Daily News 08/18

Daily News 08/18

George Monbiot:Declare Capitalism Dead – Before it Takes Us All Down With It! (2019) “The economic system is incompatible with the survival of life on Earth. It is time to design a new one Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity. Those who defend capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from goods to services, economic growth can be decoupled from the use of material resources. Last week a paper in the journal New Political Economy, by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, examined this premise. They found that while some relative decoupling took place in the 20th century (material resource consumption grew, but not as quickly as economic growth), in the 21st century there has been a recoupling: rising resource consumption has so far matched or exceeded the rate of economic growth. The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and appears impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion., A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone – from which materials are taken without full payment – and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.” Today, The United States Capitalists’s are Clearly Operatiing to Creat More Profit at the Expense of the Environment. The declining rate of profit have pit the capitalists in a wolrd wide war is search of new profits. The War in Iran for oil, the quest to plunder the ocean with mile long tents and ocean deep see mining, and fracking the artice tundra. are all taking a toll on the environment. These global plunder plinder have led to increase of environmenal destruction and accleration in global warming, wildfires, drought, deserification, floods, famine, global hunger, a global economic crisis and a global water crisis! The encironment scientists and the World Meteorological Association all agree that the nationas of the world have to coperate to prevent acclerating global warming. The Capitalism System is based on comeption — not coperation! It is time to ‘Declare Capitalism Dead – Before it Takes Us All Down With It!’ It is time to unite to build a co-operative world! Sociism is a system based on coperation! The Choice before Humanity is Ecosocialism or Capitalist Ecocide ‘Tomorrow will be too late for what we should have done long ago’!

Methane Menaces: Fracking and Factory Farms’ Dire Climate impact When it comes to fighting climate change, speed is of the essence. Rising temperatures will push many processes to tipping points at which catastrophe will be impossible to stop. To avoid this, we need to act fast. And one greenhouse gas will make a huge difference: methane. Methane is an especially potent climate pollutant. While carbon dioxide has gotten lots of attention — it is the most dominant greenhouse gas, and it sticks around for millennia — methane is far more powerful in the short term. It has 86 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide in a 20-year timespan, making methane reduction a key part of climate action, right now. Globally, methane emissions come largely from two main sources: animal agriculture and fossil fuel production. And the United States is a major contributor. Food & Water Watch’s recent research quantifies the danger: we found that in 2022, factory farms1 released up to 3.2 million metric tons of methane, and the fracking industry released an estimated 26.4 million metric tons.

AI, data centres, and the quiet hum of revolution From environmentally-damaging data centres, to the threat of unemployment, to alienating AI slop – widespread anger is building towards the tech bosses accelerating us towards a dystopian future. What is the revolutionary way forward? Anger is building against the tech bosses accelerating us towards a dystopian automated future. Just like the constant, low-frequency hum emitted by data centres, there is a deep, suffocating bass drum shaking people to their core. The AI arms race is contributing, literally and metaphorically, to tremors that will become earthquakes of class struggle.

What Fidel Castro Gave Us Fidel Castro would have turned 100 this week. His revolutionary legacy of reminds us that breaking free from neocolonial plunder demands the rigorous construction of productive capacity and an unyielding commitment to human dignity. I was only sixteen years old when I first set eyes on Fidel Castro at the 1983 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in India. When Fidel, who would have turned 100 this week, met Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the conference venue, he broke protocol and gave her a giant bear hug. Fidel loved India, something I would learn from him eighteen years later in Durban, South Africa. ‘I went to India many times’, he told me then, ‘but never for very long’. I was too scared to tell him that I had seen him from afar at the NAM conference and had, because of his gigantic personality, imagined that Cuba was an enormous country – and not an island nation of approximately 110,000long agosquare kilometres with a population smaller than that of the Calcutta metropolitan area where I was born. Seeing him from afar, in his green military fatigues, I pictured him as a young Fidel marching into Havana from the Sierra Maestra, all the while wondering if he was carrying a pistol under his cloak to protect himself from the assassins who seemed never to touch him.

“Tomorrow will be too late”: Fidel Castro’s speech on the Environment and Development, June 12, 1992 An important biological species is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive liquidation of its natural living conditions: humans. We are now becoming aware of this problem when it is almost too late to prevent it. It is necessary to point out that consumer societies are fundamentally responsible for the atrocious destruction of the environment. They were born from former colonial metropolises and imperial policies that, in turn, engendered the backwardness and poverty that plague the vast majority of humanity today. With only 20 percent of the world’s population, they consume two-thirds of the metals and three-quarters of the energy produced in the world. They have poisoned the seas and rivers, polluted the air, weakened and perforated the ozone layer, and saturated the atmosphere with gases that alter climatic conditions with catastrophic effects that we are already beginning to experience. … When the supposed threats of communism have disappeared and there are no longer any pretexts for cold wars, arms races, and military spending, what is stopping us from immediately dedicating these resources to promoting the development of the Third World and combating the threat of ecological destruction of the planet? Let selfishness cease, let hegemonism cease, let insensitivity, irresponsibility, and deceit cease. Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done long ago.

Donald Trump threatens to bomb Oman if it ‘gets in the way’ of ending Iran warPresident issues threat to ‘bomb the shit out of them’ after previously threatening Gulf ally in May

It Can Happen Here! Re: Trump is hinting at declaring a national emergency ahead of the midterms to restrict voting. When a conservative commentator suggested declaring an emergency, Trump responded “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.”: From S.2296 – National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 Summary. The President of the United States has available certain powers that may be exercised in the event that the nation is threatened by crisis, exigency, or emergency circumstances (other than natural disasters, war, or near-war situations). Such powers may be stated explicitly or implied by the Constitution, assumed by the Chief Executive to be permissible constitutionally, or inferred from or specified by statute. Through legislation, Congress has made a great many delegations of authority in this regard over the past 230 years. From: Obama’s Coup D’état The Police State Is Emerging!: There are, however, limits and restraints upon the President in his exercise of emergency powers. With the exception of the habeas corpus clause, the Constitution makes no allowance for the suspension of any of its provisions during a national emergency. Disputes over the constitutionality or legality of the exercise of emergency powers are judicially reviewable. Both the judiciary and Congress, as co-equal branches, can restrain the executive regarding emergency powers. So can public opinion. Since 1976, the President has been subject to certain procedural formalities in utilizing some statutorily delegated emergency authority.

Just as In All Wars, The 1% Consider the Troops, That Die in Their Wars, to Be ‘Just Cannon Fodder’: Sign: “Fire Pete Hegseth for the USS Lincoln Disaster” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth must be fired for the USS Lincoln disaster. When the troops you are responsible for don’t have adequate food and water, you have screwed up in a horrific way. And when conditions on a ship are so bad that sailors have started jumping off it into the ocean, you need to go. NOW.

A Confinement Lot at Blackshirt Feeders. Credit: Sonya Doctorian/Inside Climate News In Nebraska, Blackshirt Feeders LP is building the country’s largest feedlot for 200,000 beef cattle on a square-mile slab of concrete. … As the industry has replicated the factory farm model across the world, the number of livestock has swelled, leading to more livestock-related planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. The production of livestock globally accounts for somewhere between 16.5 and just under 20 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers have determined that, even if the world stopped using fossil fuels, the largest source of heat-trapping gases, there’s no way to meet global climate goals without reducing emissions from the food system, including from cattle.

Warning: Factory Farms are a Threat to Life!AI Overview: Factory farming significantly pollutes air, water, and land, contributing to climate change through emissions like methane and nitrous oxide, which are more potent than carbon dioxide. It is linked to respiratory illnesses and reduced quality of life for communities near operations, and pollutes waterways with nutrients and pathogens from animal waste. In the U.S., the agricultural sector accounts for a significant portion of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, and animal agriculture is a major source of these pollutants. Cause Pandemics: Over the last few decades, hundreds of human pathogens have emerged at a rate unprecedented in human history. Emerged from where? Mostly from animals. The AIDS virus is blamed on the butchering of primates in the African bushmeat trade, we created mad cow disease when we turned cows into carnivores and cannibals, and SARS and COVID-19 have been traced back to the exotic wild animal trade. Our last pandemic, swine flu in 2009, arose not from some backwater wet market in Asia, however. It was largely made-in-the-USA on pig production operations in the United States. In this new Age of Emerging Diseases, there are now billions of animals overcrowded and intensively confined in filthy factory farms for viruses to incubate and mutate within.

Alzheimer’s research is latest casualty in Trump administration war against ‘DEI’

BiPartisan Postponing of Our Health and Welfare:US law to investigate foodborne illness outbreaks has been delayed for 15 years Law was set to go into effect in January, months before cyclosporiasis outbreak, but now is set for 2028.