National Pentagon Radio (NPR)

Is NPR more propaganda than it used to be or was I just not paying attention before? I sat through a piece the other morning on Health Care that was unbelievable. The woman interviewed said she had to go to the emergency room for a procedure and was shocked by her out-of-pocket expenses (deductable, co-pay, etc) which made her a better CONSUMER of health care. Because now she questions the doctors recommended procedures and prescriptions! As a wise CONSUMER she goes online to decide for herself if she can get something cheaper in THE MARKETPLACE. I swear they used the word consumer a dozen times and never once referred to the woman as a patient. Once again the Invisible Hand is going to deliver cheaper goods and services and all you have to do is second guess your doctor. You can spend countless hours doing research (because what else do you have to do) and become a smart shopper and find something cheaper that you hope works just as well. Then I go to public television and listen to Gwen Ifil interview Carl Meacham who is a Fellow at a Thinktank called The Center For Strategic International Studies which has ties to Pete Peterson and Henry Fucking Kissinger. Carl has a lot of skin pigment and tells us how democratic the opposition in Venezuela is (with a straight face). Next I thumb through The Atlantic and see an ad by Fidelity Investments touting An Entrepreneurial Approach to Solving the Global Water Crisis. The "approach" involves privitizing water so that same Invisible Hand can decide if you get to fill your jug and survive another day. At the same time The Hand will be deciding the spot price for sweet crude and coal and less sweet crude. One busy hand.

Regime Change

There has been much ink spilled over the large demonstrations in Caracas last week that erupted in violence. A video on UTube, supposedly by a young Venezuelan ex-pat has gone viral after The Guardian gave it kudos for its entrepreneurial spirit. They seem unconcerned that it is an amazing piece of propaganda filled with lie after lie. But no matter who you believe is responsible for the violence and no matter how you feel about capitalism, it must be admitted that having that many young students committed to ending the Bolivarian Revolution is a bad sign for Chavismo and his project of 21st Century socialism.. Plenty of ink has also been spilt over the rate of violent crime, the food shortages, the inflation and such but what strikes me is the incredible appeal of capitalist ideology to a generation of young latinas and latinos. They worship free markets and individualism and all the tropes about liberty and upward mobility. It is a whole generation of Beaks, able to ignore history and accept the jingoist propaganda unquestioningly. Notice also the color of their skin as you watch them march through the streets, the brands of jeans they are wearing. It is the revolt of the bourgeoise with money and weapons and media at their disposal. They yearn for the good old days of Perez when brown and black people stayed in their slums.

Conservation

For many years I was an active reformist, working hard at the local level for incremental change.Oh yeah. Been there, done that. I worked my way up to a seat on the State Council of Trout Unlimited, I was on the board of Montana Conservation Voters, was a founding member of the Bitterroot Watershed Group, Land Stewardship Committee,etc.etc.. if there was a place to volunteer in the service of trout, I was on it. The people I worked with considered themselves conservationists. Trout Unlimited raises amazing amounts of money nationwide and has donated untold volunteer hours donated to it for habitat restoration projects. Everywhere industrial capitalism has degraded some watershed, TU steps in to try to fix things and restore "wild" fisheries. I include agriculture as industrial capitalism because of the scale and technologies applied. Anyway, TU never says a word about capitalism as such, it just cleans up the messes and tries to regulate it, legislate it, collaborate with it to make it kinder to fish. But of course after all the billions of donated dollars and donated hours fixing up streams and protecting habitat along comes climate change and in one fell swoop, threatens to undo all that work. Particularly sensitive and threatened species like arctic grayling or cutthroat trout should be on the endangered species list but that would mess with production and profit. All trout in the West, where water is life, are affected by changing moisture regimes due to climate change. Forest succession is changing, grass and prairie lands are changing, reservoirs are drying up and fires are raging. Trout Unlimited, and conservationists more generally, want to tackle the problem one local project at a time. What if all that money and time had instead been spent tackling the disease rather than the symptoms?

Oil Sands

The US State Dept. just released a long anticipated environmental report which concludes the Keystone XL pipeline would not have a "significant impact" on carbon pollution. The first exercise is to unpack the language and wonder what a "significant impact" would be. It is fascinating to look at the wording used by the NY Times, "substantially worsen", or by Obama recently, "significantly exacerbate". It is purely subjective and without metrics. It had nothing to do with climate science and everything to do with economics. It is in fact meaningless in the sense of calculating the Alberta Tar Sands contribution to climate change. What it is instead is an appraisal of Market factors. As a source quoted in the Times put it, "at the end of the day, there's a consensus among energy experts that the oil will get shipped to markets no matter what." So all the report was doing was weighing the significant impacts between rail, truck and barge versus a pipeline. The Market will decide for us how it travels. If the price stays between 65$ and 75$ a barrel, we pipe it and truck it. If it falls below that we just pipe it. If, however, we go into a global economic depression, that would be a "significant impact" and the oil will stay in the ground. So again, the Market decides. It is reported that "environmental groups" think this crash scenario is the "good news". Double digit unemployment and misery can save us from ecocidal catastrophe. Isn't capitalism awesome. Speaking of language, the reporting was that "environmentalists will not be happy with the report", setting up a great them vs us dichotomy. Most people love the concept of "American Energy Independence" and those who don't favor servitude to Arab sheiks or Venezuelan dictators. This logic is a dominant force within the hegemonic ideology of capital along with various other discourses designed to keep us in check. The thing to remember is, the fossil fuels will "get burned anyway." It is all a done deal.The Market will decide how much. The only question is :Which Side Are You on?