If we look for the source of the social pathologies increasingly evident in our culture, we find they have a common origin in the dominator relations of Empire that have survived largely intact in spite of the democratic reforms of the past two centuries. The sexism, racism, economic injustice, violence, and environmental destruction that have plagued human societies for 5,000 years, and have now brought us to the brink of a potential terminal crisis, all flow from this common source. Freeing ourselves from these pathologies depends on a common solution — replacing the underlying dominator cultures and institutions of Empire with the partnership cultures and institutions of Earth Community. Unfortunately, we cannot look to imperial power-holders to lead the way.
—David Korten
Breathing in, I see myself as still water.
Breathing out, I reflect things as they are.
Near the mountain, there is a lake with clear, still water reflecting the mountain and the sky with pristine clarity. You can do the same. If you are calm and still enough, you can reflect the mountain, the blue sky, and the moon exactly as they are. You reflect whatever you see exactly as it is, without distorting anything.
Have you ever seen yourself in a mirror that distorts the image? Your face is long, your eyes are huge, and your legs are really short. Don’t be like that mirror. It is better to be like the still water on the mountain lake.
We often do not reflect things clearly, and we suffer because of our wrong perceptions. Suppose you are walking in the twilight and see a snake. You scream and run into the house to get your friends, and all of you run outside with a flashlight. But when you shine your light on the snake, you discover that it isn’t a snake at all, just a piece of rope. This is a distorted perception.
When we see things or listen to other people, we often don’t see clearly or really listen. We see and hear our projections and our prejudices. We are not clear enough, and we have a wrong perception. Even if our friend is giving us a compliment, we may argue with him because we distort what he says.
If we are not calm, if we only listen to our hopes or our anger, we will not be able to receive the truth that is trying to reflect itself on our lake. We need to make our water still if we want to receive reality as it is. If you feel agitated, don’t do or say anything. Just breathe in and out until you are calm enough. Then ask your friend to repeat what he has said. This will avoid a lot of damage. Stillness is the foundation of understanding and insight. Stillness is strength.
The climate crisis is not a neutral storm. It is not an unfortunate accident of weather or a tragic twist of fate. It is the latest battlefield of empire — a slow, suffocating siege in which the Global South pays for the pollution of the Global North. Rising seas, burning forests, collapsing harvests, and vanishing species are not the random convulsions of nature. They are the predictable consequences of centuries of extraction, industrial greed, and colonial arrogance.
The atmosphere has become the new frontier of conquest. Climate colonialism is the silent siege of our age — a war without declarations, a violence without bullets, a domination masked as diplomacy.
The story is old, though the terrain has changed.
Once, colonial powers plundered Africa’s gold, Asia’s spices, and the Americas’ silver. They carved continents, enslaved peoples, and extracted wealth with ruthless precision. Today, they plunder the atmosphere with the same entitlement. The industrial revolution — fueled by coal, oil, and the bodies of enslaved labor — enriched Europe and North America while laying the foundations of planetary collapse.
The nations that built empires on slavery, resource extraction, and racial hierarchy now dominate climate negotiations. They dictate the terms of survival while refusing the burden of accountability. Bretton Woods institutions once imposed debt; now climate summits impose delay. The language has changed, but the logic remains: the powerful decide, the powerless endure.
Green rhetoric has become the new imperial dialect — polished, diplomatic, and pr5ofoundly dishonest.6
The climate crisis is global, but its burdens are violently unequal.
Pakistan’s floods displaced millions, though the nation contributes less than 1% of global emissions.7
The Sahel’s droughts devastate farmers who never profited from fossil fuels.8
Pacific island nations face rising seas that threaten their very existence, though they did not ignite the carbon fire.9
Mozambique, Dominica, and the Philippines rebuild again and again after storms intensified by warming oceans.10
Meanwhile, the Global North continues to burn oil, expand pipelines, and subsidize fossil corporations. Promises of “climate finance” remain unfulfilled or repackaged as loans — deepening the very debt that strangles the South.11
The South is told to adapt with crumbs while the North feasts on the profits of destruction.
Behind every statistic is a life, a family, a nation struggling to breathe.
Children in Bangladesh wade through floodwaters that swallow their schools. Mothers in Kenya watch crops wither under relentless drought. Fishermen in the Caribbean return to empty nets as coral reefs bleach and die. Families in the Andes watch glaciers — their ancestral water towers — melt into memory.13
The poor do not emit the carbon that drives catastrophe, yet they inhale its consequences. Climate colonialism ensures that those least responsible suffer the most.
This is not misfortune. It is injustice.
Empire adapts. Its tools evolve, but its intentions remain unchanged.
Carbon markets commodify the atmosphere, turning the sky into a trading floor.Greenwashing disguises destruction as sustainability, allowing corporations to pollute while posing as saviors.
Climate debt forces nations to borrow for disasters they did not cause, deepening dependency.
Geoengineering schemes threaten to weaponize the sky, allowing powerful nations to manipulate weather under the guise of “innovation.”
Land grabs for “green energy” displace Indigenous communities, repeating the oldest colonial script.
The cycle repeats with chilling precision: extraction → pollution → catastrophe → debt → control.
Climate colonialism is not about saving the planet. It is about preserving empire’s privilege.
May the climate crisis be named not as fate but as injustice. May the polluters be held accountable, and the victims restored. May the atmosphere be freed from commodification, and the earth from extraction. May every human breathe clean air, drink pure water, and eat from fertile soil. May the world awaken to the truth that climate justice is not charity — it is reparations, restoration, and the rebirth of global dignity.
Let justice roll down like waters and let the whole earth breathe again.
Source: Mother Jones
During the 2024 presidential campaign, a conservative playbook emerged. Created by the Heritage Foundation, this 900-plus-page document was a roadmap written for a future conservative president. And while some Republicans tried to distance themselves from Project 2025, the authors and the concepts they wrote about have been embraced by President Donald Trump.
Journalist David A. Graham did a deep dive analyzing the pages for his book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America. “I think at the heart of all of this is they want this Christian, conservative vision of society, and the way that they wanna achieve that is by dismantling many of the institutions of government as we know them,” he says.
Source: Salon
None of what we have seen over the past few weeks — not the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of federal officers, the seizure of children by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, the callous disregard of civil rights and liberties from an increasingly authoritarian administration — is supposed to be happening in America. But it is.
American citizens are being arrested and brutalized for exercising their constitutional rights — recording ICE, standing nearby or simply being the “wrong” color in the wrong place. The Trump administration has labeled these Americans “domestic terrorists,” claiming they posed existential threats to heavily armed federal agents, despite clear video evidence to the contrary. Immigrants are hiding, afraid to go outside. Entire neighborhoods and communities are under siege. Even though it’s only January, at least eight people have died from their encounters with ICE.
The cognitive dissonance is dizzying. Disorientation is one of the authoritarian leader’s most powerful weapons.
The cognitive dissonance is dizzying. Disorientation is one of the authoritarian leader’s most powerful weapons.
Hours after Pretti was killed on Jan. 24, hundreds of people protested near the site in Minneapolis where he died. There, an older white woman told a reporter that “the government is not supposed to be doing these horrible things to the American people. It is unbelievable. This is something like Nazi Germany or Russia.”
I yelled at the television. “What d**n country do you live in?”
But her sentiments are common among people who are gathering at protests, community meetings and town halls all across the country.
Like many other white Americans, and too many Black and brown Americans, she seemed willfully ignorant of her own country’s history, which includes genocide and land theft against First Nations; white-on-Black chattel slavery; Jim and Jane Crow; the Black Codes; the Red Scare; violent social and political repression of LGBTQ Americans; the Palmer Raids; mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, to name just a few examples.
And then there is the language. When many protesters insist that “regular people,” “good people” and “citizens” should not be treated this way, what they often mean — consciously or not — is middle- and upper-class white people like themselves.
Historian Robin D.G. Kelley recently explained why the killings of middle-class white people like Good and Pettri by ICE and Border Patrol have provoked such widespread outrage among white Americans and “even the most seasoned organizers.”
“[Good] was a white woman and a mother — two things you’re not supposed to be when armed agents of the state put you in a body bag,” Kelley wrote. “Of course, the very idea that certain people, by virtue of their characteristics, don’t deserve to be brutalized, caged, or killed by police is the problem… Centering someone’s innocence clouds the case for abolition, which seeks to create a world where no one is caged or gunned down even if they broke the law. No matter who she was, what she looked like, her marital or citizenship status, or what she might have done in the past or even in the moment, Good had the absolute right not to be shot for driving away.”
White racial innocence, in its various forms, is exhausting for those of us on the other side of the color line. But after allowing myself a moment of exasperation with the woman on the television, I turned to the lessons of history.
The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement understood that images of those who were often referred to as “respectable white people” being beaten, arrested and even killed would move white moderates — and, crucially, white elites — to oppose Jim and Jane Crow apartheid.
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“Their simple but straightforward calculation was that Black suffering wasn’t new,” journalist Thomas Ricks wrote in “Waging a Good War,” “but white suffering was, especially when it was inflicted by Mississippi officials on middle-class college students from the North. And so [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] decided, John Lewis wrote, to bring ‘an army of Northern college students into Mississippi….If white America would not respond to the deaths of our people, the thinking went, maybe it would react to the deaths of its own children.’”
Now, 60 years later, similar images of “respectable white people” being abused by police and other law enforcement are having a powerful impact on public opinion.
Polls released in the aftermath of Good and Pretti’s killings show that a majority of Americans oppose Donald Trump’s immigration policies. According to a YouGov poll, more Americans (46%) want to abolish ICE than support it (41%). A small but growing number of Republicans also want ICE abolished or reformed with far stricter oversight.
The next step in mobilizing and movement building requires that many more white Americans who oppose the mass deportations and the Trump administration’s assault on democracy to move beyond relatively safe virtue signaling and being “allies” and embrace the role of collaborators. This means, but is not limited to, nonviolent protesting, offering refuge and other forms of aid to their immigrant neighbors, and being citizen observers and human shields like we have seen in Minneapolis and other parts of the country.
The struggle for America’s multiracial democracy needs — and has always needed — everyday white people of conscience who are prepared to make good trouble.
If I could talk to the older white woman I saw being interviewed — who appears to be what my grandmother and other elders would describe as “good white people” — I would tell her that she was in love with a country that never really existed but that she truly thought was real. Now is the time for her and others like her to broaden their lenses and accept our new reality. What is happening now to white people like her has been the norm for Black, brown and other marginalized communities throughout American history. This is the moment for us to lean into solidarity — to learn from our shared history of struggling for a better society and democracy on both sides of the color line.
A white freedom rider — a real American hero, though he would never use that language — once told me that he decided to join the Civil Rights Movement after asking himself a basic question: What type of white person do I want to be? More importantly, what type of human being do I want to be?
As Trump’s authoritarian vise continues to tighten, Americans on both sides of the color line will be forced to answer that question.
0:00 – Intro 2:05 – Why Susan went to Gaza 6:15 – Gaza as the future of humanity 10:42 – The psychology of helplessness & control...
