#destroy the fossil fuel industry

[official-virtual-hug-dealer]

Whenever I see someone posting about banning abortion, just one question comes to mind:

What do you propose to make sure that no one should be desperate enough to do something drastic like that?

[zooophagous]

So why do you hate the advertising industry?

Hokay so.

Let me preface this with some personal history. It's not relevant to the sins of the advertising industry perse but it illustrates how I started to grow to hate it.

I wanted to be a veterinarian growing up, but to be a vet you basically have to be good enough to get into medical school. I do not have the math chops or discipline to make it in medical school. I went into art instead, and in a desperate attempt to find some commercial viability that didn't involve moving to California, I went into graphic design.

I've been a graphic designer for about seven or eight years now and I've worn a lot of hats. One of them was working in a print shop. Now, the print shop had a lot of corporate customers who had various ad campaigns. One of them was Gate City Bank, which had a bigass stack of postcards ordered every couple months to mail to their customers.

Now, paper comes from Dakota Paper, and they make their paper the usual way. Somewhere far, far from our treeless plain there is a forest of tall trees. These trees are cut down and put on big fossil fuel burning trucks and hauled to a paper mill that turns them into pulp while spewing the most fowl odors imaginable over the neighboring town and loads the pulp up with bleach to give it a nice white color.

Then the paper is put on yet another big truck and hauled off to the local paper depot, then put on another big truck and delivered to my print shop, where I turned the paper into postcards telling people to go even deeper into debt to buy a boat because it's almost summer. The inks used are a type of nasty heat sensitive plastic that is melted to the surface of the paper with heat. Then the postcards are put on yet ANOTHER truck and sent to the bank, which puts them on ANOTHER truck and finally into the hands of their customers, who open their mail and take one look at the post card and immediately discard it.

Heaps and heaps and literal hundreds of pounds of literal garbage created at the whim of the marketing team several times a year. And thats just one bank in one city.

I came to realize very quickly that graphic design was the delicate art of turning trees into junk mail.

And wouldn't you know it there are a TON of companies that basically only do junk mail. Many of them operate under the guise of a "charity," sending you pictures of suffering children or animals and begging for handouts and when they get those handouts the executives take a nice fat cut, give some small token amount to whatever cause they pay lip service to, and then put the rest of the cash right back into making more mailers. "Direct mail marketing" they call it.

Oh but maybe it's not so bad, you can advertise online after all. Now that there's decent ad blocker out there and better anti-virus ads usually don't destroy your computer anymore just by existing.

Except now when I search for the exact business I want on Google it's buried under three or four different "promoted search items" tricking me into clicking on them only to shoot themselves in the foot because I searched for the specific result I wanted for a reason and couldn't use those other websites even if I felt like it.

And now we have advertising on YouTube and on every streaming service, forcing more and more eyes onto the ad for the brand new Buick Envision that parks itself because you're too stupid to do it on your own.

Oh thats ok maybe I'll get Spotify premium and go ad free and listen to some podcasts- SIKE we have the hosts of your show doing the song and dance now. Are you depressed and paranoid from listening to my true crime podcast about murdered and mutilated teenagers? That's ok, my sponsor Better Help can keep you sane enough to stay alive and spend more money.

It's gotten so terrible that now you have content farms, huge hubs of shell companies that crank out video after video to get more and more precious clicks. Which if the videos were innocuous maybe that wouldn't be so awful except now you have cooking hacks that can actually burn your house down and craft hacks that can electrocute you being flung into your eyes at the speed of mach fuck so some slimy internet clickbait jockey doesn't need to get a real job.

It of course goes without saying that animals are also relentlessly exploited by clickbait companies that will put them in compromising situations on purpose to create a fake fishing hack video or even just straight up killing them for sport by feeding small animals to a pufferfish that rips them apart for the camera.

And all of this, ALL of this doesn't even touch how adveritising is the death of art in general. Queer topics, any kind of interesting art, any kind of sex or substance use topics are scrubbed clean and hidden at the behest of advertisers.

Sex education, a nude statue, topics such as racism or sexism or bigotry in general have tags purged or hidden from search, even life saving information about SDTs or drug use, because if someone saw that and complained then Verizon might sell fewer tablets and we can't fucking have that.

Conservative talking heads often bitch and moan that they're being censored on social media. The stupid part is, they're right! They are being censored! But it's not by a woke mob, it's by ATT and Coca Cola not wanting their adspace sharing screen time with their stupid fucking opinions.

However, they won't ever figure that out, because the talking heads they get their marching orders from like Tucker and Jones ALSO rely on the sweet milk flowing from the sponsorship teat and they aren't about to turn on their meal ticket so they have to come up with even stupider shit to say for the train to continue rolling.

I managed to rant this far without even getting into the ads I see for the beauty industry. The other day a botox ad described wrinkles as "moderate to severe crows feet" as if wrinkles are a symptom of a fucking serious disease! Like having a flaw in your skin is a medical problem that you need thousands of dollars of literal botulism toxin to fix! I was incandescent with anger.

Advertising is a polluting, censoring, anti educational and anti art industry at it's very core. It destroys human connections, suppresses human thought and makes us hate our own bodies. It ads no value, actively detracts from value, and serves no real purpose and I believe it should be almost if not entirely banned.

[wilwheaton]

As any professional interrogator can tell you, deep down inside, all of us humans are really just scared little kids. The more we’re broken down by the circumstances of life or government policy, the less secure we feel, the harder it is to get by in life, and the more scared we become. And, for many people, out of that fear comes the willingness — hell, the enthusiasm — to embrace “big daddy” in the form of a tough guy leader who promises to “restore” those who feel the fear back to their previous (or imagined future) positions of power, wealth, and authority. This becomes particularly easy for fascist leaders when their followers are convinced that the nation’s government has become hopelessly corrupt, a project rightwing fossil fuel billionaires, rightwing media, and Republican politicians have been promoting here in the US for decades. Ever since the Reagan Revolution, in their zeal to cut their own taxes and stop regulation of the fossil fuel and other polluting industries, they’ve been hammering the message that our government has been seized by “deep state socialists” bent on destroying our country. Republicans and the billionaires who own them have repeated this conspiracy theory so often for the last few decades that an entire religion, Qanon, as arisen around it. This belief, that much of what our government does is illegitimate or even malicious, makes it easy for low-information voters to bind themselves to a fascist “reform movement” that promises better times ahead. As fascist followers act out their violent threats against their leaders’ perceived enemies, they get an inner sense of strength and the feeling that they’ve joined a community: that diminishes their own fear for a short while. The more an “other” — political enemies; racial, religious, and gender minorities; women — are blamed for the ills of the nation, the more vigilante-style violence against them is justified and the more violent the future becomes. When the state pushes back against that violence, as America did after January 6th, the calls for increased violence become even louder. Trump is practically shouting “kill them!” with a bullhorn and even our court system is afraid to stop him by throwing him into jail as they would have any other common criminal who encouraged such violence against judges, juries, witnesses, court officials, and their families.

Will Trump's Violent Movement Conquer America?

[queerbrownvegan]

We're using more fossil fuels than ever. It's a giant machine, one that may not be dismantled or deconstructed in a day, but we all must repeatedly call to attention that fossil fuel industries continue to make record profits while destroying our habitat.

-qbv

[iberiancadre]

Blaming job precarity on labour protections, thay is some real neoliberal shit for a post tagged "real marxist hours". Are you sure there aren't any other causes? Like, I don't know, the recessions and crashes of 2008/2012/2014/2020, tolerance of employers who hire and pay under the table, insufficient protections for people affected by the practice (especially non-EU workers), relative disregard for unions in labour law negotiations, inequalities in infrastructure distribution and so on? None of those things are essential parts of social democracy, they're the consequences of right-wing attacks on it, and Spain's specific failures at social democracy are not universal nor a reflection of the system in general.

And the issue of colonial and post-colonial exploitation wasn't addressed sufficiently in marx's very works either, or under any application of socialism in a country already high-up in the hierarchy of imperialism (remember when a certain socialist country became one of the largest fossil fuel producers by drilling oil on indigenous land, effectively turning most of "its" territory into a settler colonial regime servicing the state oil industry? Talk about funding public expenses through imperialism!)

All of what you're saying sounds great and would be valid if they weren't objectively false. I don't think you're usamerican (the target audience of the post you're replying to) but you sure sound like one. If you aren't, we'll I'm sorry but you're just ignorant:

btw this is in relation to this post in case anyone wants to read it

"Blaming job precarity on labor protections sounds like neoliberalism" If by protecting labor you mean legalizing and protecting a type of work that allows workers to spend most of the year effectively unemployed, unable to claim unemployment because they're technically employed, and also prevents them from getting a second job because they are at the mercy of their first employer's needs? Then yeah, I am blaming labor protections for job precarity. This is one especially egregious example of what the socdems in this country have done, and it's funny you mention neolibs because this new law allowing "fixed discontinuous" work is a direct continuation of the 2012 labor reform done by neoliberals. I am blaming a precarious form of work which already has millions of contracts under it for precarious work.

I'll remind you also that marxists/communists are not just the people to the left of socdems or progressives or how you may call it. We reject the very system all those other ideologies operate within, therefore any criticism aimed towards social-democracy isn't comparable to neoliberalism because it's levied from a completely different framework.

"The recessions of 2008/2012/2014/2020 are a cause of precarious work and a consequences of right-wing attacks" it's funny you mention 4 crisis because it leads very well into the point about recessions. Capitalism, because of the anarchic nature of its production and focus on maximizing profit, has cyclical recessions regardless of who is managing capitalism at the moment. Recessions in capitalism have occurred since capitalism first took form, because of mechanisms like overproduction (capital tends to produce too much, inflating stockpiles and eventually necessitating a sudden drop in prices) and the falling rate of profit:

The rate of profit is the total portion of value that capitalists as a class are able to extract from the working class after paying off their costs. Because of reasons too complex to explain here (but you can look at graphs and verify that it always tends to fall), the rate of profit tends to fall and diminish. The only times it ever increases is because of destruction of capital and/or productive forces, such as during a war, or because of superprofits enabled by imperialism. This rate of profit has been getting smaller and smaller, it temporarily rises after recessions and it also means capitalism will either destroy itself or destroy the human race in an effort to raise it. The rate of profit is not applicable to individual companies or even sectors, it is a capitalist class wide trend.

Going back to the point of recessions, they aren't the sole reason for precarious work. they certainly worsen it, but the point of the post is that social-democracy not only does not alleviate this particular problem, but they are also fully capable of worsening it. They are doing this in Spain and in other countries too.

"Tolerance of employers who pay under the table is a cause of precarious work and a consequence of right-wing attacks" First of all, this wasn't the kind of precarious work I was talking about in the post innit?. Apart from that, who do you think is tolerating extralegal work. Is the right-wing forcing social-democrat governments across the world to tolerate this? Of course not. Work that isn't regulated by a contract is useful to the bourgeoisie because it keeps a portion of the working class in a limbo between unemployment and employment, allowing the reserve army of labor to not shrink while also exploiting a part of this reserve army and generally lowering costs. Social-democracy tolerates this because it is just one manager of capitalism, and they fundamentally serve the class interests of the infrastructure because they are part of the superstructure. This is true regardless of how much they like to talk like pro-worker communists and how much welfare they instate.

"Insufficient protection for people under irregular work contracts or no contracts, especially inmigrants, is a cause of precarious work and a consequence of right-wing attacks" This is also not the kind of precarious work I was talking about in the post. Regardless, the reason for this is similar to the one I explained above, it is convenient of capitalism to have workers halfway between employment and unemployment, and social-democracy protects capitalism. It's really insidious of you to bring up non-european workers and their exploitation while defending social-democracy, since the various European progressive and left-of-center governments have all contributed one way or another to NATO's interventions in SWANA and West Africa, the very places these inmigrant workers come from, escaping the violence these governments have caused, sponsored and benefitted from. I've already addressed who benefits from the cheap labor these inmigrants and refugees produce.

"Disregard of unions in labor law negotiations is a cause of precarious work and a consequence of right-wing attacks" Oh boy have I talked about unions on this blog. In short, unions are not the magic wand which makes exploitation disappear that so many people on this website and app seem to think they are. Their only function is to achieve temporary better working conditions while staying within the bounds of capitalism and salary work. This is also a point that's really funny to make while talking about the social-democrat precarious labor reforms because they signed it with the full approval of every big labor union in Spain. Another aspect of unions that I addressed in the linked post is that they also serve as the lapdogs of social-democracy. Something that happens in every single country where social-democrats are in power including the usamerican leftist's crush, the nordic countries.

Socialism-communism isn't when UBI, good wages and beating the capitalists at their own game. It's the complete overthrow of a bourgeois system to replace it with a proletariat system, it is rejecting the workings of the game at which social-democrats and labor unions pretend to try to win.

"Inequalities in infrastructure distribution is a cause of precarious work and a consequence of right-wing attacks" I'm not exactly sure if by infrastructure you're referring to like, roads and railways, or infrastructure in the sense of the avenues through which the state provides welfare, subsidies, etc. Either way, the inequality in the distribution of things like communication networks, utilities and state programs is one of the many contradictions inseparable from capitalism. I thought the point of "inequality is inherent to capitalism" was like, leftism 101. Is anon aware that social-democracy is still capitalism? Universal healthcare and government programs are not going to solve the unavoidable effects of the capitalist mode of production. That's what revolutionary marxism is for.

"So many more things are a cause for precarious work and a consequence of right-wing attacks" I can't answer if you don't give me more concrete examples, sadly. But I hope it's become clear to the reader why social-democracy is not the way to solve all of this issues, and why it is actually interested in keeping it around.

"None of those things are essential to social-democracy, and Spain's particular case isn't reflective of social-democracy in general" If I were a lesser man I'd say you sound like what "tankies" sound like to anti-communists when we address the mistakes and failings of proletariat states. But I don't think this would be a good answer to you, and I get the point you're making. Social-democracy is one variant of government in bourgeois democracies.

For this point to make sense to you, anon, (im really trying to be patient here, if I come across as condescending it's not intentional) you have to first understand that marxists believe, noht without reason, that the primary character of any state is the economic system that it protects. In our case, this system, the infrastructure, is capitalism, so the state and any party that governs it (part of the superstructure) will keep protecting capitalism because that is what's in its class interests. Individual people are able to go against class interests, but individual actions are close to irrelevant when we talk about the infrastructure.

It's not that every aspect discussed is essential to social-democracy, it's that social-democracy is essential to capitalism, which in turn ensures the existence of these problems. You're putting the cart before the horse.

With that denser part out of the way, regarding Spain's case. The post you're replying to wasn't meant to be an exhaustive treaty on the class character of social-democracy. It's a rant complaining about seeing usamericans championing the very fucking same talking points and policies that I see every single day fail. I know that social-democracy across various countries is different when it comes to these particular cases. But their class character is the same and their function within imperialist capitalism is the same.

To the second part of the ask now.

"The issue of colonialism wasn't very discussed in Marx's works" Yeah I know. Maybe you're under the impression that marxists are blind followers of Marx, I understand. But if you ask any actual marxist or communist, they'll acknowledge that Marx and Engels lacked in a lot of places (especially Engels in anthropology, he was very racist and uninformed in that regard). Which is why we also recommend people read other works such as Lenin's, which as far as I'm aware popularized the term of imperialism as a descriptor for capitalism, and the concept of dividing capitalism into stages, so many pseudo-communists like to say. There is also a myriad of work about imperialist capitalism written by colonialized people, such as Frantz Fanon or Eduardo Galeano. These are the places where marxist theory is most developed regarding colonialism, and it's where the idea of social-democracies in imperial core countries benefitting from imperialism in every instance comes from.

As a side note on marxism, the reason it's called that is not because we treat every work of Marx like holy texts, but because the analytical framework that his works establish and develop is the basis for any analysis and criticism of class conflict and revolutionary communism. We do not blindly follow what he says, we take his works (or any marxist work for that matter), instead, we analyze, critique and explore the ideas presented.

"The USSR was imperialist" (this is basically what anon is saying in the last portion of the ask) Imperialism is a specific stage in the development of capitalism, characterized by the export and tendency to monopoly of capital. It is a concrete economic descriptor that is useful to a specific timeframe in history. It is not, however, when a big country does something in a small country and expands. This definition, while simpler and more useful to the liberal status-quo, is functionally useless to define a state when it can be applied to the Greek colonization of the Mediterranean in the 6th century BC, the trading kingdoms of South East Asia, the Roman state before Caesar and the prinicipate, the germanic tribes that moved into souther Europe, the mongol state (and later states) that stretched from the sea of Japan to Hungary and from the arctic circle to Persia, the Incas and Aztecs, the HRE, the Iriquois confederacy (I'm not that sure on this one, but I'm including it because they were quite big and that's what qualifies as an empire to some people), the various rich kingdoms of west Africa, the modern USA and a long etcetera.

The more popular definition of imperialism, the one that somehow tries to coherently categorize all of the examples above and more under the same word, essentially boils down to territorial expansion. It should be called expanisonism, not imperialism. So if you're using that definition, and it looks like it, then yeah, the USSR was expanisonist. Extending the proletariat state against bourgeois states is good, actually.

I don't know what you think settler-colonialism is, but extracting fossil fuels definitely isn't it. Also, the oil and gas was extracted by the corresponding republics within the USSR. Many smaller republics, such as Turkmenistan, could specialize in fossil fuel extraction because the USSR guaranteed that the goods they didn't produce would reach them regardless. This is one of the reason the capitalist shock therapy posg-1991 forced onto the ex-soviet republics was so catastrophic, their production was organized under the assumption that they wouldn't need to sell off half their country to access basic consumer goods from a capitalist market.

Goddamn was that a long post to type on a phone. If anyone, including anon, replies to this with a low effort insult or to what they think I said instead of what was written on the post, I'm going to block you without exception. you've all been warned

[probablyasocialecologist]

Genly describes war as “the opposite of civilization,” and this is literally true on Winter—if not on our Earth. The planet’s inhabitants cannot afford the destructiveness of war or risk Death by Planet, by diverting or destroying resources needed for survival. They do not have the luxury of surviving both the climate and war. Writes Genly in Left Hand of Darkness: “On the fortieth day and the two succeeding we were snowed in by a blizzard. During these long hours of lying blotto in the tent Estraven slept almost continuously, and ate nothing, though he insisted I eat, ‘You have no experience with starvation,’ he said. I was humiliated. ‘How much have you—Lord of a Domain, and Prime Minister—’ ‘Genry,’ he replied, ‘we practice privation until we’re experts at it. I was taught how to starve as a child.’” Here on Earth, we are blessed, or have been blessed, with living on a planet with a range of climates, many of which have been mild or fairly easy to adapt to. This is not to say that there have not been terrible periods of famine and privation even before the climate crisis, but we have also been allowed the luxury of a range of acts of the imagination not available to the planet Winter. We have, for example, in truly terrible ways, been allowed the “luxury” of war. Even if recovery from this luxury has varied depending on circumstances of resources and landscape as well. Another, ongoing war we often don’t acknowledge comprises deforestation, devastation caused by contamination by the fossil fuel industry, and the loss of the natural world in so many ways. This war is one largely defined by invisibility or by its sudden absence, which is difficult to quantify or to make manifest in people’s minds even as ghost. How do you memorialize or refer to a nothing that may not have been documented as a verdant forest to begin with?  In Tallahassee alone, where I live, over hundreds of acres of forest have been clearcut within city limits in the past two years, wiping out trillions of organisms, including the topsoil, and will be replaced with unaffordable houses on the now terraformed landscape. This isn’t happening in the Amazon—it is happening everywhere. We call this ecocide, but we need a better word or words. Just as the inhabitants of Winter have dozens of words for snow and ice, we need as many words for ecocide. 

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A group of demonstrators gathered outside the RBC branch on Main Street Saturday to protest the organization’s support of oil and gas projects. A 2023 report called Banking on Climate Chaos revealed RBC invested over 40 billion in the fossil fuel industry in 2022. “That’s not ok,” says Kirby Cote, one of the organizers behind the demonstration. “We need to hold them accountable for the money that they’re giving people who are destroying our planet.” Cote says the rally is also meant to show solidarity with Indigenous land defenders.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

i actually was taught at school that cows do play a big part in ozone layer destroying because the amount of methane their farts cause, was I lied to????

A lot of things play a role, but cattle have been overstated in how much of a role they play due to oil companies having the influence to spin the narrative.

Global warming is not caused by cows, it’s caused by unsustainable industrial use of fossil fuels and more modernly we now have to worry about egomaniacs launching random rockets and private jets. The US having better public transportation to limit the reliance on cars would go a long way as well.

If cattle produced enough methane to cause real ecological damage, you wouldn’t be able to light a match anywhere near a ranch without causing a catastrophic explosion.

[kp777]

By Thom Hartmann

Common Dreams

March 31, 2023

The Republican Party's most dangerous grift today has been their embrace of the lie that America is not a democracy but instead is a theocratic republic that should be ruled exclusively by armed Christian white men. It's leading us straight into the jaws of fascism.

Nobody ever accused Republicans of not knowing how to make a buck or BS-ing somebody into voting for them. Lying to people for economic or political gain is the very definition of a grift.

Whenever there’s another mass- or school-shooting, Republican politicians hustle out fundraising emails about how “Democrats are coming to take your guns!” The result is a measurable and profitable spike in gun sales after every new slaughter of our families and children, followed by a fresh burst of campaign cash to GOP lawmakers.

But the GOP’s ability to exploit any opportunity that comes along — regardless of its impact on America or American citizens — goes way beyond just fundraising hustles.

When Jared Kushner was underwater and nearly bankrupt because he overpaid for 666 Fifth Avenue and needed a billion-dollar bailout to cover his mortgage, his buddies in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) blockaded American ally (and host to the Fifth Fleet) Qatar until that country relented and laundered the money to Jared through a Canadian investment company.

Just this week, after Trump deregulated toxic trains leading to a horrible crash and the contamination of East Palestine, Ohio, Steve Bannon — already charged with multiple fraud-related crimes and then pardoned by Trump — showed up this week to hustle $300+ water filters to the people of that town.

The grift is at the core of the GOP’s existence, and has been since Nixon blew up LBJ’s peace talks with the Vietnamese in 1968 and then took cash bribes from the Milk Lobby and Jimmy Hoffa in the White House while having his mafia-connected “plumbers” wiretap the DNC’s offices at the Watergate.

— Republicans successfully fought the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices for decades; in turn, Big Pharma pours millions into their campaign coffers and personal pockets (legalized by 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court).

— Republicans beat back Democratic efforts to stop insurance giants from ripping off seniors and our government with George W. Bush’s Medicare Advantage privatization scam; in turn, the insurance companies rain cash on them like an Indian monsoon.

— Republicans oppose any effort to replace fossil fuels with green energy sources that don’t destroy our environment; in turn, the fossil fuel industry jacked up the price of gasoline into the stratosphere just in time for the 2022 election (and you can expect them to try it again in 2024).

— Republicans stopped enforcement of a century’s worth of anti-trust laws in 1983, wiping out America’s small businesses and turning rural city centers into ghost towns while pushing profits and prices through the ceiling; in turn massive corporate PACs fund ads supporting Republican candidates every election cycle.

— Republicans authored legislation letting billionaires own thousands of newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets; in turn the vast majority of those papers (now half of all local papers are owned by a handful of rightwing New York hedge funds) and stations all run daily news and editorials attacking Democrats and supporting the GOP.

— Republicans Trump and Pai killed net neutrality so giant tech companies can legally spy on you and me, recording every website we visit and selling that information for billions; in turn, major social media sites amplify rightwing voices while giant search engines stopped spidering progressive news sites.

Newspeak — George Orwell’s term for the grift where politicians use fancy phrases that mean the opposite of what people think they mean — has been the GOP’s go-to strategy for a half-century.

Richard Nixon, for example, promised to crack down on drugs, but instead used that as an excuse to crack down on anti-war liberals and Black people. Instead of an economic grift, it was a political grift.

As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“

The grift is a recurrent theme through Republican presidencies in the modern era.

Ronald Reagan told us if we just destroyed America’s unions and moved our manufacturing to China and Mexico, great job opportunities would fill the nation.

He followed that up by promising if we just cut taxes on the morbidly rich, prosperity would trickle-down to the rest of us.

Reagan even assured us that raising the Social Security retirement age to 67 and taxing Social Security benefits would mean seniors could retire with greater ease.

All, of course, were grifter’s lies. Republican presidents since Reagan have continued the tradition.

George W. Bush called his program to make it easier to clear-cut America’s forests and rip roads through wilderness areas the “Healthy Forests Initiative.”

His program to legalize more pollution from coal-fired power plants and immunize them from community lawsuits (leading to tens of thousands of additional lung- and heart-disease deaths in the years since) was named the “Clean Air Act.”

Bush’s scam to “strengthen” Medicare — “Medicare Advantage” — was a thinly disguised plan to privatize that program that is today draining Medicare’s coffers while making insurance executives richer than Midas.

Donald Trump told Americans he had the coronavirus pandemic under control while he was actually making the situation far worse: America had more deaths per capita from the disease than any other developed country in the world, with The Lancet estimating a half-million Americans died needlessly because of Trump’s grift.

Jared and Ivanka cashed in on their time in the White House to the tune of billions, while Trump squeezed hundreds of millions out of foreign governments, encouraging them to illegally pay him through rentals in his properties around the world.

Other Trump grifts — most leading to grateful industries or billionaires helping him and the GOP out — included:

— Making workplaces less safe — Boosting religious schools at the expense of public schools — Cutting relief for students defrauded by student loan sharks — Shrinking the safety net by cutting $60 billion out of food stamps — Forcing workers to put in overtime without getting paid extra for it — Pouring more pollution from fossil fuels into our fragile atmosphere — Gutting the EPA’s science operation — Rescinding rules that protected workers at federal contract sites — Dialing back car air pollution emissions standards — Reducing legal immigration of skilled workers into the US from “shithole countries” — Blocking regulation of toxic chemicals — Rolling back rules on banks, setting up the crisis of 2023 — Defenestrating rules against racially segregated housing

While Nixon was simply corrupt — a crook, to use his own term — in 1978 when five Republicans on the Supreme Court signed off on the Bellotti decision authored by Lewis Powell himself, giving corporations the legal right to bribe American politicians, the GOP went all in.

Ever since then, the GOP has purely been the party of billionaires and giant corporations, although their most successful political grift has been to throw an occasional bone to racists, gun-nuts, fascists, homophobes, and woman-haters to get votes.

Democrats at that time were largely funded by the unions, so it wasn’t until the 1990s, after Reagan had destroyed about half of America’s union jobs and gutted the unions’ ability to fund campaigns, that the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton was forced to make a big turn toward taking corporate cash.

Since Barack Obama showed how online fundraising could replace corporate cash, however, about half of the nation’s Democratic politicians have aligned with the Progressive Caucus and eschewed corporate money, returning much of the Party to its FDR and Great Society base.

The GOP, in contrast, has never wavered from lapping up corporate money in exchange for tax cuts, deregulation, and corporate socialism.

Their most dangerous grift today, though, has been their embrace of the lie that America is not a democracy but instead is a theocratic republic that should be ruled exclusively by armed Christian white men. It’s leading us straight into the jaws of fascism.

Bannon’s grift in East Palestine is the smallest of the small, after his being busted for a multi-million-dollar fraud in the “Build the Wall” scheme and others, but is still emblematic of the Republican strategy at governance.

When all you have to offer the people is a hustle, then at the very least, Republicans figure, you should be able to make a buck or gain/keep political power while doing it.

[fyeah-olivia-colman]

Olivia Colman has dressed as a latex-wearing oil executive called Oblivia Coalmine in a new campaign video highlighting the role of pension funds in fossil fuel projects.

The Academy Award-winning actress’s character thanks pension savers for allowing oil and gas companies to “dig, drill and destroy more of the planet than ever before” and spills an oily black liquid over her face while toasting with a champagne glass.

Created on behalf of the group Make My Money Matter, the advert encourages people to tell their pension schemes to remove their investments in fossil fuel projects.

Research from the campaign group found £88 billion of UK pension savers’ money goes to fossil fuel companies, £20 billion of which is to Shell alone.

Ms Colman said: “Fracking hell, Oblivia Coalmine really is a nasty piece of work. But the scariest thing about her is that she represents something very real.

“That’s why this is such an important campaign. I hope everyone who sees this ad realises the shocking, but unintended, impacts of our pensions and makes their money matter. It really is one of the most powerful things we can all do to protect the planet.”

The advert, created by Lucky Generals and directed by Raine Allen-Miller, coincides with recent polling that suggests 19 per cent of pension savers support their money going towards oil and gas and 66 per cent want it to go to renewables.

David Hayman, the campaign’s director, said pension funds invest in fossil fuels because it has typically provided a good return, but this is likely to change with the global energy transition, which is putting the money increasingly at risk.

He said: “Pension funds are investing billions each year in companies developing new oil and gas, this is bad for people and bad for the planet.

“If we are to stay below 1.5C of warming, fossil fuel expansion must stop, and our pensions can play a big role in this.

“These companies face the risk of stranded assets, government regulation and customer pushback, so continuing to sink our money into these companies is hugely risky.

“It’s time for pension funds to think beyond the short term and really consider what type of world their members will be retiring into in the future.”

Countries have committed to stop the Earth’s average temperature rising 34.7F (1.5C) above pre-industrial levels, considered the limit of a safe environment, and will gather in Dubai next week at Cop28 to discuss progress on this.

Research from the UN has found there to be only a 14 per cent chance of achieving this goal with current policies, predicting that the Earth will warm by 37.4F (3C) by the end of the century.

Mr Hayman said that not one major UK pension scheme has committed to stopping fossil fuel financing and that those people who want their savings removed should email their pension schemes.

He said: “The most powerful thing any of us can do is contact our pension scheme and tell them to stop using our money to finance new oil and gas.

“Our campaign has shown that consumer power can work in pushing big financial institutions to act on climate change, and the more people show they care, the more the pensions industry will have to listen.” (X)

[wolf-grimoire]

ASH TREE EXTINCTION

Emerald ash borer beetles are destroying North American ash tree populations. In a matter of a couple decades, the bugs have reduced ash numbers to a fraction of what they were. “Functional” extinction, meaning extinct outside of human intervention, is imminent for the ash trees of the upper Midwest—and soon, for ash trees everywhere. For a couple hundred bucks a pop, ash trees can be inoculated against the bugs—meaning, with the proper funding and man power, they could be saved. However, the state isn’t even considering the option. Some restrictions have been put in place to minimize the spread of the beetle, but it’s apparent local governments have no intention of shifting efforts from slowing the extinction to an attempt to save the North American ash tree.

It's a shame, considering the spending habits and rhetoric of such a nihilistic government. Every week, millions of dollars are vomited up from the state’s coffers to fund vague corporate-washed “sustainability” initiatives. Most of it serves as little but market bucks to give the state or its private cronies an environmentally friendly sheen. Meanwhile hundreds of millions more are gobbled up in subsidies for massive energy companies who continue to profit from fossil fuels. New cobalt and rare earth mining operations receive federal greenlights in the name of a supposedly “sustainable” EV industry. The sustainability industry, claiming to be saviors of the earth and its critters, is quite literally letting a whole species of tree die off despite a clear path to success—at a fraction of the fraction of the cost spent to spread “awareness” about things like biodiversity loss. In 2022 alone, the Biden administration set aside something like 44 billion to “tackle the climate crisis”.

In comparison, the state of Minnesota has set aside something like 2 to 3 million to protect ash trees from emerald borers, apparently through “community forestry activities on public lands”. The same bureaucrats coughing up 3 million to stop the very real extinction of our ash trees are expected to hurl up 17.5 billion for all those beautifully vague “sustainability” initiatives.

I’d have to guess a great deal of these initiatives include the creation of new financial opportunities for these bureaucrats in ways that killing emerald borers and inoculating ash trees just can’t. If the black ash or mountain ash controlled a share of the energy market and had a small army of lobbyists on their payroll, they might be lucky enough to be made the poster child of the great climate crisis, lucky enough to receive even a shred of the publicity that Greta Thunberg or the countless pretty teenagers crowding the “climate crisis” get all the time.

Every now and then, the environmentalists throw actual Wilderness a bone. Probably by accident. A glacier, usually. Glaciers and polar bears—even then, some pretty teenager is always there to devour the microphone.

New generations are growing up with peers suffering from “climate anxiety” and uncles and aunts dying from “climate related” causes. Millions of Americans will call themselves environmentalists without having spent a night in wilderness, some without having ever really seen the stars. This is how multinational corporations will seize the new markets of the 21st century, developing more wilderness and farmlands than ever before, as American consumers convince themselves their Tesla is atonement enough.

[no-passaran]

(...) The investment of 125 of the world's richest billionaires yield an annual average of three million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year, more than a million times the average for someone in the bottom 90 per cent of humanity, according to a new report by non-profit group Oxfam. These super rich people have a collective USD 2.4 trillion stake in 183 companies.

Their investments in polluting industries such as fossil fuels and cement are double the average for the Standard and Poor group of 500 companies, said the report titled "Carbon Billionaires: The investment emissions of the world's richest people".

Cumulatively, these 125 billionaires fund 393 million tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) per year, which is equal to the annual carbon emissions of France, a nation of 67 million people.

To put things into perspective, each of these billionaires would have to circumnavigate the world almost 16 million times in a private jet to create the same emissions, the report said.

(...) "The major and growing responsibility of wealthy people for overall emissions is rarely discussed or considered in climate policy making. This has to change. These billionaire investors at the top of the corporate pyramid have huge responsibility for driving climate breakdown. They have escaped accountability for too long," said Amitabh Behar, CEO of Oxfam India.

(...) "They can't be allowed to hide or greenwash. We need governments to tackle this urgently by publishing emission figures for the richest people, regulating investors and corporates to slash carbon emissions and taxing wealth and polluting investments", said Nafkote Dabi, Climate Change Lead at Oxfam International.

Oxfam also estimated that a wealth tax on the world's super-rich could raise USD 1.4 trillion a year, vital resources that could help developing countries - those worst hit by the climate crisis - to adapt, address loss and damage and carry out a just transition to renewable energy. (...)

"The super-rich need to be taxed and regulated away from polluting investments that are destroying the planet. Governments must also put in place ambitious regulations and policies that compel corporations to be more accountable and transparent in reporting and radically reducing their emissions," said Behar. (...)

[heimonas]

the arguments people who play hogwarts legacy use when called out are so stupid like I'm not surprised but at the same time. maybe I am. because some are openly transphobic or using the "free speech" excuse which sure, has been done tons of times in the past but. some. are like. accusing people who call to boycott for damaging the lives and careers, not of jk rowling (which according to them had no involvement in the development? sure, the creator and copyright holder of a franchise has no say and also gets no money. I'm sure that's how it all works.) but of game developers and other people involved in the making of the game. I'm sorry but what. since when are we countering arguments on human rights with the fact people will lose their jobs (which we all know won't happen, let's be for real for a second here). oh you know weapon factories employ so many people! you can't possibly ask for peace.... Have you ever thought of the people who work in the industry? oh ofc the fossil fuel industry might be destroying the planet but it's one of the biggest employers. how dare you ask for restrictions and sanctions to combat pollution. you're so oblivious. damn girl don't you know human traffickers have families to feed? do you see how stupid this sounds? do you?

and you just know these people have never cared for workers before. not when they need to get on the street and defend their rights. they only bring up workers affected and unemployment when their precious little interests are threatened. and it shows how many mental backflips they will do to basically say "I don't care about Jewish or trans people or minorities in general when it comes to my entertainment."

and one last thing. what's up with saying jk rowling will keep being rich but game developers will be harmed. who do you think gives jk the money. do they fall from the sky? I can't believe we're dealing with grown ass people who don't know the first thing about how the world works and are falling in so many paradoxes in their arguments but they wanna play a game so badly that they don't even think before they speak and won't see their mistakes even when people point it out in the calmest way possible.

[dustedmagazine]

Jonathan Shaw's Year in Review: Another year of pissed-off music (and some that’s somehow not so pissed), for the freaks, and the lovers, and the ghosts

2023 threatened for some months to be a marginally less awful mess than the several years before it, but then came autumn, and the Cop28 Conference turned into a massive lobbying event for the fossil fuels industry; and Geert Wilders pulled off his dismaying political success in the Netherlands; and the paranoid style in American politics was further entrenched (witness MTG’s juice as a figure of national political import and Mike Johnson holding the House gavel); and Gaza was reduced to blood-soaked rubble; and there is the ever-increasing, mind-flaying certainty that yes, 2024 will be dominated in the States by a presidential race between two completely unacceptable choices: a frail Boomer largely coasting on the fact that he is not his principal rival for the office, and that principal rival, whose absurdity increases in direct proportion to the hazard of his petulant, narcissistic rage.

No wonder much of the music on this list is so steeped in fury, contempt and sorrow for the continuing idiocy and grinding horror of the human condition. Some of that music is memorably grim, or ferocious, or both. See the records below by Gravesend, Lucifixion and Spirit Possession, all of which cut viscerally violent paths through your senses. Eardrums are subjected to scorched-earth treatment. I dig it.

But those aren’t the only feeling tones available on records I listened to a lot this year (still the dominant metric for how records get on this list: How often did I play them?). On “Bananas,” a great song from Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, Will Oldham’s gentle strumming and the song’s duet of hushed vocals dramatize lovemaking, to achingly gorgeous effect. On “Quiet World,” the best track on Home Front’s excellent Games of Power, the band commits to the sad-boy, New Romantic postpunk that some of their other songs flirt with a good deal less certainly. And while no one would ever wish to accuse the Sleaford Mods of anything other than sardonic smarts, “The Rhythms of Class” may be as close to pop music as the band has ever gotten, and it’s a terrific tune.

So maybe that’s why Gel’s Only Constant got so much play in my world this year: it’s “hardcore for fucking freaks,” as the band likes to insist, and it rips. But that’s not its only tone. The songs are also affirming, like the hand on your back at the edge of the pit that doesn’t shove but seeks to steady you on your pins. You can hear plenty of anger in the songs, but it’s not the sort that sends you out to score coke or oxy (more likely it'll mostly be fentanyl—careful out there, kids) or prompts you to set fire to random objects in the public square. It’s music to dance to, along with the other freaks, and to gather and sing in support of something you believe in. And thank goodness there is still great punk rock that wants us to feel that.

So Only Constant is presented below, first, as the album I am most grateful for this year, and all the other records are alphabetical by artist.

Gel—Only Constant (Convulse Records)

What’s better than those first 50 seconds of “Honed Blade”? To my ears, this year, nothing.

BIG|BRAVE—nature morte (Thrill Jockey)

Noisy, beautiful and idiosyncratic songs of love, desperation and death. The band finds new ways to create shapes with sound, and tunes out of those shapes.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy—Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You (Drag City)

Simultaneously spare and lush, poetical and direct, wooden and fleshed. It’s the best record he’s made in some years.

Gravesend—Gowanus Death Stomp (20 Buck Spin)

Like a dip in the Gowanus Canal, this record is cold, corrosive and really, really bad for you. Not all of Brooklyn is for hipsters.

Home Front—Games of Power (La Vida Es un Mus)

Synth-rich postpunk meets the macho multi-voiced choruses of Oi! and the unthinkable happens: the songs are really, really good.

Lucifixion—Trisect Joys of Pierced Hearts (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Icy, satanic black metal that’ll strip you down to the bones, and it’ll grin while doing so. Weirdly, you may grin, too.

Retirement—Buyer’s Remorse (Iron Lung Records)

Overly adventurous consumers might have some buyer’s remorse if this record slips impulsively into their carts on a Bandcamp Friday, but smart punks sure won’t. Fast, nasty, hammering, anti-capitalist hardcore.

Sleaford Mods—UK Grim (Rough Trade)

More songs slagging Idles, Brexit, Tories and Labour, but as ever, the Mods make it all sound fresh. Angry, exhausted and jaded, but still fresh. Neat trick. Good record.

Spectral Lore—11 Days (I, Voidhanger)

Originally released as a straight-to-digital charity fundraiser, 11 Days has been packaged as a CD by I, Voidhanger and put back into circulation. Unusually political for Spectral Lore, the record sonically represents the journey thousands of migrants have taken across the Mediterranean, only to face the current racism and ethno-nationalisms proliferating through Europe. It’s harrowing stuff.

Spirit Possession—…Of the Sign (Profound Lore)

Utterly nutty, memorably antic, acid-drenched black metal. Like a bad trip, but you’ll be sort of disappointed when it ends.

Special shout-out to Mitski for “My Love Mine All Mine,” a great song that is, as a friend pointed out to me, both pop and the real thing—in spite of which the broader culture has embraced it. And also this:

They’re both gone now, but we still have their songs, and memories of them like this one. O’Connor’s weird, inbent charisma is hugely effective here, and she is so, so lovely. But it’s MacGowan’s song, and while he wrote it a bit earlier (when he and Cait O’Riordan were both still in the Pogues; she sings on the excellent version of the tune that made it onto Sid and Nancy’s soundtrack), it’s bittersweet that the last great song he ever recorded and released was a love song. A song in which the power of love is registered by the extent to which one is “haunted” by its “ghost,” and hence also by its death—that’s MacGowan to the core, and we’ll never get another songwriter like him.

Down with fascism, smash all nationalisms, turn the music up.

Jonathan Shaw

[elinaline]

"we don't need to take steps to adapt to a world without fossil fuel we just need to destroy the entire petrol industry without thinking of how we'll live afterwards ! After all the petrol industry only impacts packaging, medication, clothing, furniture, energy, medical devices, transportation, accessibility aids, hair care, soaps, power tools, construction, insulation,"

Like yeah going zero waste, secondhand, repare and recycle has little to no effect on the industry. The effects are for you, to learn how to live in a post petrol world, to get your independence from the petrol industry. Because one day we will be in a post petrol world and you have NO IDEA how many things in your life actually depend on fossil fuels.