UN plan to save Earth is “fig leaf” for Big Business: insiders

Click here to access article by Nafeez Ahmed from Insurge Intelligence.

“The big corporate powers via Global Compact and the rich nations have already agreed on what the fig leaf will look like,” said Ladha. “Whatever the SDGs end up saying will, by the very logic of the system they serve, promote a growth-at-all-costs, neoliberal game plan of trickle-down economics and climate destruction.”

But Ladha’s colleague, Joe Brewer, emphasised that this apparent sleight-of-hand is ultimately about the power of ideology. Neoliberal capitalism prevails as the default position not just because of a conspiracy of the powerful, but because it is already everywhere. Everyone, even the less powerful, find it difficult to imagine a world outside capitalism — and so the assumption is that such a world is simply not an option:

    “The logic of neoliberal capitalism is now the water people swim in culturally. It is largely invisible and most don’t realise how their minds default to the dominant commonsense frames of economics discourse.”

Yet the science is increasingly incontrovertible: capitalism’s endless growth paradigm is unsustainable. The post-capitalist era is dawning. And the frog — in this case, the human — is boiling in a dying paradigm of its own construction that has far outlived its usefulness.