ZAID JILANI, - Think Progress
Stephan: Could it be any more transparent how this game is fixed? It is so blatant it is hard to explain how this could be so. Perhaps Aldous Huxley offers us the apposite insight:
'There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.' -- Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961
Today, hundreds of thousands of people comprising a Main Street Movement1 – a coalition of students, the retired, union workers, public employees, and other middle class Americans – are in the streets, demonstrating against brutal cuts to public services and crackdowns on organized labor being pushed by conservative politicians. These lawmakers that are attacking collective bargaining2 and cutting necessary services like college tuition aid3 and health benefits for public workers4 claim that they have no choice but than to take these actions because both state and federal governments are in debt.
But it wasn’t teachers, fire fighters, policemen, and college students that caused the economic recession that has devastated government budgets – it was Wall Street5. And as middle class workers are being asked to sacrifice, the rich continue to rig the system, dodging taxes and avoiding paying their fair share.
In an interview with In These Times, Carl Gibson, the founder of US Uncut6, which is organizing some of today’s UK-inspired7 massive demonstrations against tax dodgers, explains that while ordinary Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to use the rigged tax code to avoid paying any federal taxes at all. As he says, if […]
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Stephan: Water is destiny. Where there is no water there can be no permanent communities. The Climate Deniers, large populations of which live in the Southwest, are going to learn this the hard way.
Water demand in many countries will exceed supply by 40 per cent within 20 years due to the combined threat of climate change and population growth, scientists have warned.
A new way of thinking about water is needed as looming shortages threaten communities, agriculture and industry, experts said.
In the next two decades, a third of humanity will have only half the water required to meet basic needs, said researchers.
Crisis? Water demand in many countries will exceed supply by 40 per cent within 20 years due climate change and population growth, scientists have said
Agriculture, which soaks up 71 per cent of water supplies, is also likely to suffer, affecting food production.
Filling the global water gap by supply measures alone would cost an estimated £124billion per year, a meeting in Canada was told.
But this could be cut to between £31billion and £37billion by an approach which both raised supply and lowered demand, according to leading water economist Dr Margaret Catley-Carlson.
Around 300 scientists, policy makers, and economists attended the international meeting in Ottawa hosted by the Canadian Water Network (CWN) in the run-up to U.S. World Water Day on March 22.
Dr Catley-Carlson, a director of the CWN, which co-ordinates water research and policy in […]
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