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Tagged ‘McKibben‘

Shearing Sheep

Endurance

May 29, 2016

by Jay Taber

 

Shearing Sheep Getty

A trial of the new automatic sheep shearing machine at the government’s agricultural experimenting station at Beltsville, Maryland, circa 1927. Getty Images.

When in Ireland, I witnessed a sheep farmer and his Border Collies herding sheep into an enclosure. Using whistle commands, the farmer instructed the Collies on which way to turn the sheep, when to bunch them, and when to move them into the pen.

I was reminded of this witnessing the Break Free ‘fossil-free’ campaign events, May 14-16. Assuming the role of the sheep farmer, 350 (led by Bill McKibben) blew the whistle commands, while Break Free organizers barked at environmental activists (the sheep)–herding them into protest encampments at oil refineries.

It was astonishing to witness such precision in action. Of course, this entertaining choreography would never have taken place without the enticement of a payoff for McKibben and his herders from the ‘wool merchants’, i.e. Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and the Rockefeller Brothers.

a-border-collie-herding-sheep-at-the-rockefeller-center-1948-photo-for-life-magazine-by-george-silk

1948 — a sheepherding demonstration at the Rockefeller Center

Now, all that remains is the sheep shearing by on-the-take politicians–the wool taking the form of U.S. Treasury funds for nuclear-powered electrical generating stations, along with large scale solar and wind turbine farms, using highly toxic chemicals from the oil industry in their manufacture.

Now that’s an efficient, vertically-integrated operation.

 

[Jay Thomas Taber is an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal. Since 1994, he has served as communications director at Public Good Project, a volunteer network of researchers, analysts and journalists defending democracy. As a consultant, he has assisted Indigenous peoples in the European Court of Human Rights and at the United Nations.]

Climate Evangelism

A Culture of Imbeciles

January 23, 2015

by Jay Taber

Jim & Tammy 3

June 8, 1988: Overhead portrait of disgraced PTL evangelist Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye, surrounded by members of the Bring Bakkers Back (BBB) group, outside the HQ of the New Covenant Ministries, the latest Bakker movement, at the Carousel shopping center. Photo credit: Will McIntyre

Klein & McKibben Crowd

November 15, 2012, Boston, MA: Do The Math tour

True to form, Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein — the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of climate evangelism — are exhorting their mindless followers to double down on ‘activist’ charades in the wake of COP21. Unlike the disgraced televangelists, however, the climate opportunists probably won’t face a Federal grand jury probe or do any time for fraud. As the loyal ‘opposition’ of the financial elite, they will stick with the Wall Street script, keeping their devotees busy whining but ineffective in confronting the power politics of their billionaire paymasters.

SusanRockefeller-2066-676x450

Susan Rockefeller, Co-Executive Producer of the “This Changes Everything” documentary film and founding partner of Louverture Films, LLC. Louverture is the production company for the documentary film “This Changes Everything” (with The Message Productions, LLC / Klein Lewis Productions ). Photo: Rockefeller at her home on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, New York, on Sept. 8, 2015. Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times) Further reading: Financing “The Message” Behind Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ Project

 

 

 

 

[Jay Taber is an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, a correspondent to Forum for Global Exchange, and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal. Since 1994, he has served as communications director at Public Good Project, a volunteer network of researchers, analysts and activists engaged in defending democracy. As a consultant, he has assisted indigenous peoples in the European Court of Human Rights and at the United Nations. Email: tbarj [at] yahoo.com Website: www.jaytaber.com ]

 

 

350.org: Selling a Lie

Seemorerocks

by Kevin Hester

March 9, 2015

I shouldn’t really be surprised that the Guardian, which has hitherto been one of the better sources of information on climate change has adopted the stance it has in the editorial by retiring editor Alan Rusbridge.

After all this is the newspaper that, almost above all others has acted as a liberal attack dog for the neocons in its crusade against Russian and Vladimir Putin.

The article started out saying all the things that one might expect from a mainstream source on climate change and then Rusbridge brought in Bill McKibben and 350.org.

In particular this:

565 gigatons: “Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by mid-century and still have some reasonable hope of staying below 2C,” is how McKibben crisply puts it. Few dispute that this idea of a global “carbon budget” is broadly right.

The Guardian has become the vehicle for a Big Lie that in the face of all the science it has produced over the years to say otherwise. We are told by McKibben in one breathe that not only is 2C a workable goal but that we still have ‘wiggle room’ and can continue to emit CO2 into the atmosphere just so long as we don’t put too much – and we start to divest from investment in fossil fuels.

Guy McPherson was recently asked if he had read McKibben’s work and he quipped that he has no time for fiction.

Quite.

The biggest danger these days comes not from the reptilian climate change deniers of the Republican Party. Indeed, the biggest danger comes from the liberal flank, from McPherson calls abrupt climate change denial.

As we have come to know 350.org is receiving funding from corporate America and even talks about “our friends in Wall Street”. The line comes down from the top: from McKibben, and his “friends in Wall Street” tell McKibben what the acceptable message is.

The aim is to obfuscate and take the discussion away from the realities that show that climate change is NOW and that, with a growing number of positive self-reinforcing feedbacks (including the growing release into the atmosphere of a gas, methane, that is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. the train has long left the station.

We musn’t know that 2C (which already threatens our ability to practise agriculture and feed ourselves) is already baked into the cake with CO2 remaining in the atmosphere for a thousand years and a lead time between emissions and the effects of warming being felt.

We musn’t know how close the Arctic is to melting; about the melting permafrost and the release of methane and the real-time connections will increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather.

That might get people to really question closely about how all this came about and that would take people back to Wall Street and the Infinite Growth Paradigm that is not at all challenged by the mainstream environmental movement.

Instead the corporates would like the masses to put their energy into signing petitions, appealing to President Barack Obama, changing their light bulbs, driving a Prius and divesting from investment in the fossil fuel industry.

Above all we should donate our money and build the 350.org movement.

Anything but being radical – getting to the root of the matter.

350.org and the liberal, white. middle class, male Americans that stand behind the likes of Global Warming Fact of the Day (from which the author, Guy McPherson, Paul Beckwith and other friends have been ejected) play their role in reinforcing the comforting idea that real climate change is somewhere off in the future and we must believe the conservative science ‘consensus’ rather than those who have, through actual observations shown that the computer models are sorely lacking in their ability to explain the reality of abrupt climate change.

The article, which I wrote in 2013 [link] expresses not even the half of the sordid reality of the betrayal by the liberals, and by McKibben and his organisation.

I would recommend a careful reading of the articles by Cory Morningstar that express the full, sordid reality behind 350.org…..

For the full story read these two articles by Cory Morningstar

Truth About 350

Public Good Project

by Jay Taber

bread-and-circuses2

 

With Chris Hedges op-ed at Truthdig calling the People’s Climate March a “climate-themed street fair,” corporate-funded pied pipers like Avaaz and 350 — both major promoters of the march — will be going on the offensive against reporters who expose Big Green fraud. Indeed, the Labor Day puff piece on 350 at The Real News Network was an opportunity for readers to start discussing the reality of foundation-sponsored spectacle.

While Hedges did not name Avaaz, 350, McKibben, Klein, Soros or Rockefeller brothers in his op-ed, he did say the march is organized by a bunch of “corporate fronts,” and that isn’t going to help Avaaz or 350 any.

Ironically, Hedges is a poster boy at TRNN, and wrote his rebuke of the march the day after the puff piece was hammered in the comment section. Perhaps he can see that the tide is turning against the Avaaz/350 charade, and doesn’t want to seem like a dupe by not calling it what it is. Whatever his reason for waiting so long to speak out, it is nevertheless timely to shine a light on charlatans like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein.

 

[As an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal, Jay has assisted indigenous peoples seeking justice at the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations. Since 1994, he has served as creative director at Public Good Project. ]

Welcome to Netwar

Public Good Project

August 19, 2014

by Jay Taber

imperialismtrade

Illustration: http://stephaniemcmillan.org/

In 1999, when the AFL-CIO herded protestors away from the WTO ministerial in Seattle, it was following through on its nefarious 1994 bargain with President Clinton over NAFTA. Having sold its soul to Wall Street for the few crumbs promised in the aftermath of the opening salvo of globalization, organized labor in the US fell all over itself to become Clinton’s lapdog. Looking back, one might ask, What side were we on?

By November 30, 1999, the fact of labor’s complicity in destroying the economies of the US and Mexico was somehow overlooked or forgotten by the thousands of marchers leaving the AFL-CIO rally. When hundreds of these innocents inadvertently left the labor parade to see what was going on at the WTO convention site, they experienced a rude awakening to reality. As they became enveloped in what came to be known as the Battle in Seattle, these newcomers to activism became witnesses to civil disobedience and police misconduct on a scale not seen since the Civil Rights Movement. As the tear gas-laden fog of war left many choking and disoriented, those on the front line (that labor leaders had hoped the marchers would never see) had opened America’s eyes to the brutality experienced daily in the Third and Fourth World.

imperialist-tool

Illustration: http://stephaniemcmillan.org/

In a parallel of history, AFL-CIO in November 2012 joined Wall Street fossil fuel exporters in promoting a carbon corridor of global proportions on the Salish Sea between Seattle and Vancouver. As part of a campaign to annihilate First Nations treaty rights in Washington and British Columbia, the organized labor alliance was engineered by the world’s largest public relations firm for the purpose of clearing the way for the Tar Sands bitumen, Powder River Basin coal and Bakken Shale crude armada to overwhelm Coast Salish communities, inundating the San Juan and Gulf Islands with fleets of colliers and supertankers carrying fossil fuels from North America to Asia.

imperialism worker-substitution

Illustration: http://stephaniemcmillan.org/

By 2013, Wall Street had learned some important lessons from the multitude of post-1999 protests against globalization. This time around, it owned its own NGOs, which are extremely effective in herding the naive away from making clear and effective demands. Amplifying these lapdog NGO voices with Wall Street-funded Wurlitzers, celebrities like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein (350.org) were created and marketed to lead the credulous astray. As pied pipers of climate change, McKibben and Klein have managed to deceive thousands of American youth into believing fossil fuel divestment on college campuses, or XL photo-ops in front of the White House, are revolutionary. Continuing the historical parallel, In September 2014, 350.org is organizing a Peoples Climate Change March in New York City.

peoples march social mediaclimatemarchsept2014

As Wall Street hijacks the environmental movement using foundation-funded NGOs, Indigenous peoples struggle to be heard, hoping to survive the onslaught of organized labor, compromised greens and militarized police. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department and Pentagon have reorganized to counter Indigenous insurgencies around the globe.

Welcome to Netwar.

geothermal

Maasai Protest Against New Land Concessions For Geothermal Extraction In Kenya. Read more: 

https://intercontinentalcry.org/maasai-protest-aginst-new-land-concessions-geothermal-extraction-kenya-24504/

 

[As an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal, Jay Taber has assisted indigenous peoples seeking justice in such bodies as the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations. Since 1994, he has served as the administrative director of Public Good Project.]

 

Welcome to Netwar

Public Good Project

August 19, 2014

by Jay Taber

imperialismtrade

Illustration: http://stephaniemcmillan.org/

In 1999, when the AFL-CIO herded protestors away from the WTO ministerial in Seattle, it was following through on its nefarious 1994 bargain with President Clinton over NAFTA. Having sold its soul to Wall Street for the few crumbs promised in the aftermath of the opening salvo of globalization, organized labor in the US fell all over itself to become Clinton’s lapdog. Looking back, one might ask, What side were we on?

By November 30, 1999, the fact of labor’s complicity in destroying the economies of the US and Mexico was somehow overlooked or forgotten by the thousands of marchers leaving the AFL-CIO rally. When hundreds of these innocents inadvertently left the labor parade to see what was going on at the WTO convention site, they experienced a rude awakening to reality. As they became enveloped in what came to be known as the Battle in Seattle, these newcomers to activism became witnesses to civil disobedience and police misconduct on a scale not seen since the Civil Rights Movement. As the tear gas-laden fog of war left many choking and disoriented, those on the front line (that labor leaders had hoped the marchers would never see) had opened America’s eyes to the brutality experienced daily in the Third and Fourth World.

imperialist-tool

Illustration: http://stephaniemcmillan.org/

In a parallel of history, AFL-CIO in November 2012 joined Wall Street fossil fuel exporters in promoting a carbon corridor of global proportions on the Salish Sea between Seattle and Vancouver. As part of a campaign to annihilate First Nations treaty rights in Washington and British Columbia, the organized labor alliance was engineered by the world’s largest public relations firm for the purpose of clearing the way for the Tar Sands bitumen, Powder River Basin coal and Bakken Shale crude armada to overwhelm Coast Salish communities, inundating the San Juan and Gulf Islands with fleets of colliers and supertankers carrying fossil fuels from North America to Asia.

imperialism worker-substitution

Illustration: http://stephaniemcmillan.org/

By 2013, Wall Street had learned some important lessons from the multitude of post-1999 protests against globalization. This time around, it owned its own NGOs, which are extremely effective in herding the naive away from making clear and effective demands. Amplifying these lapdog NGO voices with Wall Street-funded Wurlitzers, celebrities like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein (350.org) were created and marketed to lead the credulous astray. As pied pipers of climate change, McKibben and Klein have managed to deceive thousands of American youth into believing fossil fuel divestment on college campuses, or XL photo-ops in front of the White House, are revolutionary. Continuing the historical parallel, In September 2014, 350.org is organizing a Peoples Climate Change March in New York City.

peoples march social mediaclimatemarchsept2014

As Wall Street hijacks the environmental movement using foundation-funded NGOs, Indigenous peoples struggle to be heard, hoping to survive the onslaught of organized labor, compromised greens and militarized police. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department and Pentagon have reorganized to counter Indigenous insurgencies around the globe.

Welcome to Netwar.

geothermal

Maasai Protest Against New Land Concessions For Geothermal Extraction In Kenya. Read more: 

https://intercontinentalcry.org/maasai-protest-aginst-new-land-concessions-geothermal-extraction-kenya-24504/

 

[As an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal, Jay Taber has assisted indigenous peoples seeking justice in such bodies as the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations. Since 1994, he has served as the administrative director of Public Good Project.]

 

Guy McPherson: James Hansen & Bill McKibben are Guilty of Malpractice [VIDEO]

November 6, 2013

Excerpt from the October 16, 2013 lecture by Guy McPherson: “How Do We Act in the Face of Climate Chaos?”

Watch the full lecture here: http://guymcpherson.com/2013/10/presentation-in-boulder-colorado/

Read a summary of the video:

http://carolynbaker.net/2013/10/29/how-do-we-act-in-the-face-of-climate-chaos-summary-of-research-guy-mcpherson/

About Guy McPherson:

“More than ten years into a career in the academic ivory tower, McPherson began focusing his efforts on social criticism, with topics ranging from education and evolution to the twin sides of the fossil-fuel coin: (1) global climate change and (2) energy decline and the attendant economic consequences. His public appearances stress these two predicaments because each of them informs and impacts every aspect of life on Earth.

 

He also speaks about our individual and societal response to these phenomena, and includes topics such as authenticity, Socratic lives of excellence, and the role and responsibility of our species in the world.

 

McPherson’s latest chapter includes abandoning his tenured position as full professor at a major research university for ethical reasons. His story is described in his memoir, “Walking Away from Empire.” You can read about that book and his many others at his website: http://guymcpherson.com/

 

 

Question: Environmental Politics: What’s Left? Answer: Bourgeois Primitivism, That’s What

By DAVID CORREIA

“The cheap prices of commodities,” wrote Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto, “are the heavy artillery with which” the bourgeoisie batters down all borders. The rise of the bourgeoisie “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. It creates a world after its own image.”

[No Logo?] Perils of the Keystone XL Pipeline Confront Obama by Ralph Nader

forward climate3obama3obama-hi-res-logo-capsobama2forward climate 350.orgforwardforward climate black

‘Forward on Climate’ images in above Obama logo montage (found on Greenpeace and 350.org websites). ForwardOnClimate.org (Feb 17, 2013 rally) was presented by 135 different organizations and their members, including 350.org, the Sierra Club, the Hip Hop Caucus, Greenpeace, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Green For All and Forecast the Facts.

Above: What ever happened to No Logo? One may wish to ask 350.org’s Naomi Klein why brand recognition is so important to corporate power. In her book No Logo, Klein described branding as a “fetish strategy”.

Iconic brands are defined as having aspects that contribute to consumer’s self-expression and personal identity. Brands whose value to consumers comes primarily from having identity value are said to be “identity brands”. Some of these brands have such a strong identity that they become more or less cultural icons which makes them “iconic brands”. Many iconic brands include almost ritual-like behaviour in purchasing or consuming the products.

There are four key elements to creating iconic brands (Holt 2004):

  1. “Necessary conditions” – The performance of the product must at least be acceptable, preferably with a reputation of having good quality.
  2. “Myth-making” – A meaningful storytelling fabricated by cultural insiders. These must be seen as legitimate and respected by consumers for stories to be accepted.
  3. “Cultural contradictions” – Some kind of mismatch between prevailing ideology and emergent undercurrents in society. In other words a difference with the way consumers are and how they wish they were.
  4. “The cultural brand management process” – Actively engaging in the myth-making process in making sure the brand maintains its position as an icon. [Source: Wikipedia]

WKOGFeb13

The Nader Page

by RALPH NADER

Feb 21, 2013

Bill McKibben, a prolific writer and organizer on global warming and climate change, has had a busy year teaching environmentalists not to despair and will soon be learning some lessons himself.

Pseudo-Protests and Serious Climate Crisis

Keystone-protest-2

Protesters of the Keystone XL pipeline project were bussed in from 30 states and Canadian provinces. Photograph: 350 org

War is a Crime

By David Swanson

17 February 2013

You elected this president. You reelected this president. . . . Stop being chumps!” –Van Jones

Going in, I was of mixed views regarding Sunday’s rally in Washington, D.C., to save the earth’s climate from the tar sands pipeline.  I still am.

Why on a Sunday when there’s no government around to protest, shut down, or interfere with?

And why all the pro-Obama rhetoric?  Robert Kennedy, Jr., was among the celebrities getting arrested at the White House in the days leading up, and his comment to the media was typical.  Obama won’t allow the tar sands pipeline, he said, because Obama has “a strong moral core” and doesn’t do really evil things.