Nina-Bytes: Big Oil, Political Will and Crimes Against Humanity

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

Fossil Fuel CEOs Will Testify About Role in Climate Denial Before Congress

As announced yesterday, Congress is hauling in the CEO's of four major oil companies, and two powerful lobby groups, to testify (presumably under oath) before the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Environment. The group, which includes executives from ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell Oil, the American Petroleum Institute, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will specifically face questions about the industry's role in supporting climate change denial. The hearing, which is scheduled for October 28th, probably wouldn't have happened without the threat of a potential subpoena; although subcommittee chair Ro Khanna was too polite to do more than imply as much in the media. The obvious question here however is, what exactly is Congress hoping to learn?

Did Big Oil collectively lie about fossil fuels and climate crisis? Unquestionably, yes! We've caught them doing so. Did these same companies fund climate science denial propaganda? Absolutely! Once again, we caught them red-handed. Furthermore, none of this is new information; I was reading about it myself in books like Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate" in 2014, and Oreskes and Conway's "Merchants of Doubt" way back in 2010. Frankly, these people have never stopped lying about fossil fuels and climate crisis! The fact that these executives and their predecessors are not already in prison for what amounts to mass murder, is one of the most galling injustices of our time.

If you're asking me in a vacuum whether it's better to have these hearings, or to not have them, when discussing the objectively genocidal activities of oil executives over the past five decades, my answer is that having them is better than nothing. As many in the media have already noted, there are significant potential parallels between this situation and the 1994 Congressional hearings that ultimately brought Big Tobacco down to size; or at least into court, to get sued. Maybe someone talks too much. Maybe someone gets caught spouting obvious lies under oath. I'm not so cynical I'd pass up a chance to fuck with Big Oil and see if they panic. But I'm not getting my hopes up either.

The reality here is that we already know who is responsible for the climate crisis. We already know fossil fuel companies knew what they were doing. We know they purposely mislead and deceived the public. Even if nobody in power will admit it, we know they're responsible for the deaths of millions already; with perhaps billions more on the horizon. There's no mystery here for the subcommittee to solve; no secret to expose on live TV. It's not a lack of knowledge preventing society from holding these folks accountable, it's a question of money, power, and political will.

Let's be very clear now. We don't need a hearing, we need to start making arrests; and Ro Khanna doesn't have the power to make that happen. These folks have openly destroyed the world with absolute impunity for forty years; telling obvious and outrageous lies to protect their profits. It's not a secret, everyone, including everyone in government knows; yet they're allowed to continue unmolested. That isn't going to change because of this hearing. Until oil executives start going to jail for what they've done, there's no reason to expect anything to change at all.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

In the Aggregate: A Neofeudalist Dystopia on NIDC

 

Editor’s Note: as of now, In the Aggregate is a regular round-up feature on NIDC, that showcases and expands on my social media analysis from around the web.

Gimme One With Everything

Whelp; in terms of my private war against arbitrary publishing deadlines, it's been a week of ups and downs so far.

Unfortunately, a frustrating tech fail yesterday morning left me without a mid-week essay to publish. Fortunately, I'm so extremely online I was able to make lemonade out of analysis I haven't shared on ninaillingworth.com yet. Combining original material, with most of my recent blogging, and polished highlights from all of my various social media feeds, this epic edition of In the Aggregate should feel like we're hanging out and watching the news together. Whether that cool, or a horrifying nightmare, is a question I'll leave to the historians. Check it out today on NIDC.

"What the liberal establishment refuses to accept is that America has always embraced the same foundational principles this fascist movement is built on. Slavery, genocide, extraction, exploitation, rigid social hierarchies, virulent anti-communism, the national security state; these too are the legacies of American democracy and values. Just because the punditry refuses to acknowledge these truths, doesn’t mean they aren’t real."

To read more over on ninaillingworth.com, click on the quotation block above, or the header below:

In the Aggregate: A Neofeudalist Dystopia 

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Nina-Bytes: Class War, Inequity, and the Rise of Neofeudalism

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 11th, 2021 over on our Facebook page.

As Americans Demand Tax Reforms, Analysis Finds Top 1% Hold More Wealth Than Whole Middle Class

Look, I hate to keep beating this same drum here, but there’s a reason I loathe rich people and it sure ain’t envy. In this Common Dreams article, Brett Wilkins talks about a recent Bloomberg report revealing that Americans in the top 1% have more wealth than the entire middle class; these are of course the same Americans funneling cash into dark money groups to stop moderate tax reforms in the U.S. as we speak. Even setting aside the somewhat arbitrary and politically disempowering way the “middle class” is defined here, the federal data shows that 1.3 million U.S. households (making 500K or more) now have more wealth than the 77.8 million families in the middle 60% of income tiers.

As the article details, the super-rich are currently beating the “middle class” (which includes plenty of affluent people as the maximum income rate for this definition is 141K a year) 27% to 26.6% in terms of national wealth share. This represents a stark departure some similar figures released as recently as 1990, when the super-rich controlled roughly 17% of national wealth, to the middle-classes 36%. Please keep in mind that while this economists definition of the middle class does include people making as little as 27K a year, it does not include anyone our society is prepared to call “poor.”

What I don’t think really comes across in this article however, is how absolutely unprecedented this situation is in the history of the Pig Empire. Everyone knows that the so-called Gilded Age was an era of vast inequity, robber barons, and open corruption by a complicit political class under the influence of monopoly power and its rivulets of cash. What most people don’t seem to realize however is that the levels of financial inequity and open corruption in our very own society have long surpassed anything from the Roaring Twenties.

Indeed, as I have posited elsewhere, we’re approaching a point where this level of inequity is fueling a new, and yet disturbingly familiar form of capitalism I’ve taken to calling “neofeudalism.” The rich have captured enough wealth and political influence to transform our whole society into a machine whose entire purpose is funneling even more wealth and power into their greedy fingers; even at the cost of all life on earth. Given that this is still capitalism, this wealth is obviously being taken from everyonebeneath them on the socioeconomic ladder; as the numbers we just looked at demonstrate.

This fusion of money power and control of the state has now locked the whole of society into a parasitic relationship that resembles landed lords and serfs from the darkest ages of European feudalism, and there’s no indication the rich have plans to stop the machine anytime soon. The class war may not look any different on the ground, but the moneyed interests we’re battling against today are armed with more power and influence than ever before; which is allowing them to rig our governments to serve them, and snatch the wealth of a broader and broader swath of our society.

It’s a slaughter alright; but the fattest pigs are running the abattoir and everyone who isn’t with them, is next on the chopping block.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Six Things I Think: Reconciliation and the Dirty Pair on NIDC

 

Editor’s note: Six Things I Think is an ongoing political media deconstruction and analysis series, featured on NIDC.

Fan Fiction for Lanyards in a Model Modern Oligarchy

Well folks, I finally did it; I wrote a full length essay for the first time since I was forced to stop working and manage my long covid symptoms. In today's edition of Six Things I Think, I'm conducting an in-depth investigation into a riddle nobody outside of the Beltway was struggling to solve: "why can't Democrats pass the reconciliation bill?!" 

The answer is of course, because rich people don't want them to; but don't tell that to the Manchinologists and Sinema-Whisperers in Beltway media! We've got budget reconciliation, greasy dark money, the Kochtopus, and two Democrat Senators who owe their souls to the company store, today on NIDC.

"At this point, I’m convinced Sinema is actually some type of human thought experiment designed to measure how long corporate cash donations alone can animate a terminal political career. Loathed by nearly every human who’s ever met her, the Arizona Senator has recently taken to cowering in the bathroom to avoid having to face her constituents."  

To check it out over on ninaillingworth.com, click on the quotation block above, or the header below:

Six Things I Think: Reconciliation and the Dirty Pair 

 

 nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Nina-Bytes: A Fascist Cult of Useful Crackpots

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 6th, 2021 over on our Facebook page.

French child kidnap plot shows global sway of QAnon style

One of the most frustrating things about the vast majority of mainstream media reporting on Q-Anon is the liberal establishment’s general inability to accept the movement for what it is – a fascist conspiracy cult that has gone completely global. More specifically, it’s a globalized fascist conspiracy cult that works by blending all the other reactionary conspiracy theories into one, and then conveniently aligning believers with far right, objectively fascist politicians, parties, and political organizations. 

The fact is that while believers in the cult may not always perceive themselves as acting politically, the conductors marshalling the cult are explicitly political in nature. Therefore, it does no good to approach Q-Anon as a grift, because it literally doesn’t matter if the freaks pushing these conspiracies into the mainstream are true believers or not. What matters is that they’re able to draw on a massive, preexisting undercurrent of people motivated by anger, reaction, and bugsh*t conspiracy writings, and then point those people at the enemies of the would-be fascist order. In some ways this makes Q-Anon almost something of a “rent-a-mob” organization, to be summoned and deployed by more organized fascists – both in politics and in the streets.

Of course, linking and empowering these folks has a cost, usually paid in crime, violence, and sometimes human lives, but generally it’s not the rich nazis paying it, so they don’t care. Indeed, one might argue that the blowback produced by the Q-Anon cult in and of itself works towards the fascist goal of destabilizing our faux liberal-democratic order, and creating the demand for a more authoritarian form of government. The chaos is a feature, not a bug.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Nina-Bytes: Climate Crisis, Capitalism, and Culpability

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 5th, 2021 over on our Facebook page.

World's richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam

I don't know about you, but I'm getting mighty damn tired of hearing excuses about why "we" can't collectively come together to prevent climate catastrophe; and I'm especially getting tired of hearing it from bougie ruling class muppets who're inarguably a massive part of the problem.

You can chant "we're all on this Earth together" like a mantra if you want, but the numbers don't lie. Rich people are overwhelmingly using more of our shared resources, and releasing more carbon than the entire labor class. Poor people and indigenous farmers aren't killing the planet; seventy one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 come from just one hundred corporations. And we know who the owners and controllers of those corporations are! Hell the one of the largest polluters on Earth is the United States military; does that sound like a "we" problem to you?

It's overwhelmingly the capitalist class that's causing the problem, and it's the capitalist class whose lust for endless and immediate profits that's preventing us from taking the steps necessary to save our planet, and with it potentially all life on Earth. The rich have already pillaged our collective future for filthy lucre, and now they (and their in pocket politicians) are refusing to pay for the ensuing fallout; a fallout that may well kill us all. 

This is absolutely not a "we" crisis, and we sure as sh*t aren't all in this together.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”