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| Trump’s Secret War? |
By John Haltiwanger 2017-11-30
U.S. Military’s Presence In Middle East Has Grown 33 Percent In Past Four Months |
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| Slaves and Bulldozers, Plutocrats and Widgets |
By KRISTINE MATTIS 2017-11-28
On a finite planet every excess dollar, every excess material good, every extra home, car, garment, trinket, piece of food, or beverage that one person possesses essentially correlates to an item that another person does not have. When we normalize one person having more than he/she needs in a world where billions have far less than the bare minimum required to meet their basic needs, then we are obliged to rethink our morality....Poverty only exists because excessive wealth exists and neither is compatible with a sustainable and humane civilization.... The elites who are not in denial about the problems we face want scientific and technological solutions – solutions that they can throw their money at and have others solve so they do not have to think about their own contribution to the problems.... Science cannot save us. Scientific research itself relies on the same unsustainable production, consumption, use of resources, and waste as every other industry.... Technology mavens always tout the great social or biological service that their new technology will provide. Their innovations comes under the guise of helping the world, but the majority of the time, their creations are frivolous and do not do much more than use natural resources, create waste, and earn them exorbitant profit.... the principle purpose of our education, of our careers, is profit.... Nevertheless, there are people who have chosen lives based on conviction rather than money. Living with integrity and simplicity is difficult. They live this way because only by walking the walk rather than talking the talk will we ever start to achieve justice and sustainability to help preserve the future of our species.... The best protest we can do in America now is to reject the bourgeois life – reject excessive wealth and the material components that come with it, reject profligate consumption, reject consumerism, reject wasteful holidays, reject wasteful trinkets, reject all that is incompatible with what we purport to champion.... To be sure, if we are remotely interested in a sustainable and equitable world, the attainment of wealth must be transformed from admirable to contemptible. With regard to the multitude of obstacles we face, Ralph Nader once wrote “only the super-rich can save us.” He’s right. They can save us by not existing. |
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