Saturday, August 11, 2018

August 11:The things we cannot have - the things we must not have...

Today's issue of the irving press was stunning. This is a news chain that has ignored the evidence of climate change from the start, and has ignored this summer's record heat all over the world.

Just a week ago, the editorial page column by Norbert Cunningham ridiculed the idea of climate change as the phantasy of leftists - and leftists, as we all know, are all crackpots.

But his column today was a supremely intelligent and courageous one, admitting that this all is for real, and that we have ( maybe) ten to twenty years to deal with it. Maybe not.

This is a stunning break with the propaganda that has characterized the irving press from the start. I should not be surprised if Mr. Cunningham were to be removed from his position as a columnist. If so, crowds should be there in the streets to cheer him.

For the sake of the survival of all of us on this planet, we cannot waste time and money on wars. We can no longer afford the interference of billionaires in our governments. The final disaster is staring us in the face.

And the Conservative party of New Brunswick is actually campaigning to restore fracking in this province. That should tell us something about the greed of its financial backer, the servility of its leader, and the hopeless ignorance of its candidates.


And this is only one small sample of what is now happening in the world - and which is going to get worse.

Funny this story has not appeared in the irving press. Monsanto weed killer is what New Brunswick spreads on its forests - and us. It's the reason that our government got rid of our chief medical officer for raising this issue.

The irving papers are not just stinking papers. They are actively destructive.

And New Brunswickers just sit there and stare into space.

There is no hope in either the Liberals or the Conservatives. And the other parties, with better intentions, still have a distance to go in grasping reality.

This item below is reality. It explains why the wealthy like us to hate refugees and the poor. (You know, all those people who are too lazy to be rich.) In our world of political madness, the wealthy use their news media and bought politicians to put all the blame on those people they teach us to hate. Thus the election of a Donald Trump, of a Doug Ford, --of a Hitler.

So much for rule by democracy.

Thank you, Mr. irving. Thank you, all you ass-kissing Liberals and Conservatives.

CANADA IS COMPLICIT IN CHILD SLAUGHTER IN YEMEN. We supply weapons to Saudi Arabia. We have not said a word about massive child slaughter by the U.S. or the Saudis. And for those who go to church, you're not likely to hear about this satanism from a preacher whose great message is that Jesus loves us. (We don't want any nasty news at church. And certainly you won't get any at the Irving Chapel.) No. Jesus might love us. But apparently He has utter contempt for the starving and murdered children of Yemen.

As I learn about this (though not from the irving papers), I wonder where the hell are the Christians of our western world? What a farce they make of Christianity!

The most important factor in creating our modern age is the public school - open to all, and the source of most of the world's scientists, thinkers and, yes, even lawyers. The world we know, the good parts of it, would not exist without our public schools.

But capitalists don't see it that way. In their 'thinking', the purpose of schools is to make profits for the wealthy by privatizing education. The result in the U.S. is tens of millions of children who can't afford 'charter' schools, and so have to attend a public system seriously weakened by the diversion of taxes from education to profits for billionaire weapons makers.

Are private schools better? I've spent a lifetime in education. And I know of no evidence that they are better. The irvings all attended private school. I see no evidence of high intelligence in the family. Their university dropout rate is high.
And their lack of academic accomplishment unimpressive.

But the attack on public schools is on. And it's coming from people whose world view is that all that God created is here only to make profits for them.

Long ago, long, long ago, we should have made universities public. We didn't. And successive new generations are going to pay one hell of a price for that.

The lesson of World War 1 was that its human cost was far to great to have justified the war in the first place. The lesson of World War 2 was that World War 3 would be the last world war.

Despite the obvious fact that a World War 3 would destroy all life, the world immediately (particularly the U.S.) began preparing for the final war even as World War Two ended. It has been doing that ever since, partly to create an empire of the whole world controlled by American billionaires, partly to create immense profits for weapons corporations.

The  item below shows how we are in the late stages of that process.

More evidence of tomorrow's news.

Does the U.S. need its hugely expensive defence spending and aggression all over the world? No. In all of its history, the U.S. has been attacked by only one country - Japan. And even that was a setup created by the U.S. when it cut off Japanese oil supplies. (Yes. Canada did attack the U.S. in the war of 1812. But that began with an American invasion of Canada.)

In fact, ever since 1945, the U.S. has been far the most aggressive and murderous country in the world. (How dare those football players not stand up in pride at the playing of (God's) national anthem?)

There is no democracy in any government owned by the very wealthy.

Racism is common all over the world. It seems natural. If other people are different from us, they must be inferior to us because we are perfection. Like all countries, Canada has a long history of racism. Even Israel, of all nations, is profoundly racist in its treatment of arabs who are Israeli citizens, and of Africans who are converts to Judaism but, well ---black. And that's too different to be acceptable in Israel.

A general thought on it all.

Capitalism appeared gradually, beginning about five hundred years ago according to most authorities. The purpose of it was simple. It was to produce profits for private investors. It placed no obligation on the capitalists to serve any public good. It's only purpose was profit.

Anything for the public good was a matter to be handled by governments which, then as now, had no great record for interest in the public good.

Columbus' discovery of the wealth of North America touched off a frenzy of exploration, murder and plunder by western Europe - notably by Spain, Portugal, Britain and France with later help from The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. How many were murdered, starved to death, enslaved we shall never know. But the total may well have exceeded a billion.

At first, this was managed by the kings and nobles. But private capitalists came to be the majority. Their wealth enabled them to buy aristocratic rulers and even to replace them with what they called democracies. In reality, real power came under the ownership of the major capitalists.

They used that power to control national armed forces that the politicians then would send off to wars - but only to wars that would benefit the capitalists. Almost every war since then has been fought to benefit our capitalists. Canada sent troops to the Boer War not because South America threatened Canada. And Britain, which started that war, was certainly not threatened by South Africa.  Canadians died in that war - no, not for King and country. They died to make British mining speculators rich.

World War 1 happened not because countries were threatening each other. It happened because the European countries were all dominated by capitalists. And all were competing - with each other - and so all the capitalists of any country feared the capitalists of the other countries. That's why the assassination of an aristocrat was enough to trigger the greatest war to that time in history.

Immediately after that war, Canada, Britain, the U.S. and others sent troops to Russia. No. Russia was not a military threat to us. The Russian people had risen to overthrow a brutal, murderous and thieving aristocracy. In fact, that rebellion had nothing to do with us. But it was a threat to capitalism because the rebels were going to establish communism. It was capitalists, not the rest of us, who felt threatened. Eventually, under Stalin, the system did become a brutal  (and quite uncommunist) one. But our capitalists were guilty of such brutal regimes all over the world - as in their support of Chiang kai-Shek in China, of apartheid in South Africa, of dictatorships all over Latin America and in The Philippines.

Our news media taught us to hate the "evil communists" - but not the equally evil capitalists. (This is not a defence of communism. I don't know whether it would work. But even the debased form of communism under Stalin was no worse than the murderous and degrading behaviour of capitalism.)

Can capitalism work? Maybe. With some very serious controls. With an educated public. With honest and intelligent news media. With a democracy that is not controlled by billionaires. But as it is, we are dangerously close to being what the Soviet Union was under Stalin.  And that closeness is accompanied by the most destructive weapons in history.

The decisions that are important to us have fallen into the hands of people whose moral and intellectual abilities are not strong. The only thing they understand is their own greed. Greed defines all of their decisions. That's why in the U.S. and Britain, for example, they are destroying public education by privatizing it. That's why the U.S., the world's richest nation, has monstrous poverty levels and cannot provide most of its people with health care. That is why Cuba has to be punished for governing its own people. That's why American troops are poised to invade an Iran whose government has the nerve to govern its own country.

That's why Canada's Conservative party  (and, too often, the Liberals) has been eager to suck up to the rich by privatizing elements of health care and education.

That's why, from the start, the common people of countries like Canada and Britain got nothing out of industrialization and economic growth. Wages remained at starvation levels until the war and its immediate aftermath. To this day, Canadians have no idea of the horrors their ancestors had to suffer in order the pay for the 'mansions on the hill'. As a child, when I skipped school (which was frequent), I would often wander among the 19th and twentieth century splendour of the great houses in Montreal - and then go home to drink in the squalor of the homes of me and my friends.

What we've lived through from, perhaps, the late sixties, is the return to the monstrous income gaps between rich and poor as the rich use their power to plunder and impoverish us. The ignorance and reactions we're seeing in the election of Trumps and Fords is the confusion of so very much of the general population at why this is happening. They're being fed to blame immigrants, to blame nations like China (which we murdered and plundered for centuries), or nations like Iran which have done nothing whatever to us. We're taught to hate refugees whose horror and starvation are what we have created.

Public education, the greatest force to develop our understanding of our world, has been put on hold for the last hundred years. That, in addition to the irving press, is why New Brunswickers have no idea what is going on. New Brunwickers do not discuss. They do not debate. They are conditioned to believe it is bad form to have anything resembling opinion that is  different from the official ones. (I have attended a few Conservative and Liberal candidate sessions in the current election campaign. They were painful. They were really a dreadful collection of commonplace half-wits. They weren't even evil, just painfully ignorant and, so far as I could tell, with no sense even of what an election is really about. 

Well - there might have been one exception. The Conservative leader might be evil.)

Here's the picture.

Capitalist greed is spreading poverty, starvation and death all over the world. In its uncontrollable greed, it is destroying itself as we near economic collapse and a final, needless war which will kill the capitalists as well as the rest of us.

We have a population in Canada and the U.S. brought up on myths about our past and present.   (Some day, if we are to survive, our schools should be permitted to tell the truth about our histories.)

We are a very short distance from a starvation and immigration crisis. Most of the refugees will die because we won't lift a finger for them. And, eventually, if we survive that long, we will become refugees. Climate change is destroying our food supply. And, yes, it can and will happen here. And before it happens, there is a strong possibility the U.S. will invade Canada.

We have, if we're very, very lucky, ten years and maybe a bit to bring capitalism under control, to realize that socialism is not a dirty word but simply one that means we - the whole society and not capitalists -  should be controlling our own lives and governments.

We have to make it easier for education to reach all people. We cannot possibly survive in a world as illiterate as this one.  We need easy access all the way through university to those who qualify for it. We need far, far more public learning and public discussion than we are getting.

We have permitted a world in which a small number of people of no significant intelligence or sense of morality control our lives and our futures. In the present election here in New Brunswick, we have two parties that represent change to that. Neither has had the courage (?) to go deeply enough into the problem we face. But it's a start.

The centuries of conquest are over.

We now face the decades of salvation. But we first have to wake up. Please WAKE UP!

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