China’s Other Big Export: Pollution – The New York Times

By PAULINA GARZÓN and LEILA SALAZAR-LÓPEZJULY 21, 2017

While President Trump rolls back environmental protections and announces the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate accord, China is trying to position itself as the world’s climate leader, pledging to cooperate with other countries to build an “eco-civilization.” China has established the largest solar panel farm in the world, plans to close over 100 coal-fired power plants, and is committed to spending at least $361 billion on renewable energy by 2020.

All of this is laudable and sorely needed. But if China truly wants to be a climate leader it needs to address its global climate footprint, not just pollution within its borders.

China’s lending in Latin American and Caribbean countries provides a telling example of how the country has outsourced its emissions.

The Chinese Development Bank and the China Export-Import Bank provided more than $141 billion in loan commitments to Latin America and the Caribbean from 2005 to 2016, far surpassing lending from multilateral banks to the region. These loans have gone mainly to projects with significant environmental effects like oil drilling, coal mining, hydroelectric dam construction and road building. Over half of all public-sector lending from China to Latin America, some $17.2 billion in 2017, went to the fossil-fuel industry.

…(read more).

Missing Link – George Monbiot

21st July 2017

How a secretive network built around a Nobel prizewinner set out to curtail our freedoms

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19th July 2017

It’s the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century. To read Nancy MacLean’s new book Democracy in Chains: the deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America is to see what was previously invisible.

The history professor’s work on the subject began by accident. In 2013 she stumbled across a deserted clapboard house on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia. It was stuffed with the unsorted archives of a man who had died that year, whose name is probably unfamiliar to you: James McGill Buchanan. She writes that the first thing she picked up was a stack of confidential letters concerning millions of dollars transferred to the university by the billionaire Charles Koch.

Her discoveries in that house of horrors reveal how Buchanan, in collaboration with business tycoons and the institutes they founded, developed a hidden programme for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. The programme is now reshaping politics, and not just in the US.

Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued, in the first half of the 19th century, that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property – including your slaves – however you may wish. Any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he called “public choice theory”. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes are forms of “differential or discriminatory legislation” against the owners of capital.

Any clash between what he called “freedom” (allowing the rich to do as they wished) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that “despotism may be the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we observe.” Despotism in defence of freedom.

…(read more).

Trump gives ‘nothing concrete to guy w/ the lunch bucket’ – labor leader

RT America

Published on Jul 21, 2017

President Trump is promising greater enforcement of the ‘Made in America’ label and a crackdown on counterfeiters and theft of intellectual property, as part of his administration’s “Made in America Week.” This isn’t really helping the American worker, Larry Cohen, labor leader and chair of Our Revolution, tells “News with Ed.”

That one time David Letterman laid the smackdown on Donald Trump about his Made In China line of clothes

akayezu125

Published on Aug 30, 2015

That one time David Letterman laid the smackdown on Donald Trump about his Made In China line of clothing.

As Trump Touts “Made in America” Week, Indonesian Workers Toil Away Making Ivanka Trump Apparel

Democracy Now!

Published on Jul 21, 2017

https://democracynow.org – While President Trump is promoting “Made in America” week, we turn now to look at a recent investigation by The Guardian that revealed workplace abuse, grueling production targets and deplorably low pay at an Indonesian factory that makes clothing for Ivanka Trump’s label. Many of the female workers at the factory in West Java say the pay is so low that they live in constant debt and can’t afford to live with their own children. We speak to journalist Krithika Varagur in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital.

CNN host shocked to learn US meddled in 81 elections in 47 countries

RT America

Published on Jul 21, 2017

Michael Smerconish just did a segment on CNN with the banner reading, ‘International Intervention: Has the US meddled in other countries’ elections?’ In the segment, Smerconish’s guest, Dr. Levin, reveals just how extensively the US has meddled in other countries’ elections, and Smerconish appears very surprised. The Resident breaks it down. Follow The Resident at http://www.twitter.com/TheResident

Jim Hansen: Negative CO2 Emissions

Climate State

Published on Jul 18, 2017

Young People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions by James Hansen July 18th, 2017 http://csas.ei.columbia.edu/2017/07/1…

Via Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm57x…