alanjjohnstone
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Pope Francis has told young people that populism starts by sowing hate. He noted Hitler and Nazi Germany rose to power through the use of populism.
He said there should be more efforts to teach young people about the history of World War One and World War Two, “so that they do not fall into the same mistake and know how populism spreads.”
https://www.dw.com/en/pope-francis-says-populism-leads-to-hitler/a-46012149
More harbingers of doom
Wall Street and European stock markets followed Asian shares lower on Tuesday, as investors around the world took fright at the increasingly fractious global geopolitical outlook.
Investors are growing increasingly worried about a cocktail of risks that could act as a significant drag on the world economy. Potential headwinds include the trade dispute between the US and China, rising US interest rates, the fallout from the death of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the budget dispute between the EU and Italy.
Oliver Jones, a markets economist at the research firm Capital Economics, said: “Worries about problems in the US, and to some extent in the past few days China, have proved contagious.”
UK investor morale has hit its lowest level in at least 23 years, according to the financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown.
“Investors are in grim mood, as time is running out on Brexit negotiations with little progress on show”
Stephen Innes, the head of Asia-Pacific trading for the foreign exchange firm Oanda, said stock markets “remain shrouded in a thick blanket of risk” triggered by negative news from around the world.
Oh, i should also add that i cashed in the bonds early convinced that the record highs of the stock market could not continue and share prices would drop.
How was i to know that they would keep getting even more record highs and i should have waited a bit longer.
Perhaps it is because i am much more vulnerable to the vagaries of capitalism, Matt, that i see constantly see dark clouds of recession on the horizon looming.
When i retired, received the redundancy lump sum pay-out and sold my house, i placed money in investment bonds…guess what…the 2007/8 crash happened and the promised returns never materialised for a long time.
Then when the referendum went for leaving the EU, the pound exchange rate dropped and has not recovered so it reduced my budget for paying household bills. When Brexit does happen, that exchange rate is guaranteed to fall again, isn’t it?
Hence my pessimism and glass-half-empty outlook. If my fellow-workers shared this attitude, perhaps they might be a bit more determined to fight for a better future. 👿
Scientists recently did experiments and found that when people feel poor, they want to eat more meat.
The researchers’ conclusion that people treat meat as a status symbol does match up with previous studies that find people lower down the socioeconomic food chain are more likely to buy big status items, like flashy cars.
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It’s now pretty widely accepted that lots of meat eating (especially red meat) is bad for our health and our environment. Sicker people and a sicker planet have knock-on effects on our economy. Ill people are unhappier, and work less. Lots more ill and out-of-work people requires lots more government money to be spent on healthcare and welfare. Animal farmland destroys the habitats of wild species. Climate change (partly caused by burping cows) causes weather that damages property and hurts people: flooding, stronger hurricanes, droughts, etc.
From here
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I suppose we should mention Marx’s relationship with David Urquhart as perhaps Marx involved in a genuine conspiracist theory ie British prime minister Lord Palmerston was in the pay of the Tsar.
I did a very quick google search on the military and its effects on climate change to get some scale of the problem.
Every year, America’s armed forces consume more than 100 million barrels of oil to power ships, vehicles, aircraft, and ground operations—enough for over 4 million trips around the Earth, assuming 25 mpg.
DOD retains one of the largest real estate portfolios in the U.S. government, encompassing 562,000 buildings and structures distributed across 4,800 sites worldwide. This includes 293 active installations across the Army, Navy, and Air Force, in addition to numerous Coast Guard installations under the Department of Homeland Security.
The US military is the largest single consumer of energy in the world.If it were a country, the Department of Defense would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just ahead of Sweden.
Government spending on the military is 28 times more than spent on climate change policies.The US military consumes as much as one million barrels of oil per day and contributes 5 percent of current global warming emissions. Keep in mind that the military has 1.4 million active duty people, or .0002 percent of the world’s population, generating 5 percent of climate pollution.
This comparison understates the extreme military impact on climate change. Military fuel is more polluting because of the fuel type used for aviation. CO2 emissions from jet fuel are larger – possibly triple – per gallon than those from diesel and oil. Further, aircraft exhaust has unique polluting effects that result in greater warming effect by per unit of fuel used. Radiative effects from jet exhaust, including nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, soot and water vapor exacerbate the warming effect of the CO2 exhaust emissions.
The DoD uses 4.6 billion US gallons of fuel annually, an average of 12.6 million gallons of fuel per day.
Electricity usage by the military, which accounts for even more greenhouse gas emissions, is also gargantuan. In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours of electricity at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The DoD’s electricity use would supply enough electricity to power more than 2.6 million average American homes.
In fiscal year 2012, the DoD consumed about a billion gigawatt hours of site delivered energy at a cost of 20.4 billion dollars. While consuming that amount of energy, DoD emitted 70 million metric tons of CO2. And yet, total DoD energy use and costs are even higher simply because the energy use and costs arising from the contractors to support military operations both domestically and abroad are not included in DoD’s data.
At the outset of the Iraq war in March 2003, the Army estimated it would need more than 40 million gallons of gasoline for three weeks of combat, exceeding the total quantity used by all Allied forces in the four years of World War 1. Among the Army’s armamentarium were 2,000 staunch M-1 Abrams tanks fired up for the war and burning 250 gallons of fuel per hour.
The US Air Force is the single largest consumer of jet fuel in the world. Fathom, if you can, the astronomical fuel usage of USAF fighter planes: the F-4 Phantom Fighter burns more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel per hour and peaks at 14,400 gallons per hour at supersonic speeds.
The B-52 Stratocruiser, with eight jet engines, guzzles 500 gallons per minute; ten minutes of flight uses as much fuel as the average driver does in one year of driving! A quarter of the world’s jet fuel feeds the USAF fleet of flying killing machines; in 2006, they consumed as much fuel as US planes did during the Second World War – an astounding 2.6 billion gallons.
Much appreciated.
I eagerly await reading the Pankhurst pamphlet now
(btw, i note the addition of comment aids but what is
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experimented with it
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spoiler
Robbo, a bit news for those who think meat-eating is a form of animal abuse.
A food company in San Francisco produces chicken nuggets grown from the cells of a chicken feather. They want to stop the slaughter of animals and protect the environment from the degradation of industrial factory farming.
They say they are solving the problem of how to feed a crowded earth without destroying the planet, pointing out that their meat is not genetically-modified and does not require antibiotics to grow.
This is actual meat grown from animal cells and variously described as cultured, synthetic, in-vitro, lab-grown or even “clean” meat. It takes about two days to produce a chicken nugget in a small bioreactor, using a protein to encourage the cells to multiply, some type of scaffold to give structure to the product and a culture, or growth, medium to feed the meat as it develops.
The skin was crisp and the meat flavoursome although its internal texture was slightly softer than you would expect from a nugget at, say, KFC.We slaughter 70 billion animals each year to feed seven billion people. The global demand for meat is doubling as more people rise out of poverty and that humanity won’t be able to raise enough cattle and chicken to sate the appetite of nine billion people by 2050. Tyson is the biggest meat processor in the US, processing around 424,000 pigs, 130,000 cows and 35 million chickens every week.
So we could just literally grow any meat, poultry or seafood directly from those animal cells,” Dr Valeti says.
Dutch scientist Mark Post created the first lab-grown hamburger in 2013
No company has yet scaled-up production to serve a cell-based patty commercially but Post estimates that if he started mass producing his burgers, he could get the cost of making them down to about $10 each. “That’s of course still way too high,” he said. [But not in socialism]
The low prices found on supermarket shelves mask meat’s hidden costs. Research has revealed that meat is being sold to consumers at just a fraction of what it would cost if it accurately reflected the true value of the environmental damage it inflicts. Supermarket prices for meat are misleading and hide the huge secondary costs arising from the environmental impact of meat production. Upon quantifying and monetizing the environmental impact of meat production in Germany, researchers found that conventionally farmed meat would cost three times the price the consumer actually pays. That’s an additional cost of 196 percent. When the meat is organically farmed, those hidden costs amount to 82 percent more than the price advertised on the shelves.
“The problem is that these environmental costs currently don’t have a market price,” Tobias Gaugler, one of the study’s authors, told DW. From a purely economic perspective, this amounts to a “market distortion,” he added.
“Environmental costs, and pollution and the corresponding damage to human health, have a cost of zero,” said Gaugler. These prices “don’t reflect the reality.”
The meat and dairy industry is on track to becoming the biggest contributor to climate change, outpacing even the fossil fuel industry.
According to an analysis by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the non-profit GRAIN, the world’s livestock sector could be responsible for 80 percent of the allowable greenhouse gas budget by 2050.
So some capitalists suggest a meat tax as tobacco taxes are used to reduce consumption.
https://www.dw.com/en/should-there-be-a-meat-tax-to-fight-climate-change/a-45868996
As i said in earlier message i think our current approach might make us unwelcome bed-fellows with the climte change deniers and i have seen more than one member defend fracking, for instance, suggesting it is a special case of a fossil fuel, allying ourselves with the likes of the Koch brothers
Perhaps it went unnoticed but i did raise the issues that have been subsequently mentioned.
I posted “Can we expect a future socialist society not to initiate changes in consumption, commencing with what we eat? Maybe the optimists believe that the disappearance of the armament industry will suffice? Perhaps the ending of all the auxiliary businesses to the buying and selling will be enough. I don’t know for sure. Nobody does until it is studied and researched but we should be honest and not exclude the possibility that we will have to adapt our everyday lives and adopt a change of diet.”
As you also see i also raised the question that presently we have no reliable data to back this up. I recall there was once a Production For Use committee that had a remit to provide sources supporting our case. I think perhaps a climate change committee should be formed to seek out the information necessary to postulate what may well be necessary. I’m not sure we can convince our fellow workers all will be well when socialism is established but until then we all keep your fingrrs crossed
We risk not being associated with the lentil stew mob but linked to climate change denialists, that everything will be alright, the market will fix it but in our arguement we simpl refer to once we get socialism an decline recognising scientific opinion as the climate change deniers do by not offering our own detailed response to their recommendations. I would be very happy if we had the facts and figures to present our approach to climate change, alas, we don’t, just generalised opinions.
Our SOYMB blog has touched on the topic of the military, btw
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2015/11/oil-barrels-and-gun-barrels.html
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2014/10/us-military-and-climate-security.htmlI think i made it clear and no-one has questioned me that there is a great possibility that before we have an opportunity to implement socialist climate change policies with the establishment of socialism, that we there is a very good chance that the crisis hits runaway tipping points where no remedial action can reverse the momentum of climate change ie we won’t be around as a civilisation to build socialism and that some other form of society which won’t be capitalism and not socialism prevails insteaad. We already witness the fracturing of any world-wide coordination to counter-act global warming. Nevertheless, we might have optimists amongs us who believe capitalism will be the leopard that does change its spots and will do it inside the timescale required to avert a catalysm.
BTW,I refer people to Pieter Lawrence book the Last Conflict for a similar analogy of a pending catastrophe with unintended consequences
I also referred to the temporary initial stage of socialism where we will require to increase the environmental impact of production to end the misery and squalor that most of our fellow-workers live in. To permit this we need to perhaps take a lot more action to mitigate this expansion than what will be required at a later period.
An article on Spain’s and Portugal’s left-leaning governments
