By Arlen Grossman/ The Big Picture Report
(1) Many Muslims hate the U.S. because we interfere in the affairs of Muslim countries
(2) In reaction to this interference, Muslim extremists fight back with terrorist tactics
(3) In reaction to the terrorist tactics, the U.S. militarily interferes in Muslim countries.
(4) Repeat steps (1) to (3)
The solution should be obvious.
The Earth, in case you haven’t noticed, is a big mess right now. All living things, humans included, are suffering the effects of a planet stressed to the breaking point.
(At the time of Jesus, there were about 200 million people on Earth.)
Consider the problems we face:
GLOBAL WARMING. Carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants are collecting in the atmosphere, trapping the sun’s heat and causing the planet to warm up. Already we are experiencing record heat (the 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1990), drought, storms and fires, and they are expected to get worse. According to the United States Global Change Research Program (which includes the Department of Defense, NASA, National Science Foundation and other government agencies): “global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced” and that “climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow.”
(In 1000 A.D. the population of the world was about 300 million.)
SPECIES LOSS. The planet is losing species faster than at any time since 65 million years ago, when the earth was believed to have been hit by an enormous asteroid. The National Wildlife Federation estimates we are losing 27,000 species a year. Dr. Richard Leakey, the famed paleontologist, believes that half of the earth’s species will vanish within one hundred years, a mass extinction that “threatens the entire complex fabric of life on Earth, including the species responsible for it: Homo sapiens.”
(By 1500, the world population was roughly 500 million.)
POVERTY. According to a World Bank study, more than half the people in the world live on less than $2.50 a day. More than half of the world’s nations cannot grow or import enough food to adequately feed their population. One-third of all deaths around the world, according to UNICEF, including 22,000 children a day, are a result of poverty.
(By 1800, the world population reached nearly one billion.)
POLLUTION. About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, according to a 2007 Cornell research study. With 1.2 billion people lacking clean water, the World Health Organization estimates 3.4 million people a year, mostly children, die from water-related disease. According to the WHO, another seven million people every year die from air pollution.
(By 1850, the population of the world grew to about 1,200,000,000.)
WATER SHORTAGES. More than 1 billion people are currently living without clean drinking water. The World Bank reports that 80 countries now have water shortages that threaten health and economies. By 2030, nearly half of the world’s people will be living in areas of acute water shortage, according to a U.N. report.
(By 1900, the world’s population rose to about 1,600,000,000.)
LOSS OF RAINFORESTS. We are swiftly losing the one of the Earth’s most important ecosystems. Experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson called the depletion of rain forest areas “the greatest extinction since the end of the age of dinosaurs.”
(By 1950, there were over 2,500,000,000 people in the world.)
These are just some of the serious problems fouling the environment and ruining the health of our home planet. We haven’t even touched on many other quality of life concerns: education, medical care, traffic congestion, waste disposal, crime, war, violence, etc.
(By 1975, world population increased to over 4,000,000,000.)
What is the cause of all these societal problems and global degradation? Some readers might examine one issue at a time–global warming, water and food shortages, etc.– to look at causes and solutions. Some may think they can find answers by reading between the lines. In this brief essay, more astute readers merely need to read between the paragraphs in this essay to recognize a major contributor to all these problems.
(In 2011, world population reached 7,000,000,000.)
It shouldn’t be hard to grasp, but for too many it is: humans have been and will continue proliferating at a far faster pace than the Earth can handle. When the consequences of overpopulation are widely understood–and when human impact is acknowledged and resistance to population control overcome–only then can we begin reversing this dangerous course. Only then will there be a realistic hope of healing and saving the only planet we have. The longer we wait, the harsher the consequences.
(By 2050, the population of the world is expected to be about 9,300,000,000.)
Also published at OpEdNews, June 21, 2014
(This is a revised and updated version of my essay first published in The Big Picture Report and OpEd News in 2011.)
In a national radio address on February 23, 1934, Huey Long unveiled his “Share Our Wealth” plan, a program designed to provide a decent standard of living to all Americans by spreading the nation’s wealth among the people.
Long proposed capping personal fortunes at $50 million each (roughly $600 million in today’s dollars) through a restructured, progressive federal tax code and sharing the resulting revenue with the public through government benefits and public works. In subsequent speeches and writings, he revised his graduated tax levy on wealth over $1 million to cap fortunes at $5 – $8 million (or $60 – $96 million today).
The full text of this speech, as printed in Long’s official Share Our Wealth pamphlet appears below.
Radio Address by Senator Huey P. Long, of Louisiana, February 23, 1934
Is that a right of life when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120,000,000 people?”
Ladies and Gentlemen: —
I have only 30 minutes in which to speak to you this evening, and I, therefore, will not be able to discuss in detail so much as I can write when I have all of the time and space that is allowed me for the subjects, but I will undertake to sketch them very briefly without manuscript or preparation, so that you can understand them so well as I can tell them to you tonight.
I contend, my friends, that we have no difficult problem to solve in America, and that is the view of nearly everyone with whom I have discussed the matter here in Washington and elsewhere throughout the United States—that we have no very difficult problem to solve.
It is not the difficulty of the problem which we have; it is the fact that the rich people of this country—and by rich people I mean the super-rich—will not allow us to solve the problems, or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people.
We have a marvelous love for this Government of ours; in fact, it is almost a religion, and it is well that it should be, because we have a splendid form of government and we have a splendid set of laws. We have everything here that we need, except that we have neglected the fundamentals upon which the American Government was principally predicated.
How many of you remember the first thing that the Declaration of Independence said? It said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that there are certain inalienable rights for the people, and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and it said further, “We hold the view that all men are created equal.”
Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all men are created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10,000,000,000 and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing?
Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children’s children could ever dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?
That was not the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that all men are created equal or “That we hold that all men are created equal.”
Nor was it the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that they held that there were certain rights that were inalienable—the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Is that right of life, my friends, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it by 120,000,000 people?
Is that, my friends, giving them a fair shake of the dice or anything like the inalienable right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or anything resembling the fact that all people are created equal; when we have today in America thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of children on the verge of starvation in a land that is overflowing with too much to eat and too much to wear?
I do not think you will contend that, and I do not think for a moment that they will contend it.
Now let us see if we cannot return this Government to the Declaration of Independence and see if we are going to do anything regarding it. Why should we hesitate or why should we quibble or why should we quarrel with one another to find out what the difficulty is, when we know that the Lord told us what the difficulty is, and Moses wrote it out so a blind man could see it, then Jesus told us all about it, and it was later written in the Book of James, where everyone could read it?
(CONTINUED-READ THE ENTIRE SPEECH HERE)
The Vimeo video of Snowden’s interview that I posted has already disappeared. So far there is a link in the article that I posted that you can go to in order to see the video.http://benswann.com/media-blacks-out-new-snowden-interview-the-government-doesnt-want-you-to-see/ We’ll see if that one lasts. —BPR Editor
Last Sunday, former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden was interviewed for the German television network ARD. The interview was big news in Germany and much of the world in both print and broadcast media. However, the interview appears to have been blocked intentionally by US government authorities. In fact, the media in the US appears to have gone to ‘radio silence’ about it. It has been posted on YouTube several times, but is taken down almost immediately. The video site Vimeo has it embedded, but as I write this, Vimeo is under a DDoS attack. LiveLeak also has it, and that video is embedded in this report by Jay Syrmopoulos for Ben Swann’s news page.
Mr. Snowden spoke candidly in a thirty-minute English language interview with the reporter from ARD.
He says his “breaking point” was “seeing Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress.” That was when Clapper denied the existence of a domestic spying programs when he testified before Congress in March of last year. Snowden added, “The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public.”
In case Ben Swann’s page is taken down, along with the LiveLeak video, here is the interview (above) on Vimeo. Offered without commentary, since Edward Snowden can speak for himself.
Two politicians who apparently represent different planets……
Today, a federal appeals court handed over control of free speech on the Internet to a handful of companies. This is why it matters.
—
Say you’re an NRA Republican. You’re from Tennessee. The websites you go to on a daily basis are Yahoo for your email and news, ESPN for your sports, and TNGunOwners.com, a message board to talk about your day at the range.
What if one day your access to your email is fine, your Tim Tebow coverage from ESPN is as loud as ever, and TNGunOwners.com inexplicably took 4-to-6 times longer to load? What if you called your Internet service provider and their answer was, “That’s just the way it is now”?
Say you’re a Whole Foods-pillagin’ Democrat. You’re from Portland. You go to GMail for your email, MSNBC for your news, Reddit for your cat videos, and an indie music blog likeSaid The Gramophone to find your music.
One day, your access to Gmail is fine, your Rachel Maddow clips are coming in clear as day, and that YouTube video of a cat taking a bath on Reddit is rolling along smoothly. But it takes so long to load one song from that indie music blog you just turn on the radio.
Say you’re entirely apolitical. It doesn’t matter where you live. You’re struggling with depression because it’s hard to cope with your mother’s recently diagnosed cancer. You go tocancerforums.net. You go to takethislife.com for help, when you can’t read the cancer forum anymore.
One day, those sites take ten times longer to load than they did before. What if you called your Internet service provider and their answer was, “Verizon now throttles bandwidth to websites from the non-Premium Tier. Would you like to upgrade?”
—
A federal appeals court ruled that the FCC can no longer enforce which websites Verizon and all other broadband providers can favor, limit access to, or outright block — even if it’s to prop up a service or website of their own.
This is not a binary political issue. It is not a Republican or Democrat issue.
This is naked corporate greed. It is a bunch of companies who want to control the largest free information platform in the world.
There is nothing good that an individual can derive from this decision. Nothing.
Before someone tells you otherwise, Internet service providers’ backs were not against the wall in any way. “Bandwidth congestion” is not real. It costs just as much money, if not more money, to cap the data flowing through your broadband connection as it does to serve it to you. Data caps are solely a money-making construct.
Average connection speeds in South Korea are twice as fast as those in the United States. That gap will grow even wider now. This ruling is anti-competitive for American business on a global level.
Tech giants Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Yahoo have come out against rulings like this in the past. Instead, the decision favors companies with access to pipelines, like Comcast. It will help them use the Internet as a marketing tool for its other ventures, like NBC Universal.
The very best scenario a consumer can hope for is this: Companies will start offering “unlimited” Internet plans to access the Internet you currently see today. The Web will be partitioned off into sections, like cable tiers, and those ISPs will offer speedier connections to certain kinds of websites if you buy into each tier.
The very worst a consumer can expect is that some information will be deemed too unsavory for public consumption, while select corporate messages can be blasted to your home at lightning speed.
This is not a political story. This is corporate greed at its most blatant and obvious.
Call a Congressman. Get a law passed. Override the better lawyers, the lobbyists, the bought Congressmen. Do the impossible. It’s the only way.
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