OMNI
US CAPITALISM
NEWSLETTER #22, April 2, 2015.
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
(#1 Jan. 30, 2011; #2 August 24, 2011; #3
October 2, 2011; #4 Oct. 29, 2011; #5 Jan. 29, 2012; #6 April 7, 2012; #7 June
8, 2012; #8 July 14, 2012; #9 Nov. 12, 2012; #10 Dec. 27, 2012; #11 Feb. 24,
2013; #12 April 23, 2013; #13, July 7, 2013; #14 August 28, 2013; #15, Nov. 22,
2013; #16 Feb. 18, 2014; #17, March 16, 2014; #18, May 6, 2014; #19, Sept. 12,
2014; #20, October 14, 2014; #21, Dec. 28, 2014).
What’s at stake:
We seek an economic system for all people and species that enables affirmative
government and supports domestic and international peace, economic and social
justice, human rights, democracy, and protects and enhances the earth and
species.
[For more see What’s at stake in Newsletter
#18.]
My blog: The War Department and Peace Heroes
Newsletters:
Index:
See Citizens United/McCutcheon, Class,
Corporate Crime, Corporate Personhood, Corporations, Economics, Globalization,
Go Not to Jail, Greed, Imperialism, Inequality, Information Control, Lobbying,
Marx, Military Industrial Complex, Monopoly, Occupy, Rapacity,
Regulation/Deregulation, Secrecy, Socialism, Too Big To Fail, US Economic
Imperialism, Working Class, and related topics.
Recent OMNI
Newsletters: Knowledge for Peace, Justice, Ecology Action
US Chamber of
Commerce
Bill of Rights
DAY
UN Human Rights
DAY
Vegetarian
Action
Snowden/Surveillance
Causes/Prevention
of Wars
US Capitalism Nos. 13-21 at end.
US Capitalism Newsletter #22
History of Capitalism
Steve Fraser, The New Robber
Barons | Moyers & Company ...
US Capitalism Today
Fulton, Swiss
HSBC
Boing,
Boing: Taibbi, The Divide
Resistance (but so is this all)
Venus Project
Documentary Series
Public Citizen,
Appeal to Pres. Obama
Naomi Klein, Capitalism vs. The Climate
Foster and
Clark, “Crossing the River of Fire” Review of Klein
Dick, Klein’s
Appeal for a Cooperative World Before Too Late
Ladha and Kirk,
Capitalism Is Just One Story
Pilisuk
and Rountree, The Hidden Structure of Violence
Give Us
Alternatives in Affirmative Government:
Post Office Banking
HISTORY OF CAPITALISM
Steve Fraser, The New Robber
Barons | Moyers & Company ...
billmoyers.com/episode/steve-fraser-new-robber-barons/
Bill D. Moyers
Dec 19, 2014 - Author and historian Steve Fraser has answers. ...
Web Extra: The New Robber Barons; Why Have Americans Stopped Resisting Economic ...
CAPITALISM TODAY
'Rotten Core of
Banking' Exposed: Global Outrage Follows HSBC Revelations by Common Dreams
'These bankers
are too big to fail and too big to jail, so they just keep engaging in illegal
activity.' By Deirdre Fulton, staff writer.
[A Swiss bank is also under US regulatory oversight. –D]
28 Comments
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Tuesday, February 10,
2015
Published on Monday,
February 09, 2015
"It's time
we ensured banks were working in the public's interest instead of conspiring
against us," says David Hillman of the Robin Hood Tax campaign. (Photo:
Gyver Chang/flickr/cc)
New details
about how HSBC bank helped tax evaders and money-launderers—from political
figures to celebrities to arms dealers—conceal billions of dollars in assets
have sparked international condemnation, from elected officials as well as
public interest groups around the world.
Documents
leaked by whistleblower Hervé Falciani,
who worked for HSBC, show how a Swiss division of the U.K.-headquartered bank
routinely allowed clients to withdraw bricks of cash, often in foreign
currencies of little use in Switzerland; aggressively marketed schemes likely
to enable wealthy clients to avoid European and U.S. taxes; colluded with some
clients to conceal undeclared "black" accounts from their domestic
tax authorities; and provided accounts to international criminals, corrupt businessmen,
and other high-risk individuals.
"These
bankers are too big to fail and too big to jail, so they just keep engaging in
illegal activity." —James Henry,
Tax Justice Network
"This
exposes once again the rotten core of banking—it would be shocking if it weren't
for the frequency with which we hear of such scandals," said David
Hillman, spokesperson for the U.K.-based Robin Hood Tax campaign. "It
shows a sector not content with dodging its own obligations, but also conniving
to help the richest people shirk their responsibilities to society as
well."
"It's
clear our...approach to the banking sector is wholly inadequate," Hillman
continued. "It's time we ensured banks were working in the public's
interest instead of conspiring against us."
James Henry,
former chief economist at the international consultancy firm McKinsey & Co.
and now senior adviser with the U.K.'s Tax Justice Network, noted that HSBC got
hit with a $1.9 billion fine for sanctions-busting and money-laundering in
2012, "but only a $12 million fine from the SEC related to this tax
dodging." Regardless, such fines do little to change systemic corruption,
he said.
"These
bankers are too big to fail and too big to jail, so they just keep engaging in
illegal activity," Henry declared. "There’s a widespread pattern of
using fines to penalize the top 20
global big banks—$247 billion since 1998, for 655 separate major infractions
of all kinds. But they just pass along the costs and continue with business as
usual, with client secrecy preserved. It’s
like a criminal syndicate."
In the U.S.,
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) called on the federal government to explain
"its actions—or lack thereof—upon learning of these allegations in
2010." The Guardian established
that the leaked data was shared with U.S. regulators five years ago.
Meanwhile, Jack Blum, a former tax
investigator at the U.S. Senate, said on 60 Minutes Sunday evening that any
bank that helped an American citizen to evade taxes was guilty of a felony.
"First of
all, for the average American taxpayer it's beyond shocking," he said.
"But, perhaps, not that surprising. Swiss banks have been caught
protecting tax dodgers before, but never has this much detail been revealed.
Under U.S. law, any bank that does that, that assists a U.S. person in evading
U.S. tax is guilty of a felony. And it doesn't matter where the bank is located
or where the bankers are located."
Matt
Taibbi's The Divide: incandescent indictment of the American justice-gap
Matt Taibbi's The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth
Gap is a scorching, brilliant, incandescent indictment of the
widening gap in how American justice treats the rich and the poor. Taibbi's
spectacular financial reporting for Rolling Stone set him out as the
best running commentator on the financial crisis and its crimes, and The
Divide -- beautifully illustrated by Molly Crabapple -- shows that at full
length, he's even better. Cory Doctorow reviews The
Divide.
boingboing.net/2014/06/02/matt-taibbis-the-divide-inc.html
Boing Boing
Jun 2, 2014 - Matt Taibbi's The Divide: American Injustice
in the Age of the Wealth Gap is a scorching, brilliant, ... Cory Doctorow reviews The Divide. By Cory ...
Matt Taibbi's The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth
Gap is a scorching, brilliant, incandescent indictment of the
widening gap in how American justice treats the rich and the poor. Taibbi's
spectacular financial reporting for Rolling Stone set him out
as the best running commentator on the financial crisis and its crimes, and The
Divide -- beautifully illustrated by Molly Crabapple -- shows that at
full length, he's even better.
(All illustrations courtesy of
Molly Crabapple)
"We've put society on bureaucratic autopilot... a steel
trap for losers and a greased pipeline to money, power and impunity for the
winners."
Taibbi's core hypothesis is that,
just like the widening wealth-gap, America has a terrible problem with a
widening justice gap. Since the Clinton years, the American state
has treated poverty as a crime, turning the receipt of state aid into a basis
for the most invasive intrusions into your personal life, for a never-ending
round of barked accusations and cruel threats to your freedom, your family, and
your future. Meanwhile, Eric Holder's "Collateral Consequences"
doctrine -- conceived under Clinton, revised under GWB, and perfected under
Obama -- tells federal prosecutors to punish big companies carefully, even for
the worst crimes imaginable, in order to protect the innocents who work for
those companies and rely on them.
The net effect is a society where
HSBC can be found guilty of laundering billions for brutal Mexican drug-cartels
who torture and murder with impunity, pay a fine equal to a few weeks' profit,
and partially defer bonuses for a few of its executives. But on the same day,
across America, poor and mostly brown people are locked into inhumane prisons
for selling a joint or two of the weed those cartels control.
"The two approaches to justice may individually make a
kind of sense, but side by side they're a dystopia, where common courts become
factories for turning poor people into prisoners, while federal prosecutors
turn into overpriced garbage-men, who behind closed doors quietly dispose of
the sins of the rich for a fee."
The key to the financialization of
criminal impunity is that it is profoundly boring. Understanding how Barclays
stole at least -- at least -- five billion dollars from the
pension funds, small towns and individuals who were owed money by Lehman
Brothers requires that you get ahold of a myriad of spectacularly dull esoteric
financial concepts and long-winded legal wheezes. The actual smoking gun is a
paragraph of legalese so stultifying it should come with a Surgeon General's
warning and a tissue to soak up the cerebrospinal fluid that leaks out of the
ears of anyone who tries to actually read it.
But Taibbi is a fantastic
storyteller, and has a gift for making the technical material accessible. His
key is to alternate between different kinds of explanation: whodunnit-style recounting
of breathtaking financial crimes, personal profiles of sociopathic crooks, and
informed speculation about the mentality and calculus that has sapped the spine
of America's prosecutors and law enforcement officers.
"Because it's fueled by the irrepressibly rising vapor
of our darkest hidden values, it attacks people without money, particularly
nonwhite people, with a weirdly venomous kind of hatred, treating them like
they're already guilty of something, which of course they are -- namely, being
that which we're all afraid of becoming."
Of course, official corruption and
impunity for the rich is only half the story. The other half is the increasingly
vicious war on the poor. Taibbi's recounting of the unspeakable corruption of
stop-and-frisk and other quota-driven, dragnet policing mechanisms have the
power of classics like Upton Sinclair's 1906 The Jungle, but unlike Sinclair, Taibbi is
telling the true stories of living people.
These are people who are routinely
stopped, beaten, humiliated, jailed, and cleaned out by a system that can
always find something that you're guilty of. Sometimes, it's the undocumented
workers who hide in the shadows as small-town cops bust them for driving without
a license, charge them $1000 (while citizens charged with the same offense pay
nothing, so long as they promptly get the missing license), and then rip them
from their families and deport them to Mexico, where many are kidnapped and
tortured my members of drug cartels who understand that deportees have US
relatives with cash.
Other times, it's people who commit
the crime of being brown and/or poor while walking. In the NYC projects, you
can be charged with obstructing pedestrian traffic for stopping in front of
your own building at 1AM after a shift at work, resting briefly on an empty
street after walking the dog. And your public defender will refuse to enter a
plea of not guilty, and the judge will not understand why you want such a
thing, and if, by some miracle, the cop who arrested you, beat you up, and
jailed you admits that he falsified your arrest, you're let go -- and so is he.
"Increasingly, the people who make decisions about
justice and punishment in this country see a meaningful difference between
crime and merely breaking the law."
Here, too, Taibbi looks for the systemic causes of these
attitudes, a familiar and depressing blend of political expedience (Clinton
wooing disaffected Dixiecrats by promising to get tough on welfare fraud, no
matter what the human or financial cost), regulatory corruption (private
prisons beget lobbying for rules to put people in private prisons, and the poor
and nonwhite are the easiest people to put in prison without much fuss), and
the financial vacuum left behind by the supernova-scale frauds of the
too-big-to-fail banks (your bankrupt town can treat terrorized undocumented
migrants as ATMs, hitting them up for giant fines for offenses that the lucky
documented among us walk away from, Scot-free).
The Divide is
a book that is more enraging than depressing. Part of that is down to Taibbi's
facility with language and plot, but it's also a function of his brilliant
structural trick of rotating between the stories
of the afflicted and the comfortable, details of the technical mechanisms
of their respective plights, and cutting analysis of the system that created
the mess.
"[The government] has never put together a task force
to concentrate on corruption... The Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee was
given a budget of $9.8m, 'roughly one-seventh of the budget for Oliver Stone's Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps.' ...The increase in the national drug enforcement
budget for the year of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression was
roughly 200 times the size of the sole executive branch effort at formally
investigating the causes of financial corruption."
In some ways, Taibbi's worst
villains are not the financial criminals, but the captured, conflicted
milquetoaste prosecutors who let them get away with crimes again and again,
using fines instead of jail time, effectively imposing a modest tax on crime
that isn't a deterrent -- it's just a line-item on the budget.
The argument, which originated with
Holder, is that banks that are too big to fail are too big to jail. If you brought
the full force of the law to bear against the criminals who steal billions and
abet the most heinous crimes, rapes, tortures, and murders imaginable, their
institutions will fail and everyone who depends on them -- thousands of
innocents, and possibly the whole global economy -- will suffer. The
prosecutors argue that their "leverage" is best used to extract
billions in fines (from companies that are often sitting on hundreds of
billions in government handouts and contracts) is a better outcome for "society"
than putting a couple of fat-cats in jail.
But Taibbi demolishes this argument.
The billions in fines are hardly matched by the hundreds of billions in harm
the companies do -- over and over and over. And if the state has leverage over
a company that is too big to jail, then let them use that leverage to break
up the company so that the next time it commits a crime, the entire
C-suite can be thrown in the Hole and the key tossed out.
"As the...wealth divide gets bigger, it becomes less
and less possible for law enforcement to imagine the jail-or-garbage option for
[bankers from top firms] and more and more possible to imagine it for an
ever-expanding population of Everyone Else."
Because, Taibbi argues, there's
another systemic risk to allowing this corruption to run unchecked: it rots us.
If two people who commit the same crime always face wildly different
punishments based on how rich they are, there is no justice in the justice
system. A cherished and fundamental value of democratic societies -- of the
rule of law -- is eroded. MORE: http://boingboing.net/2014/06/02/matt-taibbis-the-divide-inc.html
PUBLISHED 5:03 AM MON, JUN 2, 2014 ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
I write books. My latest are: a YA graphic novel called In Real Life (with Jen Wang); a
nonfiction book about the arts and the Internet called Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the
Internet Age (with introductions by Neil Gaiman and Amanda
Palmer) and a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's
the sequel to Little Brother). I speak
all over the place and I tweet and tumble,
too.
CONTINUE THE DISCUSSION AT
BBS.BOINGBOING.NET
7 replies
RESISTANCE
THE CHOICE IS OURS
Documentary Series
The Venus Project invites you to watch Part I & II
of this three-part documentary series
Part I explores the
determinants of behavior to dispel the myth of “human nature” demonstrating
that environment shapes behavior.
Part II illustrates how
our social structures impose our values and behaviors demonstrating that our global monetary system is obsolete and
increasingly insufficient to meet the needs of most people.
Part III, to be released
this year, will depict the vision of The Venus Project to build an entirely new world from the ground up, a “redesign of the
culture” where all enjoy a high standard of living, free of servitude and debt,
while also protecting the environment.
In addition, we have an
official website for the film series with further details about the documentary
at: thechoiceisoursmovie.com http://www.thechoiceisoursmovie.com/watch-film/?utm_source=newsletter_42&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-choice-is-ours-documentary
APPEAL TO PRES. OBAMA TO
STOP ONE KIND OF $$CORRUPTION$$ OF OUR LAWMAKERS
From Sharon Killian about a virtual Town Hall
Meeting concerning CITIZENS UNITED:
(Information was sent through Dick Bennett from Jonah Minkoff-Zern
of Public Citizen.)
This Friday, a coalition of organizations is hosting a virtual town hall meeting featuring Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s and superstar activist for reining in corporate power.
During this conversation, we’ll discuss an alarming kind of corruption that has emerged because of Citizens United — and how we can call on President Barack Obama to end this corruption.
Join the virtual town hall meeting on Friday, March 6, at 4 p.m. Eastern:
Sign up to let us know you want to join Friday’s conversation and to make sure you get an email with all the details.
Corporations that receive government contracts can secretly funnel untold sums to help elect (and re-elect) the very same lawmakers who are responsible for awarding those government contracts.
It’s a cycle of corruption enabled by inadequate election laws. Thankfully, fixing this corruption doesn’t require an act of Congress.
President Obama has the authority to fix the problem with the stroke of a pen.
This is a unique opportunity, not only to learn what’s happening, but also to join the nationwide response in a way that puts your outrage about the destruction of our democracy front and center in the public eye.
Sign up to be a part of the conversation on Friday, March 6, at 4 p.m. Eastern.
Jonah Minkoff-Zern
Public Citizen’s Democracy Is For People Campaign on behalf of the Get Money Out Collaborative
P.S. Unable to attend, but want to help plan a rally against corruption in the coming weeks? Sign up here, and we’ll follow up with you about plans for upcoming opportunities to organize a local demonstration or event.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs.
The Climate
By Naomi Klein.
Simon and Schuster, 2014.
http://books.simonandschuster.com/This-Changes-Everything/Naomi-Klein/9781451697384
The most important book yet from the author of the
international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant
explanation of why the climate crisis
challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time,
restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.
In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option.
In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.
Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.
Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.
In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option.
In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.
Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.
Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.
- See
more at: http://books.simonandschuster.com/This-Changes-Everything/Naomi-Klein/9781451697384#sthash.mils8ecs.dpuf
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Tuesday February 17th,
2015, 5:57 pm (EST)
Browse: Home / 2015,
Volume 66, Number 9 (February) / Crossing the River of
Fire
Dear Reader,
We place these articles
at no charge on our website to serve all the people who cannot afford Monthly
Review, or who cannot get access to it where they live. Many of our most
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REVIEW OF THE MONTH
“Crossing the River of
Fire”:
The Liberal Attack on
Naomi Klein and This Changes Everything
by John Bellamy Foster
and Brett Clark
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly
Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Brett Clark is
associate professor of sociology at the University of Utah and co-author of The
Tragedy of the Commodity (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming).
The front cover
of Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes
Everything, is designed to look like a protest sign. It consists of the
title alone in big block letters, with the emphasis on Changes. Both the
author’s name and the subtitle are absent. It is only when we look at the spine
of the book, turn it over, or open it to the title page that we see it is
written by North America’s leading left climate intellectual-activist and that
the subtitle is Capitalism vs. the
Climate.1 All of which is clearly meant to convey in no uncertain terms
that climate change literally changes everything for today’s society. It
threatens to turn the mythical human conquest of nature on its head,
endangering present-day civilization and throwing doubt on the long-term
survival of Homo sapiens.
The source of
this closing circle is not the planet, which operates according to natural
laws, but rather the economic and social system in which we live, which treats
natural limits as mere barriers to surmount. It is now doing so on a planetary
scale, destroying in the process the earth as a place of human habitation.
Hence, the change that Klein is most concerned with, and to which her book
points, is not climate change itself, but the radical social transformation
that must be carried out in order to combat it. We as a species will either
radically change the material conditions of our existence or they will be
changed far more drastically for us. Klein argues in effect for System Change
Not Climate Change—the name adopted by the current ecosocialist movement in the
United States.2
In this way
Klein, who in No Logo ushered in a new generational critique of commodity
culture, and who in The Shock Doctrine established herself as perhaps the most
prominent North American critic of neoliberal disaster capitalism, signals that
she has now, in William Morris’s famous metaphor, crossed “the river of fire”
to become a critic of capital as a system.3 The reason is climate change,
including the fact that we have waited too long to address it, and the reality
that nothing short of an ecological revolution will now do the job.
In the age of
climate change, Klein argues, a system based on ever-expanding capital
accumulation and exponential economic growth is no longer compatible with human
well-being and progress—or even with human survival over the long run. We need
therefore to reconstruct society along lines that go against the endless
amassing of wealth as the primary goal. Society must be rebuilt on the basis of
other principles, including the “regeneration” of life itself and what she
calls “ferocious love.”4 This reversal in the existing social relations of
production must begin immediately with a war on the fossil-fuel industry and
the economic growth imperative—when such growth means more carbon emissions,
more inequality, and more alienation of our humanity.
Klein’s
crossing of the river of fire has led to a host of liberal attacks on This
Changes Everything, often couched as criticisms emanating from the left. These
establishment criticisms of her work, we will demonstrate, are disingenuous,
having little to do with serious confrontation with her analysis. Rather, their
primary purpose is to rein in her ideas, bringing them into conformity with
received opinion. If that should prove impossible, the next step is to exclude
her ideas from the conversation. However, her message represents the growing
consciousness of the need for epochal change, and as such is not easily
suppressed.
The Global
Climateric
The core
argument of This Changes Everything is a historical one. If climate change had
been addressed seriously in the 1960s, when scientists first raised the issue
in a major way, or even in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when James Hansen
gave his famous testimony in Congress on global warming, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change was first established, and the Kyoto Protocol
introduced, the problem could conceivably have been addressed without a
complete shakeup of the system. At that historical moment, Klein suggests, it
would still have been possible to cut emissions by at most 2 percent a year.5
Today such
incremental solutions are no longer conceivable even in theory. The numbers are
clear. Over 586 billion metric tons of carbon have been emitted into the
atmosphere. To avoid a 2°C (3.6°F) increase in global average temperature—the
edge of the cliff for the climate—it is necessary to stay below a trillion
metric tons in cumulative carbon emissions. At the present rate of carbon
emissions it is estimated that we will arrive at the one trillionth metric
ton—equivalent to the 2°C mark—in less than a quarter century, around 2039.6
Once this point is reached, scientists fear that there is a high probability
that feedback mechanisms will come into play with reverberations so great that
we will no longer be able to control where the thermometer stops in the end. If
the world as it exists today is still to avoid the 2°C increase—and the more
dangerous 4°C, the point at which disruption to life on the planet will be so
great that civilization may no longer be possible—real revolutionary ecological
change, unleashing the full power of an organized and rebellious humanity, is
required.
What is
necessary first and foremost is the cessation of fossil-fuel combustion,
bringing to a rapid end the energy regime that has dominated since the
Industrial Revolution. Simple arithmetic tells us that there is no way to get
down to the necessary zero emissions level, i.e., the complete cessation of
fossil-fuel combustion, in the next few decades without implementing some kind
of planned moratorium on economic growth, requiring shrinking capital formation
and reduced consumption in the richest countries of the world system. We have
no choice but to slam on the brakes and come to a dead stop with respect to
carbon emissions before we go over the climate cliff. Never before in human
history has civilization faced so daunting a challenge.
Klein draws
here on the argument of Kevin Anderson, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate
Change in Britain, who indicates that rich countries will need to cut carbon
emissions by 8–10 percent a year. “Our ongoing and collective carbon
profligacy,” Anderson writes, “has squandered any opportunity for ‘evolutionary
change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C budget. Today, after two
decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary
change to the political and economic hegemony.”7
Instead of
addressing climate change when it first became critical in the 1990s, the world
turned to the intensification of neoliberal globalization, notably through the
creation of the World Trade Organization. It was the very success of the
neoliberal campaign to remove most constraints on the operations of capitalism,
and the negative effect that this had on all attempts to address the climate
problem, Klein contends, that has made “revolutionary levels of transformation”
of the system the only real hope in avoiding “climate chaos.”8 “As a result,”
she explains,
we now find
ourselves in a very difficult and slightly ironic position. Because of those
decades of hardcore emitting exactly when we were supposed to be cutting back,
the things that we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in
conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in
the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the
heart of our economic model: grow or die….
Our economy is
at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate
needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what
our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one
of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature….
Because of our
lost decades, it is time to turn this around now. Is it possible? Absolutely.
Is it possible without challenging the fundamental logic of deregulated
capitalism? Not a chance.9
Of course, “the
fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism” is simply a roundabout way of
pointing to the fundamental logic of capitalism itself, its underlying drive
toward capital accumulation, which is hardly constrained at all in its
accumulation function even in the case of a strong regulatory environment.
Instead, the state in a capitalist society generally seeks to free up
opportunities for capital accumulation on behalf of the system as a whole,
rationalizing market relations so as to achieve greater overall, long-run
expansion. As Paul Sweezy noted nearly three-quarters of a century ago in The
Theory of Capitalist Development, “Speaking historically, control over
capitalist accumulation has never for a moment been regarded as a concern of
the state; economic legislation has rather had the aim of blunting class
antagonisms, so that accumulation, the normal aim of capitalist behavior, could
go forward smoothly and uninterruptedly.”10
To be sure,
Klein herself occasionally seems to lose sight of this basic fact, defining
capitalism at one point as “consumption for consumption’s sake,” thus failing
to perceive the Galbraith dependence effect, whereby the conditions under which
we consume are structurally determined by the conditions under which we
produce.11 Nevertheless, the recognition that capital accumulation or the drive
for economic growth is the defining property, not a mere attribute, of the
system underlies her entire argument. Recognition of this systemic property led
the great conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter to declare: “Stationary
capitalism would be a contradictio in adjecto.”12
It follows that
no mere technological wizardry—of the kind ideologically promoted, for example,
by the Breakthrough Institute—will prevent us from breaking the carbon budget
within several decades, as long as the driving force of the reigning
socioeconomic system is its own self-expansion. Mere improvements in carbon
efficiency are too small as long as the scale of production is increasing,
which has the effect of expanding the absolute level of carbon dioxide emitted.
The inevitable conclusion is that we must rapidly reorganize society on other
principles than that of stoking the engine of capital with fossil fuels.
None of this,
Klein assures us, is cause for despair. Rather, confronting this harsh reality
head on allows us to define the strategic context in which the struggle to
prevent climate change must be fought. It is not primarily a technological
problem unless one is trying to square the circle: seeking to reconcile
expanding capital accumulation with the preservation of the climate. In fact,
all sorts of practical solutions to climate change exist at present and are
consistent with the enhancement of individual well-being and growth of human
community. We can begin immediately to implement the necessary changes such as:
democratic planning at all levels of society; introduction of sustainable
energy technology; heightened public transportation; reductions in economic and
ecological waste; a slowdown in the treadmill of production; redistribution of
wealth and power; and above all an emphasis on sustainable human development.13
There are ample
historical precedents. We could have a crash program, as in wartime, where
populations sacrificed for the common good. In England during the Second World
War, Klein observes, driving automobiles virtually ceased. In the United
States, the automobile industry was converted in the space of half a year from
producing cars to manufacturing trucks, tanks, and planes for the war machine.
The necessary rationing—since the price system recognizes nothing but money—can
be carried out in an egalitarian manner. Indeed, the purpose of rationing is
always to share the sacrifices that have to be made when resources are
constrained, and thus it can create a sense of real community, of all being in
this together, in responding to a genuine emergency. Although Klein does not
refer to it, one of the most inspiring historical examples of this was the
slogan “Everyone Eats the Same” introduced in the initial phases of the Cuban
Revolution and followed to an extraordinary extent throughout the society.
Further, wartime mobilization and rationing are not the only historical
examples on which we can draw. The New Deal in the United States, she
indicates, focused on public investment and direct promotion of the public
good, aimed at the enhancement of use values rather than exchange values.14
Mainstream
critics of This Changes Everything often willfully confuse its emphasis on
degrowth with the austerity policies associated with neoliberalism. However,
Klein’s perspective, as we have seen, could not be more different, since it is
about the rational use of resources under conditions of absolute necessity and
the promotion of equality and community. Nevertheless, she could strengthen her
case in this respect by drawing on monopoly-capital theory and its critique of
the prodigious waste in our economy, whereby only a miniscule proportion of
production and human labor is now devoted to actual human needs as opposed to
market-generated wants. As the author of No Logo, Klein is well aware of the
marketing madness that characterizes the contemporary commodity economy,
causing the United States alone to spend more than a trillion dollars a year on
the sales effort.15
What is
required in a rich country such as the United States at present, as detailed in
This Changes Everything, is not an abandonment of all the comforts of
civilization but a reversion to the standard of living of the 1970s—two decades
into what Galbraith dubbed “the affluent society.” A return to a lower per
capita output (in GDP terms) could be made feasible with redistribution of
income and wealth, social planning, decreases in working time, and universal
satisfaction of genuine human needs (a sustainable environment; clean air and
water; ample food, clothing, and shelter; and high-quality health care,
education, public transportation, and community-cultural life) such that most
people would experience a substantial improvement in their daily lives.16 What
Klein envisions here would truly be an ecological-cultural revolution. All that
is really required, since the necessary technological means already exist, is
people power: the democratic mass mobilization of the population.
Such people
power, Klein is convinced, is already emerging in the context of the present
planetary emergency. It can be seen in the massive but diffuse social-environmental
movement, stretching across the globe, representing the struggles of tens of
millions of activists worldwide, to which she gives (or rather takes from the
movement itself) the name Blockadia. Numberless individuals are putting
themselves on the line, confronting power, and frequently facing arrest, in
their opposition to the fossil-fuel industry and capitalism itself. Indigenous
peoples are organizing worldwide and taking a leading role in the environmental
revolt, as in the Idle No More movement in Canada. Anti-systemic, ecologically
motivated struggles are on the rise on every continent.
The primary
burden for mitigating climate change necessarily resides with the rich
countries, which are historically responsible for the great bulk of the carbon
added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution and still emit the most
carbon per capita today. The disproportionate responsibility of these nations
for climate change is even greater once the final consumption of goods is
factored into the accounting. Poor countries are heavily dependent on producing
export goods for multinational corporations to be sold to consumers at the
center of the world capitalist economy. Hence, the carbon emissions associated
with such exports are rightly assigned to the rich nations importing these
goods rather than the poor ones exporting them. Moreover, the rich countries
have ample resources available to address the problem and carry out the
necessary process of social regeneration without seriously compromising the basic
welfare of their populations. In these societies, the problem is no longer one
of increasing per capita wealth, but rather one of the rational, sustainable,
and just organization of society. Klein evokes the spirit of Seattle in 1999
and Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to argue that sparks igniting radical ecological
change exist even in North America, where growing numbers of people are
prepared to join a global peoples’ alliance. Essential to the overall struggle,
she insists, is the explicit recognition of ecological or climate debt owed by
the global North to the global South.17
The left is not
spared critical scrutiny in Klein’s work. She acknowledges the existence of a
powerful ecological critique within Marxism, and quotes Marx on “capitalism’s
‘irreparable rift’ with ‘the natural laws of life itself.‘” Nevertheless, she
points to the high carbon emissions of Soviet-type societies, and the heavy
dependence of the economies of Bolivia and Venezuela on natural resource
extraction, notwithstanding the many social justice initiatives they have
introduced. She questions the support given by Greece’s SYRIZA Party to
offshore oil exploration in the Aegean. Many of those on the left, and
particularly the so-called liberal-left, with their Keynesian predilections, continue
to see an expansion of the treadmill of production, even in the rich countries,
as the sole means of social advance.18 Klein’s criticisms here are important,
but could have benefited, with respect to the periphery, from a consideration
of the structure of the imperialist world economy, which is designed
specifically to close off options to the poorer countries and force them to
meet the needs of the richer ones. This creates a trap that even a Movement
Toward Socialism with deep ecological and indigenous values like that of
present-day Bolivia cannot seek to overcome without deep contradictions.19
“The unfinished
business of liberation,” Klein counsels, requires “a process of rebuilding and
reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the
civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect.”20 To
accomplish this, it is necessary to build the greatest mass movement of
humanity for revolutionary change that the world has ever seen: a challenge
that is captured in the title to her conclusion: “The Leap Years: Just Enough
Time for Impossible.” If this seems utopian, her answer would be that the world
is heading towards something worse than mere dystopia: unending, cumulative,
climate catastrophe, threatening civilization and countless species, including
our own.21
Liberal Critics
as Gatekeepers
Confronted with
Klein’s powerful argument in This Changes
Everything, liberal pundits have
rushed to rein in her arguments so that her ideas are less in conflict with the
system. Even where the issue is planetary ecological catastrophe, imperiling
hundreds of millions of people, future generations, civilization, and the human
species itself, the inviolable rule remains the same: the permanency of
capitalism is not to be questioned.
As Noam Chomsky
explains, liberal opinion plays a vital gatekeeping role for the system,
defining itself as the rational left of center, and constituting the outer
boundaries of received opinion. Since most of the populace in the United States
and the world as a whole is objectively at odds with the regime of capital, it
is crucial to the central propaganda function of the media to declare as “off
limits” any position that questions the foundations of the system itself. The
media effectively says: “Thus far and no further.” To venture farther left
beyond the narrow confines of what is permitted within liberal discourse is
deemed equivalent to taking “off from the planet.”22 MORE http://monthlyreview.org/2015/02/01/crossing-the-river-of-fire/
Klein’s Plea for a Cooperative World
Klein’s book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the
Climate, is a vital addition to the critiques of capitalism. Here she is, as chaos is foreseen by the
consensus of scientists if the rising global temperature is not stopped and
reversed soon, calling for faith in human beings and the rejection of the US
corporate state. Here she is, tracing
the awful history of the rise of the self-regarding right wing mainly in the
Republican Party, and yet in 2014 expressing hope in a cooperative future at a
moment of possible, terrible climate chaos.
Hers is a lucid plea for sanity and compassion at a moment when the irrationalism
of misology and misoneism have gained power over the government.
Related reading: Harvey Kaye’s The Fight for the Four Freedoms, 2014 (a
history of the rise of FDR’s New Deal and belief in affirmative government and
their decline under the new, reactionary Republican onslaught) and Rudolf Rocker’s Nationalism
and Culture, 1933/1937 (written in Berlin while Hitler’s Brown Shirts were
marching outside his window, a denunciation of the corrosive effects of
nationalism). Dick
Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk of The Rules,
"Capitalism is Just a Story and Other Dangerous Thoughts"
Video
“Capitalism Is Just a Story”
Capitalism is a Just a Story
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The Hidden Structure
of Violence
Who Benefits from
Global Violence and War
by Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree
304 pages May 2015
e-book available!
Acts of violence assume many forms: they may travel by the arc
of a guided missile or in the language of an economic policy, and they may
leave behind a smoldering village or a starved child. The all-pervasive
occurrence of violence makes it seem like an unavoidable, and ultimately
incomprehensible, aspect of the human world, particularly in a modern era. But,
in this detailed and expansive book, Marc Pilisuk and Jen Rountree demonstrate
otherwise. Widespread violence, they
argue, is in fact an expression of the underlying social order, and whether it
is carried out by military forces or by patterns of investment, the aim is to
strengthen that order for the benefit of the powerful.
The Hidden Structure
of Violence marshals vast amounts
of evidence to examine the costs of direct violence, including military
preparedness and the social reverberations of war, alongside the costs of
structural violence, expressed as poverty and chronic illness. It also documents
the relatively small number of people and corporations responsible for
facilitating the violent status quo, whether by setting the range of
permissible discussion or benefiting directly as financiers and manufacturers.
The result is a stunning indictment of our violent world and a powerful
critique of the ways through which violence is reproduced on a daily basis,
whether at the highest levels of the state or in the deepest recesses of the
mind.
Because of its inter-disciplinary approach, The Hidden Structure of Violence will be valuable for scholars and
students in a range of fields, but especially psychology, macro-economics,
sociology, international relations, history, journalism, peace studies,
military science, community development, and social change.
An encyclopedic and yet highly focused analysis of the causes
and consequences of violence and wars … This is a sober book that nonetheless
leaves us with hope for future generations.
—G. William Domhoff, author, Who Rules America?
One of the most comprehensive—and programmatic—discussions of
the sources and nature of global violence in years.
—Tom Hayden, author, Inspiring Participatory Democracy
Marc Pilisuk teaches at Saybrook University and is
Professor Emeritus of Human and Community Development at the University of
California at Davis. He is a former president of the Society for the Study of
Peace, Conflict, and Violence and a steering committee member of Psychologists
for Social Responsibility. He has published ten books and more than 140
articles over an academic career spanning five decades.
Jennifer Rountree is research manager at the National Indian
Child Welfare Association in Portland, Oregon. She has a PhD in psychology from
Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco, California, and
supports American Indian/Alaska Native tribes and urban Indian communities in
community based participatory research.
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Sunday March 22nd, 2015, 11:50 am (EDT)
Post Office banking needs this education, but when poll respondents were informed
that this would create competition for Wall Street banks, support jumped to
56-25
Lower-income Americans have been under-banked and
abandoned. Now a vast progressive movement is high...
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Contents US Capitalism Newsletter #21
History of Capitalism
Ian Klaus, Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds and the Rise of
Modern Finance
US Capitalism Today
Bucheit, NationofChange: Super
Rich
Moyers and Winship, Graft and Bribes abracadabra Contributions
Greed is
Good…..for the Rich
Joyce Hale,
Film Shadows of Liberty
Seth
Sandronsky, “Reading Samir Amin” (2 2013 books by Amin)
Taibbi, The Divide (between rich and poor)
Resistance
Bill Moyers’
Recent Interviews
Hilgert, Right
of Workers to Safe\ Work (2013 Book)
Conflict Within
ACLU Over “Corporate Free Speech”
END US CAPITALISM
NEWSLETTER #22
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