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Consider This....
Death By Oligarchy
Chris Hedges: Oligarchs are blinded by hubris, wealth and power. Their cloying sense of entitlement sees them outraged by even the most tepid reforms or mildest of criticisms. They lack empathy and compassion, along with remorse or guilt, for what is done to those outside of their tiny, elitist circles. Privilege does strange and unpleasant things to human beings. ... The repugnant characteristics of the rich are skillfully masked by armies of lawyers and publicists, a servile and intimidated press, good manners and the fig leaf of philanthropy. ... Oligarchs, freed from outside oversight and regulation, wantonly pillage the political and economic institutions that sustain them. They run up huge government deficits by slashing taxes on the rich...
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Nov 11, 2019, 2:57pm
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Is America a democracy? If so, why does it deny millions the vote?
The Guardian, UK: Voter suppression as a tactic – from strict ID laws to closing polling places to purging voter rolls – is deliberately making it hard for minority communities in America to exercise their democratic right ... Until recently, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ensured that the federal government had oversight of changes to voting systems in those US states that had a history of voting discrimination. But that changed six years ago with a supreme court ruling that gutted the law. ... the states with the worst history of voting discrimination were free to revert to something like their previous behavior .... “In 2016, pummeled by voter suppression in more than 30 states, the black voter turnout plummeted by seven percentage points. For the GOP, that was an effective kill rate...
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Nov 7, 2019, 11:05am
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California Must Take Back Its Power—Literally
Sonali Kolhatkar: While the climate crisis fueling our wildfires is the direct result of the fossil fuel industry’s profit-driven corporate greed, another culprit, one that has for years valued moneyed interests over human needs, is also to blame: the nation’s largest utilities company, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E). ... Now PG&E is resorting to mass power outages to protect itself from liabilities during fire season ... it obscures PG&E’s decades-long negligence of the state’s power infrastructure—negligence in the service of maximizing shareholder profit over long-term grid resilience ... There is an analogy to be made with our current health care system that relies on a profit model to deliver quality medical care to all Americans. Just as people need health care, they need electricity to power their homes....
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Oct 31, 2019, 3:18pm
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Without encryption, we will lose all privacy. This is our new battleground
Edward Snowden: the US government, along with the governments of the UK and Australia, is attempting to undermine the only method that currently exists for reliably protecting the world’s information: encryption. Should they succeed in their quest to undermine encryption, our public infrastructure and private lives will be rendered permanently unsafe. ... The true explanation for why the US, UK and Australian governments want to do away with end-to-end encryption is less about public safety than it is about power: E2EE gives control to individuals and the devices they use to send, receive and encrypt communications, not to the companies and carriers that route them. ... This, then, would require government surveillance to become more targeted and methodical, rather than indiscriminate and universal....
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Oct 16, 2019, 4:23pm
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Exploring Limits on Wealth
Sam Pizzigati: Letting small slivers of a population amass as much wealth as they can grab might not be such a hot idea after all. ... On the Internet, “every billionaire represents a policy failure” has become a popular meme ... This sense — the conviction that grand concentrations of private wealth endanger our common well-being — is deepening all around the world, so much so that the every-billionaire-a-policy-failure perspective now has a philosophic label: limitarianism. ... Limitarians see climate change and questions of distributive justice as “deeply intertwined” and believe that limitarian thought can help us envision a “less unjust” and “ecologically more sustainable” world...
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Oct 3, 2019, 3:02pm
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Ten Ways The Climate Crisis And Militarism Are Intertwined
Medea Benjamin: 1. The US military protects Big Oil and other extractive industries. ... 2. The Pentagon is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world. ... 3. The Pentagon monopolizes the funding we need to seriously address the climate crisis. ... 4. Military operations leave a toxic legacy in their wake. ... 5. Wars ravage fragile ecosystems that are crucial to sustaining human health and climate resiliency. ... 6. Climate change is a “threat multiplier” that makes already dangerous social and political situations even worse...
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Sep 26, 2019, 3:59pm
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MOTHER EARTH IS THE “GREAT SPIRIT”
Mohawk Nation News: The original people are the key to the consciousness of turtle island from pole to pole, ocean to ocean. The serpents from far away accumulated their fame and fortune on genocide of the natural people and natural world of turtle island. The natural people are placed here by creation to protect the land because we are one with the land. sewahontsakwenio. ... kaneronkwatsera is the medicine inside us that comes from plants, earth, wind and water, to embrace the best of ourself. watewiionnison is the natural way of life. The universe is life which we are part of. We do songs, ceremonies and commemorations to our mother earth to celebrate and remember our natural place. We acknowledge all that sustains life. Each root that comes out of the earth is a vein that nurtures others. In the end the land shall claim us...
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Sep 18, 2019, 2:51pm
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Big Data, the Nuclear War on Your Soul
Gordon Duff: By the 1990’s the bridge between media, academia and spy agencies had disappeared. Publishing, lecturing, every aspect of journalism or education, eventually to include science, mathematics and engineering as well, had become “political.” ... Any individual who strayed became a threat. Every organization, official or ad hoc, had to be penetrated and managed, using programs developed by the FBI under Hoover in the 1950s and 1960s. ... Conversely, all “output,” meaning every lecture, every book, every news story, knowing all was “filtered and controlled” was a source of intelligence “backwash” and could reveal not only “intentions” but “patterns of misdirection.” ... This was before social media, before facial recognition, before license plate scanners that could check everything from your unpaid fines to medical records...
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Sep 13, 2019, 2:40pm
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Move Over Wall Street, People’s Banks Are Coming to Replace You
Phoenix Goodman: A specter is haunting Wall Street: the public banking movement, which vows to replace private banks’ influence in public affairs. ... As patience for the “too-big-to-fail” banks wanes, cities and states are finally realizing they are better off doing for themselves what Wall Street perniciously insisted we’ve needed it for: providing necessary banking services to the public. ... We need banks that are not only publicly owned, but accountable, democratic, local, environmentally and socially conscious, uncorrupt, competent and conducive to social good and sustainable economic growth. ... is there any doubt that private capital is the greatest power in our plutocracy? Indeed, it’s no secret that the levers of finance and big business determine the agenda to which the rest of us are forced to submit. ... We literally cannot have a real democracy until finance itself is democratic. Until the levers of money creation are under public accountability, we will have a pseudo-democracy subverted by financiers behind the curtain...
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Sep 6, 2019, 11:57am
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What Low-Wage Work Does to Us
“Cyborg jobs” is the term Emily Guendelsberger uses in her new book, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane to describe the low-wage, high-stress jobs that make up a large portion—something like 47%—of employment in the United States. ... You could say they’re jobs determined by algorithms. Cyborg jobs are designed through data analysis to boost profits by getting the maximum out of workers. ... Staff scheduling is tight to avoid slow periods, so workers spend much of the day rushing to where they’re needed. Bathroom breaks are limited and timed. ... Workers’ movements and performance are monitored throughout the day. If they call in sick, they lose pay and maybe even their jobs...
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Sep 2, 2019, 2:34pm
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‘We are waiting for war’: Lebanese say Israel has gone too far
Andre Vltchek: After the recent Israeli attacks against Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, the Middle East has found itself in the midst of undeclared war. ... Israel has been regularly attacking Syria and bombing Palestine for decades. But Lebanon is a totally different story: only its airspace has been habitually violated by the Israeli jets flying towards the Syrian targets. Bombing Iraq is also clearly an escalation of Israel’s bellicose strategy. A bizarre escalation, considering that Iraq is still de facto a state occupied by Israel’s closest ally – the United States. ... Everything that is Shia – short of Iran itself (for now) – suddenly became a ‘legitimate target’ for Israel. For many years, Shia Islam has been synonymous with the ideological resistance to Western imperialism in the Middle East: Iran itself, several factions inside Iraq, and Hezbollah, among others...
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Aug 29, 2019, 11:32am
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Two Arguments for Localism
Richard Heinberg: Argument 1: Localism is inevitable. ... If the cyclical behavior of past societies is repeated in ours, recent trends toward globalization and urbanization will reach natural limits and be reversed. ... The inflection point may not be far in the future. ... Factors potentially leading to a loss of connectivity are growing in number, including environmental degradation (climate change, biodiversity loss, widespread plastics and petrochemical pollution), resource depletion (topsoil, fresh water, minerals), and over-reliance on debt to maintain economic growth. ... Argument 2: Localism is desirable. ... The past few decades have seen many social movements advocating localization, driven mostly by concerns for equity, human rights, and environmental protection (as still-local indigenous communities struggle to maintain their way of life in the face of globalization). ... humans evolved living in small groups and function best in contexts where they know one another face-to-face ... we work hardest to protect places we know and love...
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Aug 26, 2019, 2:50pm
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Why Should Iran be Cherished and Defended?
Andre Vltchek: Iran has never attacked anyone. It has done nothing bad to the United States, to the United Kingdom, or even to those countries that want to destroy it immediately: Saudi Arabia and Israel. ... Its only ‘crime’ is that it helped devastated Syria. And that it seriously stands by Palestine. And that it came to the rescue of many far away nations, like Cuba and Venezuela, when they were in awful need. ... Thousands, millions of Iranians may soon die, simply because a psychopath who is currently occupying the White House wants to humiliate his predecessor, who signed the nuclear deal. ... You know, you were of course never told by the Western media, but Iran is a socialist country. It professes a system that could be defined as “socialism with Iranian characteristics” ... It clearly has an internationalist spirit: it shows great solidarity with the countries that are being battered by Western imperialism, including those in Latin America...
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Jul 29, 2019, 12:29pm
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U.N. Report Condemns Torture of Assange
Robert Scheer: The mass media has played into this character assassination while both Manning and Assange are in jail, and instead of refusing to treat this as one of the most egregious assaults on press freedom, it has largely turned their back on the victims. ... Now, the media’s reporting has been revealed to have done something even more damaging than destroy Assange’s reputation—it has served to torture him. ... “To my mind, it was like Emile Zola in J’Accuse...!, in the Alfred Dreyfus case 120 years ago” ... “What I saw is that he has been exposed to a concerted and kind of sustained campaign of mobbing [which is] where you shame and insult someone, you intimidate people. But it’s always the collective turning against an isolated individual. … It can cause people to commit suicide, even in this isolated environment. Now, in Assange’s case, basically the whole world ganged up against him.”...
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Jul 13, 2019, 3:17pm
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Creative + Strategic = Effective Movements for Change
Rivera Sun: If you want to make change, think outside the protest box. It’s easy to get hung up on demonstrations. ... Creativity is key to making your actions meaningful and memorable. Paired with a sound strategy, creative actions can be unstoppable. ... we have to remove tangible support from the problem (think: boycott the business, go on strike, walk-out of schools and workplaces) while putting resources into the solution (think: worker-owned cooperatives, restorative justice, solar panels, local food). ... Oil and gas companies wanted to build a pipeline through 800-acres of land owned by Alberta artist, Peter von Tiesenhausen. So, in 2003, he covered the earth with art ... This move protected his land under copyright law...
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Jun 10, 2019, 3:28pm
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