Talking About a Revolution

August 1, 2017

http://fair.org/home/talking-about-a-revolution/

It’s long been clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic climate disruption on a scale that threatens human civilization, we need to leave vast amounts of fossil fuels in the ground. Environmental writer Bill McKibben pointed out the math in a crucial 2012 article for Rolling Stone: To avoid disaster, 80 percent of the carbon already discovered by private and state-owned energy companies has to be left alone—to be treated as useless rock, not precious resources.

The problem is, the energy companies are some of the richest, most powerful entities on Earth. Corporations are designed to act like organisms with a single goal, maximizing profits. And the fossil fuel industry’s future profits—roughly 80 percent of them—depend on extracting that carbon and burning it, climate and civilization be damned. They have been using and will continue to use their vast influence to thwart any effort to avert that disaster.

Does humanity have the collective power to tell the current owners of carbon deposits that they no longer own them—that they don’t have the right to take them out of the ground and sell them as fuel? That’s the $640 trillion question. Doing so is essential to our future as a species—but a massive transfer of wealth of that kind isn’t like a revolution, it is a revolution, and a revolution on a scale history hasn’t seen before.

But climate isn’t the only crisis that requires a revolution. Healthcare provided by for-profit corporations inevitably tends towards more than we can afford to pay, as the demand for life-or-death products is infinite. Solving the problem of paying for medical care means telling medical corporations that they can no longer expect the hyper-profits that their market value is based on expecting.

And it’s increasingly evident that an entire sector of the healthcare industry—the purveyors of for-profit health insurance—needs to be eliminated in order to bring health costs under control. The insurance industry, though, has a special power in our economy: As its business model involves taking money from people and investing it, virtually every corporation on the stock exchange counts insurance companies among its owners. So taking on the insurance business, which is necessary to make healthcare affordable, means taking on all business. In other words, it means a revolution.

This conflict between the needs of the majority and the interests of the few runs throughout our economy. On a local level, many cities have serious shortages of housing that people can afford to live in, not because it costs so much to build and maintain housing, but because the real estate market sets prices that assume that landlords will maximize profits—and maximizing profits from a fixed supply of land leaves many tenants on the street. If cities want ordinary people to be able to afford to live in them, they will need to lower the value of their real estate—which would be a revolutionary reversal of priorities for most local governments.

These gaps between the status quo and our survival are why we need a new media system. Corporate media are really designed around preserving the status quo—unsurprisingly, because they are owned by the class of people who benefit from things staying the same. And they’re funded, through advertising, by the same corporations who are profiting from the disastrous course we’re on—with energy, healthcare and real estate among the most prominent industry sponsors. You will not learn from corporate media how much danger their advertisers are putting us in, or what we can do to stop them.

Revolutions need organizing, and organizing needs information. We need a revolution, and the place to begin is with the media

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Democrats Help Trump Sabotage Iran Nuclear Deal

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Gulf of Mexico's Dead Zone Could be Largest Ever, Thanks to the Meat Industry

Lorraine Chow

https://www.ecowatch.com/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-2467931985.html

Scientists predict that so much pollution is pouring into the Gulf of Mexico this year that it is creating a larger-than-ever "dead zone" in which low to no oxygen can suffocate or kill fish and other marine life.

The Guardian reported that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is expected to announce this week the largest recorded hypoxic zone in the gulf, an oxygen-depleted swath that's even larger than the New Jersey-sized, 8,185 square-mile dead zone originally predicted for July.

And in a new analysis from environmental group Mighty, the meat industry as well as the country's appetite for meat is much to blame.

When fertilizer and manure washes off soy and corn fields used to grow feed for livestock, it not only contaminates local drinking water supplies, it flows into larger water bodies and creates toxic algal blooms from the excessive nutrients, particularly phosphorus and nitrogen. When the algae dies and decomposes, it depletes the waters of oxygen and eventually leads to vast dead zones that is toxic to aquatic life.

"While fertilizer pollution starts in the Midwest, it flows down the Mississippi River until it finally dumps out into the Gulf of Mexico, which collapses into one of the world's largest Dead Zones each year as a direct result," the report states.

"Approximately 1.15 million metric tons of nitrogen pollution flowed into the Gulf of Mexico in 2016 alone, which is around 170 percent more pollution than was dumped into the Gulf by the BP oil spill."

Mighty is calling on Big Meat—particularly Tyson Foods, the largest meat company in the U.S.—to urge their grain producers such as Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland to take steps to reduce and prevent runoff pollution.

"This problem is worsening and worsening and regulation isn't reducing the scope of this pollution," Lucia von Reusner, campaign director at Mighty, told the Guardian. "These companies' practices need to be far more sustainable. And a reduction in meat consumption is absolutely necessary to reduce the environmental burden."

Just Released Docs Show Monsanto 'Executives Colluding With Corrupted EPA Officials to Manipulate Scientific Data'

By Carey Gillam

https://www.ecowatch.com/monsanto-papers-2467891575.html

Four months after the publication of a batch of internal Monsanto Co. documents stirred international controversy, a new trove of company records was released early Tuesday, providing fresh fuel for a heated global debate over whether or not the agricultural chemical giant suppressed information about the potential dangers of its Roundup herbicide and relied on U.S. regulators for help.

More than 75 documents, including intriguing text messages and discussions about payments to scientists, were posted for public viewing early Tuesday morning by attorneys who are suing Monsanto on behalf of people alleging Roundup caused them or their family members to become ill with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. The attorneys posted the documents, which total more than 700 pages, on the website for the law firm Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, one of many firms representing thousands of plaintiffs who are pursuing claims against Monsanto. More than 100 of those lawsuits have been consolidated in multidistrict litigation in federal court in San Francisco, while other similar lawsuits are pending in state courts in Missouri, Delaware, Arizona and elsewhere. The documents, which were obtained through court-ordered discovery in the litigation, are also available as part of a long list of Roundup court case documents compiled by the consumer group I work for, U.S. Right to Know.

It was important to release the documents now because they not only pertain to the ongoing litigation, but also to larger issues of public health and safety, while shedding light on corporate influence over regulatory bodies, according to Baum Hedlund attorneys Brent Wisner and Pedram Esfandiary.

"This is a look behind the curtain," said Wisner. "These show that Monsanto has deliberately been stopping studies that look bad for them, ghostwriting literature and engaging in a whole host of corporate malfeasance. They [Monsanto] have been telling everybody that these products are safe because regulators have said they are safe, but it turns out that Monsanto has been in bed with U.S. regulators while misleading European regulators."

Esfandiary said public dissemination of the documents is important because regulatory agencies cannot properly protect public and environmental health without having accurate, comprehensive and impartial scientific data, and the documents show that has not been the case with Monsanto's Roundup herbicide and the active ingredient glyphosate.

When reached for comment, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., one of the plaintiffs' lawyers said, "This trove marks a turning point in Monsanto's corporate life. They show Monsanto executives colluding with corrupted EPA officials to manipulate and bury scientific data to kill studies when preliminary data threatened Monsanto's commercial ambitions, bribing scientists and ghostwriting their publications, and purchasing peer review to conceal information about Roundup's carcinogenicity, its toxicity, its rapid absorption by the human body, and its horrendous risks to public health and the environment."

"We can now prove that all Monsanto's claims about glyphosate's safety were myths concocted by amoral propaganda and lobbying teams," Kennedy continued. "Monsanto has been spinning its lethal yarn to everybody for years and suborning various perjuries from regulators and scientists who have all been lying in concert to American farmers, landscapers and consumers. It's shocking no matter how jaded you are! These new revelations are commensurate with the documents that brought down big tobacco."

Several of the document discuss a lack of robust testing of formulated Roundup products. In one email, Monsanto scientist Donna Farmer writes "you cannot say that Roundup is not a carcinogen ... we have not done the necessary testing on the formulation to make that statement. The testing on the formulations are not anywhere near the level of the active ingredient."

The release of the documents Tuesday came without the blessing of Judge Vince Chhabria, who is overseeing the multidistrict litigation moving its way through the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In March, Chhabria did agree to unseal several other discovery documents—over Monsanto's objections—and those documents prompted a wave of outrage for what they revealed: questionable research practices by Monsanto, cozy ties to a top official within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and indications that Monsanto may have engaged in "ghostwriting," of research studies that appeared to be independent of the company.

The revelations within those documents prompted an investigation by the EPA's Office of Inspector General into possible Monsanto-EPA collusion, and roiled Europe where regulators now are trying to decide whether or not to reauthorize glyphosate, which is the most widely used herbicide in the world and is found in numerous products in addition to Roundup.

The lawyers said they are sending copies of the documents to European authorities, to the EPA's OIG and to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), which has been sued by Monsanto for moving to list glyphosate as a known carcinogen

Monsanto has fought to keep most of the documents it turned over in discovery sealed, complaining to Judge Chhabria that in several court filings plaintiffs' attorneys presented discovery materials out of context and tried to exploit the information to influence public opinion. Chhabria has both chided Monsanto for trying to improperly seal certain documents and warned plaintiffs' attorneys against unfairly publicizing certain documents. It is unclear how Judge Chhabria will react, if at all, to the law firm's release of these more than 75 documents.

Baum Hedlund attorneys said they notified Monsanto on June 30 of their intent to unveil the 75+ documents and gave Monsanto the legally required 30-day window to formally object. That period expired Monday, clearing the way for them to make the release early Tuesday, said Wisner.

Concerns about the safety of glyphosate and Roundup have been growing for years amid mounting research showing links to cancer or other diseases. But the lawsuits only began to accumulate after the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in 2015 classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. The plaintiffs in the lawsuits allege that the combination of glyphosate with certain surfactants used in Monsanto-branded Roundup products is even more toxic than glyphosate alone, and Monsanto has sought to cover up that information.

Monsanto has publicly denied that there are cancer connections to glyphosate or Roundup and said 40 years of research and scrutiny by regulatory agencies around the world confirm its safety.

Monsanto has made billions of dollars a year for decades from its glyphosate-based herbicides, and they are the linchpin to billions of dollars more it makes each year from the genetically engineered glyphosate-tolerant crops it markets. The company is currently moving toward a planned merger with Bayer AG.

The only way to defeat Trump— and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy—is to detach ourselves from liberal democracy’s corpse and establish a new Left.

Elements of the program for this new Left are easy to imagine.

Trump promises the cancellation of the big free trade agreements supported by Clinton, and the left alternative to both should be a project of new and different international agreements.

Such agreements would establish public control of the banks, ecological standards, workers rights, universal healthcare, protections of sexual and ethnic minorities, etc.

The big lesson of global capitalism is that nation states alone cannot do the job—only a new political international has a chance of bridling global capital.

Excerpt from:

“We Must Rise from the Ashes of Liberal Democracy”

BY Slavoj Žižek

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19918/slavoj-zizek-from-the-ashes-of-liberal-democracy

Many U.S. Parents Outsourcing Child Care Overseas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxj1RDbp_iE&list=PLE4B9FD1BE4772DE3&index=24