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Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Waking Up Alive

Dreaming Together,

Caitlin Johnstone presents the case that humans are waking up, as one might do in a dream, when just about to hit the ground from a long fall. (I'm trying.)

Tulsi Gabbard, the anti-war soldier, Congresswoman from Hawaii, and forbidden candidate for POTUS:
​ ​She strongly opposes “US regime change war policy because it has been completely counterproductive to US interests and has caused immense human suffering around the world.”
​ ​She called for ending “genocidal war in Yemen” and breaking off longstanding US relations with Saudi Arabia, a despotic crime family masquerading as a nation-state, true as well about other despotic Gulf states.
​ ​The US should stay out of Venezuela, she said, adding: It’s all “about the oil.”
“Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders, so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.”
​ ​Asked if she opposes (US-designated puppet) Guaido, US sanctions on Venezuela, and military intervention, she said “all of the above.”
Despite voting for a nonbinding congressional resolution, condemning the right to boycott Israel in support of Palestinian rights, she pledged to oppose legislation that “restrict(s) freedom of speech by imposing legal penalties against those who participate in the BDS movement.”
​ ​On Afghanistan, the longest US war in modern times with no end of it in prospect, she said she’ll “bring our troops home within the first year in office because they shouldn’t have been there this long.”
​(​They shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11 — the mother of all US state-sponsored false flags.​)​
Gabbard joined the army national guard “after the al-Qaeda terror attacks on 9/11 so I could go after those who attacked us on that day,” she said.

​I've not been able to find anything good and informative about Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal proposal, supposedly the most detailed yet.
Here is something from a few days ago. This is mostly political gobbledygook, but there are some key features.
 I see them within the framework of both Climate Change and Resource Depletion, which are linked. Oil and coal have been the forms of energy which drove the global economy to the point where it is over the past 300 years. Iron and copper mining have played huge parts.​ 
Natural resources like forests, farmland and mineral ores have been converted to toxic waste. 
We are at immediate risk of losing our support system, and we are also being poisoned by it. 
The world is being poisoned, too, but only we face losing the industrial economy which feeds and supports us.
Sanders proposes putting people to work with green jobs. 
Good idea. What will that mean? I don't know many people who do manual labor like small scale farming, tree work, and landscaping. 
How do you introduce sedentary adults to physical labor, labor that will also lose-money for the foreseeable future? 
I have some rudimentary ideas. 
Changes in education of our little children are critical, and also need to stop being so big-brotherish. 
Kids can grow vegetables and raise chickens at school. We can have trade-tracks in schools, like Germany does.
Sanders proposes getting off fossil fuels for electricity and transportation by 2030. I think that is an opening bid.
I think 2030 is a good time marker to have begun massive economic restructuring. 
It looks like the bottom is about to fall out of the global financialized-industrial-economy. 
We will need to be more than a financial reset. The power structure that saps productivity to feed parasites really has to be broken up. 
This happens periodically. This time it's big, because growth is over and we need to focus on personal survival, family survival, and community survival. Planetary ecology needs to survive enough to regrow in time.
 We need to become loving stewards in that time.
We need to become loving stewards of life on Earth. 
That needs to be an economy. Discuss...

Charles Hugh Smith:
​ ​But alas, there is no self-sustaining, self-reinforcing expansion of growth; there are only massive, increasingly fragile asset bubbles, stagnant wages and a New Gilded Age as the handful of bankers, financiers and corporations that were handed unlimited nearly free moneyenriched themselves at the expense of everyone else.
​ ​Central banks' near-zero interest rates and trillions in new credit destroyed discipline and price discovery, the bedrock of any economy, capitalist or socialist.

Sanders talks about nationalizing the power grid. Big risk. Public utilities, though, are appropriate. Rentier capitalism needs to quite sucking the life from the economy at every level.
​ ​“You can’t nibble around the edges any more,” says Sanders in explaining his plan to essentially nationalize electricity production in the U.S. The full interview is here.
​ ​Bernie Sanders recently released his plan for implementing the Green New Deal. These include such comprehensive goals as transitioning to 100% renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030 and decarbonizing the entire economy by 2050 (full details here).

Globalization Transferred the American Economy to China. Paul Craig Roberts. 
Yeah, we need a working, productive economy, composed of lots of little local productive economies.​ 

Sanders says he is the candidate to take down Trump. He might be. The DNC still does not want him, but they have had some years to consider things. Their major donors don't want him, but do they see what is coming toward them? Sanders has always cut good deals with capitalists. Always. He's nothing for elites to fear existentially. They know this. He's old, and they can look at what he did as mayor of Burlington. Deals.

Here is a meticulous report from Joe Biden's 8/23/19 town hall talk, by a long term contributor to Naked Capitalism blog. 
Joe is looking older than his years, thin, frail, and is wandering in his talks, not staying on task. Well described.

There is always the very real possibility that the DNC desperately wants to lose the presidency to Trump next year, scapegoat him and sweep to power on the ugly rebound. They are paralyzed.
Senate battleground Dems shun 'Medicare for All'
Republican strategists are already working relentlessly to tie vulnerable Democratic incumbents to 'Medicare for All.'

Agriculture can integrate carbon into the soil, or with diesel, machines and chemicals, release it into the atmosphere, for the cheapest food ever.
​ A​ll plants absorb carbon as they photosynthesize, including corn, soybeans, wheat and the other commodity crops that now blanket huge swaths of the planet. And just like the trees in a forest, crops interact with microbes in the soil to produce organic matter, a stable form of underground carbon storage that outlasts the growth and decay of aboveground vegetation. Farmland is—potentially—a vast, inexpensive way to sequester carbon and store it long-term.
​ ​The problem is that modern agricultural practices emit far more carbon than they sequester. In addition to emissions from tractor fuel, cow burps and petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, common practices such as slash-and-burn, and even old-fashioned tillage, release carbon stored in plants and soils into the atmosphere.  

What is Israel doing blowing up an Iraqi weapons depot with drones based in Iraq, on a US airstrip? Thanks Eleni.
Israel is proving that it can hit Iran anywhere, at far remove, on Israel's timing, and is seeking to provoke Iran into action that would justify a massive US attack. Draining Iran of scarce financial resources is an obvious goal. Blocking cooperation through roads and pipelines, between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon is also a major goal. The "axis of resistance" is playing very conservatively against Israel/US.

 Hoping To Get Along

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