Venezuelan Coup Fails & So Does CNN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8rnWIRrpW0

Pompeo Says US Prepared to Take Military Action in Venezuela "If That's What's Required"

"The team that brought you Iraq seems to thrive on death, destruction, and spending workers' hard earned tax dollars," said one anti-war activist

Jake Johnson, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/05/01/pompeo-says-us-prepared-take-military-action-venezuela-if-thats-whats-required

Going a step beyond the "all options are on the table" platitudes consistently parroted by Trump administration officials, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday the U.S. is prepared to take military action in Venezuela "if that's what's required."

"The president has been crystal clear and incredibly consistent—military action is possible," Pompeo said in an interview on Fox Business.

Trump administration officials are "trying to do everything we can to avoid violence," Pompeo said, even as the White House expressed unequivocal support for the "military uprising" led by Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guiado.

"In the event that there comes a moment—and we'll all have to make decisions about when that moment is and the president will ultimately have to make that decision—he's prepared to do that if that's what's required," said the Secretary of State.

"The team that brought you Iraq seems to thrive on death, destruction, and spending workers' hard earned tax dollars," Evans tweeted.

In an appearance on MSNBC just hours after Pompeo's interview, national security adviser John Bolton echoed many of the Secretary of State's talking points while continuing to make the Orwellian claim that the coup the Trump administration is supporting in Venezuela is somehow not a coup.

"If [Guaido] holds constitutional legitimacy as we believe, trying to take control of the government is not a coup, it's his constitutional obligation," Bolton told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "The coup that we're worried about in Venezuela may have already taken place through the insertion of tens of thousands of Cuban security forces."

As Common Dreams reported, progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers have condemned the Trump administration's support for the attempted coup and urged the U.S. to stop interfering in Venezuela's internal affairs. 

"Bolton, Pompeo (and Guaido) say they want a 'peaceful transition,' even while creating chaos in the streets and calling for a military coup," Gerry Condon of Veterans for Peace wrote for Common Dreams on Wednesday. "In recent years, we have been overwhelmed by endless wars on multiple fronts.  Will Venezuela be one more such war? No, we say. This will not stand."

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Climate change being fuelled by soil damage - report

By Roger Harrabin

BBC environment analyst

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48043134

There's three times more carbon in the soil than in the atmosphere – but that carbon's being released by deforestation and poor farming.

This is fuelling climate change – and compromising our attempts to feed a growing world population, the authors will say.

Problems include soils being eroded, compacted by machinery, built over, or harmed by over-watering.

Hurting the soil affects the climate in two ways: it compromises the growth of plants taking in carbon from the atmosphere, and it releases soil carbon previously stored by worms taking leaf matter underground.

The warning will come from the awkwardly-named IPBES – the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services - a panel studying the benefits of nature to humans.

The body, which is meeting this week, aims to get all the world’s governments singing from the same sheet about the need to protect natural systems.

IPBES will formally release its report on Monday 6 May.

About 3.2 billion people worldwide are suffering from degraded soils, said IPBES chairman Prof Sir Bob Watson.

"That's almost half of the world population. There’s no question we are degrading soils all over the world. We are losing from the soil the organic carbon and this undermines agricultural productivity and contributes to climate change. We absolutely have to restore the degraded soil we’ve got."

Prof Watson previously led the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"Governments have focused on climate change far more than they have focused on loss of biodiversity or land degradation. All three are equally important to human wellbeing."

Soil expert Prof Jane Rickson from Cranfield University, UK, added: "The thin layer of soil covering the Earth's surface represents the difference between survival and extinction for most terrestrial life.

"Only 3% of the planet's surface is suitable for arable production and 75 billion tonnes of fertile soil is lost to land degradation every year." She said soils form at a rate of 1cm in 300 years.

There's uncertainty about the exact level of global soil degradation. But the major hotspots are reported to be in South America, where forests are being felled; sub-Saharan Africa; India and China. Soil scientists in both the biggest Asian nations are worried that their ability to grow their own food may be compromised.

In the US, some soils are being restored as forests take over poor quality land previously worked by small farmers, but others are still being degraded.

The UK is not immune either. Some maize fields in south-west England suffer major soil loss with heavy rainfall because growing maize leaves bare soil exposed. Heavy rain is more likely under climate change. Erosion is also a long-standing issue in the fertile Fens, where, on dry windy days, peaty soil particles sometimes form a kind of smog called the "Fen Blow".

Peat has a high carbon content – and a recent paper suggests there’s far more carbon being lost from peatlands than previously thought.

And on the chalky hills of southern England, chemical-intensive crop farming is said to have caused the loss of over a foot of soil in some places.

Soils are "incredibly important" for our well-being, said Dr Joanna Clark from Reading University.

"We all know that crops are grown in soil, but soils are important for climate change as well. There's three times more carbon stored in soil than there is in the atmosphere. So imagine if all that carbon was released, we’d get runaway climate change. So we need to keep the carbon in the soil."

The simplest way to protect soils while combating climate change is to let forests grow back. This option is favoured by fans of re-wilding.

But some farmers believe they can continue to produce food by changing the way they farm to enhance the soil.

Brexit could give the UK greater flexibility on how to spend public money on farming - enabling much more leeway to reward farmers for capturing carbon in the earth. But there are more than 700 soil types in the UK alone, so it won’t be simple.

Antibiotic resistance as big a threat as climate change – chief medic

Dame Sally Davies calls for Extinction Rebellion-style campaign to raise awareness

Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent

Mon 29 Apr 2019 08.17 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/29/antibiotic-resistance-as-big-threat-climate-change-chief-medic-sally-davies

Protests against climate change should be extended to the other greatest threat facing humanity, according to England’s chief medical officer, who says an Extinction Rebellion-style campaign is needed to save people from antibiotics becoming ineffective in the face of overuse and a lack of regulation.

The threat of antibiotic resistance is as great as that from climate change, said Dame Sally Davies, and should be given as much attention from politicians and the public.

“It would be nice if activists recognised the importance of this,” she said. “This is happening slowly and people adjust to where we are, but this is the equivalent [danger] to extreme weather.”

Davies said efforts to combat the problem of common illnesses becoming untreatable by antibiotic medicines should be coordinated at a worldwide level in a similar way as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of scientists set up in 1988 to tackle global warming.

The IPCC warned last year that climate change would lead to disaster within 12 years if urgent action was not taken to reverse the growth in greenhouse gas emissions. Davies said the consequences of antibiotic resistance posed at least as great a threat to humanity’s future, and in the same timescale, but few efforts had been made to deal with the issue.

“There is not the appetite [among pharmaceutical companies] to develop new medicines,” she said. “There is a systemic failure. We need something similar to the IPCC.”

She listed a series of problems that the world has allowed to build up, from overuse of antibiotics and a lack of restraints on prescribing strong medications, to the rampant use of the drugs on animals, including by farmers for “growth promotion”, as the drugs can make animals put on weight faster. Such use has been banned in Europe and the US, but is common elsewhere, and even in the EU and US, the use of strong antibiotics critical to human health is still allowed on animals despite scientific advice to the contrary.

Davies said she had to be persuaded to regard any use of antibiotics on animals as ethical, given the potential for overuse leading to increased bacterial resistance. “I do think now they can be used on sick animals, I have been convinced,” she said. But she is still concerned that antibiotics are vastly overused in farming, and that this is one of the biggest factors behind the growing problem of resistance. Globally, by far the majority of antibiotic use is for animals.

Fish farming is also a major concern, said Davies, as the use of antibiotics has been largely overlooked in that industry. Few areas of farming are free from concern – she noted antibiotics are allowed to be used in spraying citrus fruit in the US, which she regards as a serious danger.

Davies will leave her post later this year, so will no longer have a government role when post-Brexit trade deals with the US are likely to be signed. But she made it clear she would continue to speak out against deals that she viewed as weakening the UK’s protections on antibiotic use. The US has different rules to the EU on antibiotic use on animals and plants.

A landmark report published on Monday by the the UN’s Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance (IACG) recommended stronger rules should be brought in across the world to prevent the overuse of such medicines on farms, and on people.

Haileyesus Getahun, the director of the IACG, said the threat of antimicrobial resistance was “a silent tsunami”. He said the public were still largely unaware of the problem, but that it could yet be solved if people were educated about the dangers. “We are calling for people to come together,” he said. “We don’t see the effects of it yet, but what is coming will be a catastrophe.”

The report calls for the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in farm animals to be abolished globally, and for the strongest antibiotics to be reserved for human use. The authors also called for pharmaceutical companies to “prioritise public good over profit”, because of the market failure that means developing new drugs, while of enormous public benefit, does not result in companies making more money.

Another critical issue is sanitation, because the lack of clean water and good sanitation that afflicts more than 2 billion of the world’s population is fuelling the rise of antibiotic resistance that quickly spreads around the globe, including to rich countries.

The report found that failing to take urgent action would result in 24 million people being forced into extreme poverty by 2030, and lead to 10 million deaths a year by 2050.

Rammstein - Völkerball live Les Arenes de Nimes 2005, Full Concert HD

https://ok.ru/video/1392772435

Tipping Point: The Gilets Jaunes are winning, what’s next?

David Studdert

https://off-guardian.org/2019/04/29/tipping-point-the-gilets-jaunes-are-winning-whats-next/

The weekend just gone, Manifestation 23, marked a seismic shift in the five month battle between the Gilets Jaunes and the French state. The Notre Dame fire has brought into the open the strategic shift in public opinion that has occurred over the winter; shifts all to the advantage of the Gilets Jaunes. While the cold winter months with their looming darkness only allowed us to glimpse two equal parties grinding away at each other in the gloom, the advent of spring and its clear light, reveals how the Gilets are gathering reserves of strength all over France, and how, now, they are slowly winning in Paris as well. The sight of French police surrounding Notre Dame and denying access to its ‘own’ population, starkly illustrates what the state seeks to deny. After all, these sort of monuments are the materiality through which states demonstrates their connection to the population, their right to rule and their own power.

The Neo-liberal state is crumbling and Macron is going be the sacrificial lamb. At this stage he will be lucky to last two months. His clumsy handling of the Notre Dame blaze has outraged and enraged more sections of the French population. Indeed throughout the five months of protest, and despite the wall to wall media propaganda, opinion polls consistently show continued and unwavering sympathy and support of the Gilets Jaunes.

In the sharp light of spring it is clear that Macron’s winter strategy: the Great National Debate, has achieved nothing for the government and more tellingly perhaps, has further revealed Macron’s own incapacity to either change himself or shift course. As one anonymous French state official reportedly said: ‘Mitterrand gave them an extra week’s holiday, but Macron can’t manage anything’. He simply seems unable in any form to communicate with either the Gilets or the people of France. His constant speeches, with their casual insults and lack of empathy, remain one of the best recruitment tools the Gilets possess.

His recent pronouncements continue this trend. His promise to rebuild the cathedral in five years was met with scorn – ‘this is not a railway line’, said one commentator, while his invitation to the world (a typical empty gesture) angered and aroused traditionalists. Indeed, as has been widely reported, his endorsement of cash donations from billionaires, simply provided the Gilets with yet more free sticks to beat him and the state.

Even his big showpiece speech was cancelled when the Cathedral burst into flames. And what was his big announcement? A freeze on hospital and school closures, the index-linking of pensions to inflation and the closing of the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the university that produces the country’s political and civil elite, all of which, particularly the last, were seen as too late and totally irrelevant. After all it doesn’t put food on the table or help the people get to the end of the month with any money. As I noted in previous articles, this is typical of Macron, revealing only how his personal authority is slipping away, and strangely enough, how irrelevant he is becoming to the entire debate.

Above all, Macron is guilty of being one of those stupid/intelligent middle class people; the sort neo-liberalism delights in providing for us in many guises: administrators, legacy media editors, heads of departments, councillors, politicians. He is bright, he is buffed, he has aspiration, he can speak fluently on subjects for hours, yet for all of that, every speech he makes simply inflames the situation. And this, coupled with his inability to convey a shred of empathy and his apparent lack of understanding concerning both politics and national history, reveal him to be nothing so much as a messenger boy for the rich and the powerful. Once again none of this escapes the French population.

Clearly Macron much prefers international summits to meeting his own people and in truth his dreams of the future, which is all he has, are as banal as Marinetti’s.

All of this was starkly obvious in the course of the great National Debate. Billed as a listening exercise, every photo showed Macron not listening, but lecturing, while his rolled shirt sleeves made him look like a boy, inexperienced and out of his depth. The state PR is simply not working and one can’t believe that any worker in France was fooled by this nonsense.

So Macron is finished and he’ll be gone soon, but the question remains where does this revolt go from here? For the manner in which his removal occurs, how long it takes and who replaces him, will determine the next stage.

Unfortunately for the French neo-liberal state, Macron’s dismissal will not solve the problem. Firstly because, in an immediate sense, there is no alternative candidate within ruling circles acceptable to the Gilets. Secondly, because it is becoming increasingly apparent that neo-liberalism as a form of governance can only succeed in a climate of profligate personal credit, which, along with rising house prices (not counted as inflation), remains the only method available to Neo-Liberalism for generating wealth among all social classes. They simply are unwilling or unable to give anything to the people.

The dismissal of the Paris police chief and the calls by the state for the police to use greater violence and employ more weaponry, simple confirm the gridlock which has entangled the neo-liberal state and its bureaucratic class. A gridlock which not only depresses and represses the rest of us, but also, within the current ruling dogma, is impossible to transcend; violence and exclusion are all the contemporary state has left.

And what of the Gilets? Well, they are everywhere. Every week Facebook is full of online Gilet house-parties, where films, discussion and reinforcement abound. When they don’t demonstrate they talk.. Nor, despite the toil required, is there any sign the people of France are quitting the movement. My roundabout still has people each week-end, as they have been every week-end through what was a cold and desolate winter, and in this they are simply duplicating events at the other twenty or so occupied roundabouts in Gers and all through France. Recently the group at my roundabout distributed a flyer saying that they were finding it difficult to continue every weekend and could others come and assist them, something which according to locals, met with an influx of new recruits. ‘Nous le faisons pour vous’ is their standard speech as they hand out flyers to passing motorists, almost all of whom appear friendly and sympathetic; something entirely to be expected, given all of them are locals.

Some liberal commentators still persist in presenting the Gilets as supplicant Oliver Twists, begging for more from their superiors table and these same commentators love to speak of the revolt as being the periphery verses the centre. As I have made clear in my previous articles, this is the opposite of the truth.

For the Gilets are showing rising levels of political consciousness; with an apparent endless enthusiasm for debates concerning violence, socialism and their demands – debates which are still, even after five months, managed online with toleration and respect for the diversity of people’s opinions.

Additionally, from a strategic perspective the Gilets have already demonstrated their capacity to bring every major French city to a halt. Toulouse, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lyon, have all seen large, persistent demonstrations coupled with massive arrests.

Concurrently, smaller provincial centres like Tarbes in the south west continue to host their own weekly demonstrations, something duplicated in similar centres all over France. And with that is rising, both a hatred of the police, particularly the metropolitan police, and a sense of unity and determination among the Gilets. Naturally most of this escapes the metropolitan elite and the official media, preoccupied as they are with head counts and privates on parade. Yet even in Paris, there is considerable evidence of the movement’s growing support, with people increasingly prepared both to manifest at demonstrations and to express sympathy in media interviews, phone-ins and online.

This narrows the state’s room for manoeuvre drastically. In short the invisible hand is now visible. Something clear when the government, in a brief and crude attempt, sought to blame the Gilets for the Notre Dame blaze – accusations howled down and swiftly rescinded.

Slowly, slowly this battle is developing into a life or death struggle for the neo-liberal state and we can, over the next few months, expect them to intensify their violence during demonstrations, inaugurate house arrests, seal off more railway routes and Paris monuments and ultimately intensify various false flag operations aimed at splitting the movement and fermenting inter-communal conflict.

For the Gilets, this sense they are winning will only increase their determination. If I could make a prediction this will lead ultimately to increased demonstrations, perhaps beyond the self-imposed week-end boundaries, as well as larger, longer blockades of railways and motorways. The French word for demonstration is manifestation and that is a useful word here, because in every sense and every action the Gilets are manifesting their unity, their vision for France and their commitment to that vision.

The last week has been a good week for those who believe that neo-liberalism is a con trick, incapable of providing most a reasonable life, or indeed frankly of governing an increasingly sophisticated social world and an increasingly savvy citizenry. The simplistic nostrums of neo-liberalism remain incapable of confronting the huge problems facing us as a species – a simple truth which is becoming increasingly obvious.

Finally, this week, both the Gilets Jaunes and the Extinction Rebellion in London, are revealing that, despite massive surveillance, militarized, violent policing and the state’s propaganda apparatus, contemporary populations are developing new methods and new visions capable of surmounting these obstacles and finally, after this endless decade of stagnation, moving us forward in a positive, inclusive and effective manner.