No-no-no more Bill McKibben, please. He is capitalism lite, loving each climate change bubble of CO2, nitrous oxide and toilets a flushing as part of COP 21. Can he stay home and teach? Do we need parading after parading of the usual suspects – Naomi Klein, Billy-boy, Prince Charles, Mark Ruffalo, Björk, David Bowie, Coldplay, Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, Colin Firth , Emma Thompson Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Gwyneth Paltrow ou encore Nathalie Portman Sean Penn, Leo Dicaprio.
Can we cart these planet-killing capitalists out the door with the 200 world leaders and now get a move on with grassroots activism? Can we stop having the One Percent and the zero-point-one percent parading around with thousand dollar dresses and goofy smiles at a climate change convention? Can we stop their jets, stop their silliness, stop their Democratic Party loving selves, and stop their Hillary Is Better than The Donald Alternative? Can we tax them to hell, tax their monopolies running their shows, the $1500 an hour lawyers, the agents, the publishing houses, the entire crap that is all about a few-few, sometimes dual citizens, running this globe into the ground.
Did I say NOTHING good comes out of actors’ mouths once they attempt to be, human, one with us? Just do your part, play your play acting roles, and believe in your grandness, your bellicose selves, all the attention, the pimping and sales pitches for the dirties and most criminal companies on earth. These people are disgusting, and yet, they are there, Paris, parading.
Did I say, No More McKibben.
I still can’t break from the radio interview I did with him years ago, and he just could not take my negativity – about Obama on the first go round. “Give him a chance … boy, Paul you lack confidence in all the systems. Paul. Really, we have to work with these players, these Wall Street types. We have to give Obama a chance. I thought I was dark and gloomy — you put me to shame.” I have it, on an MP3 file, and one day I am going to upload it and others on a website I create very soon. Stay tuned. To sell a serialized book, one that is in real time, and you pay a little, each month, and you get the next installment as I finish it monthly. I might even have bidding for a few subthemes and characters persons bid for and pay a bit for to be put into the narrative. Sound cool? Ya think Bill McKibben will buy the 12-month deal. Sort of a dystopian novel, based around bad dealings in the Hanford Nuclear deal, you know, killing those Japanese, and the intrigue and other such REAL facts I have been collecting. Think he might pay for fiction? Nah!
These people are so far removed from social justice, from the poverty inflicted by their systems, their books, their careers, their movement toward what, $41 trillion out there for green investment? What is green investment? Is it retrenchment, pushing capitalism to the cutting room floor? Is it investment in very small and multitudinous farms and co-ops, an arts based society, away from markets and buy-sell-junk-produce-suck-fulfill?
Is this the world these One Percenters want? Do they have concepts of the deprivation of war, of environmental collapse, of all those fisheries and all those wetlands and all those forests destroyed? By man’s hand, by capitalism, by the engines that run Hollywood, all their jet-setting, their clothing love, and triple mansion lust, all the shit that is Media Central and Marketing Magic. All that time wasted watching them play act, and now they get news items about their views on COP21 and climate and world events? This is the death of culture, the dying empire, but it is painfully slow, and kills radicals like myself who want change now, fast, clean break from the mire and muck of Capitalism.
Oh, how the narrative around climate and what to do is done up by McKibben and played out in these climate movies, documentaries, very much the work of the Chosen Few, very much steeped in money making/career making, so much of so many careers are made from the flicks, and we see how the world changes (not) so much by these films. See below.
I have talks with liberals, friends, 62, older, white, former engineers, who want to be the solution, but fear losing pensions if they cross the police lines. Who fear being left out on the streets. This is America, the fear zone, all that shit on TV, the shit in movies, the shit from the mouths of these shit-faces from Ivy League or Minor League, politicians, policy wonks, lobbyists, military midgets. So, I say, YES, capitalism has to go, and, yes, you are in the way if you continue to say nothing can change, nothing will happen in our lifetimes or the next generations’. This is a world Klein and McKibben and Iggy Pop know nothing of.
I faced this as a teacher for 33 years. Accusing me of being negative, being too political, being to out there, revolutionary, and, alas, they are the ones hobbled by cynicism, the careerism that turns people into slaves of false ideas and pretensions of Capitalism Not Being Evil, Just Being Money.
Imagine, all the toxins, the lies, the killings, the overthrow of elected people, the floods of goo and the mountains leveled, and the air salted with everything to kill humanity. Imagine hedge funds, Casino Capitalism, hostile takeovers, eminent domain for sports stadium, privatizing profits and socializing costs, and $2000 pills for Hep C, and imagine VW lying, as the rest of Big Pharma-Big Ag-Big Data-Big Ed-Big Prisons-Big Policing-Big Medicine-Big Business lies and colludes and kills and maims; and imagine farms flooded with fumigants, pesticides, fertilizers? Imagine all those lawyers working for the Corporate Mafia. Imagine a Steve Jobs and the suicides and slave labor for those piece of shit items, junk, things we now must have-have-have. Imagine the irradiated milk solids, dog food that kills, acceptable levels of a million carcinogens, the genetically altered foods, the war machines, the entire mess that is making money from poverty, the fines, the PayDay loan legality, the usury, the fines, debt prisons. Yes, there are debt prisons in the USA, big time. Figure it out – McKibben and Klein. FIGURE it out. Climate change is about Capitalism. Both have to be stopped.
I think they watch junk, Orange is the New Black, Breaking Bad, whatever shit comes, and think they know our times, our lives? Jokes. Ya miss that court date for a bogus moving violation, seat belt infraction, texting while parked, what have you, and you can’t pay the $600 or $1500 fine, and they add up, and your phone is turned off, and, bam, you have a warrant out for your arrest. This is a daily 50-state deal, in the tens of thousands a day, cycling into the criminal justice system, run by Chosen Few at the top and the millions working the system, from PO, to jailer, to social worker, to warden, to all those private concerns making a mint off of curled up baloney sandwiches and Kool-Aide punch meals into the cells.
COP21 — it’s about the stars, the same usual suspects yammering away, and the trillions ready to be made by the mean lean green Capitalism Machine, with all the bells and whistles and exploitation of resources and unnecessary junk, all that living big ethos, all the rotten jobs producing more rotten things, stuff, and, it’s Billy Boy McKibben, yammering away with his tenure and his elbow rubbing with the stars in the City of Lights when he should have just Skyped his way there, or better yet, gave his spiels at home in Vermont or wherever he’s from and put it on a thumb-drive and had it delivered.
These people don’t rail against the very airlines they fly to Paris with and those component makers of those floating death cans that make money killing, monitoring, stealing, cacheing humanity, and colluding with the fascists. All that Boeing surveillance gear, all the humming engines of death missiles, all the death equipment that makes GE or Microsoft or Intel so so profitable. Smart bombs and drones use that software and mother boards of the shit gigabyte world.
Read the 20 points here on why Green Capitalism is a killer for the poor, and will be a totalitarian model with corporations feeding off of our souls, those of us who do not want profits from climate crisis and biocrisis!
By Tadzio Mueller and Alexis Passadakis (12/2008). Alexis is a member of attac Germany’s coordinating council, Tadzio a part of the Turbulence editorial collective (www.turbulence.org.uk). They are both active in the emerging climate justice movement, and can be reached at againstgreencapitalism (at) googlemail.com
Here 17 and 18 –
17. Such solutions include: no to free trade, no to privatisation, no to flexible mechanisms. Yes to food sovereignty, yes to degrowth, yes to radical democracy and to leaving the resources in the ground
18. As an emerging global climate justice movement, we must fight two enemies: on one hand climate change and the fossilistic capitalism that causes it, and on the other, an emergent green capitalism that won’t stop it, but will limit our ability to do so
We won’t see the ecosocialists at Amy Goodman’s George Soros supported table, the millionaire that she is, oh, that she is. So, end it with this, Mr. Smith:
Given the multiple existential threats to our very survival, you might expect that our leading environmental thinkers and activists would be looking into those “radical” solutions, and especially be thinking “beyond capitalism.” Don’t hold your breath. From the perennial boosters of “green capitalism” and tech-fixits like Lester Brown, Al Gore, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman, to the apostles of “degrowth” like Tim Jackson, the New Economic Foundation’s Andrew Simms, and Serge Latouche, for decades, mainstream debate has been confined to hopelessly discredited, self-contradictory and empirically implausible save-the-planet strategies – held in check by their protagonists’ fear of challenging the principal driver of global ecological collapse, capitalism. Thus, speaking for the mainstream, the United Kingdom’s Jonathon Porritt, former Green Party co-chair and director of Friends of the Earth, and Tony Blair’s environment czar, wrote in 2005 that “Logically, whether we like it or not, sustainability is therefore going to have to be delivered within that all-encompassing capitalist framework. We don’t have time to wait for any big-picture successor.” Thus, even as his own studies demonstrate how (market-driven) out-of-control growth is burning up the planet, the world’s preeminent climate scientist-turned-activist James Hansen can’t bring himself to associate with the left, to think outside the capitalist box, to abandon his doomed-to-fail carbon tax scheme and join the struggle against the economic system that is destroying the future for his grandchildren. And even as he cites ever more dire warnings from climate scientists, Bill McKibben, the world’s premier climate protest organizer, won’t touch the third rail of capitalism because he’s not a socialist and because he doesn’t want to alienate his liberal base and wealthy foundation funders.
Read him — Richard Smith is an economic historian. He wrote his UCLA history Ph.D. thesis on the transition to capitalism in China and held post-docs at the East-West Center in Honolulu and Rutgers University. He has written on China, capitalism and the global environment and on related issues for New Left Review, Monthly Review, The Ecologist, the Journal of Ecological Economics, Real-World Economics Review, Adbusters magazine and other publications. His book To Save the Planet, Turn the World Upside Down will be published in 2015.
I am serious — I was a college teacher, I am a writer and journalist and expert on a few things, I have had a radio show, I understand film and film studies, but I guarantee, this film-making is in the echo chamber, nothing to change anyone, except those making the films, financing them, and getting all those jobs associated with film making and film marketing. But, you tell me — which of the following 245 movies changed you, changed capitalism, changed policy, changed the One Percent and the Six percent, us, USA, destroying humanity with killing, droning, blasting economic time bombing, consumer slicing? Help. Really. Two hundred and forty-five ways to think about what’s being projected or shown on TV and than do nothing about. But watch a flick or two! Do we come together in these screenings, open up the pot, collection basket, get people to downsize and bring into the conversation about intentional communities? Throwing in and stopping this madness, this “my home is my castle and you can get your own some day, or not . . . . ” This is where we have rigged our lives into collapse . . . we are not a sharing and community based society, so we will die lonely and limp and lost. Thanks, Bill, for showing up yet again, and see you at COP 22.
This is the top ten in some internet blogs’ listings? Here!
10. Meat The Truth (2008)
Although many films have convincingly succeeded in drawing public attention to the issue of global warming, they have repeatedly ignored one of the most important causes of climate change, namely: intensive livestock production.
9. The Crisis of Civilization (2011)
A dark comedy remix mash-up bonanza about the end of industrial civilization. featuring clowns, car crashes, explosions, super heroes, and xylophones and much, much more ….. Based on the Book by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Directed by Dean Puckett
8. The Island President (2011) (trailer)
Jon Shenk’s The Island President is the story of President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, a man confronting a problem greater than any other world leader has ever faced—the literal survival of his country and everyone in it.
7. The 11th Hour (2007)
Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, this captivating documentary explores the perilous state of our planet, and the means by which we can change our course. Contributing to this crucial film are noted politicians, scientists and other ambassadors for the importance of a universal ecological consciousness.
6. The Denial Machine (2006)
In the past few years, a hurricane has engulfed the debate about global warming. This scientific issue has become a rhetorical firestorm with science pitted against spin and inflammatory words on both sides.
Also a noteworthy update: Climate of Doubt (2012)
If you think Mitt Romney’s recent threats against PBS were actually about budgets or Big Bird, think again. The reason the right hates PBS is that sometimes it commits the unpardonable sin of journalism.
5. Out Of Balance: ExxonMobil’s Impact on Climate Change (2007)
Out of Balance: ExxonMobil’s Impact on Climate Change“ shows the influence that the largest company in the world has on governments, the media and citizens and what can be done about global warming.
4. What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire (2007)
A middle class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the demise of the American Lifestyle.Featuring interviews with Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Jerry Mander, Chellis Glendinning, Richard Heinberg, Thomas Berry, William Catton
3. Trading on Thin Air (2010)
Trading on Thin Air explains the methods used by the financial oligarchy to extract the wealth of the nation and how the same strategy is being used to subvert a movement for conservation and sustainability and harness it to create the next big bubble.
Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite plays an old man living in the devastated world of 2055 in this documentary-drama-animation hybrid from Director Franny Armstrong and Oscar-winning Producer John Battsek. Runaway climate change has ravaged the planet by 2055.
1. Chasing Ice (2012)
Acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog heads to the Arctic in order to capture images that will help to convey the effects of global warming. Balog was initially skeptical about climate change when the issue entered scientific discussion, but…