"Some people don't understand why we're doing this.
Those are the people who haven't read 1984."
'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'
Smith's metaphor of the Invisible Hand is often used to justify policies of Laissez-faire absolutism, of course this is taking a very specific quote out of a very specific context of Smith's belief that national level disruptions caused by globalized trade would be restricted by specifically nationalist sympathies. Essentially, exactly the kind of thinking dismissed by globalization's current high priests as narrow and parochial.Under capitalism the more money you have, the easier it is to make money, and the less money you have, the harder.
Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. The affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many.
This series of suggestions is written because my country is on a path that will first destroy other societies -- upon which we depend -- and the biospheric basis of life itself; and this means eventually our own society.
(1) If there is a US military base in your country, begin a concerted campaign to get rid of it. These bases are exercises of imperial power against your own sovereignty. They are creating base-economies of crime, corruption, and prostitution. They are environmental disasters. Wage a sharp political struggle to make them untenable.(2) If there are US companies, be they factories, financial offices, or retail outlets, in your country, organize sustained boycotts of them.
(3) If you live in a country that owes an external debt to the US or the US-controlled International Monetary Fund, begin a fight to either default on that debt outright, or secure low-interest or no-interest loans from other countries to pay down the principle. Your nations' debt is your peoples' slavery.
(4) Boycott any American agricultural products being dumped on your national markets; and wage a political fight to stop them coming in. US industrial agricultural corporations are heavily-subsidized and predatory monstrosities that destroy the environment and are used as a weapon to destroy your local, traditional agriculture. Ending agriculture for export and supporting your own subsistence and local market agriculture is necessary to break your dependency upon and subjugation to the United States. Fight for you nations' land; and do not let it become an export platform for dollar-crops in the US market.
(5) Boycott American cultural products. They are propaganda aimed at turning your children into mindless consumers and your nations into obedient colonies.
(6) Make these political issues at home. Fight politicians who are called "pro-American," This means they are stooges for US-based transnational corporations or for the US state.
(7) Fight to nationalize your most valuable natural resources; and support politicians who will abrogate agreements that allow US finance capital unlimited access to your national markets.
(8) Try to close down any projects that are run out of the US Embassy by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). These projects are designed to drain talented local people away from national independence movements, and the USAID works closely with the Central Intelligence Agency.
(9) Expose and resist any political activity by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), also operating in concert with the US Embassy. This is a front organization for the purpose of engineering election outcomes in your nation that are seen as favorable to US transnational corporations and the US state.
(10) Mount massive political efforts directed at US Embassies everywhere that oppose the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and demand not only withdrawal, but that no US bases be left behind.
While Bellamy's source claimed that 55% of 625 glaciers are advancing, Bellamy claimed that 555 of them - or 89% - are advancing. This figure appears to exist nowhere else. But on the standard English keyboard, 5 and % occupy the same key. If you try to hit %, but fail to press shift, you get 555, instead of 55%. This is the only explanation I can produce for his figure. When I challenged him, he admitted that there had been "a glitch of the electronics".So, in Bellamy's poor typing, we have the basis for a whole new front in the war against climate science. The 555 figure is now being cited as definitive evidence that global warming is a "fraud", a "scam", a "lie". I phoned New Scientist to ask if Bellamy had requested a correction. He had not.
It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb: a crumb which then disintegrates in the palm of your hand. You must ignore an entire canon of science, the statements of the world's most eminent scientific institutions, and thousands of papers published in the foremost scientific journals. You must, if you are David Bellamy, embrace instead the claims of an eccentric former architect, which are based on what appears to be a non-existent data set. And you must do all this while calling yourself a scientist.
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.I find it compelling that despite how lucrative global warming denial can be, the overwhelming majority of respected scientists in the field are so unequivocal about global warming's existence and causes.Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasize the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
