in the time remaining, to help us understand how the man-made system of capitalism will lead to the extinction of our human species, and so many others.
Click here to access article by Richard Smith from Climate and Capitalism. However, to access the website which contains the abstract of the article, the pdf link, and comments on the article, go here.
Yes, I am listing this again because it is a crucial document in order to understand the fundamental conflict between an ecosystem that can sustain human life (and many other life forms) with that of the system of capitalism.
Last night I read the article completely after printing out a double-sided copy of the 33 pages on 17 - 8X11 sheets. Smith lays out his thesis with some of the best arguments and documented evidence that I've seen anywhere. It certainly does not represent the last word on this vital topic, but it is a huge beginning. Others must step up to carry his thesis forward if we are to have any chance against this 300 year old juggernaut of capitalism that is hellbent on destroying the habitat that supports all decent human life. This is the very best article that I have posted on this blog in the year and a half of posting. Need I say that it is a must-read?
One commentator's (Allen Cookson) response to the article makes reference to a lot of cold war era thinking and other rather shallow thoughts about socialism to critique the article. I am referring to his allusions to socialism which indicate a Soviet type and socialism as meaning public ownership of some industries. Such thinking is so common among people who have been totally immersed in Western capitalist indoctrination all their lives--and who hasn't been if you live in the West?
On page 117 of the article Smith writes:
The global ecological crisis we face cannot be solved by even the largest individual companies. Problems like global warming, deforestation, overfishing, species extinction, the changing ocean chemistry are even beyond the scope of nation states. They require national and international cooperation and global economic planning. This requires collective bottom-up democratic control over the entire world economy. [my emphasis] And since a global economic democracy could only thrive in the context of a rough economic equality, this presupposes a global redistribution of wealth as well.
It is hard for most people to get their heads around a concept like "bottom-up democratic control" simply because most people have never known anything but hierarchical control. If you stop to think about it, hierarchy is a necessary system whenever a few people need to control many people. This is true for all institutions in a capitalist society and for any type of privileged class structured society.
Visualize the typical military type organizational structure. It's a pyramid shape that represents one or a few people at the top and progressively more people as you go down the schematic. All important organizational structures in a capitalist society have precisely this kind of structure. In addition, outside of formal organizations there are many kinds of informal norms of behavior that privilege some people over others. Such norms promote and reflect the interests and values of those at the top of the formal structures who consist of a general class of capitalists.
So, who are these people? They are the most privileged and powerful because they live off the "ownership" of money, resources, implements of production (capital); while others live off their labor whether manual, skilled, or intellectual. The former, or capitalist class, according to the rules of the system, have several fundamental advantages: they appropriate the wealth created by working people, provide working people some portion of that wealth mostly based on market rules of supply and demand (essentially the same rules applied to any commodity),control the supply of jobs (rented labor or wage slaves), control what is produced and how, and control the general supply of money and credit.
Because humans have lived in class structured societies for several thousand years, they find it difficult to imagine any other arrangement. But there is abundant evidence gathered from anthropologists, archeologists, etc. to conclude that class structured societies have been in existence for less than 2% of humanity's existence. Unfortunately, this has been the last 2%.
So, we humans have forgotten how to live in a collective, egalitarian, and democratic way. Also, we now live in huge numbers where before we lived in small bands of people. Thus, we can't simply go back to making decisions the way we did before. So, there's the rub. How do we build a democratic decision making system that uses small group participation in fundamental core units of a society in a way that results in control of higher levels of organization? This is precisely where much work needs to be done.
I haven't had time to read this lengthy article, but it appears to offer an excellent critique of "green capitalism" and a clarification of the profound contradictions between a capitalist system and a sustainable ecosystem. I recommend that you print out this pdf document and read it at your leisure.
...for all the green initiatives, corporate business practices have changed little -- or the little they’ve changed has had no great effect. From Kyoto to Cancun, governments have all made it abundantly clear that they will not accept binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. They will not sacrifice growth today to save the planet tomorrow. Europe’s cap and trade scheme, the first large scale effort, enriched traders and polluters but failed to put the brakes on the relentless rise of greenhouse gas emissions. What few carbon taxes governments actually imposed have likewise failed to stem emissions. At the end of the day, the project of green capitalism is in disarray.
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Paul Hawken was right: We need a “restorative economy,” an economy that lives within nature’s limits, that minimizes and even eliminates waste from production, and so on. But he was completely wrong to imagine that we could ever get this under capitalism. In what follows I will explain why this is so then discuss what I think are the implications of this critique.
While protests continue in many places in the Middle East and North Africa, the US Empire is seizing on opportunities to eliminate governments it doesn't like while ignoring the atrocities of friendly, compliant regimes.
On Wednesday, the brave Greeks who were protesting against all the public spending cutbacks were attacked by the goon squads of the financial and political elites, and they are fighting back.
Greek workers and youth took to the streets of Athens once again on Wednesday to protest a new round of austerity measures to be introduced by the social-democratic (PASOK) government of Prime Minister George Papandreou. The demonstration was accompanied by the second general strike to be held this year and the tenth since the outbreak of the international finance crisis in 2008.
See also many pictures of this demonstration and conflict at these sources:
From Al Jazeera a 1:55m video and Alfavita ( a Greek website, scroll down to the videos and pictures.)
5-13-2011 10:00AM NOTICE: Google's blog service has been down earlier today, and after it resumed service I notice that yesterday's (5-12-2011) entries are missing. Perhaps they will show up later.
Meanwhile, I am working on today's postings which will appear at the usual 12 noon Seattle time.
The author takes a simple quote from Huck Finn to illustrate in a very gentle way how rebellious acts can create major changes in the world--a lesson many of us need to learn.
Change always seems impossible, at least change that benefits the many instead of the few. But there are instances of change that we can look back upon. Slavery was considered to be natural and expected, but through an incomprehensible number of disobedient acts, the collective delusion was lifted. Individuals found a moral compass removed from the shroud of society.
I am posting this article to introduce some of my views on voting. The article does a good job of clarifying the choices we have in the election process which is widely and falsely regarded as an essential indicator of democracy. The article begs the often expressed question among progressives: should we bother participating in elections?
I admit that I have gone round and round debating this question with myself. Here is where I am now on this question.
Think of voting in the context of a military strategy to be employed when an army needs to retreat from a particular battlefield when faced with overwhelming forces. It is a widely accepted fact that an organized retreat is far preferable to a disorganized rout in order to preserve your battle forces to fight again another day. I regard the strategy of voting for a "lesser evil" in the same way: as providing time to salvage and protect truly progressive forces.
This strategy requires that we accurately identify "lesser evils" among the candidates for the various offices. In my opinion, the ruling class will never allow us to vote for a candidate for President who will pursue any policy other than that of the ruling class. If, in the extremely unlikely event he/she were inclined to pursue some other polices, he/she would be removed one way or another. This is simply because the ruling class has invested so much power in the Executive branch of our government. So, don't bother to vote in Presidential elections regardless of the promises made by what is presented as a more liberal candidate. However, there are some candidates for Congressional offices that will impede the progress of our capitalist foes to wreck havoc on our lives. So, vote for these candidates after looking at their track record--not what they say in their campaign speeches.
But, simply voting must be the least important part of your strategy. Focus on what is needed to fight the next battles in order to defeat your oppressors. First, you need to become as best informed on the real issues as time allows. You need to select the best reliable sources of information. You need to link up with others of a like mind to share information, and then you need to organize around strategies to defeat your foe.
The main problem I see now with progressive people especially in the US is that they cannot even identify the foe. This is not because ordinary people or even progressive people are stupid. It is largely because our oppressors have almost total control over the ideas that are allowed to be transmitted by institutions of education and media. And, of course, most working people are so focused on merely surviving and raising their families that they have little time to educate themselves. But, we must find the time, we must fight to gain clarifying ideas, and to find ways of sharing these ideas with friends and neighbors.
Beside dis-informing us, our oppressors like to divide us, to have us fight against each other--you know, the old divide and conquer strategy. They excel with this strategy. They have had us divided by encouraging straights to fight against gays, to target immigrant workers as our enemy, or people on welfare assistance, Muslims, and foreign people who fight back against the Empire ("terrorists"), to encourage women and men to see each other as enemies, etc. We must stop wasting our energies fighting each other!
So, who or what show we fight against? If you have followed this blog at all, you know that I see the primary enemy as a system--capitalism, a system that benefits a small group of people called capitalists. I don't even see all of the latter as "the enemy" simply because many of them have been duped also by misinformation. It is the system itself that we must fight against, and I think the most effective way after gaining reliable information is to begin constructing a new system and alternative institutions to serve our real best interests--to live in peace with each other with the ecosystem that sustains all life.
If you are interested in the various ways hedge funds are used by major sociopaths to get ever richer, this is an article for you.
In contrast to most Wall Street scams, the hedge fund boys may risk the ire of enough powerful people among the capitalist elites to actually see prison time--you know, like Bernie Madoff who went about screwing other rich people. Although hedge fund scams rob from everyone, the rich players are most directly affected.
I like the author's final statement:
It’s not enough to get tougher sheriffs to stop the cheating. We’ll need to wipe out the entire casino if we want to get out of Dodge alive.
It is amazing how accurate George Orwell was about how he saw the future. As an active participant in the Spanish Civil War he witnessed first hand the mailed fist of the emerging fascist powers of the 1930s, the duplicity of the Soviet rulers, and the hypocrisy of Western elites.
Although I don't approve of his name calling, I share in the author's astonishment about US officials always bringing up the tiresome human rights issue whenever they negotiate with Chinese officials. It must gall Chinese officials and the rest of the world given the atrocious record of the US in that regard.
I really don't see China as replacing bin Laden. China is by far too powerful a world player to be regarded as an individual rogue. There are, and will be, plenty of others in 3rd world countries to take his place: anyone who fights back effectively against the Empire's domination and exploitation of their countries.
Most importantly Roberts is offering valuable evidence of the growing fascist behavior of government authorities within the US. Because mainstream media serves mostly to dis-inform and distract the American populace, reports such as the incident in Illinois need to get out.
The executive branch of the federal government, to whom we used to look to protect us from abuses at the state and local level, acquired the right under the Bush regime to ignore both US and international law, along with the US Constitution and the constitutional powers of Congress and the judiciary. As long as there is a “state of war,” such as the open-ended “war on terror,” the executive branch is higher than the law and is unaccountable to law. Amerika is not a democracy, but a country ruled by an executive branch Caesar.
A peer-reviewed study by Duke researchers confirms what has been widely reported by residents near gas drilling sites: the drilling is causing the contamination of water supplies. The above video demonstrates this dramatically. (See also this report from ProPublica for more details.)
This source of fossil fuels has been much heralded in mainstream media as providing the new abundant energy needed to promote more industrial growth in the US in this century. I have my doubts that this study and future ones will be covered to any significant extent in mainstream media.
Thus, the governing class will continue their drilling, and they will continue driving this engine of capitalist growth which is headed straight off a cliff of environmental degradation, resource exhaustion, and climate destabilization. It is up to us, the working people of this earth, to cease this destruction and create a social-economic system that can enable us to live in harmony with the ecosystem and each other.
In Pakistan, Australia and now the center of the North American continent, we're getting a powerful taste of what global warming feels like in its early stages. (And if for some reason you've decided not to believe scientists, then ask the people we pay to analyze risk in our society: In September, one of the largest reinsurance companies in the world, Munich Re, said that "the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.")
I guess I have to apologize for my criticism of Huffington Post in yesterday's edition of my blog.
While Romi has trouble feeding her family, Glencore - the world's largest diversified commodities trader - is planning a US$11billion share sale, likely the largest market debut ever seen on the London Stock Exchange.
"The price for our daily food has at least doubled in the past two years," Lia Romi told Al Jazeera through a translator. "Food costs 100 per cent of my family's daily income [of about $3]. I have nothing saved and I owe [money] from my [market stall] business."
While Romi, and millions like her, worry about feeding their families, the initial public offering from the commodity speculating giant will create at least four billionaires, dozens worth more than $100million and several hundred old fashioned millionaires. Chief Executive Ivan Glasenberg is set to make more than $9bn from the share sale. And speculating on food prices is an important part of his wealth.
This very well researched and written article connects the plight of a poor family in Indonesia with the ability of a large corporation to manipulate and profit from unstable markets.
However, we shouldn't judge a capitalist system on the basis of supplying human needs--in spite of what you've heard, it wasn't designed for that purpose. (See this leaked Citigroup report.) It was designed by people who wanted to amass wealth, and the more the merrier. Surely, to be fair, we have to acknowledge that it succeeds in doing that--I mean, look at all the billionaires it has created.
Bill Gross, bond market tycoon and manager of the world’s largest bond fund, apparently believes his fellow millionaires and billionaires are divinely entitled to positive risk free real returns on their hoards. And because the US government hasn’t been providing them lately, he aspires to be the “captain” in a “Caine Mutiny” “revolt” against this rising “repression”. It’s class warfare, plain and simple.
The US holders of US debt, also known as The One Percent, are apparently not satisfied with bleeding the American public dry, by forcing them to cut back on health care, education, and social supports in order to pay the debt holders such as Bill Gross more in risk free interest payments.
The editor of Global Research, Michel Chossudovsky, does us a great service by republishing this interview with Osama bin Laden that occurred shortly after the 9/11 attack. The interview, as I recall, was very superficially reported by US mainstream media at that time.
I find bin Laden's observations to be very creditable and plausible, much more so than the carefully framed propaganda that came out from the war hawks such as Dick Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Perle.
I am in complete agreement with the observations of this writer who asserts that what we have is...
...the most terrifying culture ever to exist, a culture that wholeheartedly, without question, believes in the fantasy that it can continue to live on a finite planet while practicing a way of life predicated on the assumption of infinite growth; a culture that will do anything within its means to reinforce this fantasy--such as, for one, destroy an entire planet through extractive industry and its waste" or, better yet, send messages to underdeveloped communities around the globe that declare that the resources beneath the ground of those respective communities are needed to keep this fantasy believable for those currently living it: Those resources are coveted and they will be forcefully taken if they are not voluntarily handed over, so the message goes.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he is unable to name that part of the culture which is the dynamic that shapes so much of our culture--the capitalist system. If we can't name it, we can't identify the cause sufficiently so that we can apply some kind of effective remedy. With this kind of conceptualization of the problem, one might be left with some kind of moral imperative--like, we should all stop shopping so much. Imagine how effective that would be.
With much of the nation focused on a spring marked by historic floods and deadly tornadoes, Texas and parts of several surrounding states are suffering through a drought nearly as punishing as some of the world's driest deserts.
With all the extreme weather that we have seen here in the US, and indeed across the world, one might expect some mention of climate change. But I haven't seen any such reference for several years. Nowhere in this and the many other mainstream media articles will the journalists make any possible connection to climate change. This is even more surprising coming from a section of Huffington Post, now a semi-mainstream media source that is supposedly devoted to the subject. Apparently the authorities have purged this concept from journalism.
I wonder how censorship works in a "free press" that we in the West supposedly have. I mean, it is not like Stalinist Soviet Union, is it?I mean, surely somebody from a central government agency doesn't keep close watch on media matters and disciplines those who stray.
I haven't had time to thoroughly digest this article, but it appears to contain much insightful material regarding the new form of capitalism which is increasingly showing fascist characteristics, and which is causing so many devastating effects on populations and the environment. It is important to understand this new phase of capitalism if we are going to have a chance of stopping it and replacing it with one that promotes human life and protection of the environment.
By the late 1990s, the system entered into chronic crisis. Sharp social polarisation and escalating inequality helped generate a deep crisis of over-accumulation. The extreme concentration of the planet's wealth in the hands of the few and the accelerated impoverishment, and dispossession of the majority, even forced participants in the 2011 World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos to acknowledge that the gap between the rich and the poor worldwide is "the most serious challenge in the world" and is "raising the spectre of worldwide instability and civil wars."
(Note: the author uses the Marxist term "primitive accumulation" which is a term used "to help explain how the capitalist mode of production came into being. According to Marx, before there could be money with which to make more, i.e. capital, an original accumulation must take place. This might take the form of resource extraction, conquest and plunder, and/or enslavement." See source.)
Public debt seems to operate like a mask behind which lies a shadowy world of creditors to whose upkeep entire economies are mortgaged.
Can that mask be lifted? It has been in other countries, through the mechanism of a debt audit. Initiatives like this have happened in Brazil, Ecuador and elsewhere in order to untangle the web of secrecy around the debt and work out who lent what to whom, when and for what purpose. Typically, there is an expectation that some, at least, of the debt, will be found to be "illegitimate", and can therefore be repudiated.
Unfortunately, the authors barely scratch the surface of this debt problem that has had widespread adverse effects, not only geographically, but historically and against not only individuals but entire nations.
Many of these debts were aggressively pushed onto governments led by corrupt regimes. After lining the pockets of dictators the loans were often used wastefully, e.g. to buy weapons from large corporations. More recently huge debts occurred after many governments bailed out their banks that gambled with worthless packaged mortgages and other obscure financial instruments that few people understood. See this, and for Greece as an example see this, and this about government debts resulting from the bailouts.For inside information about the earlier loans pushed often onto corrupt governments, read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins.
Also in should be mentioned that instead of raising taxes on the rich, the rich much prefer having their governments assume debt in the forms of bonds, loans, etc. Instead of paying decent wages to workers, they encourage workers to use credit cards to purchase items that the advertising world insists they should have in order to be an acceptable human being.
This critical thinker takes apart the NY Times' framing of US military cuts to explain what the political operatives of the US ruling class, the largest purveyors of violence on the planet, really mean when they look at military budget cuts, and how they see the future and the use of military force.
Seeking to dominate the entire planet by force is a losing proposition, but it isn't challenged in the New York Times' columns. In fact, the case for even teeny cuts to the military isn't so much made as assumed, as is the case for ending current wars. But the possible need for future wars is simply accepted, and the damage the wars do -- outside of budgetary concerns -- is either avoided entirely or reduced to purely U.S. terms....
I normally link articles to their original source, but was unable to do so in this instance. However, it is interesting that Venezuelan Analysis website carried this article because the latter has mostly functioned as a supporter of Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution ideology. It is to their credit that they, the editors of this website, have included this critical piece because it indicates that they are not beholden to the role of one leader, Chavez, but for the ideology or revolutionary principles that he and others have articulated in the past.
The issue of turning over this former FARC activist, now Swedish citizen, appears to be another sign of the weakening of Chavez's revolutionary principles supposedly for the sake of expediency. I think it is more than that. I think that Chavez and company have become addicted to power which gives them an immediate "high" in contrast to the longer range satisfaction that can be obtained from the hard work of confronting existing power while trying to build a new society in which power is widely shared.
I have had my doubts about Chavez and his administration after visiting Venezuela in December of 2005 on a two week tour focused on the accomplishments of his revolutionary regime. After listening to a report given by one member of his administration, I asked him a question about the creation of popular power through the institution of community councils. This social unit was to be the fundamental building block to build socialism in Venezuela from the bottom up.
The speaker initially didn't understand my question, and I attributed this to some translation difficulties. But, finally he did understand and gave a very perfunctory response that suggested to me that the concept held very little importance to him.
Since then, I have seen no evidence to suggest that community councils are used for anything other than to administer government grants for community developments, and I have seen significant evidence that it is being used as a base political support for the Chavez regime. For example, see some comments made in a forum in June 2009 presented over Venezuelan TV on a critical review of the Bolivarian revolution. Here are some excerpts:
...there is another problem - which I'm simply going to mention - and that is the lack of popular revolutionary organizations. A revolution like this is constantly under threat from the enemy, and here what has been built, which are extremely valuable, are the communal councils, but these are not exactly revolutionary organizations, they are institutional organizations. ...What we have to have, as well as these [communal councils], are popular organizations in all parts, at the level of the barrios, at the level of whatever space that revolutionary organizations can exist. We had them and we lost them, because the Bolivarian Circles were exactly a practice run of this, and disgracefully they were left behind along the way. But a revolution under threat like this one needs something to defend itself with. ...There are conspiracies here, there are threats, there is a permanent war here to destroy this process and the people need to be well organized to confront it.
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Strong independent movements don't exist
We have a serious problem: that our revolutionary process does not have a truly independent, class conscious and organized workers movement. And the attempts to organize one have ended up bringing the workers movement closer to the policy of the state, [my emphasis] which should not always be the policy that the worker movement should take because the workers movement has to go much further beyond this.
Nor do we have a peasant movement that is sufficiently strong and a student movement; we have been trying to build one but it also is not sufficiently strong. These are great weaknesses of our process, because you cannot build socialism without workers, without peasants, without well-organized popular sectors that can push towards more radical situations or positions.
It is astonishing to read articles like this that illustrate how backward and narrow minded our corporate elites are. The Business Roundtable is a powerful organization that CEOs use to promote their interests. They are very influential because they constitute a major source of funding of our so-called representatives in Congress, which, of course, are their representatives. But, that is how capitalist style democracy works. In contrast to this group, the American people feel otherwise:
A February poll... found 60 percent of people questioned said Congress shouldn’t stop the EPA rules and 35 percent thought lawmakers should bar the agency from limiting discharges of carbon dioxide, a primary greenhouse gas.
Although many corporations have record amounts of cash overflowing their coffers, they are so addicted to profits to the exclusion of every other consideration that they can't even tolerate the minimal government regulation that currently exists.