Terrifying UN Draft Climate Report Urges Total Transformation of Our Way of Life

https://truthout.org/articles/terrifying-un-draft-climate-report-urges-total-transformation-of-our-way-of-life/

~~posted for collectivist ~~

A protester holds a placard reading "Our house is on fire" during a climate demonstration outside The Hague, Netherlands, on June 24, 2021.

The western states have been stuck in a blast furnace of hot weather as spring transitions to summer. Record-breaking heat, drought and extreme stress to power grids have almost half the country in deep distress. The last couple of days have seen a small reprieve, but that’s about to end.

“The National Weather Service is warning of a ‘Record-Breaking and Dangerous Heatwave’ hitting this weekend and early next week,” reports Brian Kahn for Gizmodo. “Weather models are also coalescing around blistering heat. If the forecasts come to fruition, we’re not just talking about a few daily records falling here and there. We’re talking about a heat wave for the ages that could absolutely destroy all-time records from Washington to California as well as parts of Canada.”

According to a terrifying, massive and excruciatingly detailed report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was obtained by Agence France-Presse (AFP), what is happening out west is not a meteorological fluke, but a hard look at the immediate future of the planet. “Species extinction, more widespread disease, unlivable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas — these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30,” reports AFP.If the data and conclusions in this IPCC report are accurate, what immediately awaits us is staggering:

By far the most comprehensive catalogue ever assembled of how climate change is upending our world, the report reads like a 4,000-page indictment of humanity’s stewardship of the planet. But the document, designed to influence critical policy decisions, is not scheduled for release until February 2022 — too late for crunch UN summits this year on climate, biodiversity and food systems, some scientists say.

The challenges it highlights are systemic, woven into the very fabric of daily life. They are also deeply unfair: those least responsible for global warming will suffer disproportionately, the report makes clear. And it shows that even as we spew record amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we are undermining the capacity of forests and oceans to absorb them, turning our greatest natural allies in the fight against warming into enemies.

It warns that previous major climate shocks dramatically altered the environment and wiped out most species, raising the question of whether humanity is sowing the seeds of its own demise. “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems,” it says. “Humans cannot.”

Beyond the dire warnings contained in the report, the assessment of current efforts to curtail climate disruption is damning. One example offered is the 2015 Paris Agreement, which seeks to limit global warming to a 1.5 degree Celsius increase — two degrees at most. This was based on the assumption that the Earth would not warm that much before the year 2100. According to the data included in the report, “On current trends, we’re heading for three degrees Celsius at best…. Last month, the World Meteorological Organization projected a 40 percent chance that Earth will cross the 1.5-degree threshold for at least one year by 2026.”

In other words, nearly every idea floated by governments to address climate disruption is woefully insufficient and out of date. “Current levels of adaptation will be inadequate to respond to future climate risks,” reads the IPCC report. Billions face the threat of coastal destruction, drought, famine, fire and plague … not after 2100, but today, tomorrow and the day after that.

One immediate example is the drought-ridden west, and the massive conflagrations caused by the high heat and dry air. “When wildfires blaze across the West, as they have with increasing ferocity as the region has warmed, the focus is often on the immediate devastation — forests destroyed, infrastructure damaged, homes burned, lives lost,” reports The New York Times. “But about two-thirds of drinking water in the United States originates in forests. And when wildfires affect watersheds, cities can face a different kind of impact, long after the flames are out.”

While the report takes a dim view of current efforts to curtail climate disruption, its message is not entirely pessimistic. Much of the damage to come is already baked into the situation, yet areas of significant mitigation are possible — but only if action is taken immediately.

“There is very little good news in the report,” reads the AFP dispatch, “but the IPCC stresses that much can be done to avoid worst-case scenarios and prepare for impacts that can no longer be averted…. But simply swapping a gas guzzler for a Tesla or planting billions of trees to offset business-as-usual isn’t going to cut it, the report warns.”

“We need transformational change operating on processes and behaviours at all levels: individual, communities, business, institutions and governments,” reads the IPCC report. “We must redefine our way of life and consumption.”

Is the United States capable of such a radical transformation? We can’t get people to wear masks in order to save their own lives and the lives of their loved ones, there are millions of dollars to be made lying to a large segment of the population about issues like climate disruption, and our governing bodies cannot summon the necessary majority to fix a pothole.

Our capitalism is driving everything that is murdering the planet — oil, war, consumption — and that capitalism has powerful defenders.

If the western U.S. goes up in flames like an untended tinderbox and California’s huge economy is derailed, if another major city like New Orleans is devoured by a climate storm, if the United States sees a sharp uptick in displaced climate refugees fleeing for their lives, maybe Mitch McConnell will forego the filibuster and let a solution come to a vote, but I am not holding my breath.

I always wince when I hear someone say we are “destroying the planet.” The planet is just fine, thank you very much, 4 billion years and counting, and we humans are to this space-bound orb what amounts to an annoying summer cold. “Next up,” Earth appears prepared to announce. “Let’s see if another species can do better in a few million years. Pardon the mess; the last tenants were real assholes.”

For our own sake, for the sake of all life, and in the name of simple enlightened self-interest, we need to change everything about how we exist as creatures on this planet, and we need to do it now.

It is almost, but not quite, too late.

SitRep: Biden/Harris? Just More "Change We Can Believe In" ~~ Loren Bliss

SitRep: Biden/Harris? Just More "Change We Can Believe In"

MY APOLOGY FOR Dispatches' long silence.

Convinced there is no way to defeat our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters save by doing whataver may be necessary to survive their ongoing campaigns of exterminate-the-Working-Class ecogenocide -- the murderously weaponized profiteering by which they are replacing us with slaves and robots -- I have been trying since last November to find some new pathway for this blog. At that I may have succeeded; my new approach might be termed "speculative futurism" -- that is, if by some miracle we have any future at all. But its launch -- at present a collection of handwritten notes that fill two legal pads -- has been repeatedly delayed by the need to complete several more mundane projects I trust will be infinitely more useful to those who inherit my few possessions.

And now our relentlessly Neoliberal (Neonazi) politics, in the form of six exceptionally disturbing reports in the daily horror show of local, state, federal and global news, has added its own depressing taint: 

The Republican Party has Turned Fascist and is Now the Most Dangerous Threat in the World
So triumphs the (mostly clandestine) termination of USian democratic process our Masters began with the Wall Street Bankers' (quickly forgiven and forgotten) Plot c. 1929-1934 to turn the U.S. into an ally -- and more likely a colony -- of Nazi Germany.  

Supreme Court Rules Against Union Recruiting on California Farms
This completes the methodical murder of the USian labor movement begun by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1974.

With support of Biden, federal court backs Trump’s police-state assault on peaceful protests in Lafayette Square
A horror story accurately summarized by its headline.

Time to Say "You're Fired" to Merrick Garland?
See obvious reasons above.

Military Document Puts (All) Socialists in League With Neo-Nazis
In other words, any form of socialist organizing is to be made illegal.

Appearance Versus Essence: Biden is Stabilizing, Not Ending, Neoliberalism
As predicted, the "Democratic" (sic) Party is again functioning as the Republican Fifth Column.

Indeed the news has become so incessantly horrific, I -- a near-lifelong journalist -- radically reduced my reading of it after by some miracle (thank you Goddess!) we managed to get the Hitler-wannabe Trump and the WitchFinder-General-wannabe Pence at least temporarily out of the federal executive branch.

But since that deceptive "victory," it has become painfully obvious nothing of substance will change under the new regime -- that in hideous truth the only "change we can believe in" (exactly as under Barack the Betrayer) -- is that our Masters will continue to worsen our lives. 

And now we know the Democrats will do as they did before 2018 -- that is, everything possible to ensure the overt Nazis take full power in 2024.

*****

BECAUSE I AM fervently committed to de-politicizing Dispatches, I am also publishing here today a commentary from earlier this month, originally intended as the beginning of a preface to an introduction of the new Dispatches, but now revised for presentation here as what I hope will by my last purely political commentary ever. For when truth is shrunken to pearls before swine, when our Masters' Moronic Majority has been permanently conditioned to such moral imbecility it reflexively applauds atrocities as victories, then journalism is reduced to utter pointlessness, to naught but (another) exercise in skull-versus-boulder futility.  

Initially what I wrote was in favorable response to "A Kinder, Gentler US Empire Is Not Possible"; I sought to employ this exceptionally thought-provoking column by Caitlin Johnstone as the peg upon which to hang my withdrawal from political journalism. 

While I wholeheartedly agree with Ms. Johnstone’s hypothesis and salute her courage for daring express it,  I soon realized I must also respectfully suggest she has not taken it to it’s ultimately unavoidable conclusion, to wit: whether our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters have revealed themselves to be the sadistic moral imbeciles they truly are or remain closeted as Democrats and other pseudo-humanitarians, the ultimate lesson of human history is that all genuinely progressive movements -- that is, any truly humanitarian movement -- will be methodically destroyed at birth or as soon as possible afterward.

Note I am 81 years old, a near-lifelong Marxian formerly self-disguised by sometimes award-winning journalistic necessity, first as a "liberal Democrat" (until arson, almost certainly by federal agents, destroyed all my life's work in 1983); next as a "democratic socialist" (until the forcible retirement imposed by the ecogenocidal profiteering of '08-'09 cost me everything save a miserly Social Security pension and damned me to ever-deadlier poverty).  I am also a seasoned veteran of defeat: the (failed) post-Sputnik campaign to make USian K-12 brainwashing more like Euro/Soviet education and thus far less hostile to science, mathematics, the humanities and original thinking in general; the (failed) Civil Rights Movement; the (failed) Anti-Southeast Asian War Movement, which despite its innumerable lies to the contrary was pathetically immaterial to Vietnamese victory, won solely by the infinite courage of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People's Liberation Army;  the (failed) Back-to-the-Land Movement; the (failed) Alternative Press Movement; and the (repeatedly failed) Labor Movement.

Though I voted for Obama twice -- votes I considered meaningless apart from their function in preserving the franchise -- by  2011 I had dubbed him "Barack the Betrayer" and had recognized his “change we can believe in” as the greatest Big Lie of political betrayal in USian presidential history; during that same period of enlightenment I was repeatedly booted in the metaphorical gonads by the irrefutable and therefore terrifying technological truth our ever-worsening circumstances are now so universal they have become inescapable save by death -- precisely as our Masters intend.

Thus, recognizing I truly had nothing left to lose, I joined the earliest Tacoma-activist ranks of the (failed) Occupy uprising, at the same time publicly acknowledging the Communist-at-heart I had secretly been at least since the murderous aftermath of the coup of 22 November 1963 proved to me our species' one and only genuinely humanitarian alternative was a definitively transitional Dictatorship by the Proletariat -- a true reformation now rendered forever impossible by the defeat of the Soviet Union.  

I was also an early activist in the (failed) Tacoma $15 Now Movement, though worsening health forced me to drop out several months before its defeat by the already reliably subjugated voters.

Yet even then I moronically retained just a bit of hopefulness.

But now after living through the cunningly disguised but effectively genocidal Neoliberal weaponization of the first 18 or so months of the Covid-19 pandemic, I can no longer doubt all is lost, certainly for modern society. In which context the entire global space-race becomes nothing more than an all-time epic of colossal propaganda and obscenely costly psychological warfare intended to maintain the cult of compulsory optimism. How? By distracting us from the ever-more-undeniable reality of an apocalypse already well underway – and most likely fatal to our entire species.

Why – or perhaps how – have I at last achieved some semblance of intellectual realism?

More appropriately, what enabled me to escape what Chris Hedges aptly terms the "curse" of optimism?

I escaped because anyone who recognizes the terminal magnitude of patriarchal technology also understands there is no power on this planet capable of overcoming our Masters' wealth-sustained (and therefore eternally unbreakable) monopolies on the technologies of universal surveillance and thermonuclear terror.

In societal reaction to which – or so I strongly suspect – our burgeoning belief in “space aliens” is most likely nothing more than the military-technology-fostered 21st Century reinforcement of our self-destructive dependence on adult versions of the Santa-Claus myth, specifically the variously named patriarchal god of both the socioeconomically suicidal belief in the biological absurdity called “eternal life” and the maximized ecogenocidal malevolence of a misogyny that in its apocalyptic ejaculations of clitoris-envy damns all femaleness from our Mother Earth’s to that of our planet’s smallest distinctively gendered creatures.

It is a bit of an aside, but in psychological truth the Christmas Santa is our starter-god; he introduces us to the same terror that defines not only the globally dominant patriarchal god Yahweh/Jesu/Allah, but also all the planet’s governments assembled – whether knowingly or not – using the YJA biblical Erector-set: “he sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake; he knows if you’ve been bad or good; obey or burn at the stake.” In other words, it’s the same enslave-the-Working-Class scam whether invoked as Santa or Jesus or any other allegedly “divine” (and therefore “infallible”) would-be “savior.”

If space aliens exist, our own species' history should tell us they are undoubtedly here as conquerors – which perhaps in our species’ final moments will end forever the greatest deception of all human history, the ultimate Big Lie “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” To those of us who actually know history, the truth is of course the diametrical opposite: if there is any moral arc at all, what it bends toward is ever-more-technologically enhanced – and therefore ever more inescapable – ecogenocidal tyranny.

Proof? Look how our capitalist Masters warred against the Soviet Union until it was finally destroyed by the dark undertow of the very Russian history it had sought so fervently to transform. Yet even now 64 percent of the former Soviet population tells pollsters their lives were far better when they were governed by Marxism. Ditto for the former East Germans. (Note that Foreign Policy is a Ruling Class publication, hence -- because our Masters require accurate intelligence if they are to maintain their methods of oppression at peak efficiency -- it is allowed to be a  bit more truthful in its [still-obviously biased] reporting.)

In any case, what our Masters did to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its Warsaw Pact allies proves that if any genuine (i.e. truly ecohumanitarian) revolution were to occur anywhere, it will be crushed. Remember not just the murdered Karen Silkwood but the murdered Kennedy brothers and the government-murdered victims at Chicago (Fred Hampton and Mark Clark); at Kent State University (Allison Beth Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, William Knox Schroeder and let us not forget Dean Kahler, whose life was destroyed by the  permanent paralysis inflicted by a single round of .30-caliber M2 Ball through the spine); and at Jackson State College (Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green).

But those atrocities only hint at the horrors of our now inevitable future. For had the Soviet revolutionaries been long-term disciplined enough to perpetuate their ideology not only by successfully resisting invasion, infiltration and  disinformation, but by defeating co-optation and its backup SOPs (standing operating procedures) of arrest, torture, murder and political assassination of all true progressives -- our Masters’ new Final Solution was already in their arsenals. This is the Neutron Bomb, designed specifically to exterminate hostile or rebellious populations without damaging infrastructure (gold teeth included) or reducing its post-holocaust value as loot – ever the material wealth of capitalism and its euphemism-cloaked empires.

As to the too-rapidly mutating Covid-19, I must confess it increasingly seems to me its three most plausibly deniable alternatives are (1)--the Jackson Browne/Gaia Hypothesis alternative, the punitive anger of our Mother Earth, let us hope not (yet) in terminal fulfillment of JB’s ever-more-obviously prophetic vision of “the magnitude of her fury in the final hour”; (2)--the Biblical alternative, i.e., self-imposed apocalypse by deliberate or (allegedly) accidental release and/or by any and all of the (other) diabolical forms divinely imaginable; or (3)--the space-alien bio-weapon hypothesis many humans sense but too few of us dare speak aloud, certainly not as fact but just as certainly, given UFOs, as another intuitively obvious possibility we must therefore publicly consider.

Whatever obtains, it is scarcely more than a distraction now that our downward momentum has become irreversible. Whether in service to their own moral imbecility, as puppets of extraterrestrial conquerors or in some unspeakably repugnant combination of both evils, our Neoliberal Masters have already created the intentionally addictive technologies of tyranny that doom us all, exactly as prophesied by the darkest science fiction. Worse, they have weaponized their technology into the instrument of our ultimate self-betrayal, the now-inescapable shackles of limitless surveillance falsely peddled and gullibly embraced as a technology of human bonding. With the flawed but nevertheless Working-Class-exemplary Soviet Union gone forever and China permanently reduced to a slave-state capitalism indistinguishable in its ecogenocidal sadism from that of the avowed Neoliberalism that rules the rest of this planet, I cannot doubt all is truly lost.

Yet resistance remains vital to ourselves and to our offspring and to theirs and thus to the sustenance of human spirit, yes even and most especially now when any hope for betterment or promise of rescue is banished by our ever-more-obvious subjugation, and the sci-fi prophecy of "resistance is futile” has in fearsome fact become the one pivotal truth of all our lives -- which means survival itself may soon be our sole remaining possibility for revolutionary defiance.

LB/14-23 June 2021

-30-

 

BIDEN MUST STOP PIPELINES TO DELIVER CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

 https://popularresistance.org/biden-must-stop-pipelines-to-deliver-on-climate-change-and-environmental-justice/

~~posted for dmorista ~~

The Mountain Valley Pipeline And Others Awaiting Approval Are Nails In America’s Climate Coffin.

And most are concentrated among vulnerable communities.

Four years of President Donald Trump have cost America dearly. We lost our global leadership on addressing climate change and saw the struggle for environmental justice thwarted here at home. President Joe Biden has defined both of these objectives as cornerstones of his legacy, but a huge interstate methane gas pipeline now being rammed through the Appalachian Mountains threatens to undermine the progress his administration has promised.

The 42-inch diameter Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) would run 303 miles from West Virginia to Virginia, and it is one of the biggest U.S. gas pipelines in process. The pipeline’s climate impact is estimated to be equivalent to about 23 typical coal plants, or more than 19 million passenger vehicles. That does not include a proposed 74-mile extension of the pipeline into North Carolina.

Methane gas is a climate change double whammy. It’s a fossil fuel and, when burned for energy, releases the planet-warming greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. But methane itself is a very potent greenhouse gas, and when some of it inevitably escapes into the atmosphere during hydraulic fracturing, we get further warming.

Pipelines Affect Disadvantaged People

Yet these harmful pipeline projects continue. Two other major interstate methane gas pipelines, the PennEast and the Pacific Connector, are being challenged, while more than a dozen are waiting for approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission – each another nail in America’s climate coffin.

A recent national analysis found that the vast network of existing transmission pipelines are disproportionately concentrated where people experience high levels of “social vulnerability,” a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention index of race, socioeconomic status, age, type of housing, language spoken and other factors.

It should come as no surprise that the big energy corporations behind the MVP who are willing to profit at the price of hurricanes, wildfires, floods and droughts are equally willing to trample local people. They even seem willing to trample the dead.

The MVP pipeline and its extension roughly follow the Native American Great Trading Path through Virginia and North Carolina, and tribal representatives are concerned the projects would desecrate sacred sites. Construction of the MVP mainline has already impacted sites on the traditional homeland of the Monacan Indian Nation (federally recognized in 2018), and Occaneechi, Saponi and Tutelo tribes, including a burial mound near Roanoke, Virginia, dating back several thousand years.

Despite requests by tribes for consultation with the FERC to ensure cultural resources were protected, they were largely ignored. The developer, describing the burial mound as a rock “push pile,” has clear-cut the woodlands within yards of the site.  Last month, FERC reached out to the Monacan Indian Nation to start consultation.

Then there are the lower-income and elderly rural residents along the MVP route, too often disenfranchised when confronted with these kinds of projects. Almost half of the 17 affected counties in West Virginia and Virginia have poverty rates higher than the respective state average, and 14 of the counties have more elderly than average.

Two of the MVP’s three West Virginia compressor stations – significant sources of air pollution – are in counties where 1 in 5 people live below the poverty line, counties “considered environmental justice communities,” according to FERC.

Colonizer Mentality On Display

The MVP has also been an unmitigated disaster for water quality. Regulators in the two states have cited the developer for more than 350 clean water violations, amounting to more than $2 million in fines.

Now, the company is seeking permission from federal agencies to bore under or trench through hundreds more streams, rivers and wetlands, threatening countless water resources. In one case, the developer wants to drill under the Greenbrier River in West Virginia, a huge effort that would use 1 million gallons of water and take months, putting at risk the drinking water for a local public service district.

The MVP, announced in 2014, is still roughly only half-built, more than three years behind its original schedule and almost 100% over budget. It’s one of the last-ditch efforts of the fossil fuel industry to squeeze out every penny in profit before it goes the way of the dinosaurs. It’s also a clear example of the colonizer mentality of industry special interests, who have done unimaginable harm and put the planet in a climate crisis.

We fervently hope the Biden administration intends to make genuine progress on the paired crises of climate change and environmental justice. The MVP, for starters, has no place in that vision for America.

What does Biden’s summit spree tell us about the future of U.S. empire?

 https://mronline.org/2021/06/19/what-does-bidens-summit-spree-tell-us-about-the-future-of-u-s-empire/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~ 

NATO heads of state at the alliance’s summit in Brussels

Joe Biden took part in several key international meetings over the last week covering a wide range of issues but with one key goal in mind: intensify the new Cold War with China and construct a global front towards this end. This is the most intensive series of diplomatic summits for the Biden administration yet, and provides key insights about how it plans to manage the affairs of U.S. empire.

The first major event took place in the UK, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson hosted the other members of the “Group of 7” club of advanced imperialist economies from June 11 to 13. Biden took credit for pushing the other leaders to attack China by name for the first time in the closely-watched communique issued at the conclusion of the summit. The communique was designed to provocatively touch on the issues that China considers to be core to its sovereignty and the integrity of its national territory.

The G7 called on China “to respect … those rights, freedoms and high degree of autonomy for Hong Kong enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law”. It also demanded that China “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, especially in relation to Xinjiang”. The communique expressed support for “peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues. We remain seriously concerned about the situation in the East and South China Seas and strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo and increase tensions.”

These words are dripping in hypocrisy. For 150 years Hong Kong was ruled in a completely dictatorial fashion by the British Empire with no guaranteed political rights for its residents, who were colonial subjects of the Queen of England. The city returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 after having been stolen in the infamous Opium Wars of the 19th century, a development the G7 leaders are effectively trying to undo by supporting the separatist protest movement. The manufacturing of the “Uighur genocide” issue by the United States and allied powers similarly seeks to slice off a major section of China’s northwestern territory and damage its reputation internationally. And far from promoting “peace and stability”, the United States and others routinely sail warships and fly military aircraft through the Taiwan Strait in deliberate provocations against China. Taiwan, formally known as the Republic of China, was seized by the defeated forces of dictator Chiang Kai-shek at the conclusion of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 with U.S. backing and is rightfully claimed by China as part of its national territory.

The Biden administration along with the other G7 leaders fueled the baseless conspiracy theory that Coronavirus was unleashed onto the world accidentally or intentionally by a virology lab in China. This is clearly intended to compensate for the imperialist countries’ woefully poor performance containing the pandemic relative to China. A similar logic was at play with the pledge by the G7 to donate one billion COVID vaccine doses to poorer nations. Especially considering how wealthy the major western powers are compared to China, the Chinese government’s extensive efforts to aid 66 other countries’ vaccination efforts has put them to shame.

A spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry strongly rejected the G7 communique, which it said sought to, “wantonly smear China and blatantly interfere in its internal affairs.” The ministry affirmed that,

Gone are the days when one country or a group of countries dictated the world.

The United States and European powers made economic moves to deepen their aggressive posturing towards China. On June 15, a U.S.-European Union Trade and Technology Council was established with the goal of coordinating policies to constrain China’s ability to trade with the rest of the world and pursue its economic development. The U.S. and European leaders pledged the “development and deployment of new technologies based on our shared democratic values”. It is ludicrous that the government that developed the monstrous NSA electronic surveillance state that spies on its own population along with much of the rest of the world feels the right to lecture China on democratic values in technology. To underscore their commitment to coordinating economic policy as part of a united front against China, U.S. and European officials brokered an end to their long-running dispute over subsidies for corporate giants Boeing and Airbus.

NATO Summit

On June 14, immediately after the conclusion of the G7 summit, the leaders of the NATO military alliance gathered in Brussels. There, the leaders declared for the first time that China constituted a “systemic challenge to the rules-based international order”. The “rules-based international order” is a euphemism frequently used to refer to the existing world order dominated by the U.S.-led bloc of imperialist powers.

This represents a historic shift in the mission of NATO. Founded in 1949, the goal of NATO was to prepare for a new world war with the Soviet Union, and ensure that all the major capitalist powers would be united in their global confrontation with the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has served in large part as a mechanism to threaten Russia—now capitalist but still outside of the control of the traditional imperialist powers.

The elevation of China to the status of a “threat” of the same magnitude as Russia is a serious escalation. It also further disproves NATO’s assertion that it is a “collective defense” organization for the North Atlantic, considering that it has now taken up stoking war in East Asia as a core task.

Biden-Putin meeting

Biden capped his week of diplomacy with a highly-anticipated meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Biden has a long history of hostility towards Russia. He was effectively put in charge of Ukraine by the Obama administration following the 2014 coup that installed an anti-Russian government, is a proponent of the debunked conspiracy theory that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, and shortly after taking office as president called Putin a “killer”—which led to the withdrawal of the Russian ambassador to the United States and subsequently the withdrawal of the U.S. ambassador to Russia.

Anti-Russia hardliners in the U.S. political elite were disappointed that Biden expressed something less than absolute, unmitigated hostility at the Putin summit. The tone of the meeting was in marked contrast to for instance the Alaska summit with top Chinese officials in March, where the U.S. side was senselessly belligerent and saw the meeting as little more than an opportunity to raise ideologically-charged criticisms of China’s system of government. But at the same time little was done in the way of concrete action to change the status quo of simmering tension.

Biden described his policy towards Russia as “strategic stability”. This essentially means the preservation of the status quo instead of a further deterioration in relations. Towards that end, Biden and Putin agreed to hold ongoing talks between their respective countries’ officials on the issues of cybersecurity and arms control. They also put Biden’s “killer” remark behind them and agreed to send their ambassadors back to their posts.

But the core issues that have put the United States and Russia on a collision course remain unchanged: the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, the conflict in Ukraine, efforts at regime change in Russia-aligned Belarus, the war in Syria, and others. “Strategic stability” suggests that Biden does not intend to make any major moves to resolve these conflicts.

Biden’s preference for “strategic stability” is likely motivated in large part by his desire to focus on the new Cold War with China. Russia and China have been developing progressively closer relations in the face of deepening hostility from the United States in recent years. Keeping China and Russia divided has long been a key goal of U.S. foreign policy, and its ability to achieve this was key to its success in the original Cold War. Momentarily softening pressure on Russia to foster suspicion in China (and vice versa) is a tried and true tactic in the toolkit of U.S. imperialism.

On the road to war

While Biden and his top officials were busy escalating global tensions with statements, press conferences and communiques; bombers, fighter jets and warships in East Asia were demonstrating the real-world consequences of these reckless moves.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Navy announced it had deployed the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier along with a guided-missile destroyer and a guided-missile cruiser to the South China Sea. The South China Sea is the site of numerous territorial disputes between neighboring countries including China, which the United States has long sought to inflame by sailing warships through contested waters.

Also on Tuesday, China’s air force flew 28 planes into an area around Taiwan’s airspace known as an Air Defense Identification Zone—the largest number of mainland aircraft yet to be sent into the ADIZ. This maneuver was carried out in retaliation to the G7 communique that raised the issue of Taiwan for the first time. China needed to demonstrate that it would not back down from its rightful claim to sovereignty over all of its territory.

Reports surfaced this week that the Pentagon was mulling the creation of a permanent naval task force to patrol the waters surrounding China. This task force would be led by the United States but also involve forces from U.S. allies. While it has yet to be confirmed, the task force is conceptualized along the lines of the Standing Naval Forces Atlantic that operated during the original Cold War. Should this come to pass, it would represent a major ratcheting up of military pressure on China.

The Biden administration is pursuing a foreign policy completely at odds with the interests of workers in the United States. If a war between the United States and China were to ever break out, the consequences for every person on the planet would be catastrophic. In the meantime, trillions of dollars that could otherwise be used to solve social problems will instead be wasted on instruments of destruction. And for what? The continued domination of U.S. banks and corporations over the whole world is not a cause worth dying for.

America’s Gun Obsession is Rooted in Slavery ~~ Carol Anderson

https://www.blackagendareport.com/americas-gun-obsession-rooted-slavery

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Carol Anderson

 

16 Jun 2021

  

America’s Gun Obsession is Rooted in Slavery

The sheer brutality of human bondage created an overwhelming fear among whites of the enslaved’s capacity and desire for retribution.

“The militias’ all-important role was to quash revolts, especially if the uprising was widespread, as in the 1740 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina.”

Bodies are piling up all over the second amendment as two of America’s pandemics converge. The “plague of gun violence” and the inability to mount an effective response, even in the wake of multiple mass shootings, is, unfortunately, rooted in the other pandemic gripping the United States: anti-Blackness and the sense that African Americans are a dangerous threat that can only be neutralized or stopped by a well-armed white citizenry.

For too long, the second amendment has been portrayed with a founding fathers aura swaddled in the stars and stripes.

But “a well-regulated militia” wasn’t, as the story goes, about how valiant and effective the militias were in repelling the British. George Washington was disgusted with their lack of fighting ability and the way the men would just cut and run from battling against a professional army. Nor was the militia reliable as a force to uphold the law. In Shays’ Rebellion, bands of armed white men, who were in the state’s militia, attacked the Massachusetts government because of foreclosures and debt seizures, demonstrating, again, how unreliable the militia were. Boston merchants had to hire mercenaries to put down the rebellion.

On the other hand, where the militia had been steadfast was in controlling the enslaved Black population. Access to guns for white people was essential for this function.

“The second amendment has been portrayed with a founding fathers aura swaddled in the stars and stripes.”

In 1788, at the constitutional ratification convention in Virginia, a major source of contention was that the draft constitution had placed the training and arming of the states’ militia under federal control. Virginians Patrick Henry and George Mason balked, and raised the specter of a massive slave revolt left unchecked because Congress could not be trusted to summon the forces to protect the plantation owners. Mason warned that if and when Virginia’s enslaved rose up (as they had before), whites would be left “defenseless.” Patrick Henry explained that white plantation owners would be abandoned because “the north detests slavery”. In short, Black people had to be subjugated and contained and state control of the militia was the way to do that.

The sheer brutality of human bondage, where plantation owners were notorious for “barbarities such as scalding, burning, castrating and extracting the tongues or eyes of slaves”, had created an overwhelming fear among whites of the enslaved’s capacity and desire for retribution. A series of revolts in the 1600s and 1700s terrified white residents and led to a slew of laws forbidding Black people from having any weapons, including guns. The militias’ all-important role was to quash those revolts, especially if the uprising was widespread, as in the 1740 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina.

“Mason warned that if and when Virginia’s enslaved rose up (as they had before), whites would be left ‘defenseless.’”

This function of the militias was so important during the war of independence that governments such as that in South Carolina devoted the lion’s share of their white manpower to the containment of the enslaved. As a result, the colony did not have enough white men to join the Continental Army and repel the British. The calculus was simple: it was more important to the plantation owners in the colonial government to maintain slavery and control Black people than to fight for American independence.

In other words, concerns about keeping enslaved Black people in check are the context and background to the second amendment. The same holds true for today.

In May 2000, NRA president Charlton Heston invoked the constitution and then asserted, as he held a 19th-century-era rifle over his head, that the only way that Al Gore and other liberals would take his gun would be “from my cold dead hands.” That unyielding statement was a response to his people supposedly being under attack. Three years earlier Heston had declared: “Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle-class, Protestant or – even worse – admitted heterosexual, gun-owning or – even worse – NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff.”

Nearly two decades later the Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who bragged about carrying her Glock to work in Washington DC, echoed that same defiance and fear as she wrote to her followers: “I told Beto [O’Rourke] HELL NO to taking our guns.” Without weapons, she exclaimed in a fundraising ad, her overwhelmingly white constituency would be left defenseless against “gang members, drug runners and thugs,” pejoratives that are often deployed as synonyms for African Americans.

“Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle-class, Protestant…”

Previously, Dana Loesch, NRA spokeswoman, had painted a similar picture of “them” screaming “racism,” breaking windows, burning cars, bullying and terrorizing “the law-abiding.” And, she added, when the police are called “to stop this madness, “they” get outraged. The only way we save our country and our freedom, she asserted, is to “fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.” Clearly, the same clenched one that Heston held over his head holding a gun.

Thus, the slaughters in Sandy Hook, the Pulse Club in Orlando, Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and San Bernardino did not lead to any meaningful gun safety laws despite the staggering casualties. The rampant anti-Blackness that dominated Barack Obama’s presidency helped to short-circuit a tangible, legislative response. Instead, the fear of being left defenseless to a nation with a sizable Black population and Black leadership was palpable. Gun sales soared by 158% as did the rise of anti-Black rightwing militias.

The Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who has an A rating from the NRA, sums it up. He didn’t fear white insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol, injured 140 police officers, built a gallows to “hang Mike Pence” and hunted for Nancy Pelosi; he would have been afraid, however, if it had been Black Lives Matter. Indeed, because that fear and the second amendment mean that Black lives don’t matter. And whites and others caught in the crosshairs of mass shootings are the collateral damage and pay the price.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American studies at Emory University. She is the author of White Rage and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

“ 0 GIVE $ Record Heat and Flimsy Power Grid Across US Illustrates Urgent Need for Green Infrastructure ~~ Julia Conley

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/06/16/record-heat-and-flimsy-power-grid-across-us-illustrates-urgent-need-green

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

"Texas' grid shutting down in both cold and heat," said one Democratic lawmaker, "underscores the facts we need to invest in clean and renewable energy infrastructure. Immediately."

JULIA CONLEY, STAFF WRITER

June 16, 2021

With states across the southern and western United States facing record high temperatures weeks before the hottest months of the year, scientists and progressive lawmakers on Wednesday doubled down on calls for green infrastructure to ensure the nation is prepared for increasing levels of extreme weather on a rapidly warming planet. 

For the second time in four months, state regulators in Texas on Monday warned residents that the demand for energy was straining the state's power grid, asking millions to set their thermostats to 78 degrees or higher, turn off lights, and avoid washing clothes and cooking. 

Nevada and Arizona residents were also advised about drought conditions, wildfires, and extreme heat, and in California regulators on Tuesday warned people that they may soon be asked to conserve energy as parts of the state saw temperatures rising to 110 degrees and several wildfires burning. 

Temperatures across Texas have reached the 90s this week, and the power demand on Monday came to 70 gigawatts—breaking the state's record for June and coming close to the maximum that the grid was able to offer with some power plants offline for reasons that were unclear.

The New York Times noted that in the state's deregulated energy system, power producers sometimes "simply choose not to offer electricity into the market because it might not prove economically beneficial, leaving customers short on energy and paying high prices for the power they do get."

Following the winter storm in Texas in February that left nearly five million homes and businesses without electricity for days and was linked to more than 100 deaths, state lawmakers introduced legislation to better weatherize the power grid, but critics said this week's heat wave has demonstrated how the plan is inadequate.

"If we talk about infrastructure without considering how that infrastructure needs to match the climate conditions from today on into the future, then we're building something that won't stand a chance," Julie McNamara, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Times. 

According to The Guardian, solar power generation—demand for which skyrocketed after February's power failure—has kept millions of Texans' lights from going out this week. 

"We have over five times as much solar as we had a few years ago and that made the difference in having these afternoons when we've had calls for conservation," Dan Cohan, a civil engineering professor at Rice University, told The Guardian. "There likely would have been rolling blackouts if we didn't have solar farms online."

Kevin Doffing, a Houston resident who bought a solar energy system after the winter storm, told the Times, "I just don't see how we keep doing what we've been doing and expect different results."

The state's power grid was "deregulated and designed 20 years ago," said Mike Collier, a former adviser to President Joe Biden who is running for lieutenant governor in the state, and is now in "desperate need of modernization and simply hasn't kept up with technology."

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) tweeted that the power grid's failure to provide for the state's needs in unseasonably cold and hot weather—both of which are expected to continue amid the climate emergency—underscores the need "to invest in clean and renewable energy infrastructure."

"The need to include climate action in any infrastructure package should not be in question," said Lori Lodes, executive director of Climate Power.

As February's storms left 69% of Texans without electricity, the state's Republican leaders were quick to blame progressives who have pushed for a Green New Deal and an infrastructure plan that includes clean energy investments—despite agreement among experts that failures of fossil fuel-powered energy sources were behind the crisis. 

In fact, said Dan Lashof of the World Resources Institute, "investing in modernizing our electricity grid to make it more resilient" is one key component of rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, despite Republican claims that the proposal doesn't qualify as "traditional" infrastructure.

"Which provisions of the American Jobs Plan do opponents want to cut when they say they want to limit spending to 'traditional' infrastructure?" Lashof asked on social media.

"If we do all of these things fast enough and at large enough scale we will create millions of good jobs, reduce death and disease, and cut our emissions of heat-trapping pollution in half within a decade," said Lashof.

'Surreal' and 'Distressing': Climate Experts' Predictions Come True With US Heatwave ~~JESSICA CORBETT

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/06/18/surreal-and-distressing-climate-experts-predictions-come-true-us-heatwave

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

'Surreal' and 'Distressing': Climate Experts' Predictions Come True With US Heatwave

"The current heatwave and drought leave no doubt, we are living the dangerous effects of the climate crisis."

JESSICA CORBETT, STAFF WRITER

June 18, 2021

As what the National Weather Service described as "dangerous and record-breaking heat" affects 50 million people across the Western United States even before the first day of summer, climate experts and activists are using the hot conditions to reiterate warnings and calls for policy change as scientists are seeing their dire predictions come true.

"The current heatwave and drought leave no doubt, we are living the dangerous effects of the climate crisis," activist and former Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer tweeted Friday. "Action is urgently needed."

Steyer shared a Thursday New York Times report on the extreme heat that also caught the attention of Campaign for Nature director Brian O'Donnell, who warned that in the absence of bold action to address the climate emergency, "this will all get much worse."

O'Donnell's ominous warning was echoed by Daniel Swain, a Colorado-based climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"We'e still a long way out from the peak of the wildfire season and the peak of the dry season," Swain told the Times. "Things are likely to get worse before they get better."

The newspaper detailed some of the current conditions in the U.S. West:

A heat dome is baking Arizona and Nevada, where temperatures have soared past 115 degrees this week and doctors are warning that people can get third-degree burns from the sizzling asphalt.

At Lake Mead, which supplies water for 25 million people in three southwestern states and Mexico, water levels have plunged to their lowest point since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s. In California, farmers are abandoning their thirstiest crops to save others, and communities are debating whether to ration tap water.

In Texas, electricity grids are under strain as residents crank their air-conditioners, with utilities begging customers to turn off appliances to help avert blackouts. In Arizona, Montana, and Utah, wildfires are blazing.

As National Weather Service meteorologist John Salmen put it to the Associated Press while discussing temperatures in and around Las Vegas that are expected to continue this weekend: "This is pretty impressive. We're seeing all-time records fall."

Swain told The Guardian that "the most distressing part is that this is very much in line with predictions. Climate scientists have been repeating essentially the same messages and warnings since before I was born."

Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas-based climate expert and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, responded similarly in comments to the newspaper.

"The extreme heat and the wildfires aren't surprising. But it is just surreal to see what you only ever saw before in your research studies and models, actually happening in real life. And you're almost dumbfounded by the speed at which your projections have become reality," she said.

A recent study co-authored by Hayhoe shows "Americans associate hot, dry days and extreme drought with global warming," but many people don't reach the same conclusion about extreme rainfall or flooding, despite experts' findings.

Citing survey results that suggest even though about three-quarters of Americans recognize that the planet is warming, less than half think it will directly harm them, she told The Guardian that "right now is a really important time for scientists to communicate with the public that climate change is here, and climate action matters."

Writing Wednesday for Intelligencer, David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, outlined what this summer could look like in California—which has seen some devastating and historic wildfires in recent years—and beyond:

Fire isn't neatly predictable, since it depends both on underlying conditions (moisture on the ground and the amount of dead flora, often called "fuel") and a considerable amount of randomness (wind events and "ignitions" both human and natural). But while there is always the possibility that ignitions could be anomalously quiet, and that the state could endure a year of off-the-charts conditions without having to fight and flee and breathe the smoke of a commensurate fire season, the outlook for 2021 isn't just bad, it is quite a bit worse than that, even if you are modeling expectations off the record-setting recent past. Across the American West, "extreme" drought conditions are more widespread than they've been in at least 20 years. The next category worse, called "exceptional" drought, typically rare, is already this year blanketing most of the West and Southwest; it's so widespread it would probably be better called "unprecedented drought," at least in the age of modern record-keeping. This week arrives, throughout the region, what is expected to be a record-breaking heat wave, with temperature warnings issued for more than 50 million people: In Phoenix, it could reach 118, and in Death Valley 127.

Already this spring, more than twice as many acres in California have burned as had by this point last year, when the state was on its way to more than doubling its previous fire record. Rerun last year's random ignitions on top of this year's underlying conditions, and you won't just have the worst season ever but, potentially, something considerably scarier still. Get relatively lucky, with fewer ignitions than is typical, and you're still probably in for the sort of season that used to set state records and scar the memory of populations as recently as a decade or two ago.

Meanwhile, in Texas, "the temperature at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on Wednesday passed 94 degrees for the sixth day in a row. It was the ninth consecutive day that the peak heat there was worse than normal," the Houston Chronicle reported Thursday.

Noting that warmer weather is an expected result of human-caused climate change, the newspaper spoke with Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, who compared that area's higher temperatures, arriving earlier and lasting longer, to "a rising tide."

"Our climate in Texas is changing," said Suzanne Scott, state director of the Nature Conservancy in Texas. "It really affects everything from our natural resources to our economy and our quality of life."

As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, the high heat comes as negotiations between the White House and Congress over an infrastructure package drag on, and the conditions in the U.S. West are bolstering progressive lawmakers and activists' position of "no climate, no deal."

According to Climate Power executive director Lori Lodes, the "extreme heat, intensifying droughts, electric grids on the brink, and fires already burning hundreds of thousands of acres out West" make clear that "the need to include climate action in any infrastructure package should not be in question."