Sunday, July 14, 2013

Money Always Wins or Courage (Nut-Case Insanity) To Tell the Truth? (It's A Death Struggle)




Gee, I wish the following essay were fiction. What a lovely world it would be . . . well . . . for the 1% anyway.

For a while.

The listing that follows of all the nature organizations (that can't actually be held to any real defined standards of not just being money-makers with a few nice droppings for "saving" our natural world) includes quite a few I stopped giving money to over a decade ago when it became obvious that their goals were more along the lines of accruing money and fame, not serving conservation purposes. And I would tell you which ones but the data make it soooo obvious that . . . well . . . just see for yourselves.

The real agenda behind this international agenda and promotion of its almost religious “climate change ideology” is establishing the rationale for a massive regulatory and taxation system to reshape human behavior and lifestyle, in addition to carving out an entirely new area for technology outlays and financial speculation using carbon-related securities and derivatives.

Ostensibly a not-for-profit enterprise, preaching the climate change creed has also become a lucrative endeavor, with immense financial resources provided for its continued proselytization.

Indeed, the climate-related tax-exempt 501C3 organizations constitute a multi-billion dollar public relations machine devoted to driving home one central theme: humans are to blame for every weather-related disaster graphically presented in every electronic media outlet. Such phony environmentalism involves vigorous efforts to transform public policy based on dubious science while ignoring genuine environmental threats.


While such 501C3's may be found encouraging donations from the general public, the scale of many such organizations’ annual revenue and assets suggests reliance of very deep-pocketed individuals and institutions with an eye toward selling government officials and the broader public on the notion that almost every aberrant weather event is the result of greenhouse emissions.

Bet you didn't know there's some real controversy behind the "climate change" Austerity Boys' agenda. That other most important agenda. Absolutely necessary agenda. Once again, we lose - they win. Or we all lose? But they still win and win big. Right now (and that's what counts in the money game).

Is the rate of change of political drama(s) getting just a tad too energetic for you? I've been thinking there may be several plots afoot. But, then again, I'm no conspiracist. Just an attentive observer.

CO2 and the Ideology of Climate Change: The Forces Behind “Carbon-Centric Environmentalism”

By James F. Tracy

Global Research, July 12, 2013

On June 25, 2013, President Obama laid out his long term agenda for reducing US industrial and consumer “greenhouse emissions.” On July 11th the Department of Energy warns that “climate change”-related events will be threatening traditional sources of energy production and causing more energy supply disruptions. All the while, the notion that unusual or extreme weather events are primarily due to an excess of atmospheric CO2 and the consequent “greenhouse effect” is arguably based much more on long term economic and political designs than sound science.

As a response to the urgent pleas accompanying the purportedly thorough and unbiased research from scientists comprising the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that seeks to link climate change to human and industrial activity, an array of programs are being proposed and implemented by fiat in both Europe and the US.

Such programs will drastically change the standard of living of most every individual in the developed world. Indeed, since global temperatures do not readily correlate with the minute rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, there has been a marked shift within the CO2 public relations machine from the “global warming” meme to the more amorphous and catchall term, “climate change.”

The real agenda behind this international agenda and promotion of its almost religious “climate change ideology” is establishing the rationale for a massive regulatory and taxation system to reshape human behavior and lifestyle, in addition to carving out an entirely new area for technology outlays and financial speculation using carbon-related securities and derivatives.

Ostensibly a not-for-profit enterprise, preaching the climate change creed has also become a lucrative endeavor, with immense financial resources provided for its continued proselytization. Indeed, the climate-related tax-exempt 501C3 organizations constitute a multi-billion dollar public relations machine devoted to driving home one central theme: humans are to blame for every weather-related disaster graphically presented in every electronic media outlet. Such phony environmentalism involves vigorous efforts to transform public policy based on dubious science while ignoring genuine environmental threats.

While such 501C3's may be found encouraging donations from the general public, the scale of many such organizations’ annual revenue and assets suggests reliance of very deep-pocketed individuals and institutions with an eye toward selling government officials and the broader public on the notion that almost every aberrant weather event is the result of greenhouse emissions.

The following list of nonprofit organizations devoted to pushing the view of climate change and sustainability — by no means completehas been gathered from their 990 tax forms for 2010.

In that year such 501C3's brought in over 1.7 billion in revenue ($1,742,350,656), with the Nature Conservancy, led by former Goldman Sachs managing director Mark Tercek, accounting for over half that amount.

Data in the fourth column demonstrates the extent of such entities’ public presence; some command greater journalistic attention while others operate with almost complete anonymity.

(Click here if you can't see all the information in the fourth column.)

501C3 Name
2010 Income
Net Assets
Mentions in Major World News Publications, July 1 2012-June 30 2013 (LexisNexis)
Sierra Club
$97,757,678
$52,209,573
726
World Wildlife Fund
$267,993,426
$182,067,246
993
Friends of the Earth
$5,495,897
$3,407,984
1,831
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
NA
NA
697
United Nations Environmental Program
NA
NA
115
United Nations Foundation
$197,737,803
$231,213,165
101
Nature Conservancy Inc.
$997,037,663
$5,180,558,726
242
Greenpeace Inc.
$27,465,948
$824,056
2,879
Climate Works Foundation
$83,026,313
$215,248,816
1
World Resources Institute
$50,079,176
$59,901,847
125
Center for Biological Diversity
$7,181,472
$10,734,072
115
Defenders of Wildlife
$30,229,512
$23,839,354
35
International Institute for Environment and Development
$30,335,978
$5,121,919
1
Natural Resources Defense Council
$97,957,964
$197,413,060
484
National Council for Science and the Environment
$3,526,925
$562,386
8
Global Green USA
$4,633,587
$4,372,965
8
Pew Center on Global Climate Change
$6,424,365
$4,666,874
2
Institute for Sustainable Communities
$15,007,337
$6,207,761
0
Sustainable Markets Foundation
$4,347,579
$1,660,940
0
US Climate Action Network
$2,414,999
$1,067,116
1
350 Org
$3,013,995
$2,250,300
109
Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education
$2,362,495
$736,159
0
The Alliance for Climate Protection
$19,150,215
$12,052,979
5
Climate Solutions
$2,642,682
$907,901
29
Alliance for Climate Education
$2,749,291
$369,251
2
Climate Central Inc.
$3,273,478
-$808,414
49
Climate Group Inc.
$2,746,784
$465,685
0

For example, the Al Gore-funded Climate Project was first set up for “educational purposes,” principally to have the message of An Inconvenient Truth carried into US classrooms. Another organization, Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, similarly carries out the less prominent work of promoting the green agenda within colleges and universities. Overall, such resources are utilized to emphasize the alleged dangers of greenhouse gas emissions to the very existence of civilization and life itself. The extent of such resources is comparable to what many transnational corporations spends on advertising annually.

While Obama and the array of well-funded environmental organizations campaign on the purported dangers of gaseous emissions, they are wholly silent on what are truly grave threats to the environment and humanity namely the widescale contamination of the food supply from genetically modified organisms, the array of clandestine weather modification and geoengineering programs, the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, and grave pollution of entire global regions from depleted uranium and Fukushima radiation that will last many lifetimes.

In light of these ongoing catastrophes and the powerful financial interests behind carbon-centric environmental advocacy, Obama’s posturing over anthropogenic climate change and environmentalists’ well-funded overtures may be seen for what they actually are the visible components of a complex social engineering program far advanced in convincing the public that its return to a pre-feudal-like existence will not only be agreeable, but absolutely imperative for the greater good.

On another front (if you can stand another major item of blinder-clearing news today) we learn from intrepid reporter Greg Palast's fine edge:


. . . that's the conflict at the core of civilization's corrosion: not between national security and freedom, but between courage and complicity.

Warren Ellis - you might know his comic books, including "Transmetropolitan" with Darick Robertson - said that journalism is a terribly weak weapon - though when correctly aimed, can blow the knees off very large villains.

Last week, the US Supreme Court burned a judicial cross on Martin Luther King's grave, effectively ending the Voting Rights Act. Official apartheid now returns to America's elections. And by the time you read this, Nelson Mandela will probably be dead - along with his vision of human equality and comity.

In the face of such villainy, my reporter's weapon feels limp and my aim not so good. That's why I've deleted my draft of a column which contained my usual screed on the week's transgressions of our political leaders. Given the limits of journalism, there might be more to learn from fiction and poetry.

I begin with Warren Ellis.

Like the assassin in Gun Machine, his latest novel, Ellis is horrified and angry beyond reason that just to walk across Manhattan for a bagel, you step on the unseen skulls of Lanape Indians, on putrefying corpses of immigrants with tuberculosis, on the evidence of unsolved murder-suicides caused by home foreclosures traced back to algorithmic high-speed derivatives trading.

Ellis' killer is not completely nuts when he concludes that whoever dies on this ill ground, this poisoned graveyard, deserves it. Deserves the bullet in the skull, or, more commonly, the demotion to part-time security work at a shopping center owned by some toad-licking financier with a shell company in the Virgin Islands.

Both Ellis' gunman and the cop who hunts him, have - like Manning, Snowden and Mandela - a pathological inability to ignore unpleasant reminders of the flesh on which we've built our empires.

The New York Times editor who greedily used Manning's "Wikileaks" cables, nevertheless called Manning, "disturbed." OK, then, let's accept that courage is a form of insanity. All prophets are nut-cases.

The rest of us are sane. We stare are our paperwork, brown-nose to a promotion, feel up our once-pretty wife's prettier sister, and when Satan says, "Hey, thanks," we pretend not to hear Him.

But Warren Ellis hears Him. In "Gun Machine," Ellis uses the police procedural as a brilliantly subversive way to re-tell the Biblical battle in a form that befits our age of lazy-ass electronically-induced ethical somnolence. Listen:

"Jim Rosato's killer was a bodybuilder gone to burgers and long days on the sofa. He was trembling all over… The top of his head was bald and seemed too small to contain a human brain. …The name Regina was badly tattooed over his chest, stretched by his hairy tits. [Police Officer] John Tallow could not in that moment see any reason why he should not just fucking kill him, so he put four hollow points through Regina, and a stopper through the shitbag's stupid tiny head."

Hey, we've all had days like that.

I'll admit that my dragging in a comic-book-detective-story writer's novel has an ulterior motive. It's part of my never-ending, disconsolate battle against stupid.

I recommend, I insist that, after reading Ellis's "Gun Machine," you move on to Anna Chen, the Dragon poet, then Michael Griffin and Robert Parry. Do that, and you won't have wasted your summer.

It must have been ten years ago. Under the ill influence of the free wine in the Newsnightgreen room, I remember saying things unkind to your nation's Poet Laureate. I think it was his loafers and fey velour-y jacket that made me think he'd just come from some poet's costume store. His poems wore loafers, too. Anna Chen's poetry wears wet leathers, red lipstick, stilettos - and is heavily armed. Her slim volume, Reaching for My Gnu, is filled with what I'd call "strap-on poems." They look like an evening's easy pleasure but are far more painful and unforgettable than you'd bargained for. Here's from "Burgers," describing the need for the artist to get deep into the grime, to the bottom of Life's Deep Fryer:

…I want a burger that's not cooked through, burnt outside with a pinkish hue, coughed on, sploshed on, kicked around and noshed on… One where the chef 's been to the loo, a number one and a number two and a number three if he fancies you.

Chen, a militant BEAA (British East Asian Artist), playwright who blogs as Madam Miaow, jerks around with race stereotypes in the poems "Yellowface" and "Anna May Wong Must Die!" They have that perfect mixture of fun and threat.

Like most good literature today, "Gnu" is only available online.

No loafers allowed.

Savonarola could have learned a lot about book burning from the British Courts. Michael Griffin told me he doesn't have a single copy of his extraordinary book, Reaping the Whirlwind - The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan. Instead, he has a certificate from a crematorium certifying that every known copy has been thoroughly burnt. Apparently, one sentence bothered a billionaire, so the auto-da-fé was ordered by a be-wigged freak in a robe, what the English call a "judge," enforcing the Inquisitional libel laws of the benighted isle. Whatever, I was able to dig through the used book bin at the Strand bookstore in New York to get a copy.

Griffin published "Taliban" just a couple of months before the September 11, 2001 attacks. He expected the book to be ignored. It was.

That is, by time it became a flash bestseller, it was way too late.

You still get a frisson of horrifying irony as Griffin warns that Osama bin Ladin's threats against the USA, despite George W. Bush's la-di-dah view, were no joke.

And there are plenty of sickening OMG moments here, as when Iran masses 200,000 troops on the Afghan border to overthrow the Taliban, "orthodox savages," in the words of Iran's president Khatami. Iran hoped to halt the Taliban's murder-spree against Shia villages - military action blocked by US threats.

Despite the book's ending before the US-UK invasion, you lose nothing in reading this history of Afghanistan, because Central Asian history simply repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, then as Obama.

As I don't want Griffin to get in trouble (more trouble than he's in already), I suggest that you pick up a copy only after your escape from Britain.

Finally, there's Robert Parry's new book, America's Stolen Narrative: From Washington and Madison to Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes to Obama. Don't be put off by the dull title and crappy cover: this book is a tightly-written, tightly-aimed information drone strike.

Example:


Parry's take-down on General David Petraeus whom the US press creamed over (until the General had to resign for creaming over one distaff member of the press). Gen. Petraeus came up with the sick and bloody idea of a "surge" - a massive increase in troops and killing - to subdue occupied Iraq. "The Surge" supposedly quelled the Sunni insurgency.
Bullshit. The insurgency died down when the US quietly handed big bricks of cash to the insurgents and their brethren ("The Awakening Council") - then turned a blind eye to the Sunni ethnic cleansing of Shia within Anbar province (while Shia were allowed to conduct pogroms elsewhere against Sunni).

[N.B. The danger-addicted photojournalist Ricardo Rowley filmed this US-sanctioned ethnic mayhem for Al Jazeera - a report available in Big Noise "Dispatches" video magazine - another good source of anti-stupid.]

Parry was the Associated Press reporter who uncovered the Iran-Contra Arms-for-Hostages scandal. For committing that and other courageous acts of journalism, he was canned by the AP. Parry has suffered the US media's equivalent of banishment to Siberia. Banned from the airwaves and blocked out of his former newspapers and magazines, Parry must now, like Solzhenitsyn, publish his own books Samizdat style. So forgive him the cheap-o cover design.

What? Did you come here for an argument?




1 comment:

Cirze said...

Good one, Phil!

Although . . . I was thinking that they each only had half . . . a heart.

But it's probably only a quarter in reality as they can't have a whole heart even when added together.

Love you,

S