It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, August 07, 2025
Joie de Vivre: Reclaiming a Positive Vision in
Troubled Times
by David Andersson / August 5th, 2025
Joie De Vivire, 1946 by Pablo Picasso
Not recognizing the magic of the present moment may just be a crime against our humanity.
In my recent article, From Personal Development to Human Development, I explored the imbalance between our inner growth and society’s relentless focus on external activity. One of the greatest obstacles to genuine human development today is the sheer level of negativity we encounter daily.
As an editor, I regularly receive submissions from Western contributors. Many center on themes like political corruption—even among progressive leaders—technological control, cognitive warfare, genocide, alarming climate forecasts (“only three years left to avoid the worst”), and Europe’s persistent, deadly hypocrisy. The list continues, each entry more urgent than the last.
Collectively, these submissions seem to be constructing a culture of counter-revolution—one defined more by resistance than by creation. But if our goal is true change, we must cultivate a positive vision of the future. We need to recognize the progress that has been made and redirect what has gone astray. When people protest today, do they still believe a new world is possible—or are they simply expressing despair over the current one?
Negativity breeds negativity. Nihilistic thinking attracts negative actions, which provoke negative reactions, and ultimately empower harmful leaders. At its core, our crisis is in our heads: it’s about how we perceive the world, and how we respond to adversity.
Paradoxically, we are living in one of the most extraordinary periods in human history—yet many of us are depressed and paralyzed.
In contrast, I also receive submissions from Asia with headlines like Mobile, UPI, and AI Drive India’s Digital Travel Evolution,Roshan Shrestha: The Voice from the Hills Changing Nepali Digital Journalism, and Bangladesh’s “Mango Diplomacy” to Sweeten Relations with India. These aren’t naive success stories. They are narratives of effort, of transformation, of possibility.
Corruption of the mind is among the most violent assaults on human dignity. Today, there’s a deep disconnect between our thoughts and our lived experience. Many of us receive more than we need—yet still feel as though we have nothing. If we can’t manage our thoughts, our focus, our attention—and our blind spots—then no policy or medical breakthrough can save us.
Where is our reverence for human experience? Did we build thousands of years of civilization just to surrender now to despair? What are our cultures, languages, and songs for, if not to nourish us? Or have they been drowned in the noise of our “successful” lives?
Is joy really so hard to access? Has happiness become a strange, distant memory? When was the last time you were truly happy?
Changing the course of one’s life may begin with something as simple as changing what we choose to pay attention to.
David Andersson is a French-American journalist, photographer, and author who has lived in New York for over 30 years. He co-directs Pressenza International Press Agency and is the author of The White-West: A Look in the Mirror, a collection of op-eds examining the dynamics of Western identity and its impact on other cultures. Read other articles by David.
From USSR & Russia and Islam, to Toronto to Antisemitic in the Eyes of the Overload
Eric Walberg interview -- intellectual provocateur who is now under the gloom of Jewish Supremacy and his Israel-Induced Gastritis
Oh, we did it, via Zoom, from Newport, Oregon, to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We had to use the free version of Zoom (is anything free with digital gulag tools, since Zoom has our data, our recording, even the stuff we said off the recording mode?) which is 40 minutes max, and then we did another recording, so, that’s 30-30, Parts One and Parts Two. It’s in an MP4 format, which I will convert to an MP3 for the KYAQ FM radio show that will air sometime in October.
Oh, he was daring to come onto my show since he has been so much more dignified in older shows.
My idea of a 30-30 interview? Make that .30-30 caliber.
Go here for a three-part book review, which gets under the chigger-infested skin of a world gone Israel Mad:
(In this three-part series, Canadian author and journalist Eric Walberg reviews Dan Steinbock’s book, The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military, 2025. All three parts are published in this issue to provide continuity.)
Baby steps?
And we talked about this giant step forward FOR all of Jewish-Kind:
Oh, Samson and Hannibal and David’s Sling and Pegasus and Esther Project, and alas, we are seeing a few stories about the 9/11 of Oct. 7:
Reporting on the testimony, Israel’s Channel 7 reported that “At 5:20 a.m.” on October 7th, Shitrit said, “We were playing on the phone and suddenly a strange message came up from my deputy commander, .. and what he says on the radio is something like this: ‘I don’t know why, but an order was given that there would be no patrols in the (Gaza) fence until 9 a.m”.
He went on to say, “And sure enough, an hour later, at 6:30, suddenly sirens”.
The outlet reported that he said, “Every morning the platoon raises alert, and in his estimation, there are no mornings in which there are no patrols on the (Gaza) fence,” quoting him saying, “because you are in an operational battalion and that is part of the matter”.
Eric and I discussed his Dissident Voice pieces, and this one, surely would put him in the dock if he was living in Germany or UK: “Israeli Jews’ Love of Genocide — Review of Peter Beinhart’s Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning” by Eric Walberg / May 17th, 2025.
I think just saying the word “Jew” will get you in trouble, and saying that the Jews of Israel Love Genocide is certainly a death sentence. For Muslims. Walberg is Muslim.
Reality: Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui,
“I was forced to resign from my role as Senior EDI Advisor (Jan 2024) and then let go from my position as professor (Aug 2024) at Sheridan College for my advocacy on the genocide of Palestinians.
While waiting for the arbitration date, I was advised by the union lawyer to “cool it” on my advocacy if I expect any positive outcome.
I made it clear from the start that my only reason to fight this unfair dismissal was to get a formal apology and public acknowledgement of the college’s bias. I was told an apology would be expecting too much, but compensation a more likely reality.
Over a year later, I’m still waiting for the date of arbitration.
And in this time, the department I worked in has dissolved, the people involved in my case have moved on to better pastures. even the president has left. This institution that I’m waiting to receive accountability from has been totally refaced.
AND the genocide has continued with even greater barbarity.
I was expected to hold my tongue, suppress my conscience, lie in wait, all whilst the institution and people that harmed me not only continued to harm others, but be rewarded for it.
The systems that oppress us are designed to silence us and the systems in place to protect us from them are designed to tire us.
Clearly my advocacy never stopped.
Because my moral conscience was a price I was not willing to pay for my career.
Look, accountability is important, we should take every step to hold these institutions to task, but we must also understand that a fair and just outcome – in my case, being vindicated, compensated or reinstated is rare.
The false hope we are asked to place into the systems that we know so well to be historically discriminating, all at the expense of our silence, is nothing but a tantalizing and delusive dangling carrot.
Don’t fall for it.
Maintain your integrity.
Never stop speaking the truth.”
[Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui is a globally recognized multiple award-winning public-speaker, media pundit, researcher, and a passionate social justice advocate. As well as being a professor of sociology, criminology, and criminal-psychology, she is currently directing one of Canada’s largest government-funded Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives at Colleges and Institutes Canada’s National EDI Knowledge Mobilization Centre hosted at Sheridan College. She is also leading a national study with Institute for Social Policy and Understanding in Washington, DC, that both quantifies and analyses in-depth the influence and impact of a right-wing extremist political group on U.S. institutions and American attitudes.
As a postcolonial scholar, her intersectional research concentrates on the impacts of colonialism and imperialism on the lives of diasporic peoples in the West. Focusing in the areas of migration, race/ethnicity and ethno-religio identity, Dr. Ghaffar-Siddiqui’s doctoral research explored the ways in which Muslim communities in the West navigate their social worlds in a post 9/11 climate. Her previous research includes a qualitative analysis of South Asian people’s experiences of discrimination and healthcare seeking behaviours in traditionally colonial healthcare structures and settings in Ontario.]
Eric and I did not get into Sabreena’s dismissal, which is basically hateful and Jewish-Inspired Klanadian version of 1984 a la 2025.
We didn’t get into this blasphemy:
By David Miller
Zionist war criminals are being secretly hosted in Britain, with thousands arriving over the past several years, according to documents in the possession of Press TV.
They are hosted by Zionist families in the UK, taken on tours to popular tourist sites, and welcomed into private homes — as reported on the now-deleted website of the “charity” involved that goes by the name ‘British Friends of Israel War Disabled’ (BFIWD):
We did all the usual things, had an orientation tour of London, went to the theatre, visited Waddesdon Manor, went shopping, had a tour of the Houses of Parliament, visited the RAF museum and went bowling.
Our host families fed and made our guests a part of their families and we all danced the night away at the final thank you and farewell party. No one who met our guests was not moved by their experiences and the atmosphere at the final party was electric. Each and every one of them touched our hearts.
Fawning over genocidaires suggests that the risks to the UK extend beyond the visitors themselves to those who host them. There is something particularly disturbing about Zionists in the UK providing what is, in effect, material support for ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
*****
Eric played good cop to my bad cop, which is funny coming from Walberg:
… all of us pin our hopes on world mass opinion. None of the world leaders, apart from the Axis of Resistance can be counted on. Arab leaders loathe the pesky Palestinians almost as much as US-Israel does. It is only the revolting masses that stand between them and the Palestinians.
The first real sign that South African apartheid would be dismantled was when (Jewish) MP Harry Schwarz met with ANC’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi to sign the Mahlabatini Declaration of Faith in 1974, enshrined the principles of peaceful transition of power and equality for all, the first such agreement by black and white political leaders in South Africa.
But it took another two decades of struggle until de Klerk opened bilateral discussions with Nelson Mandela in 1993 for a transition of policies and government.
It seems we have reached that first stage today. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2006 to 2009, and Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian foreign minister from 2005 to 2006, met Pope Francis on October 17, 2024, to promote a peace plan that would see a Palestinian state existing alongside the state of Israel ‘on the basis of 1967 borders’ with a few territorial adjustments.
Their plan calls for the city of Jerusalem to be the capital of both Israel and Palestine, with the Old City being ‘administered by a trusteeship of five states of which Israel and Palestine are part.’
In the last lecture of “Society must be Defended” and in the last chapter of The History of Sexuality (Vol.1), Foucault noticed how biopolitics, that is, the positive power over life can become a deadly form of power. It is not only a “calculated management of life” but also a “power to expose a whole population to death”.2 Drawing on the dramatic experiences of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes and on the global nuclear threat, Foucault highlighted how human masses are eliminated in the name of the protection and survival of a nation, a people and/or a class. Besides, he noted how racism has become the political tool that enables the biological division of the human species and the justification of the extermination of those considered inferior. Foucault insisted modern racism has developed with the “colonizing genocide”, so that the right to take life could be justified.3 Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito have explored these foucauldian observations with the notions of “homo saccer” and “thanatopolitics”, insisting respectively on the sovereign right to kill with impunity and the biological/pathological justifications of humans’ exterminations.4 Mbembe’s necropolitics offers a novel approach as it draws both on Foucault and a decolonial approach (often inspired in Frantz Fanon) and conceives of necropolitics as the political making of spaces and subjectivities in an in-between of life and death. The colony in general and the slavery plantation in particular have given birth to those necropolitical practices — fostered by white supremacy — that still continue today.
The subjugation of life to the power of death
Necropolitics entails the “subjugation of life to the power of death”. In “our contemporary world” — following Mbembe — various types of “weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living-dead”.5 This production of “death-worlds” is carried on by three main factors I will define subsequently. On the one hand, necropolitics entails a necroeconomy. Modern capitalism would produce nowadays an excess of populations that could not be exploited anymore but require to be managed precisely through their exposure to deadly dangers and risks. The so-called “climate crisis” is maybe the most illustrative example of this necroeconomy, along with the current destruction of public/social goods and rights. On the other hand, necropolitics draws on the confinement of certain populations in particular spaces: campsites. Relying on Agamben’s insights, Mbembe holds that the camp-form (refugees, prisons, banlieues, suburbs, favelas) has become a prevailing way of governing unwanted populations. The latter are enclosed in precarious and militarized spaces so that they can be controlled, harassed and potentially killed. It is “a permanent condition of ‘living in pain’ ”.6
The third and “key characteristic” of necropolitics is “to produce death in a large scale”. This aspect is developed, in particular, in a subpart untitled “Relation Without Desire” from the First Chapter “Exit From Democracy” of Necropolitics (2019). It is possible to explain this characteristic, highlighting seven traits that, according to my understanding, seem to underpin Mbembe’s account on the issue.
1) State terror: The State persecutes, imprisons and eliminates certain populations so that political and social contestations can be neutralized. Those repressive tactics are operated not only by totalitarian regimes but also by contemporary liberal and illiberal countries.
2) The shared use of violence: In many cases, the State does not have and willingly shares the monopoly of violence with other private actors (i.e., militias, paramilitary), increasing the circulation and use of weapons in society. The latter is therefore divided between “those who are protected (because armed) from those who are not”.7
3) The “link of enmity”: According to Mbembe, in a society where the possession and nonpossessions of weapons define one’s social value, all social bonds are destroyed. The link of enmity normalizes therefore the “idea that power can be acquired and exercised only at the price of another’s life”.8
4) War: “Coercion itself has become a market commodity”.9 Nowadays, war and terror have become modes of production on their own, and as such need to generate new military markets.10
5) The predation of natural resources: In order to exploit valuable natural resources, populations are displaced and eliminated (i.e. indigenous people in the Amazon rain forest) though the active and hidden collaboration of the State, public forces, international corporations and criminal organizations.
6) Different modes of killing: The exposure to death is multiple: tortures, mutilations, mass killings, high-tech elimination through “drone strikes” represent various modalities of necropolitical devices.
7) Different moral justifications: According to Mbembe, atrocities are justified for various reasons such as the eradication of corruption, different types of “therapeutic liturgy”, “the desire for sacrifice”, “messianic eschatologies”, and even “modern discourses of utilitarianism, materialism, and consumerism”.11
Necropolitics implies therefore a closed entrenchment of political, economic and military devices, oriented towards the eliminations of human populations. But along with this aspect, necropolitics is also deployed through “small doses” of death that structure the everyday life of individuals.12
Less human than human
Along with mass killings and exterminations, Mbembe argues that necropolitics implies a surveillance on individuals not so much for the purposes of discipline, but to extract from them a maximum of utility, such as in the case of sexual slavery.13 The instillation of those “small doses” of death in the daily existences of many individuals also comes from “unbounded social, economic, and symbolic violence” that destroy their bodies and the value of their social existence.14 Daily humiliations perpetrated by public forces on certain populations, the strategy of “small massacres” inflicted one day at a time, and the absence of basic social goods (e.g. sanitation, housing) bring about a kind of existence whose value “is the sort of death able to be inflicted upon it”.15 Under those circumstances, necropolitics consists
in the power to manufacture an entire crowd of people who specifically live at the edge of life, or even on its outer edge — people for whom living means continually standing up to death …. This life is a superfluous one, therefore, whose price is so meager that it has no equivalence, whether market or — even less — human …. Nobody even bears the slightest feelings of responsibility or justice towards this sort of life or, rather, death. Necropolitical power proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death, as if life was merely death’s medium.16
Under everyday necropolitics, a mass of populations live under extreme precarious conditions and as such, can be exploited and eliminated “naturally”. Mbembe singles out racism as the main criteria that allow necropolitics to be performed and expand in society. Along with an “hydraulic racism” that defines institutional racism (State, law, administration), Mbembe pays attention to a so-called “nanoracism” that is deployed in everyday social relations, and is designed to stigmatize, to injure and to humiliate “those not considered to be one of us”.17 Taking into account current political, social and symbolic forms of violence that are deployed worldwide, Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics represents a relevant heuristic category for contemporary critical thought.
Antonio Pele is an Associate Professor at the Law School of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
*****
Next time I have Eric on we will discuss his books:
He’s got gravitus and gastritis, which he attributes to the on-going genocide and horrific images of children and civilians being gunned down while lining up for so-called food aid.
Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s. He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for the foremost Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, Al-Jazeera and Turkish Weekly, and is a commentator on Voice of the Cape radio. His articles appear in Russian, German, Spanish and Arabic and are accessible at his website ericwalberg.com. Walberg was a moderator and speaker at the Leaders for Change Summit in Istanbul in 2011. His book, Postmodern Imperialism, is published in Chinese, Turkish and Russian.
Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.
Economic Terror and the Turbochuggf*ck in Texas
by Danbert Nobacon / August 6th, 2025
I don’t know what word in the English language—I can’t find one—that applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life … so they can put a few more dollars into highly overstuffed pockets. The word ‘evil’ doesn’t begin to approach it.
Unlike other historical periods of extreme wealth inequality, the added fact that our planet’s life support systems are currently being pushed toward a breaking point adds a new level of horror to current governance by the elites. As Chomsky implies, we need new words to describe our daily and worsening situation.
The short answer to Chomsky’s question is that these people, mostly oligarchs, are corporateeconomic terrorists, answering to no one as they are executing the suicide hijacking of the natural systems that pilot the planet Earth, in their quest to rule a now-burning planet of their own making. Operating mostly by stealth to keep fossil fuel king, their cumulative crimes over the last five decades amount to a mostly slow-motion, everyday reign of terror over the whole planet, punctuated by the turbo–charged, greenhouse gas-fueled, climate chaos of extreme weather events.
Exposing the Entrapocracy
Extreme weather terror, or turbochuggf*cks in the vernacular, is most recently evident in July 2025, in the human catastrophes caused by floods in Texas, New Mexico, and North Carolina, as well as in the heatwaves across Europe and around many other parts of the world that do not merit media coverage in the US. Increasing in number and intensity each year, such disasters are the sharp end of global warming, which is pushing the planet’s life support systems towards the brink of collapse. Crucial, but absent in most of the reporting of these disasters and climate change in general, is the role of the corporate-powered climate denial lobby in prolonging the shelf life of fossil fuels for decades beyond their sell-by date.
The most profitable business in the history of the world has leveraged its vast wherewithal to assume political, judicial, and cultural control of those human systems necessary to prolong its own primacy, by completely normalizing this insanity. In the face of now long standing near total agreement amongst climate scientists that as a global community we simply need to stop using fossil fuels, the fossil fuel industry seized control of the invisible hand to throttle dissent, whilst slamming down its invisible foot harder on the accelerator of increasing fossil fuel production, driving the planet ever closer towards the climate precipice.
Whilst mostly sticking to the shadows of their dark money universe, these corporate economic terrorists do have names, and they should be made to answer for their eco-cidal crimes. Best in Show corporate economic terrorist is Charles Koch, who pioneered in practice the now much-copied template for bending the US political system away from genuine democracy and towards authoritarianism, and, in his case, in favor of the bottom line of his personal economic agenda.
Koch stands head and shoulders above his peers as a key organizer in terms of coordinating billionaire “solidarity,” not least enabling allegedly competing brands within the fossil fuel industry to work in unison, if not direct collusion, to use any means necessary to prop up the fossil fuel oligopoly’s monopoly on how the planet is powered. Acting like a protection racket, this entrapocracy ensures that the general public’s subsistence needs are largely dependent on an infrastructure specifically designed for the exclusive use of fossil fuels’ key products, keeping us, the global citizenry, largely entrapped, often against our better judgment, but nonetheless hooked.
“Climate Homicide”
The fatal “side effects” of unregulated capitalism are long known. Back in 1845, Friedrich Engels formulated the concept of “social murder,” defining it as an unnatural death that results from social, political or economic oppression, “whereby the class which at present holds social and political control … places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death,” precisely because of the unregulated dominating activities of the ruling class. Engels’s point wasn’t rhetorical. In 2022, a US worker was killed at work every ninety-six minutes, on average, according to records kept by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Jason Hickel identifies a second era of horror unleashed on the Global South by corporate power mongers in the Global North as “colonialism 2.0.” Hickel calls the catastrophic harm to billions of people in poorer nations from the “excess emissions of a few rich nations” a “crime against humanity” and stresses that “we should have the clarity to call it that.”
A joint study by the Harvard School of Public Health and three British universities in 2021 found that 1 in 5 global deaths, or around 8.7 million people per year, can be attributed to fine particulate fossil fuel pollution. These deaths are on top of those directly resulting from turbochuggf*ck weather events.
In a 2024 journal article, published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review and covered by Common Dreams, David Arkush and Donald Braman describe the man-made climate crisis as not only “globally catastrophic” (as the fossil fuel industry has known for years) but also “climate homicide.” They point out that the oil majors have been “technically sophisticated enough to know that they could hide the harms they were generating from lay observers for decades, allowing them to earn trillions of dollars while researchers, activists, and regulators struggled to overcome the sophisticated disinformation and political influence campaigns these profits supported.”
Further, Arkush and Braman contend that, “The case for [climate] homicide prosecutions is increasingly compelling. A steady growth in the information about what [Fossil Fuel Companies] knew and what they did with that knowledge is revealing a story of antisocial conduct generating lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history.”
Charles Koch inherited a fortune and then multiplied it many times over. Initially, in 1969, as a rookie CEO, he secured control of the Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota and refined the tariff-free, dirtiest of “garbage crudes” from the Canadian tar sands, to become the Koch cash cow for decades to come. Lee Fang described Koch Industries as a “pollution-based empire,” engaged in what George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison called the modern expression of capitalism’s essential DNA—colonial looting— which has made Koch the twenty-second richest man in the world today.
Toxic Business Activism
As if mirroring their extremely profitable and ever-expanding ventures of turning the world’s most toxic raw materials into sellable products, Charles Koch and his brother David pioneered an equally toxic form of business activism, which continues to push the planet to the brink of habitability and the US political system into authoritarianism.
In a 1974 speech organized by the Institute for Human Studies, Charles Koch praised the infamous Powell Memo, which urged business activism, but noted that it did not go far enough. Recommending a radical corporate libertarian vision for the country, where government only exists to oversee the police and the military in their duties to protect the private property rights of the elites, Koch envisioned a world where any taxes on elites amounted to theft, where the progressive reforms of the twentieth century would be rolled back, and where all regulations against corporate activity would be abolished. We can call this Koch’s Project 1974, and, some fifty years later, many of Koch’s wishes are being fulfilled by the second Trump administration in the form of Project 2025, which, of course, Koch himself partly funded.
The political machine he built to this end became known as the Kochtopus, for its multi-tentacled, democracy distorting, and unprecedented seizure of US politics. Call this Koch math, i.e., billionaires weaponizing what, for them, is chump change (the millions of dollars available from their tax evasion schemes) to secure billions of dollars in return in the form of further tax cuts, corporate perks, and government deregulation. Koch initiated donor summits in 2003, harnessing the undisciplined billionaire instinct of throwing money at causes and weaponizing its collective power in the form of what Theda Skocpol and her colleagues called a “donor consortia,” thus multiplying times over what good, old-fashioned, dirty oil money could buy in terms of actual political influence.
Couching the defense of fossil fuel in the broader realm of the conservative tent of rabid market fundamentalism, the Kochtopus became a toxic ideological engineering pipeline, pedaling this capitrickalist free malarketry from ideas generated by paid-for-professors and taught in funded university programs across the country; refined into policy proposals in conservative think-tanks and deployed in the real world in “scripts” handed to paid-for-politicians; all of which were distilled and seeded as invasive species of dominant narratives in the corporate owned media. The Kochtopus’s reach was further and uniquely magnified by the addition of astroturf boots on the ground, facilitated by paid-for-organizers, often graduates from the above network, with budgets leftists and progressives could only dream of.
Promoting Climate Denial
We now know that Big Fossil Fuels’ own scientists predicted, with remarkable accuracy, turbochuggf*cks and climate breakdown as a result of global warming all the way back in the 1970s. Koch was certainly privy to this insider knowledge at the time. By 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen had testified before Congress, putting the world on notice that global warming was real and was happening.
In response, Koch’s own Cato Institute hosted the world’s first climate denial conference in 1991, the details of which remained buried until Christopher Leonard revealed it in his 2019 book, Kochland. Fifteen years ahead of the Tea Party, Koch’s own free-market thought police, the fake populist Citizens for a Sound Economy, led the efforts to defeat the Clinton-Gore administration’s attempts to tax carbon. And the Kochtopus joined the industry-wide pushes to derail the Kyoto Protocol and to prevent Al Gore from becoming President in 2000.
Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez document how, by the mid-2010s, the Koch effect operated on the scale of a national U.S. political party … but despite its massive size, the Koch network is a leveraging operation—not a separate third party—because it is intertwined with (although not subordinated to) the institutional GOP … the Koch network operates as a force field to the right of the Republican Party, exerting a strong gravitational pull on many GOP candidates and officeholders. The overall effect is to reset the range of issues and policy alternatives to which candidates and officeholders are responsive.
In 2004, after Citizens for a Sound Economy underwent a rebranding, it emerged as Americans for Prosperity. During the Obama administration, the much expanded group bullied politicians, with the threat of primary challenges from the right, into taking a “climate pledge” that effectively flipped almost the entire Republican Party into the party of climate denial. By 2014, “only eight out of 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change was a reality.”
If all this were not enough, Koch’s key cognizant pre-meditated climate crime is the massive expansion of Koch Industries into frack-f**cking the planet. Its Corpus Christi refinery in Texas, which had focused on light oil refining, was ideally positioned to capitalize on the fracked oil boom of the early 2010s. Despite the well-established and public climate science that recommended remaining fossil fuel reserves stay in the ground, Koch doubled down on fracking, confirming his intentions to stay the course. Around this same time, Koch began trying to whitewash his own image using the smallest of his small change, as the Kochtopus used its massive wherewithal to continue to bully the GOP and the country towards the authoritarianism that would be essential to defending his businesses in the 2020s.
The Other DEI: Domestic Election Interference
Americans for Prosperity gloated over the recent passage of Trump’s Big Abomination of an Abysmal Bill, praising how it “unleashes American Energy” by reducing regulations and increasing tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry, oblivious as ever to the economic terror guaranteed by this implementation of this Project 1974 “economic freedom über alles.”
In late 2024, Connor Gibson and Robert J. Brulle, joined what is now a chorus of journalists and researchers who have exposed the Koch brothers as leaders of climate denialism, if not the scam’s leading perpetrators; yet when I play the songs from my Kochtopus’s Garden recording at shows and ask who has heard of the Koch brothers, very few people raise their hands.
Unable to let go, Charles Koch remains CEO of Koch Inc. Now aged 89, he’s likely to escape in death any punishment for his life of economic terrorism. In 2023, as an hors d’oeuvre for his undeclared plans for life after death, he bequeathed, tax-free, a record-breaking $5 billion to sustain the Kochtopus after his passing. For those inheriting the burning planet that is the Kochtopus’s Garden, documenting his crimes and stopping their daily recurrence is up to us—by dissent, by court cases, and by dismantling the corrupt, oligarchic political system Koch did so much to create.
This article first appeared in https://www.projectcensored.org/economic-terror-turbochuggfck-in-texas/
Danbert Nobacon, Chumbawamba alumni, lives in Twisp, WA. His most recent CD is Kochtopus’s Garden—Now That’s What I Call Capitalism—The Musical. He hosts The Mystery Motel radio show, playing music and talking about current events with his pals. He is writing a book with the working title, Kochtopus’s Garden—The Origin Story of the American Oligarchy and Its Idiot Plan to Rule a Burning Planet. Read other articles by Danbert.
