parliament that some of the common tools for cutting emissions weren't proving to be effective enough, including the European Union's carbon trading marketat its current prices.

"There are so many emissions credits floating around that using them won't have any effect on total emissions or atmospheric concentrations on a meaningful time scale. We can't wait 30 to 40 years," she said. The UN Emissions Gap Report released this week "basically says we've done nothing so far."

The new Nature article reinforces other recent similar warnings, said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Texas Tech University Climate Science Center.That includes a chapter in the latest U.S. National Climate Assessment on "potential surprises" in the climate system, "The scariest thing that you'll ever read that's not by Stephen King," Hayhoe said.

It explores climate impacts and feedback systems that we don't fully understand, she said, and "that may be far more worrisome than what we do know."

===

...TOO MUCH INFORMATION

Phillips wants to make it clear that it’s not just Facebook or Twitter’s fault. It’s not just the fault of Alex Jones or Donald Trump or 4chan. It’s your fault, too.

“A lot of the misinformation being spread is not the result of bad actors,” Phillips says. “It’s everyday people doing everyday things.”

She thinks of it in terms of an ecological metaphor, where pollution is the accumulation of a billion little actions from individuals. All of the tweeting, retweeting and Facebook posting adds up.

“We’re sort of at the whims of everyday folks, disinformation agents, algorithms, white supremacists, all jockeying to win the attention economy,” Phillips says. “The result is an air that is so clogged that we can barely breathe.”

In that environment, with so many different competing and contradictory claims, people “don’t even necessarily trust there is such a thing as truth.”

But Phillips doesn’t necessarily agree that more information is the answer. Journalists like to say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But Phillips argues that sometimes thesunlight simply heats up the petri dish and spreads the disease— especially when people are liable to believe a hoax is true because a journalist says it isn’t.

“The truth can contribute to pollution as much as falsehood can,” Phillips says. “It is easy to feel like you are pushing back against a story when you are saying, ‘This story’s terrible.’ But the algorithm doesn’t care about your righteous indignation. The algorithm cares that you’re engaging with content.”

She urges journalists and everyday people to shift the lens, focusing less on the liars and more on how lies and ideologies have impacted communities.

Warzel, meanwhile, also urges social media users to slow down. Be wary about clicking that retweet button. If a story seems too perfect, doubt it. If a crazy news story doesn’t come from an established media outlet, wait until at least one outlet covers it — ideally two.

Marantz, the expert on online trolls, says thelong-term solution to the disinformation crisis is a deep and philosophical one that he’d explain at length with phrases like “reaffirming our commitment to epistemic depth.” But for now, the simpler way to react to disinformation is to rely a little bit more on the old gatekeepers.

“If you read the New York Times or the BBC or the alt-weekly in your town or the New Yorker, you’re going to be better informed than if you read Facebook,” Marantz says.

Not because they’re perfect — there’s a billion reasons to complain about mainstream journalists, he says — but because, for all their flaws, right now they’re the best we’ve got.

“It’s the best short-term solution,” he says, “as opposed to just living a world where no one knows anything.”

===

$41 trillion in worker pension, need scale places to put in

green energy (wind) now cheaper than nat'l gas, thus massive stranded assets

local power grid resilient b/c it's local, not dependent on larger system.

3rd industrial revo non-hier; must be glob-LOCAL; feed-in tariffs let local ppl go to bank and get loan b/c knew could repay

merkel

china big green grid investment 12 wks after mtg w/ Jeremy Rifkin wrote The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth audio interview 9/19.

rifkin

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/new-report-details-10-critical-transitions-to-tackle-the-climate-crisis-and-feed-the-world/

The ways humanity produces and consumes food cause up to 30 percent of planet-warming emissions, generate widespread malnutrition, and perpetuate poverty and inequality—but a new report released Monday claims that 10 global transformations over the next decade could help the international community tackle the climate crisis and feed over nine billion people.

The report, *Growing Better: 10 Critical Transitions to Transform Food and Land Use*(pdf), comes from the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU), which launched in 2017 to bring together organizations representing key actors—from business and civil society leaders to scientists and policymakers—to transform global food and land use systems.

...see sustainability

koch mit engr systemic gov't lobby machine:

819 DN Kochland bk

And then, finally, perhaps most importantly, Koch has built a nationwide activist network called Americans for Prosperity. And what this is is a boots-on-the-ground operation. So, Americans for Prosperity has chapters around the country. They can activate people to go knock on doors, take petitions. They will charter busesfrom West Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, you name it. They will get buses of angry voters[pseudo-populist trigger anti-gubmint] to come to Washington, D.C., and then go visit congressional offices that have been specifically identified by that big corporate lobbying shop we talked about, where they can pressure lawmakers.

And Koch put this political machine into full force in 2009 and 2010, when it looked like the United States was going to regulate greenhouse gas emissions for the first time. You know, back then, there really was bipartisan support to do something on climate change. The Republican, John McCain,ran on doing something about climate change. But Koch Industries intervened, and, I think more than even Exxon or other companies, it sort of — it politicized this issue of climate change. And Koch went after any moderate Republicans who acknowledged that climate change was real, who supported any effort to put a price on carbon. And Koch helped to drive those people out of office. So it played a vitally important role in making it clear to Republicans that they could not support any effort on climate change.

AMY GOODMAN: The Kochtopus? Elaborate further.

CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: The Kochtopus, here’s a great example. In 2009, when we were debating climate change, my book shows that Koch secretly funded a think tank report from this group called the American Council [for] Capital Formation. And this report said that if we regulate climate change, it will be a disaster for the American economy. Then another Koch-funded think tank called the American Energy Alliance took the findings from that report, made political ads and targeted those ads at Republican politicians, like Lindsey Graham, who supported climate change legislation, so now Lindsey Graham has got these horrible campaign spots running back home. And then the corporate lobbyists from Koch will be visiting the offices of Lindsey Graham and explaining why they can’t support climate change bill.

So, the Kochtopus is this remarkably effective 360-degree machine that affects the public debate around issues like this, that has lobbyists who work on issues like this, and that can, finally, bring voters in. You know, Americans for Prosperity will — I’ve been at these events where they bus voters into Washington, D.C. They give them glossy printed protest signs. They feed them a boxed lunch. They take them to the congressional offices. And they can stoke what appears to be a real public revolt against legislation like this....

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/13/humanitys-destruction-oceans-nearly-doubled-over-decade-scientists-warn-and-could

Humanity's impact on global oceans nearly doubled in a just over a decade and could double again soon without urgent and sweeping international action, warns a study published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports.

"We can improve things. The solutions are known and within our grasp. We just need the social and political will to take action."

—Ben Halpern, study lead author

To determine the pace of change in cumulative human impacts on the world's oceans, researchers from University of California, Santa Barbara and Stanford University combined annual data from 2003 to 2013 on 14 human stressors and how they affected 21 marine ecosystems.

The team found that over the 11 years, 59 percent of the ocean experienced a significant increase in cumulative impact, "in particular due to climate change but also from fishing, land-based pollution, and shipping." Human impact significantly decreased for only five percent of the ocean.

"Impacts of human activities on the ocean have been shown to be substantial, ubiquitous, and changing," the study says, pointing to both existing uses of global oceans and emerging ones such as offshore energy production, aquaculture, and undersea mining. "The resulting cumulative impact of these activities often leads to ecosystem degradation or even collapse."

Researchers determined that during the analyzed period, "nearly all countries saw increases in cumulative impacts in their coastal waters, as did all ecosystems, with coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves at most risk." However, some regions saw high impacts and are at greater risk for ecosystem collapse: the Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean Sea, Canadian Eastern Seaboard, Southern Atlantic Ocean, and Southern/Western Australia.

With the new study, the team aimed to provide "aholistic perspective of where and how much human activities shape ocean change—for better or worse—which is essential to policy and planning," according to a statement from UC Santa Barbara announcing the research.

"If you don't pay attention to the big picture, you miss the actual story," said lead author Ben Halpern of the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara. "The bigger picture is critical if you want to make smart management decisions—where are you going to get your biggest bang for your buck."

The apparent accelerating pace of human impacts on oceans around the world "creates even more urgency to solve these problems," Halpern added. "We can improve things. The solutions are known and within our grasp. We just need the social and political will to take action."

As the study explains:

Despite these sobering results, messages of hope remain. During this time period, many countries, particularly in Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa, saw notable declines in impacts from commercial fishing, and many countries saw reduced impacts from land-based pollution. In a few cases, these declines were larger than increases in climate change and other stressors, leading to overall decreases in [cumulative human impacts] , and in all cases the declines helped mitigate increases.

"Coordinated, comprehensive management that accounts for multiple stressors can leverage decreases in single stressors," the study continues, noting that "results indicate that climate mitigation to meet targets of the Paris agreement would have major positive impact on the condition of marine ecosystems."

Co-author Melanie Frazier, a data scientist at NCEAS, pointed to the accelerating rate at which oceans are warming—because of global heating fueled by human activity—as a motivator for swift international action.

"You don't need fancy statistics to see how rapidly ocean temperature is changing and understand the magnitude of the problem," she said. "I think this study, along with many others, highlights the importance of a concerted global effort to control climate change."

"You don't need fancy statistics to see how rapidly ocean temperature is changing and understand the magnitude of the problem."

—Melanie Frazier, study co-author

The research was released just a week before United Nations delegates are scheduled to meet for the third time in less than a year to discuss "conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction."

In an op-ed published Monday by The Hill, Mark Abbott of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Chris Scholin of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute wrote that "so far, these negotiations have had a critical omission: the vast stretch of ocean known as the twilight zone" that spans from 660 to 3,300 feet deep.

"With the twilight zone, we have an opportunity to transform how humanity relates to little known—yet potentially indispensable—ecosystems and resources," they argued. "The ocean's midwater is remote enough that it has mostly remained shielded from human impacts. We do not have to make another mistake of epic proportions and find ourselves trying to repair the damage done by overexploitationwhen it is already too late."

aha: matthew effect, dark money lobby corruption and financialization funnels money to the top; thus low and Middle class ppl go into debt; everything is more expensive relatively if you're poor /working class (eg no bank acct means cash check at walmart they take a cut or payday loan that takes a big one); worse are predatory capitalist who prey/extract (pay phones on street but esp in prison). sol: post office a public bank

7/23/19

see Liz warren on howdebt (personal and banksters) creates systemic risk and instability.

related to inequality

not re- but aforestation

https://grist.org/article/stop-building-a-spaceship-to-mars-and-just-plant-some-damn-trees/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-surprisingly-cheap-and-simple-plan-could-put-a-huge-dent-in-climate-change/

no lnx many

A surprisingly cheap and simple plan could put a huge dent in climate change

written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams July 5, 2019

Amid record-setting temperatures worldwide and predictions by experts that this year will be among the hottest humanity has ever seen,researchers behind a new study say a rapid global effort to plant billions of trees and the restoration of forests would be the “most effective” strategy for battling the planetary climate emergency.

Based on a model of the potential for restoring trees worldwide to capture atmospheric carbon that is heating the planet, a Europe-based research team found that currently “there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares (2.22 billion acres) of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests.”

Lead researcher Tom Crowther, a professor at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, explained to Metrothat “if we act now, this could cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by up to 25 percent to levels last seen almost a century ago.” A worldwide planting program, researchers estimate, could remove two-thirds of the carbon that human activity has put into the atmosphere.

In terms of cost, Crowther said that “the most effective projects” do restoration at about ¢30 per tree, meaning that restoring a trillion trees would be about $300 billion—which, he added, makes tree restoration “by far the cheapest solution that has ever been proposed.”

Putting that figure into context, the U.S.-based youth-led Sunrise Movement tweeted, “For a fraction of the cost of the Trump tax cuts, we could pay for a trillion new trees and offset 2/3rd of all emissions to date.”

Sunrise Movement ??

@sunrisemvmt

For a fraction of the cost of the Trump tax cuts, we could pay for a trillion new trees and offset 2/3rd of all emissions to date.

(^rough cost estimate but still crazy cheap)

We have solutions ready to go; we’re just missing the political will to act.https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/04/planting-billions-trees-best-tackle-climate-crisis-scientists-canopy-emissions …

2,690

Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' to tackle climate crisis

Research shows a trillion trees could be planted to capture huge amount of carbon dioxide

theguardian.com

1,161 people are talking about this

The report, published Friday in the journal Science, describes tree restoration on a global scale as “our most effective climate change solution to date” while also warning that “climate change will alter this potential tree coverage.”

We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares (₅₅₁ million acres) by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.

In its reporting on the new research, Vox noted that “there is distinction here between restoration, also known as reforestation, and afforestation. The latter refers to planting new trees where there were none before. The former refers to bringing trees back to areas that were previously forested, whether that’s through planting trees or allowing the woodlands to regrow on their own.”

This research team focused on the former—planting trees where they once were. While the potential is great, accomplishing it is no easy task, Vox reported, because “deforestation is still rampant and is accelerating in some parts of the world. Rather than building up forests as a resource to offset greenhouse gas emissions, we’re currently losing them, and emitting more carbon in the process.”

Crowther, however, appeared optimistic—given the potential impact and wide range of people and institutions that can actually take action.

“What blows my mind is the scale,” Crowther told The Guardian. “I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”

According to the newspaper:

Crowther emphasized that it remains vital to reverse the current trends of rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and forest destruction, and bring them down to zero. He said this is needed to stop the climate crisis becoming even worse and because the forest restoration envisaged would take 50-100 years to have its full effect of removing 200bn tonnes of carbon.

Some activists and experts—including Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and Glen Peters, a research director at Norway’s Center for International Climate Research—responded to the new study by emphasizing the importance of also changing human behaviors that produce planet-heating emissions, considering how long it could take to plant enough trees to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Greta Thunberg

@GretaThunberg

Yes, of course we need to plant as many trees as possible.

Yes, of course we need to keep the existing trees standing and rewild and restore nature.

But there’s absolutely no way around stopping our emissions of greenhouse gases and leaving the fossil fuels in the ground. https://twitter.com/Peters_Glen/status/1147037393725329408 …

Glen Peters

@Peters_Glen

“The only way we can keep below 1.5°C or 2°C is to stop emitting fossil fuels”...

It could take hundreds of years to add enough mature forests to remove what we will emit in 20 years at the current rate of 40GtCO2/yr.@StephenLeahyhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/07/how-to-erase-100-years-carbon-emissions-plant-trees/ …

Crowther pointed out that planting trees is a solution that doesn’t require U.S. President Donald Trump “to immediately start believing in climate change, or scientists to come up with technological solutions to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.”

“It is available now, it is the cheapest one possible, and every one of us can get involved,” he said, considering that in addition to any government-backed efforts individuals and charities can plant trees.

The model reveals restoration opportunities worldwide, with the six largest countries—Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Russia, and the United States—collectively containing about half of the sites.

Crowther described Brazil—which contains the majority of the Amazon rainforest and is currently under the control of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro—as his “dream hotspot to get it right,” but he reiterated that “the potential is literally everywhere—the entire globe. In terms of carbon capture, you get by far your biggest bang for your buck in the tropics, but every one of us can get involved.”

Author and anthropologist Jason Hickel praised the research as “brilliant” and noted that in addition to sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to combat the global climate crisis, tree restoration could provide job opportunities....

2 big SYS fails uncorrected led to djt: gt recess and gulf war 2, brexit

...curry salon

After the Iraq war, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed a commission to investigate how exactly his country stumbled into such a tragic fiasco.The Chilcot Report (for Lord John Chilcot, who led the commission) was an account of political bungling and deception as thorough and damning as the Pentagon Papers. Its 2016 release made former Prime Minister Tony Blair, chief accomplice to George W. Bush in that disastrous undertaking, into a social leper. Unlike Robert Mueller, Chilcot had an absolute right to interview any witness and compel production of any document he felt he needed; nearly all his interviews were done in public, and he delivered his report direct to the people of the United Kingdom.

The war was hatched in America by ideologues bent on exporting democracy via bribery and force of arms. In the eyes of many, it surpasses Vietnam as the worst foreign policy blunder in our nation’s history. In a speech to the nation summarizing the case for it, Bush leaned heavily on the only possible rationale for an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation:

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

For months, his vice president and national security adviser peddled “evidence” of nuclear and chemical weapons. Before his speech, Bush was told by experts at the Department of Energy that the evidence was false, but he kept the news to himself. To this day it remains unproven who was lying, and who was only lied to.

The Congressional Budget Office says the war cost the U.S. $2 trillion. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz puts it at $3 trillion. Nearly 4,500 U.S. military personnel died there, and tens of thousands more suffered disabling physical and psychic wounds. Iraqi casualties remain in dispute — as Gen. Tommy Franks informed reporters, “We don’t do body counts” — but estimates range from 180,000 to more than a million deaths. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees counted 3.7 million refugees. Americans think the war’s over. Last month, it took 166 Iraqi lives.

In 2009, as Gordon Brown was launching the Chilcot Inquiry, Barack Obama was being pressured to take a similar look back at how America was lured or lied into war. Obama took a different tack. Rather than appoint a commission with plenipotentiary powers, he did nothing. Aides said he thought retracing Bush’s path to war would make it hard to forge bipartisan alliances with Republicans.

2: Similar concerns colored his take on the other huge crisis he inherited, the 2008 Wall Street meltdown that leveled the global economy. No one knows its true cost, only that the number exceeds most human minds’ ability to conceptualize. A Government Accountability Office study put the U.S. cost at $22 trillion.

Social and political costs were even higher. Post-meltdown austerity measures, following ondecades of stagnant wages just as millions of Middle East refugees flooded Europe, rocking center-left coalitions that had ruled the West since World War II. Far-right political parties the old order was too polite to label fascist began to metastasize. Britain got Brexit. America got Trump.[NOTE CONFLUENCE OF 2 FAILS]

When the crisis broke, Obama was running for president. His closing stump speech was a litany of vows to curb corruption; above all, to punish Wall Street fraud. His administration never brought a case. Three years later, he went on “60 Minutes” to explain that the worst behavior wasn’t actually illegal. Given his dazzling intellect and access to wise counsel, one assumes he knew that what he said wasn’t true.

Privately, Obama revealed his thinking. He worried that prosecutions would hurt banks. He worried he’d lose personal support in the business community. (A major culprit, Goldman Sachs, was also his biggest donor.) And he worried he’d lose business backing vital to building bipartisan coalitions in Congress.

Lying was as much a cause of the Great Recession as it was of the Iraq war. Loan originators lied about applicants’ creditworthiness. Investment bankers lied about the toxicity of mortgage portfolios. Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s and Fitch all lied. So did Obama and most of Congress, which meant major reforms, excepting only Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, were designed to curb “irrational exuberance,” not the immorality at the root of what befell us.

Instead of going to prison, bankers got bailed out, while homeowners got betrayed. Like the meltdown itself, the government’s response helped incite a populist revolt. Obama and Clinton Democrats were deaf to it, but Trump’s final 2016 TV ad began “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment.” In the last week, it replaced nearly every other ad he had up in the industrial Midwest.

These failures — to investigate the origins of the Iraq war and the Great Recession and punish the culprits — were not anomalies. After 9/11, no one had the stomach to hold George W. Bush to account for ignoring intelligence reports on his desk, so the bipartisanship crowd invented a structural failure and wasted years rearranging intelligence and homeland security bureaucracies, resulted in a new Cabinet-level post, the Director of National Intelligence, who lacks the authority to direct anyone to do anything.

It happened after the 2000 election: Media barons set out to fix the exit polls, Congress set out to rid the world of hanging chads via nifty paperless ballots and the Democratic Party set out to rid the world of Ralph Nader.Thus, a pioneering GOP foray into voter suppression went nearly unremarked. Despite butterfly ballots, staged riots, a chief election official doing double duty as a Bush campaign chair and a Supreme Court concocting phony equal protection claims to rob Al Gore of real due process, Bush was clothed in legitimacy, leaving millions of Americans to conclude that the system was indeed rigged.

I doubt we’d be saddled with Trump had we not come to resemble him: way too materialistic, more than a bit narcissistic, unfocused, unlettered, infantile, even amoral. Our responses to these crises suggest that we also share a high tolerance for lying, a limited capacity for self-examination and an unspoken belief that the rich and powerful are above the law. Which brings us to the latest in our recent line of failures to look either evil or ourselves in the eye, the Mueller Report....

AHA! THE SOLUTION IS TO RESTORE THE COMMONS

AHA: REDUCTIONISM KILLS/ ENSLAVES/ EXTRACTS

VS SYSTEMS HEAL, CONNECT, FREE

I/THOU VS I/IT ME v WE

triggered by

wicked smart henry g

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/our-culture-of-ignorance-has-made-possible-the-rise-of-a-terrible-new-political-blend-neoliberal-fascism/

The ghosts of a fascist past are with us once again resurrecting the discourses of hatred, exclusion and ultra-nationalism in countries such as the United States, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. In addition, right-wing extremist parties are on the move politically in Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Germany. The designers of a new breed of fascism increasingly dominate major political formations and other commanding political and economic institutions across the globe.They have infused a fascist ideology with new energy through a right-wing populism that constructs the nation through a series of racist and nativist exclusions, all the while feeding off the chaos produced by neoliberalism.

Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence and disposability is legitimated, in part, in their control of a diverse number of cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This reactionary educational formation includes the mainstream broadcast media, digital platforms, the Internet and print culture, all of which participate in an ongoing spectacle of violence, the aestheticization of politics, the legitimation of opinions over facts, and an embrace of a culture of ignorance. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of neoliberal ideology, literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science. Chris Hedges is right to argue that both the rule of law and the institutions that make democracy possible are being undermined.He is worth quoting at length:

The mechanisms that once made democracy possible have withered and died. We no longer have elections free of corporate control; real legislative debate; an independent press rooted in verifiable fact that lifts up the voices and concerns of the citizens rather than peddling conspiracy theories such as “Russiagate” or cheerleading for disastrous military interventions and occupations; academic institutions that vigorously examine and critique the nature of power; or diplomacy, negotiation, détente and compromise. Puffed up by self-importance, intoxicated by the ability to wield police and military power, despots and their grotesque courtiers are freed with the collapse of the rule of law to carry out endless vendettas against enemies real and imagined until their own paranoia and fear define the lives of those they subjugate. This is where we have come, not because of Trump, who is the grotesque product of our failed democracy, but because the institutions that were designed to prevent tyranny no longer function.

Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, and render invisible important social issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice. James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in “No Name in the Street” that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

...

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REPAIR THE COMMONS

AHA, TRANSPARENCY IS SYNERGISTIC, CASCADE GOOD OR BAD/DOWN journalism is a force multiplier?

https://theconversation.com/environmental-reporting-can-help-protect-citizens-in-emerging-democracies-115822

What happens when an illegally logged tree falls or poachers kill endangered brown bears in the forest, but there’s no journalist to report it?

That’s the situation in the Republic of Georgia, which faces challenges that include poaching, deteriorating air quality, habitat disruption from new hydropower dams, illegal logging and climate change. The effects cross national borders and affect economic and political relationships in the Caucasus and beyond.

I researched environmental journalism in the Republic of Georgia as a Fulbright Scholar there in the fall of 2018. I chose Georgia because many of its environmental and media problems are similar to those confronting other post-Soviet countries nearly 30 years after independence. As I have found in my research on mass media in other post-Soviet nations, journalists risk provoking powerful public and corporate interests when they investigate sensitive environmental issues.

But when the media don’t cover these problems, Georgians go uninformed about issues relevant to their daily lives. Eco-violators operate with impunity, and the government and Georgia’s influential private sector remain opaque to the public. At a time when government hostility to journalists is rising in many countries, Georgia illustrates how environmental damage, pollution and ill health can spread, and go unpunished, when powerful interests are unaccountable to the public.

...

Transparent in principle, not in practice

...

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systems GIG

http://democracyfund.applytojob.com/apply/WQSvPzAHE0/Learning-And-Strategy-Manager

on hold 818

oops?

http://democracyfund.applytojob.com/apply/r7k9z4PfUS/Team-Coordinator-Public-Square-Program%20title=

Democracy Fund was created by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar out of a deep respect for the U.S. Constitution and our nation’s core democratic values.

systems@democracyfund.org

===

aha MIC and PIC merge; note systemic solution // new green deal

“People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel,” Vitale said. “They are held up as this liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically neutral police with the support of the citizenry. But this really misreads the history. Peel is sent to manage the British occupation of Ireland. He’s confronted with a dilemma. Historically, peasant uprisings, rural outrages were dealt with by either the local militia or the British military. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, in the need for soldiers in other parts of the British Empire, he is having more and more difficulty managing these disorders. In addition, when he does call out the militia, they often open fire on the crowd and kill lots of people, creating martyrs and inflaming further unrest. He said, ‘I need a force that can manage these outrages without inflaming passions further.’ He developed the Peace Preservation Force, which was the first attempt to create a hybrid military-civilian force that can try to win over the population by embedding itself in the local communities, taking on some crime control functions, but its primary purpose was always to manage the occupation. He then exports that model to London as the industrial working classes are flooding the city, dealing with poverty, cycles of boom and bust in the economy, and that becomes [its] primary mission.”

“The creation of the very first state police force in the United States was the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905,” Vitale said. “For the same reasons. It was modeled similarly on U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines. There was a back and forth with personnel and ideas. What happened was local police were unable to manage the coal strikes and iron strikes. … They needed a force that was more adherent to the interest of capital. … Interestingly, for these small-town police forces in a coal mining town there was sometimes sympathy. They wouldn’t open fire on the strikers. So, the state police force was created to be that strong arm for the law. Again, the direct connection between colonialism and the domestic management of workers. … It’s a two-way exchange. As we’re developing ideas throughout our own colonial undertakings, bringing those ideas home, and then refining them and shipping them back to our partners around the world who are often despotic regimes with close economic relationships to the United States. There’s a very sad history here of the U.S. exporting basically models of policing that morphs into death squads and horrible human rights abuses.”

The almost exclusive alliance on militarized police to deal with profound inequality and social problems is turning poor neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago into miniature failed states, ones where destitute young men and women join a gang for security and income and engage in battles with other gangs and the police. The “broken windows” policy shifts the burden for poverty onto the poor. It criminalizes minor infractions, arguing that disorder produces crime and upending decades of research about the causes of crime.

“As poverty deepens and housing prices rise, government support for affordable housing has evaporated, leaving in its wake a combination of homeless shelters and aggressive broken-windows-oriented policing,” Vitale writes. “As mental health facilities close, police become the first responders to calls for assistance with mental health crises. As youth are left without adequate schools, jobs, or recreational facilities, they form gangs for mutual protection or participate in the black markets of stolen goods, drugs, and sex to survive and are ruthlessly criminalized. Modern policing is largely a war on the poor that does little to make people safer or communities stronger, and even when it does, this is accomplished through the most coercive forms of state power that destroy the lives of millions.”

The accelerated assault on the poor and the growing omnipotence of the police signal our transformation into an authoritarian state in which the rich and the powerful are not subject to the rule of law.The Trump administration will promote none of the conditions that could ameliorate this crisis—affordable housing; well-paying jobs; safe and nurturing schools that do not charge tuition; better mental health facilities; efficient public transportation; the rebuilding of the nation’s infrastructure; demilitarized police forces in which most officers do not carry weapons; universal, government-funded health care; an end to the predatory loans and unethical practices of big banks; and reparations to African-Americans and an end to racial segregation. Trump and most of those he has appointed to positions of power disdain the poor as a dead weight on society. They blame stricken populations for their own misery. They seek to subjugate the poor, especially those of color, through police violence, ever harsher forms of punishment and an expansion of the prison system....

===

aha? polarization // inequality? see above

sys

2016

Ages of Discord

https://www.amazon.com/Ages-Discord-Peter-Turchin/dp/0996139540

2015

Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

https://www.amazon.com/Ultrasociety-Years-Humans-Greatest-Cooperators/dp/0996139516

20 min vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLS8C1K9s7w

https://www.salon.com/2016/10/01/breaking-point-america-approaching-a-period-of-disintegration-argues-anthropologist-peter-turchin/

As the 2016 campaign reaches fever pitch, the more heat there is and the less light is shed. Which is why evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin's new book comes as such a breath of fresh air. "Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History" is not about this year's presidential election, per se, but it's a quantum leap forward in illuminating the disintegrative trends that America has experienced over the last several decades that are currently driving our politics.

Everything from skyrocketing inequality and political gridlock to white working class angst and the rise of mass shootings and other troubling signs of our times — these are all interconnected reflections of whereAmerica is in a cyclic historical process: social integration followed by disintegration, discord and violence. Turchin and others have observed this pattern repeatedly in civilizations from ancient Rome and early Chinese dynasties up to the present day.

aha:

public bank: see also commons, co-op, buffer (jiu jitsu on buffer gestalt flip?)

Buffer resilience

see mod tag and Moderation node

Buffers are reserves of resources that give systems resilience

Tendency to engineer out as inefficient, eg just in time supply chain

but evil darkside [eg corp trade groups) limits transparency and acctability

eg IPAA, CoC, API...

ca farm bureau

3/19 primary, evil pending, BUFFER on chemicals and water

11 tags

===

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27112018/emissions-gap-unep-report-paris-goals-climate-change-solutions

...

How Can Countries Get on Track to Meet the Paris Goals?

The new report highlights a range of policies that can help keep emissions in check.

Most G20 nations can take actions to end fossil fuel subsidies, phase out coal-fired power plants, implement policies to boost industrial efficiency and increase support for the use of renewable energy to heat and cool buildings.

Norway has adopted a combination of incentives that helped electric vehicles grab nearly 40 percent of the new car market there last year. A few countries have adopted efficiency standards for heavy-duty vehicles, but the others have yet to do so.

Broadly speaking, the largest potential for emissions cuts lies in three areas, the report says:

boosting wind and solar power,
improving efficiency of household appliances and cars, and
stopping deforestation while allowing new forests to grow.

The report also says carbon prices offer tremendous room for improvement. About half the world's emissions do not carry any price or tax. The report cites various studies to say that adopting a carbon tax of $70 per ton could, along with other policies, lead to emissions cuts of up to 40 percent in some countries.

What About Cities and States That Are 'Still In'?

...

badass ppt 3 kinds of fail: SYS

1) economic,recession, depression (bubble burst, sytsem in runaway mode, no balance)

2) ecological: Dust Bowl (overlaps with above), exxon valdez /gulf oil spill [deregulation, greed cut corners on worker and nature safety: nature commons is a buffer, but free to pollute, externaliies)

3) political fail: massive inequality (Matthew Effect, amplifying fdbk) rich corrupt political process; white rural working class feel same hopelessness ghetto felt for decades (no riots, but own drug epidemic of despair). inequality led to instability that allowed russian trolls to tweak enough ppl to vote against their own interests (drain the swamp, bring back coal and mfg jobs w/ tariffs]; Cambr anal target swingables in swing states? related to jrnl fail.

aha war on drugs is sys fail; opium record amounts in afghanistan (which is a regional issue, other countries are stakeholders [Paki intel works at cross purposes?)

drug WAR is wrong metaphor: build a wall to keep the bad guys out; ignores the demand (ppl are sick, need treatment); opioid epidemic of despair (often starts with pain med for ppl hurt at work; trump no $ for new opioid pgm (tho recently rolled on going after co's?); opioid sold as non-addictive, data hidden like tobacco?

see dana m on traps: problem with drug war is that the obvous tactic is to push harder, arrest more, harsher mandatory sentnences (3 strikes) but it just reduces supply which raises the price which provides more resources to smuggle and incentives to use violence (so the answer is surrender? truce?) legalize? libtard reductionism? (junkies who kill themselves are "externalities/ collateral dmamage, stupid poor brn ppl who take themselves out of the darwinian/american pool?)

connection between militarism and drug addiction? 4 horse [heroin pun] war on terror

war on drugs big under nixon, Reagan and bush 43 --> PIC (Clinton triangulation)

aha ALEC 5 NOLA:

note pattern, any time mod kicks in ctr-attack], it's an immune system!

dodge v ford newmark v ebay profit max corp:

https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/special-comment/ebay-v-newmark-al-franken-was-right-corporations-are-legally-required-to-maximize-profits/

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aha:

offshore banks are secret vs transparency thus boost corruption, but also allow tax dodge for rich ppl and corps to park assests offshore, thus evade tax thus extraction from economy (as our country becomes de-industrialized/finanacialized) so a huge buffer untapped to stimulate economy and build infrastructure

===

incentives, basic rules dictate behavior:

https://www.alternet.org/ex-wall-street-banker-sounds-alarm-ten-years-after-financial-crisis-were-going-end-same-situation

Ex-Wall Street Banker Sounds the Alarm: Ten Years After the Financial Crisis, 'We're Going to End Up In the Same Situation'

William Cohen warns next time, it might even be worse.

By Elizabeth Preza / AlterNet August 5, 2018, 4:46 PM GMT

William Cohen—a former senior-level mergers and acquisitions banker on Wall Street who is now a special correspondent for Vanity Fair—on Sunday spoke about the ten-year anniversary of the 2008 financial crisis, warning the practices that prompted the economic collapse have not substantially changed in the past decade.

In an interview with CNN’s Ana Cabrera, Cohen warned the United States has not made the necessary changes to prevent another devastating recession.

“I wish I could say that we had, but we haven’t,” Cohen said.“The main driver of bad behavior on Wall Street is the compensation system, what people get rewarded to do. People are pretty simple—they do what they are rewarded to do. Wall Street is still rewarded to take big risks with other people's money. They are not rewarded to take prudent risks. We're going to end up in the same situation again. I'm afraid it's going to happen much sooner than anyone would like and it will be just as bad as the last one, if not worse.”

“We need to change what bankers are rewarded to do so they are not rewarded to to swing for the fences as if it were somebody else's money, because it is, as opposed to their own money where they will be prudent about their risk taking,” Cohen explained. “That's the single biggest thing we should change if we want to change this kind of an outcome from happening again.”

Cohen also described the “very short-term psychological damage” stemming from the 2008 financial crisis.

“Institutions that we once had a lot of faith in the banks, Wall Street, were completely shattered,” Cohen explained. “A lot of faith was lost in Congress because they voted down the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) the first time and only passed it the second time. I mean, honestly, if you look at the economy now and the spirits that are raging now, I think it was sort of a short-term frightening and scary effect, but now ten years later, I bet most people don't even remember it. Most people who are young on Wall Street couldn't even tell you what had happened.”

Watch below:

===

***

authoritarian playbook anti-social media; modi, duterte

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/1/a_threat_to_global_democracy_how

“Black Elevation.” “Mindful Being.” “Resisters.” “Aztlan Warriors.” Those are the names of some of the accounts removed from Facebook and Instagram Tuesday after Facebook uncovered a plot to covertly influence the midterm elections. The tech giant said 32 fake accounts and Facebook pages were involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

This announcement comes just days after the company suffered the biggest loss in stock market history: about $119 billion in a single day. This is just the latest in a string of controversies surrounding Facebook’s unprecedented influence on democracy in the United States and around the world, from its pivotal role in an explosion of hate speech inciting violence against Rohingya Muslims in Burma to its use by leaders such as Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte in suppressing dissent. Facebook has 2.2 billion users worldwide, and that number is growing. We speak with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.” He is a professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia.

solution:face to face forum engagement in depth at public libraries etc

---

===

yikes, imp prz meets agw:! [// converge of PIC and _?]

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/donald-trump-just-sign-much-deeper-failings-united-states-and-world

tom e

Maybe where this leaves us is: Where do we go from here? What can be done? I've been talking for a while in my work about how we ought to create policies where government's role is more visible, and we ought to deliver policies in a way where we're trying to make that evident to people. For those things to happen, I think you have to have the political will, and right now that's not the case. What I actually think is more significant now is organizing on the ground, interacting with people and helping to connect the dots for them.

If you go back to the middle of the 20th century, when many more Americans belonged to labor unions than today, labor unions helped to make it more evident to people what difference government makes to them, and what policies were helpful. The AARP does that and continues to do that for retired people, on the role of Medicare and Social Security in their lives. But we don't have many other organizations that do that. For these problems we have been talking about, and lots of others that are confronting American democracy these days, it's necessary for people to become active at the grassroots level in organizations, and for those organizations to make these connections with people.

galloway esquire

As I wrote in my book, The Four, the only way to build a company with the dominance and mass influence of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple is to appeal to a core human organ that makes adoption of the platform instinctive.

GOOGLE: MIND-ALTERING

Our brains are sophisticated enough to ask very complex questions but not sophisticated enough to answer them.

===

cascade effect Trump’s three anti-union executive orders, two of which target labor organization and one that makes it easier to fire federal civil servants.Part of that effort is to deny union members the opportunity—and their privilege—to visit with lawmakers on official time.

Should you be worried that these executive orders attacking federal unions—which are comprised of scientists and engineers—might negatively impact the environment and public health?

ppl think cap'l produce equilibrium (supply and demand) but marx sez opposite

harvey sez forces student debt, homeles....?

Interview with David Harvey on Marx’s contribution to understanding capitalism now. Hosted by Richard D. Wolff.

https://kpfa.org/episode/economic-update-june-29-2018/

kpfa 6/29/18 baby jails

northern triangle el salv, guate, honduras

3 roots: stolen guns from US pay for drugs; US biggest mkt for drugs, we export gangs to central am [death squads contras sell drugs and arms? school of Am ctr-insurgency]

kind of like triangle slave trade

RR AN 418

...A surprising number said they planned to vote for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump – the two anti-establishment candidates who promised to “shake up” Washington.

This whole story might have been different had Democrats done more to remedy wage stagnation and widening inequality when they had the chance.

Instead, Bill Clinton was a pro-growth “New Democrat” who opened trade with China, deregulated Wall Street, and balanced the budget. (I still have some painful scars from that time.)

Obama bailed out the banks but not homeowners. Obamacare, while important to the poor, didn’t alleviate the financial stresses on the working class, particularly in states refused to expand Medicaid.

In the 2016 election Hillary Clinton offered a plethora of small-bore policy proposals – all sensible but none big enough to make a difference.

Into this expanding void came Trump’s racism and xenophobia – focusing the cumulative economic rage on scapegoats that had nothing to do with its causes. It was hardly the first time in history a demagogue has used this playbook.

If America doesn’t respond to the calamity that’s befallen the working class, we’ll have Trumps as far as the eye can see.

A few Democrats are getting the message – pushing ambitious ideas like government-guaranteed full employment, single-payer health care, industry-wide collective bargaining, and a universal basic income.

But none has yet offered a way to finance these things, such as a progressive tax on wealth.

Nor have they offered a credible way to get big money out of politics. Even if “Citizens United” isn’t overruled, big money’s influence could be limited with generous public financing of elections, full disclosure of the source of all campaign contributions, and a clampdown on the revolving door between business and government.

Trump isn’t the cause of what’s happened to America. He’s the consequence – the product of years of stagnant wages and big money’s corruption of our democracy.

If they really want to stop Trump and prevent future Trumps, Democrats will need to address these causes of Trump’s rise.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16042018/cap-and-trade-economics-energy-efficiency-jobs-rggi-regional-greenhouse-gas-initiative-carbon-market-data

Nine years after its launch, the nation's first mandatory carbon-trading program is still boosting the economy and creating jobs while continuing to cut power plant emissions in its nine-state region, a new report shows.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, wasn't designed for economic development, but that's been an important outcome, the Analysis Group, an economic research firm, reported Tuesday.

The nine Eastern states gained $1.4 billion in economic benefits from RGGI over the past three years because of the way they invested proceeds from the cap-and-trade program, the analysts found. The biggest payoff came in investments in energy efficiency programs, which have led to more businesses and jobs in activities such as energy audits and installing energy-efficiency equipment.

...

===

https://ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/Category:Systems_Thinking

**Joanna Macy** is an "eco-philosopher, is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology (short video definition). A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with four decades of activism. She has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application." Video on Great Turning.*** Coming Back to Life : Practice to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World ***(updated 2015 intro download) / Joanna Macy, Molly Young Brown 1998 Location McH Stacks GF80 .M33 1998. Excerpt:Macy, J. and Brown, M. provide a good introduction as well, relating systems thinking to spiritual practices. *** (login required). 2014 Bioneers keynote video. Working Through Environmental Despair (Excerpt, audio and text).

Donella Meadows archive of her articles, one of the best being the 12 Leverage Points. *** See also her 2008 book Thinking in Systems: A Primer Table of Contents. A summary of the conclusion: Dancing With Systems. Meadows was also part of a team of three scientists from MIT in 1972 who created a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. Their results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global 'overshoot,' or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Now, preeminent environmental scientists Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows audio interview 2004 have teamed up again to update and expand their original findings in The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Global Update. summary pdf.

Peter Senge The Necessary Revolution: Working Together to Create a Sustainable World by Bryan Smith, Peter M. Senge, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, Sara Schley.

===

https://www.c-span.org/video/?440956-1/its-looks

FEBRUARY 20, 2018

It's Better Than It Looks

Gregg Easterbrook introduces policy reforms to address economic inequality, climate change, and more. He emphasises shifting from a fear-based approach to one that restores hope.

:{Paul Hawken |:(style="font-weight:normal"):}: Drawdown

www.drawdown.org/staff/paul-hawken

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{Paul:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is an author and activist. He has founded successful, ecologically-conscious businesses, and consulted with heads of state and CEOs on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy. He has written seven books including four national bestsellers: The Next Economy, Growing a Business, and ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

===

solve for pattern:

http://www.alternet.org/environment/new-law-new-jersey-combating-climate-and-hunger-same-time

A new law in New Jersey aims to shrink the state’s climate footprint and feed the hungry by drastically reducing the amount ofwasted food that ends up in landfills.

The law requires the state to develop a plan over the next year to cut the state’s food waste by half by 2030. The bipartisan measure, which passed the state legislature without a single dissenting vote and was signed last week by Gov. Chris Christie, mirrors an Environmental Protection Agency goal for the entire country set under the Obama administration in 2015.

“The beauty of the bill is it’s going to get at two long-festering problems—climate and hunger—at the same time,” said Eric Goldstein, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York City. “The states are going to have to take the lead on issues like climate and this new law holds the hope of tackling one piece of that problem.”

Up to 40 percent of the food produced in the U.S. ends up uneaten and tossed into the garbage. So much food is thrown away every year that it adds up to the equivalent of about 20 pounds of food per person every month. Discarded food also wastes cropland and energy that are used in the production of food.

Worldwide, processing wasted food generates about 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually. That means if food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest climate polluter after China and the U.S., according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

When leftovers and rotting fruit and vegetables are tossed out and end up in the dump, they become a major climate problem. Decomposing food pollutes the atmosphere withmethane, a greenhouse gas 34 timesas powerful in warming the climate as carbon dioxide over the course of a century.

Larry Hajna, spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, said that while New Jersey has implemented more effective methane emissions controls at its landfills over the past 30 years, much of the state’s garbage is shipped to landfills out of state where New Jersey officials have no control over emissions.

Less methane will be emitted from those landfills and the climate will benefit if the amount of food New Jerseyans discard is cut drastically, he said.

At least five states either ban organic waste from landfills or mandate food waste recycling to some degree, according to the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic.

California mandates organic food waste recycling and requires businesses to cap the amount of food they send to the landfill each year. Connecticut and Rhode Island also require many businesses to cap the amount of food thrown out. Massachusetts and Vermont have a weight limit on food waste both individuals and businesses can throw away....

===

http://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-tipping-point-2170296371.html?page=2

18 Signs That Show We've Reached the Tipping Point

Dec. 30, 2016 01:58PM EST

Bruce Melton

Our planet's systems have a tremendous capacity to absorb punishment before they begin to show signs of degradation. Earth's ecology self-heals like a cut on a finger. It assimilates pollution by chemical, physical and biological means—it changes pollutants into non-hazardous materials and proceeds upon its merry way as if there had been no pollution at all. Up to a point.

Acid rain is an excellent example of how our planet can self-heal. By the late 1960s, the U.S. was emitting so many sulfate and nitrate pollutants (smog) from burning fossil fuels, that sulfuric acid washed from the sky was killing forests and lakes. President Richard Nixon's Clean Air Act stopped about half of the sulfur from going into our atmosphere. This was enough to allow nature to take over again and our forests and lakes began to heal.

Global warming didn't really get started in a big way until the 1950s. Today, the warming rate is seven times greater than it was in the 1950s and the carbon emission rate is four times greater than in the '50s.

That same sulfur pollution that caused all the acid rain in the '60s and '70s is a global cooling pollutant that hides warming. With grossly increasing smog in Asia since about the turn of the century, the results have been that 30 percent of warming that should have occurred has been masked or covered up by global cooling sulfate smog.

It's also a very common misconception that some of the warming is natural. However, until about 100 years ago, our climate was cooling. The planet cooled about 5 degrees F in polar regions near Greenland (half or less globally) over the last 6,000 years. This research comes from mini-icecaps on Baffin Island where easily dateable rooted plants were revealed from melt. In the last 100 years, the temperature on Baffin has warmed about 7 degrees Fahrenheit; 2 degrees warmer than at any time in the last 120,000 years. Most of this warming has occurred since the 1950s.

The extremes we are experiencing now (temperature, rainfall, drought, etc.) will not increase at the same rate as the average temperature. The physics of thermodynamics say extremes will increase nonlinearly. Earth has lost its ability to buffer the warming. As we replace coal with non-fossil fuel alternatives, masking of warming by global cooling pollutants will also disappear, compounding the nonlinear rate of increasing extremes.

We live on a very complicated and dangerous planet that is worthy of great respect and awe. The past year's advances in climate science should urge us to put that respect and awe into practice, taking definitive action against global warming.

1. Extremes

The American Meteorological Society's latest report on weather extremes tells us: "Without exception, all the heat-related events studied in this year's report were found to have been made more intense or likely due to human-induced climate change and this was discernible even for those events strongly influenced by the 2015 El Niño."

Human-caused "anthropogenic" influence was documented in 23 of 28 major global geographic regions. The events included increasing average temperature, warming of winter extremes, decreasing humidity due to warming, increasing dryness, increasing heavy precipitation, increased sunshine, more extreme drought, more extreme tropical cyclones, increased wildfire burn area and intensity, decreased arctic sea ice, more high tide flooding and decreased snowpack.

2. Attempts at Climate Reform

President Obama's Clean Power Plan (CPP), which is the first policy to set a national limit on power plant-generated CO2 pollution, was one of the major developments of 2015. The CPP is almost identical to the U.S. Kyoto Protocol commitment (created in the mid-1990s) of reducing CO2 emissions but the CPP is 18 years behind Kyoto. In other words, the new regulations are no different than they were a generation ago and we have emitted almost as much additional carbon dioxide during the delay. Implementation of the CPP began in June 2015, six years after carbon dioxide was successfully declared a pollutant by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In February 2016 however, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the CCP back to Federal Appeals Court to determine if it is legal or not. This is the first time that the U.S. Supreme Court has ever blocked an EPA rule.

The U.S. climate commitment at Paris, 80 percent CO2 emissions reductions by 2050, is 30 percent less than and 30 years behind Kyoto Phase 2, which was supposed to be implemented by 2020. President-elect Trump has threatened to back out of the Paris Agreement and he will also have final say over the CPP when it returns from court. After over 20 years of trying, we remain without meaningful climate pollution regulations, even though the U.S. is the single country that has unarguably emitted a third of all CO2 ever emitted—three times more than China. It is also very important to note that the U.S. is the only country in the world that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

3. Increasing Wildfires Across Western North America

Work from the Sierra Nevada Research Institute by Anthony Westerling reveals the western U.S. wildfire season has increased by more than 60 percent since the 1970s, from 138 days to 222 days, because of earlier onset of spring. The average burn time has increased nearly 800 percent, from six days to 52 days, because of deeper drying from early snowmelt. Burned area increased an astonishing 12 times (1,271 percent). Human-caused ignition has played a very small role in increasing wildfire trends. Westerling also notes: "Given projections for further drying within the region due to human-induced warming, this study underlines the potential for further increases in wildfire activity."

Work from the University of Idaho and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory led by John Abatzoglou revealed that most of the increase in wildfire across the American West has happened since about 2000 and beetle killed trees are not factored into the trends (40 million acres across the US West has been killed by native beetles since 2000). Abatzoglou said that in 20 to 30 years, so much of the forest will have burned that the annual burn rate will begin to fall even with continued warming, because there will be too little forest left to burn.

4. The Amazon Continues to Emit More Carbon Than it Absorbs

It began in 2005 with a 100-year drought. Then in 2010, there was another, more extreme drought. Billions of trees were killed. As a result, the Amazon is no longer absorbing CO2. Instead, it is emitting it to the tune of 257 megatons annually—more than half of Brazil's annual emissions. The most recent and extensive study of this topic, from 56 researchers at the University of Exeter in the UK, led by Ted Feldpausch, showed the decreasing sequestration was not from drought kill alone, but drought stress induced by higher temperatures was also responsible.

In 2010, I spoke with Leeds University researcher Simon Lewis who performed some of the first work on Amazonia after the 2010 drought. He said billions of trees were killed in the two droughts, and that for all of the trees to decay will take a relatively short 29 years in the rain forest. Lewis continued, "Two droughts like this in one decade will not completely offset the sink within that decade, but three in a decade may." Considering the newer work by Feldpausch shows the flip has already occurred, it's clear that—as so often happens with climate science—the deeper we look, the more extensive the damage really is....

p2 on ice etc

http://www.alternet.org/environment/smart-city-20-transforming-cities-self-learning-self-modulating-organisms

why the book/map matters:

===

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/010920

15/fossil-fuel-industry-ensures-CEO-executive-pay-bonues-sink-climate

A report released Wednesdayexamining the pay practices of the 30 largest publicly held U.S. oil, gas, and coal companies concluded that pay incentives for the companies' chief executives encourages reckless behavior and is hastening a climate crisis.

In the analysis, all 13 oil exploration and production companies examined by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) tied executive bonuses to increasing the amount of proven carbon reserves each year.

"What we are essentially doing here is paying people massive amounts of money to continue to drill and burn and do things that are going to harm the planet and put a lot of costs on the rest of us," said lead author Sarah Anderson of IPS, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

Fossil fuel companies current hold vast reserves of oil, gas, and coal which, if burned in their entirety would emit five times the amount of carbon than can be emitted to keep the planet from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius. The same companies also spend $600 billion a year to locate additional carbon reserves.

"These companies are already sitting on reserves that if fully burned would cause catastrophic effects, so why are we tying executive bonuses to expanding those reserves?" Anderson said.

Compensation packages for corporate executives are increasingly tied to short-term profit gains, a practice financial watchdogs criticize. For the oil and gas sector, however, the concern is amplified by the carbon dioxide emissions created from burning fossil fuels.

"When you're talking about companies with this great of an impact on our long-term health, we think it is even more necessary to take a long hard look at this and change the incentives," Anderson said.

The report cites the salary and stock bonuses of ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, who made a reported $33 million in 2014. Under Tillerson, Exxon has boosted share prices by buying back its own stock, which alsoinflates Tillerson's equity-based pay. According to the report, 51 percent of ExxonMobil earnings per share growth from 2003-13 was a result of buybacks. Tillerson owns an estimated $166 million worth of shares.

ConocoPhillips also gave its CEO, Ryan Lance, an 18 percent raise to $27 million in 2014, the report says, while the company laid off 1,500 employees that year.

One group looking to change incentives for oil and gas company executives is Ceres, a non-profit sustainability advocacy organization based in Boston. In 2013, the group launched the Carbon Asset Risk Initiative to work with fossil fuel companies to address the financial risks of climate change.

"It really comes down to compensating executives for creating value for the company rather than compensating for amassing huge reserves on their books that might never be exploited or brought to market," said Shanna Cleveland, a senior manager at Ceres.

For the past 150 years, the best way for these companies to make more money was to sell more barrels of oil, so increasing reserves made sense. We are now, however, entering a period of transition where continued expansion of reserves isn't necessarily in a company's best interest, Cleveland said.

"You need to think about whether you've got reserves on your books that are resilient to reduced prices for a barrel of oil, lower demand scenarios, and whether or not you can generate revenues from other types of energy sources," Cleveland said.

A 2014 study by European financial services company Kepler Cheuvreux compared potential investments by oil companies over a 20-year period. The study found that onshore wind would be competitive with oil over a 20-year period if oil sold for $25 a barrel. Offshore wind would be competitive with oil at at $50 a barrel and solar would compete at $75 a barrel. Oil is currently trading at $47 a barrel, down from $100 in July 2014.

The current report also found fault with share repurchases, a controversial practice of public companies buying back shares of their own stock. Critics say this artificially inflates a company's share price. In 2014, 23 of the top 30 fossil fuel companies spent a combined $38.5 billion repurchasing shares, afigure six times larger than the $6.6 billion all corporations spent that year on research into renewable energy, according to the report.

"The money that is disgorged through share repurchases would be much better spent doing research and development on green energy technologies," said Lynn Stout, a professor of corporate law at Cornell University. Forty years ago the average American public company reinvested 40 percent of its profits into its business. Today, due in part to share repurchases, reinvestment is typically less than 15 percent, Stout said.

Many of the Bhopal-related emails, addressed from Stratfor to Dow and Union Carbide public relations directors, reveal concern that, in the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, the Bhopal issue might be expanded into an effective systemic critique of corporate rule, and speculate at length about why this hasn't yet happened—providing a fascinating window onto what at least some corporate types fear most from activists.

"[Bhopal activists] have made a slight nod toward expanded activity, but never followed through on it—the idea of 'other Bhopals' that were the fault of Dow or others," mused Joseph de Feo, who is listed in one online source as a "Briefer" for Stratfor.

"Maybe the Yes Men were the pinnacle. They made an argument in their way on their terms—that this is a corporate problem and a part of the a [sic] larger whole," wrote Kathleen Morson, Stratfor's Director of Policy Analysis.

"With less than a month to go [until the 25th anniversary], you'd think that the major players—especially Amnesty—would have branched out from Bhopal to make a broader set of issues. I don't see any evidence of it," wrote Bart Mongoven, Stratfor's Vice President, in November 2004. "If they can't manage to use the 25th anniversary to broaden the issue, they probably won't be able to."

Mongoven even speculates on coordination between various activist campaigns that had nothing to do with each other. "The Chevron campaign [in Ecuador] is remarkably similar [to the Dow campaign] in its unrealistic demand. Is it a follow up or an admission that the first thrust failed? Am I missing a node of activity or a major campaign that is to come? Has the Dow campaign been more successful than I think?" It's almost as if Mongoven assumes the two campaigns were directed from the same central activist headquarters.

Just as Wall Street has at times let slip their fear of the Occupy Wall Street movement, these leaks seem to show that corporate power is most afraid of whatever reveals "the larger whole" and "broader issues," i.e. whatever brings systemic criminal behavior to light. "Systemic critique could lead to policy changes that would challenge corporate power and profits in a really major way," noted Joseph Huff-Hannon, recently-promoted Director of Policy Analysis for the Yes Lab.

META/PATTERN: income shifts up:

prop 13 OC gop CA taxpayer revolt spreads across cty; defunded states and school districts turn to lotto to fund school (big chunk of $ that rw moguls want to pvtize/grab

3. Almost 70% of Corporations Are Not Required to Pay ANY Federal Taxes

And that's even before tax avoidance kicks in. The 'nontaxable' [10] designation exempts 69% of U.S. corporations from taxes, thus sparing them the expense of hiring tax lawyers to contrive tax avoidance strategies.

The Wall Street Journal [11] states,"The percentage of U.S. corporations organized as nontaxable businesses has grown from about 24% in 1986 to about 69% as of 2008,according to the latest-available Internal Revenue Service data. The percentage of all firms is far higher when partnerships and sole proprietors are included."

In recent years the businesses taking advantage of the exemption include [12] law firms, hedge funds,real estate partnerships, venture capital firms, and investment banks.

4. Lotteries Pay for Corporate Tax Avoidance

This means revenue comes from the poorest residents of a community rather than from billion-dollar corporations. Many of the lottery players don't realize how bad the odds are. Fill out $2 tickets for 12 hours a day for 50 years and you'll have half a chance of winning [13].

Some astonishing facts reveal the extent of the problem. Low-income households spend anywhere from five [14]to nine [15] percent of their earnings on lotteries. A Pennsylvania survey [16] found that nearly half of low-income residents planned to gamble at a newly-opened casino. America's gambling losses in 2007 were nine times greater [17] than just 25 years before.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tRdFX6IXUg

n Nov 12, 2014

Providing key context and framing for the important race to ‘drawdown’ greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, legendary author and entrepreneur Paul Hawken outlines Project Drawdown:a book, a digital platform, and open-source database. Through measuring the beneficial financial, social and environmental impact that 'state-of-the-shelf' solutions can deliver, Project Drawdown shows the world that if it's happening, it's possible.

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fair pt:

We need a consumer boycott on fossil fuels says Dale Vince, founder of green electricity company Ecotricity, because the divestment campaign on its own isn’t enough to end the demand for fossil fuels.

Vince, who has received an OBE for his services to the environment, adds that in addition to the divestment campaign and a consumer boycott we must eliminate government fossil fuel subsidies. “These three things together will get us to where we need to be,” he said.

Speaking at a Guardian Live debate on divestment last week, Vince argued: “Simply selling shares of a fossil fuel company doesn’t undermine its fundamental business plan. The problem is that we are all demanding fossil fuels and that is what underpins the business plan.”

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), fossil fuel companies are benefiting from global subsidies of $5.3 trillion (£3.4tn) a year. And in March, Chancellor George Osborne’s budget announcement gave new exemptions of more than £200 million a year to encourage exploration in the North Sea.

This is not to mention the everyday direct and indirect consumer purchasing of fossil fuels, from petrol to beef... 6/15 desmog uk

Dynamics of Climate Change: Understanding and Influencing the Planet's Future

This recently held webnar was quite marvelous and here are links to the followup information...

* Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDI7bZbGxNI

* Slides: http://xmile.systemdynamics.org/wp/wp-content/userup/Jones-C-ROADS-XMILE-Oct-2013-share.ppt

* C-ROADS Model: http://bit.ly/1dZU3ZO

Ctr-cultural tactics of 60's are the commons, the earth's immune system see hawken multitude DIVERSITY of NGO, autonomous but united; efficient b/c small w/ few resources.

WWW is a buffer of memory, but also unfiltered, too fast moving, "narrow-casting" so polarizing

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-centric_warfare

The tenets of network-centric warfare are:^[5]

Tenet 1: A robustly networked force improves information sharing.
Tenet 2: Information sharing and collaboration enhance the quality of information and shared situational awareness.
Tenet 3: Shared situational awareness enables self-synchronization.
Tenet 4: These, in turn, dramatically increase mission effectiveness.

Power to the Edge

The last publication dealing with the developing theory of network centric warfare appeared in 2003 with Power to the Edge, also published by the CCRP. Power to the Edge is a speculative work suggesting that modern military environments are far too complex to be understood by any one individual, organisation, or even military service.

Modern information technology permits the rapid and effective sharing of information to such a degree that "edge entities" or those that are essentially conducting military missions themselves, should be able to "pull" information from ubiquitous repositories, rather than having centralised agencies attempt to anticipate their information needs and "push" it to them. This would imply a major flattening of traditional military hierarchies, however.

Power To The Edge's radical ideas had been under investigation by the Pentagon since at least 2001. In UIAW, the concept of peer-to-peer activity combined with more traditional hierarchical flow of data in the network had been introduced.

A brittle system is system characterized by a sudden and steep decline in performance as the system state changes. This can be due to input parameters which exceed a specified input, or environmental conditions which exceed specified operating boundaries. This is the opposite of a gracefully degrading system. A brittle system will tend to operate with high performance until it reaches a limit and then degrades suddenly and catastrophically.

A virtuous circle and a vicious circle (also referred to as virtuous cycle and vicious cycle) are economic terms. They refer to a complex chain of events that reinforces itself through a feedback loop.^[1] A virtuous circle has favorable results, while a vicious circle has detrimental results.

Both circles are complexes of events with no tendency towards equilibrium (at least in the short run). Both systems of events have feedback loops in which each iteration of the cycle reinforces the previous one (positive feedback). These cycles will continue in the direction of their momentum until an external factor intervenes and breaks the cycle. The prefix "hyper-" is sometimes used to describe these cycles if they are extreme. The best-known example of a vicious circle is hyperinflation.

legal

MACRO: big green shifted from grassroots to the courts EDF etc and won major victories

stuffed spotted owl story?) AND what's the point of having a Clean Air Act if it's not enforced? Similarly, historic anti-tobacco suit forced companies to admit they kill ppl, forced them to pay damages, and forced them to turn over the proof (those databases are still useful in outing BS ppl and tactics. Do we need same for fossil fuels?

In addition, CRM used the courts to get social and economic justice (Brown v Bd of Ed) thus Powell says we need FedSoc to balance ACLU (plus corps have massive legal capability to defend and attack eg SLAPP; however, legal firm branches out into lobbying, also buffer (Hunt & Wms hires the intel co to spy on activists). COORDINATION mini-hub PLUS BUFFER

===

Dana meadows says the most powerful balancing feedbacks are the ones that repair/enhance other balancing feedbacks; she also says in natural systems balancing feedbacks are rarer than amplifying? evil/perverse is mirror (breaking that which repairs). Cf crypto, which is an organization that not just pretend to be what it's not (eg astroturf) but is designed to destroy / OFFENSIVE the original (Stepford Wives style). eg PIRGs

Steven Johnson Where Ideas Come From speaks of Darwin discovering nature's engineers, eg tiny symbiotic coral that can build structures that withstand hurricane waves.

matrix study: powell memo, defund the left, beck, targets, rush? james ok'eefe?!

compare and contrast the targets of the left, methods of attack, effectiveness of attack (name and shame?) NB: if major right tactic is buffer (eg API shields exxon), take those out?

Question: is there a correlation between effective progressive ppl/orgs and targets? How smart is the right about the threat? Nader an early target (by Powell no less). In anti AGW rant 4/13 Rush rails at corrupting universities.

Post CU, some left groups pressuring IRS to look at outrageous scam of 501c4 charity non-pol secret ; unhappily fell into trifecta of "scandals" which also echo TP BS on tyranny (no win: if Obama does not stop leaks, he's soft on military) Defund the Right? anti-corruption

Beck has crude network conspiracy theory, but does target significant agents of change: Mann, Bill McK, Acorn, Color of Change, van jones, Soros, unions, cap and trade, UN agenda 21, Occupy (fox piven , holdren, sunstein reg czar legal); maybe he's just reacting to any effective resistance, but maybe also the targets fit into the tradtional defund the left campaign?

===

see social networks node, as well as Wheregoodideas.txt:

Ruef at Stanford found that creative ppl have broad network diverse 166 // Ron Burt found innovation in ppl who bridge "structural holes" between tightly knot clusters 167 (U of Chic studying Raytheon! Chapter 7 The Social Capital of Structural Holes Ronald S. Burt

faculty.chicagobooth.edu/ronald.burt/research/files/scsh.pdf

Structural Holes and Good Ideas

www.econ.upf.edu/docs/seminars/burt.pdf

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military-industrial-prison complex? (war on drugs?) ike originally added congress a la revolving door but was talked out of it

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mountaintop removal

Of interest because effective against tall odds, divestment strategy? Banks are being peeled off? each DEFECTOR win increases pressure on holdouts? THEY ARE EXPOSED AND NO LONGER HAVE BUFFER COVER

Why are they winning when other green efforts stalled or losing ground?

alliance between poor (white?) ppl/workers and greens? Worst of worst: coal cooking the planet, coal vulnerable b/c BO and EPA GHG regs, fracking makes coal less economically viable. Perfect storm is systemic?

VERY 1ST TRY:

Color of change very effective at driving defectors [cascade?] (prompted ctr attack), see also alec and ICC/Heartland: cf expose faster than RWI can construct astroturf BS; perhaps related 350.org driving funders away, eg pension plans, successfully done against apartheid, divestment. note not directly a defund the right strategy, only use market forces in ju jitsu fashion: if the fossil fuel corps understand/respond only to profit/shareholders, then use that. Not possible to defund the right? the money will get laundered one way or another? What is happening to shareholdr ability to sway?

Listening to Amy Goodman on BookTV, i realized jiu jitsu peel off strategy to undo the integrative4 dovetails: 1) stewards vs xian, 2) military goes green tired of fighting for flammable and heavy oil (convoy); 3) anti-commie on last gasp (tho BO w/ moustache? and Agenda 21 backed by all TP PRES? cands?); 4) Paul Hawken new green economy? insurance co's 1st to crack on AGW; anti-corp TP and Occupy admit mkt not perfect?

THANK YOU FOR NOT PAYING ATTENTION

Where to start? When did this all really begin? Four waves: 1) Cromagnon needed complex language 2) agriculture led to civilization which needed writing 3) Industrial Revolution set of by print that led to Scientific Revolution and reductionism. Also consumerism (including the ability to massively extract resources from anywhere/ using anyone, and emitting gigtonnes of waste 4) Digital Revolution gave us power to overthrow reductionism, retribalize, world brain/CNS (enough to recognize the damage; all previous civilizations destroyed themselves thru eco-cide), become makers again.

am revo was against corp more than cty uk. jefferson and madison against monopolies, wanted small scale farmers.

charters allow mil action 32 rushkoff

Remember that you are writing an argument based on a systemic analysis:

Thesis: Building the RWI had the (unintended?) consequence of polarizing America and disabling crucial moderating functions. By any means necessary: for carbon industry, tremendous sunk costs means the stakes are very high (for politicians important to keep the economy going, funders happy, and gas prices reasonable/aritficially low). For religious, we must defeat godless Communists. So four groups/ideology/stories have absolutist (?) stance in which the failure of their mission brings cataclysm (convenient, for the cynics/realists) , and these stories are interlocking/self-supporting.

Evil is perversion of the commons.[related to mirror/crypto?] Advertisers use our defense mechanisms against us (e.g., we know you're far too smart to fall for ad scams and we respect you for it; you can demonstrate your insightfulness to the world by buying [and ironically displaying?] our products). Climate deniers use journalistic balancing norms to get marginal (at best) science into mainstream. Denialists abuse the norms of science (skeptical requirement of proof, careful use of language making uncertainties clear since that is the function of science, to clear them up, that's how progress is made).

When defense fails, go on the offense: use FOIA, designed to have government transparency to get scientists to share data and processes; of course this is typically routinely done as standard operating procedure, however some scientists who have been attacked (even had death threats) are reluctant to release (raw?) data because they know that it will be unfairly cherry-picked, that is the norms of science and academic fairness will not be observed. In the case of Cronon, it was not even data that was sought, but personal correspondence/emails. Normally we would expect conservatives to be very respectful of privacy and freedom of expression, but because these emails are sent via a public university system, they are somehow public property. The purpose is not even to get information, but to intimidate. Academic freedom is another source of moderation/protection: ensure the quality of information.

The two Gulf Wars indicate the peril when info is not high quality/shit-detectors disabled:in both varous rationales were offered up, rejected and replaced. In gulf 1 b1 stated we needed the oil? Nayirah helped shift to humanitarian [then encouraged uprising but did not support it, which led to slaughter including use of poison gas]. Later we greenlighted invasion of Kuwait (disputed). In Gulf 2, the right answer was laid out and supporting intelligence was demanded. Conflicting evidence was discarded. Dissidents were threatened (Plame).

Delay/buffer: Robert Lazarus shows us that it takes a long time and it's really hard to pass major green legislation, and it's fairly easy to undermine it once it does pass. This makes the evil all the more dangerous. Additonally, since the problem is cresive, it's hard to see/get excited about, since changes (it is thought) will happen slowly and in the distant future, if at all. However, To add to our predicament, it will take quite a long time for any action we now do to take effect, given the large buffer of the atmosphere and oceans. What the public does not understand is that physical systems can undergo fairly rapid phase state transitions when a threshold is reached (tipping point), even when the change that reaches it is incremental. Even those who understand this can interpret it in terms of doomsday scenarios that green experts and activists have predicted in the past (eg population bomb).

Systems must maintain balance to exist. Skin is a filter that allows some substances to enter (nutrient) and excludes that which is harmful; our biological systems also eliminate waste and destroy pathogens. It maintains constant temperature and even balanced mental state. This is done through amplifying feedback loops that increase or decrease substances, and balancing loops.

Our problem is that on a social/political level, moderating forces are being disabled or coopted.

Donella Meadows lays out 12 leverage points to affect a system

[Which ones are the RW using? abusing?]

12 She begins with least important (counterintuituvely) numbers and parameters, the changing of which have no real effect until they trigger one of the ones below. For example, one would think that campaign finance reforms/limits on money would help make the "debate" on global warming more fair as it would prevent the right from donimating. EXPLAIN why this won't work: kochtopus morphs, and will find ways to game the system and get around any limits? Life will find a way, and so will money? it's fungible?

11: Size of Stabilizing buffers: we've touched on this above, but institutional memory (diversitry of viewpoint), checks and behaviors of fair play are important and have accumulated over time. Analogy of FM radio: easy to destroy and difficult to reconstitute. {aquifer)

Barry Commoner points out that the slowest cycle is often the limiting factor. 24/7 compresssed news cycle creates appetite which elcitis bad information is is corrected belatedly if at all.

It's usually easier to slow down than speed up a system, since some (at least natural processes like the growth of a child) cannot be accelerated. Moreover, if we could slow economic system, it would lessen GHG and give us more time to cope.

10 Structure of (materials) stocks and flow (and nodes?):

My analysis follows the flow of money and information (the two are related). Blood provides energy and is a proxy for activity/power (in CATscans?). Money can create and amplify, and dampen competing makers and distributors of rival info/memes. Mass media has flows (reporters get info from government officials and experts. Constrained by time, the need to make the story interesting (and possibly the political views of boss).

I also track social and professional relationships (the two are related) , b/c/but money and info flow through these as well.

Speed of feedback: too slow and sluggish reaction, too fast and sets up oscillation (or bad decision?)

A favorite cure of RW is term limits; they assume that gov't service is inherently corrupting, and like people cleaning up after a nuclear accident, we have to limit their exposure. The problem with this theory is twofold: 1) you need to raise lots of money to get elected in the first place, and perhaps bend to an orthodoxy you may not even believe in, so it's not life purity is lost like virginity. The second problem is graft could be increased/accelerated b/c got to grab it while one can? And of course one can always run for a different office (or do a lateral into lobbying or some other aspect of pension plan?] The other problem is that gov't is complex, and we have ppl constantly learning not only info on issue but how to get things done.

9. Delays relative to the rate of system change: compression (and corruption?) of news cycle leaves less time to evaluate the quality of the information and relect on it's meaning (putting it in bigger context?). The first Clinton presidential campaign discovered how damaging it was to not respond to neagtive portrayals, and thus created a rapid response "war room." These have now become more frequent and even perennial (and permanent: ad hoc and temporary Bork organization to secure his confirmation becomes the permanent ___). In terms of video by O'Keefe, pressure to respond led to defunding and destruction of ACORN, the firing of NPR management (and re-opening to recurring attempts to defund) [note that Fox news expects its personnel to be partisan, but appearance of same is grounds for dismissal at npr, i suppose b/c the latter is public?], and the firing of innocent dept of Agriculture official (who was in fact making a speeach about racial harmony, but had it perverted to one of reverse discrimination [another instance of mirroring/tarbaby tactic: arnold gropes, gray beats). [This is a failure of historical/systemic analysis? slavery was built into rules and economic structure, not an evil in the heart of an individual].

What is the corrective? balancing loop? how do we slow down the news cycle?

Are there any penalties for being wrong/lying? Breitbart briefly shunned? ["muckraking" o'keefe still on his biggov site 6/11] Blumenthal had to drop lawsuit for lack of money (why didn't he have pro bono ACLU help?]. But remember the pension plan/safety net. Longbets?

What is the rate of system change we're talking about?

8. Strength of balancing feedback loops (relative to the forces/impacts they are working against)

Well, if the impact is sudden cataclysmic climate change, then our efforts are going to be necessarily puny? Against Kochtopus? However, if the impact is political change, that happens relatively slowly? But remember, time is not on our side. Domhof says ��the right info released at the right time in the right way can have disproportinate effect. Documentary films. But much of my argument/thesis is that we're losing ground here. Corp? Whistleblower laws ineffective (most regret?!]

To be effective, feedback /info must be accurate, timely (which require monitoring) and the response must be targeted? sufficient?

Filibuster and secret holds have evolved to keep majoring from steamrolling the minority. can we findf examples of unfair or clear abuse?

Dana says sometimes a moderating function can lay dormant a long time between times that it is needed. It's a mistake to get rid of this (and other kinds of "overhead") as old fashhioned or obsolete/redundant? ��What is dormant in our system that could be revived/re-tooled?

7. Gain by driving amplifying loops: source of growth, collapse, evolution and learning? Trust buids trust, bi-partisanship creates more, but all Obama attepts ignored or used as basis for moving the goalpost?

In a war between networks, it's the one that learns fastest and adapts the best that wins? "It has the additional advantage of being the truth"?

Esacalate the LW infra to cope/beat rw?

Matthew Effect destabilizes the political and economic system, and gives the rich more power to fight (and a greatr stake in defense? relateds or not to sunk cost of energy co?]. But can't the rich have enough money to to feel safe and thus not retaliate? Any attempt to redistribute wealth/levl the playing field portrayed as socialist/commie. But Freakonmics? says we have an inherent? sense of what fair taxes are, and any demand above that leads to cheating to achieve that level?

6 Structure of Info flow: who has access to what?

In gulf 2, b2 given benefit of the doubt b/c assumed he had better info (that is we trusted he would do what's right w/ it [also shields us from guilt of acting to go to war and kill ppl)

More/better/info (quicker) gives us the ability to make better decisions and thus be safer, saner and healthier. Hopeful eg is Dutch electricity meter: new/better info led to painless improvement. Internet envisioned as such, but RW blogospherev Fox news and other info bubbles were unforseen and unintended consequwnce?

Dana says missing info is the most common cause of system malfunction.(157). The market knows the price of fish, but not how many there are (or worse, higher price leads to better to techniques to find and thus wipe out remainders).

Systematic tendency for humans to (try to) avoid accountability for decisions [a partial explnation for why erors not corrected: personal humiliation and an opportunity for enemy to discredit? ]

5. The rules of the system: (written and not? formal vs informal?

The constitution is the operating system, but Rushkoff says corps have gotten into the DNA? a corp is a person, thus has free speech = unlimited SECRET money, money decoupled from info in some ways, cf sho has access to info, orfor that matter what lobbyist has access to what pol]

checks and BALANCES

WTO has no accountability (ironic that RW worries about black helicopters of UN, but roots for WTO? it deprives US and all of soverignty, but we run it so we don't worry, or doctrine is that the market will always make the right decision a la Greenspace circa 2008). But it rules against subsidies which in principle RW says are bad? Also encourages outsourceing/race to the bottom wherein green and labor laws are ignored?

4 Power to add, change, evolve or self-organize the system:

rebuild buffers, balance, moderation functions

strengthen old ones

create new ones

Digital revo/social networks allow for mass fund-raising, mobilization, as Arab Spring shows, was of getting around state control (or in our case Kochtopus control? does it have control? of what?

It can levrage psychological factors: we think about ourselves and our own in short term, we don't think well logically or long term. Economic collapse makes us all more insecure, so no bold action/risk-taking?

3 Goals of the system:

Goal of RWI is to grow and win (power over)

Goal of US is a more perfect union, increase equity, quality of life (not exactly standard of living, not freedom to buy/use/waste whatever we want to]

2. The paradigm out of which rules goals etc arise:

the world is a resource for us to as.

Ideas manifest themselves in a newspaper story or highway layout

1. Power to transcend paradigms: humans are separate and better than the earth? work with vs power over (which is geo-engineering?!]

Native Americans (indigenous ppl in general [fem vs male tribes?] thought for 7 generations? they are the basis of our democracy [Franklin spoke Choctaw?]

They lived here 10K years w/o wrecking it, tho they did transform it (buffalo pop boom b/c we killed off hu predator/mgr? passenger pigeon?] terra preta magical emergent properties?

bio-mimicry

How to shift:

Point out anomalies [a la Kuhn?]

speak up, act out

Put ppl w/ the new paradigm in public and in power

Don't waste time on reactionaries, find and support the change agents
Build a model of the system that lets us get outside of it and look at it. THAT'S MY GOAL

The RWI has been doing this better than we have?

expose your model to light of day to see where it does not reflect reality

USER FRIENDLY TIPS

Note that the higher the hierarchy, the more resistance

Expand the boundaries of caring (to more ppl, all ppl, all things? LongNow expands time horizon

Honor and distribute Info

Make Feedback policy : eg Carter idea to tax oil at the % of imports. Montreal protocol readjusted limits based on performance. Constant fackcheck.org score/meter?

stay humble, stay a learner: jesus was right, the meek shall inherit the earth, prode/hubris/arrogance cometh before a fall (look at list of bad guys and see what hqppened to them, any patterns?

Business has some advantages inthat its goal is clear (to sell more stuff) and that is measurable, so it's easier to test and know what's working. Agreeing on quality of life and measuring it is tougher? However, we can measure votes, IMR, Bhutan meas happiness?

Use language with care and expand its ability to explain

Locate responsibility in the system (this does not mean to place blame retroactively?)

Her classic eg is put drinking water input pipes downstream of our sewage outflow. In theory we hold our political leaders accountable for corruption and bad decisions (note that a a bad decision for a ceo is one that does not maximize profit in the short-term?)

Go for the good of the whole: RWI cannot do this. Thatcher said society does not exist. This is merely an extension of perverted idea of invisible hand translates individual acts of selfishness magically into a pub;ic/common good.

Test for rightness: does it preserve integrity, stability and beauty?

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What is A Life of Its Own in systems terms?

. Here are seven possibilities:

Smart Subsidies: The free market doesn't reign in energy, nor should it. It can't price carbon correctly because it leaves out the costs we all bear collectively, like environmental destruction and damage to our health. Since the free market can't price carbon correctly by itself, government policies need to help the market by rewarding technologies that lessen the cost to society and our environment and punishing those that increase it: R&D subsidies to responsible new technology; clean energy and efficiency rebates to consumers; heavy taxes on profits of fossil fuel companies; and an end to subsidies and loan guarantees to dicey modalities like nuclear, ethanol and gas.
Smart Standards: We need to develop common sense standards for new technology so we don't go halfway down the road to hell paved by our good intentions. The precautionary principle has been adopted by the EU to ensure new chemicals don't get introduced into industrial processes before they are proven safe. It wouldn't have taken all that much time for scientists and eco-economists to figure out that corn ethanol violates the precautionary principle. All the billions of dollars wasted on that dead end could have given us a jumpstart on safer forms of biofuels, from algae to switchgrass -- and ones yet discovered.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has developed these "Bioenergy Principles" to guide R&D and investment in alternative fuels. A national renewable energy standard would also be smart, enabling innovative technologies to be developed with a national market in mind and improved predictability for investors.

Smart Efficiency: Some criticize efficiency efforts, pointing out that while vehicle efficiency has increased, overall vehicle emissions have stayed the same, because people are driving more. Increasing use as efficiency goes up is called the Jevons effect; it's real, but doesn't apply everywhere and can be minimized. For example, making buildings more energy efficient will decrease total emissions because people won't jack up the heat or AC beyond the level of comfort. Engineering solutions like smart lighting that goes off when no one is in a room makes efficiency easy, as does architecture that increases available daylight.

Even transportation can sidestep the Jevons effect -- if mass transit is made more attractive than driving, as it is in many European cities or the older, dense cities of the US Northeast. Make trains affordable, available, with good connections and clear and frequent scheduling and many will give up driving with relief. Smart traffic lights can decrease fuel use and ease driving for those who must use cars. Discouraging sprawl and encouraging urban density will help too.

Smart Transition: We need to get serious about shortening the transition time away from fossil fuels to clean, responsible renewables. But we can also lighten the impact of fossil fuel production by adopting more stringent standards for pollution control and efficiency. Cars -- even gasoline engines -- can be much more fuel-efficient than current standards mandate. Coal plants can scrub their emissions better than they do now. Companies will scream and moan about costs, but, as the case of vinyl chloride shows, when they finally have to knuckle down and do the right thing, they will probably find a healthier bottom line. And a government mandate would level the playing field between companies and encourage a smart approach. As the Union of Concerned Scientists has pointed out, "Addressing all four major pollutants (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury and CO2) at once allows utilities to take an integrated approach to pollution control, reducing industry costs and greatly increasing the public health benefits."

The war against climate chaos isn't just about technology and efficiency. It's also about hearts and minds.

Smart Patriotism: The war metaphor is apt: just like the Allies did during World War II, citizens need to pitch in together so our children will have a chance. We need to make it unpatriotic to waste energy; we need to engage communities with Clean Energy Challenges, tree planting and climate resilience projects, and community wind developments; the list is endless. We need to redefine security to conform more to the real threats -- wars over climate and dwindling resources -- so we can take money from bloated defense budgets and use it to change the climate calculus to lessen the threat.
Smart Engagement: Many European cities use their trash to generate energy, but I heard a radio report on WNYC in New York that discounted that possibility for the city -- a city which is now burning tons of carbon (and cash) to truck its mountains of trash away. The report said residents would never accept trash-to-energy installations. Well, maybe community education and engagement, along with incentives in the form of lower energy costs -- and disincentives to continue business as usual -- might change some hearts and minds. It’s worth a try. We need to educate and engage citizens in being part of the solution, not the problem.
Smart Consumption: And that bring us to the final strategy. Let's redefine the good life to value quality over quantity; the commons we share over the stuff we hoard (or heedlessly discard); the things that are free and priceless, like health, community, compassion, conviviality and a shared investment in our human future.

It's up to us.

About Francesca Rheannon

Francesca is CSRwire's Talkback Managing Editor. An award-winning journalist, Francesca is co-founder of Sea Change Media. http://www.csrwire.com/csrlive/commentary_detail/4138-Top-Seven-Strategies-to-Cure-Global-Warming

AlterNet [1] / By Don Hazen [2]

The 4 Plagues: Getting a Handle on the Coming Apocalypse

June 4, 2013 |

Every day, thousands, probably millions of people ask their family, friends, neighbors and colleagues similar and increasingly familiar questions: What has happened to our country? How did we get here? Isn’t it scary? Can anything be done about it?

There is an abundance of evidence that there are forces tearing apart the U.S. economy and society, causing increasing levels of fear, anxiety and trauma for large numbers of people. Many people are mystified as to the specific causes of their fears, with a mass media system that constantly broadcasts propaganda about how great America is and a new digital media system that may be exacerbating the problems for a society under immense and unprecedented duress.

There is the added problem that the theories and the means of social change we are familiar with, and to which we still turn, are not remotely up to the task we face, and have mostly proven to be inadequate. Virtually every problem we face has gotten worse over the past 40 years, and heavily sped up since 9/11 and the economic crash of 2007.

In an environment of confusion and despair, it can be helpful to name the beast—essentially to understand the forces at play, how they operate, and why they feel both intractable and overwhelming. So, what follows is a kind of "Users' Guide To What Is Freaking Us Out.”

What Has Happened to Us?

So the big question is: what is the “it” that has happened to us? Depending on your vantage point and the myriad problems in front of us, “it” can be any number of causes and factors.

For many, it is the disappearance of the sense of a democracy many thought was embedded in U.S society. Sure, we’ve always been ruled by elites. But we are in a new era where we feel crushed by the overwhelming dominance of corporations and big institutions that treat people like commodities, getting away with degrading people’s dignities while pocketing large profits. This is especially true of banks, which are now so big they are beyond the reach of the legal system for fear that the global economy will be adversely affected.

Many people feel they have no control over the direction of the country because their vote doesn’t matter—incumbents with the most money mostly get elected. Many voters feel trapped by the lack of options because of pro-corporate stances of both Republicans and Democrats, and then there is another beast—the rabid right-wing.Our legislators are bought by campaign contributions and seem incapable of constructive action. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court decision in *Citizens United* [3], and the fact that legally corporations are often treated like persons, is beyond most people’s comprehension.

Economic Disaster For Many

For others, the anxiety producing “it” is directly connected to personal economic loss, of homes, jobs, personal wealth, or increased debt, all which has contributed to a massive erosion of financial security.

The statistics are quite shocking. The poor are suffering—more than 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty level [4], which is $23,201 for a family of four. That's $5,800 per person; but a far larger group of 138 million people (nearly 40% of American households)—many of whom had considered themselves part of the middle class—are living paycheck to paycheck [5]. And, according to a Pew Foundation survey [6], “nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) say they had trouble putting food on the table in the past 12 month revealing a painful level of deprivation and family trauma despite the U.S. being the richest country in the world. Our level of deprivation is closer to that in Indonesia or Greece rather than Britain or Canada.”

Especially for Those About to Retire … Or Thought They Were

Furthermore, financial security for the future, often referred as the “American Dream,” is increasingly out of reach for many millions. This is especially true for those approaching retirement—a goal that has been undermined, even destroyed, by the economic crash of 2007, which robbed so many of what small wealth they had. Over the long run, a major culprit has been the replacement of pensions by the grossly inadequate 401K model, which is forcing millions of Americans to keep on working, or find marginal jobs to help pay the bills as they age, or in some cases fall into poverty, living only on a meager Social Security stipend.

As Joshua Holland recently noted, this trend “has been an integral part of what Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker called the great risk-shift [7], in which the burden of paying for education, healthcare and retirement has increasingly shifted from corporations and the government onto the backs of individuals and families."

Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economics at the New School for Social Research writes, [8] “The specter of downward mobility in retirement is a looming reality for both middle- and higher-income workers. Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day.” She adds, “Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 [9] in their retirement accounts.”

But the situation is far from great for recent college graduates, many of whom are being crushed under student loan debt [10], while facing a competitive and often exploitative job market, where all too often an unpaid internship is an essential way to advance in a career. This is the first generation since the Great Depression that will make less money [11] and have fewer resources than their parents. Perhaps because of dealing with all the stress, this generation has a prescription pill epidemic on their hands, which may be leading to a significant increase in suicides in their demographic.

Take Your Pick

This first summary just touches on some of the economic problems. The list of concerns and anxieties goes on and on—here are some of the most prominent, but any reader will be able to add her own to the list:

• The lack of an adequate response to the looming climate crisis [12].

• Mass incarceration,in which 2.3 million Americans, a huge number of them African American and Latino, are behind bars [13].

• Thehuge and still expanding security state,as police forces militarize, even in small cities and towns.

• A high level of unemployment [14] at 7.5 %, considerably beyond what historically has been acceptable. And as Andrew Ross points out [15] in the San Francisco Chronicle, “12.2 million Americans are classified as ‘not in the labor force’ because they're considered ‘discouraged.” When you add in the discouraged and the reluctant part-timers (7.2 million people) the unemployment rate jumps first to 9%, then to 13.9%.

• The continued prevalence [16] of violence against women, often fueled by alcohol, and by the culture of rape in the U.S. military.

• The war on poor students [17] as testing dominates the move toward privatizing public elementary and secondary education via charter schools; and in public schools, kids are increasingly treated as criminals [18].

• The assault [19] on journalists, civil liberties and whistleblowers by a Democratic president, who campaigned quite differently than he is governing.

• The return of many wounded and psychological damaged soldiers from our two wars,where hundreds of thousands of soldiers are suffering [20] from PTSD, and often lacking in supportive services to help them cope.

• The still-unchallenged power of the NRA, as many states are passing more lax gun laws, or making sure there are no gun control laws at all, despite the popular will, and the overwhelming data [21] documenting the number of people killed by guns.

The list of disasters adds up to a very dark picture; the future looks bleak for tens of millions of people, a fact that has produced an epidemic of fear and anxiety. And finding our way out is a huge challenge, in part because the safety net keeps getting shredded, and the guidebooks we have used to challenge oppressive power are not capable of leading the way.

Many critics have been content to attribute the current state of affairs to a particularly virulent brand of casino capitalism [22] practiced in the U.S. and gaining dominance globally. Sure, this is true. But it is not sufficient to simply chalk up our predicament to capitalism, because there are many forms of the capitalist economic system that don’t produce the dire results we have here in the U.S.

The problem is the special brand of American capitalism, with its thousands of interlocking parts feeding on each other, that ends up controlling and exploiting a majority of Americans. It is important to deconstruct how this happens in a digestible way.

The Symptoms Are All Around Us

A strong case can be made that collectively we are traumatized as a society, though perhaps reluctant to admit it. A constant barrage of stress, anxiety, intrusion, incarceration, and a generalized drumbeat of fear from the media and we have the mess we are in. Increasingly, despair leads to addiction, violence and even suicide, especially for people hardest hit by job loss.

Newly released and striking figures [23] from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that from 1999 to 2010 the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, up from 13.7 to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people. In 2010 more people in the U.S. died from suicide than from car crashes—a statistic that alone seems to stand as troubling testament to desperate times. As the New York Times notes [24], the CDC and other experts believe the suicide figures to be on the low side.

Another striking symptom is high levels of stress that lead to drug use, abuse and addiction. Research [25] concludes that stress can render people susceptible to serious illness, and that chronic stress can play a role in the progression of cancer. It is hard to believe, but 11 percent of all Americans aged 12 and older, which is well over 30 million people, are currently taking [26] antidepressants despite the danger of suicide for some users.

And a stunning 23 percent of women in their 40s and 50s are now taking antidepressants according to a major study [26] by the CDC.

And that is before you consider alcohol abuse and the fact that the majority [27] of violence toward women is fueled by alcohol.

A Useful Blueprint

Given the malaise that many are grappling with, the increasing feelings of desperation can feel confusing, overwhelming and crazy-making. Where do we start? How do we understand what is happening so that what we learn can help us take action and improve our outlook? What steps can we take to protect ourselves, to shift the momentum?

A first step is to try to get clear about the nature of how all these forces are coming together to make us so stressed out, and perhaps collectively on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As AlterNet’s executive editor, I have personally been engaged for many years in all the issues and developments described above, publishing much of the best writing on every topic. I too have felt overwhelmed by the tsunami crashing over us. After all the years publishing many thousands of articles, what is happening today feels fundamentally unprecedented—the combination of spiritual malaise and social collapse, an abundance of cruelty and callousness.

Recently I found a way of better understanding the forces that are at play, which I want to share in case it can be helpful. Basically, in this analysis there are four especially powerful and pernicious overarching economic and political mechanisms operating. These are privatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization, which together are producing a steadily creeping authoritarianism—a new authoritarianism—to fit our times. Let’s call them the Four Plagues, or if we wish, “The Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse,” from the Book of Revelations in the New Testament.

Actually, according to most accounts, the four riders are seen as symbolizing Conquest, War [28], Famine [29], and Death [30], respectively. So, they’re not exactly analogous, but you get the idea: it’s about very bad stuff that is coming.

The four “plagues” are very potent. With financializationwe are confronting a new hyper form of capitalism, underway for years, but especially apparent with the crash of 2007. Author David Graeber describes the financialization of capitalism in an interview with the SF Bay Guardian as “… casino capitalism, speculation… they are making money out of thin air. … It is based on getting everyone in debt.”

Graeber adds that the profits of Wall Street are increasingly based on finance, not commerce, which means “…they go into your bank account and take your money.” Extracted by the finance sector are mortgages, credit card debt, loan debt,STUDENT all the fees and penalties you are not noticing. Graeber estimates the finance sector is at or near 20 percent of the economy.

Privatization is pervasive in our culture, tearing the moorings away from democratic ideals and the commons—the common ground that has held many communities together for centuries. Schools, highways, parks, many things we hold dear are being taken away from public stewardship. Perhaps the privatization of water, where the huge multinational Nestle is leading the way globally, is the most daunting. In his thorough analysis of Nestle, the world’s largest food company and the most profitable corporation in the world according to the Global Fortune 500, Andrew Gavin Marshall writes [31] that Nestle’s chairman, Peter Brabeck, believes that nature is not “good,” that there is nothing to worry about with GMO foods, that profits matter above all else, that people should work more, and that human beings do not have a right to water.

The signs of militarization are increasingly visible in the nation’s police forces, especially with drug raids, as well as the escalated capture of undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the point where far more immigrants have been deported during the Obama administration than during George W. Bush’s tenure. There is also now a massive private prison operation mainly to handle those immigrants arrested.

The U.S. is still by far the world’s largest arms dealer, and we have military bases in 63 countries [32], and all across the U.S. as well, with nearly 1,140,000 soldiers in uniform [33].

The militarization of America was on graphic display in the over-reactions in response to the Boston bombing. The entire city of Boston was shut down and a kind of martial law declared as millions were told to stay indoors and lock up. Public events were canceled, transportation in and out of the city ceased, people were stranded at the airport—and all because a wide array of police forces were searching for a wounded 19-year-old on foot. The horrible bombing with its horrendous death and destruction traumatized many. But it is likely that the overwhelming police response—local police, ATF, FBI, DEA, etc.—traumatized the population even more. The military model of “lockdown” has become the default response to many disturbances. The use of SWAT teams all over the U.S. has increased dramatically, as the military has supplied local police forces with a wide array of super-powerful weaponry, often far beyond what is needed.

Cornell West Speaks

In a recent dialogue with Institute of New Economic Thinking’s [34] (INET) Rob Johnson at Columbia Theological Seminary, Cornell West used the first three of what I am now calling “plagues” as examples of what is scaring him as he sees our society heading toward fascism. I thank him for his help in advancing my thinking.

I was struck by what West said, but I realized that it is necessary to add criminalization as a fourth plague for a fuller picture. In our world of mass incarceration, we see students, poor people, the homeless, debtors, drug users, and whole neighborhoods being criminalized in huge numbers. One powerful example is in the efforts by the New York Police Department known as “stop-and-frisk [35].” Since Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City in 2002, stop-and-frisk increased by 600%, [36] from 100,000 New Yorkers targeted to almost 685,000 in 2011. Nearly 90% of those stopped are black or Latino.

Mass Incarceration and the New Jim Crow

More than 2 million people in jail has resulted in what author and lawyer Michelle Alexander has called the “New Jim Crow,” in her book of the same name. Despite the civil rights movement, theoretical progress on racism, and even an African-American president, more people of color are in jail than were ever slaves; more people are jailed in the U.S. than in any other place in the world. As Alexander writes: “Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”

According to the NAACP [13], from 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled, from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people. Today, the US is 5% of the world population and has 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Millions in jail is part of a strategy of mass incarceration fueled by the highly funded and militarized war on drug users, which is primarily aimed at the poor and people of color. The racist caste of the criminal justice system is overwhelming: African Americans, incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, now constitute nearly one million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population. Mass incarceration accomplished in the 21st century what slavery accomplished more than 150 years ago: the oppression and disenfranchisement of a whole generation of black men.

So, looking through the lens of these four plagues provides me with a useful handle on what is happening to our country, and to the globe. They help explain trends and shifts that are destroying the middle class, exacerbating poverty, keeping millions in jail, and traumatizing many millions more. Most of it can be attributed to one or more of the plagues, and often all four.

Essential Ingredients for the Success of the Plagues

But I don’t want to stop here. To best understand the plagues, there are several cross-cutting fundamentals of U.S. capitalism which fuel the oppressive nature of the plagues and help us understand how they interact.

Follow the money: For every unfair, exploitative and destructive force going on in America—and there are so many—some corporations or groups of people are profiting. Not only are they making a lot of money, they have also very likely built a powerful infrastructure to ensure the security of their cash flow using a potent array of tools to protect their interests. These are lobbyists, PR agents, campaign contributions, trade associations to agitate for their interests, and with overarching powerful giant entities like the chamber of commerce to provide the protective umbrella.
When following the money, it is often the case that the system picks on the weakest. Long ago, someone figured out that the easiest way to make a lot of money is to paradoxically target those who don’t have much.Or use powerless people as scapegoats to leverage access to large pots of money. One example is state lotteries, about which AlterNet’s Steve Rosenfeld explains: “What many people don’t know about lotteries is that they prey on those who can least afford it.” State lotteries [37] amount to a hidden tax on the poor. They eat up about 9 percent of take-home incomes from households making less than $13,000 a year. They siphon $50 billion a year away from local businesses—besides stores where they’re sold.

Another example is that theprivatization of the public school system is on the backs of poor kids, with the discredited fantasy that schools will be improved when people make money off of them. "Rent to own,” “payday loans” and many other tactics of capitalism all exploit poor people.

The best way to maximize profits and make radical changes in policies is to take advantage of crises. We all know what happened after the horrible death and destruction of 9/11. Our government, the Bush administration, orchestrated the most gigantic overreaction in history, turning a criminal case to the ongoing “war on terror,” which has transformed most of our lives in many negative ways.

The aftermath of 9/11, which includes the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, also created the most extraordinary secret government in the history of humankind. The Washington Post, in an unprecedented investigation that took two years, discovered a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in oversight. “After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is a system incredibly massive --1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.”

Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine has helped us understand that when crises erupt, those in power will use the opportunity to increase power in extreme and undemocratic ways, in what is now called “Disaster Capitalism.” For example, as Kristen Rawls reports, [38] after the massive impact of Hurricane Katrina, most of the schools in New Orleans’ Parish were replaced by charter schools.

What to Do—The Challenges Ahead

How do we fight these massive interlocking forcesthat often seem impossible to slow down, let alone stop and change? Well, there is good news and bad news.

The first answer is, we don’t stop the machine, at least now, because we can’t, not at this moment in history, anyway. At the present, there is no large-scale, coordinated, funded plan, across issue lines to organize a mass movement capable of putting a dent in the juggernaut; and there are some major problems on the social change organizing front to be sure.

The Occupy movement was a great moment, and a popular response to financialization and militarization.But then we saw the surveillance state in action as police power along with the titans of big finance crushed the dissent. Certainly Occupy generated, at least for a time, a new level of discourse on economic fairness and exploitation. But it is already a memory, and the system of the “four plagues” grinds on as the wealth gap increases every week.

On the other hand, no one could have predicted Occupy. Is there another upheaval waiting to explode?

Nevertheless, there is a lot of good news on the activism front. As Kevin Zeese [39] and Margaret Flowers write, “Every week we are inspired by the many people throughout the country who are doing excellent work to challenge the power structure and put forward a new path for the country. The popular resistance to plutocracy, concentrated wealth and corporatism is decentralized, creative and growing.”

A couple of examples, according to Zeese and Flowers, include a growing series of protests called “the ‘Moral Monday’ demonstrations in North Carolina ....challenging the systemic corruption, undermining of democracy and misdirection of a state government that puts human needs second to corporate profits—which they have dubbed ‘Robin Hood in Reverse.’"

There was a recent victory for Seattle teachers and students [40] that resulted from their citywide protests against standardized testing. The school district announced that testing in the high schools would not occur next year. The teachers said they will keep protesting until the tests are banned from lower grades as well.”

There are dozens of examples like this. Hopefully momentum will build, although the obstacles are formidable and the forces of repression ready to step in at any moment.

Still, being realistic, the challenges of building resistance, finding ways to reform and change the "system” is hugely daunting. Many thinkers argue that our version of exploitative capitalism is doomed, and will someday fall apart.The only problem is, those thinkers have no idea how to bring down capitalism, or even change the system, beyond critiquing it. The number of people and books that bewail the system are many, but the path to solutions, almost nil. Meanwhile, more people suffer every day.

I am personally frustrated, that some of our biggest thinkers and experts are not investing much of their brain power or political capital in the bigger picture of strategy and tactics—the battles to gaining more political clout to confront the power centers. The ability to build to a point where millions of people are in the streets is currently not on the horizon. So there is much work to be done in that regard. An assessment of the possibilities to change, and a range of the options is beyond the scope of this article, but will be forthcoming.

economics [41],

poverty [42],

military [43],

security [44]

---

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/4-plagues-getting-handle-coming-apocalypse

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/don-hazen

[3] http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf

[4] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/

[5] http://www.consumerfed.org/news/560

[6] http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/05/23/advanced-economies-report-lowest-deprivation/

[7] http://www.commonwealthmagazine.org/Voices/Conversation/2007/Winter/Great-Risk-Shift-author-Jacob-Hacker-on-the-growing-financial-perils-for-modern-families.aspx

[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/opinion/sunday/our-ridiculous-approach-to-retirement.html?_r=0

[9] http://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/guaranteeing-retirement-income/528-retirement-account-balances-by-income-even-the-highest-earners-dont-have-enough.html

[10] http://www.alternet.org/story/152809/the_$1_trillion_student_loan_rip-off%3A_how_an_entire_generation_was_tricked_into_taking_on_crushing_debt_that_just_enriches_banks

[11] http://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_detail.aspx?id=596

[12] http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/

[13] http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet

[14] http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/05/30/16-trillion-only-reduces-unemployment-from-8-to-7-5/

[15] http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/bottomline/article/Long-term-unemployed-pushed-to-margins-4489203.php

[16] http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/Worldswomen/WW2010%20Report_by%20chapter(pdf)/violence%20against%20women.pdf

[17] http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/poor-kids-booted-their-preschool-programs-thanks-sequestration

[18] http://www.alternet.org/story/154276/strip-searching_kids_6_shocking_ways_our_schools_treat_students_like_criminals

[19] http://www.alternet.org/5-worst-obama-assaults-civil-liberties-besides-ap-scandal

[20] http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/magazine/issues/winter09/articles/winter09pg10-14.html

[21] http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/major-evidence-siding-nras-gun-nut-agenda-politically-radioactive

[22] http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/933484/why_obama_should_be_attacking_casino_capitalism_--_both_romney's_bain_and_jpmorgan

[23] http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/suicide-datasheet-a.PDF

[24] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/health/suicide-rate-rises-sharply-in-us.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130503

[25] http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,2,22;journal,156,175;linkingpublicationresults,1:300314,1

[26] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db76.htm

[27] https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/188266.pdf

[28] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War

[29] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine

[30] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death

[31] http://www.alternet.org/environment/human-beings-have-no-right-water-and-other-words-wisdom-your-friendly-neighborhood

[32] http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-worldwide-network-of-us-military-bases/5564

[33] http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/04/us/table.military.troops/

[34] http://ineteconomics.org/

[35] http://www.nyclu.org/issues/racial-justice/stop-and-frisk-practices

[36] http://www.alternet.org/5-disturbing-revelations-nypd-stop-and-frisk-trial-about-aggressive-racist-policing

[37] http://www.alternet.org/hard-times-usa/disturbing-facts-about-state-lotteries-they-prey-poor-and-trash-economy-and-political

[38] http://www.alternet.org/education/corporations-advise-school-closings-while-private-charters-suck-public-schools-away

[39] http://www.alternet.org/activism/popular-resistance-percolating-across-country-inspiring-activism-corporate-media-always

[40] http://october2011.org/blogs/margaret-flowers/victory-seattle-teachers-win-battle-standardized-test-boycott

[41] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economics-0

[42] http://www.alternet.org/tags/poverty-0

[43] http://www.alternet.org/tags/military-0

[44] http://www.alternet.org/tags/security-0

[45] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

===

315 copies from aha/insight

aha insight

lost/capt 3/28/2015

forgot this category:

adding mega-trends, big picture

see OMG in Bizzaro

5 Powerful ShiftsTransforming the Future of American Society into Something Unrecognizable and Frightening

Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.

Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of "we the people."

Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway, and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.

1. 1% Elections

Check out the news about the 2016 presidential election and you’ll quickly feel a sense of been-there, done-that. As a start, the two names most associated with it, Bush and Clinton, couldn’t be more familiar, highlighting as they do the curiously dynastic quality of recent presidential contests. (If a Bush or Clinton should win in 2016 and again in 2020, a member of one of those families will have controlled the presidency for 28 of the last 36 [4] years.)

Take, for instance, “Why 2016 Is Likely to Become a Close Race,” a recent piece [5] Nate Cohn wrote for my hometown paper. A noted election statistician, Cohn points out that, despite Hillary Clinton’s historically staggering lead in Democratic primary polls (and lack of serious challengers), she could lose the general election. He bases this on what we know about her polling popularity from the Monica Lewinsky moment of the 1990s to the present. Cohn assures readers that Hillary will not “be a Democratic Eisenhower, a popular, senior statesperson who cruises to an easy victory.” It’s the sort of comparison that offers a certain implicit reassurance about the near future. (No, Virginia, we haven’t left the world of politics in which former general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower can still be a touchstone.)

Cohn may be right when it comes to Hillary’s electability, but this is not Dwight D. Eisenhower’s or even Al Gore’s America. If you want a measure of that, consider this year’s primaries. I mean, of course, the 2015 ones. Once upon a time, the campaign season started with candidates flocking to Iowa and New Hampshire early in the election year to establish their bona fides among party voters. These days, however, those are already late primaries.

The early primaries, the ones that count, take place among a small group of millionaires and billionaires [6], a new caste flush with cash who will personally, or through complex networks of funders, pour multi-millions of dollars into the campaigns of candidates of their choice. So the early primaries -- this year mainly a Republican affair -- are taking place in resort spots like Las Vegas, Rancho Mirage, California, and Sea Island, Georgia, as has beenwidely reported [7]. These “contests” involve groveling politicians appearing at the beck and call of the rich and powerful, and so reflect our new 1% electoral system. (The main pro-Hillary super PAC, for instance, is aiming for a kitty of $500 million [8] heading into 2016, while the Koch brothers network has already promised to drop almost $1 billion [9] into the coming campaign season, doubling their efforts in the last presidential election year.)

Ever since the Supreme Court opened up the ultimate floodgates with its 2010 Citizens United [10] decision, each subsequent election has seen record-breaking amounts of money donated and spent. The 2012 presidential campaign was the first $2 billion election [11]; campaign 2016 is expected to hit [12]the $5 billion mark without breaking a sweat. By comparison, according to Burton Abrams and Russell Settle in their study, “The Effect of Broadcasting on Political Campaign Spending,” Republicans and Democrats spent just under $13 million combined in 1956 when Eisenhower won his second term.

In the meantime, it’s still true that the 2016 primaries will involve actual voters, as will the election that follows. The previous election season, the midterms of 2014, cost almost $4 billion [13], a record despite the number of small donors continuing to drop [14]. It also represented the lowest midterm voter [15]turnout since World War II. (See: demobilization of the public, below -- and add in the demobilization of the Democrats as a real party, the breaking of organized labor, the fragmenting of the Republican Party, and the return of voter suppression laws [16] visibly meant to limit the franchise.) It hardly matters just what the flood of new money does in such elections, when you can feel the weight of inequality [17] bearing down on the whole process in a way that is pushing us somewhere new.

2. The Privatization of the State(or the U.S. as a Prospective Third-World Nation)

In the recent coverage of the Hillary Clinton email flap, you can find endless references to the Clintons of yore [18] in wink-wink, you-know-how-they-are-style reporting; and yes, she did delete a lot of emails; and yes, it’s an election year coming and, as everyone points out, the Republicans are going to do their best to keep the email issue alive until hell freezes over, etc., etc. Again, the coverage, while eyeball gluing, is in a you’ve-seen-it-all-before, you’ll-see-it-all-again-mode.

However, you haven’t seen it all before. The most striking aspect of this little brouhaha lies in what’s most obvious but least highlighted. An American secretary of state chose to set up her own private, safeguarded email system for doing government work; that is, she chose to privatize her communications. If this were Cairo, it might not warrant a second thought. But it didn’t happen in some third-world state. It was the act of a key official of the planet’s reigning (or thrashing) superpower, which -- even if it wasn’t [19] the first time such a thing had ever occurred -- should be taken as a tiny symptom of something that couldn’t be larger or, in the long stretch of history, newer: the ongoing privatization of the American state, or at least the national security part of it.

Though the marriage of the state and the corporation has a pre-history, the full-scale arrival of the warrior corporation [20] only occurred after 9/11. Someday, that will undoubtedly be seen as a seminal moment in the formation of whatever may be coming in this country. Only 13 years later, there is no part of the war state that has not experienced major forms of privatization. The U.S. military could no longer go to war without its crony corporations doing KP [21] and guard duty, delivering the mail, building the bases, and being involved in just about all of its activities, including training [22] the militaries of foreign allies and even fighting. Such warrior corporations are now involved in every aspect of the national security state, including torture [23], drone strikes [24], and -- to the tune of hundreds of thousands [25] of contract employees like Edward Snowden -- intelligence gathering and spying. You name it and, in these years, it’s been at least partly privatized.

All you have to do is read reporter James Risen’s recent book, Pay Any Price [26], on how the global war on terror was fought in Washington, and you know that privatization has brought something else with it: corruption, scams, and the gaming of the system for profits of a sort that might normally be associated with a typical third-world kleptocracy. And all of this, a new world being born, was reflected in a tiny way in Hillary Clinton’s very personal decision about her emails.

Though it’s a subject I know so much less about, this kind of privatization (and the corruption that goes with it) is undoubtedly underway in the non-war-making, non-security-projecting part of the American state as well.

3. The De-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency

On a third front, American “confidence” in the three classic check-and-balance branches of government, as measured by polling outfits, continues to fall. In 2014, Americans expressing [27] a “great deal of confidence” in the Supreme Court hit a new low of 23%; in the presidency, it was 11%, and in Congress a bottom-scraping 5%. (The military, on the other hand, registers at 50%.) The figures for “hardly any confidence at all” are respectively 20%, 44%, and more than 50%. All are in or near record-breaking territory for the last four decades.

It seems fair to say that in recent years Congress has been engaged in a process of delegitimizing itself. Where that body once had the genuine power to declare war, for example, it is now “debating” in a desultory fashion [28] an “authorization” for a war against the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and possibly elsewhere that has already been underway for eight months and whose course, it seems, will be essentially unaltered, whether Congress authorizes it or not.

What would President Harry Truman, who once famously ran a presidential campaign against a “do-nothing [29]” Congress, have to say about a body that truly can do just about nothing? Or rather, to give the Republican war hawks in that new Congress their due, not quite nothing. They are proving capable of acting effectively to delegitimize the presidency as well. House Majority Leader John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undercut the president's Iranian nuclear negotiations and the letter [30] signed by 47 Republican senators and directed to the Iranian ayatollahs are striking examples of this. They are visibly meant to tear down an “imperial presidency” that Republicans gloried in not so long ago.

The radical nature of that letter, not as an act of state but of its de-legitimization, was noted even in Iran, where fundamentalist Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proclaimed [31] it “a sign of a decline in political ethics and the destruction of the American establishment from within.” Here, however, the letter is either being covered as a singularly extreme one-off act (“treason! [32]”) or, as Jon Stewart did [33] on “The Daily Show,” as part of a repetitive [34] tit-for-tat between Democrats and Republicans over who controls foreign policy. It is, in fact, neither. It represents part of a growing pattern in which Congress becomes an ever less effective body, except in its willingness to take on [35] and potentially take out the presidency.

In the twenty-first century, all that “small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats can agree on is offering essentially unconditional support to the military and the national security state. The Republican Party -- its various factions increasingly at each other’s throats almost as often as at those of the Democrats -- seems reasonably united solely on issues of war-making and security. As for the Democrats, an unpopular administration, facing constant attack by those who loath President Obama, has kept its footing in part by allying with and fusing with the national security state. A president who came into office rejecting torture and promoting sunshine and transparency [36] in government has, in the course of six-plus years, come to identify himself almost totally with the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and the like. While it has launched an unprecedented campaign [37] against whistleblowers and leakers (as well as sunshine and transparency), the Obama White House has proved a powerful enabler of, but also remarkably dependent upon, that state-within-a-state, a strange fate for “the imperial presidency.”

4. The Rise of the National Security State as the Fourth Branch of Government

One “branch” of government is, however, visibly on the rise and rapidly gaining independence from just about any kind of oversight. Its ability to enact its wishes with almost no opposition in Washington is a striking feature of our moment. But while the symptoms of this process are regularly reported, the overall phenomenon -- the creation of a de facto fourth branch of government -- gets remarkably little attention. In the war on terror era, the national security state has come into its own. Its growth [38] has been phenomenal. Though it’s seldom pointed out, it should be considered remarkable that in this period we gained a second full-scale “defense department,” the Department of Homeland Security, and that it and the Pentagon have become even more entrenched, each surrounded by its own growing “complex” of private corporations, lobbyists, and allied politicians. The militarization of the country has, in these years, proceeded apace.

Meanwhile, the duplication to be found in the U.S. Intelligence Community with its 17 major agencies [39] and outfits is staggering. Its growing ability to surveil and spy on a global scale, including on its own citizens, puts the totalitarian states of the twentieth century to shame [40]. That the various parts of the national security state can act in just about any fashion without fear of accountability [41] in a court of law is by now too obvious to belabor. As wealth has traveled upwards in American society in ways not seen since the first Gilded Age, so taxpayer dollars have migrated into the national security state in an almost plutocratic fashion.

New reports regularly surface about the further activities of parts of that state. In recent weeks, for instance, we learned from Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley of the Intercept that the CIA has spent years trying to break the encryption [42] on Apple iPhones and iPads; it has, that is, been aggressively seeking to attack an all-American corporation (even if significant parts of its production process are actually in China). Meanwhile, Devlin Barrett of theWall Street Journal reported [43] that the CIA, an agency barred from domestic spying operations of any sort, has been helping the U.S. Marshals Service (part of the Justice Department) create an airborne digital dragnet on American cell phones. Planes flying out of five U.S. cities carry a form of technology that "mimics a cellphone tower." This technology, developed and tested in distant American war zones and now brought to "the homeland," is just part of the ongoing militarization of the country from its borders [44] to its police forces [45]. And there’s hardly been a week since Edward Snowden first released crucial NSA documents in June 2013 [46] when such “advances” haven’t been in the news.

News also regularly bubbles up about the further expansion, reorganization, and upgrading of parts of the intelligence world, the sorts of reports that have become the barely noticed background hum of our lives. Recently, for instance, Director John Brennan announced [47] a major reorganization of the CIA meant to break down [48] the classic separation between spies and analysts at the Agency, while creating a new Directorate of Digital Innovation responsible for, among other things, cyberwarfare and cyberespionage. At about the same time, according to [49] the New York Times, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, an obscure State Department agency, was given a new and expansive role in coordinating “all the existing attempts at countermessaging [against online propaganda by terror outfits like the Islamic State] by much larger federal departments, including the Pentagon, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies.”

This sort of thing is par for the course in an era in which the national security state has only grown stronger, endlessly elaborating, duplicating, and overlapping the various parts of its increasingly labyrinthine structure. And keep in mind that, in a structure that has fought hard [50] to keep what it's doingcloaked [51] in secrecy, there is so much more [52] that we don’t know. Still, we should know enough to realize that this ongoing process reflects something new in our American world (even if no one cares to notice).

5. The Demobilization of the American People

In The Age of Acquiescence [53], a new book about America’s two Gilded Ages, Steve Fraser asks why it was that, in the nineteenth century, another period of plutocratic excesses, concentration of wealth and inequality, buying of politicians, and attempts to demobilize the public, Americans took to the streets with such determination and in remarkable numbers over long periods of time to protest their treatment, and stayed there even when the brute power of the state was called out against them. In our own moment, Fraser wonders, why has the silence of the public in the face of similar developments been so striking?

After all, a grim new American system is arising before our eyes. Everything we once learned in the civics textbooks of our childhoods about how our government works now seems askew, while the growth of poverty, the flatlining of wages, the rise of the .01%, the collapse of labor, and the militarization of society are all evident.

The process of demobilizing the public certainly began with the military. It was initially a response to the disruptive and rebellious [54] draftees of the Vietnam-era. In 1973, at the stroke of a presidential pen, the citizen’s army was declared no more, the raising of new recruits was turned over to advertising agencies (a preview of the privatization of the state to come), and the public was sent home, never again to meddle in military affairs. Since 2001, that form of demobilization has been etched in stone and transformed [55] into a way of life in the name of the “safety” and “security” of the public.

Since then, “we the people” have made ourselves felt in only three disparate ways: from the left in the Occupy movement, which, with its slogans about the 1% and the 99%, put the issue of growing economic inequality on the map of American consciousness; from the right, in the Tea Party movement, a complex expression of discontent backed and at least partially funded [56] by right-wing operatives and billionaires, and aimed at the de-legitimization of the “nanny state”; and the recent round of post-Ferguson protests spurred at least in part by the militarization of the police in black and brown communities around the country.

The Birth of a New System

Otherwise, a moment of increasing extremity has also been a moment of -- to use Fraser’s word -- “acquiescence.” Someday, we’ll assumedly understand far better how this all came to be. In the meantime, let me be as clear as I can be about something that seems murky indeed: this period doesn’t represent a version, no matter how perverse or extreme, of politics as usual; nor is the 2016 campaign an election as usual; nor are we experiencing Washington as usual. Put together our 1% elections, the privatization of our government, the de-legitimization of Congress and the presidency, as well as the empowerment of the national security state and the U.S. military, and add in the demobilization of the American public (in the name of protecting us from terrorism), and you have something like a new ballgame.

While significant planning has been involved in all of this, there may be no ruling pattern or design. Much of it may be happening in a purely seat-of-the-pants fashion. In response, there has been no urge to officially declare that something new is afoot, let alone convene a new constitutional convention. Still, don’t for a second think that the American political system isn’t being rewritten on the run by interested parties in Congress, our present crop of billionaires, corporate interests, lobbyists, the Pentagon, and the officials of the national security state.

Out of the chaos of this prolonged moment and inside the shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of politics, a new kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Call it what you want. But call it something. Stop pretending it’s not happening.

[Note: My special thanks go to my friend John Cobb, who talked me through this one. Doing it would have been inconceivable without him. Tom]

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s [57] as well as The End of Victory Culture [58], runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com [2]. He is the author of, most recently, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World [59] (Haymarket Books, 2014).

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forgot this category:

adding mega-trends, big picture

see OMG in Bizzaro

5 Powerful Shifts Transforming the Future of American Society into Something Unrecognizable and Frightening

And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.

1% Elections

The Privatization of the State (or the U.S. as a Prospective Third-World Nation)

The De-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency

The Rise of the National Security State as the Fourth Branch of Government

The Demobilization of the American People

The Birth of a New System

[Note: My special thanks go to my friend John Cobb, who talked me through this one. Doing it would have been inconceivable without him. Tom]

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s [57] as well as The End of Victory Culture [58], runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com [2]. He is the author of, most recently, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World [59] (Haymarket Books, 2014).

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/5-powerful-shifts-transforming-america-society-unrecognizable-and-frightening

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/tom-engelhardt-0

[2] http://www.tomdispatch.com/

[3] http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=1e41682ade

[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-no-freshness-in-our-2016-presidential-contest/2015/01/16/f7c4c310-9d8c-11e4-96cc-e858eba91ced_story.html

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/upshot/hillary-clinton-is-more-vulnerable-in-2016-than-you-think.html

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/us/koch-seminar-is-early-proving-ground-for-gop-hopefuls.html

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/us/politics/gop-race-starts-in-lavish-haunts-of-rich-donors.html

[8] http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-fenn/2015/02/12/jeb-bush-and-hillary-clinton-2016-fundraising-is-out-of-control

[9] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/koch-retreat-donors-249-million-2016

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Opinions_of_the_Court

[11] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/06/2012-presidential-election-cost_n_2254138.html

[12] http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/230318-the-5-billion-campaign

[13] http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/01/politics/4-billion-expensive-election/

[14] http://ivn.us/2014/12/01/political-donors-spent-enough-money-last-election-to-rebuild-detroit-twice/

[15] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11/10/voter-turnout-in-2014-was-the-lowest-since-wwii/

[16] https://www.aclu.org/maps/battle-protect-ballot-voter-suppression-measures-passed-2013

[17] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/richer-and-poorer

[18] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/opinion/frank-bruni-hillary-clinton-the-email-controversy-and-the-2016-presidential-race.html

[19] http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/03/11/two-names-the-press-omits-from-email-coverage-c/202847

[20] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175507/tom_engelhardt_remotely_piloted_war

[21] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175036/pratap_chatterjee_inheriting_halliburton_s_army

[22] http://www.thenation.com/blog/197057/afghanistan-war-still-raging-time-its-being-waged-contractors

[23] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/outsourcing-torture_n_6317236.html

[24] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/29/world/la-fg-drones-civilians-20111230

[25] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/nsa-leak-contractors_n_3418876.html?1370919691

[26] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544341414/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20

[27] http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/HTML%20Reports/confidence-in-institutions-trends-in-americans-attitudes-toward-government-media-and-business0310-2333.aspx

[28] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/us/congress-shows-a-lack-of-enthusiasm-for-giving-obama-war-powers-to-fight-isis.html

[29] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/12/01/do-nothing-congress-was-way-more-productive-than-the-current-one

[30] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/03/09/text-of-gop-senators-letter-to-irans-leaders-on-nuclear-talks/

[31] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/world/middleeast/ayatollah-ali-khamenei-criticizes-republicans-letter-on-iran-nuclear-talks.html

[32] http://newsbusters.org/blogs/curtis-houck/2015/03/12/nbc-touts-petition-alleging-gop-senators-committed-treason-and

[33] http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/ial564/under-miner

[34] http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/11/opinions/stanley-congress-iran-letter/

[35] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/us/politics/struggling-in-congress-republicans-unite-on-foreign-policy.html

[36] http://www2.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/news/20090121/index.htm

[37] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175500/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren,_in_washington,_fear_the_silence,_not_the_noise/

[38] http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/

[39] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175901/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_entering_the_intelligence_labyrinth/

[40] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175713/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_you_are_our_secret/

[41] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175833/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_knowledge_is_crime/

[42] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/10/ispy-cia-campaign-steal-apples-secrets/

[43] http://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-gave-justice-department-secret-phone-scanning-technology-1426009924

[44] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175834/tomgram%3A_todd_miller,_the_creation_of_a_border_security_state/

[45] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175881/tomgram%3A_matthew_harwood,_one_nation_under_swat/

[46] http://www.theguardian.com/world/series/the-snowden-files

[47] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-plans-major-reorganization-and-a-focus-on-digital-espionage/2015/03/06/87e94a1e-c2aa-11e4-9ec2-b418f57a4a99_story.html

[48] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/06/spies-now-cia-director-announces-major-restructuring/

[49] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/world/middleeast/us-intensifies-effort-to-blunt-isis-message.html

[50] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175526/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren,_joining_the_whistleblowers%27_club/

[51] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/16/whistleblowers-double-standard-obama-david-petraeus-chelsea-manning

[52] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/14/congress-wont-protect-us-from-the-surveillance-state-theyll-enhance-it

[53] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316185434/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20

[54] https://msuweb.montclair.edu/%7Efurrg/Vietnam/heinl.html

[55] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175904/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_inside_the_american_terrordome

[56] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Tea_Party

[57] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608460711/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20

[58] http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20

[59] http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/ref=la_B001JP2OJK_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416267939&sr=1-1

[60] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on 5 Powerful Shifts Transforming the Future of American Society into Something Unrecognizable and Frightening

[61] http://www.alternet.org/

[62] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

loss of classified ads killed newspaper (jrnlism) but boosted google and facebook

sam singer SF poster boy for jrnl degradation?

ALecKoch-alypse

These areprivatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization, which together are producing a steadily creeping authoritarianism—a new authoritarianism—to fit our times. Let’s call them the Four Plagues, or if we wish, “The Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse,” from the Book of Revelations.

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union = mod

Robert Reich: Why Americans Are Screwed and Europeans Are Not

By Robert Reich [1] / Robert Reich's Blog

March 15, 2015

The U.S. economy is picking up steam but most Americans aren’t feeling it. By contrast, most European economies are still in bad shape, but most Europeans are doing relatively well.

What’s behind this? Two big facts.

First, American corporations exert far more political influence in the United States than their counterparts exert in their own countries.

In fact, most Americans have no influence at all. That’s the conclusion of Professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, who analyzed [2] 1,799 policy issues — and found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Instead, American lawmakers respond to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and of big corporations – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.

The second fact is most big American corporations have no particular allegiance to America. They don’t want Americans to have better wages. Their only allegiance and responsibility is to their shareholders — which often requires lower wages to fuel larger profits and higher share prices.

When GM went public again in 2010, it boasted [3] of making 43 percent of its cars in place where labor is less than $15 an hour, while in North America it could now pay “lower-tiered” wages and benefits for new employees.

American corporations shift their profits around the world wherever they pay the lowest taxes. Some are even morphing into foreign corporations.

As an Apple executive told [4] the New York Times, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.”

I’m not blaming American corporations. They’re in business to make profits and maximize their share prices, not to serve America.

But because of these two basic facts – their dominance on American politics, and their interest in share prices instead of the wellbeing of Americans – it’s folly to count on them to create good American jobs or improve American competitiveness, or represent the interests of the United States in global commerce.

By contrast, big corporations headquartered in other rich nations are more responsible for the wellbeing of the people who live in those nations.

That’s because labor unions there are typically stronger than they are here — able to exert pressure both at the company level and nationally.

VW’s labor unions, for example, have a voice in governing the company, as they do in other big German corporations. Not long ago, VW even welcomed [5] the UAW to its auto plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (Tennessee’s own politicians nixed it.)

Governments in other rich nations often devise laws through tri-partite bargains involving big corporations and organized labor. This process further binds their corporations to their nations.

Meanwhile, American corporations distribute a smaller share of their earnings to their workers than do European or Canadian-based corporations.

And top U.S. corporate executives make far more money than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.

The typical American worker puts in more hours than Canadians and Europeans, and gets little or no paid vacation or paid family leave. In Europe, the norm [6] is five weeks paid vacation per year and more than three months paid family leave.

And because of the overwhelming clout of American firms on U.S. politics, Americans don’t get nearly as good a deal from their governments as do Canadians and Europeans.

Governments there impose higher taxes on the wealthy and redistribute more of the wealth to middle- and lower-income households. Most of their citizens receive essentially free healthcare and more generous unemployment benefits than do Americans.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that even though U.S. economy is doing better, most Americans are not.

The U.S. middle class is no longer the world’s richest. After considering taxes and transfer payments, middle-class incomes in Canada and much of Western Europe are higher [7] than in the U.S. The poor in Western Europe earn more than do poor Americans.

Finally, when at global negotiating tables – such as the secretive process devising the “Trans Pacific Partnership” trade deal — American corporations don’t represent the interests of Americans. They represent the interests of their executives and shareholders, who are not only wealthier than most Americans but also reside all over the world.

Which is why the pending Partnership protects the intellectual property of American corporations — but not American workers’ health, safety, or wages, and not the environment.

The Obama administration is casting the Partnership as a way to contain Chinese influence in the Pacific region. The agents of America’s interests in the area are assumed to be American corporations.

But that assumption is incorrect. American corporations aren’t set up to represent America’s interests in the Pacific region or anywhere else.

What’s the answer to this basic conundrum? Either we lessen the dominance of big American corporations over American politics, or we increase their allegiance and responsibility to America.

It has to be one or the other. Americans can’t thrive within a political system run largely by big American corporations — organized to boost their share prices but not boost America.

pwl memo

root of defund the left strat?

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As Trende observed, the Democratic political coalition “has become geographically narrow in the past decade, heavily concentrated among urban liberals and minorities who live in densely populated cities or are placed into minority-majority districts under interpretations of the Voting Rights Act that many minority groups pressed for in the 1980s and 1990s.” This concentration helps win some state-wide races and national electoral votes, but means that Democrats lose a lot of close races for the House. When Democrats do manage to win in the House, they often win by larger margins than Republicans do, which helps account for their national popular vote majority. Gerrymandering is part of the problem faced by the Democrats, but the other part is that, like the Republicans, they too are less inclined to appeal to those outside of their coalition. Democrats may not be as extreme as Republicans, but they are also less interested in compromise and consensus building than they used to be.

When we look at American politics we need to understand that our legislative branches represent places (districts and states) as well as people. The U.S. is a representative democracy yet by design is far from a pure democracy. Our constitution is designed to facilitate continuity and the translation of economic power to political power, but it is also designed to permit change when absolutely needed. In the past, dramatic change has taken place when the stability of the political system was threatened by the absence of change. These changes took place when the political center accepted them: the reforms of the progressive era, the economic policies of the New Deal, the changes brought about by LBJ’s Great Society. Typically, agents of change convince moderates to accept some part of their view. The exception that proved the rule was our Civil War.

In the past, the geographic orientation of our political system has led to moderate politics. In the U.S. system, an extreme party receiving 20 percent of the votes in every congressional district would send no one to Congress. Therefore, the political dynamic pushed candidates to the center where they build the largest coalitions generating pluralities or majorities. The growing presence of moderate independent voters continues that trend in general elections. But the growing importance of low-turnout primary elections has driven candidates further to the extremes. It is hard to believe that Eric Cantor was too moderate for the Republican base—but he was. The Tea Party has less than 20 percent of the national vote, but they have managed to skillfully work the seams of the political and media system to dominate the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. If the Occupy movement had been less politically pure they might have done the same thing on the left.

7/16/14

extreme ideology or just tactics lead to attacks on moderate/allies: anita roddick, social entre; thses prove that mkt an be tame/humane vs ecoterror (see Kill the msgr: in genocide, must prove that opp win will lead to apocalyse

shareholder revolts? DDT

look at issa targets: post office, jaczko, solyndra

Krugman Divulges Real Reason Conservatives Freak Out About California Success Story

ctr for climate strategies is pro-biz gp (dow)

Left-Right alliance?

Nader new book unstoppable (vs billionaires will save us?) finds 25 points of overlap

CFR levy says up tax on oil! (also export more LNG? boost US green energy for comp advantage?)

Laffer debate carbon tax

local regulation under hvy attack, ironically b/c agenda 21 ppl think that local control will somehow flip to international control. conservative governors just sellout to corps who want to extract/pollute

the two biggest offending industries are the most subsidied: oil and agribiz, and both have populist potential

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right has morphed into a corporate protection racket: norquist extorts with pledge; abramoff got paid by playing 2 sides against each other;corp protection in broader sense of powell memo too

ironically the actors who played gangsters were leftists/union men, while the patriots were anti-union, often associated with the real mafia