Forwarded from Dead Lasagna (Maya Klenger)
Fresh air being sold in bottles is already a reality, not some anti-utopian futuristic sci-fi. The richest countries didn't have decrease in air pollution due to ecological reforms, they did it by relocating the dirtiest industries into countries of Global South, where labour is being violently exploited and states bribed to keep regulations at bay.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/10/where-the-air-is-pure
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/10/where-the-air-is-pure
Current Affairs
Where the Air Is Pure ❧ Current Affairs
<p>We suffocate the world with industry, then we commodify air- and find new ways to blame the most vulnerable. </p>
it is worth explaining that right-wing libertarians generally treat “agreeing” to do something as synonymous with “choosing,” “wanting,” and “preferring” to do something. If you agreed to sell one of your organs to a black market organ-grinder in order to pay your child’s medical bills, it means you “wanted” to do so. There is no compulsion under capitalism, meaning that even if the only job available involves allowing Jeff Bezos to perform disfiguring medical experiments on you, you are simply a voluntary participant in a mutually beneficial transaction.
[...] Low prices are the ‘At least the trains ran on time” of big capitalism—a basic concession to daily stability while the power centers gather strength in the shadows.
[...] According to the Economic Census of today’s markets, the eight largest software publishers code programs that earn half the market’s income. The four biggest snack food corporations produce over half the total, and 80% of US pet food comes from just eight firms (often misleadingly labeled as separate brands), both being classic oligopolies
currentaffairs.org/2020/10/big-business-and-its-bottomless-bootlickers/
[...] Low prices are the ‘At least the trains ran on time” of big capitalism—a basic concession to daily stability while the power centers gather strength in the shadows.
[...] According to the Economic Census of today’s markets, the eight largest software publishers code programs that earn half the market’s income. The four biggest snack food corporations produce over half the total, and 80% of US pet food comes from just eight firms (often misleadingly labeled as separate brands), both being classic oligopolies
currentaffairs.org/2020/10/big-business-and-its-bottomless-bootlickers/
Current Affairs
Big Business and its Bottomless Bootlickers ❧ Current Affairs
<p>Some economists say that big business is good, actually. Are they correct? They are not.</p>
"Fascism-lite is one reason Americans have a hard time pronouncing this particular ‘F word.’ Another is that we’ve failed to teach younger generations about the barbarism of historical fascism. In the 1950s and ‘60s my father, who served in the Army during World War II, told me war stories at bedtime. The big death camps were well known then, although today two-thirds of young Americans are unaware that Nazis slaughtered six million Jews in the Holocaust. My father’s jobs in the Army were capturing post offices, splicing communications cables and blowing up bridges. But he also told us that in addition to Auschwitz and the concentration camps, there were slave labor camps in many German towns he passed through, filled with emaciated survivors and dead bodies piled up like cordwood.
Later I learned that many veterans did not tell their families what they had witnessed. These members of the Greatest Generation didn’t want to revisit those horrors. Together with the Western allies and the USSR, they defeated Nazi Germany, along with Mussolini’s fascists, Japan’s imperialists, and all those lesser fascists like Hungary’s Arrow Cross. Some of their grandchildren became today’s Proud Boys, Patriot militias and neo-Nazis, which surely has many World War II vets turning over in their graves.
In the aftermath of World War II, almost all Americans were unequivocally anti-fascist. Now, for those in power, ‘anti-fascist’ has become a term of opprobrium. That might be because fascism applies to them too."
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/fascism-america/
Later I learned that many veterans did not tell their families what they had witnessed. These members of the Greatest Generation didn’t want to revisit those horrors. Together with the Western allies and the USSR, they defeated Nazi Germany, along with Mussolini’s fascists, Japan’s imperialists, and all those lesser fascists like Hungary’s Arrow Cross. Some of their grandchildren became today’s Proud Boys, Patriot militias and neo-Nazis, which surely has many World War II vets turning over in their graves.
In the aftermath of World War II, almost all Americans were unequivocally anti-fascist. Now, for those in power, ‘anti-fascist’ has become a term of opprobrium. That might be because fascism applies to them too."
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/fascism-america/
openDemocracy
Fascism in America
Words matter. We must call what is happening in the US by its true name.
"The crisis is not that the American constitutional system is broken but that the American constitutional system is working—perhaps not as the Framers intended but, as a legal and administrative matter, mostly as it was designed to."
https://newrepublic.com/article/159823/constitution-crisis-supreme-court
https://newrepublic.com/article/159823/constitution-crisis-supreme-court
The New Republic
The Constitution Is the Crisis
There’s no reason why a rigged Supreme Court should have the final say on the law of our land.
"And in a report released this week, the United Nations forecast that unless global warming is stopped the planet will turn into “uninhabitable hell” for millions. The UN report put it on the line: political and business leaders are being “wilfully negligent” as natural disasters nearly double this century. In the period 2000 to 2019, there were 7,348 major recorded disaster events claiming 1.23 million lives, affecting 4.2 billion people (many on more than one occasion) resulting in approximately US$2.97 trillion in global economic losses. This is a sharp increase over the previous twenty years. Between 1980 and 1999, 4,212 disasters were linked to natural hazards worldwide claiming approximately 1.19 million lives and affecting 3.25 billion people resulting in approximately US$1.63 trillion in economic losses."
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/10/18/the-imf-smokescreen/
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/10/18/the-imf-smokescreen/
Michael Roberts Blog
The IMF smokescreen
In its latest World Economic Outlook report, the IMF again tackled the issue of climate change, global warming and what to do about it. As it did last year, the IMF recognised that climate change …