Finally Sasha got her residency approved here in Spain after 4-5 years of us trying, spending money, being stressed. After being rejected once because we did not have enough money as a family - imagine that! That was the actual reason.

But now that I had a "job" they made us wait 7 months from the moment we applied, and 2 complaints later from the lawyer about why they do not approve it, it finally got approved. And the reason was ONLY because I was a "trader" in this bullshit trade society.

How terrible that we treat people like tools. The value is in what and how much you can trade. Does not matter if you are a good human being. Smart? Doesn't matter. Calm and helpful? Nope. Scientifically minded? Nah.

I spent my life doing free things for others, never made a profit, but this has 0 value in this society.

Anyway, fuck you to those who support a world where we are divided into tribes and languages, and treating people like sole traders/marketers and not humans. We have global problems but so many still want to have their own "separate" tribe and care only about that. Fuck your flag, your language, your culture. Fuck nationalism. A primitive disease.

We are all humans with a 4 billion years long history, a mindblowing one. Single cells becoming what we are today. The way we are connected to each other, scientifically, dwarfs any bullshit man-made story about their own tribe. We have lego-brick-like structures we call the DNA that encode all of what we are. And all of what other creatures are, and how we are all connected.

We live on a giant sphere with a thin layer of atmosphere protecting us from the infinite universe out there.

So fuck you if you think your nationalism is so important, and your borders and stupid nonsensical laws.

I had to let this out because it is outrageous how primitive this society is.

Fuck you! :)

#capitalism #world #abuse #trade #nationalism

The author, Grant Ennis, covers a lot of important ground in this book. Most of it is dedicated to showing the reader exactly how we have got into multiple crises and why it feels like we can’t get out of any of them.

Much of this can be traced back to Margaret Thatcher and her assertions “There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women”
This of course is not a statement of fact, but more of a statement of how Corporations & Billionaires want things to be. Once people see themselves as individuals then they are less likely to organise into groups and to fight inequality and injustice. As individuals we see problems like the obesity crisis as personal ones, that can be fixed by exercise and good habits. We see the climate crisis as something that can be fixed by reducing our individual carbon footprint. We see a plastics crisis that can be fixed by individuals recycling. As we all know, this doesn’t solve the underlying problems.

Grant points out “We have an over production problem, not over consumption problem” If we were not overproducing stuff then we would not be consuming this intensely. We have to stop the over production, if we want to solve the multiple problems that our planet is facing. This can only happen if people come together organise and call out the Corporations & Billionaires and the Politicians they have put in power. These Politicians write rules and laws that result in us subsidising over production. This over production is not the result of “Free Markets” and “Competition”, it’s the result of Tax payers subsidising it.

Corporations, Billionaires and their paid Politicians have us running round thinking we can, as individuals, pressure corporations into change through consumer campaigns. However, researchers at Florida Atlantic University published a paper in the Joural of Business Research examining 502 consumer campaigns and discovered that they have no long-term financial effects, concluding that they “do not, on average, inflict any financial loss on the target.” They don’t work!

We have been lead to believe that “just voting” is enough for a healthy democracy. This has been a convenient boon for authoritarians and anti-change corporate interests. Viewing democratic participation strictly through the lens of electoral politics narrowly frames citizenship around the ballot box while crowding out attention to association and petition. Voting and other forms of participation in electoral politics comprise only a fraction of citizens’ duties. Corporations gain when we frame the individual act of voting as the only criterion for citizen action. Voter turnout is a poor indicator of democratic health; all North Koreans vote but no one would argue that North Korea is a beacon of democracy.

In the book Grant talks about the other many tools and ways that Corporations, Billionaires and their Politicians keep us distracted and confused. Concepts like
Multistakeholderism. The idea that it’s not one entity that is to blame, but a coalition of many. Global Warming Organiser and Nobel Prize nominee Greta Thunberg observed how assigning shared blame and problem-solving responsibility undermines our ability to assign genuine blame and seek genuine solutions: “Some people say that the climate crisis is something that we have all created, but that is not true. Because if everyone is guilty then no one is to blame, and someone is to blame. “ The idea that we have all created the problem, and therefore all must solve it, is a con.

The “It’s complicated” and “we need to do all of the above to fix this,” narrative has been hugely successful in fragmenting our efforts to stop these global problems. When in truth what we need to do is go after the biggest problem first. We need to go after the biggest issue, the worst perpetrators. And in most cases that means, we get our politicians to stop us subsidising the problems and make the Corporations responsible for them solving them.

With The Nine Devious Frames Grant splits the many techniques that Corporations, Billionaires and their Politicians continue to use to prevent real productive action. Denalism, Post-denialism, Normalisation, Silverlinings… Anyone who has been holding truth to power for a while will instantly recognise them. When you read these frames you will no doubt recall the many, many times Conservative Media & Politicians have used them. These frames highlight just how much lying, misinformation, deviousness has been used to perpetuate all these problems for so long.

Grant finishes up talking about the many ways we can come together. Examples of what’s been done before and who is doing stuff right now. It’s important because not all protest and organisation is productive. Grant points out “Protests are not meaningless but we often mistakenly view them, rather than the organized movements behind them, as harbingers of change. Like focusing on the hammer and disregarding the arm that swings it, we too often fail to nurture the organized movements critical to protests’ success. We too often witness, and accept the notion of, individuals protesting without the backing of a cohesive organized movement. Long-term movements made up of numerous, close-knit, tiered organizations are capable of staging results-generating political demonstrations. Protests alone are not those movements.“

In my opinion, what all this should result in, is fast food companies being made responsible for obesity and they should have to pay for all the health impacts. As well as ending subsidies, companies that make plastic and sell plastic should be responsible for its recycling and clearing up of our oceans. Fossil Fuels Companies are most responsible for Climate Change and must pay for the impacts as well as be responsible for reducing their emissions, year on year, in line with scientists recommendation. Road builders, operators, petrol and car companies are responsible for road accidents, environmental & health impacts and should be fixing the problems.
I don’t expect any of these wishes to be implemented over night but unless we start in the right place, with the right understanding, real change will not happen. Unless we start with 5% reduction year on year. A 5% contribution year on year to impacts and externalities, these problems will continue to get worse. Nothing else is actual progress. For 50 years we have known all these problems about obesity, traffic deaths, climate change, plastic pollution and they have all gotten worse, because we don’t go after the root cause. The corporations responsible and their subsidies.

This change will never happen unless we organise and work together. We are fighting a bunch of Corporations, Billionaires and their paid Politicians with unimaginable wealth and power. More than we have seen in all history. But change can happen. Who would have thought that Gods & Kings could ever be toppled, but they were. We have to understand how we are being fooled. How to come together and how to force genuine change. And if we learn to organise an overcome these problems, who knows what we can achieve, social justice? world peace?

I highly recommend you read the book and recommend it to your fiends. You can find Grant in the #Fediverse @grantennis@mastodon.social

https://owgf.org/2024/04/08/dark-pr-how-corporate-disinformation-harms-our-health-and-the-environment/

#Capitalism #climateChange #ClimateChange #Consumerism #Environment #Fediverse #Obesity #PlasticPollution #Politics #traffication

In addition to being a massive global eugenics project, it is now increasingly clear that rich people used the pandemic as an excuse to accelerate and prosecute the class war:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/billionaire-wealth-up-88-percent-pandemic

"Four years ago, the United States entered the Covid-19 pandemic. Forbes published its 34th annual billionaire survey shortly after with data keyed to March 18, 2020. On that day, the United States had 614 billionaires who owned a combined wealth of $2.947 trillion.

Four years later, on March 18, 2024, the country has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion, an 87.6 percent increase of $2.58 trillion, according to Institute for Policy Studies calculations of Forbes Real Time Billionaire Data."

The numbers here are staggering, but I think what's most important to remember in all of this is how this vast economic change was sold to us by "Very Serious People" and for-profit media. After thousands upon thousands of stories about "inflation" and how giving poor people money to survive the pandemic would wreck the economy, the obvious truth is that the greed of billionaires and their minions are why you can't afford groceries and everything costs too much now. Rather than us "all being in this together" the pandemic is when the knives came out and the rich bled us all dry. Tax the rich? To hell with that; it's time to abolish them.

#Capitalism #Covid #Inflation #ClassWar #Propaganda

Are you old enough, like me, to remember the Exxon Valdez catastrophe, a disastrous oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989?

Here's some important info about that event from Greg Palast...
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"Don’t Buy Exxon’s Fable of the Drunken Captain"

The true cause of the Exxon Valdez catastrophe was the oil giant breaking their promises, cynically and disastrously, in the 15 years leading up to the spill.

As for Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar.

But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker’s radar was left broken and disabled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.

Today, three decades after the oil washed over the Alaskan beaches, you can kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station.

The Fable of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America’s greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests — the profit-driven disregard of the law — made the spill an inevitability, not an accident.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://www.gregpalast.com/dont-buy-exxons-fable-of-the-drunken-captain-2/

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #Capitalism #Pollution

Electric vehicles clearly are better for our climate and environment, at least in terms of overall carbon emissions, than traditional ICE vehicles.

That doesn't mean EVs are good for the climate and environment, however, because they're not. As always, the best option is not to drive a car at all. Instead, if you can, ride a bicycle or an electric bike or scooter or use public transit.

But tire manufacturers *really* want you to keep driving. And they're okay with either kind of vehicle, ICE or electric. Of course, they would prefer that you drive a large SUV or one of those giant pickup trucks. That makes more money for them because the tires cost more and they wear out faster.

Big EVs are especially great for tire companies...
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With their heavy weight and quick acceleration, EVs tend to burn through tires about 20% faster than internal combustion vehicles do, according to AlixPartners. And the tires cost about 50% more.

“If EV does proliferate through the car population like some think, it may bring about what I call the gold rush for tire manufacturers,” said John Healy, an analyst with Northcoast Research.
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FULL STORY -- https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/19/why-evs-are-causing-a-tire-boom.html

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #Capitalism #WarOnCars #BanCars