Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1117
December 29, 2017
The US government wants journalists and protesters in prison
The Trump administration is openly suppressing the First Amendment and freedom of the press.
Last week, a federal prosecutor told a jury that a journalist’s knowledge of terms like “black bloc” and police “kettling” was cause for suspicion. Photojournalist Alexei Wood faced 50 years in prison for getting swept up in a mass arrest during the inaugural protests. He was acquitted Thursday, but 188 others who were arrested during the J20 protests still face 50-60 years each, accused of conspiracy for merely attending.
While perpetrating a massive redistribution of wealth, the US government isn’t simply trying to stifle protest, it is attempting to criminalize our ability to discuss protest. In the face of such fascistic repression, front line movement coverage has never been so crucial.
At Truthout, we have laid the groundwork to fight on our front: to defend the greatly reduced landscape of independent news. We cannot allow the only narratives about this political moment to be molded by corporate forces. We…
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Leaflet for Amazon workers – December 2017
UK Amazon workers organize against atrocious pay and working conditions (that have made Jeff Bezos the richest person in the world).
Amazon workers in Hemel Hempstead and Amazon Flex workers in West London: Let‘s learn from the struggles of our colleagues in Italy, Germany and Poland!
Click here for PDF version: AmazonBW
It‘s peak season and work sucks the life out of us. The media presents us as victims, losing the competition with Amazon‘s robots. That sucks too. We can show them that we are no victims.
In Hemel Hempstead we have many problems:
* The picking target of 120 is too high, and it‘s raining verbal and written warnings. Management makes temp workers hit higher targets for the season, and then makes the regulars reach those targets throughout the whole year. ‘Power Hour’?! – No, thanks!
* PMP and Adecco pay low. They advertise £10 an hour, but you have to kill yourself with overtime to get it. Some guys work 60 hours plus. The more hours we work per…
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Greenest year ever for UK as renewables outstrip coal by three-to-one
Analysis of the U.K.’s energy figures for 2017 show that renewables provided more power than coal on 315 days of the year, with solar a dominant player throughout the summer months.
AGR Daily 60 Second News Bites
The skies may be gray and the ground dappled with the white stuff right now, but the U.K. can look back on 2017 as its greenest year ever as figures from the National Grid confirm record levels of renewable electricity generation.
The data covers the period of January 1 to December 12 this year and reveals that on 315 days renewables produced more power than coal plants. Broken down by generation source, wind bested coal on 263 days of the year, while solar bettered coal’s output on 180 days of the year.
Between the sunniest months from April to August, coal provided more power than solar on just 10 days. Overall, renewables outperformed coal for 90% of the year, data from MyGridGB shows
via Greenest year ever for UK as renewables outstrip coal by three-to-one – pv magazine International
December 28, 2017
The 5 Cartels that Rule America and the World
The 5 industries that exert nearly total control over our lives: the banking industry, the medical establishment, the energy industry, the agriculture chemical industry and the information industrial complex.
Americans have been programmed to fight amongst themselves along partisan political lines, always pointing the finger at the other side of the phony left-right paradigm. Divide and conquer is the broad tactic being used to keep people from recognizing, focusing on, and targeting the truly diabolical agents in our world who hold real power over all of us at once.
We are not ruled by Republicans or Democrats, but rather by the not-so-hidden hands of institutions which have consolidated a tremendous amount of power. Our world is deeply colored by these cartels, and they impact every area of our lives, constantly maneuvering to make more and more dependent on them for our needs.
In short, these are the organizations which rule over us. These are the great forces in our world which prevent positive change and ensure that we continually slide downward into tyranny and self-destruction.
1. The International Banking…
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Beijing Complicates Washington’s Afghan Strategy
Beijing hopes to make Afghans and Pakistanis stakeholders in regional projects and thereby generate traction to its peace initiative.
After a meeting in Beijing on Tuesday of the China-Afghanistan-Pakistan Dialogue, a newly created trilateral format, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made a major announcement that Beijing and Islamabad will look at extending the US$57 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to Afghanistan.
The joint press release after the meet said the three countries “reaffirmed their commitment to improving their relations, deepening mutually beneficial cooperation, advancing connectivity under the Belt and Road Initiative.”
Wang was forthright later at a press conference: “China and Pakistan are willing to look at with Afghanistan, on the basis of win-win, mutually beneficial principles, using an appropriate means to extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to Afghanistan.”
Pakistani Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif chose his words carefully, saying Pakistan and China are “iron brothers” and the successful implementation of the CPEC “will serve as a model for enhancing connectivity and cooperation through similar projects with neighboring countries…
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Standing Rock: The Documentary
Black Snake Killaz: a No #DAPL Story
Unicorn Riot (2017)
Film Review
The main significance of Black Snake* Killaz is the continuous historical record it provides of the 2016 Standing Rock occupation and blockade of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The occupation drew participation from indigenous supporters all over the world, as well as environmental activists and veterans. It also inspired dozens of support protests in cities around the US.
By engaging in continuous direct action, either placing their bodies in the path of construction equipment, vandalizing it or locking themselves down to it, the Water Protectors succeeded in bring pipeline construction to a total halt.
The Full Scale Military Campaign Launched Against Standing Rock
The film also brought home for the first time the full scale military campaign launched against the occupation by federal, state and private security personnel. The basic counterinsurgency strategy employed was drawn up by TigerSwan, a private security company operating illegally in North Dakota. Their battle plan was virtually identical to the military operations launched against jihadists in Afghanistan.
Black Snake Killaz also helped me understand that the DAPL (which the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe challenged in Federal Court) was illegal from the outset. Although the private land used for pipeline construction was just north of the Standing Rock reservation, it was routed through sacred land ceded to the Sioux in the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Moreover the Army Corps of Engineers granted a permit for pipeline construction to start (across this private land) in August 2016 without the legally required comprehensive environmental impact assessment.
At the point Energy Transfer Partners commenced pipeline construction, the Army Corp had yet to grant a permit for the pipeline to cross federal land. In fact, they granted permission for Water Protectors to set up camp (which they named Ocetic Sakowin) on federal land.
Trump Approves Pipeline Via Executive Order
Shortly following Trump’s election in November the Army Corp announced their intention to shut down Oceti Sakowin. They had finally ordered a comprehensive environmental impact assessment (as a condition for granting the easement for the pipeline to cross federal land). However Trump scuppered it four days after taking office, when he signed an executive order directing the Army Corp to immediately approve the easement.
Although the Water Protectors ultimately failed in their efforts to halt DAPL, the massive publicity generated by the nationwide Standing Rock campaign would lead US Bank and a Norwegian bank to withdraw funding for the pipeline. It would also lead numerous cities to divest from Energy Transfer Partners and the banks that fund them.
The pipeline has already caused three oil spills since it began operations in May 2017.
*The Water Protectors refer to DAPL as the Black Snake based on an old Sioux prophecy that a black snake would come out of the North and poison their water.
December 27, 2017
THE U.S. SHALE OIL INDUSTRY: Swindling & Stealing Energy To Stay Alive
As time goes by the U.S. shale [fracking] industry will behave like a BLACK HOLE, by sucking more and more energy in to produce even lower and lower quality oil and gas. At some point, the shale energy industry will collapse upon itself leaving one hell of a mess behind. While it’s hard to predict the timing of the event, it will likely occur within the next 2-5 years.
By the SRSrocco Report,
While the U.S. Shale Energy Industry continues to borrow money to produce uneconomical oil and gas, there is another important phenomenon that is not understood by the analyst community. The critical factor overlooked by the media is the fact that the U.S. shale industry is swindling and stealing energy from other areas to stay alive. Let me explain.
First, let’s take a look at some interesting graphs done by the Bloomberg Gadfly. The first chart below shows how the U.S. shale industry continues to burn through investor cash regardless of $100 or $50 oil prices:
The chart above shows the negative free cash flow for 33 shale-weighted E&P companies. Even at $100 oil prices in 2012 and 2013, these companies spent more money producing shale energy in the top four U.S. shale fields than they made from operations. While costs to produce shale oil and gas…
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California’s hidden homeless: Teachers, chefs, nurses and other middle class workers living in cars in parking lots because of the state’s crazy property prices
Hundreds of people, including nurses and chefs, are sleeping in parking lots in affluent areas like Santa Barbara as they make the most of the only homes they can afford.
AGR Daily 60 Second News Bites
The rising cost of rent and housing in California is forcing residents into alternative accommodation with middle class workers taking up residence in their cars and RVs by the side of the road to make ends meet.
Hundreds of people, including nurses and chefs, are sleeping in parking lots in affluent areas like Santa Barbara as they make the most of the only homes they can afford.
Marva Ericson, who works as a nursing assistant, has been sleeping in her Kia for the past three months. She wakes up before dawn each day, showers at the local YMCA and dresses in her hospital scrubs to head to work.
via California’s middle class homeless living in parking lots | Daily Mail Online
Student Debt Slavery: Bankrolling Financiers on the Backs of the Young
The advantages of slavery by debt over “chattel” slavery – ownership of humans as a property right – were set out in an infamous document called the Hazard Circular, reportedly circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts during the American Civil War.
Higher education has been financialized, transformed from a public service into a lucrative cash cow for private investors.
The advantages of slavery by debt over “chattel” slavery – ownership of humans as a property right – were set out in an infamous document called the Hazard Circular, reportedly circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts during the American Civil War. It read in part:
Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages.
Slaves had to be housed, fed and cared for. “Free” men housed and fed themselves.
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December 26, 2017
What Elon Musk doesn’t understand about public transit hurts everyone — Quartz
Written by Rich Sampson
Recently, Elon Musk shared his perceptions during a tech industry conference that public transit is both inconvenient and dangerous. “It’s a pain in the ass,” he said. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”
Several commentators—including myself, along with transit network design expert Jarrett Walker—called out his views as an uninformed elitist, perched atop his high-tech empire:
When you’re white, wealthy & emotionally estranged, you view everyone else as an inconvenience at best and a threat at worst. @elonmusk proves time and again he should have no role in planning communities. https://t.co/wwPluazVtL
— RAIL Magazine (@RAILMag) December 14, 2017
In cities, @elonmusk‘s hatred of sharing space with strangers is a luxury (or pathology) that only the rich can afford. Letting him design cities is the essence of elite projection. https://t.co/gtSVgPkfPohttps://t.co/CmCpoIJ5NE
— Jarrett Walker (@humantransit) December 14, 2017
Musk presents a dilemma for many mobility advocates—as do other transportation tech sector-disruptors, such as the Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) Uber and Lyft: their ideas offer clever innovations to overcome network gaps and sluggish bureaucracy, but are rooted in profit motives that run counter to transit’s primary aim of affordable accessibility.
Musk’s dig at transit raises our industry’s dander when a billionaire (whose Boring Company is currently digging a privately-funded tunnel from his home to his corporate headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.) scoffs at a resource that millions of less-fortunate people—as well as vast numbers of people of color, women and people with disabilities—rely on every day to get to work, healthcare, school, childcare and myriad other destinations. . .
via What Elon Musk doesn’t understand about public transit hurts everyone — Quartz
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