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--- catastrophes [2018/03/09 17:29]
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+++ catastrophes [2018/11/04 13:30]
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 Meanwhile, the Trump administration continued to work feverishly and consistently to scrub any mention of ACD from government departments and websites.
+NOTE add RG material from "Fake News" article.
 == Cities ==
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 === How ===
+== The Fable of Noah We! ==
+by Sam Friedman
+Once  upon  a  time,  in  a  land  now  gone  below,  clouds  gathered,  and  rains  began.These  were  not  your  ordinary  clouds.  They  were  very  ominous  indeed.    The  rai  ndrops  were  the  size  of  golfballs  the  first  few  days.  But  as  the  days  passed,  they  grew  to  include  baseballs  andthen  even  basketballs.And  there  were  lots  and  lots  of  rain-balls.Day  after  day,  it  rained.  The  puddles  filled  the  roads.  Roofs  leaked,  then  gushed.  In  the  districts  where  the poor  people  lived,  roofs  collapsed.    After  a  week  or  so,  whole  tenement  buildings  began  to  fall  in.
+It  got  so bad,  the  politicians  forgot  all  about  promising  tax  cuts,  monuments  for  their  pals,  and  new  prisons.The  Republicans  said  that  the  rains  were  a  sign  of  God’s  displeasure  at  tax-and-spend  government  and  atmolly-coddling  the  poor.  They  called  for  cutting  food  stamps  from  three  loaves  of  bread  a  month  to  two;  for stronger  umbrellas  for  police  on  riot  duty;  and  for  tax  incentives  to  spur  investment  in  galoshes  and reinforced  raincoats.    Just  to  show  how  seriously  they  took  the  threat  of  these  rains,  they  adopted  a  new emblem  for  their  party:  The  elephant  trunk  snorkel  as  a  symbol  of  self-reliance  under  all conditions.The  Democrats  scoffed  at  the  Republicans  and  their  callousness.  They  demanded  a  program  of  levees  or  the river  banks,  and  of  tarpaulins  and  tacks  to  fix  the  leaks  on  the  roofs  of  the  poor.  Of  course,  they  also  put forward  suggestions  for  tax  cuts  and  monuments  for  contractors  good  enough  to  provide  these  services  and products.    They  too  changed  their  party  emblem,  to  the  donkeys  who  hauled  all  that  sand.
+After  the  legislative  debates  and  compromises,  Democratic  and  Republican  officials  alike  hired  their  cousins and  contributors  to  do  the  job.    When  the  largest  of  these  companies,  End-Run,  provided  sandbags  held together  with  fishnets,  and  tarpaulins  of  chickenwire,  they  promised  a  thorough  audit  by  Under-Sand  andCompany.    They  also  got  lots  of  photo-ops  and  posed  beside  elephants  and  donkeys  who were  hard  at  work.Now,  the  common  people  were  fed  up  with  their  leaky  roofs,  collapsing  buildings,  and having  to  swim  to their  jobs.  By  the  twelfth  day  of  the  rains,  they  were  demanding  action.    Some  went  to  their  churches,mosques,  or  synagogues,  where  they  all  were  told  to  pray  to  the  lord  for  smaller  raindrops  and  su  nny  skies;and  to  sacrifice  a  scapegoat  or  two  to  make  their  prayers  effective.  And,  of  course,to  atone  for  their  sins  and think  of  Heaven,  a  nice,  warm,  dry  spot  far  above  the  rainclouds.    But  after  catching  and  burning  a  few workers  of  other  faiths,  and  praying  all  the  while,  the  rains  just  kept  falling.
+Others  went  to  the  leftish  political  parties,  the  Social  Democrats  and  Greens.    These  parties  organized  a demonstration  where  the  party  officials  swam  around  the  legislature  with  signs  demanding  action.  (No workers  came  because  they  held  it  during  a  working  day.)    The  main  effort  of  these  parties  was  to  set  up re-call  petitions  to  hold  new  elections.  It  was  real  hard  work  swimming  door  to  door to  get  signatures,  and  the ink  on  these  signatures  kept  running  in  the  rain.    But  these  folks  were  determined  and  gutsy.    By  the  17th  day of  the  rains,  they  had  enough  signatures  to  demand  a  re-call  election.    And,  after  alot  of  legal  hemming  and hawing,  even  the  election  commission  had  to  agree  (on  the  25th  day).    So  new  elections  were  called  for  three months  (92  days)  later.  And  so  the  election  campaign  began.And  the  rains  kept  falling.    The  Democratic  and  Republican  officials  got  more  and  more  worried  about  what the common  people  might  do.    They  started  blaming  a  neighboring  land  they  called  the  I-Wreck-Ye’s  for  the rains.    They  gathered  an  army,  and  supplied  it  with  all  the  best  swords  and  spears  made  by  the  End-Run  and Boing-Boing-Blockhead-Marionetta  corporations.  And  the  army  waded  off  to  defeat  the  idolatrousI-Wreck-Ye’s  to  stop  the  rains.  But  within  three  days,  the  army  swam  back  home  again because  their  weapons were  too  rusted  to  use,  and  because  their  uniforms  (by  Oy-Veh!-Say-Low-Rain)  were  rotting  away.    TheDemocrats  and  Republicans  thereupon  cried  that  the  war  was  being  sabotaged  by  I-Wreck-Ye-loving  red  and green  terrorists,  and  called  upon  all  the  patriotic  citizens  to  put  out  flags  to  support  their  country.    But  within two  days,  these  flags  (by  the  Oy-Veh!-Say-Low-Rain  and  the  I’mGod  corporations)  had  molded  to  ruin.
+Now,  some  of  the  workers  in  the  shipbuilders,  seafarers,  longshore,  umbrella-makers,and  trash-haulers unions  were  getting  pretty  upset.  They  were  afraid  all  their  families  and  friends  would  drown  or  get  crushed by  falling  tenements.  They  called  a  meeting.    Many,  many  good  people  came,  including waist-deep  ecologists and  women  tired  of  pumping  basements  when  they  had  swum  home  from  work  (because  even then,  women’s work  was  never  done,  from  rainfall  dawn  to  pump  and  run.) They  named  themselves  the  Necessary  Organization  Against  Horrors  (NOAH,  for  short).Their  action  plan was  to  build mighty  ships.  The  trash-haulers  brought  lumber  and  nails  from  the  rubble  of  collapsed  buildings.  A  lot  of  the boards  and  doors  were  floating  in  the  roads  anyway.  The  sailors  brought  rope  and  tar they  just  happened  to find  on20the  piers.  The  longshore  workers  and  truckers  brought  boxes  of  food  and  jugs  to  catch  rainwater.(These  just  happened  to  get  dropped  as  they  swam  packages  to  ships  and  trucks.)  And  everybody,  women,men,  and  kids,  worked  dawn  to  dusk  and  dusk  to  dawn  (when  not  at  their  jobs)  to  build  ships  and  put  food  on them.    The  waist-deep    ecologists  swam  through  the  countryside  rounding  up  animals  and  seeds—snails,pussycats,  hyenas,  morning  glory,  cannabis,  even  a  few  donkeys  and  elephants,  and  lots  of  doves  to  seek  the land  of  peace  and  dryness.And  on  the  31st  day,  NOAH  and  the  common  people  went  to  their  ships  singing  and  praying.
+But  the  rich and  the  politicians  heard  about  it  because  a  few  over-their-head  ecologists,  who  had decided  that  the  human race  had  done  too  much  damage  and  should  drown,  ratted  out  NOAH’s  plans  to  the  cops.So  the  politicians and  the  rich  folks  and the  police  came  running  with  their  guns to  take  what  the  workers  had  made  for  their own  use.    They  had lots  of  practice  at  such  theft,  since  that  is  their  day  job.But  this  time,  their  plans  to  seize  the  ships  for  their  own  use  were  pretty  obvious,so  it  made  it  easier  for  the workers  to  know  what  to  do.  They  fought  back.    When  most  everybody  and  everything  were  on  board,  they sent  a  herd  of  aurochs  running  down  the  pier  to  shove  the  attackers  back.And  so  NOAH  sailed  off  with  great  hopes,  leaving  the  rich  and  the  politicians  beside the  collapsing  levees  in their  designer  galoshes  and  silken  raincoats—trying  to  make  life  jackets  out  of  bales  of  End-Run  stock.  After some  weeks  on  the  waters,  NOAH  and  the  people  and  animals  and  plants  landed.  They  built  monuments  to the  aurochs  for  giving  their  all,  and  to  the  workers  of  NOAH  for  saving  all  but  the  aurochs.
 === Now ===
+== Restoring the Earth ==
+Little by little the natural order was re-establishing itself on earth. In the agricultural countries of the South, the peasants had taken back the good lands expropriated by invaders and used to cultivate luxury products for export to rich countries. These export commodities —coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, bananas, spices – had been produced by the labor of impoverished natives reduced to semi-slavery. Their children had ended up in horrible favelas, bidonvilles, slums and urban projects where they lived on garbage. In the name of “free markets,” rich monopolies had ruined peasant markets by flooding them with produce at the lowest prices. That unfair competition was subsidized by the “democratic” governments that offered gross subsidies to big agro-business enterprises.
+In Africa today, there are museums devoted to the 'chocolate children'. Pathetic huts, child drawings, photographs and recorded interviews bear witness to a common early 21st Century practice. It was a memorial of the sufferings of parents too poor to feed their own children who ended up selling them to manpower merchants and never seeing them again.  These merchants sold them to cocoa cultivators who starved them while making them work endless hours picking cocoa  to fulfill contracts with the multinationals. Companies like Nestlé resold these chocolates to children in industrial countries at prices twenty to a hundred times the cost of production. Interviews revealed that none of these children had ever seen, much less tasted a chocolate bar.
+During the planetary Emergence, these poor peasants of Africa, Latin America, and Asia organized and struggled to take back their traditional lands. Their first goal was to become  self-sufficient nutritionally by planting traditional subsistence crops. At the same time on part of the land, they  continued to farm the sugar, cocoa, coffee, spices and other commodities that city workers like to eat, to use for trade. Women had long provided the labor and commercial savvy for agriculture in Africa, and now their energy and experience was united as they took the initiative long monopolized by male profiteers and armed thugs.
+Regular trade or barter was re-established spontaneously from the very beginning of the reconstruction period. Sailors and aircrew who brought emergency relief and the technical aid for things like irrigation and communication, didn’t return home with their planes and boats empty. They filled them with good things for workers of the world’s metropoles. Railroaders, truckers, sailors and aviation crews had played a primordial role by bringing aid. After medication and food came tools with teams of aid-workers and technicians working in cooperation with local assemblies. They helped the peasants dig wells, construct cisterns and irrigate. They helped push back the hunger, thirst, and diarrhoea that had for so long tortured the Billions in the south of the planet.
+Thus the natural rapport between city and country was re-established almost spontaneously in outbursts of solidarity, mutual help and cooperation. For the first time in five imperialist centuries, nobody was dying of hunger either in the rich fields of the earth or in the slums of great opulent cities.
+Today in 2117 we live on a planet where vast desert lands have been reclaimed through irrigation and the revival of long-dormant native seeds, where new forests have been planted to halt erosion, prevent desertification, and absorb CO2 while releasing oxygen, where animal and vegetable waste matter is recycled as nature fertilizer, where permaculture techniques have replaced chemical fertilizers and pesticides, where small farmers flourish and provide fresh, healthy, seasonal produce to local markets which also serve to unite communities, etc, etc.
+Yet all this was not only possible, it was already actually happening in a century ago on a small scale in the interstices of capitalist society, visible elements of the new world growing within the old.
+We now look back in horrified amazement at the world of 2017 — a planet of continued enclosures where forest people were exterminated and forests cut down to graze cattle for McDonald's burgers, where peasants were legally deprived of the right to plant their own seeds and forced to buy them from global monopolies like Montsanto, where peasants routinely committed suicide to escape the overwhelming burden of debt, where traditional subsistance farmers in Mexico
+were ruined by the dumping of huge amounts of cheap industrially-produced corn into local markets, where vast factory-farms, owned by banks and conglomerates, were making billions transforming inputs of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers and pesticides into mega-tons of uniformly tasteless produce designed to attract the eye and to remain salable for weeks after harvesting, where agricultural products were transported thousands of miles to markets at a huge cost in carbon pollution, where monopolistic distribution chains paid farmers ridiculously low prices for their produce and suck up enormous profits overcharging customers, where nearly half of this excess produce went to waste in the 'advanced' while famines raged across half the world, where food riots out periodically broke out in Asia, and where the extraction of petroleum for industrial agriculture and the clear-cutting of forests for profitable luxury crops like palm oil contributed massively to global warming and impending climate catastrophe.

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