The Free is a book and a blog. .”the most detailed fictional treatment of the movement from a world recognizably like our own to an anarchist society that I have read.. imagined strongly enough to allow readers to believe that events could happen this way.” 451,225 blog reads so far (2020).
Why do we tolerate the massive environmental impacts of the very rich?
By George Monbiot, November 2021. shared with thanks. Illustrations added
Most of our dysfunctions are caused by pandering to the rich.
The way governments have allowed democracy to be eroded by lobbyists (including politicians with lucrative private interests); the deregulation that lets corporations, oligarchs and landlords squeeze their workers and tenants, then dump their costs on society;
the permissive environment for profiteering during the pandemic; the degradation of health, education and other public services by the constant drive towards privatisation: all these are symptoms of the same condition.
The same applies to the worst of our predicaments: the destruction of our life-support systems. The very rich arrogate to themselves the lion’s share of the planetary space on which we all depend. It is hard to understand why we tolerate this attack on our common interests.
The richest 1% of the world’s people (those earning more than $172,000 a year) produce 15% of the world’s carbon emissions: twice the combined impact of the poorest 50%.
On average, they emit over 70 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person every year, 30 times more than we can each afford to release if we’re not to exceed 1.5C of global heating. While the emissions of the world’s middle classes are expected to fall sharply over the next decade, thanks to the general decarbonisation of our economies, the amount produced by the richest will scarcely decline at all: in other words, they’ll be responsible for an even greater share of total CO2.
Becoming good global citizens would mean cutting their carbon consumption by an average of 97%.
Even if 90% of the population produced no carbon at all, the anticipated emissions of the richest 10% (those earning over $55,000) across the next nine years would use almost the entire global budget. The disparity in environmental impact mirrors a nation’s inequality.
On Monday, November 22, 2021 A Turkish court has sentenced Kurdish singer Veysi Ermiş to a year and a half in prison for using the words “Kurdistan” and “guerrilla” in a song.
Ermiş is part of the Mesopotamian Cultural Center (MKM), a space for the promotion of Kurdish arts that has suffered persecution and outlawing since it was founded in Istanbul in 1991.
The judge has suspended the sentence because the musician has no background but he warned that in Turkey, using these two words is tantamount to praising the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK) and the Koma Civakên Kurdistan (Confederation of Kurdistan Communities, KCK).
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Original in Catalan
El cantant kurd Veysi Ermiş condemnat a un any i mig de presó per haver emprat la paraula “Kurdistan” en una cançó
Sun Ng at Edward Hospital in Napierville, Illinois, where officials refused, until ordered by a court, to administer life-saving ivermectin for covid. (Photo by daughter Man Kwan Ng as submitted to the court.)
A Chicago-area judge saved a grandfather’s life with the single question that exposes hospitals blocking doctors from using a safe, FDA-approved drug: Why?
Sun Ng, a retired contractor from Hong Kong, traveled to Illinois to celebrate his only granddaughter’s first birthday. He got covid and was near death in a Chicago-area hospital. All other options were exhausted, but the hospital refused to give Mr. Ng a generic, FDA-approved drug with an extraordinary safety record that a doctor believed could safe his life.
Finally, a judge asked the right question about ivermectin.
“What’s the downside?”
Put another way: If a man is dying of covid in an ICU and all else has been tried, why not order a hospital to give a safe, last-ditch drug?
Sun Ng, 63, traveled from Hong Kong for his granddaughter Kaylie’s first birthday celebration on September 17. (Photo by daughter Man Kwan Ng as submitted to the court.)
Edward Hospital, located near Chicago, offered three arguments as to why Sun Ng, seventy-one, should not be given ivermectin:
In the following report, Pranav Jeevan P explores the conflict between the farmers and the far-right government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the character of the movement that the farmers initiated, and the means by which they triumphed.
In the following report, Pranav Jeevan P1 explores the conflict between the farmers and the far-right government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the character of the movement that the farmers initiated, and the means by which they triumphed.
“People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
– Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
Farmers in India have won a historic victory against state efforts to privatize the agricultural sector for corporate exploitation. The authoritarian right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally had to bow before the farmers’ protests, accepting the demand to repeal the three anti-farmer laws. The success of the year-long farmers’ struggle shows that horizontal, self-organized, decentralized protests can involve hundreds of thousands of people—that they can persist against tremendous obstacles—that they can triumph even against determined authoritarian regimes.
Neither corporate media propaganda, nor state repression, nor attacks by pro-government mobs succeeded in suppressing the farmers. The protests became one of the largest anti-corporate and anti-government mass movements in the world, identifying the corporate-government nexus as enemies of the freedom, well-being, and self-determination of the rest of the population of India.
Even when parliamentary opposition to the reigning regime is weak, the judiciary is silent about the injustices people face, and bureaucracy serves the oppressors to pave the way for more exploitation, mass movements can always find a way to defeat these systems of oppression.
The farmers were able to sustain these massive protests month after month in the face of so much hardship for two reasons: self-organization and decentralization.
No single leader commanded the protests; meetings involving all the farmers’ unions made all the decisions together. The participation of women and landless laborers added to the cause, addressing their concerns and creating a unified front that cut across the usual fault lines of Indian society.
Since the very beginning of the covid panic, the narrative has been this: implement severe lockdowns or your population will experience a bloodbath. Morgues will be overwhelmed, the death total toll will be astounding. On the other hand, we were assured that those jurisdictions that implement the lockdown would experience only a fraction of the death toll.
Then, once vaccines became available, the narrative was modified to:
“Get shots in arm and then covid will stop spreading. Those countries without vaccines, on the other hand, will continue to face mass casualties.”
The lockdown narrative, of course, has already been thoroughly overturned. Jurisdictions that did not lock down or adopted only weak and short lockdowns ended up with covid death tolls that were either similar to—or lesser than—death tolls in countries that adopted draconian lockdowns. Lockdown advocates said locked-down countries would be overwhelmingly better off. These people were clearly wrong.
Undaunted by the increasing implausibility of the lockdown narrative, the global health bureaucrats are nonetheless doubling down on forced vaccines—as we now see in Austria—and we continue to be assured that only countries with high vaccination rates can hope to avoid disastrous covid outcomes.
Yet, the experience in sub-Saharan Africa calls both these narratives into question: Africa’s numbers have been far, far lower than the experts warned would be the case.
[T]here is something “mysterious” going on in Africa that is puzzling scientists, said Wafaa El-Sadr, chair of global health at Columbia University. “Africa doesn’t have the vaccines and the resources to fight COVID-19 that they have in Europe and the U.S., but somehow they seem to be doing better,” she said….
Fewer than 6% of people in Africa are vaccinated. For months, the WHO has described Africa as “one of the least affected regions in the world” in its weekly pandemic reports.
There have been as many as 8-10 deployments of U.S. Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, equipped to launch Standard Missile-3 anti-ballistic missiles, to the Black Sea so far this year. There have also been regular deployments of U.S. strategic/nuclear-capable B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers over the Black Sea region this year as part of Bomber Task Force Europe. See: 30 flights, some only 12 miles away: U.S. bombers practiced nuclear attacks on Russia – DM
[T]he U.S. Embassy in Kyiv posted a diplomatic warning called “A Black Friday public service announcement” on its Twitter account.
“To distract from the truth, you may hear Russian officials make false claims about the Black Sea,” the embassy said in the video, adding a photo of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying: “We see deliberate provocations.”
Ansarullah continue gaining ground, aided by their drone and missile abilities, and despite continual blitzing from the air by Saudi forces using US intelligence.
The Yemeni forces advanced on the southern gates of the central Marib city, pushing Saudi-backed militants loyal to former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi further back.
According to a report published on Friday by Lebanese al-Akhbar daily, Saudi forces and their mercenaries failed to stop Yemeni soldiers and their allies from making rapid advances on the southern flank of the provincial capital city.
Hadi loyalists have already withdrawn from most of their positions in the eastern and central parts of the Balaqin sub-district over the past two days, despite intense airstrikes carried by Saudi warplanes in their support.
The paper, citing local military and tribal sources, said Yemeni army troops and Popular Committees fighters have made major advances on the western outskirts of Falaj area after establishing control over all heights overlooking the region.
Sources close to pro-Hadi forces said their defeats appear to…
What happens when one small clique of people has accumulated enough money to buy pretty much everything and everyone?
The scenario will be a familiar one for anyone who has played Monopoly, the board game originally invented to warn against exactly this outcome.
As soon as one player has succeeded in placing hotels on several of the more lucrative districts, none of the other players stands a chance.
Every move they make lands them in more trouble, owing huge amounts of money to the dominant party.
There is no way out. It is inevitable that they will eventually lose all the wealth they have managed to gather thus far and will end up with nothing.
That is what we are up against in real life. When a group of ruthless sociopaths have all the power that money can buy, they don’t even have to pretend to be “democratic” any more.
But we should never forget that we don’t have to remain trapped within reality as they present it to us.
Their money, created out of thin air, is not real. It is just a symbol. You cannot eat it or shelter within it. It only has meaning because we all go along with the illusion of its reality.
Their propaganda, paid for by their illusory money, has no power if we stop paying attention to it. It is just words and images which we could all simply ignore.
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