This was Stuart Scott’s first video to go viral, recorded at COP-20 in Lima in 2014. It was the most viewed video on this channel until recently. It’s been copied in whole or part onto numerous other channels, collectively obtaining several hundred thousand views. The original visuals were a videos of a videos being displayed poorly in a darkened room. We are re-releasing it now, with improved visual quality, because we think it deserves all the attention it can possibly get. This is the one to watch (again for a refresher?) and share. It’s a rigorous indictment of our present economic system which, based on unlimited growth, will kill us in short order if we don’t act. We have increased our population and demands on the planet exponentially in the past century, since the current NeoClassical (growth) economic model was put in place (by Wall Street bankers) as the only thing being taught in business schools because it is the system that benefits bankers the most. The central, unique realization contained in this video (15:50) is that Money has become the ‘operating system’ of global civilization. Note the difference between ‘money’ – the stuff in your pocket, the means of negotiating trades and storing value for future use – and ‘Money’ – the obligatory system of law, custom, habit, which forces everyone from the poorest to the richest to obey certain rules all aimed at growing the human economic system within a finite planet of limited resources and even more limited ability to absorb our wastes. The confusion between money (benign) and Money (a malignancy) is one of the sources of our problem. Money is creating more and more money by using humanity (the host). As with conventional virus and cancer, the disease itself cannot see that it is killing its host, us. Money has captured our minds and our behaviors, and has infiltrated and shaped our institutions at every level of society. Money own us, not the other way around as we commonly believe. Our food systems have been optimized for Money (maximum profit), not for nutrition or health. Our medical system has been optimized for Money, not for health outcomes (the integrity of individuals in the system notwithstanding) but for maximum profit. It is more profitable for a person to remain sick and taking medicine than it is for them to be cured of the cause of their illness. Our supposed ‘news media’ is for the most part a matrix for delivering advertising. Wherever you look, Money has insinuated itself into civilization and masks the reality of our situation from us with distractions and synthetic realities so that ‘consumer confidence’ will remain high and we will keep buying cheap goods that are made to break and be replaced as quickly as possible. Until we see that our dysfunction (NeoClassical growth) economic system is killing us, and until we name it properly and not let it hide by having ‘owned’ the simple classification ‘economics’, we cannot see that there are viable alternatives that support life and not the simple goal of creating more money. We must change our economic system, and we must act fast, because there’s this threat of a sudden massive burst of methane from the arctic offshore looming over us, and threats of progressive crop failures already begun, and ramping up quickly. Our recommendation is #EcologicalEconomics, also sometimes known as Steady State Economics, espoused by Dr. Herman Daly and the International Society for Ecological Economics. Watch and share this video, as our survival depends on us understanding this basic, self-destructive principle by which our society is organized. We have to change this principle immediately, collectively.
Month: October 2019
Video from the conference: interviews and plenary talks
RESOURCE POLITICS
ESRC STEPS Centre conference | 7th-9th Sept 2015These videos from Sept. 2015 do look interesting to me!
Watch video interviews with key speakers and footage from selected plenary sessions below.
Interview clips
1-2 minute clips of interviews with Betsy Hartmann, Rohan D’Souza, Myint Zaw, Michael Watts and Dianne Rocheleau on resource politics, filmed during the conference. Click on the icon in the top left hand corner to browse the list.
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A 100 TRILLION DOLLAR STORYTELLING CAMPAIGN
October 6, 2019
By Cory Morningstar
. . .
“On August 20, 2018, Ingmar Rentzhog, the founder and CEO of We Don’t Have Time posted the “lonely girl” tweet. The tweet featured Greta Thunberg. This was the first day of her climate strike. She sat on a sidewalk and said nothing beside a sign. Just two months prior, social media accounts had been created in her name. Rentzhog, whose tech corporation is partnered with Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, tagged five Twitter accounts: Greta Thunberg, Zero Hour (youth movement), Jamie Margolin (the teenage founder of Zero Hour), Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, and the People’s Climate Strike Twitter account.
The third person to respond to Rentzhog’s tweet was We Mean Business co-founder Callum Grieve. Grieve responded to Greta with a personal message adding the hashtag #WeDontHaveTime. We Mean Business represents 477 investors with 34 trillion USD in assets. [July 4, 2019] The founding partners of We Mean Business are BSR, CDP, Ceres, The B Team, The Climate Group, The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (CLG), and the WBCSD. Together, these organizations represent the most powerful – and ruthless – corporations on the planet, groups salivating to unleash 100 trillion dollars to fuel the fourth industrial revolution. To save a global economic system teetering on collapse.”
. . .
“Grieve is the co-founder and director of Counter Culture, a brand development firm specializing in behavioural change campaigns and storytelling. He created Climate Week NYC for The Climate Group which launched in 2009. He has also coordinated high-level climate change communications campaigns and interventions for the United Nations, the World Bank Group, and several Fortune 500 companies. He also manages the Every Breath Matters campaign founded by Christiana Figueres, the former UNFCCC executive secretary credited with the Paris Agreement.
In response to the Thunberg tweet, Grieve added the following accounts to Rentzhog’s original tweet: The Climate Museum, Youth Climate March LA, This is Zero Hour Ft. Lauderdale, Greenpeace International, and the UNFCCC, the “official Twitter account of UN Climate Change”.
[Further reading: ACT IV: They Mean Business]
Suffice to say that tweet was code for “it’s started”. Covered by media on day one, within 12 days Thunberg would be featured in The Guardian. The rest is history.
The NGOs and foundations learned how to “herd cats” successfully for the People’s Climate March in September 2014, but never in their wildest dreams could they have imagined that in September 2019 they would so easily herd millions.”
. . .
“On September 25, 2019, the United Nations answered the global strikes with the call for a Global Green New Deal. It is quite fascinating that none of the groups and leading proponents who have mobilized the populace to demand a “Green New Deal” are sharing the UN announcement with the corresponding 201-page report. Perhaps it is because with this report, in which the word “growth” appears 392 times, it will be difficult to convince a populace that this is anything but what it actually is – a desperate attempt to save the global capitalist economic system destroying our planet.
UN calls for ‘Global Green New Deal’ to boost world economy:
“In a fresh report, the UN trade, investment and development agency (UNCTAD) called for countries to join forces and enable trillions of dollars in public sector investments to help reboot the global economy… What is needed, he told journalists, is to apply the same ambitious model used in the United States to overcome the Great Depression in the 1930s and apply it “at a global scale”… Looming global recession… UNCTAD’s flagship Trade and Development report painted a bleak picture of the global economic outlook, warning that the world risks slumping into recession next year… Even ignoring the worst downside risks, the report projected that global growth would fall to 2.3 percent this year from 3.0 percent in 2018, cautioning that global recession in 2020 was now “a clear and present danger“. [Emphasis added]
Even the reference to “climate” within the report is recognized as both a means and justification for global growth. (“A climate for change: The case for a global green expansion”)
One must wonder when the marchers and strikers will be notified.”
“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, the capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”
— Malcolm X
Volume I:
ACT I: The Political Economy of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex [https://bit.ly/2XkVrTR]
ACT II: The Inconvenient Truth Behind Youth Co-optation [https://bit.ly/2VibAYp]
ACT III: The Most Inconvenient Truth: “Capitalism is in Danger of Falling Apart” [https://bit.ly/2tBHp2B]
ACT IV: The House is On Fire! & the 100 Trillion Dollar Rescue [https://bit.ly/2TZyUKd]
ACT V: The Green New Deal is the Trojan Horse for the Financialization of Nature [https://bit.ly/2TZyOlP]
ACT VI: A Decade of Social Manipulation for the Corporate Capture of Nature [Crescendo] [https://bit.ly/2U7YBbx]
Addenda I: The Branding of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — By Any Means Necessary [https://bit.ly/2kpDDIv]
Volume I in book form: https://amzn.to/2kV6Jj9
Volume II:
An Object Lesson In Spectacle [An introduction to Volume II] [https://bit.ly/2kKLAZc]
ACT I: A Design to Win — A Multi-Billion Dollar Investment [https://bit.ly/2mjmYXF]
ACT II: Controlling the Narrative [https://bit.ly/2msdlpP]
ACT III: To Plunder What Little Remains: It’s Going To Be Tremendous [https://bit.ly/2m61flO]
ACT IV: They Mean Business [https://bit.ly/2mkPZSP]
ACT V: The Behavioural Change Project “To Change Everything” [https://bit.ly/2mr3pwL]
ACT VI: Natural Climate Manipulations [https://bit.ly/2MjT1zZ]
[ACT VII forthcoming]
[Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her recent writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation and Counterpunch. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can support her independent journalism via Patreon.]
Deadly Waters
I wonder how many people in the West know about these deadly waters and do care that something is being done about it . . .
No Class
I started reading this article. I find it stimulates my thinking, very much so. “Risking the direction for needed change by allowing capital investments to chart the course is a very dangerous idea.”
This is just one of the sentences that I would like to think about a lot . . . .And so it goes on. I want to see whether reblogging this article by John Stepling is going to help me to continue with a bit more thinking! 🙂
By John Stepling
Class analysis is not conspiracy theory. Full stop. Class exists and is part of the hierarchical system of global capitalism. The so labeled *Climate Change* crisis — as it exists on the level of Green New Deal or Extinction Rebellion — has very little to do with protecting Nature. Global warming is a fact that humanity will have to adjust to and learn to live with. So much of the rhetoric and identifications that exist in the Greta narrative are driven by a subterranean belief in technology to fix any problem. Global warming can’t be fixed. And there are enormous difficulties for the entire global population, really. . . The incursion of technology into nearly every waking moment of the daily life of the Westerner has conditioned a populace, one that doesn’t read, to see the acceleration of everything as natural. . . And capitalism is not…
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Climate scientists reveal their fears for the future
Are we a humane Society?
In this post from 2016 Peter says, that capitalism is not interested in a humane society . . . .
I made at the time this comment to Peter’s blog:
I think capitalism would not be so bad if somehow “exploitation” could be avoided. Maybe it is not that capitalism as such is inhumane, only what people make of it because of their greed and not being satisfied with profits that can be had without any exploitation of people or countries. Letting everyone have their fair share, wouldn’t that bring about a ‘humane’ society?
What do you think, would it not be possible to let everyone have their fair share if people were only willing to be totally fair in every way? People were then also able to see that it is not right to profit from things that are bad for the environment!
Who, for heaven’s sake, could have the power to change people’s behaviour??
Peter’s blog was posted in Essay and tagged Capitalism, Frankfurt School, humane behaviour, Love, Middle East, modern societies by berlioz1935
There is so much strife in the world today. Sixty-five million people are refugees and looking for a better place where they could bring up their children in safety. The refugees often assume the nations of the European Union are shining examples of a “humane” society.
I wonder where they got that idea from? We, in the West, believe that the Western nations have indeed achieved a high level of human existence. We convinced ourselves, that since the end of the 18th Century, and the birth of the Enlightenment, we had turned the corner to a better world populated by enlightened people. We thought we had become more humane.
The educational reforms following the Enlightenment produced a better-educated populace. Research and inventions pushed us progressively towards a capitalist society in which the majority of people were indeed better off in the material sense. But the seeming progress also brought extreme…
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Use Natural Climate Solutions To Protect Nature
The €ost of $aving Ourselves, Oct 26, 2018
As amazing as it seems, we seem to be a species that is unwilling to spend the money to save ourselves from extinction. Mind boggling realization. This is not just the rich, who are completely corrupted and dominated by Money. But even ordinary folks, who are unwilling to pay a bit more for their electricity or fuel to avoid the CO2 that is wreaking havoc with the climate system. What’s worse, money and the ideology it has bought, create trolls and deniers who are dead sure (emphasis on the ‘dead’ part) that these planetary changes are IN THEIR OPINION a hoax. In fact, the ‘hoax theory’ is the hoax. But Money is in control, and will have it’s way. Create more Money until the host (humanity) is gone. Sad way to end a beautiful species.
AuntyUta 