Will 2020 Bring Better Vision?

Here we go into the second decade of the third millennium (that is if you start counting time when they say we should). If I could define a clear yearly vision it would start with an end to the wars and coups the US perpetrates to enhance global corporate/capital power. Then with both the monies saved and return of our veterans, we rebuild and create a new paradigm. Imagine locally produced power, food, transportation, parks, ecosystem restoration, and water capture and purification. Imagine the end of the fracking industry, which has never been profitable except as a con. Use the last of current fossil fuel production to create a fossil fuel free world and then end it...no new wells nor coal mines. I can continue by dreaming of a new food production system not focused on grains and soy which are driving so much of our ill health, but focused on neighborhood market producers, and humane animal production using regenerative farming. Eating well (which would require an examination of current (mis)guidelines plus a re-education program) would reduce the chronic disease epidemic. We need universal health care for all, but first we need accurate health advice. The big problem of the future is said to be the loss of jobs to AI, but we will always need teachers, park rangers, librarians, ecologists, climatologists, hydrologists, solar specialists, electric car mechanics, restoration ecologists, farmers, herders, ranchers, welders, carpenters, plumbers, and on and on. There's plenty of work for all but we haven't developed a system of value for our ecosystem nor one another. It is time. It is past time.

As we begin a new decade I wonder if we as a nation are able to look in the mirror and see ourselves clearly. Let's start with reasons for ending war. There's always plenty of platitude about peace this season, but little understanding of the horrors of war (nor US involvement and promotion). Perhaps it is willful blindness used to escape the thought of the children and civilians we murder with our drones. Or maybe we don't want to think that we would use depleted uranium leaving ages of death in the wake of our war zones. How many people are even aware there was a coup in Bolivia orchestrated by US corporations to capture their lithium reserves? Then again it might be that most folks are unaware of our atrocities because there is little to no reporting about them. One thing is for sure, they ain't gonna tell you on the evening news (unless its the eb). Perhaps the year is really 1984.

This nation began with war. Do you know the Christmas story/myth of the US first success on Christmas day, 1776? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9lkWXtAYLM (1.5 hour A&E film)
...or a shorter clip "10 days that changed world" from 12/25/1776-1/3/1777 in 15 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF-Y7s_YIAU
We've been programed to think we are entitled...and seek a higher good.

John Pilger does a good job dispelling the myth in this interview...

American “exceptionalism” – which, he (John Pilger) points out, mirrors that of Nazi Germany – has developed into a hyper-rogue phase. The relentless denigration of Russia by American and Western media show that there are few red lines left to restrain aggression towards Moscow, as there were, at least, during the past Cold War. Russia and China’s refusal to bow down to Washington’s dictate is infuriating the would-be American hegemon and its desire for zero-sum world domination...
...“exceptionalism” is not only embraced by the American right. Although they may not admit it, many liberals believe it in it, as do those who describe themselves as “left”. It’s the spawn of the most rapacious ideology on earth: Americanism. That this word is rarely uttered is part of its power....
...the US surrounds China with 400 military bases and sails its low-draught ships into Chinese waters and flies its drones in Chinese airspace. American-led NATO forces mass on the same Russian frontier the Nazis crossed; the Russian president is insulted as a matter of routine. There is no restraint and none of the diplomacy that kept the old Cold War cold. In the West, we have acquiesced as bystanders in our own countries, preferring to look away (or at our smart phones) rather than break free of the post-modernism entrapping us with its specious “identity” distractions.
...I wrote for many years for the Guardian; my last piece was five years ago after which I received a phone call. I was purged, along with other independent writers. The Guardian now promotes fiction about Russia, obsessively, the interests of Britain’s intelligence services, Israel, the US Democratic Party, bourgeois gender imperatives and an unctuous view of itself. The paper’s witch-hunt against Julian Assange – part of a campaign which the UN Rapporteur on Torture refers to as “mobbing” – includes fabrication of a kind previously associated with the rightwing Murdoch press; certainly, its cruelty towards Assange is a profanity on the liberal values for which it claims to stand...
...Julian Assange is what journalists should be and rarely are: he is a tireless, fearless truth-teller. He has exposed, on a vast scale, the secret, criminal life of great power: of “our” governments, their lying and violence in our name. Ten years ago, WikiLeaks leaked a British Ministry of Defense document that described investigative journalism as the greatest threat to secretive power. Investigative journalists were rated higher on the threat scale than “Russian spies” and “terrorists”. Assange and WikiLeaks can claim that laurel. If the Americans come for him and incarcerate him in a hell hole, they will come for others, including those journalists who simply do their job. And they will come for their editors and publishers too.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/27/american-exceptionalis...

This is an excellent conversation about the objective of US global aggression. (25 min)

The '92 Wolfowitiz report that was discussed in the clip...

The 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), crafted by then-Defense Department staffers I. Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Zalmay Khalilzad, is widely regarded as an early formulation of the neoconservatives’ post-Cold War agenda, laying out a series economic and military objectives that were intended to ensure a U.S.-led unipolar global system.

https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/1992_draft_defense_planning_guida...

Lee Camp had a good montage of his pieces about the US MIC. The 1st 15 min is great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90obYQz4SXQ (25 min)

Onto "the Graveyard of Empires"

The US has so many on going coups and wars it is difficult to even name them all. We've been busy working at world domination for well over 100 years. The recent Afghan paper release proves we have no real goal except promoting more war for more profit.

The Afghanistan Papers obtained by the Washington Post and reporter Craig Whitlock, while in many ways as revealing and infuriating as were the Pentagon Papers, are arriving in a different America — an America where there is virtually no organized peace movement, an America whose news media are complicit in the country’s wars, even hiring retired generals (often who sit on and receive fat paychecks from the boards of companies that sell arms to the Pentagon!) to serve as “commentators,” an America that has an all-“volunteer” military of men and women who signed up to fight and who, even if they don’t agree with what they’re doing, feel like they signed up for it, an America where the citizenry rarely even thinks about the wars, which are carefully kept at a distance by the government, are fought largely from the air, are talked about little, and are funded with borrowed money instead of taxation.

As independent journalist David Mizner observes of the new 'Afghan Papers' it remains that "US politicians lie to stay at war, every time. The real crime was going to war in the first place — and almost no US politicians, pundits, and or journos with large platforms opposed the war." https://www.zerohedge.com/political/unearthed-pentagon-docs-reveal-afgha...

The Afghanistan Papers should also be considered an excellent case study of contemporary colonial propaganda, and yet another example of corporate media criticizing US wars without opposing US imperialism.

https://fair.org/home/wapos-afghan-papers-propagate-colonial-narrative-o...

Warmongering is promoted by both US political parties. The Democratic Party is just as culpable in this matter as the Republican Party is. Pelosi could have written the funding for this war out of the budget 3 years ago but has chosen not to do so. And where is the new Authorization to Use Force that the Democrats have been promising to write for years now? Trump wants 14,000 more troops shipped to the ME. The war in Afghanistan should have been settled a decade ago and all of our troops should have been home for Christmas in 2009 when Obama was the president. Unfortunately there are too damn many warmongers in leadership positions in the Democratic Party who are preventing the just thing from being done, and now the Party establishment wants either warmonger Joe Biden or warmonger and phony Pete Buttigieg to be the Party’s presidential nominee.

Can we reinvent our world and begin anew in this new year? Somehow I don't think we can by fighting the existing power structure, but what if we just walked away from it? Others have succeeded. One example is the Acorn community and their seed company, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. We use them for most of our seed and it is almost all heirloom.
Here's a couple of great interviews with community members...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_yS1PxcpsE (10 min)
This clip focuses more on their seed production operation...drying, threshing, and cleaning with a visit from Josh Sattin, a young farmer I often feature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PHqmCqO1Fw (31 min)

With the new year it is time to think about ordering your garden seed. Last year I featured several good producers. https://caucus99percent.com/content/weekly-watch-110

This is a leap year...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTOr8_ILqGw (2 min)

...and of course it is also an Election year...
https://www.270towin.com/

It is out with the old and in with the new. How about this 7 year old? (4 min)

We go round in the circle game: a comparison of Joni's song and Neil Young's Sugar Mountain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f04v8RN2_9k (10 min)

The real elephant in the room is biosphere destruction driven by burning fossil fuels and ecosystem destruction aimed at wringing more profit from the Earth. We must promote radical change in this new decade to avoid human extinction. We are driving mass extinction in our greed to make more money in any manner possible. Future be damned. This is one reason just stepping out side the system will not address this fundamental structural issue.

Jane Fonda on her climate activism and why she started Fire Drill Fridays.
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/24/jane_fonda_fire_drill_fridays_pr...

...too few of them are talking about the real problem, which is fossil fuels. You know, you can talk about relocation, you can talk about windmills and the renewables that have to come into play, but point our fingers at the criminals, the people that have caused this to happen to us: the fossil fuel industry. They knew in 1977 what they were doing. Their scientists told them that they were poisoning the atmosphere and it could lead to irreversible damage. And they lied to us, and they hoodwinked us, and they kept on drilling. And that’s why right now it’s too late for moderation. We have to take very, very brave, bold steps....
We have to let people know that now is the time. It’s a very interesting, if you will, privilege that we have, those of us who are healthy and alive during this decade. It’s in our hands. We are entering the decade that can make a difference in how many hundreds of millions of people will suffer, and many of them die, depending on our actions....
...we can have all the windmills and all the solar collectors in the world, but if they keep drilling and fracking and mining, it’s not going to do any good. They say, “Well, we have to keep fracking for gas because it will affect our national security.” Oh, really? Then why are they sending so much of it overseas? We are now exporting gas and oil. All that would stop on day one, also issuing a gradual phaseout out of fossil fuel, also making sure that the families and communities and workers that would be affected by that would be protected with union jobs, training, benefits, pensions, with all the security that they have now working in the fossil fuel industry then working in a sustainable energy system.

There's this synergy of banks and fossil fuel and the war machine and MSM that is hell bent on making as much money as possible before the complete collapse of the system. Stepping outside of the system can be helpful to individuals, but until these corporate powers are broken apart and stopped we all will suffer the consequences...some more than others.

Brazil provides such a good example of US covert coups in order to grab cash for environmental destruction. War and destruction are US stock and trade. First working with the corrupt court, Dilma, the elected president, is deposed. Then Lula who should be Brazil's president was set up and imprisoned. Bolsonaro visits CIA headquarters on his inaugural US visit. Compare Lula's success with Bolsonaro's failure. What a successful coup for the corporate class. The story illustrates the manner in which all these crises intersect.

Max and Stacy had an interesting show yesterday from Brazil. They discuss the real value of ecosystems versus destruction for short term economic gain in the 1st 15 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evDg7DXzzRM

All these issues of climate, the environment, military/corporate coups, and attempted US global dominance are intersecting this decade. It is time for resolutions. Will we create a sea change before the rising seas force us to act in some sort of cooperative manner? The US needs to accept responsibility for these insane wars, coups, conflicts, and global bullying. We sit at a balance point in time. Our actions in the next decade will determine if the human species survives or becomes extinct.
I want to close with a similar sentiment to last week's column...

Here's wishing us all the best of the New Year and hoping that the people of Earth find a clear 2020 vision to bring peace and sustainability to our planet.