THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS GLOBAL NATIONALISM IS A DETERRENT TO FIGHTING IT
THE 99% OF THE WORLD UNITE!
YOU HAVE A WORLD TO WIN!

DEAR EARTHLINGS; ITS OFFICIAL WE ARE NOW EXPERIENCING

THE EARLIEST DAYS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS WILL IT BRING OUR EXTINCTION, YES BUT NOT FOR THE 1% WHO PLAN TO HIDE AWAY WITH THEIR ILL GOTTEN WEALTH
THEY DON'T CARE BUT TO MAKE MONEY TILL THE END FRENCH
CHERES TERRES SES OFFICIELS, NOUS SOMMES EN TEMPS

QUI PEUVENT VIVRE LES PREMIERS JOURS DE LA CRISE DU CLIMAT APPORTERA-T-IL NOTRE EXTINCTION, OUI MAIS PAS POUR LES 1% QUI PREVIENT CACHER Loin de leur richesse indécise POURQUOI ILS NE SOIGNENT PAS MAIS POUR FAIRE DE L'ARGENT JUSQU'À LA FIN SPANISH

UERIDOS TERRENOS SU OFICIAL ESTAMOS AHORA EXPERIMENTANDO

LOS DÍAS MÁS ANTIGUOS DE LA CRISIS CLIMÁTICA LLEVARÁ NUESTRA EXTINCIÓN, SI PERO NO POR EL 1% QUE PLANEA OCULTAR LEJOS CON SU IGUALDAD DE LA RIQUEZA POR QUÉ NO LE IMPLICAN PERO HACER DINERO HASTA EL FINAL RUSSIAN
УВАЖАЕМЫЕ ЗЕМЛИ ЕГО ОФИЦИАЛЬНО МЫ СЕЙЧАС ОПЫТАЕМ

РАННИЕ ДНИ КЛИМАТИЧЕСКОГО КРИЗИСА ОСТАЕТ ЛИ НАШЕ ВЫМИРАНИЕ, ДА НО НЕ ДЛЯ 1% КТО ПЛАНИРОВАТЬ ВПЕРЕД ИХ БОЛЕЕ ПОЛУЧИЛО БОГАТСТВО ПОЧЕМУ ОНИ НЕ ЗАБЫВАЮТ, НО ЗАРАБАТЫВАЮТ ДО КОНЦА
UVAZHAYEMYYe ZEMLI YEGO OFITSIAL'NO MY SEYCHAS OPYTAYEM
RANNIYe DNI KLIMATICHESKOGO KRIZISA OSTAYET LI NASHE VYMIRANIYe, DA NO NE DLYA 1% KTO PLANIROVAT' VPERED IKH BOLEYe POLUCHILO BOGATSTVO POCHEMU ONI NE ZABYVAYUT, NO ZARABATYVAYUT DO KONTSA ESPERANTO
ĈAPITROJ Lia Oficejo Ni Nuntempe Spertas

la Fruajn Tagojn de la Klimata KRIZO I alportos nian esprimon, JES SED NE POR LA 1% KIU PLU LIAVAS Malproksima Kun Ilia Malvarmeta Riĉaĵo KIAL Ili ne zorgas SED FARAS MULTAJN ĜIS LA FINO HEBREW יבלות משרדנו אנו חווים כעת את הימים המוקדמים ביותר של משבר האקלים האם זה יביא את הכחול שלנו, כן אך לא ל -1% אשר מתכננים להסתיר הרחיק לכת עם עולמם העולמי למה הם לא דואגים אבל לעשות כסף עד הסוף ARABIC أعزائي الأرض مسؤولها نحن الآن في تجربة أقدم أيام الأزمة المناخية سوف يجلب لنا انقراض ، نعم ولكن ليس لخطة 1 ٪ الذين يختبئون بعيدا مع ثروتهم حصلت على الثروة لماذا لا يهتمون بكسب المال حتى النهاية

'aeizzayiy al'ard maswuwluha nahn alan fi tajribat 'aqdam 'ayam al'azmat almunakhia sawf yajlib lana ainqirad , nem walakun lays likhutat 1 % aladhin yakhtabiuwn beida mae tharwatihim hasalt ealaa altharwa limadha la yahtamun bikisab almal hataa alnihaya CHINESE SIMPLIFIED

亲爱的地球 它的官方我们现在正在经历气候危机最早的日子 它会带来我们的消极，是的 但不是1％的计划隐藏 离开他们的ILL GOTTEN财富 为什么他们不关心，但赚钱 直至最后

Qīn'ài dì dìqiú tā de guānfāng wǒmen xiànzài zhèngzài jīnglì qìhòu wéijī zuìzǎo de rìzi tā huì dài lái wǒmen de xiāojí, shì de dàn bùshì 1%de jìhuà yǐncáng líkāi tāmen de ILL GOTTEN cáifù wèishéme tāmen bù guānxīn, dàn zhuànqián zhízhì zuìhòu

[FOR OTHER LANGUAGES FEEL FREE TO TRANSLATE

I USED GOOGLE TRANSLATION FOR THESE

SORRY NO NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGE GROUPS

IN GOOGLE TRANSLATE LET THEM KNOW ]

Red-hot planet: All-time heat records have been set all over the world during the past week

Montreal, Glasgow, Belfast and Yerevan, Armenia, are among the international cities to set all-time-high temperatures.

Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest hits nearly three football fields per minute: report

 Alaska melts glaciers, hints at bigger problems that may be to come
Alaska's temperature has risen by 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 50 years, that's compared with 2 degrees for the rest of the planet.

No Climate Event in 2,000 Years 

Compares to What’s Happening Now

While parts of the world have warmed or cooled 

in the past, modern climate change is happening

just about everywhere at the same time.

Extinction Rebellion: Home

https://rebellion.earth/

We are facing an unprecedented global climate emergency. The government has failed to protect us. To survive, it's going to take everything we've got.

‎About Us · ‎Join Us · ‎Events · ‎Our Demands

Extinction Rebellion - Home | Facebook

https://www.facebook.com › Pages › Businesses › Nonprofit Organization

Extinction Rebellion.We are in a period of ecological devastation brought about by our own hands. We must..

International Extinction Rebellion

https://xrebellion.org/

International Non-Violent Rebellion Against the World's Governments for Criminal Inaction on the Ecological Crisis. WE DEMAND: >> Governments tell the truth

Extinction Rebellion - latest news, breaking stories and comment 

https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/extinction-rebellion

 Does Extinction Rebellion Have the Solution to the Climate Crisis?

The disconcerting thing about such radicalism, at this moment, is that it is the activists—rather than the state or law enforcement—who have the facts on their side. One of Extinction Rebellion’s favored tactics is to quote the first line of the executive summary of the 2018 report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” On the day I visited, a study commissioned by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, a research organization which dates back to 1754, set a deadline of 2030 to fundamentally redesign British agriculture to withstand the climate crisis and worrying trends in public health. “What we eat, and how we produce it, is damaging people and the planet,” the report said. “This is not some dystopian future; this is happening here and now, on on our watch.”

THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS GLOBAL 

IT IMPACTS ALL OF US 

IT RECOGNIZES NO NATIONAL BOUNDARIES

THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS THE CRISIS OF CAPITALISM

SYSTEM CHANGE NOT CLIMATE CHANGE  

Can Ecosocialism Save The World

teleSUR English

Capitalism is killing the planet, what's the solution?

SEE: HEAT WAVE EUROPA THE WORLD IS AFLAME 

Law professor Charles Reich, author of ‘Greening of America,’ dies at 91
Steve Rubenstein 

July 5, 2019


Charles Reich’s “The Greening of America” blessed the counterculture

 of the 1960s and became a million-selling manifesto for a new and

 euphoric way of life.
Photo: Roger Ressmeyer / Getty Images

Half a century ago, Yale law school professor Charles Reich wrote a million-seller book that had the country talking.

It was called “The Greening of America” and it was full of history and philosophy and predictions about America’s future, all wrapped up with something that Reich called Consciousness I, II and III.

The book was a sensation. In December 1970, it was the best-selling book in the country. A long excerpt ran in the New Yorker magazine. The engaging, brilliant and popular law school professor who loved nothing so much as a quiet walk in the woods suddenly found himself a national phenomenon.

That the work is little known or remembered today puzzled the author’s many friends and left Reich, who moved to San Francisco four decades ago, bemused and at least as philosophical as anything in his book.

Reich died June 15 in San Francisco of natural causes following a period of declining health. He was 91.

“He was brilliant, and he was respectful and warm, in a positive way,” recalled retired Stanford Law School professor Michael Wald, his longtime friend and former student. “It was a real treat to be in his class. Almost every day, at the end of class, his students stood and applauded.”

Another friend and former student, California Court of Appeal presiding Justice J. Anthony Kline, said Reich had an “inquiring mind and was a bit of a skeptic.”

He devoured books on any subject, from the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to rock music.

“The key to his creativity,” said Kline, after thinking the matter over, “is that he was not vested in conventional verities.”

In “The Greening of America,” Reich declared that Consciousness III was represented by the counterculture of the 1960s, its free lifestyle and its use of recreational drugs. It replaced the earlier two “consciousnesses” represented by 19th century America and by the New Deal.

The cover of his book carried a five-sentence summary in large type — unusual for any book before or since — that proclaimed a coming revolution “will originate with the individual and with culture ... and will not require violence to succeed.”

Another friend, San Francisco environmental lawyer Trent Orr, called Reich “really smart and really fun, with some fairly out-there ideas that he wasn’t afraid to put out there.”

A native of New York City and a graduate of Oberlin College and Yale law school, Reich served as a clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and became a close friend of Justice William O. Douglas. He taught at Yale from 1960 to 1974.

At Yale, Kline recalled, the young Reich was assigned to teach a course in property law, about which he complained he knew little. He threw himself into the subject and became an internationally known authority, writing a highly cited law review article on the changing notion of property rights and maintaining that property included not only real estate but such institutions as welfare benefits and professional licenses.

Among his other Yale students were a pair of ambitious idealists named Bill and Hillary Clinton.


In 1974, he moved to San Francisco and taught at University of San Francisco law school. He enjoyed the outdoors, books and long talks with friends.

“He was a complicated guy,” Kline said. “He became a celebrity, but becoming a celebrity was never something he aspired to.”

Of his book’s fall from popularity, Wald said, Reich had little time or inclination to be sad.

“The book had a big impact, and then the world changed,” Wald said. “It moved in a different direction.”

In a 2010 interview with CBS News, Reich mused on how the changes he foretold didn’t play out as he predicted.

“The things that troubled young people in the ’60s and the things that trouble young people today seem quite different, in the sense that the troubles today are mostly material trouble — I can’t get a job; I can’t support a family. Whereas the complaints in the 1960s were more spiritual — I don’t feel like a real person, or something like that,” he said.

“However,” he added, “whether you’re complaining about spiritual emptiness or material emptiness, you’re ultimately complaining about the same system that’s creating both kinds of emptiness. That’s the link between ‘The Greening of America’ and the way young people are feeling today.”Reich is survived by his nephew, Dan Reich, of Baltimore and by his niece, Alice Reich, of Philadelphia. A private memorial gathering was held in San Francisco.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF


ERIC ED110384: The Future of Work and Leisure. ERIC Publication date 1975

Topics ERIC Archive, Economic Climate, Employed Women, Futures (of Society), Labor Market, Leisure Time, Life Style, Population Trends, Prediction, Social Change, Sociocultural Patterns, Values, Work Attitudes


Collection ericarchive; additional_collections


Language English

Earlier projections of labor supply and speculations about the impact on values and lifestyles on work, leisure, and work-leisure relationships are reassessed in light of current events. Previous projections were the basis for three alternative scenarios of possible work-leisure relationships. The first examined some of the implications of arguments developed by Charles Reich in "The Greening of America." The second was developed as an antithesis to the first and traced the implications of a renewed commitment to full employment and the preservation of the traditional meaning of work. The third depicted a blending of the values and life styles of the first two. Upon examination after four years time, the elements which induced a preference for the third alternative require modification based on the increasing economic activities of women, the aging of the baby-boom, and the potential resource scarcities and recession. The emerging trends appear to suggest a shift from the third scenario to the second. Projections over the next quarter century and their implications are discussed. Footnotes and tables are included. (Author/KSM)

No, Higher Consciousness Won’t Save Us

https://www.laprogressive.com/higher-consciousness/

Charles Reich (William K. Sacco/Yale University)

Autumn 2010 is a time of disillusionment for many who deplore the USA’s current political trajectory. Some who’ve been active for progressive causes are now gravitating toward hope that individual actions — in tandem with higher consciousness, more down-to-earth lifestyles and healthy cultural alternatives — can succeed where social activism has failed. It’s an old story that is also new.

From economic inequities to global warming to war, the nation’s power centers have repulsed those who recognize the urgency of confronting such crises head-on. High unemployment has become the new normal. Top officials in Washington have taken a dive on climate change. The warfare state is going great guns.

When social movements seem to be no match for a destructive status quo, people are apt to look around for alternative strategies. One of the big ones involves pursuing individual transformations as keys to social change. Forty years ago, such an approach became all the rage — boosted by a long essay that made a huge splash in The New Yorker magazine just before a longer version became a smash bestseller.

The book was The Greening of America, by a Yale University Law School teacher named Charles Reich. In the early fall of 1970, it created a sensation. Today, let’s consider it as a distant mirror that reflects some similar present-day illusions.

On the front cover of “The Greening of America,” big type proclaimed: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act.”

That autumn, I was upbeat about Reich’s new book — including its great enthusiasm for “the revolution of the new generation.” (Hey, that was me and my friends!)  The book condemned the war, denounced the overcapitalized Corporate State, panned the rigidity of schools, lauded the sensuality that marijuana was aiding, and dismissed as pathetically venal the liberalism that had driven the country to war in Vietnam.

At the time, I scarcely picked up on the fact that “The Greening of America” was purposely nonpolitical. Its crux was personal and cultural liberation — in a word, “consciousness,” which “plays the key role in the shaping of society.” And so, “The revolution must be cultural. For culture controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa.” In effect, the author maintained, culture would be a silver bullet, able to bring down the otherwise intractable death machine.

Let’s freeze frame those two dreamy claims and mull them over. Consciousness “plays the key role in the shaping of society.” And culture “controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa.”

Reich combined those outsize tributes to “consciousness” and “culture” with disdain for some plodding struggles. “The political activists have had their day and have been given their chance,” he wrote. “They ask for still more activism, still more dedication, still more self-sacrifice, believing more of the same bad medicine is needed, saying their cure has not yet been tested. It is time to realize that this form of activism merely affirms the State. Must we wait for fascism before we realize that political activism has failed?”

In his 1970 book, Reich laid it on the line: “The great error of our times has been the belief in structural or institutional solutions. The enemy is within each of us; so long as that is true, one structure is as bad as another.” And Reich added a fanciful theory of “liberation” that would leave behind the corporate liberal constraints of the era.

Liberation, he wrote, “comes into being the moment the individual frees himself from automatic acceptance of the imperatives of society and the false consciousness which society imposes.” His optimism sprang from the belief that “the whole Corporate State rests upon nothing but consciousness. When consciousness changes, its soldiers will refuse to fight, its police will rebel, its bureaucrats will stop their work, its jailers will open the bars. Nothing can stop the power of consciousness.”

Fast forward a quarter century.

In 1995, the same Charles Reich was out with another book — Opposing the System — his first in two decades. Gone were the claims that meaningful structural change would come only as a final step after people got their heads and culture together. Instead, the book focused on the melded power of huge corporations and the U.S. government.

Reich’s new book was as ignored as “The Greening of America” had been ballyhooed; no high-profile excerpt in The New Yorker or any other magazine, scant publicity, and not even faint controversy. Few media outlets bothered to review “Opposing the System.” A notable exception, the New York Times, trashed the book.

In his 1995 book, Reich challenged what he called “the System” — “a merger of governmental, corporate, and media power into a managerial entity more powerful by reason of technology, organization, and control of livelihood than any previously known form of rule.” Reich astutely noted that “we deny and repress the fact of corporate governmental power,” and he pointed out: “There will be no relief from either economic insecurity or human breakdown until we recognize that uncontrolled economic forces create conflict, not well-being.”

In sharp contrast to his flat assertion a quarter century earlier that “the whole Corporate State rests upon nothing but consciousness,” Reich now emphasized the egregious imbalances of financial power: “It is economic deprivation that comes first, dysfunctional behavior second, in the true cause-and-effect sequence.”

The author saw a much fuller social context for the yearning and euphoria that had animated “The Greening of America” and the era it celebrated to excess in 1970. Far wiser in 1995, he wrote: “Most of the important things in life, the things we truly desire, such as love, joy, and beauty, lie in a realm beyond the economic. What we do not recognize is how economics has become the destroyer of our hopes. It is economic tyranny that cuts off our view of a better future.”

Today, even more, we live in a time of economic tyranny. The mantra of “hope” has proven hollow when directed toward a political leader; some react to disappointment by pinning their hopes on individual consciousness or cultural transformations. But deep patterns of economic predation, ecological destruction and endless warfare cannot be effectively undermined by transcendent consciousness or cultural radicalism. Realistic hope is not in a political star or in the mere transformation of our individual selves. Our best strategies and our futures are bound together with political engagement that embraces all of humanity.
Norman Solomon

Norman Solomon is national co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched byProgressive Democrats of America. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

Book REVIEW / NONFICTION : 

Fighting a New Bogyman--a Nameless, Faceless System :

 OPPOSING THE SYSTEM by Charles A. Reich; Crown $23, 219 pages
JONATHAN KIRSCH SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Charles Reich's "The Greening of America," first published in 1970, was one of those rare books that captured and helped to define the spirit of its times. The very word greening became a kind of shorthand for the boisterous but humane values of the late '60s and pre-Watergate '70s, and Reich was seen as a gleeful guru of revolution and redemption.

No such light escapes the black hole of Reich's new book, "Opposing the System." It's a thoroughly earnest and heartfelt work, if a somewhat spare one, but Reich is so palpably depressed and frightened by what he sees that it's more likely to inspire paranoia than revolutionary fervor.

Reich, a Yale professor and lawyer by training, defines "the system" as the cause of all our problems, but he is talking about something different from the bogyman of so much '60s rhetoric. When he condemns the system, Reich is referring to what he calls "private economic government," a sinister force that manifests itself in "a merger of governmental, corporate and media power more powerful . . . than any previously known form of rule."

Indeed, Reich begins to sound a bit like a character from a Philip K. Dick novel when he conjures up a world in which faceless corporate minions driven by pure and impersonal greed make the only decisions that really count.

"The invisible system that governs us has no name," he writes. "It has circumvented the Constitution, nullified democracy, and overridden the free market. It usurps our powers and dominates our lives. Yet we cannot see it or describe it. It is new to human history."

Only rarely does Reich step down from his soapbox and speak in concrete terms--and only then do we begin to understand what he is so worked up about. He insists that "big government" and the "free market" and the "welfare state" are mostly myths; the real power, and thus the real problem, can be found in the boardrooms and corner offices of corporate America.

"Private economic government is a far more important factor in the lives of individuals than public government," he writes. "In order to get a job, have a career, escape the abyss of being rejected or discarded, people will accept the dictates of corporate and institutional employers, even when these dictates go far beyond anything that public government could constitutionally impose."

An employee who is desperate to get or keep a job, Reich points out, will submit to drug-testing, workplace surveillance, personal searches and censorship by the employer, all of which would be illegal if carried out by the government.

"Economic coercion," he quips, "is violence in slow motion."

Reich specifically calls for a revival of the spirit of protest that characterized the '60s as a way to "fight the system," a phrase that summons up the crackling but directionless energy of the very era in which "The Greening of America" was a bestseller.

"The next stage of this drama must inevitably be the return of protest, of demonstrations and direct action," Reich exhorts. "But this time, protest must find a way to be effective, to unite rather than divide, and to achieve a change of direction."

Reich insists that we need "a new map of reality," and he boldly takes it upon himself to give us one in "Opposing the System." And yet Reich despairs over the loss of vision that once prompted us to feel so optimistic in the '60s. "We are all stumbling in the dark," he broods. "We have lost the ability to imagine a better future."

There's an irony at work in Reich's book. Precisely because so many Americans feel overwhelmed by the system, so frustrated at the impotence of our democracy, so uncertain about which way to jump, it's hard to imagine that Reich's book will prompt the populace to take to the streets in a stirring show of unity.

Reich calls on us to "fulfill our duty as human beings to choose the upward path." But I could not help but feel that the reader who will respond most powerfully to Reich's description of a vast conspiratorial machine that runs our lives is more likely to think in terms of train derailments and the bombings of government buildings than in peace marches and love-ins.

The Koch Brothers and the Tar-Sands

ENVIRONMENT  •  July 5, 2019  •  John McMurtry

Big Lies and Ecocide in Canada

As we know, big lies can run free across borders with few people joining the dots. For example, no media has been reporting that China’s growing dispute with Canada is based on Canada’s enforcement of the Trump administration’s unilateral embargo against Iran. This is what politicians called ‘the rule of law’. In fact, it is assisting the US takedown of China’s superior IT competition – Huawei – for not obeying the illegal US embargo.

One lie builds on another. Repetition institutionalizes it. Then that becomes the truth that sells. As explained long ago by Edward Bernayes, the founder of public relations, democracy is “the manufacture of consent.” What he did not say is that only system-supporting lies may be on offer.

So, the imprisonment of Huawei’s vice-chairwoman and CFO Meng Wanzhou, continues as justified by ‘the rule of law’ and China is at fault for not recognizing it. Official Canada again reverts to type. It attacks the designated US Enemy, in junior partnership with its global corporate command.

Yet this time there is a new twist. Canada is attacking itself on all levels without knowing it. China has imprisoned two Canadian citizens and blocked long-standing major agriculture imports to our increasing public humiliation. The US, the actual cause of the problem, has done nothing to resolve it, and all the while, a deeper self-destruction of Canada unfolds to serve US Big-Oil demands.

The usual leaders of Canada’s branch-plant culture in politics, media news and ‘expert’ commentary just continue their barking.

Great Canada

A US Big-Oil backed juggernaut of Conservative provincial governments and the federal Opposition have been advancing for months in a campaign to reverse longstanding parliamentary decisions, environmental laws, climate action initiatives, Supreme Court directions, and First-Nations negotiations, with the goal of bringing down the current government of Canada. Yet no-one in public or media circles has joined the dots.

Canada’s vast tar-sands deposits are world famous as surpassing Saudi Arabia oil-field capacities in total barrels of potential yield. Great Canada! Yet few notice that over two-thirds of the entire tar-sands operations are owned by foreign entities sending their profits out of Canada, and that almost all its raw product is controlled for US refining and sale from which Canada is cut out.

What is particularly kept out of the daily news is the incendiary fact that the infamous, election-interfering and oft-EPA-convicted Koch brothers – who are behind Trump’s destruction of the US Environmental Protection Agency – have a dominant stake in the Alberta tar-sands as well as the massive BC-pipeline with its toxic sludge heading to tidewater while new colossal tankers plough through and pollute the BC coast.

Koch-owned industries have already extracted countless billions of their now $100-billion fortune from the Alberta tar-sands and have deployed their well-known voter-manipulations to change the balance of power in Canada as they have done in the US.

The objective is the same in both cases – ever more tax-free, publicly subsidized and state-enforced control by US Big Oil of Alberta’s massive oil resources with no public or government regulations or interferences in the way. This is called the ‘free market’.

A Short History of the Background Facts

Prior to the wide-mouth pipelines of toxic Alberta crude planned to go through BC mountains, lands and waters to dominant US processors and profits, oil has to be extracted from the vast tar-sands first. This demands a continuous gargantuan depleting and polluting of the great Athabaska Lake, River and watershed in order to steam-boil the tar out of the vast open-pit mines. These immense open-pit mines are not formed or pumped out of desert as in the Middle East. They are torn in state-size chunks out of the earth’s mantle by monstrous wrecking machines ripping out the boreal forest lands by the roots, destroying the carbon sinks and water-hold stabilization they provide in the Northern region as well as pumping out ever more climate-changing gases.

To boil the tar out of the endless open-pit mines already demands the equivalent of twice the amount of water the entire City of Calgary uses and recycles in a year. But water consumed by the tar-sand boiling is permanently polluted and wasted, and its fresh-water take from the great Athabaska watershed will only increase as the tar-sands ‘development’ is maximized, accessible oil fields are exhausted and prices rise as the still multiplying oil-waste system destroys all of its supporting natural evolution over tens of millions of years. So too, the boreal forests acting as a sink for carbon and holding the watershed together will be permanently lost. None of this costs the Kochs a penny; in fact, all of it continues to multiply their billions to even more billions.

Yet this is only the beginning of what ends up being the largest single point-source of carbon pollution and climate destabilization in the world. It pollutes produces 2.5 times more carbon gases than natural oil. Extraction mechanisms cost almost eight times more for fossil fuels than natural oil, and use overall almost as much energy as is produced!

The Long Game Depends on Ignorance of It

For many years now, completely unknown by the public, the Kochs have made most of their vast fortune from looting Canada’s tar-sands and processing billions of barrels of its toxic crude in the US. At the same time, the Kochs have led the huge financing operation behind climate-change denial of the known science that tells us that tar-sand extractions and burning produce far more toxic carbon gases than regular oil.

Most of all, the Kochs have acted out of sight with their Alberta fronts and partners to ensure control over elected governments that might regulate or interfere with their above-the-law rampage across the continent. The Kochs spent more than the Republican Party itself on the 2012 US elections. They invented and funded the Congress-upending Tea-Party, and they finance endless attack ads against all resisters to their domination of the US Congress and Senate (and covertly, the Trump Oval Office).

The Kochs are, in short, cartoonish Big Oil robber barons leading the meltdown of the planet, with Canada as their primary looting basin. Also never said in the news media, the Kochs are behind the destabilization of Venezuela ever since its elected President Hugo Chavez refused to sell Venezuela tar-sand crude at the old cheap rates. The Venezuelan tar-sand bitumen was processed in Koch owned monolithically polluting Flint refineries in Corpus Christi, Texas. This spewing giant multi-smokestack operation lies on the growing dead-zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and is yet another destination for future leviathan tankers out of BC to be filled with Koch-owned Alberta tar-sand crude to replace the huge supply lost from Venezuela.

Their long “cash cow” – in their accountants’ words – is their Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota, which has been processing tens of thousands of barrels of raw Alberta tar-sand crude as their ace-in-the-hole from the beginning.

In fact, the deadly Koch drive wheel of Canada’s politics has flown under the radar in Canada all along. Since being promoted to the senior position in place of Stephen Dionne, Canada Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland has more recently jumped onto the Koch-agenda bandwagon with both feet. She fits well with the Koch-led tyranny over governments that might try to resist, regulate or tax their free-booting plunder and poisoning of the Earth. Freeland’s Foreign Affairs has connected the US fight against Putin to open up Ukraine’s (and eventually Russia’s) vast resources to the war against Bolivar-socialist Venezuela for Koch control of its vast tar-sands again. The de facto goal is to gain total transnational corporate rights to loot and pollute all lands they can connect – now sixty countries in all – on ever larger scales of pillaging that overrides all sovereign control, ownership or direction.

Canada is in the Koch’s cross-hairs too if it stands up to them. But Freeland is like a glove to the Koch-led agenda. After being a cheerleader for the US-led coup in Ukraine in 2014 and then promoted to Foreign Minister, she has war-drummed against Russia, with the facts of conflict repressed in the mass media and official culture. This is why it is never reported that the majority Russian-speaking citizens of Eastern Ukraine rebelled in 2014 against the mass-murderous, Nazi-led coup d’etat that overthrew the elected president. Freeland herself has a background in the conflict – the maternal grand-daughter of the known Ukrainian-born, lead Nazi-media propagandist, Michael Chomiak (a brief scandal around her was quickly resolved by anti-communist justification). The dominant image now is of Russia as a Putin-led bully over Ukraine and its people, all the better to get the vast oil and other natural resources of both through their ‘liberation’. In fact, Kiev itself is the ancient original founding capital of the Rus people; Crimea has been Russian territory since Catherine the Great prevailed against the Ottoman Empire there; and it was the Ukrainian Communist Party Chairman Khrushchev who separated Ukraine from Russia.

More useful to the Kochs, who are immediately seeking re-control of vast Venezuela tar-sands which, in fact, weakens Canada’s own position, Freeland has formed the ‘Lima group’ of new right-wing regimes in Latin America to overthrow Venezuela’s elected Bolivarian socialist government and its public control of the oil resources. Here, every move of illegal interference is big-lied as being based in “legitimate democracy” and “the Constitution of Venezuela.” Thrown into the mix has been Canadian Global Affairs operatives like Ambassador Allan Culham, who as Canada’s Ambassador has been active in all the Latin American coups overthrowing social-democratic governments in recent years, and is now a private contractor for Global Affairs Canada enlisted to disseminate these big lies throughout Venezuelan civil society.

Few know any of this, and no-one follows the dots back to the Kochs. Canada’s tar-sands have replaced the lost Venezuela tar-sands until both can flood the world with multiplied carbon profits for the brothers. They now play with a politically loaded deck, including the support by Global Affairs Canada by CIA-style operations in at least Latin America.

The BC pipeline to tidewater further increases the extent of the Kochs’ control of raw Alberta crude and will multiply oil tanker traffic. The pipeline’s construction is now imperative for their multi-billion investments in the tar-sands. They cannot continue to be ‘developed’ big-time without such market outlets. There are now as many Koch tar-sand licenses for extraction and refineries as can be stripped, fresh-water boiled and wide-mouth piped out for them. In fact, Alberta premiers and the provincial and national media continue to push for ever more crude-to-market deliveries in order to ensure “Alberta jobs,” “foreign investors” and the “unity of Canada.”

Aftermath of the June 18 Go-Ahead of the BC Pipeline

At the official federal approval of the trans-mountain BC pipeline to tidewater on June 18, Finance Minister Morneau affirmed the pipeline by saying it ‘gives us an advantage in price by not depending on the US market’. In truth, once the toxic tar-sands crude crosses the Rocky Mountains to the inland multiplying tankers waiting on the Orca-habitat coasts to transport it, it goes wherever it is most profitable for its mainly US-controllers to ship it. Yet the Finance Minister waves a Canada market and hints at a shadowy non-US destination of China. Well, “our” toxic tar-sand tanker loads are not Canada’s to begin with. Only the shoddy pipeline bought for the mainly US owners is temporarily Canadian at five billion dollars of taxpayer costs, and it transports the toxic product to open sea-lanes for more Koch-led Big Oil trafficking and carbon pollutions.

As for a China destination for Canada toxic crude, China has been made an adversary, and is now blocking even import of Canada’s agricultural products. It is understandably enraged that Canada has imprisoned her leading corporate citizen and CEO of Huawei, the emergent global internet champion over the US with its stunning global market success in IT technology and sales. In supreme hypocrisy, the Canada claim of ‘obeying the rule of law’ in imprisoning the Huawei CEO blames China for not respecting the international norms and law that Canada is itself violating on the demand of the US for her extradition as a tactic in its trade war with China as well as on the basis of an illegal embargo against Iran.

In fact, this is ultimately a political imprisonment demanded by the US that Canada has delivered with no foundation in the normal extradition requirement – a crime or offence that is unlawful in Canada as well as the US. Canada’s Ambassador to China John McCallum long ago pointed this out in legally circumspect and diplomatic language. Yet the subterranean US-cum-CIA-news-service control of ideological reflexes across Canada’s official culture became immediately clear, but with no-one noticing. The political and mass-media roof – including CBC – fell on McCallum for doing the right thing.

More deeply in matters of uncontrolled carbon pollution destroying life and life-support capacities on Earth, the Liberal government’s justification of the massive BC pipeline-to-ocean of toxic Alberta tar-sand crude is revealing. The naming of a non-US market for this Alberta crude as a ‘price advantage’ implies that the government plans to enforce the pipeline in order to transport endless toxic tanker tar-sand crude across BC and the Channel Islands for over 9000 more kilometers of more carbon effluents across the Pacific Ocean to China or East Asia. The future implications of the policy here is so carbon-irresponsible and opposed to government commitments the mind boggles. But ocean transports, like air transports, have been kept out of the Paris Agreement led by the UA and Canada for just such reasons.

No matter which way things go, it seems, the big lies only grow bigger as the tar-sand ecocide extends its reach. There seems no end to the black hole and the mendacious cover stories. But one very Alberta attempts over months to turn the Senate into an extra-Parliamentary force of Big-Oil bullying to stop it, Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, just received Royal Assent on June 21, 2019. It bans heavy-tanker traffic on the iconic Northern BC coast up to Alaska. It is closed for now.

‘Alberta Jobs’ and ‘National Unity’

In Canada, the governing parties and the corporate media have had such a media-transmitted love-in with Big Oil that even Alberta’s NDP Premier Rachel Notley militantly demanded for years – as a moral obligation to Alberta as well as to all of Canada – that the US-dominated tar-sands mega project receive ever more rights and public subsidies to run its crude over neighboring BC mountains and the inland whale-inhabited ocean channels.

The spell of ‘national unity’ to sell Alberta’s US-controlled oil sands is not broken even as the forest fires and floods in BC, Alberta and Ontario rage beyond all records from the carbon-destabilized climate. Six new pro-developer premiers of Canada and the leader of the federal opposition have been shouting that delays to the Big-Oil pipelines are “breaking up the country.”

US Big Oil, led by the Kochs’ political war chest and already covertly dominating the US Senate and Presidency, has long gotten its way by such polarizing propaganda. Yet in Canada the line of division is portrayed by the national media as the “unity crisis” facing the country. Fortifying the big lies in think-tank gown is the Fraser Institute, forever cited by the media and bullying public policy formation in the guise of an independent professional source of economic knowledge and information. None points out that according to Canada’s tax records the Fraser Institute has received over $750,000 from just one of the Koch foundations.

Big Oil’s crucial step in putting the tar-sands into the driver’s seat of Canadian politics has gone beneath the radar. First of all, it assumes a premise which no-one questions that all the toxic raw product must be piped unprocessed through Canada to foreign refineries, and that Canada must duly enforce this off-shore refinement “as a national priority.” Once this false premise is established as a given, it follows that the Alberta crude must be piped raw and irreversibly toxic across the BC mountain forests and aquifers, and then into its paradisal inland ocean channels for oil-tanker transport – now demanding a rarely mentioned seven-times more oil-tanker traffic carrying a toxic product that cannot be cleaned up.

Any ‘delays’ to the US-Big-Oil agenda (which has the support of more ‘junior’ Canadian oil companies, are then attacked as against ‘national unity’. They are called ‘illogical’ and ‘punishing Alberta’ – even when the time is legally required for amending legislation that has been ordered by the Supreme Court of Canada as well as for negotiating with the First Nations whose lands and waters will be overrun by the dirty-oil project in the midst of a supposed period of ‘national reconciliation’.

In fact, the governing premises here are lawless and driven by what the Kochs specialize in – a fanatic anti-government agenda claiming to be for tax-payers and citizens. The rule of law is implicitly dismissed. Carbon pricing legislated by elected governments – which sane oil corporations now accept as economically required – is ferociously attacked.

Even Parliament’s long-passed Bill C-48 protecting the Northern BC Coast from heavy oil-tanker traffic (tankers carrying over 10,500 metric tons of tar-sand crude) – a bill supported and voted for by over two-thirds of MP’s – has been so militantly attacked in the Senate of Canada that even when it finally passed on June 21, there were howls of outrage led by Conservatives and big-oil fan Jason Kenney to reverse it.

Thus, the single most important legal protection of Canada’s greatest environmental treasure, one that has been the negotiated decision of Parliament and a condition for the oil-pipe through BC, has been marked for elimination even after full parliamentary reviews of both Houses, royal consent and publication. The federal Conservative Party goes along, and even its ever-smiling leader Andrew Scheer has promised if elected in the approaching federal election to abolish Bill C-48. The Koch-fronted Fraser Institute agrees.

The worst part of the whole multiplying Big-Oil tar-sands mega-project may be the mammoth toxin-filled tankers ploughing through and despoiling the world’s most awe-inspiring green inland coasts in BC. These coasts are an ecological paradise comprising a world of whales, eagles, biodiverse life and breathtaking music of nature with thriving indigenous peoples protecting the environment since ancient times.

That the current Big Oil forces, Alberta Conservatives, the federal Conservative Party, many in the Senate of Canada, and various corporate media and fronts are still all seeking to reverse the already-legislated Bill C-48 protection of even the Northern BC coasts from this grossest abuse demonstrates how cancerous the Big Oil tar-sands mega-project has become.

Yet in the unseen, historic shell-game going on behind the scenes, there is a convenient perpetual side-show of attacks on PM Trudeau, whose unforgivable sin is not to push the oil-pipes and tankers through BC fast enough.

Led by Jason Kenney as Premier and the so-far invisible Koch brothers, the Conservative Party across provinces and federally is engaging in an implicit war against any public control over or regulation of Big Oil. Any legal impediment to the massively toxic extraction and export through Canada’s most pristine natural environments to US control, the refineries and the far more profitable foreign market is reverse portrayed as an attack on Alberta and a strike at Canada’s unity as a country.

The assumed absolute necessity of this pipeline and tanker extension of the multiplying tar-sands project is, in fact, the demand of US-led Big Oil to loot and pollute Canada’s natural resources for value added in the US (including oil sales back to Canada at multiplied prices). Yet every politician is supine before the transnational Big Oil powers involved. Even Liberal leader Stephan Dionne who won the Liberal leadership in 2006 on an environmental platform dared not question the Koch-led tar-sands mega-project. “There is too much money in it,” he responded to environmentalist concerns.

With all these unseen premises against Canada’s common life interests now cast as inalterable necessity, the trap is well set. With the federal election slated to occur before October 21, all the wheels are being oiled for a Conservative toppling of the Liberal government and an override of any resistance to the biggest force-play of US-led Big Oil in Canada’s history.

The Unspeakable Contradiction

No-one yet recognizes that the Koch-led US Big Oil plan will actually result in the loss of all the Alberta ‘jobs’, ‘investment’, ‘tax revenues’ and ‘prosperity’ that it promises to deliver. In fact, all of these economic benefits would actually materialize and multiply many times if the tar-sands were processed and refined for Canadian, US and global sale inside Alberta.

Most ironic of all, the most serious immediate danger of Alberta tar-sand crude is its irreversibly toxicity because it is not processed before it is transported. This is what the BC resistance on the ground is most motivated by – the irreversibly disastrous consequences when this unprocessed toxic crude spills anywhere along the way. The spills are an historically demonstrated certitude, but like climate destabilization itself, are denied by the Big-Oil beneficiaries of future tens of billions in private profit.

As always in the ruling narrative, there is ‘no alternative’. ‘It must be done now to create jobs and get product to market’. Astonishingly, no-one in government or the mass media observes the fact that many more well-paying permanent jobs, far more oil revenues, and infinitely more safety from tar-oil spills and dirty-oil carbon effluents are assured by processing the raw bitumen in Alberta itself.

What has not been recognized is that the political stampede for the trans-mountain pipeline is based on a very big lie. If Alberta and Canada’s government, globally competitive Canada oil firms and working people really want to ‘create jobs’, ‘get product to market’, ‘achieve environmental security’, ‘provide needed investment and revenues for the Canadian people’, and ‘reduce climate-destabilizing gases’ the option is economically self-evident.

Process the tar-sand product in Canada and Alberta where the uncleanable toxins can be stripped out by rigorous regulation and safely precautions before they are flooded through huge breakable pipes across a 5000-year-old ecological wonder, larger and more unspoiled than any in the world.

However, just as climate science does not matter to rogue Big Oil, so too is the option of prevention erased from discussion. No mainstream party or mass media voice even mentions the environmental risks of pipelining the toxic crude through the mountains and coasts of BC when it could be cleaned up in Alberta first (although the Greens have done so, to the shock of some environmentalists). None yet flags all the lost Canadian fortune and economic development going down the drain by handing over control to the Big-Oil multi-billionaires like the Koch brothers. As for the foreign interference in Canada’s elections manipulating every step, none reports this either.

And all this for what? The driver is not ‘jobs and prosperity’, ‘creating and sharing wealth’, and ‘making the indigenous people independent’ (what a Canada Senator incredibly just wrote to me). The truth is the opposite on every count. Tens of thousands of high-paying jobs, escalated tax revenues, immense new domestic profits and investment opportunities are now all wasted for Canada by letting four times more of the value-added go South to US Big Oil.

The ultimate consequence here is the dispossession of Canada’s workers, First Peoples, taxpayers and the common wealth by ever more multi-billion private profits extracted from its public lands at the lowest oil-royalties in the world to further enrich the already obscenely rich who are mostly not tax payers and are, in effect, lead destroyers of the life support capacities of the planet. •

John McMurtry is Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His work has been translated from Latin America through Europe to Japan, and he is the author/editor of UNESCO's three-volume Philosophy and World Problems, as well as more recently, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism; From Crisis to Cure.

TarSands

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2019/07/jason-kenney-launches-alberta-witch.html