APPEALS TO CONSCIENCE

JEAN-PIERRE VOIRET—Currently, that is since a few years, the climate of the Mediterranean basin seems to show an increase in climate instability. Rain in North Africa ceases earlier, the desert expands, Spain, Italy and Greece are now so dry that even the rich Po valley in North Italy is showing diminishing crops. On top of this, huge forest fires devastate each summer Greece, Spain, Italy and even France. As for the countries further north, their problem is weather instability: Germany, which was shocked by huge floods in the Ahr-valley last summer, has also had forest fires like France this year.

Everybody laments climate change, but those who hope to solve these problems with such low-efficiency techniques like windmills are like children trying to stop a flood by throwing small stones in the river. The world needs real solutions, and human creativity is the solution.

DAVID GAMBLE—A common enemy unifies people. While the Yellow Vest protests have underscored the economic and financial crises of capitalism as they rally against austerity and privilege, a gasoline tax and inequities, the traumatised French population gathered en masse in unified nationalism.  They confronted the Muslim enemy, alleged radical separatism which, in some aspersions, is somehow leftist Islamo gauchisme.  What, then, is left of solidarity of the Arab working class with the general population? They have been dismissed with a word in the current rightward trend. The religious rights of Muslims need to be included. This is not limited just to Muslim students but to Arab workers who compose 3.3% of the French population.

Jimmy Dore denounces the cowardly betrayal of alternative journalism by Cenk Uygur, head of the Young Turks, and in particular Julian Assange, a man horribly persecuted by the reigning oligarchy for revealing the empire’s ugly political and war crimes. Jimmy spares no words in his public flogging of Uygur, who is now one more CIA asset repeating the agency’s dangerous falsehoods. 

ED CURTIN—While the United States has long been a hotbed for sexual scandals and media, FBI, and CIA exposure of the sexual lives of those they wish to destroy, today, when sex is a staple of the media where it is presented and discussed openly as if one were discussing another consumer product, the use of sexual blackmail and sexual muddling as a political tool of the “deep-state” propaganda apparatus is unmentionable, even as its significance is enhanced by electronic spying and the loss of privacy.

Peter Joseph is the founder of the Zeitgeist Movement, a grassroots, worldwide organization that advocates an alternative economic system based on sustainability, cooperation and human need. His most recent book, ‘The New Human Rights Movement,’ delivers a startling exposé about the violent oppression that defines our economic order, while issuing an urgent call for global activism to unite to replace it. Abby Martin sits down with Joseph to talk about the contradictions and crises of capitalism and what he advocates to save the future of the planet from catastrophe.