Prophet or madman?

Probably both.

Michael C. Ruppert was forced to leave the LAPD after claiming that the CIA was complicit in selling drugs across America, and he quickly became one of the most original and strident voices to talk about climate change, government corruption, and peak oil through his website, “From the Wilderness.”

Following the release of Collapse, Michael’s personal life underwent something of a collapse itself and he paid off all his debts, left behind all his friends, and moved with his dog Rags to Colorado, planning to commit suicide.

VICE caught up with Michael in the middle of the epic beauty of the Rocky Mountains at the end of last year. We found a man undergoing a spiritual rebirth—still passionate about the world and with a whole new set of apocalyptic issues to talk about.

Apocalypse, Man is an intimate portrait of a man convinced of the imminent collapse of the world, but with answers to how the human spirit can survive the impending apocalypse.

APOCALYPSE, MAN – PART 1

The post COLLAPSE appeared first on EcoHustler.

Given the perennial problem of increasing population growth compounded by increasing consumption I don’t need to be convinced, I wanted to more rapidly get into exploring the post-growth world.

Heinberg has to be thorough because he remains a marginalized voice drowned out against the braying of politicians and media who perennially obsess over increasing growth even as the impossibility is writ large in the world around us.

Heinberg laments that governments want to return us to “a life of carefree motoring through anonymous suburbs” even whilst every day that passes and every gallon of fuel burnt is wasted if it is not preparing us for Peak Everything; the steady decline in supply of the nutrients of the conventional economy.

From now on, to maintain and improve our quality of life, we need to be able to take care of ourselves and our loved ones without depending on mega-corps shifting the fundamentals of life (energy, food, water) around in the giant mechanical web of fossil burning machines which has, for this brief moment in history, become ubiquitous.

Heinberg demonstrates that investing now in renewable energy, low carbon food production, and local resilience could avoid catastrophe but acknowledges that governments and business, trapped in short-term planning cycles, may drive ‘business-as-usual’ over the precipice of collapse. This is why he wrote the book “to prepare individuals and communities for what is coming”.

The job of the informed minority is to have the tools, knowledge and seed ready to enable survival once our centralized, fossil fuel infrastructure splutters to a halt, and yet grass-roots, pre-emptive action should surely spread.

“The end of economic growth does not necessarily mean we’ve reached the end of qualitative improvements in human life.” Indeed, according to Heinberg the single most important thing any of us can do to prepare is to go and meet our neighbors “the people you may need to depend on”. This is also one of the easiest and most successful actions we can take to improve our well being. The number of neighbours we know is closely correlated to our happiness levels.

Heinberg cautions early on that his message may be bleak and yet I relished the realism and found hope in the later sections. At a time of ubiquitous debt, surging unemployment, slashed social welfare, and when nature’s agonies are muffled only by dismal and desperate, endless and empty calls for more; problems whose solutions require restraint, community building and a recalibration of quantity over quality my turn out not to be problems at all. Our planet is beautiful but limited couldn’t our economy be the same?

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The post The End of Growth – Review appeared first on EcoHustler.

How much information do we need? The ‘global financial crisis’ has been revealed to be a scam to pass huge amounts of public money to banks. The super-rich just got richer, they smuggled £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth into offshore accounts – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together.

Meanwhile, a devastating article published June 6 in the science journal Nature cites 100 papers in summarising what’s known about environmental tipping points. In “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere,” they put forward evidence that the entire global ecosystem could flip rapidly to a new state with devastating ramifications for billions of people.

Not only are national governments failing to take action, they still work on behalf of (and subsidise) the gargantuan fossil fuel companies who are committed to transferring as much carbon from the ground into the atmosphere as possible. They diffuse the carbon to concentrate their wealth and the public pays for the pollution. Bill McKibben writes: “Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.”

McKibben goes on to argue that the only force powerful enough to stop the planet destroyers at the helms of these behemoths is widespread moral outrage transformed into a campaign of disinvestment. This worked in the 1980s campaign to stop apartheid by demanding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa. It could work again now if we take enough money away from the corporations committing ecocide. A key part of the anti-apartheid campaign was an alliance of artists making potent music.

ADBUSTERS TACTICAL BRIEFING #36 – The Strategic Pincer

The post Revolutionary Situation appeared first on EcoHustler.

We will not return to ‘business as usual’.

The Four Horsemen is an independent feature documentary which lifts the lid on how the world really works.

Website: fourhorsemenfilm.com
#FourHorsemenFilm

Directed By: Ross Ashcroft

UK Release 15th March

Featuring: Noam Chomsky, Max Keiser, Joseph Stiglitz, Prof. Herman Daly, Dr. Ha-Joon Chang, Simon Johnson, Michael Hudson, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, John Perkins, Tarek Al Diwany, Camila Batmanghelidjh, James Turk, David Morgan, Hugo Salinas Price and more…

The post Four Horsemen – Official Trailer appeared first on EcoHustler.

Power by West sampled remix.

[At the big conclave/street gang meeting, Cyrus, the boss of the street gang appears]

Cyrus: [yelling] Can you count, suckers? I say, the future is ours… if you can count!
[a couple of soldiers cheer for Cyrus]

Cyrus: Now, look what we have here before us. We got the Saracens sitting next to the Jones Street Boys. We’ve got the Moonrunners right by the Van Cortlandt Rangers. Nobody is wasting nobody. That… is a miracle. And miracles is the way things ought to be.

[Few more soldiers cheering for Cyrus]

Cyrus: You’re standing right now with nine delegates from 100 gangs. And there’s over a hundred more. That’s 20,000 hardcore members. Forty-thousand, counting affiliates, and twenty-thousand more, not organized, but ready to fight: 60,000 soldiers! Now, there ain’t but 20,000 police in the whole town. Can you dig it?

Gang Members: Yeah.

Cyrus: Can you dig it?
Gang Members: Yeah!
Cyrus: Can you dig it?

Gang Members: YEAH!

[shouting and Cheering]

Cyrus: Now, here’s the sum total: One gang could run this city! One gang. Nothing would move without us allowing it to happen. We could tax the crime syndicates, the police, because WE got the streets, suckers! Can you dig it?
Gang Members: YEAH!
[shouting and Cheering]

Cyrus: The problem in the past has been the man turning us against one another. We have been unable to see the truth, because we have fighting for ten square feet of ground, our turf, our little piece of turf. That’s crap, brothers! The turf is ours by right, because it’s our turn. All we have to do is keep up the general truce. We take over one borough at a time. Secure our territory… secure our turf… because it’s all our turf!

The post Anarchy, Can you dig it? appeared first on EcoHustler.

Gasoline Dreams

OutKast -(ft. khujo go)
Song: Gasoline Dreams (Track 2)
Album: Stankonia (2000)

Alright
Alright
Alright

Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline?
Well burn motherfucka burn American dreams
Don’t everybody like the taste of apple pie?
We’ll snap for your slice of life I’m tellin’ ya why?
I hear that mother nature’s now on birth control
The coldest pimp be looking for somebody to hold
The highway up to Heaven got a crook on the toll
Youth full of fire ain’t got nowhere to go, nowhere to go

All of my heroes did dope
Every nigga round me playin’ married
Or payin’ child support
I can’t cope
Never made no sense to me one day I hope it will
And that’s that, sport, sport

Pray I live to see the day when seven’s happily married
With kids, woe woe
The world is movin’ fast and I’m losin’ my balance
No time to dig, low, low
To a place where ain’t nowhere to go but up
Ya wit me say shit, sho sho
Now let me ask y’all this

Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline?
Well burn motherfucka burn American dreams
Don’t everybody like the taste of apple pie?
We’ll snap for your slice of life I’m tellin’ ya why?
I hear that mother nature’s now on birth control
The coldest pimp be looking for somebody to hold
The highway up to Heaven got a crook on the toll
Youth full of fire ain’t got nowhere to go, nowhere to go

It’s shitty like Ricky Stratton got a million bucks
My cousin Ricky Walker got ten years doing fed time
On a first offense drug bust, fuck the holice
That’s if ya racist or ya crooked
Arrest me for this dope I didn’t weight it up or cook it
You gotta charge the world cause over a million people took it
Look at me, you outta your jurisdiction now ya lookin’ stupid
Officer, get off me sir
Don’t make me call L.A. he’ll have ya walking sir

A couple of months ago they gave outkast the key to the city
But I still gotta pay my taxes and they give us no pity
About the youngsters amongst us
You think they respect the law
They think they monsters, they love us, reality rappin’
And giving the youth the truth from this booth
And when we on stage we scream
Don’t everybody, everybody

Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline?
Well burn motherfucka burn American dreams
Don’t everybody like the taste of apple pie?
We’ll snap for your slice of life I’m tellin’ ya why
I hear that mother nature’s now on birth control
The coldest pimp be looking for somebody to hold
The highway up to Heaven got a crook on the toll
Youth full of fire ain’t got nowhere to go, nowhere to go

Officer of the most high you touch me you touch the apple of this eye
If they kick us out where will we go
Not to Africa ’cause not one of them acknowledge us as they kin folk
Still eatin’ pork, abomination, desecration for beating flesh
Penalty for violation is death
Woe, woe, to the man that strive with his maker on judgement day
Hip hip hooray, Mr. Reaper Babylon the great
The mother of heartless is falling, prophecy must be fulfilled
The liquor fire is calling

Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline?
Well burn motherfucka burn American dreams
Don’t everybody like the taste of apple pie?
We’ll snap for your slice of life I’m tellin’ ya why
I hear that mother nature’s now on birth control
The coldest pimp be looking for somebody to hold
The highway up to Heaven got a crook on the toll
Youth full of fire ain’t got nowhere to go, nowhere to go

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