Tuesday, May 12, 2020
THE GREEN NEW DEAL IS THE KEY TO ENDING FOREVER WARS
By Lindsay Koshgarian, Truthout.
May 10, 2020
| CREATE!
https://popularresistance.org/the-green-new-deal-is-the-key-to-ending-forever-wars/
The fossil fuel industry is a current casualty of the coronavirus pandemic, with oil prices briefly dipping below zero at the end of April. With the oil industry on the ropes, progressives see a path toward a green economic renewal. Could that spell a whole new approach to international conflict and the U.S. military endeavor, too?
Oil is the leading cause of interstate wars, but the connections between war and oil don’t stop there. From the Pentagon’s fossil fuel emissions to militarized responses to climate refugees, the U.S. military endeavor and our dependence on fossil fuels are intricately tied, as Lorah Steichen and I explain in a new report. Recognizing those ties could be the key to a whole new world.
The Leading Cause Of War
Oil is a leading cause of war, with one quarter to one half of all interstate wars since 1973 linked to oil. The fact of U.S. war for oil is such an open secret that in 2008, retired Gen. John Abizaid said of the Iraq War, “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that….We’ve treated the Arab world as a big collection of gas stations.”
Today, the U.S. is in its 17th year of war in Iraq. In the ongoing quest for dominance over the world’s oil supply, the Trump administration has a target on Iran as well. It seems like years since January, when the U.S. spontaneously assassinated Iranian Major Gen. Qassim Suleimani, which led to a brief escalation over a period of days that many feared could spill over to full-fledged war. More recently, the U.S. has continued to provoke Iran not only with deadly economic sanctions, but naval incursions into the Persian Gulf and constant verbal threats.
Even the Pentagon’s routine operations are driven by oil interests. One study estimated that the Pentagon spends at minimum $81 billion a year — nearly 10 times the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency — to defend the world’s oil supply, in addition to billions spent each year on the Iraq War.
Climate Change Is A Planetary Emergency
Much like the pandemic, climate change is a global problem, not a national one. True U.S. leadership on climate wouldn’t just clean up U.S. emissions, it would open new diplomatic efforts to reduce emissions worldwide — an effort that would be incompatible with war.
The Trump administration has a terrible track record on diplomacy, however. The list of significant international agreements and groups this administration has abandoned — the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the UN Human Rights Council, and more — portends a dangerous inability to negotiate the kind of deals that a robust response to climate change would require. Most recently, the president has said that he will withdraw U.S. funding for the multinational World Health Organization during a once-in-a-century pandemic.
Perhaps most dangerously for climate change, the president and the Pentagon have been beating the war drums about China since at least December 2017, with the Pentagon announcing its intention to make military competition with China and Russia its main priority. As the world leader in total climate emissions, China is a make-or-break participant in any international effort to arrest climate change. The U.S. can hardly afford a Cold War-style communications lockout with China if it intends to get serious about climate.
The Gas-Guzzling Pentagon
According to a recent study from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the Pentagon is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum. If the Pentagon were a country, its emissions would exceed those of industrialized nations like Denmark, Sweden and Portugal.
There can be no U.S. military as it currently exists without oil. The Pentagon has an entire program, the Petroleum Laboratory Training Division, devoted exclusively to ensuring the quality of the military fuel. As the program’s website proclaims, fuel is the “blood of the military.” Gen. David Petraeus, a commander of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, echoed the dark, oil-as-blood metaphor, noting that energy “is the lifeblood of our warfighting capabilities.”
The largest fighting force on Earth runs on oil. The Pentagon has 800 military installations in 90 countries and territories across the globe, according to American University anthropologist David Vine. Running the Pentagon’s domestic and overseas bases, supplying them and providing a constantly rotating cast of troops accounts for about 40 percent of the Department of Defense’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Another major source of emissions is the airstrikes that are a hallmark of modern U.S. military engagement. Just one of the military’s jets, the B-52 Stratofortress, consumes about as much fuel in an hour as the average car driver uses in seven years. The military campaign against ISIS (also known as Daesh), which began in 2014, has involved tens of thousands of aerial sorties ranging from weapons strikes to airlifts and reconnaissance. The fuel use of those missions can be jaw-dropping: In 2014, two B-2 bombers flew a mission from Missouri to drop bombs on ISIS targets in Libya — a 30-hour round trip that required the use of two different types of aerial refueling tankers and more than 400 tons of fuel.
The Pentagon has proclaimed that reducing fuel usage is a goal — if only to further bulletproof their own missions by reducing dependence on vulnerable supply lines. Some military critics’ proposals have called for various means of “greening the military.” Ultimately, attempts to “green the military” won’t meaningfully contribute to a green future — both because the Pentagon’s activities are inherently high-emission, but also because the Green New Deal’s commitment to human life and self-determination is incompatible with U.S. militarism.
A Just (And Peaceful) Transition
The concept of a “just transition” that builds an economy based on health and thriving communities rather than exploitation and harm is a key moral holding of the climate movement.
That concept is incompatible with environmental destruction. It compels restitution for the many Indigenous peoples whose lives and lands have been destroyed. A just transition must stop the burning of military waste in Iraq, which has contributed to widespread toxicity and elevated rates of cancer and infants born with tumors and missing limbs, that have been described as “the highest rate of genetic damage to any population ever studied.”
Climate and war refugees must be promised safe harbor. One estimate shows that by mid-century, climate change could force the relocation of 200 million people. Already, climate change has been a factor in forced migration around the world, including in the devastating Syrian War and in rising migration to the United States from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
These migration flows are being met with militarized responses. In the U.S., the fight over the southern border wall is a harbinger of worse to come. An ominous 2003 Pentagon report on climate change foretold that the “United States [is] likely to build defensive fortresses around [its country] because they have the resources and reserves to achieve self-sufficiency…. Borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America.”
The militarized response to climate change extends inward from the borders. Aggressive deportation campaigns, internment of undocumented people by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the violent response to climate and environmental protests may seem unrelated, but the need of powerful forces to subdue the effects and response to climate change is a driving force behind each of them. As activists and experts design policies to end our dependence on oil, the just transition principle suggests that the solution must also dismantle the web of related injustice.
How Do We Pay For It?
The Green New Deal will indeed require extensive resources, but those same resources have been propping up U.S. wars for nearly two decades now. While the U.S. is on the hook for $6.4 trillion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the cost of converting the U.S. energy grid to 100 percent renewable sources would be only $4.5 trillion. The cost of missing the opportunity to convert the energy grid beginning in 2001 instead of embarking on two decades of war is incalculable.
Today, the U.S. is still spending $70 billion each year on its forever wars. That money could be repurposed — along with additional cuts to Pentagon spending that would total $350 billion per year — toward a Green New Deal. These cuts would allow for the diversion of resources, but they would also directly reduce emissions and reduce conflict to make the world a safer place. Another $649 billion per year could be freed up by ending U.S. oil industry subsidies. All told, that’s a trillion dollars a year that could go toward a Green New Deal.
Some of the most profound (and sympathy-inducing) opposition to both a Green New Deal and to cutting Pentagon spending comes from people who now depend on the oil and military industries for their livelihoods. A key part of a just transition includes ensuring that those people can transition from dangerous jobs that fuel suffering and conflict, to safer, life-affirming jobs. This transition is eminently possible. Dollar for dollar, clean energy creates 40 percent more jobs than military spending. A relatively modest $200 billion annual investment in clean energy — far less than what the Green New Deal proposes — would create 2.7 million net new jobs.
Dismantling the hold of the oil and military industries — and the colonialist mindset of the 20th century — won’t be easy, but it is a necessary part of the solution to the challenges the world now faces. As the world emerges from its forced hibernation, the price of oil should be one thing that doesn’t come back.
ONCE AGAIN, CONGRESS WILL LET WALL STREET PILLAGE MAIN STREET
By Leonard C. Goodman,
PopularResistance.
May 10, 2020
| EDUCATE!
https://popularresistance.org/once-again-congress-will-let-wall-street-pillage-main-street/
Over the last decade, Congress’s approval ratings have hovered around the mid-teens or low 20s, reflecting the reality that our representatives in Washington, D.C., serve the needs of big donors while throwing an occasional rhetorical bone to the “essential” workers who actually make the country function. Congress’s handling of the current crisis of the pandemic is unlikely to improve its ratings.
Working Americans are facing an unprecedented disaster. Before the virus hit, half of them lived paycheck to paycheck and didn’t have $400 saved for an emergency. Now they have been ordered to stay home. Many have no income while their rents, utility bills, student loans, and credit card debts are accruing.
The small businesses—restaurants, gyms, and stores—that provide half of the nation’s jobs were ordered to shut down. Their rents are accruing. And with no income coming in, many have little chance of repaying what they owe when the economy reopens.
Congress has responded in typical fashion by protecting its donors—the investor class—the only people in the country who didn’t need help. By unrecorded voice vote, Congress passed the CARES Act, rushing $1.77 trillion in taxpayer money out the door to help their friends on Wall Street. This bailout also saved the stock market and preserved the wealth of the 10 percent of Americans who own 85 percent of the stocks and bonds.
And to add insult to injury, the Federal Reserve is providing trillions more in free money to fortify the banks so they can continue to collect 21 percent interest on your credit cards and buy up your distressed assets. Ordinary Americans will receive a one-time payment of $1,200, if their creditors don’t scoop it up first, and some unemployment relief, if their state’s system is functioning after the flood of new claims. (In the last six weeks, more than 30 million workers have applied for unemployment compensation.)
Governments of other countries are covering wages to keep workers in their jobs until this emergency is over. A similar plan was proposed in both the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House. But it wasn’t taken seriously or brought to the floor for debate. Neither of the two corporate-backed parties that share power in the U.S. believe that any drastic measures are necessary to save Main Street.
Congress did set up a loan program for small businesses, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). But the big banks who were put in charge of distributing the loans gave much of the money to publicly traded chains that were allowed to claim small business status under a loophole written into the bill by their lobbyists.
Many economists are predicting a dangerous explosion in a matter of months when rents and mortgages cannot be paid, businesses fail, and temporary layoffs turn into permanent job losses.
As was the case in the 2008 bailout, Congress has assured that none of the pain will be borne by its big donors. Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase won’t lose a penny. Their executives will get their bonuses and their investors will get their dividend checks. Once again, big banks have been allowed to collect their profits on risky loans even when those loans go bad. In other words, the big banks’ risk has been socialized—covered by the taxpayers—while their profits remain privatized. This is capitalism in the 21st century.
And following the playbook of the 2008-09 bailout, the Fed is making funds available to their Wall Street cronies to buy up distressed Main Street assets at fire-sale prices. Big companies will pick up small companies. Blackstone will buy up more real estate. The economy will be even more centralized.
States and municipalities are also facing rapidly approaching disasters. Unlike the federal government, states and cities cannot run a deficit or print money. They have to actually pay for things like public services and unemployment insurance by collecting revenues from sales taxes and income taxes. And they are not getting those revenues.
Nevertheless, only about 5 percent of the $3 trillion in total coronavirus relief has gone to help the 50 states. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell suggested that Congress might let states go bankrupt, meaning among other things, that workers’ pensions would likely evaporate.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi was recently asked whether she and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer made a “tactical mistake” in not providing any help for state and local governments in the relief bills. In response, she told CNN’s Jake Tapper to “just calm down.”
Tapper reportedly did calm down. But it’s not clear if ordinary Americans will just calm down when their businesses are closed and their families are thrown out into the streets.
The Democratic Party that controls the House still tries to sell the outdated notion that it is fighting for working people. Yet, despite its powerful allies in the mainstream press, fewer and fewer Americans are buying the ruse. First, we all just watched as the entire Democratic Party establishment came together to stop an insurgent candidate in the presidential primaries, Bernie Sanders, whose major sin was his refusal to sell out to Wall Street donors. Instead, the working man’s party has united behind Joe Biden, a reliable servant to Wall Street banks for nearly 50 years.
In a time when the health of our nation depends on a health care system capable of providing our neighbors with testing and treatment for a highly contagious disease, even if there is no profit to be made, the nominee for president of the working man’s party has promised his donors to veto a Medicare-for-All bill if it crosses his desk.
A second reason working Americans are less willing now to “vote blue no matter who” is that they remember the 2008-09 bailout. Back then, Barack Obama was in the White House and the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. Wall Street banks crashed the economy by selling exploding mortgages to poor people and then packaging those worthless mortgages into worthless investment securities. Obama bailed out the banks—his major campaign sponsors and donors—and he let ten million Americans lose their homes. Wall Street companies like Blackstone were allowed to buy up foreclosed homes for pennies on the dollar, and then very quickly raise rents on Americans. As a result, Black and Brown people who graduated from four-year colleges lost 70 percent of their wealth under the first Black president, according to a Federal Reserve study.
The Democratic Party learned one important lesson from 2008: it is best not to control the office of the president and both houses of Congress. Too much power makes it harder to serve the interests of the big donors while still pretending to fight for ordinary working Americans. It is much better to split power and blame the Republicans for screwing working people.
Did you ever wonder why Democrats always lose when Republicans try to game the system to silence minority voices? Republicans encounter little resistance when they gerrymander districts to make them safe from minority voters, suppress minority voters at the polls, enact filibuster rules that allow corporate interests to block popular legislation, and preserve the arcane Electoral College. All of these schemes benefit the corporate patrons of both parties by making it less costly to rig the system. Corporations don’t need to own all 535 members of Congress, or even a majority of them, to control the levers of power.
It is generally acknowledged that the situation today is more dangerous than the financial collapse of 2008. The coronavirus has shut down large parts of the economy. And because we were so ill prepared for the pandemic, there is great uncertainty as to when or how the economy will restart, or what it will look like.
Since our government has refused to bail out small businesses or ordinary working people, prominent economists like Professor Michael Hudson at the University of Missouri at Kansas City have warned that the government will need to intervene and allow Americans to write down debts that cannot be paid, or we will face economic meltdown. But writing down debts would harm the big banks, so it probably won’t happen under this Congress or this president.
I like to end columns on a positive note. I have long advocated using democratic means to wrest political power from corporations and return it to the people. But right now, the economy appears to be headed off a cliff and the corporations have a tight grip on all the controls. And I am not smart enough to know how people can take back power without a violent revolution. One thing I am sure of is that when American families start getting kicked out of their homes, the Democrats will blame the Republicans, and the Republicans will blame anyone but themselves.
‘PLANDEMIC’ CONSPIRACY VIDEO HAS BEEN THOROUGHLY DEBUNKED
By Annie Reneau,
May 10, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/plandemic-conspiracy-video-has-been-thoroughly-debunked/
NOTE: There are a number of articles addressing the misinformation in the ‘Plandemic’ video that is going around. I am posting the article below because it has a number of experts who explain the problems with Dr. Mikovits’s statements. Another very good article is this one in Science that goes through her background and her statements one by one. I find that people are unfortunately believing Mikovits and as a result are not taking the COVID-19 pandemic seriously. This puts themselves and others at risk. – MF
The coronavirus pandemic has brought out a whole slew of interesting human tendencies, including a veritable tsunami of conspiracy theories. Like, holy cow, folks. When did everyone start pulling out their tinfoil hats?
There are several reasons for this, from the emotional and psychological needs that conspiracy theories fulfill (especially during such an uncertain time), to the intellectual habits that enable people to fall prey to such theories.
And of course, there’s always a shred of truth in any conspiracy theory, which pulls people in. But just as a shred of fabric doesn’t make a shirt, a shred of truth in a conspiracy theory doesn’t make it credible or true.
By now, you’ve undoubtedly seen or at least heard about the Plandemic video making the rounds. YouTube keeps taking it down because of its policy against spreading harmful misinformation about the coronavirus, but that of course just fuels the fire of conspiracy theorists who think the truth is being silenced. The good news is that the claims in the video have been debunked many times over at this point. The bad news is that the people who need to see these debunkings have probably not even read this far into the article, and are definitely not going to take the time to read and process what we share past this point.
But we’re gonna go ahead and share these well-cited debunkings anyway, because facts matter, sources matter, not all opinions are equal, and we can’t keep letting paranoid theories that don’t hold up to scrutiny and can’t be backed up with well-done science go unchecked.
(And yes, there is such a thing as well-done science. The scientific world has spent many, many decades improving and systematizing processes for checking data, replicating studies, peer-reviewing findings, etc. so that we have a good idea of what science we can trust and what science is not credible. The only way to refute well-done science is to toss the entire systematized scientific process out the window and instead listen to random individual scientists who refuse to accept that their work was shoddy. Not all scientists are credible, and if a scientist is publishing their opinion outside of the scientific community—especially via YouTube—you should immediately be skeptical and look for whether or not their claims have been debunked by well-done science.)
Case in point, Judy Mikovitz, the scientist at the forefront of the Plandemic video.
Since there are so many clear refutations of the claims in that video and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, we’re just going to share a bunch of them with you. Off we go:
Here’s An Explanation From Kat Montgomery, A Surgical Pathology Fellow In The Department Of Pathology, Microbiology, And Immunology At Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Here’s An Explanation From A Social Epidemiologist With A PhD From Johns Hopkins:
Here’s An Explanation From A Microbiologist (See Her Credentials Here) Who Outlines Some Of The Most Blatantly Wrong Things In The Plandemic Video With Links To Back Her Up:
Here’s An Explanation Of The Difference Between A Scientific Theory And A Conspiracy Theory, For Those Who Think That The Conspiracy Theories Are Using Science As Their Basis:
Here’s a Snopes piece that details the issues with Judy Mikovitz’s research and history and why she is no way a credible source. (It’s worth noting that this was written in 2018, long before the pandemic. This woman has been discredited in the scientific world for years.)
And here’s another Snopes piece about the issues with the chiropractor in the video who advocates drinking tonic water as a way to prevent coronavirus.
(I realize that most conspiracy theorists don’t trust Snopes because…well…they think the site is part of a liberal conspiracy. But the Snopes debunkings include links to reputable sources to back up their facts checks, so if the conspiracy theorists really look at everything and think critically like they claim to do, they have to look at the information and sources claiming to debunk their theories. Then they have to either refute them with actual science from reputable sources or admit that they have no credible basis for their beliefs.)
Here’s an article I wrote about how medical associations as well as statistical experts have condemned the Bakersfield doctors shown in the video (which is a bit unnecessary since the docs issued a public statement condemned the Plandemic filmmakers for using footage of them anyway).
Here’s a decently thorough debunking by surgical oncologist David Gorski.
Here’s a very thorough explanation of the Plandemic erroneousness on Reddit, where you can also see discussion on the video and the debunking (for those of you who say, “Let’s at least have a debate!” about already thoroughly debunked claims—here’s where you can have at it.)
If you prefer doctors on YouTube sharing their professional opinions on all things pandemic—which seems to be the favorite method for conspiracy theorists to do “research”—here’s a doctor who explains a bit about the psychology of the Plandemic video and also explains the shoddy research behind it.
“Plandemic” Video Analysis | Did Judy Mikovits Connect the Dots?www.youtube.com
This final one from Stanford-trained physician Dr. Zubin Damania might be just be my favorite (but only after reading everything above for the facts). For those of us who are trying not to lose our minds over having to continually fact-check all of this misinformation for people who really should be able to do it themselves, this 3-and-a-half minutes is quite cathartic. Enjoy.
A Doctor Reacts To “Plandemic”www.youtube.com
Bottom line: The video is bunk, but conspiracy theorists will keep on insisting that it’s not. (Wake up! You’re all sheep following the mainstream media! Experts who provide data backed up by multiple peer-reviewed studies can’t be trusted! Individual doctors and scientists are more trustworthy than professional associations of thousands of doctors and scientists! Everyone is getting paid off, except these conspiracy theory pushers because I trust them because they say they’re being persecuted by the science community for no reason and that sounds totally legit! And maybe the earth really IS flat—scientists have been wrong before!)
Did I miss anything?
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