Who are these super-wealthy? One can almost believe they are beings from another galaxy inhabiting human forms. The classic sci-fi 50′s movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” comes to mind. Perhaps if we can begin to imagine them with lizardy scales under their merino wool suits, we’ll have a better sense of how to deal with these monstrous creatures.

Your point about so many Americans voting against their own self-interests, not realizing who their real enemies are–that the traitors, terrorists and saboteurs–are here on the list of the Forbes 400, and among their suitors, courtiers and functionaries in the media, in academia, among the bureaucrats at the banking institutions, in our legal, judicial, legislative bodies, etc.–that point about not recognizing where our own best interest lie–has been deftly illustrated in Joe Bagean’s DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS and in Morris Berman’s DARK AGES, AMERICA, among other books.

One little problem with one of your numbers. You write that: “During the same period, average CEO pay, at $10.54 million, was 344% higher than typical worker pay.” Would that it were only so! The number, of course, is 344 TIMES higher!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words; but a picture with superior text to accompany and framework it–such as your text–is worth considerably more. To get a sense of the nightmare world the bastards (or is that “basterds”?) and their sycophants have created for us, check out these photos:

http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/

Cheers on the anvil! Let’s make ourselves swords of justice!

The problem with the focus on “over-population” is that much of the world consumes less than $2.00/day. The real “over-population” is the over-population of rich capitalist who has concentrated resources and POWER that rules the whole planet. In other words they have set up the CONDITION whereby the planet and her people are being exploited.

The tendency of the neo-Malthusian to play up “over-population” shift the “blame” and focus away from Capitalism onto those who are EXPLOITED by Capitalism and are essentially SLAVES of the system. Notice that where there is the greatest growth in population you’ll find some of the severest poverty and worsening environmental conditions as the rich nation dump their waste onto world’s poor.

The neo-Malthusian has the luxury of being bourgeois and unfortunately I think their bourgeois clouds their analysis of the world and their perspective. I find this perspective racist on it face.

Some of the more “sophisticated” neo-Malthusian analysis that I have seen weaves “overpopulation, consumerism, and capitalism” (in that order). This is tactic IMO is an attempt to avert criticism but essentially it places people rich AND poor, Capitalist AND workers are EQUALLY to blame for the world’s ills. This strain, IMO, will do more harm and will retard solidarity as it generates more confusion than clarity.

Here we are in this jail, hell and prison boring police-apathetic state we call United States which was supposed to be a nation where you could at least reach some sort of human-development and have access to Universities, colleges, low fat foods and medical treatments, motivation, pleasures and entertainment.

But that’s not the USA for the majority, this is a country that has 12 million immigrants without a legalization opportunity and who are treated like animals, and slaves. But that’s not all, how about the “legal” people here. They also are treated like pieces of shit, and who are so depressed that the majority of people living in this damn jail have to resort to all kinds of addictions like smoking, binge-eating, sex, alcohol, workoholism, exercise-addiction and all sorts of personal disorders and addictions in order to cope with the reality of having to live in such a painful country, etc.

What a hell and what a dysfunctional nation-state.

I wish that we had a bloody revolution soon in order to put an end to this dysfunctional country of wealth and self-realization for a few, and pain and misery for the majority.

.

As a somewhat related aside, I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday and replied to his remarks:

“You are right that they [a large number of the authoritarian, power mongering, moneyed elites] do not think like us and they, also, have managed to shape nearly our whole society so that it, too, represents their plans — so that it is seen as normal and good to be greedy, self-centered, hedonistic, largely apathetic towards others, etc. (Yes, “they walk amongst us” and are usually unnoticed as being different as they, usually, are polished, crafty, adept at manipulation and glib.) So they have turned the norms to be sociopathic, narcissistic and pathological. People are, thus, “turned” so as to be like them, but it is not inherently in the majority of people’s underlying natures when the process is more widespread as it is at present. Instead, it is based largely on learned behaviors… So only around 5% or so are sociopathic, narcissistic and pathological in actuality, but they twist around 20% – 25% off into their ways of acting Machiavellian. (Capitalism is at its “finest” moment when this happens. It takes off like mad with many human and nonhuman populations and natural environments deeply harmed in the mix)…”

In addition, the analyses at these links pretty much indicate some of the reasons, aside from wealth disparity, that humanity’s in a “mess” at present. Similarly, the evaluations convey a sense of where we’re collectively heading:

The fallacy of climate activism | Grist
Aug 23, 2009 … The fallacy of climate activism 31. Adam D. Sacks ….. Adam Sacks has been a climate activist since 2001 and is the former director of the …
http://www.grist.org/…/2009-08-23-the-fallacy-of-climate-activism/ – Cached – Similar

Twenty Nine Reasons People Need To Pull Their Heads Out Of The …
By Wanda Marie Woodward. 17 May, 2008. Countercurrents.org. When money speaks, the truth keeps silent. Russian Proverb …
http://www.countercurrents.org/woodward170508.htm – Cached – Similar

World Energy and Population, http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.paulchefurka.ca/WEAP/WEAP.html&ei=r-qVSu69HpGZlAfIy6i8DA&sa=X&oi=smap&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=1&usg=AFQjCNH9Nu7uRBFGK2SfDlJ9T3WttVwtHQ

Population, the elephant in the room
Copyright 2008, Paul Chefurka. This article may be reproduced in whole or in part for the purpose of research, education or other fair use, provided the …
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html – Cached – Similar

I have just one caveat, though. You wrote:

“During the same period, average CEO pay, at $10.54 million, was 344% higher than typical worker pay.”

Let’s not confuse percents with real numbers.

Interesting observation about Paul Craig Roberts. I once asked him and he just more or less ignored the point.

I’m not sure what rationale he uses given his criticism of both Bush and Obama. I think he must simply feel they’ve crossed a line, or he has.

Fidel Castro’s Reflection: I Wish I Were Wrong

http://www.escambray.cu/Eng/Special/Comradefidel/2009/Cwrong0908251138.htm

I was amazed to read the wire services issued during the weekend about the US domestic policy, evidencing a systematic decline in President Barack Obama’s influence. His surprising electoral victory had not been possible in the absence of the deep political and economic crisis affecting that country. The American soldiers killed or wounded in Iraq, the scandal about tortures and secret prisons, and the loss of jobs and housing had shaken the American society. The economic crisis was spreading throughout the planet, thus increasing poverty and hunger in the Third World countries.

Such circumstances made it possible for Obama to run for office and be elected in a traditionally racist society. No less than 90 per cent of the poor and discriminated against black people, most of the voters of Latin descent and a broad working and middle class white minority, especially the youth, voted for him.

It was only logical for those Americans who supported him to entertain lots of hopes. After eight years of adventurism, demagogy and lies, which led to the death of thousands of American soldiers and almost one million Iraqis in a conquest war over the oil of that Muslim country, which had nothing to do whatsoever with the atrocious attack on the Twin Towers, the American people felt tired and ashamed.

Not only a few people in Africa and elsewhere got excited about the idea that the US foreign policy would change.

However, an elemental knowledge about reality would have been enough in order not to raise hopes about a possible political change in the United States after the election of a new president.

Obama had certainly opposed the war launched by Bush against Iraq long before many others in the US Congress. Since he was a teenager he knew about the humiliations of racial discrimination, and just as many other Americans, he admired Martin Luther King, the outstanding civil rights fighter.

Obama was born, educated, went into politics and managed to be successful within the United States’ imperial capitalist system. He neither wished nor could change the system. Curiously enough, despite that, the extreme right hates him for being an Afro-American and opposes anything the President does to improve that country’s deteriorated image.

He has come to understand that the United States, with hardly 14 per cent of the world’s population, consumes about 25 per cent of the fossil energy, and is the biggest source of emissions of pollutant gases in the world.

Bush, in his ravings, did not even sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Obama, for his part, intends to implement stricter rules against tax evasion. For example, reportedly, the Swiss banks would supply data about approximately 4 500 financial accounts of a total of 52 000 owned by US citizens under suspicion of tax evasion.

A few weeks ago in Europe, Obama committed himself before the G-8 countries, especially France and Germany, to put an end to the use of fiscal heavens by his country in order to inject huge amounts of American dollars into the world’s economy.

He offered health care to almost 50 million citizens who had no medical insurance.

He promised to the US people that he would grease the wheels of the production apparatus machinery, stop increasing unemployment and resume growth

He promised the 12 million Hispanic illegal immigrants he would put an end to the cruel raids and the inhumane treatment they receive.

He made other promises that I will not list, but none of them questions the system of imperial capitalist domination.

The powerful extreme right will not tolerate any single measure that could in the least mean a reduction of its prerogatives.

I will just limit myself to refer to some reports published in recent days by US news and press agencies.

August 21:

– According to a poll published that day by The Washington Post, the confidence of American citizens on Presidents Barack Obama’s leadership has substantially decreased.

– In the midst of an increasing opposition against he health system’s reform, the telephone poll made by that newspaper and the ABC TV network among 1 001 adults from August 13 to 17 revealed that … 49 per cent of respondents believe that Obama would be able to significantly improve the US health care system. This results accounts for 20 percentage points less as compared to the period before Obama started his presidential mandate.

– Fifty five per cent of the respondents believe that the US general situation is not going well, as compared to 48 per cent in April.

- The fierce debate over the health reform in the US evidences an extremism that has become a source of concern for experts; they are alarmed about the presence of armed men in popular gatherings, the drawing of swastikas and the images of Hitler.

- The experts in hatred crimes have recommended watching these extremists closely. While many Democrats have felt overwhelmed by the protests, others have decided to directly confront their fellow countrymen.

- The young woman who carried a manipulated picture of Obama, wearing a Hitler’s style moustache, nurtured the theory that the President would create ‘death panels’ that would support euthanasia among senior citizens with no hope of recovery.

- According to reports, there are those who pretend to be deaf and resort to convey messages of hatred and extremism, which Brad Garrett, the former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), deems as alarming.

- Last week Garret said to the ABC network that we were certainly living through scary times, and added that the secret services are afraid that something may happen to Obama.

- According to reports, just on Monday last about twelve people were proud to show their weapons outside the Phoenix Convention Center in Arizona, where the President was delivering a speech before the war veterans in which, among other things, he defended his medical reform.

- It was said that another man was carrying a gun bearing the following inscription: the time has come to refresh the tree of liberty, which evoked the phrase pronounced by President Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) when he said that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed … by the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

- Some messages have been even more explicit; they have wished for the death of Obama, Michelle and their two daughters.

- Those incidents show that hatred has penetrated America’s politics more strongly than ever before.

- Larry Berman, from the University of California, who has written 12 books about the US presidency, said to EFE that right now we are talking about people who shout, who carry Obama’s pictures in which he appears characterized as a Nazi (…), and refer to the term ‘socialist’ with contempt. He believes that part of what is going on is due to the racism legacy that still lives on.

- Reportedly, after The New York Times published the day before that the CIA had hired Blackwater back in 2004 to perform the tasks of planning, training and surveillance, this day’s newspaper revealed further details about the activities entrusted to that controversial private security company whose current name is ‘Xe’.

- The newspaper revealed that the United States Central Intelligence Agency recruited several Blackwater agents to install bombs on board of drones in order to kill Al Qaeda leaders.

- According to the information revealed by government officials to The New York Times, those operations were carried out in bases located in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the private company equipped the planes with Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs.

- It was reported that the current director of the Agency, Leon Panetta, decided at some point in time to cancel the program and reveal before Congress in June the type of collaboration that existed between Blackwater and the CIA.

- According to the news, Blackwater’s collaboration ended a few years before Panetta was appointed as CIA chief, because the agency officials themselves questioned the convenience of having external agents participating in programs of selective assassinations.

- Blackwater is said to be the main private security company in charge of protecting the US staff in Iraq during the George W. Bush administration.

- Reportedly, its aggressive tactics were criticized on different occasions. The most serious case occurred on September, 2007, when some agents from the company killed 17 Iraqi civilians.

- After considering the record figures of suicides and the wave of depression spreading among its soldiers, the US army is said to be, little by little, creating some special groups whose task will be to enhance its troops’ resistance against the war-related emotional stress.

August 22:

- This day the US President Barack Obama is said to have harshly criticized those who oppose his plan to reform the health system in his country, and accused them of disseminating false and distorted information.

- According to reports, as he himself has pointed out in his speeches, the objective of the reform of the health care system is to put a halt to its rapidly increasing cost and ensure health coverage for almost 50 million Americans who have no health insurance.

- According to the news, this should have been an honest debate, not dominated by the deliberately false and distorted reports that have been disseminated by those who would benefit the most if things continue to be the way they are.

- According to what was published by The New York Times this day, the US State Department has continued funding Blackwater, the private company of mercenaries who were involved in the assassination of Al Qaeda leaders which is now called Xe Services.

- It was reported that the Governor of the State of New York, David Paterson, expressed on Friday last that the media had resorted to the use of racial stereotypes in its coverage of black officials like him, President Obama and the Governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick.

- It is said that the White House has estimated that the budget deficit during the next decade will amount to 2 trillion dollars more than the figure recently estimated, which would be a storming blow for President Barack Obama and his plans to create a public health system largely financed by the State.

- Forecasts within 10 years time are said to be very volatile and could vary with time. However, the new red figures in public funding will reportedly pose serious problems for Obama in Congress, and will cause a huge anxiety among the foreigners who are financing America’s public debt, especially China. Almost all economists consider them to be unsustainable even if there were a mass devaluation of the American dollar.

August 23:

- The top ranking military who commands the American army is said to have expressed on Sunday last his concern about the loss of popular support in his country to the war in Afghanistan, while indicating that the country continued to be vulnerable to the attacks of the extremists.

- Mike Muller, the chief of the military joint command said that the situation in Afghanistan was serious and deteriorating, and added that in the last two years, the Taliban insurrection has improved and become more specialized.

- In an interview aired by the NBC TV network, Mullen did not specify whether or not it would be necessary to send more troops.

- According to reports, a little bit more than 50 per cent of the respondents in the poll made by The Washington Post and the ABC TV network, whose results were recently published, expressed that the war in Afghanistan was not worth it.

- Reportedly, by the end of 2009 the United States will have three times more soldiers than the 20 000 who were deployed in Afghanistan three years ago.

Confusion is rampant within the American society.

September 11 will mark the eighth year since the fateful 9/11. On that same day, at Havana’s Sports Coliseum, we advised that the war was not the way to put an end to terrorism.

The strategy of withdrawing troops from Iraq and sending them to the Afghan war to fight the Taliban is wrong. The Soviet Union was trapped in a quagmire there. The US European allies will be ever more reluctant to see the blood of their soldiers shed in that country.

Mullen’s concern over the popularity of that war is not far-fetched. Those who perpetrated the attack on September 11, 2001, against the Twin Towers were trained by the United States.

The Taliban is an Afghan nationalist movement that had nothing to do with that event. Al Qaeda, an organization that has been financed by the CIA since 1979 and was used against the USSR during the years of the Cold War, was the one that masterminded that attack 22 years later.

There are still some dark events that require further clarification before the international public opinion.

Obama has inherited those problems from Bush.

I do not have the slightest doubt that the racist right will do its best to try to wear him out by hindering his program and leaving him out of play, one way or the other, at the lowest possible political cost.

I wish I were wrong!

Fidel Castro Ruz

August 24, 2009

5:15 p.m.

Again I sent this e-mail to CNBC and Dick Armey was on this morning. If even read I guess a clerk might find it interesting. To smoke pot or whatever drug of choice is one of those 1,000 topics and there is a few topics that can make drugs somewhat academic. In the coming years for the younger people to learn to travel light and move fast better known as survival is a good one. Not that serious oh yes it is. There’s the e-mail and I will put again something that was well put.

Good morning,

I watched a little Fox News yesterday Glenn Beck and Maybe it’s official now. He said that there are a lot of reasons to believe that climate change is not real and even if it is there is nothing we can do about it. Is that true? Some believe that reason, knowledge the real thing and facing the problem that should be first focus, imagination, hard work and the big one working together could just work. So far do we see any of those things happening? Why not what is the reason for that is there a reason. Of course there is always’ rocket’s for that aerosol injection that we seem to be so good at covering up the problem. It’s to late and there is nothing we can do I thought some would be a little more clever than that. I hear many say we can’t do this right now what are we doing for future generations all that money what kind of a future are we leaving them? The answer to that so far is none. Cap and trade will it pass maybe in a watered down bill or not pass then what simple as possible but not simpler no there is nothing we can do but wait the rocket’s will that work no it sure will not. The next year or so different to say the least.

Don

Twin Plagues Threaten Northern Forests

HAINES JUNCTION, Yukon Territory
(Aug. 23) – A veil of smoke settled over the
forest in the shadow of the St. Elias Mountains,
in a wilderness whose spruce trees
stood tall and gray, a deathly gray even in
the greenest heart of a Yukon summer.
“As far as the eye can see, it’s all infested,”
forester Rob Legare said, looking out
over the thick woods of the Alsek River valley.
Beetles and fire, twin plagues, are consuming
northern forests in what scientists
say is a preview of the future, in a century
growing warmer, as the land grows drier,
trees grow weaker and pests, abetted by
milder winters, grow stronger.
Dying, burning forests would then only
add to the warming.
It’s here in the sub-Arctic and Arctic — in
Alaska, across Siberia, in northernmost Europe,
and in the Yukon and elsewhere in
northern Canada — that Earth’s climate is
changing most rapidly. While average temperatures
globally rose 0.74 degrees Celsius
(1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century,
the far north experienced warming at
twice that rate or greater.
In Russia’s frigid east, some average temperatures
have risen more than 2 degrees
Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), with midwinter
mercury spiking even higher. And
“eight of the last 10 summers have been extreme
wildfire seasons in Siberia,” American
researcher Amber J. Soja pointed out
by telephone from central Siberia.
Along with shrinking the polar ice cap
and thawing permafrost, scientists say, the
warming of the Arctic threatens to turn boreal
forest — the vast cover of spruce, pine
and other conifers blanketing these high
latitudes — into less of a crucial “sink” absorbing
carbon dioxide and more of a
source, as megatons of that greenhouse gas
rise from dead, burning and decaying
wood.
American forest ecologist Scott Green
worries about a “domino effect.”
“These things may occur simultaneously,”
said the researcher from the University
of Northern British Columbia. “If the bark
beetles kill the trees, you’ll have lots of
dead, dry wood that will create a really, really
hot fire, and then sometimes you don’t
get trees regenerating on the site.”
Dominoes may already be falling in western
North America.
From Colorado to Washington state, an
unprecedented, years-long epidemic of
mountain pine beetle has killed 2.6 million
hectares (6.5 million acres) of forest. The
insect has struck even more devastatingly
to the north, in British Columbia, where
clouds of beetles have laid waste to 14 million
hectares (35 million acres) — twice the
area of Ireland. It is expected to kill 80 percent
of the Canadian province’s lodgepole
pines before it’s finished.
Farther north, in the Yukon, the pine
beetle isn’t endemic — yet. Here it’s the
spruce bark beetle that has eaten its way
through 400,000 hectares (1 million acres)
of woodland, and even more in neighboring
Alaska, in a 15-year-old epidemic unmatched
in its longevity and extent.
“It’s a fingerprint of climate change,”
Aynslie Ogden, senior researcher for the
Yukon Forest Management Branch, said in
Whitehorse, the territorial capital. “The intensity
and severity and magnitude of the
infestation is outside the normal.”
Hiking through the wild and beetle-ravaged
Alsek valley, Legare, the Yukon
agency’s forest health expert, explained
how the 6-millimeter (quarter-inch) insect
does its damage.
“Usually the female bores into the tree
first, followed by the male, and then they
mate and they both excavate a main egg
gallery which runs parallel to the wood
grain,” he said.
The hatched larvae, just beneath the outer
bark, then feed via perpendicular galleries
they bore around the tree, cutting off
nutrients moving through the phloem and
killing the plant. Its needles turn reddish,
later gray, and eventually wind topples the
dead wood.
Winter spells of minus-40-Celsius
(minus-40-Fahrenheit) temperatures once
killed off larvae, but those deep freezes now
occur less often. And warmer summers enable
some beetles to complete their reproductive
cycle in one year instead of two,
speeding up population growth.
Years of summer drought, meanwhile,
weakened the spruces’ ability to extrude
sticky pitch, to trap and expel beetles. Because
the snow-streaked peaks of the
5,000-meter-high (15,000-foot-high) St.
Elias range block moisture from the Pacific,
a mere 250 millimeters (10 inches) of precipitation
falls each year. Even a slight
shortfall stresses the trees.
The Yukon has experienced smaller,
briefer beetle outbreaks in the past, fed by
patches of fallen trees left by road construction.
But “what makes this infestation different”
is that climate change is a primary
cause, said Legare.
As he spoke, smoke from dozens of fires,
some nearby in the Yukon, some in distant
Alaska, wafted over a landscape already
bleak with dead forest.
In an authoritative 2007 assessment, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), the U.N.-sponsored scientific
network, cited multiple studies linking
the spread of wildfires to warmer, drier
conditions.
This June, in the latest such study, as
early flames flared in California’s wildfire
season, Harvard scientists said the area
burned in the western United States could
increase by 50 percent by the 2050s, even
under the best-case warming scenario projected
by the IPCC.
In Siberia, “fire has been increasing, and
there’s an earlier fire season,” Soja, of the
U.S. National Institute of Aerospace, reported
from the Sukachev Institute of
Forestry in Krasnoyarsk. Her research this
summer found that a warmer, drier climate
appears to be stifling regrowth of burnedout
areas on the Siberian forest’s southern
edge, turning them to grasslands.
In Canada, area burned is double what it
was in the 1970s, despite greater firefighting
capacity and some recent favorable
weather, said Mike Flannigan, a fire researcher.

And let me add again the changes are moving much faster than first thought still time with a Herculean effort and to me to try instead of what we see now insanity, illusion, foolishness, seems so much better. What are the reasons to not do that. It appears some still think you can eat money.

we haven’t lived under capialism for some time; instead, some perverse form of crony capitalism or command and control.

or rather an uberclass, above and beyond traditional values and the rule of law, with a collectively sociopathic disposition

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08192009.html

Americans Ruled by Serfs is its name by the secretary of the treasury under Regan. authoritative.

and also, type Larry Flynt’s “Common Sense 2009″

Great article.

Also, I would submit that we do not, and have not for some time, lived with

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08192009.html

Americans Ruled by Serfs is its name by the secretary of the treasury under Regan. authoritative.

and also, type Larry Flynt’s “Common Sense 2009″

Great article.

Also, I would submit that we do not, and have not for some time, lived with