The Disaffected Lib: Monbiot – You Can’t Win on Climate Change Without First Vanquishing Plutocracy

By The Mound of Sound, on May 11, 2013, at 10:38 am

Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, took the arrival of a recrod, 400 ppm concentration of atmospheric CO2 to deliver a few thoughts on our losing battle against climate change and what really stands in the way of our hope for progress.

“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 (Read more…)

 
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The Disaffected Lib: They Are Not Of Us

By The Mound of Sound, on January 29, 2013, at 1:11 pm

An interesting essay from George Monbiot today on the grooming of oligarchs and why, even though they govern in our name, they don’t rule on our behalf.   They rule as they were born and raised to rule.   An excerpt.

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-revolutionary France “did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots”.

Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote

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Dead Wild Roses: The Precariat – Where we are going to…

By The Arbourist, on May 22, 2012, at 8:24 am

Finding a way out of the the seemingly permanent global economic crisis is going to require looking at the factors that got us there. Noam Chomsky opines that the downfall really started in the 1970′s and has been on an ever increasing spiral of ruin ever since. One of the interesting parts of his article has to do with the division of the people into the Plutocrats and the Precariat.

“Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way

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World Headlines Review: Debt Ceiling Debate is Moot: USG Owes More Dollars than in Existence

By P McGavin, on July 29, 2011, at 5:47 pm

Image by Images_of_Money The current debate in Washington as to whether or not and under what conditions to raise the debt-ceiling has for the past week dominated global news coverage and the public mind.  Absent from the debate and mainstream coverage is a discussion of the debt limit in the context of the American monetary system, which creates a structural monetary deficit in the American economy and makes inevitable ever-increasing debts and deficits in the public and private sectors.  It is this system which has fostered the current situation, which is not so simply that the federal government (Read more…)

 
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