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I would recommend going to Alter.net and reading the full article as it also focuses on the nuclear threat that humanity faces and how we in the West have been merrily poking at the hornets nest of annihilation with a stick. The part I quoted (after the Idle No More manifesto) deals with the struggle between the so called civilized societies versus the indigenous societies that is going on in many countries.
In Canada, our First Nations are organizing into a national movement called Idle No More. From their manifesto:
“We contend that: Currently, this government is trying to pass many laws so that reserve lands can also be bought and sold by big companies to get profit from resources. They are promising to share this time…Why would these promises be different from past promises? We will be left with nothing but poisoned water, land and air. This is an attempt to take away sovereignty and the inherent right to land and resources from First Nations peoples.
We contend that: There are many examples of other countries moving towards sustainability, and we must demand sustainable development as well. We believe in healthy, just, equitable and sustainable communities and have a vision and plan of how to build them. Please join us in creating this vision.”
They are pissed, and rightly so, and are demanding that we build a sustainable future in Canada as opposed to the Neo-Conservative capitalist trajectory we are currently on. Their movement is incrementally gaining traction in Canadian politics as their message, when and if it is heard, resonates with much of Canada’s populace.
INM and the indigenous people that Chomsky mentions understand that the market is not god and that the idea of a sustainable future runs counter-current to many of the practices Western societies take as the norm. The indigenous societies understand the link between the land and the people that live on it.
They get it. And we, fundamentally, do not.
The view from the business end of the colonial bludgeon provides a clarity that Western societies desperately, necessarily, need to listen to. Ignoring indigenous movements that demand sustainability over profitability such as Idle No More imperils the future for everyone.
So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster. At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible. Unlike Ecuador, and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed.
Both political parties, President Obama, the media, and the international press seem to be looking forward with great enthusiasm to what they call “a century of energy independence” for the United States. Energy independence is an almost meaningless concept, but put that aside. What they mean is: we’ll have a century in which to maximize the use of fossil fuels and contribute to destroying the world.
And that’s pretty much the case everywhere. Admittedly, when it comes to alternative energy development, Europe is doing something. Meanwhile, the United States, the richest and most powerful country in world history, is the only nation among perhaps 100 relevant ones that doesn’t have a national policy for restricting the use of fossil fuels, that doesn’t even have renewable energy targets. It’s not because the population doesn’t want it. Americans are pretty close to the international norm in their concern about global warming. It’s institutional structures that block change. Business interests don’t want it and they’re overwhelmingly powerful in determining policy, so you get a big gap between opinion and policy on lots of issues, including this one.
So that’s what the future historian — if there is one — would see. He might also read today’s scientific journals. Just about every one you open has a more dire prediction than the last.
Fiscal conservatives give me a headache at the best of times. Having them opine about how availability of birth control is going to drive up costs and make every one sad, well…makes me sad. It would be nice, for once, if our conservative friends would base their opinion on something more than a dogmatic adherence to free-market wisdom. The air out here in empirical evidence land isn’t so bad, honest.
Inequality is going to kick our ass if we don’t take measures to rectify the imbalances in your societies. The topic of this video is interesting; the presenter not so much. I recommend watching the video if you have a keen interest in how our world is working, but do not expect to be actively ‘entertained’. :)
We, in Western Civilization, are constantly bombarded with the notion that Capitalism is the be all and end all. It is the End of History, it is the Ultimate System. More like Ultimate-Horsepucky, in my opinion because we almost never get to see the critiques of our system in the mainstream and not knowing the weaknesses of your own system is hubris of the most dangerous variety. It leads to a variation to what psychologists term the Dunning-Kruger effect. And that is, given sufficient ignorance, we cannot accurately judge the quality of the work we produce. It produces truly transcendental moments such as this.
The following is a forty-five minute required slice of viewing because we really do not want to act and claim competence like the choral master linked above when it comes to arguing about our chosen economic system.
Horizontal hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” is fighting with coal mining for the title of worst possible method of resource extraction. Fracking ruins the environment and kills people. It is profitable at the moment though, so you can guess why it is so darned popular. Plus, in the US, people are desperate to feed their families and will take the dangerous jobs to make ends meet. Walter Brasch from Counterpunch writes about the consequences of fracking in his article titled “Life and Death in the Frack Zone”.
“José Lara just wanted a job.
A company working in the natural gas fields needed a man to power wash wastewater tanks.
Clean off the debris. Make them shining again.
And so José Lara became a power washer for the Rain for Rent Co.
“The chemicals, the smell was so bad. Once I got out, I couldn’t stop throwing up. I couldn’t even talk,” Lara said in his deposition, translated from Spanish.
The company that had hired him didn’t provide him a respirator or protective clothing. That’s not unusual in the natural gas fields.
José Lara did his job until he no longer could work.
At the age of 42, he died from pancreatic and liver cancer.”
For capitalism to work, a desperate exploitable class of people is needed. The fracking industry and exploitation were made for each other. But more on exploitation later, as the terribly toxic teat of fracking has much more to offer in the form of damage to human beings and the environment.
“Of the 750 chemicals that can be used in the fracking process, more than 650 of them are toxic or carcinogens, according to a report filed with the U.S. House of Representatives in April 2011. Several public health studies reveal that homeowners living near fracked wells show higher levels of acute illnesses than homeowners living outside the “Sacrifice Zone,” as the energy industry calls it.”
Here is a hint, when your industry’s nomenclature includes terminology like “Sacrifice Zone” its probably not a good industry. And what makes a bad industry worse? No unions. Unions are major drags on profitability, and thus unsurprisingly have little to no representation in the Fracking industry.
“The drivers, and most of the industry, are non-union or are hired as independent contractors with no benefits. The billion dollar corporations like it that way. It means there are no worker safety committees. No workplace regulations monitored by the workers. And if a worker complains about a safety or health violation, there’s no grievance procedure. Hire them fast. Fire them faster.
No matter how much propaganda the industry spills out about its safety record and how it cares about its workers, the reality is that working for a company that fracks the earth is about as risky as it gets for worker health and safety.”
But hey, its all okay, because the right class of people are getting richer and the right class of people are getting cancer and dying young.
I suggest you go to Counterpunch and read the whole article, but here we see the benefit of Marx’s analysis of capitalism.
“In Stack’s “manifesto”, he quotes Karl Marx. Ironically, Marx is useful here. Explaining how human labor-power is objectified in commodities, which then become realized as social relations once they are put to use, Marx demonstrates how through our labor, which is our dominant mode of social relation, we are all connected. Marx was fond of using linen as an example. A weaver’s social value is realized after a person wears a coat made by the tailor. That is, these heretofore unrelated persons now share a common relationship. If we expand upon this and ask how many people today are involved in producing the coat we wear, from the electricity that powers the sewing machines to the petrol used for delivery, the answer is infinite; the answer is all of us. Marx further explains how once the “universal equivalent”, or money, is supplanted as a metric for our labor, that organization of production tends toward profit rather than collective good.
This is a powerful tool in understanding how we share a common relationship with a destitute Greek worker or an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD and/or other psychological disorders. With wages earned from our labor we purchase German goods, exacerbating the economic imbalance between Germany and peripheral countries like Greece, thereby adding to the extreme suffering Greek workers are being forced to endure. It can explain how a solider, upon his or her return home, cannot easily reveal that the jingoist notions of freedom, liberty and security we are all imbued with had no role to play in the killing that we as a society, at least through our taxes, tacitly asked of them. It can further explain how police can criminalize the indigent for their own victimization. As Stack described, the loss of jobs from L.A. caused some Los Angelians to lose their already precarious footing in American society, namely Blacks and Latinos. Combined with systemic, inter-generational poverty and racism, it is all too easy to mistake the symptoms of this malaise for its etiology.”
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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