[NOTE: I don't have any prepared thoughts on the latest foreign-policy insanity, but I still feel the need to mention the recent hypocritical drivel coming out of Washington about Russia and China. Canada's Liberal government continues to embarrass us by going along 101% with the USA's "diplomatic boycott" of China over something. Also, the country that employed lies to invade Iraq and which lied about "winning" in Afghanistan for over twenty years is now telling us that Russia wants to invade the Ukraine and that China is all set to invade Taiwan. The country that destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and other countries, and which is currently committing crimes against humanity in Iran and Venezuela with the imposition of illegal starvation sanctions and whose ruling elites happily consign tens of thousands of their own citizens to needless death to preserve the profits of private health insurance providers, is just SOOOOO concerned about the well-being of Ukrainians and Taiwanese that it's willing to go to war to protect them from the threats from Russia and China. Meanwhile, US ally Saudi Arabia has a free pass to commit genocide in Yemen. What stupid bullshit.]
Global warming is an obvious reality in Southern Ontario. Up until the mid-nineties we were always guaranteed a white Christmas and now it's often hit-or-miss. (As someone who loved snow as a kid and still prefers a snowy winter evening to a dead, dark snowless one, this is important. It was even more important when I was a kid who loved getting presents at Christmas - "Thank You Jesus for being bo-o-orn!" - although I don't like Christmas at all anymore.) T'would appear from the shrinking glaciers and snow mountain tops and the disappearing Pacific islands, that global warming is a reality around the, ... well, ... the GLOBE.
All the right-wing shit-heads from the turn of the millenia who used to argue against global warming in the youthful blogosphere (and who might still be arguing their crapola for all I know) were, and remain so fucking wrong. The fossil fuel companies knew about it. They knew it was real. They knew that for decades. But selling fossil fuels was getting them rich and they wanted to stay rich and get even more rich. So they lied. And they paid pocket-change to sell "doubt."
It's going to be 13 degrees Celsius here in Toronto on December 13th. We're tipped on the edge of a precipice and we're probably going to topple into the abyss. And the fossil fuels industry, compelled by the "values" of Milton Friedman, Ludwig Von Mises, and Frederick Hayek continues to pursue it's own self-interest and profit.
In hindsight, it’s clear that oil and gas industry leaders used outright climate denial when it suited their corporate and political interests throughout the 1990s. But now that outright denial is no longer credible, they’ve pivoted from denial to delay. Industry PR and marketing efforts have shifted massive resources to a central message that, yes, climate change is real, but that the necessary changes will require more research and decades to implement, and above all, more fossil fuels. Climate delay is the new climate denial.
Nearly every major oil and gas company now claims that they accept the science and that they support sensible climate policies. But their actions speak louder than words. It’s clear that the future they want is one that still uses fossil fuels abundantly — regardless of what the science says. Whether it is selling deadly pesticides or deadly fossil fuels, they will do what it takes to keep their products on the market. Now that we’re in a race to a clean energy future, it’s time to recognize that they simply can’t be trusted as partners in that race. We’ve been fooled too many times.
Sometime it seems as if capitalist politicians will pretend to have more regard for right-wing (bordering on or even bonafide fascists) extremists than they do for us left-wing extremists. In reality of course they have regard for neither of us. They serve capitalism. But pandering to right-wing extremists somehow seems to serve capitalism whereas listening to left-wing extremists injures capitalism. So we have right-wing extremists who believe that global warming is a hoax, and left-wing extremists who think it's real and that we should take actions proportionate to the crisis to overcome it. This gives shit-head politicians who serve capital all the ammunition they need to say that they're trapped between extremists on both sides. (The denialists benefit the fossil fuels/Bay Street crowd whereas the realists threaten them.) That's what it looks like anyway. But I know there's a lifelong 24-7 filtration system that ensures that many of the fucked-up individuals in politics actually believe their own drivel.
It's the same with COVID. Extremists (who are mainly on the right, which explains the giant TRUMP banner I saw last Saturday when a bunch of anti-vaxxers were marching down Bloor and turning down Yonge Street) deny that there's a deadly pandemic and believe that ALL of the vaccines are deadly micro-chip installers, whereas extremists on the left want the patent protections for COVID vaccines removed so that everyone on the face of the earth can be vaccinated. Politicians can then claim, once again, to be trapped between extremists on both sides. This provides cover for protecting oligopolist Big Pharma's profits with regards to patents, and it also provides cover for politicians to do as little as possible in social reforms when responding to the realities of a viral respiratory pandemic. Meanwhile the banks and the super-rich have been making out like bandits.
COVID under capitalism gives us the worst of all possible worlds however. The upholding of Big Pharma's COVID patent protections and (more importantly for them) the profits that arise from them over the health of billions of people means that the pandemic will continue for years and years and years.
Almost two years into the pandemic, the unmet need for COVID vaccines worldwide has become an international crisis. Covax, the global immunization program, projects that it will have a total of about 1.4 billion vaccine doses by the end of 2021, far short of the 11 billion that experts believe are needed to slow the spread of the virus. The program has been hampered by production problems, export bans and vaccine hoarding by wealthy nations. Dr. Ghebreyesus, Director General of the WHO, observes that “I will not stay silent when the companies and countries that control the global supply of vaccines think the world’s poor should be satisfied with leftovers.”1 Of the 5.76 billion doses given around the world, 80 percent have been administered in high- and upper-middle income countries, with only 0.4 percent in low-income countries.2
There will be vast parts of the globe where the virus can spread unopposed. As well, the cossetting of moronic COVID-deniers and anti-vaxxers in countries like ours means a significant domestic pool of plague rats where the virus can thrive. When you combine this with vaccines and half-assed public health measures, it means a thriving virus getting billions and billions of opportunities to evolve against vaccines and masks. This means endless new and more deadly variants. This means strains of COVID able to overcome all of our abilities to control them.
Oxford University in the UK had planned to make their (in hindsight, problematic) AstraZeneca anti-COVID vaccine freely available to anyone who wanted to make it. But software oligopolist/multi-billionaire capitalist Bill Gates threatened to withhold funding for other Oxford initiatives if they did so. Public underfunding of education leads to wealthy "philanthropists" stepping in and funding research that eventually benefits them, and which, given the size of their annual donations, gives them leverage over ostensibly independent entities like universities. The COVID vaccines were still developed with public monies and often public resources, but all the profits are going to the private pharmaceutical companies who stupidly claim that suspending their patent claims to allow widespread production of them to eliminate a deadly, costly, demoralizing, exhausting, global pandemic, will discourage them from ever investing in research to develop profitable medicines in the future.
Big Pharma has been lying for decades about how they need to gouge humanity to fund the research for their life-saving potions. But this has always been nonsense. They simply want to make as much money as possible. All the time. And they don't care who gets hurt or has to die to make that happen. Fossil fuels companies knew global warming was real at least fifty years ago and their response was to contribute to the covering-up and denial of that crisis. Big Pharma knows that allowing COVID to rage untreated across the world will prolong the crisis indefinitely, and it might even lead to the evolution of variants that will overwhelm any vaccines that we could develop. Both of these too-powerful industries, anti-democratically run by greedy psychopaths, put their own continued super-profits over the survival of civilization. It's that simple.
Look at the meat-packing industry. They crammed their workers into close quarters during the pandemic and killed many of them. Their supervisors bet with each other over which workers would die. And now, with the pandemic-created supply-chain crisis, meat is one of the markets that where rising prices accounts for the overall inflation that is influencing many "experts" to call for austerity. Right-wing shit-fucks are blaming the income supports that most governments implemented in the early days of the pandemic (when so many people were prevented from working) as being the cause of this inflation. The fact that many greedy, assholish, selfish capitalist employers are having trouble finding workers as the economy (sort of) comes back to life is also being blamed on government hand-outs to lazy workers. The FACT that paycheques have been stagnant for decades and that jobs have become increasingly precarious and just plain shitty all around counts for nothing with these losers. Blame it on the workers. But then we see that meat-packing industry profits are up 300%!
We took a look at the most recent earnings statements and earnings calls of the big meat processing companies, and here's what we found: they are raising prices far more than any cost increases they're facing, resulting in skyrocketing profit margins.
We see (without too much difficulty) that it is corporate greed that is mainly behind this inflation. Plus there's some built-in neo-liberal drivel that contributes to the crisis. Such as moving so much manufacturing across the Pacific Ocean and ripping off truck drivers.
In a Zoom presentation, officials from the Teamsters and others placed the blame for many of the problems that have led to a shortage of drivers serving the ports on those workers being classified as independent contractors by companies, though the Harbor Trucking Association pushed back on that notion.
...
The problem isn’t too few drivers, Hoffa said, but rather a system in which drivers must bear much of the financial burden themselves, including paying for trucks and fuel — while having none of the regular employee benefits, such as sick pay or health insurance.
...
“At the bottom of the supply chain are port truck drivers,” said Mike Muñoz, research and policy analyst for LAANE, calling the system “a sweatshop on wheels.”
Truck driving, he said, “used to be a respected job.”
But since deregulation, he said, it’s been a “race to the bottom.”
Wages, Muñoz said, have declined some 30% since the 1980s as trucking companies shifted costs “onto the backs of the truck drivers. They have to pay for everything.”
“It’s created a wild west situation,” he said. “There currently are over 18,000 drivers registered to work in both ports, 12,000 of which make regular-to-infrequent trips. This suggests there is no actual (driver) shortage, but a surplus of drivers.”
...
Attorney Julie Gutman Dickinson, another participant on the Zoom call, said the supply chain focus provides more opportunity for additional pressure.
“It is high time for taking stock and using this moment with those we have in power to take action to end misclassification,” she said, “and make sure cargo owners have codes of conduct.”
Noting that the Port of LA has reported that 30% of truck appointments are going unfilled for moving cargo from the docks, Muñoz said, there’s an “inability to coordinate” those jobs.
“Drivers wait for hours in long lines and those hours are unpaid,” he said.
(That emphasis was added.)
The highest value of capitalism is profit. Profit at any cost. Profit however it can be achieved. Capitalism is inspired by "thinkers" like Margaret Thatcher with her stupid assertion that "there is no such thing as society." Capitalism only allows governments that worship it. And those governments will join forces to destroy any movement that challenges it. And those governments will join up to destroy any governments that arise anywhere else in the world that deny the premises of capitalism. Vicious scumbags like Crystia Freeland will link arms with mass-murdering fascist dictatorships in Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, etc., to hypocritically attack governments like Venezuela's Bolivarians for human rights abuses, which includes merely arresting violent insurrectionist traitors trying to overthrow them.
Capitalism enjoys almost complete hegemony in Canada. Liberals, Conservatives, the NDP in Manitoba and British Columbia. To become viable electorally, culturally, and in the eyes of the mass media, all these parties have to accept capitalism's premises and thereby become corrupted. Canada isn't an independent country. Our ruling parties are all slavish servants of US capitalist imperialism. They do what they're told. If they didn't, they'd find themselves going the way of Haiti's Aristide, or Bolivia's Morales or Honduras's Manuel Zelaya. As I said though, living in their bubbles of delusion and stunted intellects, many of our politicians believe their own drivel. So to the extent that they would sell our oil with pathetically low royalty fees and tacitly agree to pay for the clean-up of the toxic mess that US oil companies leave behind, and all the other ways they sell us out to domestic and foreign capitalists, ... to that extent I suppose you could call these stooges "independent."
And, yes, the world is the way it is partly because of right-wing troglodyte shit-heads; racist, vioent, stupid slobbering morons. But some blame must also fall to those fools who become loyalists to the Liberals in Canada, or to the Democrats in the USA. Milquetoast progressives become partisan hacks like Montreal Simon, babbling about O'Toole as the RCMP attacks First Nations to defend the interests of fossil fuels industry and the Bay Street mediocrities who finance them.
Still and all, the population is divided by propaganda. FOX News (itself a creature of neo-liberal imbecile Ronald Reagan's deregulation of broadcasting media that use to be forced to provide time for alternative viewpoints, has had a demonstrable, measurable (and deleterious) impact on the social-political culture in the USA. It is possible to either elevate or lower a culture with enough effort and resources. But it's also sadly true that many right-wing shit-heads come by their noxious opinions honestly. And the ways they are wrong about everything constitute a barrier to our survival. In so doing, they are serving the wills of the super-rich whose response to the calamities they're deliberately bringing down upon us all is to figure out the best way to continue to prosper in the post-apocalyptic hell they will have created:
They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.
Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?”
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed in time.
This is the enemy people. We should be fighting them as if our lives are at stake. Because they are. But we aren't fighting them really. We're complaining about them. And some of the more stupid among us are placing their hopes in them and whining when people like me call them on their stupidity and bullshit.
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