1848+: Last and First Men

Published on Friday, May 17, 2013 by Common Dreams
Burning Tar Sands = ‘Unsolvable’ Climate Crisis: Hansen
We have a ‘tremendously chaotic’ climate on the way, climate expert warns
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/05/17-1
Fresh off his resignation from NASA, leading climate scientist James Hansen is making the rounds this week, warning media and lawmakers that not only are we heading for a “tremendously chaotic” climate, but if we dig up and burn Canadian tar sands, the climate crisis will be rendered “unsolvable.”

Published on Friday, May 10, 2013 by The Guardian
400 Parts Per Million: Climate Milestone is a Moment of Symbolic Significance on Road of Idiocy
The only way forward is back: to retrace our steps and seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350ppm
by George Monbiot
Reaching
400ppm is a moment of symbolic significance, a station on the Via Dolorosa of
environmental destruction. (Underlying Photo: Corbis)
The data go back 800,000 years: that’s the age of the oldest fossil air bubbles extracted from Dome C, an ice-bound summit in the high Antarctic. And throughout that time there has been nothing like this. At no point in the preindustrial record have concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air risen above 300 parts per million (ppm). 400ppm is a figure that belongs to a different era.
[Read more →]

“Declaration”: An Excerpt
Wednesday, 01 May 2013 00:00 By Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Argo-Navis Publishing | Book Excerpt

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16075-declaration-an-excerpt

In their insightful and pathbreaking book, “Declaration”, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri analyze the diverse conditions of subordination produced under global capitalism and point to the agents of change who have raised their voices in protest globally against a range of injustices that mark the failures of a really existing democracy. They also explore the ways in which such protests have led to challenging existing zones of exclusion and disposability through the production of new social movements that are inventing a new politics and mode of collective power that affirm and reclaim the principles, truths, conditions, and associations necessary for a sustainable society. Part of the book explores and critiques what they label as four dominant forms of subjectivity that have created the context for the current social and political crisis. At the same time, they go beyond a language of critique and offer a declaration of principles for constituting what they call a “new global project for the common.” The section below draws upon two of the four figures of subjectivity that have emerged under neoliberal regimes and are considered integral to the forms of subordination, injustice and (mis)educative politics that characterize the existing social and economic order. – Henry A. Giroux
[Read more →]

Published on Monday, April 22, 2013 by Common Dreams
How Capitalism Is Dismembering America
by Paul Buchheit

Too many Americans are unaware of the extreme disparities that have been caused by the unregulated profit incentive of capitalism. Our winner-take-all system is flailing away at once-healthy parts of society, leaving them like withered limbs on a trembling body, even as the relative few who benefit promote the illusion of opportunity and prosperity for all. Concerned citizens armed with facts are not fooled. Instead, the more they learn the angrier they get. And as in revolutions of the past, discontent leads to change.
[Read more →]

Published on Monday, April 22, 2013 by TomDispatch.com
Entering a Resource-Shock World
How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion
by Michael T. Klare

Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you.  Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.

Two nightmare scenarios — a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change — are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition, and conflict. Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence), and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time all regions of the planet will be affected.

To appreciate the power of this encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to produce this future cataclysm.
[Read more →]

I am completing a new book in the Descent of Man series: Last and First Men: with a website: last-and-first-men.com. The stub web page has the information! Due this year, by summer, I hope…

This site is going to revert to its original title: Last and First Men, but radical and OWS material will still be posted.

by John Atcheson

Can a society become psychotic? Certainly a quick look at our national political dialogue would suggest that’s precisely what’s happening.

Let’s start with what passes for rational discussion on the economy.

For going on 30 years now, the Washington Asylum has focused on the debate between a collection of insanely passionate shrink-the-government-until-you-can-drown-it-in-the-bath tub supply-siders on the one hand, and … well … a collection of folks who embrace a more progressive economic agenda every four years, but seem to feel strongly about both sides of the issue in between.

Meanwhile, empirical evidence shows that the shrink the government side of the argument is counter-factual, destructive, and leads to Great Recessions, record-breaking income disparity, human want and deprivation.

So what do the Shrinkers advocate? More shrinking, of course, in the form of austerity budgets.

But as Paul Krugman pointed out, once again reality caught up with the Shrinkers. The high interest rates and economic catastrophe that debt and deficits were supposed to cause, failed to happen. In fact, the deficit is shrinking, interest rates are near all time lows, and the economy is growing – slowly, but certainly much faster than in countries that tried the austerity route.
[Read more →]

Runaway Exploitation
Plutocracy in America
by MICHAEL BRENNER

Plutocracy literally means rule by the rich. “Rule” can have various shades of meaning: those who exercise the authority of public office are wealthy; their wealth explains why they hold that office; they exercise that authority in the interests of the rich; they have the primary influence over who holds those offices and the actions they take. These aspects of “plutocracy” are not exclusive. Government of the rich and for the rich need not berun directly by the rich. Also, in some exceptional circumstances rich individuals who hold powerful positions may govern in the interests of the many, e.g. Franklin Roosevelt.

The United States today qualifies as a plutocracy – on a number of grounds. Let’s look at some striking bits of evidence. Gross income redistribution upwards in the hierarchy has been a feature of American society for the past decades. The familiar statistics tell us that nearly 80% of the national wealth generated since 1973 has gone to the upper 2%, 65% to the upper 1 per cent. Estimates as to the rise in real income for salaried workers over the past 40 years range from 20% to 28 %. In that period, real GDP has risen by 110% – it has more than doubled. To put it somewhat differently, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the top earning 1 percent of households gained about 8X more than those in the 60 percentile after federal taxes and income transfers over a period between 1979 and 2007; 10X those in lower percentiles. In short, the overwhelming fraction of all the wealth created over two generations has gone to those at the very top of the income pyramid. That pattern has been markedly accelerated since the financial crisis hit in 2008. Between 2000 and 1012, the real net worth of 90% of Americans has declined by 25%. Theoretically, there is the possibility that this change is due to structural economic features operating nationally and internationally. That argument won’t wash, though, for three reasons. First, there is no reason to think that such a process has accelerated over the past five years during which disparities have widened at a faster rate. Second, other countries (many even more enmeshed in the world economy) have seen nothing like the drastic phenomenon occurring in the United States. Third, the readiness of the country’s political class to ignore what has been happening, and the absence of remedial action that could have been taken, in themselves are clear indicators of who shapes thinking and determines public policy. In addition, several significant governmental actions have been taken that directly favor the moneyed interests.
[Read more →]

http://darwiniana.com/2013/03/03/notes-toward-a-new-communist-manifesto-a-spectre-is-haunting-the-globe-free-market-capitalism-burning-out-a-planet/
http://darwiniana.com/2013/03/03/god-delusion-ihvh-and-the-clear-evidence-of-a-higher-power-in-history/
http://darwiniana.com/2013/03/03/the-end-of-patriotism-the-great-american-yandee-doodle-super-idiot/

http://darwiniana.com/2012/12/01/the-end-of-history-an-irony-in-motion/

Last and First Men: the influence of Fukuyama’s thesis on the end of history has waned, and the nature of its propaganda appeal remains of interest: we can see that, beyond a interval of overconfidence just after 1989, the thesis of the ‘end of history’ (which wasn’t even in Hegel) would, a priori, apply better to communism, the instances in the Bolshevik zone not being any such thing at all.
The point is that a natural trend toward a global postcapitalist system is clearly going to resurface as the failing logic of capitalist globalization puts an entire planet at risk.
It was necessary to dismantle the false version of the ‘communist end of history’, to make way for the real thing.

http://darwiniana.com/2012/12/01/the-end-of-history-an-irony-in-motion/