The Shadow Bank That Owns The World

https://popularresistance.org/the-shadow-bank-that-owns-the-world/



For most people in America and much of the world, our life is — to some degree — owned, run, managed, or manipulated by a “shadow bank” that few people even know the name of. It holds between 9 and 10 Trillion dollars in assets. It is the largest or close-to largest stake holder in most enormous media companies like Disney and Comcast, most big tech companies like Google and Meta/Facebook, most big banks like Citibank, Bank of America, and Barclays. This secretive cabal is one of the biggest funders of deforestation, fossil fuel use, weapons contractors, and basically destroying the planet. And yet, despite all that, most Americans and most people around the world have never even heard of them. Watch the video to learn who it is that truly owns the planet.

All That I Ask Is That You Fight For Peace Today

https://popularresistance.org/all-that-i-ask-is-that-you-fight-for-peace-today/





By Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. July 29, 2022



The fragility of Europe’s energy supply has once again been on display in recent months. Gas shipments through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which runs from Russia to Germany, were reduced to 40% of capacity in June, a cut that Moscow said was due to delays in the servicing of a turbine by the German firm Siemens. Shortly thereafter, on 11 July, the pipeline was taken offline for ten days for annual routine maintenance. Despite receiving assurances from Moscow that the supply would resume as scheduled, European leaders expressed fears that the shutdown would continue indefinitely in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. On 21 July, the flow of Russian gas into Europe resumed. Klaus Müller, the head of Germany’s energy regulator, said that gas flows through Nord Stream 1 were below pre-maintenance levels during the first few hours of resumption, though they have now returned to 40% capacity.

European anxieties related to energy supply are linked to fears amongst the region’s governments of further instability in the Eurozone. On the same day that Nord Stream 1 resumed operations, Italy’s Mario Draghi resigned as prime minister, the latest in a dramatic series of resignations by heads of government in Bulgaria, Estonia, and the United Kingdom. Resistance from Europe to a peace agreement with Russia comes alongside recognition that trade with Russia is inevitable.

At No Cold War, an international platform seeking to bring sanity to international relations, we have been closely observing the shifting tenor of the war in Ukraine and the US-driven pressure campaign against China. We have published three previous briefings from this platform in our newsletters; below, you will find briefing no. 4, The World Does Not Want a Global NATO, which details the emerging clarity in the Global South regarding the US-European attempt to drive a belligerent agenda around the world. This new clarity relates not only to the militarization of the planet, but also to the deepening conflicts in trade and development, as evidenced by the G7’s new initiative, the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Development, which clearly targets China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

In June, member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gathered in Madrid, Spain for their annual summit. At the meeting, NATO adopted a new Strategic Concept, which had last been updated in 2010. In it, NATO names Russia as its ‘most significant and direct threat’ and singled out China as a ‘challenge [to] our interests’. In the words of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, this guiding document represents a ‘fundamental shift’ for the military alliance, its ‘biggest overhaul… since the Cold War’.
A Monroe Doctrine For The 21st Century?

Although NATO purports to be a ‘defensive’ alliance, this claim is contradicted by its destructive legacy – such as in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), and Libya (2011) – and its ever-expanding global footprint. At the summit, NATO made it clear that it intends to continue its global expansion to confront Russia and China. Seemingly oblivious to the immense human suffering produced by the war in Ukraine, NATO declared that its ‘enlargement has been a historic success… and contributed to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area’, and extended official membership invitations to Finland and Sweden.

However, NATO’s sights extend far beyond the ‘Euro-Atlantic’ to the Global South. Seeking to gain a foothold in Asia, NATO welcomed Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand as summit participants for the first time and stated that ‘the Indo-Pacific is important for NATO’. On top of this, echoing the Monroe Doctrine (1823) of two hundred years ago, the Strategic Concept named ‘Africa and the Middle East’ as ‘NATO’s southern neighborhood’, and Stoltenberg made an ominous reference to ‘Russia and China’s increasing influence in [the Alliance’s] southern neighborhood’ as presenting a ‘challenge’.
85% Of The World Seeks Peace

Although NATO’s member states may believe that they possess global authority, the overwhelming majority of the world does not. The international response to the war in Ukraine indicates that a stark divide exists between the United States and its closest allies on the one hand and the Global South on the other.

Governments representing 6.7 billion people – 85% of the world’s population – have refused to follow sanctions imposed by the US and its allies against Russia, while countries representing only 15% of the world’s population have followed these measures. According to Reuters, the only non-Western governments to have enacted sanctions on Russia are Japan, South Korea, the Bahamas, and Taiwan – all of which host US military bases or personnel.

There is even less support for the push to close airspace to Russian planes spearheaded by the US and European Union. Governments representing only 12% of the world’s population have adopted this policy, while 88% have not.

US-led efforts to politically isolate Russia on the international stage have been unsuccessful. In March, the UN General Assembly voted on a nonbinding resolution to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: 141 countries voted in favor, 5 countries voted against, 35 countries abstained, and 12 countries were absent. However, this tally does not tell the full story. The countries which either voted against the resolution, abstained, or were absent represent 59% of the world’s population. Following this, the Biden administration’s call for Russia to be excluded from the G20 summit in Indonesia was ignored.

Meanwhile, despite intense backing from NATO, efforts to win support for Ukraine in the Global South have been a complete failure. On 20 June, after several requests, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the African Union; only two heads of state of the continental organization’s 55 members attended the meeting. Shortly thereafter, Zelensky’s request to address the Latin American trade bloc, Mercosur, was rejected.

It is clear that NATO’s claim to be ‘a bulwark of the rules-based international order’ is not a view which is shared by most of the world. Support for the military alliance’s policies is almost entirely confined to its member countries and a handful of allies which together constitute a small minority of the world’s population. Most of the world’s population rejects NATO’s policies and global aspirations and does not wish to divide the international community into outdated Cold War blocs.

In 1955, ten years after the US dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima (Japan), the Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet wrote a poem in the voice of a seven-year-old girl who died in that terrible act. The poem was later translated into Japanese by Nobuyuki Nakamoto as ‘Shinda Onnanoko’ (‘Dead Girl’) and frequently sung in commemorations of that atrocity. Given the harshness of war and the escalation of conflict, it is worthwhile to reflect once more on Hikmet’s beautiful, haunting lyrics:


I come and stand at every door
But no one hears my silent tread.
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead, for I am dead.

I’m only seven, although I died
In Hiroshima long ago.
I’m seven now as I was then.
When children die, they do not grow.

My hair was scorched by swirling flame.
My eyes grew dim; my eyes grew blind.
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind.

I need no fruit, I need no rice.
I need no sweets, nor even bread.
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead, for I am dead.

All that I ask is that for peace
You fight today, you fight today
So that the children of the world
May live and grow and laugh and play.

Ready, Fire, Aim: US Interests In Afghanistan, Iraq, And Syria

https://popularresistance.org/ready-fire-aim-us-interests-in-afghanistan-iraq-and-syria/






By Chas W. Freeman, Jr., Antiwar.com.

July 26, 2022
Educate!


Contribution to a Panel Discussion at the DACOR Annual Conference, September 27, 2019.

I have been asked to join my fellow panelists in speaking about U.S. interests in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. For some reason, our government has never been able to articulate these interests, but, judging by the fiscal priority Americans have assigned to these three countries in this century, they must be immense – almost transcendent. Since we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, we have spent more than $5 trillion and incurred liabilities for veterans’ disabilities and medical expenses of at least another trillion dollars, for a total of something over $6 trillion for military efforts alone.

This is money we didn’t spend on sustaining, still less improving, our own human and physical infrastructure or current and future well-being. We borrowed almost all of it. Estimates of the costs of servicing the resulting debt run to an additional $8 trillion over the next few decades.[1] Future generations of Americans will suffer from our failure to invest in education, scientific research, and transportation. On top of that, we have put them in hock for at least $14 trillion in war debt. Who says foreign policy is irrelevant to ordinary Americans?

At the moment, it seems unlikely our descendants will feel they got their money’s worth. We have lost or are losing all our so-called “forever wars.” Nor are the people of West Asia and North Africa likely to remember our interventions favorably. Since we began them in 2001, well over one million individuals in West Asia have died violent deaths. Many times more than that have died as a result of sanctions, lost access to medical care, starvation, and other indirect effects of the battering of infrastructure, civil wars, and societal collapse our invasions have inflicted on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria and their neighbors.

The so-called “Global War on Terrorism” launched in Afghanistan in 2001 has metastasized. The US. Armed forces are now combating “terrorism” (and making new enemies) in eighty countries. In Syria alone, where since 2011 we have bombed and fueled proxy wars against both the Syrian government and its extremist foes, nearly 600,000 have died. 11 million have been driven from their homes, five million of them into refuge in other countries.

Future historians will struggle to explain how an originally limited post-9/11 punitive raid into Afghanistan morphed without debate into a failed effort to pacify and transform the country. Our intervention began on October 7, 2001. By December 17, when the battle of Tora Bora ended, we had accomplished our dual objectives of killing, capturing, or dispersing the al Qaeda architects of “9/11” and thrashing the Taliban to teach them that they could not afford to give safe haven to the enemies of the United States. We were well placed then to cut the deal we now belatedly seek to make, demanding that the governing authorities in Afghanistan deny their territory to terrorists with global reach as the price of our departure, and promising to return if they don’t.

Instead, carried away with our own brilliance in dislodging the Islamic Emirate from Kabul and the ninety percent of the rest of the country it then controlled, we nonchalantly moved the goal posts and committed ourselves to bringing Afghans the blessings of E PLURIBUS UNUM, liberty, and gender equality, whether they wanted these sacraments or not. Why? What interests of the United States – as opposed to ideological ambitions – justified this experiment in armed evangelism?

The success of policies is measurable only by the extent to which they achieve their objectives and serve a hierarchy of national interests. When, as in the case of the effort to pacify Afghanistan and reengineer Iraq, there is no coherent statement of war aims, one is left to evaluate policies in terms of their results. And one is also left to wonder what interests those policies were initially meant to support or advance.

In the end, our interests in Afghanistan seem to have come down to avoiding having to admit defeat, keeping faith with Afghans whose hopes we raised to unrealistic levels, and protecting those who have collaborated with us. In other words, we have acted in accordance with what behavioral economists call “the fallacy of sunk costs.” We have thrown good money after bad. We have doubled down on a losing game. We have reinforced failure.

To justify the continuation of costly but unsuccessful policies, our leaders have cited the definitive argument of all losers, the need to preserve “credibility.” This is the theory that steadfastness in counterproductive behavior is better for one’s reputation than acknowledging impasse and changing course. By hanging around in Afghanistan, we have indeed demonstrated that we value obduracy above strategy, wisdom, and tactical flexibility. It is hard to argue this this has enhanced our reputation internationally.

We invaded Iraq in 2003 for reasons that, aside from the pursuit of imaginary weapons of mass destruction, have never really been explained. To parody Hughes Mearns’s famous poem, Antigonish[2]:


Some time ago, Iraq was where

We looked for stuff that wasn’t there

We haven’t found it to this day,

And yet we feel obliged to stay.

By taking over Iraq, we successfully prevented Baghdad from transferring nonexistent weapons to terrorist groups that did not exist until our thoughtless vivisection of Iraqi society created them. We also destroyed Iraq as the balancer and check on Iran’s regional ambitions, an interest that had previously been a pillar of our policies in the Persian Gulf. This made continued offshore balancing impossible and compelled us for the first time to station U.S. forces in the region permanently. This, in turn, transformed the security relationship between the Gulf Arabs and Iran from regional rivalry into military confrontation, producing a series of proxy wars in which our Arab protégés have demanded and obtained our support.

Our intervention in Iraq ignited long-smoldering divisions between Shiite and Sunni Islam, fueling passions that have undermined religious tolerance and fostered terrorism both regionally and worldwide. The only gainers from our misadventures in Iraq were Iran and Israel, which saw their most formidable Arab rival flattened, and, of course, the U.S. defense and homeland security budgets, which fattened on the resulting threat of terrorist blowback. Ironically, the demise of Iraq as an effective adversary thrust Israel into enemy deprivation syndrome, leading to its (and later our) designation of Iran as the devil incarnate. Israel, joined by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, believes that the cure for its apprehensions about Iran is for the U.S. military to crush it on their behalf.

The other principal legacies of our lurch into strategy-free militarism, aside from debt and a bloated defense budget, are our now habitual pursuit of military solutions to non-military problems, our greatly diminished deference to foreign sovereignty and international law, domestic populism born of war weariness and disillusionment with Washington, declining willingness of allies to follow us, the incitement of violent anti-Americanism among the Muslim fourth of humanity, the entrenchment of Islamophobia in U.S. politics, and the paranoia and xenophobia these developments have catalyzed among Americans.

In March 2011, having unofficially cheered on the overthrow of our longtime Egyptian protégé, Hosni Mubarak, we joined some European allies in bombing and strafing Libya. The ostensible purpose for ignoring Libyan sovereignty was humanitarian – the alleged international “right to protect” civilians against their own governments (R2P). The immediate result was the overthrow and savage murder of Libya’s famously bizarre leader, Muammar Qadhafi. But the movement of the goal posts to encompass regime change was also the coup de grâce for any prospect that R2P might become established international law.

No matter. In April 2011, when unrest broke out in Syria, the Obama administration immediately called for the ouster of the Asad government. That government had the support of Iran, Iraq, and Lebanese Hezbollah, later joined by Russia. The insurgents enjoyed support from others in the region – primarily Qatar and Saudi Arabia, though each supported different factions. The Gulf Arabs were joined by the United States, France, and the U.K. Turkey facilitated these foreign interventions in Syria, as it did the passage through its territory of jihadis seeking to overthrow Asad. In 2015, Turkey intervened directly to confine hostile Syrian Kurds on its southwestern border.

Syria was soon the site of innumerable proxy wars. Saudi-supported Salafi jihadis fought Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Salafis supported by Qatar and Turkey. Sunnis fought Shi`a. Saudi and Iranian-supported forces fought each other. Hezbollah fought Lebanese Sunni forces in Syria. Israel fought Iran and Hezbollah and supported selected anti-government jihadis. Russia escalated its support of the Asad government. The United States and Israel targeted Iranian forces and intervened against both Asad and the Islamist extremists who were his most effective antagonists. Lately, we have been at risk of war with our erstwhile ally, Turkey. Throughout, a very large number of Syrians have been more alarmed by the alternatives to Asad than they are by him.

It is widely claimed that the United States was inadequately engaged in the Syrian maelstrom. Nonsense! Since 2014, we have spent well over $50 billion in appropriated funds to train, arm, and otherwise support various factions in the conflict, including some with direct links to al Qaeda. This fiscal year alone, DoD has budgeted $15.3 billion and the Department of State about $1 billion for Syria. In total disregard of international law, we have carried out well over 11,000 air and missile strikes against both government and rebel forces in Syria and deployed about 2,000 U.S. troops there to support secessionist factions. We cannot escape a considerable measure of moral responsibility for both the perpetuation of the conflict in Syria and some of the 200,000 undocumented and 375,000 documented Syrian dead, about 125,000 of whom have been verified as pro-government, 133,000 as anti-government, and 112,000 as noncombatant, neutral civilians. But we have made it clear we will not contribute to Syria’s reconstruction.

In a very sad way, that’s progress. Our forever wars have repurposed much development assistance into support for warfare and the amelioration of its consequences. The humanitarian crises in Gaza and Yemen exemplify this tragic transformation. What we and our security partners knock down with one hand, we rebuild with another before knocking it down again. This has discredited our aid to foreign societies in the eyes of Americans as well as its recipients.

To say, “we meant well” is true – as true of the members of our armed forces as it is of our diplomats and development specialists. But good intentions are not a persuasive excuse for the outcomes wars contrive. We have hoped that the many good things we have done to advance human and civil rights in Afghanistan and Iraq might survive our inevitable disengagement from both. They won’t. The years to come are less likely to gratify us than to force us to acknowledge that the harm we have done to our own country in this century vastly exceeds the good we have done abroad.

Of course, we will leave behind some concrete legacies of our misadventures in West Asia. The region is now littered with depopulated American bases and fortified bastions serving as embassies. But this architectural legacy inevitably recalls Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”


I met a traveler from an antique land,

Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . .. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

For $14 trillion or more, we should get something more than that. But we won’t unless we finally figure out what our interests really are, build a strategy that addresses them rather than politically popular delusions, and rediscover the merits of diplomacy as an alternative to the use of force.

The Whistleblower Crackdown

https://popularresistance.org/the-whistleblower-crackdown/



By John Kiriakou, Consortium News. July 26, 2022


National Whistleblower Week is a call to action on behalf of Julian Assange.

His case marks a new extreme in a series of legal reprisals that have gotten more draconian since Kiriakou’s own national-security case in 2012.

This is National Whistleblower Week, with Saturday marking National Whistleblower Appreciation Day. The National Whistleblower Center in Washington has its annual lunch, seminar and associated events scheduled. Whistleblowers from around the U.S. attend, a couple members of Congress usually show up and we talk about how important it is to speak truth to power.

I’ve been attending these events for much of the past decade. But I’m not sanguine about where our efforts stand, especially on behalf of national security whistleblowers. Since I blew the whistle on the C.I.A.’s torture program in 2007 and was prosecuted for it in 2012, I think the situation for whistleblowers has grown far worse.

In 2012, when I took a plea to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 for confirming the name of a former C.I.A. colleague to a reporter who never made the name public, I was sentenced to 30 months in a federal prison.

In 2015, former C.I.A. officer Jeffrey Sterling, who blew the whistle on racial discrimination at the agency, was sentenced to what Judge Leonie Brinkema called “Kiriakou plus 12 months,” because I had taken a plea and Jeffrey had had the unmitigated gall to go to trial to prove his innocence. So, he ended up with 42 months in prison.

Things just got worse from there.

The prosecutors of drone whistleblower Daniel Hale asked Judge Liam O’Grady to sentence him to 20 years in prison. O’Grady instead gave Hale 46 months. But to spite him, and to show prosecutors’ anger with the sentence, the Justice Department ignored the judge’s recommendation that Hale be sent to a low-security hospital facility in Butner, North Carolina, and instead incarcerated him in the supermax facility in Marion, Illinois, with no treatment for his debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder.

I was in the courtroom during Hale’s sentencing. When prosecutors asked for the draconian sentence, Hale’s attorneys cited my sentence of 30 months and Sterling’s 42 months. Prosecutors retorted that they had “made a mistake with Kiriakou. His sentence was far too short.”

It was clear that since my own case, the Justice Department’s ongoing prosecutions of national security whistleblowers wasn’t discouraging people from going public with evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality in the intelligence community. Perhaps, they thought, tougher sentences would do it. Don’t count on it, I say.

In the meantime, I ran into another national security whistleblower at an event recently. He told me that the F.B.I. had recently paid him a visit. I chuckled and said, “Because you’re so close to them and they’ve been so kind to you?”

We laughed for a moment, but he was serious. He is still on probation and the F.B.I. offered to get that probation lifted if he would tell them anything and everything he knows about Julian Assange and Ed Snowden. He told them that he speaks through his attorney and wanted no further contact with them. His attorney told the F.B.I. that his client had nothing to say, would tell them nothing about Assange or Snowden even if he knew something and to not contact his client again. They haven’t.
The Assange Nightmare

If you’re reading this, you’ve likely followed the nightmare that Julian Assange has been experiencing for years now. He could be extradited to the United States by next year and he faces more than a lifetime in prison. That’s the Justice Department’s goal — that Assange die in a U.S. prison. Ed Snowden likely faces the same fate if he were to find his way back to the U.S.

In order to try to smooth the path for Assange’s extradition, prosecutors have promised British authorities that Assange would not be placed in a Communications Management Unit or a Special Administrative Unit, where his access to the outside world would be practically nil.

They’ve also promised that he would not be placed in solitary confinement.

But that’s all nonsense. It’s a lie. Prosecutors have literally no say in where a prisoner is placed. It’s not up to the judge and it’s not up to the prosecutors. Placement is solely at the discretion of the Bureau of Prisons (on recommendation from the C.I.A., which spied on Assange and his lawyers) and they haven’t made any promises to anybody.

Belmarsh Prison in London is awful. But Supermax Marion, Supermax Florence, USP Springfield, USP Leavenworth, USP Lewisburg and any of the other American hell-holes where Assange and other whistleblowers are and can be placed would be worse.

Though it’s National Whistleblower Week, we can’t pause to celebrate. We can’t bask in minor successes. We have to keep up the fight because that’s what the Justice Department is doing.

The Dawn Of The Apocalypse

https://popularresistance.org/the-dawn-of-the-apocalypse/





By Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. July 26, 2022


We were warned for decades about the death march we are on because of global warming.

And yet, the global ruling class continues to frog-march us towards extinction.

The past week has seen record-breaking heat waves across Europe. Wildfires have ripped through Spain, Portugal and France. London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II. The U.K. saw its hottest day on record of 104.54 Fahrenheit. In China, more than a dozen cities issued the “highest possible heat warning” this weekend with over 900 million people in China enduring a scorching heat wave along with severe flooding and landslides across large swathes of southern China. Dozens of people have died. Millions of Chinese have been displaced. Economic losses run into the billions of yuan. Droughts, which have destroyed crops, killed livestock and forced many to flee their homes, are creating a potential famine in the Horn of Africa. More than 100 million people in the United States are under heat alerts in more than two dozen states from temperatures in the mid-to-upper 90s and low 100s. Wildfires have destroyed thousands of acres in California. More than 73 percent of New Mexico is suffering from an “extreme” or “severe” drought. Thousands of people had to flee from a fast-moving brush fire near Yosemite National Park on Saturday and 2,000 homes and businesses lost power.

It is not as if we were not warned. It is not as if we lacked scientific evidence. It is not as if we could not see the steady ecological degeneration and species extinction. And yet, we did not act. The result will be mass death with victims dwarfing the murderous rampages of fascism, Stalinism and Mao Zedong’s China combined. The desperate response is to burn more coal, especially with the soaring cost of natural gas and oil, and extend the life of nuclear power plants to sustain the economy and produce cool air. It is a self-defeating response. Joe Biden has approved more new oil drilling permits than Donald Trump. Once the power outages begin, as in India, the heat waves will exact a grim toll.

“Half of humanity is in the danger zone, from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires,” U.N Secretary General António Guterres told ministers from 40 countries meeting to discuss the climate crisis on July 18. “No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction.”

“We have a choice,” he added. “Collective action or collective suicide.”

The Anthropocene Age – the age of humans, which has caused extinctions of plant and animal species and the pollution of the soil, air and oceans – is accelerating. Sea levels are rising three times faster than predicted. The arctic ice is vanishing at rates that were unforeseen. Even if we stop carbon emissions today – we have already reached 419 parts per million – carbon dioxide concentrations will continue to climb to as high as 550 ppm because of heat trapped in the oceans. Global temperatures, even in the most optimistic of scenarios, will rise for at least another century. This assumes we confront this crisis. The earth is becoming inhospitable to most life.

The average global temperature has risen by about 1.1 Celsius (1.9 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1880. We are approaching a tipping point of 2 degrees Celsius when the biosphere will become so degraded nothing can save us.

The ruling class for decades denied the reality of the climate crisis or acknowledged the crisis and did nothing. We sleepwalked into catastrophe. Record heat waves. Monster droughts. Shifts in rainfall patterns. Declining crop yields. The melting of the polar ice caps and glaciers resulting in sea level rise. Flooding. Wildfires. Pandemics. The breakdown of supply chains. Mass migrations. Expanding deserts. The acidification of the oceans that extinguishes sea life, the food source for billions of people. Feedback loops will see one environmental catastrophe worsen another environmental catastrophe. The breakdown will be nonlinear. These are the harbingers of the future.

Social coercion and the rule of law will disintegrate. This is taking place in many parts of the global south. A ruthless security and surveillance apparatus, along with heavily militarized police, will turn industrial nations into climate fortresses to keep out refugees and prevent uprisings by an increasingly desperate public. The ruling oligarchs will retreat to protected compounds where they will have access to services and amenities, including food, water and medical care, denied to the rest of us.

Voting, lobbying, petitioning, donating to environmental lobby groups, divestment campaigns and protesting to force the global ruling class to address the climate catastrophe proved no more effective than scrofula victims’ superstitious appeals to Henry VIII to cure them with a royal touch. In 1900 the burning of fossil fuel – mostly coal – produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. That number had risen threefold by 1950. Today the level is 20 times higher than the 1900 figure. During the last 60 years the increase in CO2 was an estimated 100 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age.

The last time the earth’s temperature rose 4 degrees Celsius, the polar ice caps did not exist and the seas were hundreds of feet above their current levels.

You can watch my two-part interview with Roger Hallam, the co-founder of the resistance group Extinction Rebellion, on the climate emergency here and here.

There are three mathematical models for the future: a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization; extinction of humans and most other species; an immediate and radical reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere. This third scenario is dependent on an immediate halt to the production and consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet to end the animal agriculture industry – almost as large a contributor to greenhouse gasses as the fossil fuel industry – greening the deserts and restoring rainforests.

We knew for decades what harnessing a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum would do to the climate**.** As early as the 1930s ****British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar suggested that increased CO2 was warming the planet. In the late 1970s into the 1980s, scientists at companies such as Exxon and Shell determined that the burning of fossil fuels was contributing to rising global temperature.

“[T]here is concern among some scientific groups that once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible and little could be done to correct the situation in the short term,” a 1982 internal briefing for Exxon’s management noted.

NASA’s Dr. James Hansen told the U.S. Senate in 1988 that the buildup of CO2 and other gasses were behind the rise in heat.

But by 1989 Exxon, Shell and other fossil fuel corporations decided the risks to their profits from major curbs in fossil fuel extraction and consumption was unacceptable. They invested in heavy lobbying and funding of faux research and propaganda campaigns to discredit the science on the climate emergency.

Christian Parenti in his book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence quotes from “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,” a 2007 report produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security. R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, writes in the report’s final section:


In a world that sees two meter sea level rise, with continued flooding ahead, it will take extraordinary effort for the United States, or indeed any country, to look beyond its own salvation. All of the ways in which human beings have dealt with natural disasters in the past…could come together in one conflagration: rage at government’s inability to deal with the abrupt and unpredictable crises; religious fervor, perhaps even a dramatic rise in millennial end-of-day cults; hostility and violence towards migrants and minority groups, at a time of demographic change and increased global migration; intra-and interstate conflict over resources, particularly food and fresh water. Altruism and generosity would likely be blunted.

The profits from fossil fuels, and the lifestyle the burning of fossil fuels afforded to the privileged on the planet, overroad a rational response. The failure is homicidal.

Clive Hamilton in his Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.”

“But accepting intellectually is not the same as accepting emotionally the possibility that the world as we know it is headed for a horrible end,” Hamilton writes. “It’s the same with our own deaths; we all ‘accept’ that we will die, but it is only when death is imminent that we confront the true meaning of our mortality.”

Environmental campaigners, from The Sierra Club to 350.org, woefully misread the global ruling class, believing they could be pressured or convinced to carry out the seismic reconfigurations to halt the descent into a climate hell. These environmental organizations believed in empowering people through hope, even if the hope was based on a lie. They were unable or unwilling to speak the truth. These climate “Pollyannas,” as Hamilton calls them, “adopt the same tactic as doom-mongers, but in reverse. Instead of taking a very small risk of disaster and exaggerating it, they take a very high risk of disaster and minimize it.”

Humans have inhabited cities and states for 6,000 years, “a mere 0.2 percent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone,” the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in A Short History of Progress. The myriad of civilizations built over these 6,000 years have all decayed and collapsed, most through a thoughtless depletion of the natural resources that sustained them.

The latest iteration of global civilization was dominated by Europeans, who used industrial warfare and genocide to control much of the planet. Europeans and Euro-Americans launched a 500-year-long global rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities, the caretakers of the environment for thousands of years – that stood in the way. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution two and a half centuries ago, has become a curse, a death sentence.

Anthropologists, including Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies, Charles L. Redman in Human Impact on Ancient Environments and Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress, have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. Civilizations, as Tainter writes, are “fragile, impermanent things.” Collapse, he writes, “is a recurrent feature of human societies.”

This time the whole planet will go down. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new peoples to subjugate or new civilizations to replace the old. We will have used up the world’s resources, leaving the planet as desolate as the final days of a denuded Easter Island.

Collapse comes throughout human history to complex societies not long after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity.

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr writes in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of Tragedy.

The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation or use of fossil fuels, lead to disaster in the long run. This is what Wright calls the “progress trap.”

“We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion,” Wright notes, “that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature.”

The U.S. military, intent on dominating the globe, is the single largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gasses, according to a report from Brown University. This is the same military that has designated global warming a “threat multiplier” and “an accelerant of instability or conflict.”

The powerlessness many will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist beliefs in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us. The Christian right provides a haven for this magical thinking. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the later part of the 19th century as the buffalo herds and the remaining tribes faced extermination. The Ghost Dance held out the hope that all the horrors of white civilization — the railroads, the murderous cavalry units, the timber merchants, the mine speculators, the hated tribal agencies, the barbed wire, the machine guns, even the white man himself — would disappear. Our psychological hard wiring is no different.

The greatest existential crisis of our time is to at once be willing to accept the bleakness before us and resist. The global ruling class has forfeited its legitimacy and credibility. It must be replaced. This will require sustained mass civil disobedience, such as those mounted by Extinction Rebellion, to drive the global rulers from power. Once the rulers see us as a real threat they will become vicious, even barbaric, in their efforts to cling to their positions of privilege and power. We may not succeed in halting the death march, but let those who come after us, especially our children, say we tried.

A Measure To Crack Down On Predatory Medical Debt Collection

https://popularresistance.org/a-measure-to-crack-down-on-predatory-medical-debt-collection-is-on-the-verge-of-making-the-ballot-in-arizona/








By Aída Chavez, More Perfect Union.

July 28, 2022
Resist!

Is on the Verge of Making the Ballot in Arizona.

Liz Gorski was a 15-year-old in Prescott, Arizona, when she was in a car accident that changed her life, and trapped her in a cycle of medical debt. After being in a coma for five days, Gorski woke up in the hospital to a new reality. She needed surgeries, physical therapy, and extensive medical care, a bill that ended up being over a million dollars, Gorski recalled. Insurance covered some of these initial expenses, and a lawsuit several years later covered more of the bill. But she still had medical debt sent to collections.

Gorski’s health problems have required lifelong treatment, as she continues to deal with the aftermath of the crash, and the medical bills keep piling up. “Every single time I go, I have a copay and then I have some part of the bill billed to me, and every month I’m paying on all of these bills just to make sure that they don’t go to collections, but sometimes they do because it’s just too many at one time,” she told More Perfect Union. “And it’s like I’m trying to not see the doctor, I’m trying to just push it out, and it never works because then some kind of symptom happens and I can’t handle it.”

Gorski’s experiences navigating the health care system, and her struggle to keep up with endless medical bills that began in her youth, led her to join a statewide effort, known as Healthcare Rising Arizona, to bring the issue directly to voters. “The whole health care system is set up to keep people sick and basically enslaved,” she said. Now, a measure to crack down on medical debt and predatory debt collection practices is on the verge of making it onto the November ballot.

Earlier this month, a coalition of advocates and organizations across the state, led by Healthcare Rising Arizona, made history, turning in over half a million signatures to get the proposal on the ballot — more than any citizen initiative has ever gotten in the state. The campaign easily surpassed the required 237,645 signatures to qualify. The ballot initiative, known as the Predatory Debt Collection Protection Act, would shield Arizonans and their families from debt collectors and abusive practices by limiting the interest rate on medical debt and protecting more of their assets from creditors. Passing this initiative in November, Gorski said, would mean greater “freedom” for working class people in the state.

“You wouldn’t be bogged down by the power of these debt companies, you’d be able to pay off your bills, you’d be able to live your life,” Gorski said. “They don’t accept payment plans, mostly. They will harass you and everything until they get what they want.”

Jessica Baez-Staggers, a member of Healthcare Rising Arizona, became involved with the coalition and gathered signatures because she wanted to help a friend who didn’t know how to get out of $20,000 of medical debt. Passing the measure in November would mean that more working-class people would “feel secure” and that “they don’t have to lose everything because of one sickness,” she said.

Under the proposal, interest on medical debt would be capped at 3 percent. The value of household goods that are shielded from debt collectors would increase, protecting cars up to $15,000 in value, compared to the $6,000 limit for vehicles under current state law, for example. Arizonans’ homes would also get additional protections. Notably, the proposal includes a provision that would exempt people from wage garnishment. Groups like Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), Arizona Working Families Party, and CASE Action, as well as unions like Unite Here Local 11 and the Arizona Building and Construction Trades Council, are also supporting the effort.

More than 100 million individuals in the US are burdened with medical debt, including an estimated 3 million who owe more than $10,000, a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis found. About 15 percent of Arizonans had medical debt on their credit file as of December 2020, according to a Consumer Finance Protection Bureau study. The two biggest business groups in the state, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry and the Greater Phoenix Chamber, have come out against the measure, saying it would harm creditors. But the coalition says the initiative is a common sense measure that has support across the political spectrum.

“We do pretty well with everybody, you know, even Republicans who don’t necessarily agree with progressives on a ton of issues,” Healthcare Rising spokesperson Rodd McLeod told More Perfect Union. “They don’t like the idea of 10 percent interest. And they don’t like the idea of people having their home or car taken away because they can’t pay a medical bill.”

Privacy Is The Entry Point For Our Civil And Basic Rights’

https://popularresistance.org/privacy-is-the-entry-point-for-our-civil-and-basic-rights/








By Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting.

July 28, 2022
Educate!

CounterSpin interview with Nora Benavidez on post-Roe data privacy.

Janine Jackson: The anticipated—but still devastating—Dobbs decision aims to take reproductive health care out of the hands of countless people, and it’s already having that effect. But one might think as terrible as that is, at least a person can go online to learn how to get to the nearest abortion access point, or order pills from Canada.

But the same social media platforms that constantly tell us they’re about building community around and through demographic and geographic barriers are not showing up hard for those values when it comes to a free flow of information on abortion access. What are they doing and what might they do?

We’re joined now by Nora Benavidez, civil rights attorney and the senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Nora Benavidez.

Nora Benavidez: Hi, Janine. Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: Well, maybe let’s start with the shape of the problem. What are the concerns right now around data privacy that are generated specifically by this court ruling and other rulings around abortion access and its criminalization? What could happen? Or what do we see happening?

NB: From the outset, the gutting of Roe by Dobbs is so devastating for, of course, the constitutional reasons, that at one time, Roe codified and really affirmed that abortion was a basic right.

Dobbs, in overruling that, overturning that, has laid open states to pick and choose whether they will allow abortion providers and individuals that kind of right.

But we’re in a very different moment now in 2022 than we were in the 1970s, and that’s really because of the rise of the digital age. With it, as you mentioned in your opening, is that the Internet is our primary pathway for almost everyone, I think, to information, to healthcare to, you know, telehealth appointments.

And so there are these huge questions now about how people will access both just information, and then who is going to have access to that data that we are all of us engaging in and creating a footprint for.

The number one concern is that basically anything we do on our devices is reachable and is collected, retained, even sold by data brokers. In this new post-Roe era, in the states where abortion is criminal now, which is in the dozens, police and prosecutors will be able to buy information, both location and our search history, our app usage, to build criminal cases against women and providers of abortion.

And so it’s really kind of a terrifying moment where privacy is, in a very new way, the entry point for our civil and basic rights.

JJ: So in the face of that, what could social media platforms and ISPs do? I mean, a lot of them have these, we understand they simply are beholden to law enforcement. If law enforcement or the government asks for information, they hand it over. Is there something different that they could be doing in that regard?

Yeah, well, you know, so let’s start from what we already know. Platform companies are in the business of selling records to data brokers, to advertising firms. And a lot of what pre-Dobbs we’ve seen is that a lot of this information then allows platforms to target users with either content that they enjoy or content that otherwise discriminates, which is its own set of issues.

In addition, companies can also be subpoenaed, as you say. They can be subpoenaed by prosecutors who might be wanting the whereabouts of people seeking reproductive health care.

In the last year, Google has been forced to turn over its location information about its customers when law enforcement seek court orders for that information. What’s been interesting is that actually in response to Dobbs, Google has updated its privacy policy to start deleting location data about users who visit places related to their health.

My organization, Free Press, has been working on pressuring Google to modify its retention and collection practices. So this is a really huge step. It’s some initial victory. But that’s only one company. We’ve seen, for the last several years, other companies like Amazon have put major sets of information together for law enforcement when they seek something through a search warrant, subpoena, other court orders.

All of these are within the bounds of the law. The problem is that there’s that additional layer that law enforcement can actually circumvent both court oversight and other Fourth Amendment concerns by buying our data from third parties. So when they don’t want to go through the process of seeking a search warrant, a subpoena, or another court order, police can just circumvent it very easily. They can go through a data broker and pick and choose whatever they want to buy.

JJ: So what do we do in the face of this? I understand that there are certain legislative moves that are going on or being proposed. There has to be a way to address this.

NB: Yeah. Well, I always try to start with the individual and work my way up, and it’s always important, I think, to help affirm for people that they can seek out information. There are really wonderful guidelines now for how to protect yourself online. And whether that is through encrypted apps, using a VPN, those are important things to start learning about.

There are also then the much larger, what I call kind of systemic reforms that we need to be looking at. And as you say, some of that is through legislation. You know, Congress has currently a set of proposals before it that would limit what law enforcement can buy from data brokers.

One of those bills is called the “Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act.” It’s a long name, but it’s a really good bill. And it closes a loophole that allows data brokers to sell our information to police without a warrant.

There is going to be a hearing on this bill coming up this month. Free Press has endorsed the legislation. I think that we need a groundswell of support all over the country who are saying yes, this is the kind of privacy protection we need.

We also then need more, you know, we need other agencies throughout the federal government to step in. And one of those critical ones is the Federal Trade Commission, which is tasked with oversight over deceptive practices, the kinds of things that we’ve described today where people’s data has been sold, otherwise used in nefarious ways.

And so the FTC has before it a really unique moment to look at use of data practices, and begin creating rules around how corporations can mitigate the harm to their customers and other consumers. So I hope that over the coming months we are going to see the FTC take this on with an open and participatory process. It’s one that we call a rulemaking, where they build a record of the harm and then begin developing the guardrails to prevent these kinds of deceptive, unfair practices.

But we need all of these things, Janine. This isn’t some distance threat. It isn’t like women may at some point risk being prosecuted. This is already happening around the country. And so we need advocates to start telling these stories to help make the link that what we do online has very real world consequences.

JJ: Well, first of all, it’s so dystopian, the idea of our information being packaged and sold to begin with, and it almost feels like, you know, shutting the barn door after the cows have escaped. Just bigger picture, it makes me think about publicizing, nationalizing the Internet anyway. I mean, isn’t it really a public resource, and the idea of all of our information being essentially a commodity is just kind of terrifying, big picture.

NB: I agree. I mean, and yet, many times when I talk with people, their natural instinct is to say that the gathering of our data actually helped. You know, there’s this intuitive sense that whatever I do on Facebook actually can help make my experience more unique and personalized. And that may be true in some instances where you start getting ads for the types of local Facebook groups that you actually might want to join. I get that.

What we have to start talking about is that there’s that underbelly to what’s really happening, and that the Internet no longer serves people in the ways that we once thought it held such promise to connect us all to make a more equitable future.

In the middle of all of that then, I just sort of think to myself, how do we talk about these issues to help people understand there are pros and there are very real trade offs, very dangerous ones that really strip us of our own autonomy.

If you’re doing something online unaware of the trade off that as you search for something, that search result will be collected, stored and even sold to someone, that isn’t just about making your local Facebook group recommendations better or more exciting for you. That really removes any anonymity, which is something that throughout history, this country has been so committed to, at least in theory.

You know, when the founding fathers dreamt up what the fourth amendment would be, it was early, early British rule where crown officials would storm into people’s homes and take their writing and their other belongings because it was seen as potentially threatening to the crown.

And so there’s this old history of all of it being centered on power. And so what we’re seeing now in the stripping of and the violations of our privacy all come back to the ways that our power has been taken from us.

JJ: Well, I guess I would say we do have a positive vision of an Internet that could have the good things that we want if we can build in these protections that help us in terms of privacy. We can have a positive vision going forward of what the Internet could be that’s kind of the way we thought of it, you know, hopefully, many, many years ago. That can still happen, yeah?

NB: I think it can, and some of the work that excites me the most, both in my own job at Free Press, the work I see across the country now from policymakers and allies on the ground throughout the country, are people who are trying to dream up what a better Internet would look like, and what real realized civil rights are online.

One of the most exciting places that I’ve seen this is through the Disinformation Defense League, a network of over 230 local organizations around the country, either led by or centering communities of color. We are so often—I’m a Latina, you know, I work with groups that are considered typically on the fringes and otherwise not really at the table for large, systemic conversations. And this network is one of the most exciting places that I have seen harvest and try to incubate great ideas for reform.

That includes policy reform, privacy protections, civil rights protections online, things that can intervene to blunt what we see as harmful and discriminatory practices online. So I think that there is a future Internet that we can realize, and we all need to have a voice and a seat at the table.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Nora Benavidez from Free Press. They’re online at freepress.net. Nora Benavidez, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

NB: Thanks so much, Janine.