Maher to Bristol Palin: Admit it, You Liked it!

Being as how Wit's End so recently posted about unsustainable overpopulation, I have to embed this very funny (and dirty!) clip of Bill Maher's version of the topic - which mercilessly encapsulates in one scathingly comic episode everything that is hypocritical, tawdry, and ecocidal in American politics... because, everybody needs a laugh!

Chris Hedges - Endgame Strategy...Why The Revolution Must Start in America

Originally published in Adbusters - reprinted in its entirety below

The unrest in the Middle East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch toward freedom and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be pleasant or easy.

The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking. Dozens of members of Congress in the United States have announced that climate change does not exist and evolution is a hoax. They chant the mantra that the marketplace should determine human behavior, even as the unfettered and unregulated marketplace threw the global economy into a seizure and evaporated some $40 trillion in worldwide wealth. The corporate media retreats as swiftly from reality into endless mini-dramas revolving around celebrities or long discussions about the inane comments of a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin. The real world – the one imploding in our faces – is ignored.

The deadly convergence of environmental and economic catastrophe is not coincidental. Corporations turn everything, from human beings to the natural world, into commodities they ruthlessly exploit until exhaustion or death. The race of doom is now between environmental collapse and global economic collapse. Which will get us first? Or will they get us at the same time?

Carbon emissions continue to soar upward, polar ice sheets continue to melt at an alarming rate, hundreds of species are vanishing, fish stocks are being dramatically depleted, droughts and floods are destroying cropland and human habitat across the globe, water sources are being poisoned, and the great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. As temperatures continue to rise huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species. And accompanying the assault on the ecosystem that sustains human life is the cruelty and stupidity of unchecked corporate capitalism that is creating a global economy of masters and serfs and a world where millions will be unable to survive.

We continue to talk about personalities – Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama or Stephen Harper – although the heads of state and elected officials have become largely irrelevant. Corporate lobbyists write the bills. Lobbyists get them passed. Lobbyists make sure you get the money to be elected. And lobbyists employ you when you get out of office. Those who hold actual power are the tiny elite who manage the corporations. The share of national income of the top 0.1 percent of Americans since 1974 has grown from 2.7 to 12.3 percent. One in six American workers may be without a job. Some 40 million Americans may live in poverty, with tens of millions more living in a category called “near poverty.” Six million people may be forced from their homes in the United States because of foreclosures and bank repossessions. But while the masses suffer, Goldman Sachs, one of the financial firms most responsible for the evaporation of $17 trillion in wages, savings and wealth of small investors and shareholders in the United States, is giddily handing out $17.5 billion in compensation to its managers, including $12.6 million to its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.

The massive redistribution of wealth happened because lawmakers and public officials were, in essence, hired to permit it to happen. It was not a conspiracy. The process was transparent. It did not require the formation of a new political party or movement. It was the result of inertia by our political and intellectual class, which in the face of expanding corporate power found it personally profitable to facilitate it or look the other way. The armies of lobbyists, who write the legislation, bankroll political campaigns and disseminate propaganda, have been able to short-circuit the electorate.

Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.

“By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes that it can make their interests a priority,” Sheldon Wolin writes, “the Democratic Party pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian system.” The Democrats and the Liberals are always able to offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate collectivism. 

It is not that the public in the United States does not want a good healthcare system, programs that provide employment, quality public education or an end to Wall Street’s looting of the U.S. Treasury. Most polls suggest Americans do. But it has become impossible for most citizens in these corporate states to find out what is happening in the centers of power. Television news celebrities dutifully present two opposing sides to every issue, although each side is usually lying. The viewer can believe whatever he or she wants to believe. Nothing is actually elucidated or explained. The sound bites by Republicans or Democrats, the Liberals or the Conservatives, are accepted at face value. And once the television lights are turned off, the politicians go back to the business of serving business.

Human history, rather than being a chronicle of freedom and democracy, is characterized by ruthless domination. Our elites have done what all elites do. They have found sophisticated mechanisms to thwart popular aspirations, disenfranchise the working and increasingly the middle class, keep us passive and make us serve their interests. The brief democratic opening in our society in the early 20th century, made possible by radical movements, unions and a vigorous press, has again been shut tight. We were mesmerized by political charades, cheap consumerism, spectacle and magical thinking as we were ruthlessly stripped of power. 

Adequate food, clean water and basic security are now beyond the reach of half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Somalia and Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them widespread malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of five percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and political protests will be frequent, as will malnutrition and starvation. Desperate people employ desperate measures to survive. And the elites will use the surveillance and security state to attempt to crush all forms of popular dissent.

The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the wider society, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power as the crisis mounts. The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear to turn the population into passive accomplices. And as long as we remain afraid, or believe that the formal mechanisms of power can actually bring us real reform, nothing will change.

It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has become concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class – the beating heart of any democracy – is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric or Bank of America to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem for profit. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent are banished as heretics.

The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.

Many of us are seduced by childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but toward disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of nonrenewable resources and its hedonistic levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?

Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd.

The game is over. We lost. The corporate state will continue its inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation and the planet is locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most of us will struggle to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These elites do not have a vision. They know only one word: more.  They will continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem. And they will use their money to hide in gated compounds when it all implodes. Do not expect them to take care of us when it starts to unravel. We will have to take care of ourselves. We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and former international correspondent for the New York Times. His latest book is The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.

Governor Christine Todd Whitman Turns to Tricks for the Nuclear Energy Industry

My finger has been hesitating over the "publish" button since Wednesday as I dithered.  It's been years since I smoked but I've actually caught myself thinking...a cigarette would be just the thing to clear the fog in my brain so I could make some sort of decision.

Then, yesterday afternoon, I passed a pair of young oak trees after I had just posted photographs of them taken on June 2.  At that time, earlier this month, I described them as typical examples of trees, even recently planted saplings, that are visibly impaired by exposure to the rising levels of background tropospheric ozone.  The foliage of the one on the left was abnormally sparse and decidedly lacking in healthy green chlorophyll - while the one on the right was in slightly better shape but in my opinion, the pale undertone of leaves indicated it was headed in the same direction - the decline and eventual death that will ultimately kill all vegetation if we continue to poison the atmosphere with toxic emissions.

When I happened to go by them again, I couldn't believe how much they had deteriorated in the intervening time, still so early in summer after a spring with more than ample rainfall.  I decided in the seconds after I pulled off the road and walked over to them, astonished at the deterioration in just three weeks, that there is no virtue in being squeamish about reporting my unvarnished thoughts.  (Besides, it's likely I'm already the reputed village lunatic...plus, I suspect I've been disinvited to several traditional parties, and have the impression my membership at an exclusive private club has been revoked.  So what the hell.)

Here's the pair as they appeared June 2:

In a zoom of the crown on the left, it was evident that branches were exposed, and the color of leaves had a uniform and bizarrely yellow cast.

Yesterday, just a glimpse as I was driving by was enough for me to realize that they now are singed with brown, so I stopped to cross over the street for a closer inspection.

 Sure enough!  Chlorosis is proceeding rapidly to necrosis.

Among people who are, for whatever reason, acutely aware of cataclysmic climate change, ecosystem collapse, and peak resources, there is much MUCH debate about what should be done, as well as whether anything substantive can be done to avert wars and the end of civilization.  Some welcome those outcomes as the only conceivable path to save what remains of natural biodiversity.

It's made even more difficult because although it sometimes seems that there are many, many individuals who understand acutely how dangerously destabilized the future for climate, food, and water supplies will be, and in numerous locations is already occurring, still we are a tiny percentage of the overall population.

It's impossible to keep up with, let alone participate in, all of the different organizations which sadly often as not seem to be in competition with each other - some established decades ago like Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund and others more recent like the Center for Biological Diversity and the Environmental Defense Fund - without even counting all the the purely political committees trying to garner attention and funds.  There are too many blogs and articles to read them all, like Al Gore's latest, which concludes with the more common cautious approach advising activists to work for change within the existing system - while other advocacy groups that reject the current exploitative system run a gamut all the way through the Transition Town movement and Rising Tide to Derek Jensen or the Deep Green Resistance.  It's very confusing to know which way to turn especially because, after all, we are on uncharted territory.

People have faced moral dilemmas before, and certainly throughout human history were challenged with decisions where it must have felt like fate hung in the balance...but in these contemporary circumstances, this really is the very first time the fate of ALL humanity (and most other species) has been at stake.  We are left with limited choices as to how to respond, because unlike in the past, there is no longer a manifest destiny to follow, no more fertile uninhabited lands to conquer, no indigenous undiscovered peoples to enslave, no teeming populations of tasty animals left to devour and exterminate nor towering pristine forests to obliterate (at least, not unless we want to end up exactly like the Easter Islanders)...Here's the view of the second tree from yesterday - the one on the right - which now has the most peculiar loss of chlorophyll in leaves at the tips of the branches.

 

One common if not universal assessment in the bleaker recesses of the doomer community is that it is definitely past time to DO something - including past time to still feel obligated to play by rules that don't apply to a global corporate oligarchy with tentacles that control most information, whether by advertising dollars or armed troops - and way past time to be polite and play by the rules established by the very tiny minority who profit from them.

And so although I have hesitated, when I saw those struggling trees yesterday, with their leaves turning from anemically pale to scabrous brown, I decided to throw caution to the wind and say exactly what I have been thinking...and what I have been thinking is that either Christine Todd Whitman's native cognitive ability is constricted by some ideologically driven misconceptions, or she is unabashedly, mercenarily disingenuous.  In other words, she is deluded, or lying for money.

 How else to explain what she said on the radio?

Wednesday while tuned to NPR I heard an interview with her on the Brian Lehrer Show.  I've always been inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though she's a Republican...after all, she can't help that, she was born into one of the most prominent political families in that party.  I even harbored a hope that she resigned honorably as head of the EPA because she couldn't fulfill the demands made upon her by Cheney and the Bush administration to ignore science - and she was being attacked by the fuel industry in court for trying to enforce regulation of polluting emissions.

I have to admit though, it was nigh impossible to excuse throwing all the first responders to 9/11 under the bus, by assuring them the air was safe to breathe, when any idiot not possessed by the adrenaline rush of emotion at that time could see that would necessarily have been impossible - the air was full of dust, for one thing, that you could SEE, and dust of any composition is bad for people to inhale - let alone dust full of asbestos, incinerated heavy metals, and god only knows what other toxic detritus from the explosions and fires!

picture credits here

When Brian Lehrer asked her whether she had any regrets about her handling of the air quality warnings it was disappointing that she could not bring herself to express ANY misgivings, and blamed the scientists who advised her instead.  Well, I guess she has to take that line because she's already been sued for liability!

She's also a neighbor, as such things are reckoned out here in the hinterlands.  The family farm she inherited is only a mile from Wit's End (of course, any size comparison is off the scale!) and she once did me a very kind personal favor while she was Governor of New Jersey.

So I didn't want to become completely disillusioned and was thus very unhappy to hear her regurgitating - with facile fluency, of course - standard excuses condoning the unwarranted prospects for nuclear safety.  Afterwards I learned that apparently this cozy relationship on behalf of nuclear power has been going on for quite some time but, silly me, I didn't know it!  Shame on Brian Lehrer and NPR for giving the nuclear energy industry free advertising propaganda time without making it crystal clear that Whitman is paid to perpetuate their lies!

To his credit, Brian Lehrer did refer to her at one point as a "professional advocate" which apparently is the purpose of the "Whitman Strategy Group" she formed after leaving office - and he asked her rather pointedly what, of all the career paths she could have chosen after leaving government, induced her to choose to become the "co-chair" of the CASEnergy Coalition?  (Oh, you didn't know that nuclear is America's "Clean And Safe Energy" solution??  How could anyone miss that??  Okay - greenwashing has a long and venerable history - corporations have been pretending to care about the environment for as long as there have been environmentalists criticizing their records - and doing a creditable job at it too, some of which is traced here.)

By way of reply, she launched into a dubious explanation as to why nuclear is SO wonderful she just HAD to  become a spokesperson for the industry (Does she really need money that badly?  Wasn't the silver spoon in her mouth she was born with big enough?) - meanwhile she NEVER once alluded to any financial incentive, nor did Mr. Lehrer bother to ask her about it specifically.  He did slip in yet another cleverly phrased question though, when she expressed her support for some version of cap and trade on carbon emissions.  And he did make a brief ineffectual challenge to her laughable claim (she laughed) that "We have more regulatory scrutiny in America than any other country in the world."

And I thought I detected an implicit cynicism when he wondered after she expressed support for legislation, whether any sort of tax on fossil fuel would be to the benefit of the nuclear industry.  Of course, she rushed to reply - any of the green energies would benefit!  Her claim to be a champion for a clean environment in this instance isn't substantiated in her overall record, unfortunately.  She then went on to pooh pooh the problem of long-term storage as "political" not "scientific" despite the fact that one of the biggest threats at Fukushima is the stored, spent fuel!

So basically as I heard it, the talking points she is being paid to so glibly repeat include:

1.  the nuclear industry is committed to voluntary safety monitoring and that is sufficient
2.  the nuclear industry has spent SO MUCH MONEY to enhance safety and NOBODY appreciates it (wahh)!
3.  "We're always going to have coal gas and oil but we should become less reliant on power sources that we import from other countries," in other words nuclear = energy independence = NATIONAL SECURITY, NATIONAL SECURITY, NATIONAL SECURITY
4.  We already have nuclear so we have to use it because WE NEED all that energy (God forbid Americans practice let alone mandate conservation...you know, cutting back on frivolous wasteful stuff?)
4.  Switching to really green energy will cost too much MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

When asked in the awkward context of tritium leaks into the aquifers of New Jersey (and from three-quarters of US commercial plants as well) whether voluntary standards were adequate, she bristled and responded it's a question for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for their scientists ( a class for which she seems to have nothing but derision and contempt)..."they have scientists that are required to be...on site at every nuclear reactor every day...and those people have access to everyone...and they can look at everything that is happening...and they should be asking the relevant questions..."  Notice how that phrase tripped off her tongue?  I told you she was born with a silver spoon!  "Those people," as in, you know, scientists, people who have to work for a living, NOCD.  She can't help it.

She skirted around the seriousness of Fukushima and the latest revelations that the US government has been routinely loosening regulations so older plants can maintain certification.  The AP series "Aging Nukes" is essential reading to fully comprehend just how disingenuous her reassurances of safety are.  It's perplexing once you penetrate the inexplicable near-blackout of media attention to the literally unprecedented, ongoing disaster at Fukushima (never mind Fort Calhoun on the verge of being flooded in Nebraska!) just how any knowledgable person could publicly proclaim in good conscience that nuclear power can be remotely considered safe.  It's safe until it isn't.

Not wanting to be hasty and jump to the premature conclusion that she is dabbling in what should be criminal negligence by way of complicity with such life-threatening lapses simply based on one radio interview, I reluctantly started googling when I got home later to find out what sort of activities Governor Whitman has been up to since she formed her consulting company and was hired by CASE.  The first thing to pop up was a meeting this past May, described on the CASE website as follows:


Gov. Whitman was joined by Dominion Generation CEO David Christian for a productive conversation on the future of nuclear power with Washington Post journalists Stephen Stromberg and Fred Hiatt.


I love that euphemistic description of a "productive conversation" especially with an obsequious creepy disinformer like Fred Hiatt! Next I noticed, also on their website, that Whitman's co-chair is Robert Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace.  Will wonders never cease!  With credentials such as these, who would dare to suspect ulterior motives?  But oops...this is how his background is described in an entry at Wiki:

"Today he is the co-founder, chair, and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies in Vancouver, a consulting firm that provides paid public relations efforts, lectures, lobbying, opinions and committee participation to government and industry on a wide range of environmental and sustainability issues. He is a frequent public speaker at meetings of industry associations, universities, and policy groups.

He has sharply and publicly differed with many policies of major environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, on other issues including forestry, biotechnology, aquaculture, and the use of chemicals for flame retardants.^[1] He is an outspoken proponent of nuclear energy^[2]and skeptical of sole human responsibility for climate change.^[3]"

There are a number of other revelations about him, including a lawsuit by other members of Greenpeace to oust him from control, and his advocacy for a logging group accused of illegal practices.  He's a proponent of genetically modified food (remember, Monsanto rules the world) and a paid consultant hack for quite a few other polluting industries.  Strange bedfellows - why does Whitman, who in her interview praised our current New Jersey Governor Christie for admitting humans are causing (they prefer to modify it as "contributing to") global warming, co-chair CASE with a renegade fink who claims there is NO scientific evidence for it?

The more I read the angrier and sicker at heart I became.  I found an article she purportedly authored in the HuffPo last summer about nuclear safety questions arising after the Deep Water spill, with the tag line at the end:

Christie Whitman currently co-chairs the nuclear industry funded Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CASEnergy), a national grassroots coalition that promotes the economic and environmental benefits of nuclear energy as part of a clean energy portfolio.

Really?  Excuse me, but if it's a "nuclear industry funded" organization then in what sense other than Orwellian can it be considered "a "grassroots coalition'"!?  Why did HuffPo editors allow that to be printed unchallenged?  Are they too complicit, and do they think we are all idiots? And if Whitman and Moore are "PAID CONSULTANTS" how come they are called "co-chairs?"  And why is NPR giving a paid spokesperson a half-hour of free advertising time with no rebuttal from an environmentalist critical of that industry?  Shame on you Brian Lehrer!

Worst still is this litany of nefarious activities I found at SourceWatch, which connects Whitman's use of her prestige to a number of irremediably evil enterprises, from Halliburton in general to gas fracking specifically - which in general means it would require some strenuous mental gymnastics to view her activities as anything other than selling her influence to the highest bidder.  And naturally, gigantic industries like nuclear power can bid much, much higher than trees, butterflies, frogs and porpoises.

It is all so disillusioning.  I mean, I knew American is corrupt.  I watched the whole film, The Corporation, so I know how slick and skilled the lobbyists and former government appointees are at spinning through the revolving door.  But I have had a secret hope ever since I realized trees are dying that maybe if I just worked up the nerve to contact someone with a national reputation, like say fellow Oldwickian Christie Whitman, she would make an honest assessment of the sad trees crumpling around our little village everywhere in yards, woods and hedgerows and exclaim "Oh my God!  You're right!  The lovely trees in our pristine rural countryside - in fact all the trees in our Garden State - and even, all the trees around the world - are suffocating from being enveloped in a poisonous atmosphere!  We must warn people, and save them, and ourselves, from extinction!"  Unlike my easily dismissed efforts, she would have the influence and the prestige to do something about it.

When the program began I was toying with the idea of calling in to ask her whether perhaps she had noticed that the trees around her very own property are dying (which I photographed for this post from the summer of 2009) but as the interview went on it appeared they wouldn't be taking any listener questions for that episode.  I guess in hindsight, there's a reason I never got up the nerve to ask her before if she would like to take an honest inventory.  Deep in my soul I feared that she was long since bought and sold and would probably just laugh at me, or get angry.  Who knows though, maybe she'll come around.  I of course would welcome that!

In one of life's many amusing coincidences, that post linked above, which had pictures from her estate, also included a series of photographs from properties owned by a couple of other prominent right-wing leaders in this area - Donald Trump and Steve Forbes.  When the radio segmant began I happened to be on my way to visit a friend and was driving down a dirt road, along the perimeter of the home which was owned by the late, flamboyant Malcolm Forbes and where his son Steve grew up.  When I saw that toppled pine and row of maples opposite the entrance, I stopped the car, rolled down the windows and cranked up the volume so I wouldn't miss the show, while I hopped out to take pictures.

One after the other, the trees get progressively more skeletal.

They were planted not long ago, but next I passed some oaks so old and huge they dwarf the house they surround.  Young or old, it matters not - they are all dying back at an increasing rate from ozone.

Physiological damage as ozone is absorbed, season after season, causes the bark to become coarse and split off in chunks - eventually the deterioration spreads until a gaping hole invites invasions by insects and disease that will finish the job.

I missed the end of the program when I reached my friend's house before it was over, and turned the radio off with relief.  But go ahead and listen to the whole thing if you want:

Koch Brothers Want To Steal (the rest of) Your Money

This blog is supposed to be about trees dying from exposure to air pollution, and the ecosystem collapse that will be the inevitable result of their obliteration. But of course that travesty is part and parcel of our system of corrupt capitalism which is entirely dependent  upon continual, immoral, and unsustainable exploitation of the environment - and also people.  That would include everyone other than that top tiny percent, those Masters of the Universe slavedrivers that have been systematically looting wealth and resources for their own profit using every means at their disposal from illegitimate wars to Madison Avenue propaganda. So now and then I feel compelled to post something on that topic, like the video...and these graphs, found at DesdemonaDespair:

Only a pathological illness can explain why the ultra-rich need to consolidate more and more, as if they don't they possess enough yachts and jets and mansions already.  The question is, what is the cure?

The Rate of Change - Mass Extinction in the Ocean

Here's a video by CNN from their report:


Here's another interview with Dr. Alex Rogers, Scientific Director of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and professor at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford:


Now, perhaps we would see some action on the issues of CO2 emissions and pollution, if only we could have a report from foresters and farmers that would substitute "trees and crops" for "coral reefs" and "ozone" for "acidification", perhaps we would approach the appropriate level of alarm for the equivalent rapid and far more visible destruction of vegetation that is presently occurring on land...oh, wait.  I forgot, that even though it should be far more obvious that trees are dying and crops are stunted from exposure to toxic greenhouse gas emissions - volatile organic compounds that form tropospheric ozone causing leaves to be small, speckled, shriveled, brown, and fall off, with tree bark that is cracked, splitting, corroded, oozing, smothered with lichen and marred by holes from interior rot and cankers bulging like cancerous tumors - the facts and research are being suppressed by the lumber and agricultural industries (think Georgia Pacific and Monsanto).

Oceans Away

Last night I woke from a dream about fishing...and I knew immediately why.

I had seen a brief, grainy, black-and-white flashback in "The Corporation" (58 minutes in, if you want to watch) from some unspecified date but no doubt at least half a century ago or more, of a long boat lined with men standing precariously on a narrow ledge, casting with poles and hooks into the rippling sea.

Over and over they yanked the poles high and flipped the writhing, silver fish soaring over and above their heads into the boat, where other men swiftly undid the hooks, which were then tossed back again.

Just as quick as they could snap the swaying rods back into position, they hooked another fish.

It must have been exhausting but what was even more astounding was the seeming endless, churning wealth of life that must have existed just under the water's surface for them to collect it so vigorously and instantaneously.

This was the old-fashioned way for fishermen to plunder the sea.  Captions for the photos of their modern contemporaries that follow can be seen at the UK Guardian gallery Oceans2012.

That clip reminded me of when I was growing up, and my dad would take us out in our little Boston whaler, moored on the brackish Ipswich River across from the last remaining ship-building yard still producing traditional wooden lobster boats.

Whenever the tide was high enough to lift our rickety dock above the sticky mudflats, we put-putted downstream, winding along flat miles of channels through briny salt marsh past huge flocks of birds, eventually to emerge in the blue bay.  There we might anchor over the kelp beds and haul in cod or flounder until our arms ached while my dad beheaded and gutted the fish, tossing the innards overboard, until we were too tired to pull in more - or the coolers were full - and then we would head home where my mother would freeze filets for the winter - after she fried some up for supper.

If we trawled along the beach when the mackerel or striped bass were running instead, my dad would usually grill it.

There was another scene in the movie that triggered my dream, and that was an interview with Michael Moore.

He was speaking in the context of blaming multinational corporations for their many evils, such as their little known complicity with Nazi Germany...and the irony of people at Columbine who worked for Lockheed Martin building weapons of mass destruction, who then suffered the famous tragedy to their own children.

He reflected with evident shame that as a resident of Flint, Michigan, where just about everybody is dependent on the manufacture of cars in one way or another, it had never occurred to him or anyone he knew to reflect on their own personal contribution to the destruction of earth's benevolent climate, the stability of which has enabled humans to create agriculture, to multiply, and to develop civilization.

When I have recalled that the fish disappeared from Ipswich Bay I have always thought bitterly of the Japanese and Russian factory ships whose outlines we could dimly see, perched far off on the very edge of the horizon, from the vantage of our little boat.

My father described many times the destructive process of their industrial dredging and predicted, accurately, that the fish would disappear in time.  That has long since come to pass and now I too am discomfited from my own contribution to its depletion.

Michael Moore said of himself and his wife, "There isn’t a single one of us, back in Flint—any of us, including us—who ever stopped to think, this thing we do for a living, the building of automobiles, is probably the single biggest reason why the polar ice caps are going to melt and end civilization as we know it."

"There’s no connect between, 'I’m just an assembler on an assembly line, building a car, which is good for people, and society, it moves them around.' But never stop to think about the larger picture, and the larger responsibility, of what we’re doing."

"Ultimately, we have to, as individuals, accept responsibility for our collective action and the larger harm that it causes...in our world."

Like this lady - we are all just ordinary people who rarely see our role in the grand scheme of destruction and even when we do, it's difficult to understand exactly how to change it.

So when, first thing this morning, I saw the headline of this BBC article, "World's Oceans in Shocking Decline", it immediately brought forth my dream and all the questions it raised about how to be sustainable, or whether that is even possible, and even if it were, whether our ecosystem is well ruined beyond recovery.  A team of experts assembled by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean will release a report this week that summarizes (quoted passages in lavender) in a fashion that precludes the usual accusation that scientists aren't being forthcoming enough in their warnings:

"...ocean life is 'at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history"'.

They conclude that issues such as over-fishing, pollution and climate change are acting together in ways that have not previously been recognized.

The impacts, they say, are already affecting humanity."

"The findings are shocking," said Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.

"As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realized."

"We've sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we're seeing, and we've ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we're seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years."

These "accelerated" changes include melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, sea level rise, and release of methane trapped in the sea bed.

Fast changes

"The rate of change is vastly exceeding what we were expecting even a couple of years ago," said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a coral specialist from the University of Queensland in Australia.

But more worrying than this, the team noted, are the ways in which different issues act synergistically to increase threats to marine life.

"So if you look at almost everything, whether it's fisheries in temperate zones or coral reefs or Arctic sea ice, all of this is undergoing changes, but at a much faster rate than we had thought."

Some pollutants, for example, stick to the surfaces of tiny plastic particles that are now found in the ocean bed.

This increases the amounts of these pollutants that are consumed by bottom-feeding fish.

Plastic particles also assist the transport of algae from place to place, increasing the occurrence of toxic algal blooms - which are also caused by the influx of nutrient-rich pollution from agricultural land.

In a wider sense, ocean acidification, warming, local pollution and overfishing are acting together to increase the threat to coral reefs - so much so that three-quarters of the world's reefs are at risk of severe decline.

Life on Earth has gone through five "mass extinction events" caused by events such as asteroid impacts; and it is often said that humanity's combined impact is causing a sixth such event.

The IPSO report concludes that it is too early to say definitively.

But the trends are such that it is likely to happen, they say - and far faster than any of the previous five.

"What we're seeing at the moment is unprecedented in the fossil record - the environmental changes are much more rapid," Professor Rogers told BBC News.

"We've still got most of the world's biodiversity, but the actual rate of extinction is much higher [than in past events] - and what we face is certainly a globally significant extinction event."

This unrelenting, synergistic traipse to a mass obliteration of biodiversity is identical to the situation on land.  We are just starting to comprehend the degree to which we have degraded the oceans - people forget how the ocean was not long ago teeming with life that far eclipses what remains now.  Sometimes when I leave comments at different articles about our dwindling trees and wildlife I receive indignant responses about how there are still plenty of trees and squirrels.  These are from people who are too young or who have forgotten a world that hummed with life...with colors and sounds and smells that are just fading away.  Following are just a few shots taken quickly this afternoon by Peapack pond, that illustrate the furtive, surreptitious mutilation afflicting the trees whose defenses are impaired from years of absorbing toxic air pollution as they photosynthesize.  It is as though we have forced them to smoke for decades, and now, surprise surprise, they have cancer.

This cluster of trunks are maples - the youngest on the left could have grown from a shoot, or a seed that embedded next to the older tree.

 The bark is exceedingly peculiar.  It has a smooth red base, which is covered with crusty growths, and cracks, one of which is bubbling a nasty foamy excretion.

 The center of this sycamore trunk looks more like what they were once so renowned for - a dappled jigsaw puzzle of smooth, flat layers of endlessly varied subtle hues of mottled greys, rusts, greens, blues, and creamy white that reflects low pink light in the early mornings and at sunset.

But that remaining patch is being subsumed by what is corroding the sycamore bark everywhere, worsening every season until it is unrecognizable - coarse, rough, splitting chunks of uniform grey.

 Pieces fall off and expose raw, parched sapwood.

There are scarcely any full-sized leaves, many are missing, stunted in size, or brown.

Season after season, they have been defoliated, unable to defend against fungal attacks, and the energy lost in producing a second set of leaves every year is catching up with them.

 Many people do not notice yet, but any remaining illusion of serenity will soon be forever oceans away.

And now because I like it, this post will end, given her kind permission, with a poem written by Desert Dreamer, who writes in a place far removed from Wit's End but cares about much the same things:

Becoming Human - a Poem

I am not the woman
You see standing here.

I am the woman with wild hair
Dancing with souls
Of forgotten flowers.

I am completely human
Alive, real and wild
No longer tamed
Isolated
Domesticated
or restrained.

I am free
Belonging only to the
Garden of the earth.

To look in my eyes
Is to face your self.

I am the sunshine
Touching your bare skin.