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Global Community, Global Community WebNet Ltd. (Canada)

Abstract
As global crises of all sorts on our planet further intensify, Global Community may have no alternative but to show Global Solidarity and help each other out of crises. Such solidarity can only be built on the basis of harmony, cooperation and moderation, and on respecting the political and cultural diversity of our multicivilizational troubled world. Global Civilizational State is proposing creative works toward saving humanity from self-destruction, and are a complex mix of higher levels of morality, religion, education, art, philosophy, technology, and material wellbeing. Humanity is dealing with issues related to the global warming of the planet, globalization, political instability and a social and political regress to irrationality. As Global Civilizational State begins to take on a much deeper kind of global leadership, one that earns more respect than envy and more gratitude than hatred, one that can catapult the whole planet forward into a future where war is no longer thinkable between nation-states, and a legitimate and beneficial Earth governance is able to cope with global problems.

Keywords
Scale of Gobal Rights, Global Civilizational State, George Floyd, African-Americans, racism, Justice for All, Governor Andrew Cuomo, police reform, coronavirus pandemic, Covid 19, WHO, telecommuting, catastrophic climate change, extinction of the human species, capitalism, socialism, GDP, tipping points, ecological degradation, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Global Community, Global Parliament, Federation of Global Governments, global solidarity, Global Trade and Resources Ministry, social harmony, global cooperation.

Note to the reader:
The June/July 2020 Newsletter was based on the articles, letters, reports, research papers, discussions and global dialogues, and messages written by author(s) whose work were published in monthly Newsletters of years since 1985. All published work can be found in the Global Dialogue Proceedings (check link http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GIMProceedings/). Follow the Proceedings sections, and you will find the actual authors lists, with their papers and all references. Global Community Media is a way to communicate workable sound solutions to problems arising in the world. Let us share our problems and workable sound solutions. Sharing information is a necessity to all life and humanity's survival. Our world is changing fast before our eyes, and we must react quickly and hard to protect all life on Earth. No hesitation! Right now and no waiting! Life on the planet is our first priority. We must protect it at all costs. We, global citizens, fight to protect life on Earth for this generation and the next ones. We are the defenders of the environment and the global life-support systems. We know who the beasts are, and how they destroy the living on our planet. We have rallied together all over the world to protect our home, Earth. Just so you all know we don't pay anyone, and we don't pay expenses. We do volunteer work for humanity. We expect volunteers to be responsible and accountable of all their actions. We do soft activism work. We do not have a copyright research expert to do this work. In order to create a harmonious and compassionate Global Civilizational State , and to protect our planetary environment, the global life-support systems, we want to help you concerning all issues, and you may become a volunteer yourself. Check our volunteer page at: http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GPA/gpahelpsyou.htm
Global Community has held the Global Information Media ever since 1985. A short list of our previous work on the Global Information Media (GIM) proclamations aspects and issues. All work written by authors and published in this paper can be found here as well.

Racism in America and Justice for All.

Treating people on the basis of their ethnicity, language and sometimes their religion, is also practised equally by most Americans. Over past decades and centuries in the USA, there have been numerous such instances of racism unfolding in US states towards the minority groups. People have also indulged in giving them a second class treatment, and have also made them feel like less of a human, and we have also indulged in taking pleasure by mocking their identity. Such normalising and internalising racism towards a particular community is imprinted in a person over the years by numerous socialising agents.

Recently, what has sparked outrage among thousands of African descent Americans was the way in which an unarmed Black civilian, George Floyd, suspected of using a counterfeit banknote was killed by a White police officer. The officer had pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for 5 to 9 minutes forcing him to plead that he could not breathe until he went silent and limp. The Minneapolis officer, Derek Chauvin, has now been charged with second degree murder in the killing of George Floyd. Charges of “aiding and abetting” against the three other officers who were at the scene have also been applied. Discrimination against African Americans is still pervasive and is a manifestation of the larger marginalisation of the community. Through education there has been some mobility for groups within this minority especially in the decades following the civil rights movement but large segments remain trapped at the bottom of the heap. The current economic devastation caused by the pandemic has underscored the vulnerability of these segments and also revealed how the poor and disadvantaged in the US and elsewhere are more likely to be the victims of the scourge than others.

The US pursuit of global control worldwide has affected adversely the rights and interests of millions of Americans in a number of ways. By spending so much on the military in 2019, over 1 trillion US dollars, and maintaining some 1200 military bases encircling the world, the US has sacrificed the essential needs of its people such as well-equipped hospitals and schools. Gross neglect of the economic, social rights, and Justice for All of the people has emerged as a tragic reality for everyone to witness when the nation is confronted by a health and economic crisis of gigantic proportions, as well as climate change, greenhouse gases pollution, threat to natural ecosystems, guaranteed to generate irreversible tipping points or feedback loops that will precipitate human extinction in the coming generation.

Over time, there have been constant struggles and investigations in different areas to address the issues of the socio-economic disadvantages of African-Americans, from biases in allocation of state resources for basic social goods to the mass incarceration of black people to instill fear in the community and remove its working adults to prison. Police in America have always been the frontline of an absence of caring administration, which has deliberately under-invested in the upliftment of African-Americans. White officers do their superior’s bidding besides imbibing all the common prejudices against the African-Americans. Such is the threat that an oppressed, marginalized, brutalized community poses to them that their immediate reaction, despite whatever their training manual says, despite a child or an adult in front of them who is unarmed, is to pull their gun and deal with the supposed threat first.

The police should not separate itself from the larger beliefs and attitudes in a society. A historical stance of African-Americans as second class citizens, as dictated by the politics of  disposability, dominates the common attitudes and public policy. They are politics in which the unproductive (the poor, weak and racially marginalized) are considered useless and therefore expendable. and in which entire populations are considered disposable, unnecessary burdens on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves. This greater police presence in black communities increased the chances of violent encounters and in many cases, resulted in black folk being swept up into the mass incarceration system.

Perhaps it is time for all governments, local, county, state or federal, to insist on a much higher standard for policing in America. Over the past decades, Democrats have proposed gun control legislation to take guns off American citizen hands so officers will feel safer when they are facing people with no hand guns. Republicans voted down the new legislation. Lately, U.S. Congressional Democrats also unveiled sweeping legislation on Monday, June 8 2020, to combat police violence and racial injustice, two weeks after George Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody led to widespread protests. The 134-page bill would take numerous steps including allowing victims of misconduct to sue police for damages, ban chokeholds and require the use of body cameras by federal law enforcement officers, restrict the use of lethal force, and facilitate independent investigations of police departments that show patterns of misconduct. A profession where you have the power to kill should be a profession that requires highly trained officers who are accountable to the public.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the police reform legislation into law, more than two weeks after George Floyd's death in Minneapolis sparked a nation wide movement. The governor called the package "nation-leading criminal justice and police reform bills," declaring it "a historic moment for New York." Governor Cuomo will also issue the executive order "New York State Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative." The order mandates local police departments, including the NYPD, "to develop a plan that reinvents and modernizes police strategies and programs in their community based on community input." Each department's reform plan must address policies, procedures, practices and deployment, including but not limited to use of force. The plans must be adopted in order for police agencies to be eligible for state funding. "Today NY took a major step toward justice by enacting landmark police reform," Governor Cuomo tweeted. "To the activists and advocates who spoke out year after year, to all who marched and demanded justice in the last weeks, thank you. Your voices brought real change."

The laws will ban police chokeholds, make it easier to sue people who call police on others without good reason, and set up a special prosecutor's office to investigate the deaths of people during and following encounters with police officers. Some bills, including body camera legislation, drew support from Republicans, who opposed legislation that repealed a state law long used to block the release of police disciplinary records over concerns about officers' privacy. Eliminating the law, known as Section 50-a, would make complaints against officers, as well as transcripts and final dispositions of disciplinary proceedings, public for the first time in decades. One of the bills, the "Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act," mandates that a police officer who injures or kills a person by using a "chokehold or similar restraint" can be charged with a class C felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The bill is named for Eric Garner, an African American man who died in New York City after a police officer put him in a chokehold during an arrest in 2014. Chokeholds were already prohibited by the New York Police Department at that time. One bill will clarify that a person not under arrest or in the custody of law enforcement has the right to record police activity and maintain custody and control of the recording. The Law Enforcement Misconduct Investigative Office will be established by another bill to review, study, audit and make recommendations on police operations and policies. The Police Statistics and Transparency Act will require courts to compile and publish racial and other demographic data of all low-level offenses, as well as require police departments to submit annual reports on arrest-related deaths. Another bill mandates that all state police officers be supplied with body cameras. In the USA, racism is experienced everyday through, racial narratives, appearance, language accents, racial colour, interpretations, radicalized emotions and stereotypes. Our Racism has been worshipped, practiced and experienced, practically by most people through everyday affairs, and how normalising and internalising such acts can actually escalate to an incident such as that of George Floyd’s.

The issue of for whom and for what the state keeps its territory safe has become harder to conceal over time. Nowadays, the state’s political processes and its structures have been almost completely captured by corporations. As a result, the maintenance of internal and external security is less about ensuring an orderly and safe existence for citizens than about creating a stable territorial platform for globalised businesses to plunder local resources, exploit local labour forces and generate greater profits by transforming workers into consumers. Increasingly, the state has become an almost hollowed-out vessel through which corporations order their business agendas to minimise the obstacles facing them as they seek to maximise their wealth and profits in each state’s territory. The state’s role is to avoid getting in the way of corporations as they extract resources through deregulation or, when this capitalist model regularly collapses, come to the aid of the corporations with more generous bailouts than rival states. To ensure its survival, the state needs to monopolise violence and internal security, to maintain its exclusive definition of what constitutes order, and to keep the state as a safe territorial platform for business. The alternative is the erosion of the nation-state’s authority, and the possibility of its demise as was seen since Trump became President.

This was the rationale behind Donald Trump’s notorious tweet, censored by Twitter for “glorifying violence” that warned: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Not surprisingly, he invoked the words of a racist Miami police chief, Walter Headley, who threatened violence against the African-American community in the late 1960s. At the time Headley additionally stated: “There’s no communication with them except force.” Trump may be harking back to an ugly era of what was once called “race relations”, but the sentiment lies at the heart of the state’s mission.

A healthy state, committed to the social contrac, should be capable of finding ways to accommodate discontent before it reaches the level of popular revolt. The scenes playing out across the US are evidence that state institutions, captured by corporate money, are increasingly incapable of responding to demands for change. The hollowed-out US state represents not its citizens, who are capable of compromise, but the interests of global forces of capital that care little what takes place on the streets of Minneapolis or New York so long as the corporations can continue to accumulate wealth and power.

Why would we expect these global forces to be sensitive to popular unrest in the US when they have proved entirely insensitive to the growing signals of distress from the planet, as its life-support systems recalibrate for our pillage and plunder in ways we will struggle to survive as a species? Why would the state not block the path to peaceful change, knowing it excels in the use of violence, when it blocks the path to reform that might curb the corporate assault on the environment, and human extinction in the near future?

The challenge to the protesters,  either those on the streets now or those who follow in their wake, is how to surmount the state’s violence and how to offer a vision of a different, more hopeful future that restores the social contract.

Lessons will be learnt through protest, defiance and disobedience, not in a courtroom where a police officer stands trial as an entire political and economic system is allowed to carry on with its crimes.

The Covid-19 pandemic.

The global coronavirus pandemic is the product of a staggering multitude of factors, including the air links connecting every corner of the planet so intimately and the failure of government officials to move swiftly enough to sever those links. But underlying all of that is the virus itself. Are we, in fact, facilitating the emergence and spread of deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus, SARS, and the coronavirus through deforestation, haphazard urbanization, and the ongoing warming of the planet? It may be too early to answer such a question unequivocally, but the evidence is growing that this is the case.

Coronavirus is highly contagious. It can enter the human body only through the mucosa, the membrane lining the inside of nose, mouth and eyes. It cannot enter through the skin of the hands. Coronavirus is contained in tiny droplets when an infected person sneezes, coughs or speaks loudly. If these droplets are inhaled by another person before they fall to the ground or onto door handles, etc., they enter the body through the mucosa of the nose and infect that person. Hence the need for all to wear masks – an infected wearer’s mask prevents spread of infected droplets and an uninfected person’s mask prevents their inhalation. Droplets can remain on, say, a door handle for a short time. If such a surface is touched by hand, Coronavirus can get transferred to the skin of the hand/fingers, where it will be harmless, unless the hand/fingers touches the edges or inside of nose, mouth or eyes which have mucosa. All this is equally true of the common cold virus. Now, by far the largest numbers of deaths are in the United States. Americans are dying by the thousands on an almost daily basis. Health systems worldwide have long been focus of the WHO and other medical groups. For decades, specialists have tried to ameliorate a lack of doctors, an absence of medical equipment, a need for more hospitals and greater access to healthcare.

As the country, pushed by President Trump’s reelection desires, reopens relatively quickly, at whatever cost in further Covid-19 deaths, many workers will undoubtedly be brought back or rehired, but there’s no avoiding the obvious reality that any number of temporary layoffs will become permanent realities. Meanwhile, the socio-economic level of the country has plummeted as middle-class Americans lose their jobs and begin the long fall into another existence.

A pandemic is a situation where a disease spreads to various countries and continents globally in a short time, and may be slow or fast in spread and vary in mortality. Today’s crisis has been catalyzed by a viral pandemic spreading across the planet, by supply-and-demand shocks the world over, and by the collapse of a global economic system, as well as widespread lockdowns. Though the first cases were seen and reported in Wuhan, there is no substantial proof to say that the virus originated there. The first studies identified the source of Covid 19 from bats and pangolins and highlighted Wuhan as the initial epicentre. Multiple arguments were put forward mostly by politicians and media of the west, accusing of vicious motives to China.

The Coronavirus pandemic is taking its toll on the inefficient political, economic, and social systems. The human cost of the crisis makes our present look gloomy and the future is inconceivable. The discontinuity with everyday lives and emergency measures create an illusion that normality will return to its own place and pace. These illusionary desires help the crisis ridden bourgeois democracy and capitalist state to survive, and continue to create havoc in the lives and livelihoods of the masses. Over the past decades, a western world dominated the field of political philosophy. The fascinating factor is the ideological differences and the competition which took place between the western world and the non-western world.

The USA took no lesson from their past and acted with recklessness and carelessness about people’s life. On March 11th WHO declared Covid 19 as pandemic when the illness was seen in almost 110 countries and territories and over 1,18,000 cases were reported. WHO has many times pointed out the pandemic potential of the covid epidemic. Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a crisis that will touch every sector, so every sector and every individual must be involved in the fight against this crisis.

In truth, Trump, Vice President Pence, and the rest of the White House crew have a remarkable record when it comes to hijacking a pandemic and sending it crashing into the U.S., while leaving the USA unprepared for it. In fact, Covid-19 made it all the way to Washington and crashed directly into a White House that visibly had no interest in either social distancing or wearing face masks, even insisting that others take them off. While the record of the president and his administration has seemed almost uniquely destructive and inept, nationally and globally, you need to give that crew credit for one thing: they managed to bring war home big time and destroy what could prove to be the last vestiges of a sense of American exceptionalism.

In several countries, the Covid-19 pandemic has variously led to extraordinary emergency measures for the general good: free testing for Covid-19 infection, free emergency medical treatment, a safety net for the unemployed, on-line teaching and learning, and even emergency housing in 4 star hotels for the homeless. The big question is whether the end of the Covid-19 in capitalist economies will see a snap-back to rampant neoliberalism and brutal austerity imposed on the poor to pay for the Covid-19-related debt (socialism for the rich) or perhaps the world seizes the opportunity created by Covid-19-related altruism to emplace a just and sustainable economic stimulus package that aims to address climate change and economic inequality for all of Humanity. USA leadership is among world leaders is likely post-Covid-19 to revert to deadly, business as usual, merciless and unsustainable neoliberal socialism for the rich. Neoliberalism is the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism and free market capitalism. It is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. Needs based economy such as promoted by a democratic socialism philosophy, includes food, shelter, health, education and culture versus the unnecessary, damaging and deadly such as smoking, alcohol, and speciescide, pollution, global warming , obesity, ignorance, violence-promotion, and wars.

The COVID-19 crisis is also exposing still more flaws in our economic structures, not least the increasing precarity of work, owing to the rise of the gig economy and a decades-long deterioration of workers’ bargaining power. Telecommuting simply is not an option for most workers, and although governments are extending some assistance to workers with regular contracts, the self-employed may find themselves left high and dry. Many of the serious threats that the world faces today are linked to excessive economic inequality. For example, both climate change and militarism are linked to the greed of corporations, whose disproportionate power derives from their extreme wealth. The loss of democratic institutions is also linked to excessive economic inequality. The laws of corporations do not allow their CEO's to have either an ecological conscience or a social conscience. Their only duty is to maximize the profits of the stockholders. If they do not do this, then, by law, they must be replaced. We can remember that Mussolini defined fascism as “corporatism”.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a massive experiment in telecommuting. Up to half of American workers are currently working from home, more than double the fraction who worked from home in 2017-2018. Many such workers had been largely unfamiliar with telecommuting technology when this grand experiment began, but have quickly mastered the necessary skills. Given little choice in the matter, high school and college students are also becoming more adept at telework as their schools shift to remote learning. Meanwhile, companies and colleges are investing massively in the necessary hardware and software for such communications and teaching. As a result, the outbreak is accelerating the trend toward telecommuting, possibly for the long term.

COVID has also brought into focus other battles Global Community will have to unite us to win if we are to survive as a People and emerge as a humane planet with several critically urgent problems to deal with: global hunger, homelessness, poverty, wars and climate change. We will have to unite and to see ourselves as one Global Community. Humanity needs a new multinational institution, Global Civilizational State, to be activated for the purpose of orchestrating a world-wide increase in the price of carbon from its first moment of entry into the humane system and its becoming a part of all derivative goods and services. Global Civilizational State must be given powers under and institutional authority well beyond existing global institutions today; powers of international law and enforcement. This is just the first step toward human planetary resource control and of human survival. Pricing in of other negative externalities harmful to humanity and all other life on the planet can come next. All nations need to acknowledge that our planetary problems can only be solved multi-nationally. The future of human civilization hangs in the balance.

With COVID-19 pandemic almost convulsing the whole world, global cooperation and a collective response seems indispensable to negotiate multiple challenges arising out of this appalling and merciless enemy. The challenges that range from threats to public health, economic recovery, food security, looming recession and unemployment demand a multilateral cooperation and a global solidarity; instead of countries going solo and acting on their own. To prevail against the pandemic today, we will need heightened solidarity. Instead, many countries, especially the USA, tend to adopt unilateral policies and act on their own.

The Pandemic world health crisis heralded by Corona Virus which defied national boundaries and crossed continents in its remorseless spread, has in the meantime exposed the deep divisions between and within countries, as they struggled to confront the situation arising out of this lethal enemy. The situation has been exacerbated by a deep campaign of anti-globalisation sentiment, erosion of a rule-based international order, trade and technology wars between big powers and rise of populist leaders, such as Trump, who reject internationalism and pursue ultra-nationalist and protectionist policies for their narrow political benefits.

In recent years, hundreds of millions of once impoverished rural families moved to burgeoning industrial cities in central and coastal China, including places like Wuhan. Although modern in so many respects, with its subways, skyscrapers, and superhighways, Wuhan also retained vestiges of the countryside, including markets selling wild animals still considered by some inhabitants to be normal parts of their diet. Many of those animals were trucked in from semi-rural areas hosting large numbers of bats, the apparent source of both the coronavirus and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, outbreak of 2013, which also arose in China. Scientific research suggests that breeding grounds for bats, like mosquitoes, are expanding significantly as a result of rising world temperatures. The frozen subterranean soil in the Earth's polar regions accounts for about 25 percent of the Northern Hemisphere. Climate change, that great consequence of human arrogance, industry and tendency toward destruction, is causing that ice to melt at rates previously unseen. Studies show the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, and a 2017 report from the Arctic Council suggests 20 percent of the uppermost layers of permafrost may melt by 2040. As the ice begins to thaw, each eroding layer will expose new layers, along with microbes that have been frozen away for thousands of years. That vast collection of bacteria, viruses and other pathogens may impact, or infect, our lives in ways that are best not to consider just before bed. What has caused the increase of world temperatures and climate change is the global warming of the planet due to the increase of the greenhouse gases (GHGs)in the atmosphere.

Climate change and climate crisis.

But we’ve gone three decades of failure to even slow the increase in burning coal, oil and natural gas, with consequential greenhouse gases increasing in the atmosphere, with a consequential rise in global temperatures, which in turn leads to more extreme weather, sea level rise, drought and forest fires, etc. Climate change damage is accelerating and becoming increasingly costly; devastating weather is already a growing threat multiplier in our tightly linked global society.

There is a remarkable contrast in the way that governments around the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the way that they have responded to the climate emergency. The pandemic, which indeed represents an extremely grave danger to humanity, has produced a massive global response. Borders have been closed, airlines have become virtually inoperative, industries, restaurants and entertainments have been closed, sporting events have been cancelled or postponed, people have been asked to stay at home and practice social distancing, and the everyday life of citizens around the world has been drastically changed.

By contrast, let us consider the threat that if immediate action is not taken to halt the extraction and use of fossil fuels, irreversible feedback loops, tipping points, will soon be initiated which will make catastrophic climate change inevitable despite any human efforts to prevent it. This threat is by far even more serious than the COVID-19 pandemic. Climate change could make much of the earth to hot for human life. It could  produce a famine involving billions of people, rather than millions. Catastrophic climate change would lead to the extinction of the human species; much of the world would become uninhabitable, the global population of humans would be very much reduced and civilization would be extinct forever.

A strategy to deal with the pandemic would require putting the brakes on climate change as swiftly as possible through the rapid and thorough elimination of human-induced carbon emissions. Deforestation would also have to be halted and the world’s remaining wilderness areas preserved as is forever. Any further despoliation of the oceans would have to be stopped, including the dumping of wastes, plastics, engine fuel, and runoff pesticides.

The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up and the thawing of permafrost in the Arctic either from global warming or industrial exploitation. The only way to avert such a catastrophe and assure ourselves that Earth will not become an avenger planet is to cease the further desecration of essential ecosystems.

What is the reason for this remarkable contrast in our response to two serious emergencies? We see clearly and respond to what is close to us, and are relatively indifferent to what is far away. We hear of  people dying every day from the COVID-19 pandemic, and there is a danger that as many as 100 million people could die before it is over. By contrast, although immediate climate action is needed today to avoid disaster, the worst consequences of climate change lie in a few decades from now. We have a responsibility to our children and grandchildren, and to all future generations. A large-scale global famine will occur sooner than expected, and children who are alive today will experience it. Recovery from the pandemic offers climate action opportunities. When the COVID-19 pandemic is over, governments will be faced by the task of repairing the enorouus economic damage that it has caused. Today, the concept of a Global Civilizational State is being put forward globally. This concept visualizes government-sponsored programs aimed at simultaneously creating both jobs and urgently-needed renewable energy infrastructure.

Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address. By the late 1980s, when it became clear that man-made climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it. Under neoliberalism, climate change is extraordinarily difficult to deal with because it involves ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism and free market capitalism, and is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.

The pandemic has laid bare the diverging gap between interests of the billionaire financial elite indulging in terribly destructive plunder of nature and labour on one side, and the needs and sustenance of the working class and broad masses of people on the other.

There is now no hope of effective mitigation in time without business. Global business, especially American business,   must consciously roll back the neoliberal capture of government so that transforming system change becomes possible, so that governments can organize under the leadership of Global Civilizational State to effectively regulate a managed decline of fossil fuel production and use.

How have governments responded to the climate emergency? A minority, for example the Scandinavian countries, have taken appropriate action. Most governments pay lip service to the emergency, but do not take effective action; and a few countries, such as the United States under Donald Trump, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Saudi Arabia,  deny that there is a climate emergency and actively sabotage action. The world’s net response has been totally inadequate. The Keeling curve, which measures CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, continuse to rise, and the rate of rise is even increasing.

If business doesn’t organize itself to back off so that deep systemic change is possible urgently than we are all going to lose big time. If business doesn’t agree to and help form wartime-style coalition governments, the leadership of Global Civilizational State, and fossil fuel proliferation treaties across trade groups, and agree to government intervention, regulation and even triage support for markets in the transition to a hopeful post-carbon society, such a transformation will not happen.

There still is hope that we could conduct an emergency operation to save our very fortunate societies. If business returns to government the power to introduce needed ‘transformative system change’, effective climate mitigation finally becomes possible. The world needs to activate Global Civilizational State. Then our kids, the world’s kids, can hopefully enjoy opportunity and wealth creation in a future with a safe climate for our continuing evolution.

Where the virus may potentially claim the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, global heating above 4 °C is bound to claim the lives of billions, yet most governments hardly listen to the sciences.  Many governments are listening to medical science, implementing essential measures to combat the plague, instigating social isolation and economic support systems in order to avoid a potential demise of hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives. As the human onslaught against life on Earth accelerates, no part of the biosphere is left pristine. The simple act of consuming more than we actually need drives the world’s governments and corporations to endlessly destroy more and more of the Earth to extract the resources necessary to satisfy our insatiable desires. For the first time in history, more than 100 billion tonnes of materials are entering the global economy every year, which means that, on average, every person on Earth uses more than 13 tonnes of materials each year extracted from the Earth.

Without quick action to curb CO2 emissions, global warming is likely to increase by 4 degrees Centigrade (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above today’s normal during the 21st century and that is dangerously close to the temperature of 6 degrees Centigrade above normal that initiated the Permian-Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago when 96% of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebrates were wiped out.

How can our 21st century world society of seven plus billion people mechanistically orchestrate a turnover from fossil fuels to renewable energy? Will industries such as air travel, automobiles, trucking, ocean shipping and metals use for manufacturing now all so reliant on fossil fuels be able to make the transition; and if so, what can be the alternatives? How will highly carbon consumptive basic industries such as concrete and steel make the transition? How will the citizens country by country, region by region, respond to such a state of economic disruption and reorganization? There is a way that a relatively non-violent transition can take place. It will, however, require strong leadership throughout the world at the multinational level, it will require Global Civilizational State leadership.

Capitalism has neared a peak, mostly using capital to generate capital, unable to comprehend the challenges faced by its actions, going as far as it can go intensifying major problems it has created. Slowly and inexorably, the socio-economic system refutes a counter-productive capitalism, that is taking more than it gives, that is destroying more than it creates, and that has become more irresponsible than responsible. Life on Earth originated from oceans and remains the planet’s main life support system by dominating the processes that keep our planet habitable such as regulating the climate by absorbing excess carbon dioxide and heat while also giving us some idea of the impacts of this on the creatures that live in and on the oceans. The needed change does not arrive from ideological, economic, social, or political considerations; it arrives from the realization that the earth is on fire and only a strong willed and collective community can dampen the conflagration. Global Civilizational State will be needed to establish a healthy and prosperous governance of the Earth. The change comes from realization that private and civic initiatives cannot and will not resolve the forecasted problems, each will protect what they have and deny the challenges: climate change that modifies coastlines and arable lands; greenhouse gas emissions that heat the atmosphere and petition a handover from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources; robotics and artificial intelligence that change the factory floor, its administration, and the composition of the workforce; possibility of nuclear war in an atmosphere of intense international hostility and growing arms races; pandemics from new disease microbes that replicate quickly, defy conventional medicine, and spread beyond borders; security enhancements due to internal conflicts and external hostilities; political, economic and social polarizations that have stimulated populist movements; and population migrations that cause cultural conflicts and reassignment of resources. Allied to these challenges are the subsidiary challenges each of them creates: reallocation of food sources and shortages in food supply; economic upheavals due to bankruptcies of resource and transportation industries and nations dependent upon fossil fuels; re-orientation of the work force to prevent severe unemployment; forced arms controls to prevent global wars; sharing of resources to lessen predicted large scale migrations; international controls and research to prevent spread of disease; more equal distribution of income to assure all have basics for survival in a quickly changing economic landscape, and regulations that assure adequate privacy, security, and disease mitigation. Despite public awareness and concern for all the challenges, inertia is apparent. Escaping human extinction will require government intervention in all aspects of the socio-economic system.

In particular, it is becoming increasingly evident how biotic interactions, in addition to permitting the emergence and maintenance of diversity, also build up complex networks through which the loss of one species can make more species disappear (a process known as ‘co-extinction’), and possibly bring entire systems to an unexpected, sudden regime shift, or even total collapse. In simple language, a species cannot survive without the resources (the other species) on which it depends for survival and the accelerating loss of species now threatens ‘total collapse’ of ‘entire systems’. This is because resource and consumer interactions in natural systems (such as food webs) are organized in various hierarchical levels of complexity (including trophic levels), so the removal of resources can result in the cascading (bottom-up) extinction of several higher-level consumers.

We should expect most events of species loss to cause co-extinctions, as corroborated by the worrisome, unnatural rate at which populations and species are now disappearing, and which goes far beyond what one expects as a simple consequence of human endeavour. In fact, even the most resilient species will inevitably fall victim to the synergies among extinction drivers as extreme stresses drive biological communities to collapse. Furthermore, co-extinctions are often triggered well before the complete loss of an entire species, so that even oscillations in the population size of a species could result in the local disappearance of other species depending on the first. This makes it difficult to be optimistic about the future of species diversity in the ongoing trajectory of global change, let alone in the case of additional external, planetary-scale catastrophes.

We must come together as a global family, Global Community, to restore ecologically the places we inhabit and which we and our forebearers have senselessly allowed to be destroyed. One last time lets beat guns into ploughshares, to make the shovels necessary to plant the trees whose leaves we need to cool the frustrations of diminished prospects and restore hope in a mortally threatened world. By reconstituting ecology, society will reconnect to the wonders of nature. A sense of communal well-being will come; as guns, hard drugs, suicide, and over-consumption fade away. The focus will be upon shared advancement, well-being, and experience rather than insular, anxious lusting for the accumulation of more stuff. As planting of trees brings you closer to nature, it may provide spiritual wonderment and awe, and become a form of ritual worship for some. We will marvel at creation and the miracle of being as we work for her continuation. Once again, we will feel in our very cells our own intimate connection with kindred species with which we share this billions of years long evolutionary journey. There will be a resurgence in self-expression as art, sport, music, theater, science (and other knowledge), and the written word rise in prominence. Emerging technologies will be used appropriately, and only to the extent that they augment ecology, and are used exclusively for social good. Frequent long-distance travel, the military-industrial complex, fossil fuels, big government, abject despair, extreme poverty, and social want will fade away as a more just society based upon equitable and sustainable bioregional plenty re-emerges.

Policies to address climate change and other environmental problems include decarbonization policies (encouraging renewable energy sources, electric cars, heat pumps), energy efficiency policies (decreasing energy input/output ratio of appliances, vehicles, buildings), and behavioral change policies (encouraging people to consume and behave more sustainably, for instance by adopting the technologies promoted by the two other policies).

The first two strategies aim to make existing patterns of consumption less resource-intensive through technical innovation alone. These policies ignore related processes of social change, which perhaps explains why they have not led to a significant decrease in energy demand or CO2-emissions.

Advances in energy efficiency have not resulted in lower energy demand, because they don’t address new and more resource-intensive consumption patterns that often emerge from more energy efficient technologies. Moreover, renewable energy sources have not led to a decarbonisation of the energy infrastructure, because total and per capita energy demand are increasing faster than renewable energy sources are added. Consequently, the only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to focus more on social change. Energy efficiency and decarbonization policies need to be combined with “social innovation” if we want energy use and carbon emissions to go down. This is where behavioral change policies come in,and climate change policy can steer consumer choices and behaviors in a more sustainable direction.

Instruments and policy packages designed to achieve behavior change vary greatly, and can be economic incentives (such as grants for “green” products, energy taxes, soft loans), standards and regulations (such as building codes or vehicle emission standards), or the provisioning of information (more detailed energy bills, smart meters, awareness campaigns). All these policy instruments are focused on what are thought to be the determinants of individual behaviors. They assume that either individuals take rational decisions based on product price and information, or that behaviors are the outcomes of beliefs, attitudes and values.

Pro-environmental behavior is often considered to be less profitable, less pleasurable, and/or more time-consuming. Consequently, people need to make an effort to benefit the environment, and this is why, according to behavioral change researchers, pro-environmental values and attitudes are not necessarily matched by individuals’ behaviors. Behavioral change policies have been disappointing so far. Two decades of climate-change related awareness campaigns have not decreased energy demand and carbon emissions in a significant way. The reason for this limited success is that existing attempts to change behavior rest on a very narrow view of the social world. Behavioral change policies are based on the widespread agreement that what people do is in essence a matter of individual choice. For example, whether people pick one mode of travel or another, is positioned as a matter of personal preference. It follows that the power to change and responsibility for energy demand, consumption, and climate change are ultimately thought to lie within individual persons.

Individuals can make pro-environmental choices based on attitudes and values, and they may inspire others to do the same, but there are so many other things involved that focusing on changing individual “behavior” seems to miss the point. Trying to persuade people to live sustainably through individual behavior change programs will not address the larger and more significant structures and ideas that facilitate and limit their options. In fact, by placing responsibility and guilt squarely on the individuals, attention is deflected away from the many institutions involved in structuring possible courses of action, and in making some very much more likely than others.  The discourse of sustainable “behavior” holds consumers collectively responsible for political and economic decisions, rather than politicians and economic actors themselves.

Although individual behavioral change policies purport to address social and not just technological change, they do so in a very limited way. As a result, they have exactly the same shortcomings as the other strategies, which are focused on efficiency and innovation. Like energy efficiency and decarbonization policies, behavior change policies don’t challenge unsustainable social conventions or infrastructures. They don’t consider wider-ranging system level changes which would radically transform the way we live, and that could potentially achieve much more significant reductions in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. For example, recycling garbage does not question the production of waste in the first place, and even legitimizes it.

The United States is the second-largest total GHG emitter in the world and the third-largest per-capita GHG emitter behind Saudi Arabia and Australia. The US is the largest producer of new fossil fuels. People in the US have a critical responsibility and role to play in the solution to the climate crisis. We cannot count on institutions such as the United Nations, governments and corporations to take appropriate actions without outside pressure. We need to organize resistance and build the solutions in our communities. A core requirement of effective social movements is to have a clear vision of what they are working to achieve. To be transformational, this vision must embody not only the goal (for example, reducing GHG emissions) but also the structure of the system that will achieve that goal. Two major components of that structure are the ways decisions will be made and how the system will be financed. So the world needs to activate Global Civilizational State leadership to take humanity and all life on Earth toward a healthy and prosperous life for this generation and future ones.

There are a broad range of actions to take and a number of roles to play.

1. Pushing agencies to address the climate crisis in their policies When the Trump administration announced it would allow more oil and gas drilling on federal lands, advocacy groups came together and sued the Bureau of Land Management to make sure GHG emissions are assessed in considering oil and gas leases. A court recently sided with the groups and hundreds of thousands of acres of leases are being suspended. Another example is the Beyond Extreme Energy campaign to transform the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which grants permits for energy projects, to the Federal Renewable Energy Commission.
2. Direct action to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure  Major campaigns to stop pipelines, fracking and new oil and gas infrastructure are going on across the country. Oil and gas corporations cite this resistance as their biggest obstacle. Last week, activists in Wingdale, NY shut down construction of the Cricket Valley Fracked Gas Power Plant. They are pressuring Governor Cuomo to shut it down for good. And in Clearbrook, Minnesota, activists blocked construction of the Line 3 Pipeline. You don’t have to lock down or climb a tripod to participate. There are many roles required for direct actions such as media support, legal observers, jail support and more.
3. Driving disinvestment in dirty energy Students, faculty and supporters took action last week to disrupt the Harvard-Yale football game with a message to their schools to divest from fossil fuels and cancel Puerto Rico’s debt. This was one action in an ongoing divestment campaign. The European Investment Bank took a positive step recently by promising to phase out investment in dirty energy over the next two years. Though it is promising to be the first climate bank, activists will still need to watchdog what the bank supports to make sure it is not investing in more false solutions.
4. Protecting the right to protest  We know our actions are having an impact when the state tries to criminalize them. A new law was signed by the governor of Wisconsin making it a felony to protest fossil fuel infrastructure. This is the tenth state to pass such a law. In South Dakota, their anti-protest law was successfully fought in the courts this year.
5. Pressuring lawmakers (and candidates)  During the Extinction Rebellion Global Hunger Strike, which started Nov. 20, a group of activists sat-in House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office calling for her to hold a public meeting with them. Two of them continued their hunger strike through this weekend. The Sunrise Movement has organized actions targeting lawmakers, candidates and the Democratic Party throughout the year. They, along with Fridays for Future, will target lawmakers with a climate strike on December 6.
6. Constructive programs to build alternatives There are many programs to build positive alternatives from developing regenerative agriculture to a resurgence of small farmers and urban gardens to expanded public transportation, walkable communities, and bike lanes, to incentives for clean energy installation and the formation of worker-owned cooperative green businesses. Recently a new law was passed requiring new roofs in Brooklyn, NY to either have solar panels or greenery.

Scientists compared three scenarios of decarbonising the power sector by 2050: One focused mainly on solar and wind power, a second relying mainly on carbon capture and storage in combination with biomass and fossils, and a third route with a mixed technology portfolio. In all scenarios, land use requirements for power production will increase in the future. By far the most land-devouring method to generate electricity is bioenergy. The question for us then is how do we get there? If we adopt a mix of all three perspectives perhaps we will be closer to a solution. If we accept some version of a “categorical planetary ethic” then we as a species have an absolute duty to both the biosphere and all its inhabitants. We have a sacred duty of care and preservation. If this first premise is widely agreed upon then a number of possible restrictive actions follow:

1) Human being reproductive freedom should/must be immediately limited to a rate of replacement and thus 0 growth. It is neither rational nor ethical that human population growth should be unlimited while the capacity of the biosphere to sustain such growth is not.

2) Human being economic, political, scientific endeavors should be structured/organized in such a ways as to produce the maximum benefit to the biosphere and its inhabitants. The source of all life takes precedence over particular lives and their parochial interests.

3) Human beings should be educated and sensitized to their universal duty to the planet viewing themselves not just as “cosmopolitans” but as “defenders of the biosphere”.

4) Radical green politics should coordinate their policies on a voluntary, if urgent, worldwide foundation. Thus, Global governance should “green” with time.

Capitalism vs socialism.

Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address the problems. By the late 1980s, when it became clear that man-made climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it. Under neoliberalism, climate change is extraordinarily difficult to deal with.

When Covid-19 first hit and self-isolation set in, the stock market plunged and many businesses were forced to shut down normal operations. Coming specifically to the political-economic situation, with GDP growth rates in US and Europe being in the negative territory and everything including production, trade and commerce, travel and tourism, etc. coming to a halt, world economy has entered in to a frozen state that is more dreadful than the Great Depression of 1930s prompting analysts to characterise the situation as an Ice Age. From a political economy perspective, COVID-19 has totally disrupted the foundations of globalised production, both its supply and demand chains. Initial estimates by Bretton Woods Institutions made in April indicate a contraction in global GDP by around $ 9 trillion (equal to the combined GDP of Germany and Japan) during 2020. The consequences of this economic pandemic including unemployment, poverty, deprivation, are turning out to be unimaginable and unmanageable within the imperialist system. And neoliberal-corporatisation policies, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society, continue unabated even during the pandemic are constantly channeling more wealth in to corporate coffers.

There is now no hope of effective mitigation in time without business. Global business, especially American business,   must consciously roll back the neoliberal capture of government so that transforming system change becomes possible, so that governments can organize under the leadership of Global Civilizational State to effectively regulate a managed decline of fossil fuel production and use. If business doesn’t organize itself to back off so that deep systemic change is possible urgently than we are all going to lose big time. If business doesn’t agree to and help form wartime-style coalition governments, the leadership of Global Civilizational State, and fossil fuel proliferation treaties across trade groups, and agree to government intervention, regulation and even triage support for markets in the transition to a hopeful post-carbon society, such a transformation will not happen, at least not in the timeframe dictated by the science.

It is still possible that we could make the needed transition to renewables. There still is hope that we could conduct an emergency operation to save our very fortunate societies. If business returns to government the power to introduce needed ‘transformative system change’, effective climate mitigation finally becomes possible. Then our kids, the world’s kids, can hopefully enjoy opportunity and wealth creation in a future with a safe climate for our continuing evolution.

As was mentioned previously here, a sustainability policy that focuses on systemic issues reframes the question from “how do we change individuals’ behaviors so that they are more sustainable?” to “how do we change the way society works?” This leads to very different kinds of interventions. Addressing the sociotechnical underpinnings of “behavior” involves attempting to create new infrastructures and institutions that facilitate sustainable lifestyles, attempting to shift cultural conventions that underpin different activities, and attempting to encourage new competences that are required to perform new ways of doing things. As a result of these changes, what we think of as individual “behaviors” will also change. These changes can be accomplished by a new type of governance base on the Scale of Global Rights . Global Civilizational States offers short and long term solutions to the people of all nations to assure the survival of life on Earth. Both solutions require the acceptance of the Scale of Global Rights as our guide for survival. As a first step, all nations should approve the first three sections on the Scale of Global Rights. Over the past several decades humanity has bettered itself through the acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by most nations. But now is the time to leave it behind and reach to our next step of social evolution, that is the approval of a scale of social values, the Scale of Global Rights. 

Human beings have fallen into a pattern of organizing around hierarchical institutions that centralize power. Capitalism vs. socialism is a false choice specifically because both, as currently understood and practiced, centralize rather than distribute power. Thus, they diminish local control and responsibility and suppress essential local adaptation to changing local conditions. Electing the leaders who head those institutions is only a partial corrective, better even to support a Democratic Socialism Plus.

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments is the rise of anti-capitalist protests around the world against neoliberalism, a model that drives privatization of land, water, services and more. We can’t solve the climate crisis using capitalist economic models because capitalism is fundamentally about extracting profits at all costs and is based on the overconsumption of a consumer-oriented economy.

Another promising development is the work to make connections between the many crises we face. We cannot solve the climate crisis in isolation because it requires a major restructuring of our entire society. It requires the establisment of the Global Civilizational State. This is the opportunity the climate crisis provides. Over the next decade, with a clear vision of where we want to go, we can shape the world to be one that respects self-determination, human rights and sustainability. That will only come about through organization, planning, and action to create a mass movement. The seeds of that mass movement are growing. The opportunity has never been so great and the stakes have never been so high.

Due to capitalism’s irresponsible behavior, our species is hurtling towards ecocide at a frightening pace. All of us in the global north are to blame, some more than others. The fossil fuel companies that have lied to us for decades to keep us hooked on their products, the large conglomerates profiting from the destruction of entire ecosystems to keep us hooked on the flesh of animals even as we are awakening to the fact that plant based diets are healthier and more sustainable, the agrochemical corporations that enrich themselves and their shareholders by forcing farmers to use their chemicals on the food we eat which in turn makes us sick and decimates insect populations and contaminates our soil and kills our earth worms, the car companies that lie about emissions and lobby our elected leaders so we buy more of their products are largely responsible for our current predicament.  These companies and the humans that lead them are complicit in nothing short of the manslaughter of millions, the destruction of the ecosystems we rely on for our survival, and the extinction of up to 10,000 species a year. They will also be responsible for the mass starvation of billions of humans in just a decade or so. This is the work of the greed that capitalism encourages and desires in us. Capitalism only survives by us buying more and more things so investors receive returns. The GDP must keep going up and up and up forever or the system collapses. But we all know this is not possible. We have extremely limited resources, and for the GDP to keep rising, we need more and more people. We cannot continue to expand our population in perpetuity. The system was flawed at the outset, and its flaws have never been more apparent than now as we start to see our life systems unravel before our very eyes.

The capitalists and our corrupt governments are largely to blame for this destruction and the extinctions. They will also be to blame for the deaths as food and water runs dry. They were told by scientists that this would happen if they didn’t change course, but they continued anyway to keep the system going, and they ignore the reality of our distress as they fly around in private jets and moor their yachts off shore in the same place they hide their wealth. We are also complicit in this crime of ecocide. We all benefit from the system that is eating itself. Every day that goes by that we continue to talk about trivial nonsense instead of accepting our dire situation and acting. Every day that goes by as we bury our heads in the sand. Every day that goes by that we carry on buying pointless crap. Every day that goes by that we continue to feed 70 billion farmed animals in factory hell holes while almost a billion humans go hungry. Every day we stay silent as ecosystems collapse, we are complicit in the manslaughter of the global south. We are complicit in the needless resource theft of future generations. We are complicit in the future starvation and conflict that is surely going to arrive at our children’s door. We are enabling the worst to happen to our own children. Blame capitalism for ecosystem collapse, extinctions and mass starvation.

The global ecological crisis: a crisis in which we are the virus.

1. our socio-economic model is environmentally unsustainable;

1. the entire world is interconnected, and can potentially discuss shared solutions;
2. modern technologies make producing the goods and services essential to human survival more efficient. We produce and consume too much, but each unit we produce and consume has an impact on the environment compared to the past;
3. it is now a consolidated fact that beyond certain levels of consumption, further consumption does not equal more well-being for human beings.

Thus, the real fundamental question is not whether it is possible to build a sustainable society, but rather whether it is possible to do so without sacrificing the fundamental values of the West and people’s well-being. If by ‘fundamental values of the West’ we mean things such as global rights, and political and civil liberties, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. If we instead mean unchecked capitalism and a lawless market, then the answer is ‘realistically, no’.

Progressively evolving means a new information-age of a global culture, Global Community, and a new proactive civilization, the Global Civilizational State, of strong bonds and affinity between people to people. Global Community is neither blind, nor inept, it defines its own purpose, meaning and identity for peace, harmony, and solidarity that the established institutions of governance, in America or Europe or elsewhere, miserably failed to recognize or value their importance in global political affairs. Given the inherent systematic deficiencies, moral and intellectual corruption in worldwide political governance, and policy formulation toward the international community, Global Civilizational State is actively organized and morally and intellectually powerful to halt all the belligerent nightmares planned and orchestrated by the few war lords now governing the world. Making the needed change is never easy, and can challenge our ingenuity, and unfold the best in us to open the new vistas of human, intellectual and global opportunities.

Capitalism will slowly evolve into a Democratic Socialist system that will be able to provide the structures for maintaining democratic substance and resolving the challenges of a difficult future. Theory and logic indicate Socialism’s possible superiority. If centralized planners, especially in the technological age of data mining and artificial intelligence, responsibly control the processes, allocate resources, create an agreeable work ethic, and capably enter into the international trading system. Severity of forecasted global problems indicates that neoliberal Capitalism cannot meet the challenges, and a new socioeconomic system is demanded. Pure Socialism is an economic and political system, where the government owns much of production and controls most prices.

Democratic Socialism defines an economy and society that is politically democratic, allows private enterprise to generate surpluses and uses government controls to assure profits are optimally reassigned for both business (profit reinvestment) and public needs (taxation). Government policies, such as subsidizing, regulating, and distributing, help shape the economy. Social ownership of businesses is encouraged. These include worker-owned cooperatives, publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives, and workplace democracy, where workers sit on corporation boards. Some inefficient and vital industries necessitate some form of state ownership, but most industries are best run as private enterprises. Democratic Socialists consider central planning for major  public industries such as mass transit, housing, and energy, and permit market mechanisms to determine the demand for consumer goods.

In recent weeks, the bankruptcy of global capitalism has been exposed to millions as the system has gone into deep crisis and its representatives have failed to take the measures needed to stem COVID-19’s spread. This has been no accident. As scientists and health care professionals shouted themselves hoarse over the need for an urgent response, Trump and the political establishment were slow to act out of a desire to defend business-as-usual and Wall Street profits. At the root of the U.S.’s vulnerability to coronavirus has been not only Trump’s breathtaking failures but also the lack of a Medicare for All style health care system. Both parties have long fought fiercely against public health care, their determination to put profit before human lives didn’t begin with the current crisis. In reality we need to go further than Medicare for All, toward a socialized medical system in which the hospitals, health care, and pharmaceutical industries are taken into democratic public ownership, and run by the workers on the basis of human health and not profit.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the monetary value of all finished goods and services, is a distortion that needs fixing. GDP distorts reality by giving an appearance of real economic growth even as living standards stagnate for lower/middling classes. GDP totally misses ecosystem collapse by abuse/misuse/overuse, which is only noticed by the general public after it’s way too late when it’s easily noticeable, even by those of low self-esteem that blindly follow tyrannical maniacs.

Politicians see positive GDP numbers, which inspires them to continue with the status quo, meaning they do not focus on key aspects for sustainability, as well as human well-being. GDP does not compute environmental degradation. GDP does not register societal divisions that build tension over massive wealth disparity. And, GDP overlooks calculations of lowered standards of living for the abandoned middle class, as they increasingly deploy mountain-loads of debt to support bogus lifestyles. GDP does not paint a true-life picture. Rather, it’s a wobbly ghostly statistic that measures business activity without consideration for humanity or ecology, begging the question: What’s really important in life?

GDP numbers do not hint at issues with (1) sustainability of resources, (2) climate crises, or (3) the well-being of the people. Yet, all three are crucial issues under stress like never before. Furthermore, GDP totally misses crucial points supporting societal existence from an ecological perspective. GDP does not calculate, does not represent, and does not hint at the scarcity value associated with overuse/abuse of natural resources accompanied by egregious planet-wide degradation, e.g. the gooey tar sands in Alberta, Canada. The missing GDP calculations result in cultural upheaval as people increasingly “hit the streets” in protest, aware that “something is not right.”

The most daring attack to multilateralism during the outbreak came, as was expected from Mr. Trump who levelled a stinging charge on WHO, of being China-centric and in the same breath, called for stopping the funding to the agency for mismanaging the outbreak. What we see happening in the world is resurgence of geopolitical competition between the big-powers, declining respect for international rules and go-it-alone strategies of populist leaders who for their narrow political ends sing the songs of unilateralism and protectionism.  The picture that emerges is an increasingly atomised international system, devoid of global cooperation and solidarity, with no respect for rule-based international order. Interestingly, if we are to cope the challenges in the post-pandemic world, solidarity is a must or else, a Hobbesian world order awaits us, involving unrestrained, selfish, and uncivilized competition among nations.

Corporate capital is unleashing a systematic disruption in the collective bargaining power of the workforce. That is, on account of the specific character of the service sector, that today comprises more than two-thirds of the global GDP, having relatively more white-collar professions, digitalization with its emphasis on home-based work, has made it easy for capitalists to deal with employees on an individual or personal basis. Together with this, digitalization coupled with the new advancement in processing technologies that makes it possible to decentralise or decompose production into several stages has enabled corporate capital to devise a neoliberal version of the putting out system of transplanting ‘toxic’ and cheap labour-based stages of production to the dependent countries. This is speeding up  a new division of labour in material production both at the global and regional levels  leading to super-exploitation of workers and toiling masses through various arrangements for organising labour such as ‘flexible specialization’, outsourcing, assembly lines, etc. To be precise, through what is called  ‘informalisation’ or ‘disorganisation’, of the workforce, digital imperialism is swiftly reinforcing its global reach ensuring the highest rate of profit at minimum cost mainly through pushing down wages using digital platforms and tools.

Probably, the most crucial issue that accelerates the decline of US imperial reach is with regard to dollar itself. Omnipresence of the dollar that provided American finance capital an unparalleled opportunity for neo-colonial control has also been the most conspicuous expression of US hegemony. Being the only generally acceptable currency for international transactions, countries had to hold dollar as unit of account, medium of exchange and store of value. While other countries have to forego real resources for dollars, as the issuing country of dollar, the US could print any amount of dollar and purchase from or invest in any part of the world. US could finance its aid programs and military adventures out of the printing of dollar. Governments and central banks the world over were bound to keep their reserves in dollars and so on. However, obviously and logically, there is another side of the picture. That is, this dollar-denominated international arrangement has become an obstacle and at many times came in to conflict with the interests of other imperialist powers contending with US imperialism. Moreover, the underlying and badly needed symbiotic relationship between dollar as vehicle currency on the one hand, and US as world’s leading trader and capital exporter on the other, has already been broken—a repetition of what happened to pound sterling during the final decades of colonialism when Britain was still continuing as formal colonial leader. To be precise, today dollar continues as the international currency not based on the economic strength of US but only because of the absence an alternative arrangement.

It is in this context that imperialist China’s efforts to deal with US interference in international monetary transactions assume strategic political importance. China had already started using its currency Yuan along with local currencies in trade with its closest partners comprising almost half of the global trade volume. The transactions here are settled through the CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payments System bypassing the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications headquartered in Belgium since 1973) network payment system that uses dollar as the medium of cross-border settlements and therefore alleged to have a partisan approach to US in sharing financial information.  Along with this, China is in the process of launching a digital or crypto-currency called e-RMB (e-Renminbi) for circumventing the role of dollar in global transactions. The digital currency/cyber money developed with the involvement of Chinese digital giants like WeChat and Alipay has already become acceptable in many Chinese cities and is widely used for almost all transactions including salary payments. In the present international monetary system in which dollar is the numeraire, many countries are already fed up with US interference in their transactions.  For such countries, the internationalisation of digital Yuan will be very attractive.

Revealingly, with the application of ‘digital intelligence’ through such technologies as blockchain, the Chinese digital currency is designed in such a manner as to accomplish total non-interference from the Chinese Central Bank and this is expected to strengthen the general acceptability of ‘Chinese digital Yuan’ among the international community. If the Chinese initiative becomes successful and digital Yuan starts functioning, it will erode the role of dollar as world’s main reserve currency. Parallel to this, China is also planning to divest its trillions worth of dollar-denominated foreign exchange through outright write-off of loans of its closest partners or purchase of foreign assets or as OBOR investments abroad.  Meanwhile,  as per reports, the US also is planning a counter-offensive by developing a digital dollar project.  No doubt, as manifested in the assassinations of Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi, US imperialism will go to any extent to eliminate any threat attempting to replace the dollar with another viable international medium of exchange. The multi-faceted and concerted China-bashing and Sinophobia now unleashed by Trump administration is to be viewed in this perspective. However, according to latest information, France has successfully tested a digital euro, and similar experiments are going on in Japan, Canada and UK. No doubt, the outcome of such simultaneous emergence of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) including their use in global interbank settlements will be nothing short of a gunning for the dollar from rival contending centres.

In a socialized system, an epidemic will not lead to economic uncertainty; the public will know that basic care will be provided. Nor will there be confusion of for whom, how, where, and when health services will be available.

With Covid-19, the very idea of American exceptionalism may have seen its last days. The virus has put the realities of wealth inequality, health insecurity, and poor work conditions under a high-powered microscope. Fading from sight are the days when this country’s engagement with the world could be touted as a triumph of leadership when it came to health, economic sustenance, democratic governance, and stability. The pandemic has laid bare the diverging gap between interests of the billionaire financial elite indulging in terribly destructive plunder of nature and labour on one side, and the needs and sustenance of the working class and broad masses of people on the other. Our present financial system is unsustainable, and it works for the interests of a few very rich people.  For the sake of the long-term future, we must build a sustainable, steady-state economic system, an economic system which reduces inequality, and which serves the broad public interest. Intolerable and unjust economic inequality is increasing rapidly, both within and between nations. Statistics show that half of the world's net wealth belongs to the top 1%. They own as much as the remaining 99% of the world's peoples, the other 7.4 billion of us. 

There are only 2,153 billionaires in the world, according to the report, but their wealth matches that of more than 4.6 billion people, or about 62 percent of the world’s population, estimated to stand at 7.7 billion. The gap between the wealthy and all those who fare less well looks even more prominent if to compare the combined income of the richest of the rich, the top one percent, to that of some 6.9 billion people. The only way to tackle inequality is to raise taxes. Taxing additional 0.5 percent of wealth of the top 1 percent over the next decade will provide governments with enough funds to create 117 million of jobs in health, education, elderly care and other sectors.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), or the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty, is the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons, with the goal of leading towards their total elimination. It was passed on 7 July 2017. In order to come into effect, signature and ratification by at least 50 countries is required. As of 23 March 2020, 37 states have ratified the treaty. For those nations that are party to it, the treaty prohibits the development, testing, production, stockpiling, stationing, transfer, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons, as well as assistance and encouragement to the prohibited activities. For nuclear armed states joining the treaty, it provides for a time-bound framework for negotiations leading to the verified and irreversible elimination of its nuclear weapons programme. A mandate adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 23 December 2016 scheduled two sessions for negotiations: 27 to 31 March and from 15 June to 7 July, 2017. The treaty passed on schedule on 7 July with 122 in favour, 1 against (Netherlands), and 1 official abstention (Singapore). 69 nations did not vote, among them all of the nuclear weapon states and all NATO members except the Netherlands:

China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Israel, and NATO member nuclear weapons sharing states (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey)

The Pentagon knows that America most serious enemy is climate change not China or Russia or terror. Assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons first, that means our real enemy is the endless war we’re waging against Planet Earth. The U.S. military is also a major consumer of fossil fuels and therefore a significant driver of climate change. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, like any enormously powerful system, only wants to grow more so, but what’s welfare for the military brass isn’t wellness for the planet.

There is, unfortunately, only one Planet Earth. In other words, in waging endless war, Americans are also, in effect, mutinying against the planet. In the process, they are spoiling the last, best hope of earth: a concerted and pacific effort to meet the shared challenges of a rapidly warming and changing planet. No country should be allowed to threatened the world with its nuclear military weapons and equipment. What’s the best strategy for our species survival: killing each other while ignoring that global warming is happening critically today, and that the Earth natural resources and ecosystems are near increasingly compromised or destroyed.

Today the world spends almost two trillion dollars ( $ 2,000,000,000,000) every year on armaments. This vast river of money, almost too large to be imagined, is the “devil's dynamo” driving the institution of war. Politicians notoriously can be bought with a tiny fraction of this enormous amount; hence the decay of democracy. It is also plain that if the almost unbelievable sums now wasted on armaments were used constructively, most of the pressing problems now facing humanity could be solved. Because the world spends almost two thousand billion dollars each year on armaments, it follows that very many people make their living from war. This is the reason why it is correct to speak of war as an institution, and why it persists, although we know that it is the cause of much of the suffering that inflicts humanity, and that we live under the constant threat of an all-destroying thermonuclear war.

Money from wealthy oligarchs in military-industrial  complexes buys the propaganda of the mass media and the votes of politicians. Numbed by the propaganda, citizens allow politicians to vote for obscenely bloated military budgets, the oligarchs are further enriched, and thus the circular flow of money continues. Excessive economic inequality is at the root of the problem of war, as well as the loss of our democratic institutions.

What can we do to avoid this crisis, or at least to reduce its severity? We must urgently address the problem of climate change; and we must shift money from military expenditure to the support of birth control programs and agricultural research. We must also replace the institution of war by a system of effective global governance and enforcible international laws. Let us activate the Global Civilizational State leadership in dealing with global issues.

So why do America’s disastrous wars persist? Many reasons, some obvious and easy to understand, like the endless pursuit of profit through weapons sales for those very wars, and some more subtle but no less significant, like a deep-seated convictionin Washington that a willingness to wage war is a sign of national toughness and seriousness. Addicted to it, which is true enough, but here are five additional reasons for war’s enduring presence in American life:

1. The delusional idea that Americans are, by nature, winners and that our wars are therefore winnable: No American leader wants to be labeled a "loser." Meanwhile, conflicts such as the Afghan War, now in its 18th year, with several more years, or even generations, to go, continue to be treated by the military as if they were indeed winnable, even though they visibly aren’t. No president, Republican or Democrat, not even Donald J. Trump, despite his promises that American soldiers will be coming home from such fiascos, has successfully resisted the Pentagon’s siren call for patience, and for yet more trillions of dollars, in the cause of ultimate victory, however poorly defined, far fetched, or far-off.

2. American society’s almost complete isolation from war's deadly effects: We’re not being droned. Our cities are not yet lying in ruins, though they’re certainly suffering from a lack of funding, as is our most essential infra structure, thanks in part to the cost of those over seas wars. It’s nonetheless remarkable how little attention, either in the media or elsewhere, this country’s never-ending war-making gets here.

3. Unnecessary and sweeping secrecy: How can you resist what you essentially don’t know about? Learning its lesson from the Vietnam War, the Pentagon now classifies, in plain speak covers up, the worst aspects of its disastrous wars. This isn’t because the enemy could exploit such details, the enemy already knows, but because the American people might be roused to something like anger and action by it. Principled whistle blowers like Chelsea Manning have been imprisoned orother wise dismissed or, in the case of Edward Snowden, pursued and indicted for sharing honest details about the calamitous Iraq War and America’s invasive and intrusive surveillance state. In the process, a clear message of intimidation has been sent to other would-be truth-tellers.

4. An unrepresentative government: a very long time ago Congress ceded to the presidency most of its constitutional powers when it comes to making war. Still, despite recent attempts to end America’s arms-dealing role in the genocidal Saudi war in Yemen, overridden by Donald Trump’s veto power, America’s duly elected representatives generally don’t represent the people when it comes to this country’s disastrous wars. They are, to put it bluntly, largely captives of, and sometimes on leaving politics quite literally go to work for, the military-industrial complex. As long as money is speech, the weapons makers are always likely to be able to shout louder in Congress than you and I ever will.

5. America is a remarkably insular nation and suffer from a serious empathy gap when it comes to understanding foreign cultures and peoples or what we’re actually doing to them. Wherever we go, there we are, eating our big burgers, driving our big trucks, wielding our big guns, and dropping our very big bombs. But what those bombs do, whom they hurt or kill, whom they displace from their homes and lives, these are things that Americans turn out to care remarkably little about.

Tipping Points, paths to extinction on our planet.

The climate system is approaching a tipping point, a threshold beyond which rapid and irreversible changes will occur. This will create a cascade of devastating effects. There are already signs tipping points have been reached. For example, rising Arctic temperatures have led to major ice melt, and weakened the Arctic jet stream, a powerful band of westerly winds.

Together Global Community has arrived at the point where only the leaves of the tree can heal the nations. We have one last chance, and a closing window of opportunity, to restore the ecosystems that humans need to both survive and thrive. We must power down, demilitarize, reject industrial ecocide, and embrace centuries of ecological restoration as the penultimate focus of human endeavors. There is a significant body of evidence that human extinction is now imminent; that is, it will occur within the next few decades. There is also a significant body of evidence that human extinction is now inevitable; that is, it cannot be prevented no matter what we do.

There are at least three distinct paths or tipping points to imminent (that is, within five years) human extinction: nuclear war (possibly started regionally), biodiversity collapse (already well advanced and teetering on the brink), and the climate catastrophe. Needless to say, each of these three paths might unfold in a variety of ways. In addition, it should be noted, there are other possible paths to extinction in the near term, particularly when considered in conjunction with the three threats just mentioned. These include the cascading impacts triggered by destruction of the Amazon rainforest (which is now imminent) particularly given its critical role in the global hydrological cycle, the rapidly spreading radioactive contamination of Earth, and geoengineering for military purposes (which has been going on for decades and continues).

These interrelated threats have generated a shocking series of ‘points of no return’ (‘tipping points’) that we have already crossed, the mutually reinforcing set of negative feedback loops that we have already triggered (and which we will continue to trigger) which cannot be reversed in the short-term, as well as the ongoing synergistic impact of the various ‘extinction drivers’ (such as ongoing extinctions because dependent species have lost their resource species) we have set in motion and which cannot be halted irrespective of any remedial action we might take. Hence, taking into account all of the above factors, the prospects of averting human extinction are now remote, at best. Why has this happened? Because long-standing dysfunctional human behavior, which we have not even begun to recognize as the fundamental driver of this extinction crisis, let alone address, has now trapped us between a rock and a hard place. We are trapped by our grotesquely dysfunctional parenting and education models that mass produce individuals who are terrified, self-hating and powerless leaving them submissively obedient while unable to seek out and consider the evidence for themselves and take powerful action in response and who, as a result of being terrorized during childhood, are now addicted to chronic over-consumption to suppress their awareness of their deep and unconscious emotional pain.

Posing the ultimate threat to planetary health, climate change, a direct consequence of the human impulse to dump ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, potentially heating the planet to the breaking point, is guaranteed to generate the most brutal of all such feedback loops, or typing points. By emitting ever more carbon dioxide and other gases, humans are fundamentally altering planetary chemistry and posing an almost unimaginable threat to natural ecosystems. It is, however, becoming increasingly apparent that the more we alter the climate, the more the planet will respond in ways guaranteed to endanger human life and prosperity.

The main engine of climate change is the greenhouse effect, as all those greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere entrap ever more radiated solar heat from the Earth’s surface, raising temperatures worldwide and so altering global climate patterns. Until now, much of this added heat and carbon dioxide has been absorbed by the planet’s oceans, resulting in rising water temperatures and the increased acidification of their waters. This, in turn, has already led to the mass die-off of coral reefs, the preferred habitat of many of the fish species on which large numbers of humans rely for their sustenance and livelihoods. Just as consequential, higher ocean temperatures have provided the excess energy that has fueled many of the most destructive hurricanes of recent times, including Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Maria, Florence, and Dorian.

A warmer atmosphere can also sustain greater accumulations of moisture, making possible the prolonged downpours and catastrophic flooding being experienced in many parts of the world, including the upper Midwest in the United States. In other areas, rainfall is decreasing and heat waves are becoming more frequent and prolonged, resulting in devastating wildfires of the sort witnessed in the American West in recent years and in Australia this year.

It is, however, the potential for “non-linear” events and “tipping points” that has some climate scientists especially concerned, fearing that we now live on what might be thought of as life extinction on Earth. While many climate effects, like prolonged heat waves, will become more pronounced over time, other effects, it is now believed, will occur suddenly, with little warning, and could result in large-scale disruptions in human life (as in this coronavirus moment. Scientists are understandably cautious in discussing such possibilities, as they are harder to study than linear events like rising world temperatures. But the concern is there. Large-scale singular events (also called ‘tipping points,’ or critical thresholds) are abrupt and drastic changes in physical, ecological, or social systems brought about by the relentless rise in temperatures. Such events, pose key risks because of the potential magnitude of the consequences; the rate at which they would occur; and, depending on this rate, the limited ability of society to cope with them.

Until now, the tipping points of greatest concern to scientists have been the rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Those two massive reservoirs of ice contain the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of square miles of water. Should they melt ever more quickly with all that water flowing into neighboring oceans, a sea level rise of 20 feet or more can be expected, inundating many of the world’s most populous coastal cities and forcing billions of people to relocate. This might occur over several centuries, at least offering plenty of time for humans to adapt, but more recent research indicates that those two ice sheets are melting far more rapidly than previously believed, and so a sharp increase in sea levels can be expected well before the end of this century with catastrophic consequences for coastal communities. Two other possible tipping points with potentially far-reaching consequences: the die-off of the Amazon rain forest and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Both are already under way, reducing the survival prospects of flora and fauna in their respective habitats. As these processes gain momentum, entire ecosystems are likely to be obliterated and many species killed off, with drastic consequences for the humans who rely on them in so many ways (from food to pollination chains) for their survival. But as is always the case in such transformations, other species, perhaps insects and microorganisms highly dangerous to humans, could occupy those spaces emptied by extinction.

Climate scientists also speak of “singularities,” “non-linear events,” and “tipping points” the sudden and irreversible collapse of vital ecological systems with far-ranging, highly destructive consequences for humanity. Evidence for such tipping points is growing, for example in the unexpectedly rapid melting of the Arctic icecap. In that context, a question naturally arises: Is the coronavirus a stand-alone event, independent of any other mega-trends, or does it represent some sort of catastrophic tipping point? It will be some time before scientists can answer that question with any certainty. There are, however, good reasons to believe that this might be the case and, if so, perhaps it’s high time humanity reconsiders its relationship with nature. Arctic permafrost:  irreversible thawing and release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) with Arctic warming about  2 times bigger than  the global average (CH4 has an estimated Global Warming Potential (GWP) as low as 21 relative to the same mass of CO2 on a 100 year time-scale, but on a 20 year time scale and with aerosol impacts included it is 105). Of immediate concern is the fact that as CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing the Arctic permafrost is warming. Excessive amounts of Arctic methane will be released. Methane is much more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Human pandemics are not among potential climate-induced tipping points, but there is plenty of evidence that climate change would increase the risk of such catastrophes. This is true for several reasons. First, warmer temperatures and more moisture are conducive to the accelerated reproduction of mosquitoes, including those carrying malaria, the zika virus, and other highly infectious diseases. Such conditions were once largely confined to the tropics, but as a result of global warming, formerly temperate areas are now experiencing more tropical conditions, resulting in the territorial expansion of mosquito breeding grounds. Accordingly, malaria and zika are on the rise in areas that never previously experienced such diseases. Similarly, dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease that infects millions of people every year, is spreading especially quickly due to rising world temperatures. In the Arctic as melting permafrost steadily releases the hundreds of gigatons of methane, a greenhouse gas nearly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, stored in soil, lakes and sediment in Canada and Siberia. Scientists have also witnessed methane boiling up from underneath the Arctic Ocean, which is estimated to contain thousands of gigatons of methane.

If these methane reserves are ever fully released, the results would be cataclysmic. The extreme weather events of the past decade would be only the precursors of much more devastating storms, longer heat waves, drier droughts and nonstop wildfires. Coral reefs across the world would die, eliminating significant parts of the food chain. Glacial melting and sea level rise would flood every coastal city on the planet, home to between one-third and one-half of the world’s population, potentially drowning billions of people. At least one million of the Earth’s species would die and continent-scale portions of the world’s surface would become uninhabitable.

Moreover, Earth’s temperature would no longer be directly related to the burning of fossil fuels, making it exponentially more difficult for modern scientific techniques to contain or reverse. The only way to avert such a scenario would be to implement a scientifically planned global restructuring of the world’s energy industry to transition from a reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy. This in turn would involve a transformation on the same scale of transportation, logistics, agriculture and ultimately society as a whole. Such changes would necessarily cut across national boundaries, corporate profits and national security interests, all of which are features of capitalism: the division of the world into rival nation-states and the subordination of economic life to the accumulation of private profit.

The only way to place the world’s productive forces on such an internationally coordinated basis is to overthrow the profit system, nation-states and capitalism. Its opposite must be established, socialism, the democratic control of the world’s productive forces by the international working class, and replace by the Global Civilizational State.