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COMMENTS on ‘Green’ billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression of ‘Planet of the Humans’ documentary

COMMENTS on ‘Green’ billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression of ‘Planet of the Humans’ documentary

Wrong Kind of Green

September 9, 2020

An informal response written by Cory Morningstar (Wrong Kind of Green Collective) to the recent Max Blumenthal piece “‘Green’ billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression of ‘Planet of the Humans’ documentary”.

 

 

Now that much (perhaps some?) of my work over the past decade is finally suitable for discussion and sharing, having been rewrapped with a Max Blumenthal bow, I’m adding some further commentary to complement the relevant piece being widely shared by filmmaker Jeff Gibbs and many more.

Let’s begin.

1. MB: “Naomi Klein, perhaps the most prominent left-wing writer on climate-related issues in the West, did not weigh in to defend “Planet of the Humans.” Instead, the Intercept columnist, social activist, and Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University was an early participant in the campaign to suppress the film.”

Adding: Video, Gloria Steinem Discussing Her Time in the Central Intelligence Agency, [running time 3m:16s]:

2. MB: “He pointed to the New York State Assembly’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act as an embodiment of the foresight of proponents of a near-total transition to renewable energy.”

Adding: The Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act heralded as “moonshot”, “historic” and “one of the World’s Most Ambitious Climate Plans” promises more than a tripling of solar by 2025.

Percentage of NYC electricity from solar, 2019: 1.40%.

[Link: https://twitter.com/elleprovocateur/status/1144253062384619521]

Adding that “renewable energy” is old news, as data, as a new class asset, has emerged as the new oil – with carbon capture and storage, nuclear, and geoengineering to be at the forefront of climate “solutions” (with little resistance).

3. MB: “35 percent of investments from clean energy and energy efficiency funds [be] invested in disadvantaged communities.”

Adding: This language can serve to situate industrial sites (infrastructure which will include the physical waste and ecological devastation) on First Nations lands (recognizing that all land has been stolen from First Nations) and marginalized/impoverished communities.

4. MB: “Jacobson’s study, according to National Geographic, was “a foundation stone” of the Green New Deal proposal put forward by Democratic Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”

Adding: The National Geographic is a leading partner in the plan to financialize nature led by the World Economic Forum, the World Wildlife Fund, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project and the United Nations, which partnered with the WEF on June 13, 2019. This is the single most important threat to the natural world, now underway – with the non-profit industrial complex in its entirety, in tandem with media, supporting it (or remaining silent on it). This is the corporate capture of the commons, global in scale. Nature is to be bought, sold and traded on Wall Street. Assigning monetary value to social capital will follow. Nicole Schwab, daughter of Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum, serves as National Geographic Society Director International  Relations, in addition to overseeing the World Economic Forum initiatives: Platform to Accelerate Nature Based Solutions – and  1tDOTorg (the Trillion Trees initiative).

[More: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40elleprovocateur%20%3A%20nicole&src=typed_query]
[Further reading, the non-funded grassroots campaign: “No Deal For Nature: Because Life is Not a Commodity] 5. MD: “He mentioned ‘a foundation based in Sweden, I think it’s called the Rasmussen Foundation that I think has been the biggest funder.'”

Adding: The 2014 People’s Climate March was a project of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and V.K. Rasmussen Foundation from the onset. Avaaz and 350-org were the leading NGOs tasked with “herding” the “cats”. Tom Kruse, Program Director at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, serves/served on the 350-org U.S. advisory council.

Sept 23, 2015: Under One Bad Sky | TckTckTck’s 2014 People’s Climate March: This Changed Nothing:

https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2015/09/23/under-one-bad-sky/

Book review of This changes everything: Capitalism vs the Climate – by Tom Kruse, program director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Featured in the 2016 issue of Alliance magazine ("for philanthropy and social investment worldwide").

Book review of This changes everything: Capitalism vs the Climate – by Tom Kruse, program director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Featured in the 2016 issue of Alliance magazine (“for philanthropy and social investment worldwide”). Sept 27, 2014, Klein: “”But I have never said that we need to “slay,” “ditch” or “dismantle” capitalism in order to fight climate change.” Today, under the guise of “stakeholder capitalism” the ruling class is determined to maintain the social license required to continue in their plunder and exploitation while securing their position and status. See work of activist and author Stephanie McMillan.

 

Klein’s alliance with the Rockefeller Foundation goes way back. Nov 28, 2011: “Mission Related Investing, Making Sense of Philanthropy’s Role in the Occupy Wall Street Movement.” Featured on the five person panel was both Naomi Klein and Rockefeller’s Tom Kruse. In 2016 Kruse wrote a glowing book review on This Changes Everything (the project the Rockefeller’s  helped finance). Klein’s book, launched on September 16, 2014, just prior to “The People’s Climate March” and Climate Week NYC (Sept 22-28)(an annual event hosted in association with the United Nations; organized by The Climate Group, and the World Economic Forum), served a foundation for a ten-year global social engineering project. “Changing Together” and “Together” would be branded terms that would slowly erode all critical class analysis. On September 17, 2019, again just prior to the UN activities, Klein would release “On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal”. This book would serve to build demand for a Global Green New Deal as sought by the United Nations.

Sept 24, 2015: McKibben’s Divestment Tour – Brought to You by Wall Street [Part XIII of an Investigative Report] The Increasing Vogue for Capitalist-Friendly Climate Discourse:

https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2015/09/24/mckibbens-divestment-tour-brought-to-you-by-wall-street-part-xiii-the-increasing-vogue-for-capitalist-friendly-climate-discourse/

June 7, 2016: Book review by Rockefeller’s Tom Kruse featured in Alliance Magazine (“for philanthropy and social investment worldwide”):

https://www.alliancemagazine.org/book-review/this-changes-everything-capitalism-vs-the-climate-naomi-klein/

All roads lead to emerging markets. The roads are paved with the sustainable development goals.

6. MB: “It began when the foundation incubated a group called 1Sky with a $1 million grant. McKibben immediately joined as board member.”

Adding: 1Sky was injected with massive funding as this juncture, but it actually began with Step It Up (2007) – the same year Avaaz was launched. Here I will add that Avaaz and 350 are closely intertwined and have been since inception. May Boeve, 350 co-founder and current executive director, (base salary of $130,431 in 2017) has been listed as director in Avaaz 990 forms on more than one occasion.

Avaaz plays a leading role in destruction of targeted sovereign states. (A fact Klein blocked me for when asking why she did not expose this on Twitter.) Klein’s father-in-law, often affiliated with her Leap NGO, is one of Canada’s most egregious imperialists. A ideology that Klein has supported on many occasions. (Bolivia, Syria, Libya).

Avaaz is also behind the scheme to financialize nature. This ties into the global climate strikes (to strengthen the Voice for the Planet and New Deal for Nature campaigns led by World Economic Forum/UN, and the World Wildlife Fund) where again, Avaaz has played a leading role. 350 and Avaaz are both co-founders of GCCA which has largely navigated the climate “movement” since 2009. In 2015 Kumi Naidoo, former executive director of both Greenpeace International and GCCA, serving as executive director of Amnesty International, until resigning Dec 2019, was cited as a 350 director in the 2015 990 filing.

7. MB: “Whatever his motives were, since the testy exchange with Strickler, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has contributed over $1 million to McKibben’s 350.org.

Adding: $1 million is pocket change for these groups. Look at ClimateWorks and other sources of funding (corporate profits laundered through tax exempt foundations) that protect and expand capital. 350 is international in scope – financed to provide “climate change awareness services training and events” – prior to the November 2019 coup in Bolivia. This foreign influence training model (imperial tentacles) extends to countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Sept 11, 2019: A Design to Win — A Multi-Billion Dollar Investment [VOLUME II, ACT I]:

https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/09/11/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-volume-ii-act-i-a-design-to-win-a-multi-billion-dollar-investment/

Article posted October 1, 2015. The UN Global Goals, also know as the Sustainable Delevelopment Goals (SDGs), are the vehicle for emerging markets. The Word Economic Forum oversees the implemtation of the SDGs.

Article posted October 1, 2015. The UN Global Goals, also know as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), are the vehicle for emerging markets. The Word Economic Forum oversees the implementation of the SDGs.

 

8. MB: “Today, the Solutions Project is ‘100% co opted and sold out,’ Fox acknowledged.”

Adding further background research on the Solutions Project:

Dec 17, 2016: Standing Rock: Profusion, Collusion & Big Money Profits [Part 5]:

https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2016/12/13/standing-rock-profusion-collusion-big-money-profits-part-5/

9. MB: “Skoll funded Al Gore’s film on climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which went into production soon after Gore launched his Generation Investment Management fund – an inconvenient truth pointed out by “Planet of the Humans.”

Adding this as a side note: Media has recently covered the WE –Trudeau “scandal” in Canada. Conveniently media has omitted key facts – such as Jeff Skoll having been involved in the financing/creation of WE from inception. WE is partnered with the United Nations with deep ties to the ruling class in the UK.

Thread: https://twitter.com/elleprovocateur/status/1286672712690262016

Adding: To see what Gore’s dream of solar in remote and/or impoverished areas of Africa look like in real life, please read:

Jan 30, 2019: The Most Inconvenient Truth: “Capitalism is in Danger of Falling Apart” [ACT III]:

https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/01/28/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-most-inconvenient-truth-capitalism-is-in-danger-of-falling-apart/

10. MB: “Dinwoodie, who signed Fox’s letter calling for the retraction of “Planet of the Humans,” was a top donor to the Rocky Mountain Institute, a so-called “do-tank” where he serves as a lead trustee. The initiative, according to Rocky Mountain, will serve as “an engine room for the financial sector to partner with corporate clients to identify practical solutions through deep partnerships with industry, civil society and policymakers to facilitate a transition in the global economy to net-zero emissions by mid-century.”

Adding: The term net-zero has nothing to do with zero emissions.

Source: Indigenous Environmental Network [IEN]

Source: Indigenous Environmental Network [IEN]

 

Adding: Co-signer Dinwoodie serves as Sierra Club’s Climate Cabinet and Scientific Advisory Panel, MIT Mechanical Engineering Visiting Committee, Advisory Board to The Solutions Project, Advisor to the MIT Energy Club (MIT is a World Economic Forum co-curator), and executive producer of film “Time To Choose”.

11. MB: “Klein, a longtime critic of elite family foundations and the billionaire class, was among the most prominent figures to join the campaign to censor “Planet of the Humans.”

Adding the background to photo of Naomi Klein and Angel Gurría, Secretary-General of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD.)Jan 25, 2016, The De-Klein of a Revolutionary Writer: From Subcomandante Marcos to Angel Gurria:

https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2016/01/25/the-de-klein-of-a-revolutionary-writer-from-subcomandante-marcos-to-angel-gurria/

Adding that the perception that “Klein, a longtime critic of elite family foundations and the billionaire class” is largely a false premise manufactured by media. Consider “Honourable” Hilary M. Weston presenting the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction to Naomi Klein, on October 15, 2014. The Westons, one of the most wealthy families in Canada, were architects of a 14-year-long bread price-fixing scheme, fleecing working class Canadians of grocery money. In 2018, the Westons were named Ireland’s richest family for the tenth year running, with a wealth of €11.42 billion. In 2020 the Westons were included in the Sunday Times Rich List ranking of the wealthiest people in the UK. The Westons are the third richest family in Canada (made possible by the exploitation and theft of labour).

More recently Klein shares equal billing for the endorsement of The Future We Choose book (authored by Christiana Figueres; UN, We Mean Business, etc.) with World Economic Forum founder and CEO, Klaus Schwab.

The World Economic Forum's Book Club pick for March 2020: The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac.

The World Economic Forum’s Book Club pick for March 2020: The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac.

 

There is no institution more important than the World Economic Forum at this moment in time, in regard to what is to happen under the guise of climate mitigation and protection of biodiversity. This, the most critical component, is missing.

Also recent, is the 2019 Confluence Philanthropy webinar with Klein, and Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund under the subheading of “mission-aligned investing” (often referred to as “impact investing”):

 

12. MB: “Klein has celebrated the Danish government where KR Foundation leaders have served for advancing “some of the most visionary environmental policies in the world.”

Adding: The Nordic countries are also at the helm in the plan to assign monetary value to all of nature’s “services”, global in scale.

Link: https://twitter.com/elleprovocateur/status/1301966944321572865

September 20, 2019: "It was the Nordic Council Sustainability Committee who initially came up with the idea of an initiative targeting the youth, and the idea was immediately supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers for the Environment."

September 20, 2019: “It was the Nordic Council Sustainability Committee who initially came up with the idea of an initiative targeting the youth, and the idea was immediately supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers for the Environment.”

 

Nordic Council of Ministers: "This analysis examines the attitudes of Nordic youth aged 13-30 in relation to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 12 (SDG 12) on Sustainable Consumption and Production."

Nordic Council of Ministers: “This analysis examines the attitudes of Nordic youth aged 13-30 in relation to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 12 (SDG 12) on Sustainable Consumption and Production.”

 

13. MB: “For its part, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has supported The Syria Campaign, a public relations outfit that clamored for US military intervention to remove the UN-recognized government of Syria.”

Here it is critical to add that The Syria Campaign is a project incubated by Purpose – the for profit public relations arm of Avaaz. Specializing behavioural change, it’s clients include some of the biggest corporations on the planet. It’s most recent partnership with the UN is ShareVerified. (Promoting vaccines and data mining while attempting to control control pandemic narrative being leveraged by World Economic Forum to usher in the fourth industrial revolution architecture.) Both Purpose and Greenpeace  contributed to the creation of We Mean Business coalition representing 1340 corporations with an approx. 24.8 trillion market cap.

14. Adding mining links highlighting praise of both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg as “heroines” to the mining industry:

https://twitter.com/elleprovocateur/status/1193691372290793472

https://twitter.com/elleprovocateur/status/1224698188818456576

https://twitter.com/elleprovocateur/status/1190643776139739136

15. “Klein’s 2015 book and documentary film on climate change, “This Changes Everything,” was initially launched as a project called “The Message.” It was supported with hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from a who’s who of major family foundations that help sustain McKibben’s political apparatus.”

Adding source: July 30, 2014, Financing “The Message” Behind Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ Project:

https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2015/10/02/financing-the-message-behind-naomi-kleins-this-changes-everything-project/

Susan Rockefeller at her home on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, New York, on Sept. 8, 2015. Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times)

Susan Rockefeller at her home on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, New York, on Sept. 8, 2015. Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times)

 

16. MB: “In a recent The Intercept column, Klein took aim at Schmidt, describing him as one of the billionaires exploiting “a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine” to begin “building a high tech dystopia.” She noted that Schmidt is closely aligned with the national security state as chair of the Defense Innovation Board, which consults for the Pentagon on the military’s application of artificial intelligence.”

Adding that Klein neglects to use the World Economic Forum’s terminology – “fourth industrial revolution”. (Max also neglects to mention this critical terminology.) See Alison McDowell’s work on Artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G in respect to the nightmarish future of militarism. Independent journalist Alison McDowell also challenges Klein on specifics and framing (via Twitter) which Klein ignores.

17. MB: The Senate version of the Green New Deal calls for the construction of “smart” power grids almost exactly like those Schmidt imagined. Klein and other high-profile Green New Deal proponents have neglected to mention that this seeming benign component of the well-intentioned plan could represent a giant step on the way to the “high tech dystopia” of Silicon Valley barons and their national security state partners.

Adding (again) that the Green New Deal (resurrected from 2009, led by the United Nations, Avaaz, etc.) is a Trojan horse for fourth industrial revolution technologies and the financialization of nature.

Adding – that Klein, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Gore, Jamie Margolin of Zero Hour (groomed by Gore, tagged by “We Don’t Have Time” in the screenshot below), are the chosen/leading influencers – for a Global Green New Deal as sought by UN (now partnered with both World Economic Forum and the World Bank).

Communication specialist Callum Grieve: Co-founder of We Mean Business, creator of Climate Week NYC for The Climate Group - and Greta Thunberg handler. Grieve has coordinated high-level climate change communications campaigns and interventions for the United Nations, World Bank Group, C40, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and several Fortune 500 companies.

Communication specialist Callum Grieve: Co-founder of We Mean Business, creator of Climate Week NYC for The Climate Group – and Greta Thunberg handler. Grieve has coordinated high-level climate change communications campaigns and interventions for the United Nations, World Bank Group, C40, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and several Fortune 500 companies. Further reading: “A 100 Trillion Dollar Storytelling Campaign [A Short Story], Oct 6, 2019]

“The liquidation of fascism must be the liquidation of the bourgeoisie that created it.” – Gramsci [Tagging this with #WeDontHaveTime]

18. MB: Flush with dark money from Democratic Party-aligned billionaires, Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash stated on July 14 – the day Biden released his clean energy plan: “It’s no secret that we’ve been critical of Vice President’s Biden’s plans and commitments in the past. Today, he’s responded to many of those criticisms: dramatically increasing the scale and urgency of investments… Our movement, alongside environmental justice communities and frontline workers, has taught Joe Biden to talk the talk.”

Adding: “Our movement”: To speak of “environmental justice communities” and “frontline workers” – as having taught Joe Biden to “talk the talk” is hard to swallow, when Biden is an imperialist. Has Sunrise transformed Biden into an anti-imperialist who now respects self-determination? (rhetorical question).

Video: Biden and Elliott Abrams on Nicaragua,1987:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4731064/user-clip-1987-bidennicaragua

January 18, 2017, Davos: Joe Biden (R) with Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum, Image: Manuel Lopez

19. “While it brands itself as a grassroots movement that has organized anti-establishment stunts putting centrist figures like Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein on the spot, the Sunrise Movement was incubated with a grant from the Sierra Club, the Mike Bloomberg-backed juggernaut of Big Green organizing. Today, offices of the two organizations are located a floor apart in the same building in downtown Washington DC.”

Adding: Background on Sunrise and the Green New Deal:

Feb 13, 2019: The Green New Deal is the Trojan Horse for the Financialization of Nature [ACT V]:

20. Finally, Michael Moore’s commentary in the Q&A session that followed the release of “Planet of the Humans, was worse than disappointing – yet more than revealing. Highlighting Greta Thunberg, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Extinction Rebellion,  Green New Deal – all in the design/pocket of the ruling classes. In just one hour Moore undermines the said intent of the film. “That’s what’s great about Bernie and AOC… each of their Green New Deals acknowledge this income inequality…” Any/all Green New Deals will serve the ruling class. The World Economic Forum-United Nations is at the helm. Not Sanders. Not AOC. Not the Democrats. This matters as over 105,000 very interested people listened – wishing to learn. Moore: “we need to have a whole new environmental movement, maybe what Greta has started… Sun Rise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, Greta and her Friday School Strike.” Moore re-directs youth right back to foundation financed, billionaire/corporate backed “movements”. [Thread]

Adding that Max B missed the important article by WKOG collective member Michael on the Planet of the Humans documentary:

http://wrongkindofgreen.org/2020/05/20/clinton-to-mckibben-to-steyer-to-podesta-comments-on-planet-of-the-humans-by-michael-swifte

In respect to the pandemic referenced by MB in his article. The ruling class has weaponized the power of both fear and conformity against us. That Covid-19 is the catalyst to usher in a new global architecture, that is, the “fourth industrial revolution”, is not conjecture, not “conspiracy theory“, but a fact. Full compliance and social license of the global citizenry is required.

The ruling class has conspired to usher in a new global governance with Covid-19 as the pretext. With the World Economic-United Nations-World Bank partnership; a global consolidation of power, well underway. It is understood that the transition will cause unprecedented suffering. The only thing they fear is revolt.

The fourth industrial revolution architecture catalogues children as human capital data to be commodified on blockchain, linking behaviour to benefits. The human population to be controlled “via digital identity systems tied to cashless benefit payments within the context of a militarized 5G, “internet of things” and an “augmented reality” environment.” [See the work of Alison McDowell.]

The fourth industrial revolution cannot come into fruition without the 5G infrastructure that will run the Internet of Things. “Smart” cities (via Global Covenant of Mayors) must be understood within the context of global policing and the military industrial complex. Cybersecurity will be the battle space of the 21st century.

As part of “the great reset”, in 2021, the ruling class intends to implement the financialization of nature. Those with money will own nature The very corporations that have brought us to the precipice of ecological collapse – will now be appointed as the new stewards of nature. This has been dubbed by John Elkington (Extinction Rebellion Business signatory, Volans) as the “biosphere economy”. This represents the largest transformation of the global economic system in modern history. Assigning monetary value to nature (“natural capital”) will replace GDP, with nature “valued” at 125 trillion vs. GDP at 85.9 trillion (2018).

Image

Voting in a capitalist system is not going to cut it. Petitions are not going to stop it.

An environmental movement not built on a foundation of anti-imperialism, anti-militarism and anti-capitalism is meaningless. Worthless.

I have tried to keep this concise and brief – which is impossible. Upon that note, I caution that the most important elements now underway, in respect to further destruction of our natural world, are still be ignored by groups and writers with far more resources, and far larger audiences than we have at Wrong Kind of Green. Silence is complicity. Discourse is a strategy utilized by those in service to the ruling class. I hope this inspires more people to investigate, write and organize.

“And that’s the real question facing the white activists today. Can they tear down the institutions that have put us all in the trick bag we’ve been into for the last hundreds of years?” So to me the question is “are we tearing down the institutions or keeping them propped up?”

 

— Stokely Carmichael, 1966

 

[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, Internationalist 360, Tortilla con Sal, and Counterpunch. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can follow her on twitter @elleprovocateur]

WATCH: The Afterlife of Slavery: Markets, Property & Race [Cheryl Harris]

WATCH: The Afterlife of Slavery: Markets, Property & Race [Cheryl Harris]

January 19, 2016 lecture

 

“The walls talk to me. The dust on the floors write me messages. I’m in the vents. I’m in the bulletin boards. I’m in the chipped paint. Ain’t nobody can slip through the cracks past me up in here.”

 

– MONOLOGUES FROM SKELETON CREW by DOMINIQUE MORISSEAU

 

“Despite efforts to obscure slavery and indigenous dispossession in the genealogy and narrative of American nationhood, these realities remain deeply embedded in the relationship between race and markets where in fact race and economic domination are fused. Racial hierarchy is continually replenished through the market, while the market encodes property in accord with racial regimes. For example, “black” spaces are forever unstable, subprime, and “waste,” making them always available for (re) appropriation through various technologies such as debt, (de)regulation, and development.”

– Cheryl I. Harris

“In conjunction with Cameron Rowland’s exhibition 91020000, Artists Space presents a talk by Cheryl I. Harris, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Critical Race Studies at UCLA School of Law. Harris is the author of key texts in the field of critical race theory including “Whiteness as Property” (1993) and “Equal Treatment and the Reproduction of Inequality” (2001).” [Source: Artists Space]

 

WATCH: Ella Baker: “The Fight for Freedom Every Day”

WATCH: Ella Baker: “The Fight for Freedom Every Day”

“Life-long human rights activist and movement organizer, Ella Baker, addresses 1974 Puerto Rico solidarity rally about the need for every person to make the struggle for human dignity and freedom every day.”

TRANSCRIPT:

Friends, brothers, and sisters in the struggle for human dignity and freedom. I am here to represent the struggle that has gone on for three-hundred or more years — a struggle to be recognized as citizens in a country in which we were born. I have had about forty or fifty years of struggle, ever since a little boy on the streets of Norfolk called me a nigger. I struck him back. And then I had to learn that hitting back with my fists one individual was not enough. It takes organization. It takes dedication. It takes the willingness to stand by and do what has to be done, when it has to be done.

A nice gathering like today is not enough. You have to go back and reach out to your neighbors who don’t speak to you. And you have to reach out to your friends who think they are making it good. And get them to understand that they–as well as you and I–cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism. Until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day in the year, every year until they win it.”

[Source: Peaceable Power”]

WATCH: Justin Leroy: Race, Finance, and the Afterlife of Slavery [Social Impact Bonds]

WATCH: Justin Leroy: Race, Finance, and the Afterlife of Slavery [Social Impact Bonds]

Art and EducationWhitney Museum of American Art

Filmed March 29, 2017

 

Justin Leroy presents on the overlapping histories of race and financial innovation, from slave insurance to social entrepreneurship, in conjunction with Cameron Rowland’s project for the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Leroy teaches nineteenth-century U.S. history at the University of California, Davis; his book Freedom’s Limit: Racial Capitalism and the Afterlives of Slavery, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. — Whitney Museum of American Art

 

We cannot unthink our relations to property and the ways in which we govern and justify those bonds without also thinking of racialized capitalism and the afterlife of slavery, as Justin Leroy so eloquently does here. Our work is not so simple a matter as to lament that if we could only move from object/property to subject/human, then we could claim to have uprooted the logics which maintain dominance over our capacity to relate, and by proxy produce something like a life. We must also place these logics and practices within a historical continuum as a way to understand how they remain animate after their alleged abolition. [February, 2019]

Bonded Life, Technologies of racial finance from slave insurance to philanthrocapital

Abstract: “Amid public critiques of Wall Street’s amorality and protests against sharpening inequality since the financial crisis of 2008, the emergent discourse of philanthrocapitalism – philanthropic capitalism – has sought to recuperate a moral centre for finance capitalism. Philanthrocapitalism seeks to marry finance capital with a moral commitment to do good. These strategies require new financial instruments to make poverty reduction and other forms of social welfare profitable business ventures. Social impact bonds (SIBs) – which offer private investors competitive returns on public sector investments – and related instruments have galvanized the financialization of both public services and the life possibilities of poor communities in the USA and the Global South. This article maps new intrusions of credit and debt into previously unmarketable spheres of life, such as prison recidivism outcomes, and argues that contemporary social finance practices such as SIBs are inextricable from histories of race – that financialization has been and continues to be a deeply racialized process. Intervening in debates about the social life of financial practices and the coercive creation of new debtor publics, we chart technologies meant to transform subjects considered valueless into appropriate, even laudable, objects of financial investment. Because their proponents frame SIBs as philanthropic endeavours, the violence required to financialize human life becomes obfuscated. We aim to historicize the violence of financialization by drawing out links between financial capitalism as it developed during the height of the Atlantic slave trade and the more subtle violence of philanthropic financial capitalism. Though the notion that slaves could be a good investment – both in the profitable and moral sense of the word – seems far removed from our contemporary sensibilities, the shadow of slavery haunts SIBs; despite their many differences, both required black bodies to be made available for investment. Both also represent an expansion to the limits of financialization.”

[Zenia Kish & Justin Leroy (2015) Bonded Life, Cultural Studies, 29:5-6, 630-651, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2015.101713]

Bonded Life Technologies of Racial Finance from Slave Insurance to Philanthrocapital

 

WATCH: Conspiracy AND Class Power [Michael Parenti Lecture, 1993, Berkeley, CA.]

WATCH: Conspiracy AND Class Power [Michael Parenti Lecture, 1993, Berkeley, CA.]

 

 

“No ruling class could survive if it wasn’t attentive to its own interest consciously trying to anticipate control / initiate events at home & abroad both overtly & secretly.”

 

“The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly horrible.”

 

— Michael Parenti

 

Defend critical thinking.

Defend the right to question/challenge narratives that serve ruling class.

Lecture by Michael Parenti discussing the relationship of conspiracy to the larger political economic context.

“The speech on Conspiracy and Class Power (1993) was lost for several years and only recently discovered in the collection of a listener in Seattle. Michael Parenti spoke before an overflow audience in Berkeley, CA.” [Source: Dandelion Salad]

 

http://https://youtu.be/Jsua0m6GreY

Human Rights Fraud from Ukraine to Nicaragua

Tortilla con Sal

July 26, 2020

Stephen Sefton

Current Western human rights industry practice has nothing to do with establishing the truth. Increasingly in recent years, US and allied elites have sought to legitimize illegal aggression by exploiting human rights motifs in their attempts to recolonize the majority world.

 

In any given crisis, human rights NGOs funded by the US and allied corporate elites and governments deploy sensationalist false claims, for example of police murdering peaceful protestors, so as to create a cognitive limbo of doubt and suspicion aimed at disabling opposition to the West’s recolonization campaigns. Over the medium and long term, the steady drip of false accusations against countries resisting recolonization, like Syria and Iran, or Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, creates false memories, corrupting and distorting the historical record and obscuring the West’s crimes against those and so many other countries in the majority world.

Western ruling elites have corrupted human rights organizations and institutions at practically every level using corporate grant making and government funding. The practical results of this corruption mirror corporate techniques of control fraud and strategic avoidance of regulation. Economics writers like Michael Hudson and  William Black, among others, have explained how corrupt US and allied corporations have exploited these fraudulent abuses for decades.  Control fraud is essentially no different from ancient practices like debasing coins, adulterating food products or selling defective goods as fit for use. They all fool people into accepting something that causes them loss, hurt and damage.

In the United States, powerful corporations control US political and institutional life sufficiently to be able to co-opt justice and escape criminal prosecution. This reality crowds out honest, socially responsible business and financial practice. Parallel to control fraud by major financial institutions, other multinational corporations, for example oil, mining or information technology corporations,  operate what various writers call a “veil of tiers” strategy misrepresenting their earnings so as to avoid tax or other regulation, and legal prosecution. More legitimately, in the field of insurance, the “veil of tiers” strategy spreads risks associated with potential litigation. The international human rights industry uses similar techniques to justify and cover up Western attacks against the peoples of the majority world.

The dependence of international human rights NGOs on corporate and government funding and on publicity via corporate media and public relations over time has generated the osmosis of corrupt corporate practice into the human rights industry. Writers like Cory Morningstar have analyzed exhaustively how this takeover by corporate culture of the “non-profit industrial complex serves hegemony as a sophisticated fine-tuned symbiotic mechanism in a continuous state of flux and refinement. The ruling elite channel an immeasurable amount of resources and tools through these organizations to further strengthen, protect and expand existing forms of power structures and global domination.”

In a human rights context, control fraud takes the form of politically motivated, false, sensationalist accusations based on egregiously one-sided, often fact-free research, sometimes using fake pseudo-scientific reconstructions. Accountability for these false accusations is rendered negligible by means of a “veil of tiers” strategy starting at a low level with small, local or national human rights NGOS, progressing via larger international human rights NGOs and auxiliary private contractors to regional human rights institutions, then reaching United Nations organizations and ultimately the highest levels of the international human rights legal system. By excluding independent corroboration, the interchange from one level to the next imparts spurious mutual legitimacy of varying degrees between the organizations and institutions involved.

The process is quasi-judicial with zero accountability, such that attempting to counteract false accusations is extremely difficult if not impossible, especially in the short term. If anything, the human rights industry is even less accountable than multinational corporations. Two recent examples, among innumerable others, confirm the creeping monopolization of the human rights industry by corrupt corporate practice. Against both the Ukraine government in February 2014 and against the Nicaraguan government in May 2018, Western human rights NGOs made very similar accusations that their police forces murdered peaceful protestors indiscriminately. In both cases, the accusations were false.

The context of the killings in both cases was a violent attempt at regime change by a US government funded political opposition. In Ukraine’s case, the opposition had been supported for over twenty years with US government funding amounting to over US$5 billion as confirmed in 2013 by Victoria Nuland, then US Assistant Secretary of State. That US government finance was in addition to funding from US corporate oligarchs like Pierre Omidyaar and George Soros. The most notorious event in the regime change campaign in Ukraine took place over February 18th-20th in 2014 when over 70 people were killed in Kiev’s Maidan square during violent confrontations between police and protestors. The massacre led to the overthrow of the legitimate government and its replacement by a fascist US client regime.

After the event, even CNN felt bound to report a leaked conversation between Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs in which Paet confirmed that a  pro-opposition doctor treating wounded protestors claimed opposition snipers, not government security forces, had shot the protestors. That report was followed by the broadcast from Italy’s Mediaset Matrix television channel of interviews, here and here, with mercenary snipers confessing they had fired on both protestors and police during the Maidan protests in February 2014. The mercenaries had come forward aggrieved at not getting paid by the opposition aligned figures who hired them. Even so, the Ukraine authorities announced their investigation into the shootings was complete, simply repeating the false accusations against the former Ukrainian government despite categorically clear evidence to the contrary.

A prominent part of the Ukraine prosecutors’ false case was a virtual reconstruction of events  by a private New York contractor called SITU Research whose human rights work is funded by US oligarch owned grant making bodies, like the MacArthur Foundation, the Oak Foundation and the Open Society Foundations. Ivan Katchanovski of the University of Ottawa has exposed as phony the SITU Research reconstruction of the Maidan shootings, demonstrating, for example, that in various cases SITU Research’s imaging moved wound locations indicated in the respective forensic autopsy reports in order to suit the video’s conclusions. Katchanovksi’s detailed analysis draws on other evidence omitted by SITU Research which also contradicts their claims, for example witness testimony from 25 wounded opposition supporters that they were shot from opposition controlled buildings.

Katchanovski points out that numerous video and TV footage shows opposition snipers and shooters in buildings controlled by the opposition. That footage is supported by over 150 witness testimonies confirming snipers were firing from those locations. Katchanovski also notes that Brad Samuels, founding partner of SITU Research “said in a video [start at 55:16] that ‘…eventually, there is a consensus that there was a third party acting. It is clear from forensic evidence that people were shot in the back. Somebody was shooting from rooftops.’ ” Katchanovski remarks that Samuels’ “striking observation was not included anywhere in the SITU 3D model report that he produced.” Katchanovski’s critical analysis of SITU Research’s material and of the broader official Ukraine investigation into the Maidan massacre has never been seriously challenged.

Similar false accusations ignoring readily available contradictory evidence and also using SITU Research modeling were made against Nicaragua’s government earlier this year. On May 30th the Organization of American States subsidiary body the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), the Argentinian Forensic Anthropology Team and SITU Research jointly published a video allegedly proving that Nicaragua’s police shot and killed unarmed protesters at a demonstration on May 30th 2018. But detailed analysis of the video shows that in this case too SITU Research have misrepresented data, namely the distance between the police and the protestors which was in fact about 175 metres, in order to harmonize the reality of what happened with their virtual reconstruction which claims police snipers fired from a distance of around 250 metres.

The video footage of the protests in Nicaragua contains no scenes where Nicaraguan police use their firearms. Similarly, just as in their false reconstruction of events in Kiev’s Maidan square, SITU Research omitted a substantial body of information contradicting their account of the shootings in Managua on May 30th. The context in this case too was of extremely violent protests by organizations funded by the US government with over US$15 million just in 2017-2018. For example, local human rights organizations received over US$3 million from the US government that year as did local media NGOs. Although, two solidarity organizations wrote and published an open letter to the organizations who produced the video, respectfully questioning their findings, to date the letter has received only a formal acknowledgment without replying to the questions.

In both Ukraine and Nicaragua, the US government funded local opposition aligned NGOs to make false allegations of very serious human rights violations. A private company contractor was funded by US corporate interests to produce false pseudo-scientific material unfairly incriminating the governments for those violations. International human rights NGOs repeated the false accusations on the basis of that same false evidence. Regional human rights institutions accused the governments concerned on the basis of that same material.

The accusations are false but the Nicaraguan government and accused members of the former Ukrainian government are denied a fair defense. This same process has been repeated over and over again against governments resisting US and allied policies. Western human rights organizations share the same corrupt methodology as their corporate and government patrons. They make false claims, suppress inconvenient evidence, do all they can to avoid independent scrutiny and systematically evade accountability.

 

Timpsila, Medicine for Tech-No-Logic

Wrench in the Gears

August 7, 2020

By Alison McDowell

 

 

John Trudell, Native American activist and poet, spoke prophetically of a predator energy that mines the “being part of humans.” He called it tech-no-logic. Every January since the early 1970s, the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) power brokers have assembled in Davos to plot out the next steps of their planned tech-no-logic coup. We’ve now reached a tipping point with the introduction of “stakeholder capitalism.” It is a vast program of poverty mining meant to transform the masses into human capital data commodities for financial speculation and ubiquitous surveillance. This emerging investment sector runs on poverty and trauma, two things the response to Covid-19 has manufactured in abundance.

We are experiencing the lead up to WEF’s planned transhumanist future. Covid has paved the way for a reset meant to usher in their Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is a revolution in which artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, 5G, robotics, and synthetic biology threaten to consume humanity. We’re on the brink of normalizing biocapitalism – humans and nature as batteries for financial markets. Picture derivatives mixed with bioengineered eugenics, deceptively sold to the public under the brand of “green” capitalism. The plan is to channel the concentrated wealth of the world’s largest asset holders through structured deals aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Pull back the curtain and see a program unthinkingly embraced by so many progressives and liberals exposed for what it is – not climate justice and not liberation of the poor and dispossessed, but instead an orgy of mechanistic spirit eating.

“What Is The Fourth Industrial Revolution?”

The next phase of Davos’s mining program involves deploying nano-tech human computer interfaces at the population level to begin to meld us into a single hive mind. This technology will be packaged as cutting-edge therapeutics meant to keep us “safe and healthy.” Liability waivers will be put in place to ensure the companies developing such abominations, in coordination with DARPA’s mad scientists, are never held responsible for the harm they cause. I anticipate “personalized medicine” and “preventative care” in the form of a series of mRNA vaccines will be mandated to harness humanity to Bill Gates’s “software of life.”

mRNA Software Of Life Moderna

 

Moderna Gates

 

The Harvard Business Review asserts this global campaign must be rolled out “equitably.” Satellites are poised to track Black and Brown bodies from space and compel the full vaccination coverage needed to carry out these malevolent intentions. Look up Microsoft’s planetary computer. The oligarchs speak of a world where “no one is left behind.” Everyone tagged and tracked into the Internet of Humans master database, domesticated livestock with no autonomy whose life force is sucked dry to satisfy the unrelenting greed of predator energy. GAVI’s vaccines, which are being integrated into digital identity systems, may very well push humanity across the threshold into the WEF’s terrible vision.

Harvard Vaccines Satellite

 

Globalists have long targeted vulnerable populations as “social impact” fuel, this is corporate predation branded as paternalistic “care.” Within the tech-no-logic system, total compliance will be demanded. Approved behavior becomes currency, tokenized on blockchain and monitored by sensors and AI. They are training us for a future where we compete with one another to see who is the best behaved, the most docile. Surviving will mean conforming to the strident terms of psychopathic financial agreements. To obtain the data needed to verify claims embedded in twisted “pay for success” deals, our mother, the earth, must be remade as a geo-fenced digital prison using 5G and satellite constellations. All of your data will be added to your “permanent record” to evaluate your value as human capital for investor portfolios. The billionaires envision a future where freedom is a privilege limited to themselves, their functionaries, and the robots they control. Be assured AI is already keeping tabs, and social credit scoring is well underway.

Sophisticated propaganda campaigns and strategic cooptation of grassroots movements have groomed the public to embrace this model with open arms. The trap has been set. Submit now and EVERY aspect of life, which through bioengineering can now be tweaked at the cellular level, will be controlled to profit the global elite. This is not just about surveillance and policing, it is about the wholesale domination of mind, body, and spirit through smart technologies. Biometric health passports will bring these systems to scale through ID2020. Central banks will soon bring latent human capital bond markets online.

Moreau River

 

This planned future, however, is NOT preordained. Totalitarian transhumanism is not a foregone conclusion. Trudell’s remedy? Change our perception of reality through active non-cooperation. Manifest in our hearts, minds, and actions the world we desire. Where they engineer disconnect, RECONNECT with intention; not only with one another, but with ALL our relations and the land and the spiritual beings that exist beyond our senses. We must synchronize to change the vibrational reality, and that power exists within us as children of the earth.

Our relationship to the sun, sky, and universe is the cosmic web that must be rewoven. According to Trudell, awakened humans have a responsibility to use the intelligence given to them by the creator to face the violence of the tech-no-logic machine. It is up to those of us who see to do this with clarity and coherence. By becoming “thinkers” we reclaim our stability and step outside the control system that manipulates those who passively “believe.”

Trudell’s philosophy inspires me and offers a bulwark against the panic I feel watching the rise of tech-no-logic fascism steeped in medical martial law. To counter this grim vision, I want to share with you a story of the timpsila braid hanging in my kitchen. To me, it embodies the triumph of the creator and Indigenous life over disastrous tech-no-logic white western thinking. It is a reminder to check my tendencies towards despair and to work to manifest a different reality within my heart as a clear-thinking and feeling human being. When I am tempted to dig deeper into the darkness I will strive to shine a light and imagine a future of reciprocity, gratitude, community, and care.

Timpsila, Psoralea esculenta or prairie turnip - a wild food gathered by the Lakota people.

Timpsila, Psoralea esculenta or prairie turnip – a wild food gathered by the Lakota people.

 

Timpsila, Psoralea esculenta or prairie turnip, is a wild food gathered by the Lakota people. Its silvery green leaves and piercing purple flowers punctuate the prairie hills. Its tubers are wild-harvested in June after flowering. The tops are carefully placed back in each dug hole so their seeds can complete the life cycle and restore what has been taken. Slender roots braided together allow the tubers to be dried for storage. Rehydrated, they are used in stews or ground as flour. It is a durable food, a survival food. A Timpsila braid is a sign of abundance and a deep connection to the earth.

I was given two gifts this summer, the first was a gift of a month on the land and the second was the gift of the braid. That first gift extended a chance for me to knit myself back into the cosmos. My being had come perilously close to slipping into the dark embrace of algorithmic “life.” Wrenchinthegears.com is my blog, and it has been literally wrenching to watch the treacherous plans I’ve been investigating for years emerge full-blown against the Covid backdrop. Time and space to disconnect from tech-no-logic’s predator energy was an unexpected and precious offering that took me by surprise.

Initially I hesitated. Could I leave my family for the six weeks needed to drive, quarantine, and do what was needed? Could I step away from my job for that long? Was my 50-year-old not-too-fit body up for the task? I’d never done anything like that before. There was a world out there waiting beyond my kitchen table. Perhaps I would find community; perhaps I would learn more about myself; perhaps I would restore my relationship with nature – so many possibilities. In the end, I chose to step away from my laptop, put my power-mapping on hold, shift from brain work to heart work, and put my body into a project I hoped would help to feed people.

I bought a tent and dehydrated food, gathered up books and yarn and my teddy bear then headed west as spring gave way to summer. If you know you me in person, you know I’m a planner, a box-checker, and a striver. Not proud of it, but its part of the package of how I was trained up to be. To make this choice felt highly irregular, but also profoundly right. Uncertain times led me to look inside myself and trust the process. If we’re committed to changing the dominant paradigm, one shaped by empire, violence, competition, and hyper-consumerism, we have to be willing to risk healing when a door is opened – to follow the lines, as John Trudell said, with intelligence and coherence. Maybe in doing the work of healing ourselves we can help heal the world and build anew.

Before I set off, a friend who stewards an African-diaspora urban farm told me to move slow. Learn the land first. The work needed to come from a spiritual place. He offered some horticultural guidance, but cautioned that I might not end up doing what I thought I was going there to do. The challenge was to be attuned and humble. Look closely and listen carefully. Another friend suggested I go down to the river, the Schuylkill, before my trip and ask for guidance on the journey. I’m new to and rather clumsy with ceremony and ended up ankle deep in the gooey tidal mud. In a real sense I was hoping this gift of time and space would offer a measure of transformation. So the lesson I took away from my visit to the river is that if your goal is transformation, there is no tiptoeing around the edges. You have to be willing to step forward with both feet and get dirty.

 

Tidal mud

 

In the days before I left I saw many precious garter snakes, including one that was nestled in a strawberry plant in a bed I was weeding. A beautiful blue racer sped out of the tall grass to greet me in the garden one of my first days there, and the day before I left a five-foot bull snake spread itself luxuriously across a back road as a friend and I looked on appreciatively. Surely on this journey I was meant to shed some of my old skin.

To change the world, we must be willing to look deeply within ourselves. We must unpack the ways in which compulsory education, religion, politics, and consumer culture seek to contain us within a larger control system. Thus confined, the predator energy of which Trudell spoke can easily feed off the manufactured discord that is continuously inflamed to profit the Davos elite. If we can secure a new lens and commit ourselves to restoring right relationships, we might then be able to chart a new course. At this pandemic moment of the WEF’s attempted global economic reset (aka global coup via mass impoverishment) my goal was to unplug, step out of time, and carry out my own internal reboot.

So, I pointed my aging Subaru away from life in a “smart” city to a land of grass, wind, and sky. At the end of the road the IDEA of a vegetable garden waited for me in a quiet river valley. Those who’d asked me to come wanted to build a garden that would complement a chicken-raising effort: manure, insect control, feed, a circular system. The goal was to develop a prototype that with material and technical support might allow small communities to access healthier, more affordable food.

Food independence is radical. This is why counter-insurgent warfare targets the people’s ability to feed themselves. This is why the Black Panthers were considered so dangerous to the power structure. This is why corporations keep us sick with highly processed GMO consumables. This is why we are seeing consolidation of supply chains under Covid. Advancement of hydroponic, petro-chemical fertilizer-based vegetable production and lab-grown “meat” are a central feature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Food is meant to be medicine for body and spirit. Putting hands to earth is medicine. Saving open-pollinated seeds is medicine. Heirloom seeds contain histories of struggle and survival. I arrived with a spade and shovel seeking to be part of this medicine work, my hands ready.

 

Vertisol Soil

 

When I first saw it, the area for the planned garden was a lush carpet of grasses, yarrow, wild onions, and sagebrush. They grew out of a silty clay soil unlike anything I’d ever put my hands in before. It is the kind of soil that when moist you can turn into a clay pot, but once dry hardens like concrete and splinters into an infinite web of delicate cracks that shelter velvety wolf spiders as big as your hand. Vertisol soil – we came to know one other well in the weeks to come.

On the land my learning began. Before I left I gathered bird guides, grass identification charts, treatises on ethno-botany of the northern prairies. I soaked up the written word, but heart work truly blooms through the lived experience of the body. In those weeks of quarantine I walked gravel roads to distant horizons and encountered the diverse residents of the grass nation. I lived the beauty of each moment – every week new seed heads, blooms, insects, and birds to greet. As Robin Wall Kimmerer says – we are the young siblings with much to learn from the older beings around us. The prairie was my teacher, and I am forever grateful for the lessons gifted to me outside the control matrix.

Cottonwood tree

 

The wooden stakes set amidst the grass behind the chicken coops offered only a vague hint of what would emerge there. We decided to experiment with different approaches using local materials and see what worked best and what could be brought to scale. The final garden included three tilled beds with cover crops, eight hand-dug beds with new topsoil brought in, a trenched bed for potatoes, ten sod berms, and three compost piles. There was also a tilled bed amended with cattle manure where we planted corn, beans, and squash – the three sisters.

Early on my friend visited me in the garden. He tried to convince me that the soil, even though to MY eyes seemed impossible, would be fine. His ancestors had farmed the river bottom. He held that knowledge, and I am ashamed that in my uncertainty and concern over “succeeding” at this garden project, I did not fully embrace those teachings. And so in the trials we did, the bed that was tilled with just a little manure – the three sisters bed – grew as my friend assured me it would. The leaves of corn unfurled, then the beans, then the squash. By the time I departed all of the seeds had made their presence known. We decided to call it Three Sisters Sanctuary. After a stormy night that poured an inch of rain onto the cracked earth, I packed up my muddy tent and headed east knowing the sanctuary would be well cared for by my friend. After all, it was his land. He knew its life force in his heart.

During my stay, this friend generously shared aspects of life close to nature on the prairie. The June moon in Lakota is called tinpsinla itkahaca wi or moon when the seedpods of the wild turnip go to seed. He filled a five-gallon bucket and showed me how to prepare them for storage. My first attempts to peel the tubers with my rarely used pocketknife were rather dismal. I was too tentative, but eventually got the hang of how to slide the blade in near the stem end and slough off the rough husk to expose the smooth, moist flesh of the turnip inside. Supremely satisfying. In that liminal space between time zones, in many ways outside of time entirely, a midday break sitting in the shade to peel timpsila felt perfectly right. There was a rhythm to reweaving torn connections between one human and the earth. Bit by bit, tuber-by-tuber, slow, slow, slow, the bucket emptied – a small act of non-cooperation against a mechanized world defined by speed, industrialization, and global supply chains.

Peeled Timpsila

 

I was granted the opportunity to see timpsila in their proper place among other plant beings, clear ponds, and rock rings under a sky painted with clouds that filtered a dramatic pre-storm light. These are not the domesticated plants of a garden plot, not tomatoes or peppers, but wild offerings made by the creator to the being part of human. I greeted them on those hills the night of the Solstice on land that had been in one family for over a century. That crisp bite of a fresh dug turnip on that sacred land was powerful medicine. I will carry it in my heart, and I am profoundly grateful for it.

Prairie Solstice

 

The night my friend gifted me the braid he came out to my tent. It had been raining, and as he turned his head, his headlamp shown briefly on the fence. There, a spider was deftly weaving a web. It glistened with raindrops and took my breath away. We stopped for a moment to watch in the cool night air the spider going about her work. Just like the spider, those of us who are awake are empowered to be world builders. Even though we may feel overwhelmed by the dark and the rain, we have the option of creating a new story – the potential of the silken thread that lies at the core of our being. We do not have to remain trapped within the current paradigm. The old, tattered web can be consumed and made anew. Together we have the creative power to weave a future where tech-no-logic is banished from our lives.

This timpsila braid is a token of friendship, a connection across time and space. It is a powerful affirmation of Indigenous resistance to the vicious forces of capitalist growth that seek to annihilate and erase world views grounded in the care and wellbeing of the earth and all its creatures. This includes all the children of the earth who have stewarded Turtle Island, Africa, India, Australia, and Asia through these dark colonial times.

Prairie Storm

 

Imagine if non-Indigenous people had it within them to become “thinkers” as Trudell describes them. No longer indoctrinated by the control matrix feeding off their pain and strife, but instead intent on cultivating a culture of gratitude, ceremony, community, and reciprocity – all of it grounded in a connection to the earth and the cosmos. THAT could very well be the antidote to the mechanistic spirit eating of tech-no-logic “green” capitalism. It would kill the human capital bond market before 5G and wearable-tech shackles ever got off the drawing board, unleashing a power beyond anything we can imagine. We can make it so.

With clarity and brave hearts we can bring forth a new world. We commit to that and heal or submit to the tech-no-logic matrix and lose our souls. Let us embrace one another as “thinking” human beings, web weavers who dare write a different story. As Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches, we do not have to carry it all. Each of us has gifts for the bundle.

Know your gifts and how to share them. Stay grounded in the soil. Open your heart to receive true teachings. Find the others; they will cross your path. Slow down and look to the horizon, so you have eyes to see them. We are not alone. We are not isolated. Together we can nurture one another not as digital brands and avatars but as precious fellow travellers on a journey from darkness to light.

This piece is itself a web of many silken threads graciously offered up by beloved collaborators. Thank you friends.

If you’re in a position to support Lakota food independence efforts, gifts of any size will help pay for next spring’s seeds. Chas Jewett on Venmo @chas-jewett-1. Wopila.

This is a tour of Three Sisters Sanctuary. Know the past and build a better future.

The Big Green Lie

 

 

WWF recently released (June 5th, 2020) a short video[1] of British “national treasure” and conservation icon, Sir David Attenborough, telling us that “suddenly” saving the world is within reach. He says they know what to do and have a plan to build a stable, healthy world that we can benefit from forever. What’s not to like? Well, a lot! WWF’s plan regurgitates a 19th century racist assumption: That too many of the wrong kind of people threaten us all.

Their “plan” has four commandments: 1) “stop the damaging stuff”; 2) “new green tech”; 3) get population down, and; 4) keep hold of “natural wealth we have currently got.”[2] Let’s begin by removing the two “no-brainer” outliers, the first and last in the plan, stopping doing damage and keeping existing advantages. Both are self-evident approaches to pretty much anything. What we’re left with then is just two answers to the planet’s problems – new green tech and reducing population.

What’s the underlying message in the first: We can carry on business as usual so long as we change our energy source? We swap oil and coal for wind and solar and hey presto the world is saved? But hang on, what about the carbon footprint, and the slave and child labor, used in building that “new green tech” – tiny children digging cobalt in the Congo,[3] for example? What about the growing inequalities which fuel the massive overconsumption by the élite? If the world’s most famous opera house in Milan played to a packed house of the world’s richest people, it’d be host to nearly two-thirds of the total money owned by everyone on the planet.[4] Might that astonishing detail be relevant? What about the fact that the average American citizen – leave aside a well-heeled WWF executive – in just over a week consumes about the same as a sub-Saharan African does in a year, and uses the same energy as a South Sudanese does in two years?[5] Who bears the real responsibility for doing “the damaging stuff”? After all, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who live and die, often hungry, who are responsible for practically no pollution at all.

Yes, it’s certainly vital to stop burning fossil fuels, but will the “world” be saved simply by swapping oil for renewables, or might that really also be about enabling the élite to carry on doing what they’re doing, just by investing in different companies?

But it’s in the other “solution” – getting the population down – where both Attenborough and WWF really plumb the depths of their elitist ideology. One can visualize the meetings of writers who struggled to express this without attracting attacks from those like me who think the 200-year old cry of “overpopulation” is ideological, fundamentally racist, certainly eugenic, and nothing to do with science.

The writers finally came up with, “stabilize the human population as low as we fairly can.” They presumably thought that using “stabilize” rather than “reduce” (which is what they mean), and that inserting “fairly,” would satisfy the critics. That only goes to show just how little they understand what the problems with their “overpopulation” dirge actually are!

The inconvenient truth, never mentioned by the ideologues, is that the Global North’s population has been dropping for generations. Overall numbers are still growing there only because they’re boosted by newcomers from the Global South.[6] The largest growth area is sub-Saharan Africa, where the population density remains extremely low and where they use very little of the world’s resources themselves.[7] That’s because the “natural wealth they have currently got” is largely stolen from them by the North.[8] Have a look at the area at night from a satellite to see just how little energy is used in Africa compared to Europe, or get the view from a plane, as Attenborough will have done hundreds of times.

 

In other words, if you’re worried about overpopulation threatening the environment, then you’re blind to the real menace: It’s not the growing number of “have nots” in the South, but growing overconsumption by the “haves” in the North.

One group acutely worried about this non-existent “overpopulation” is the fascists who believe in “replacement theory” – that the “white races” are being overrun by growing numbers of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. Many progressive folk don’t realize just how widespread that conviction is, but it’s time they wised up: It’s been the founding creed of the extremist right wing for over a century.[9] Ecofascists are also concerned about the environment being overrun, and so are many in the conservation sector, which has its own foundation in racism and anti-immigration.[10] They might balk at thinking they too share ecofascist beliefs, but many of them do.

To underscore its point, WWF’s footage accompanying its cry to “stabilize” the population “low” looked like it was shot on the banks of the Ganges or similar. The inference is clear. Overbreeding non-Europeans threaten our world.

 

Now, social media is not the best repository for definitive answers to the universe’s riddles, or even one planet’s problems, but let’s consider all this. The film may be less than a minute long but it doubtless cost WWF thousands. Experts would have pored over the script to ensure it was exactly right before attaching the best footage to illustrate the meaning. Attenborough’s people, probably the man himself, must have approved the final cut, after all he’s probably the world’s most experienced broadcaster and he certainly picks his “issues” with extreme care. Believe me, nothing here was left to chance.

People on social media, including me, reacted quickly to the film. We complained and forced the conservation giant to take it down and apologize.[11] But it’s too late. It’s clear what WWF and their ilk actually believe.

The story reminds me of WWF fundraising from 1994, which posed the very odd question: whether to send in the army or an anthropologist to stop indigenous people destroying the Amazon (its proposed answer, needless to say, was to give WWF yet more money). Yes, WWF actually suggested that indigenous people, not the industry bigwigs[12] it invites to sit on its boards are the destroyers of the world’s largest rainforest, an ecosystem which those same indigenous people are both responsible for creating and by far the best at protecting. That can now be proven from satellite pictures and data about the higher biodiversity in indigenous-controlled territories.

 

The real tragedy here is not what Attenborough and WWF believe – that won’t change unless and until savvier folk get a controlling hand – it’s that they are able to foist their propaganda on so large a sector of the Global North, including on many progressives. Perhaps many white environmentally-aware people really do believe that “overbreeding” will overrun the Earth and see it as a duty, even “sacred” duty, to defend the planet from the barbarian hordes. That’s been the really big lie drummed into us for over a century, it’s a key component of racism and anti-immigration. It has financial support from corporations and big foundations, and enormous backing from governments which dedicate massive amounts of our money to foment it. Worst of all, those who promulgate this lie are now planning on getting billions more dollars through their terrible “new deal for nature,” which is warming up to be the biggest land grab in history. They want control of no less than one-third of the globe for their “Protected Areas,” and yes, they are sending in the army, often private militias, to get local people out.[13]

If we really want to save the world, we have to fight against such a truly destructive message. My guess is that it’s a struggle which will never end, but like combatting bigotry, cruelty and disease, that’s no reason not to engage. Here’s the real choice: On the one side are billions of dollars, on the other, billions of lives.

Attenborough and WWF say, “We now have the choice to create a planet that we can all be proud of.” They illustrate it with a sci-fi-like cityscape to illustrate what they have in mind.

 

It’s actually a picture of Singapore’s “Gardens by the Bay” theme park, which cost over (U.S.) $700 million to build and $20 million a year to run, in the world’s third richest country (per capita).[14] As you would expect, the futuristic “gardens” were built by migrant laborers who face prison and beating if they overstay. Many low-paid construction workers in Singapore are from India.[15] Who knows, perhaps some of the same laborers could be in the clip of the overpopulated “Ganges” earlier in the film? Anyway, it’s entirely fitting that Attenborough and WWF’s choice for the future is a theme park reserved for the rich. If the rest of us have a choice, then please count me on the other side.

Notes.

1) Link to the original film: (https://twitter.com/Survival/status/1268935324232814592?

2) The full text is: “Suddenly, saving our planet is within reach. We have a plan. We know what to do. Stop the damaging stuff, roll out the new green tech, stabilise the human population as low as we fairly can, keep hold of the natural wealth we have currently got and we’ll have built a stable, healthy world that we can benefit from forever. We now have the choice to create a planet that we can all be proud of, our planet, the perfect home for ourselves and the rest of life on earth.” ?

3) Amnesty International. “This is what we die for”: Human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Power the global trade in cobalt. London: Amnesty International, 2016. https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR6231832016ENGLISH.PDF (accessed June 23, 2020) ?

4) The world’s billionaires own as much wealth as 60% of the earth’s population.
Lawson, Max, Anam Parvez Butt, Rowan Harvey, Diana Sarosi, Clare Coffey, Kim Piaget and Julie Thekkudan. Time to care: Unpaid and underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis. Oxford: Oxfam International, 2020. https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/620928/bp-time-to-care-inequality-200120-en.pdf (accessed June 23, 2020) ?

5) World Bank. “GDP per capita (current US$)”. World Development Indicators. The World Bank Group. 2018.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=US-ZG (accessed June 23, 2020) ?

6) The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “Migration and population change – drivers and impacts”. Population Facts, no 2017/8 (2017). ?

7) The World Bank. “Population growth (annual%)”. 2018.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?locations=EU-ZG-US-AU-CA-NZ&name_desc=false (accessed June 23, 2020) ?

8) McVeigh, Karen. “World is plundering Africa’s wealth of ‘billions of dollars a year’”. The Guardian, May 24, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/may/24/world-is-plundering-africa-wealth-billions-of-dollars-a-year (accessed June 23, 2020) ?

9) Bowles, Nellie. “Replacement Theory,’ a Racist, Sexist Doctrine, Spreads in Far-Right Circles”. The New York Times, March 18, 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/technology/replacement-theory.html (accessed June 23, 2020) ?

10) Corry, Stephen. “The Colonial Origins of Conservation: The Disturbing History Behind US National Parks”. Truthout, August 25, 2015. https://truthout.org/articles/the-colonial-origins-of-conservation-the-disturbing-history-behind-us-national-parks/ (accessed June 23, 2020) ?

11) https://twitter.com/wwf_uk/status/1268933761573490689 ?

12) Eg. Coca-Cola, Tata, KPMG, Adamjee, AES, Indus Basin etc. ?

13) Further information can be found here:

Survival International, Rainforest Foundation UK and Minority Rights Group International. The ‘Post-2-2- Global Biodiversity Framework’ – a new threat to indigenous people and local communities?. London: Survival International, 2020. https://assets.survivalinternational.org/documents/1908/post-2020-biodiversity-framework-briefing-final-survival-rfuk-mrg.pdf (accessed June 23, 2020) ?

14) AsiaOne. “Final cost for Gardens by the Bay within budget: Khaw.” AsiaOne, Oct 15, 2012. https://www.asiaone.com/News/Latest+News/Relax/Story/A1Story20121015-377822.html#:~:text=He%20estimated%20that%20the%20annual,of%20operating%20the%20outdoor%20gardens. (accessed June 23, 2020)

Suneson, Grant. “These are the 25 richest countries in the world”. USA Today, Jul 8, 2019. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/07/07/richest-countries-in-the-world/39630693/

(accessed June 23, 2020) ?

15) Ratcliffe, Rebecca. “’We’re in a prison’: Singapore’s migrant workers suffer as Covid-19 surges back.” The Guardian, April 23, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/singapore-million-migrant-workers-suffer-as-covid-19-surges-back (accessed June 23, 2020) ?

[Stephen Corry has worked with Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, since 1972. Twitter: @StephenCorrySvl.]

We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe

Scientific American

October 17, 2019

By Joel M. Moskowitz

 

Jan 10, 2020, World Econmic Forum website:  "In fact, the revolution has already begun. The global deployment of 5G networks got a running start in 2019 and is set to rapidly expand beyond anything we expected a year ago. But the public understanding of 5G hasn’t caught up."

Jan 10, 2020, World Econmic Forum website: “In fact, the revolution has already begun. The global deployment of 5G networks got a running start in 2019 and is set to rapidly expand beyond anything we expected a year ago. But the public understanding of 5G hasn’t caught up.”

 

The telecommunications industry and their experts have accused many scientists who have researched the effects of cell phone radiation of “fear mongering” over the advent of wireless technology’s 5G. Since much of our research is publicly-funded, we believe it is our ethical responsibility to inform the public about what the peer-reviewed scientific literature tells us about the health risks from wireless radiation.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently announced through a press release that the commission will soon reaffirm the radio frequency radiation (RFR) exposure limits that the FCC adopted in the late 1990s. These limits are based upon a behavioral change in rats exposed to microwave radiation and were designed to protect us from short-term heating risks due to RFR exposure.

Yet, since the FCC adopted these limits based largely on research from the 1980s, the preponderance of peer-reviewed research, more than 500 studies, have found harmful biologic or health effects from exposure to RFR at intensities too low to cause significant heating.

Citing this large body of research, more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields (EMF) signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for stronger exposure limits. The appeal makes the following assertions:

“Numerous recent scientific publications have shown that EMF affects living organisms at levels well below most international and national guidelines. Effects include increased cancer risk, cellular stress, increase in harmful free radicals, genetic damages, structural and functional changes of the reproductive system, learning and memory deficits, neurological disorders, and negative impacts on general well-being in humans. Damage goes well beyond the human race, as there is growing evidence of harmful effects to both plant and animal life.”

The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals.

The FCC’s RFR exposure limits regulate the intensity of exposure, taking into account the frequency of the carrier waves, but ignore the signaling properties of the RFR. Along with the patterning and duration of exposures, certain characteristics of the signal (e.g., pulsing, polarization) increase the biologic and health impacts of the exposure. New exposure limits are needed which account for these differential effects. Moreover, these limits should be based on a biological effect, not a change in a laboratory rat’s behavior.

The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified RFR as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” in 2011. Last year, a $30 million study conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) found “clear evidence” that two years of exposure to cell phone RFR increased cancer in male rats and damaged DNA in rats and mice of both sexes. The Ramazzini Institute in Italy replicated the key finding of the NTP using a different carrier frequency and much weaker exposure to cell phone radiation over the life of the rats.

Based upon the research published since 2011, including human and animal studies and mechanistic data, the IARC has recently prioritized RFR to be reviewed again in the next five years. Since many EMF scientists believe we now have sufficient evidence to consider RFR as either a probable or known human carcinogen, the IARC will likely upgrade the carcinogenic potential of RFR in the near future.

Nonetheless, without conducting a formal risk assessment or a systematic review of the research on RFR health effects, the FDA recently reaffirmed the FCC’s 1996 exposure limits in a letter to the FCC, stating that the agency had “concluded that no changes to the current standards are warranted at this time,” and that “NTP’s experimental findings should not be applied to human cell phone usage.” The letter stated that “the available scientific evidence to date does not support adverse health effects in humans due to exposures at or under the current limits.”

The latest cellular technology, 5G, will employ millimeter waves for the first time in addition to microwaves that have been in use for older cellular technologies, 2G through 4G. Given limited reach, 5G will require cell antennas every 100 to 200 meters, exposing many people to millimeter wave radiation. 5G also employs new technologies (e.g., active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive multiple inputs and outputs, known as massive MIMO) which pose unique challenges for measuring exposures.

Millimeter waves are mostly absorbed within a few millimeters of human skin and in the surface layers of the cornea. Short-term exposure can have adverse physiological effects in the peripheral nervous system, the immune system and the cardiovascular system. The research suggests that long-term exposure may pose health risks to the skin (e.g., melanoma), the eyes (e.g., ocular melanoma) and the testes (e.g., sterility).

Since 5G is a new technology, there is no research on health effects, so we are “flying blind” to quote a U.S. senator. However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. Meanwhile, we are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation. These increases are consistent with results from case-control studies of tumor risk in heavy cell phone users.

5G will not replace 4G; it will accompany 4G for the near future and possibly over the long term. If there are synergistic effects from simultaneous exposures to multiple types of RFR, our overall risk of harm from RFR may increase substantially. Cancer is not the only risk as there is considerable evidence that RFR causes neurological disorders and reproductive harm, likely due to oxidative stress.

As a society, should we invest hundreds of billions of dollars deploying 5G, a cellular technology that requires the installation of 800,000 or more new cell antenna sites in the U.S. close to where we live, work and play?

Instead, we should support the recommendations of the 250 scientists and medical doctors who signed the 5G Appeal that calls for an immediate moratorium on the deployment of 5G and demand that our government fund the research needed to adopt biologically based exposure limits that protect our health and safety.

 

[Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology.]

 

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

WATCH: COVID-19! Black People Fight Back! Chairman Omali Yeshitela Overview

WATCH: COVID-19! Black People Fight Back! Chairman Omali Yeshitela Overview

Black is Back Coalition

April 19, 2020

 

“The reason this discussion is happening is not because of the numbers of people who are dying – but because who is dying. Because it is something that can also possibly affect white people…”

 

 

“Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the Black is Back Coalitions, sets the tone and sums up the political events such as COVID-19 and upcoming U.S. elections that forces the Coalition to organize the “COVID-19 Pandemic: Black People Fight Back” webinar.” [Running time: 11m:49s]

 

 

[Born in St.Petersburg, Florida, USA Omali Yeshitela is Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party USA and the African Socialist International. Full bio]