Formed by Yasuteru Yamada, The Skilled Veterans Corps are preparing to enter the Fukushima disaster zone reports CNN. The team all veterans of the Japanese nuclear industry and all retirees all aged 60 and above intend to lend their skills to stabilise the stricken power plants.

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“We have to work instead of them,” says Yamada, referring to the estimated 1,000 workers currently at the nuclear plant. “Elders have less sensitivity to radiation. Therefore, we have to work. Kazuko Sasaki, 69, the co-founder of the group, says she has a number of personal reasons why she wants to work at the plant. “My generation, the old generation, promoted the nuclear plants. If we don’t take responsibility, who will?”

Source; CNN International

Randal Wray: Banks are bigger than in ’07, are cooking their books to show profits – need regulation and people need increase in purchasing power and jobs program to avoid bigger crash

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L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, as well as a visiting Senior Scholar at the Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. He is a past president of the Association for Institutionalist Thought (AFIT) and has served on the board of directors of the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE). A student of Hyman P. Minsky while at Washington University in St. Louis where he earned his Ph.D. in economics (1988), Wray received his B.A. in Social Sciences (1976) from the University of the Pacific, Stockton, and his M.A. in economics (1985) from Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Wray has focused on monetary theory and policy, macroeconomics, and employment policy. He is currently writing on modern money, the monetary theory of production, social security, and rising incarceration rates (Penal Keynesianism). He is developing policies to promote true full employment, focusing on Hyman P. Minsky’s “employer of last resort” proposal as a way to bring low-skilled, prime-age males back into the labor force. Wray”s research has appeared in numerous books and journals including Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Journal of Economic Issues, Review of Political Economy, Review of Social Economy, Eastern Economic Journal, Challenge, Economies et Societés, Monnaie et Production, The Economic and Labour Relations Review, The Durell Journal of Money and Banking, International Papers in Political Economy, Coyuntura Agropecuaria, Social Science Perspectives Journal, Social Justice, Commercio Exterior, Street Light, and Political Economy: Studies in Surplus Approach. Professor L. Randall Wray is the author of Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability (Elgar, 1998) and Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies (Elgar 1990).

The crisis of global capitalism is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the scale of the means of violence. We truly face a crisis of humanity. The stakes have never been higher; our very survival is at risk. We have entered into a period of great upheavals and uncertainties, of momentous changes, fraught with dangers – if also opportunities.

by William I Robinson

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5909444875088969582

Facing the crisis calls for an analysis of the capitalist system, which has undergone restructuring and transformation in recent decades. The current moment involves a qualitatively new transnational or global phase of world capitalism that can be traced back to the 1970s, and is characterised by the rise of truly transnational capital and a transnational capitalist class, or TCC. Transnational capital has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to accumulation beyond the previous epoch, and with it, to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour – and to undercut the strength of popular and working class movements around the world, in the wake of the global rebellions of the 1960s and the 1970s.

Emergent transnational capital underwent a major expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, involving hyper-accumulation through new technologies such as computers and informatics, through neo-liberal policies, and through new modalities of mobilising and exploiting the global labour force – including a massive new round of primitive accumulation, uprooting, and displacing hundreds of millions of people – especially in the third world countryside, who have become internal and transnational migrants.

As the state abandons efforts to secure legitimacy among broad swathes of the population that have been relegated to surplus – or super-exploited – labour, it resorts to a host of mechanisms of coercive exclusion: mass incarceration and prison-industrial complexes, pervasive policing, manipulation of space in new ways, highly repressive anti-immigrant legislation, and ideological campaigns aimed at seduction and passivity through petty consumption and fantasy.

Source: Global capitalism and 21st century fascism

The overall theme at the summit is ROI: Reduce our Impact…Return on Investment.

From exclusive keynote speakers to intimate roundtable discussions, the Sustainable Operations Summit provides organizations with the essential knowledge take-away that is all but absent at other industry events.

http://www.vimeo.com/14285018

Since its initial launch in 2006, the Sustainable Operations Summit has become the premier forum for leading organizations to share best practices and case studies regarding the greening of their facilities and operations.

This invitation-only event brings together key leadership from North America’s most influential organizations in both the private and public sectors to promote practices that benefit both the environment and the bottom line. The overall theme at the summit is ROI: Reduce our Impact…Return on Investment. We all realize that without documenting a true return on investment most initiatives will never get the green light! The intimate and focused format of the summit provides executives with the tools necessary to keep their green initiatives thriving through the economic downturn and take their programs to greater levels of efficiency and innovation.

Source: sustainable operations summit

The Next Frontier: Engineering the Golden Age of Green focuses on the renewable, clean energy technologies that can improve our future and create significant economic opportunities.

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Produced by Filmsight Productions. Sponsored by the Professional Engineers in California Government

http://www.vimeo.com/21984188
Mar 052011
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Will you survive the transition of human industrial civilization happening now due to peak oil and climate change?

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Can you see the forest for the trees, the earth for the dream, the universe for the seed? Anima Mundi is a film about hope, but its also a film about no hope, it’s a film about reality, from the outside looking in.

Official Anima Mundi movie trailer. Anima Mundi is a new documentary movie on Permaculture, the Gaia theory, Peak Oil survival and Climate Change (man-made or not) featuring David Holmgren (co-originator of Permaculture), John Seed (Deep Ecology), Dr Stephan Harding (Gaia Science and author of Animate Earth), Dr Vandana Shiva (Human Rights – Environment – Philosophy), Michael C Ruppert (author and political activist from the movie Collapse), Noam Chomsky (author and political activist), Michael Reynolds (from the film The Garbage Warrior), Dr Christine James (Psychology), Dr Mark O’Meadhra (Integrative Medicine) and Permablitz.

Economics Professor Richard Wolff, University of Massachusetts, for a screening of his film, “Capitalism Hits the Fan”

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YouTube Preview Image http://www.vimeo.com/8103146

Source: Capitalism Hits the Fan, DVD

Academic positions

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.

Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne).
Education

  • BA in History from Harvard College (1963);
  • MA in Economics from Stanford University (1964);
  • MA in History from Yale University (1967); and a
  • PhD in Economics from Yale University (1969)

Source: Richard Wolff

Climate Change Campaigns: Climate Deniers, Climate Traders, Climate Justice

For those choosing between the filter or the lens, assuming climate change and global warming are real, its a choice between 3 Climate Change Campaigns, 2 corporate and 1 community

  1. Climate Deniers: climate change is not real, not significant, natural and not man-made, will be good & wont hurt you, is worth the inconvenience – the Greenhouse Mafia – carbon emission consumers of producers – coal, oil, gas, automobile, agriculture
  2. Climate Traders: climate change is the single biggest problem and we can deal with it by exclusively focusing on reducing greenhouse emissions, every other problem needs to cue behind it
  3. Climate Justice: global warming and climate change are a symptom of a pathological global system that is based on violence and exploitation. Imperialism, industrial and landed fuedalism, capitalism
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Over the last decade and a half we have been subjected to two competing corporate campaigns, echoing different time-honored corporate strategies and reflecting a split within elite circles. The issue of climate change has been framed from both sides of this elite divide, giving the appearance that there are only these two sides.

Source: Corporate Climate Coup, Part 1

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The first campaign, which took shape in the late 1980’s as part of the triumphalist “globalization” offensive, sought to confront speculation about climate change head-on by denying, doubting, deriding, and dismissing distressing scientific claims which might put a damper on enthusiasm for expansive capitalist enterprise. It was modelled after and to some extent built upon the earlier campaign by the tobacco industry to sow skepticism about mounting evidence of the deleterious health-effects of smoking. In the wake of this “negative” propaganda effort, any and all critics of climate change and global warming have been immediately identified with this side of the debate.

Video Source: Corporate Climate Coup, Part 2

The second positive campaign, which emerged a decade later, in the wake of Kyoto and at the height of the anti-globalization movement, sought to get out ahead of the environmental issue by affirming it only to hijack it and turn it to corporate advantage. Modelled on a century of corporate liberal cooptation of popular reform movements and regulatory regimes, it aimed to appropriate the issue in order to moderate its political implications, thereby rendering it compatible with corporate economic, geopolitical, and ideological interests. The corporate climate campaign thus emphasized the primacy of “market-based” solutions while insisting upon uniformity and predictability in mandated rules and regulations. At the same time it hyped the global climate issue into an obsession, a totalistic preoccupation with which to divert attention from the radical challenges of the global justice movement. In the wake of this campaign, any and all opponents of the “deniers” have been identified – and, most importantly, have wittingly or unwittingly identified themselves – with the corporate climate crusaders.

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The corporate campaign has done more than merely create market opportunities for mainstream popular science writers like Flannery. By constructing an exclusively Manichean contest between mean and mindless deniers, on the one hand, and enlightened global warming advocates, on the other, it has also disposed otherwise politically-astute journalists on the left to uncharacteristic credulity. Heat, George Monbiot’s impassioned 2006 manifesto on the matter, is embarrassing in its funneled focus and its naive deference to the authority of science. “Curtailing climate change,” he declaims, “must become the project we put before all others. If we fail in this task, we fail in everything else.” “We need a cut of the magnitude science demands,” he declares; we must adopt “the position determined by science rather than the position determined by politics,” as if there was such a thing as science that was not also politics.

Climate change campaigners have no greater right to be wrong than anyone else. “If we mislead the public,” he allows, “we should expect to be exposed,” adding that “we also need to know that we are not wasting our time: there is no point in devoting your life to fighting a problem that does not exist.” Here perhaps some remnants of truth seep between the managed lines, hinting yet at the opening of another space and another moment.

Historian David Noble teaches at York University in Toronto. Canada. He is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Promised Land (2005)

Source: Corporate Climate Coup, Part 3

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