I was going to post on that capitalism article I mentioned in my previous blog entry, but this video I was making on child labor took on a life of its own and demanded my entire Sunday.
Human rights organizations have documented child labor in USA. According to a 2009 petition by Human Rights Watch: “Hundreds of thousands of children are employed as farmworkers in the United States, often working 10 or more hours a day. They are often exposed to dangerous pesticides, experience high rates of injury, and suffer fatalities at five times the rate of other working youth. Their long hours contribute to alarming drop-out rates. Government statistics show that barely half ever finish high school. According to the National Safety Council, agriculture is the second most dangerous occupation in the United States. However, current US child labor laws allow child farmworkers to work longer hours, at younger ages, and under more hazardous conditions than other working youths. While children in other sectors must be 12 to be employed and cannot work more than 3 hours on a school day, in agriculture, children can work at age 12 for unlimited hours before and after school.” They would work two to three jobs depending on their age.
I came across a lengthy new article discussing capitalism’s limits/failures and inherent need for growth; I’m going to work on distilling the main points of that paper, but in the mean time, an article from Business Insider caught my attention because it illustrates the total invasivenessof capitalism and the way it permeates every aspect of our lives, rendering humans as no more than an exploitable market demographic under the prying microscope of corporations. This is all being done under the auspices of ‘catering to consumer preferences’ and harkens back to the video posted here.
Google TV, Microsoft, Comcast, and now Verizon have all submitted patent applications to create televisions and DVRs that will watch you as you watch TV…
According to the patent application, here are the ways you can be targeted:
The DVR will also build a profile about you, picking up on your “preferences, traits, tendencies.”…
Soon they’ll be installing cameras and monitoring devices in toilets for the marketing of hemorrhoidal creams and anal hygienic products. This inverted totalitarianism is not so hard to implement after several generations of inculcation into the consumerist society where shopping has become the true religion:
…the hard reality is that Jesus in the manger or bleeding on the cross has less appeal to many Americans that do the latest cellphones and other commercial gadgetry.
Actually, despite the emphasis on purchases during the holidays, shopping is a year-round phenomenon in the United States. Children might not be able to read, write, add, or subtract, but they know a great deal about the latest consumer products…
In this post I want to elaborate more on DK’s comment from my last entry:
…Pre-capitalist tribes had examples of both success and failure, perhaps equal measure of both. The key principle to these types of cultures succeeding is the principle of superabundance. There is strong correlation to the disappearance of superabundance and destructive tendencies…
In his essay ‘Are Wars Inevitable?‘, William T. Hathaway explains that modern research has shown that scarcity of resources acts as a trigger for social strife and that violence and war is NOT a genetic predisposition of humans:
…research, however, led to a key discovery: The chimps who invaded their neighbors were suffering from shrinking territory and food sources. They were struggling for survival. Groups with adequate resources didn’t raid other colonies. The aggression wasn’t a behavioral constant but was caused by the stress they were under. Their genes gave them the capacity for violence, but the stress factor had to be there to trigger it into combat. This new research showed that war is not inevitable but rather a function of the stress a society is under. Our biological nature doesn’t force us to war, it just gives us the potential for it. Without stress to provoke it, violence can remain one of the many unexpressed capacities our human evolution has given us. Studies by professors Douglas Fry, Frans de Waal, and Robert Sapolsky present the evidence for this.
Militarists point to history and say it’s just one war after another. But that’s the history only of our patriarchal civilization. The early matriarchal civilization of south-eastern Europe enjoyed centuries of peace. UCLA anthropologist Marija Gimbutas describes the archeological research in The Civilization of the Goddess. No trace of warfare has been found in excavations of the Minoan, Harappa, and Caral cultures. Many of the Pacific islands were pacifistic. The ancient Vedic civilization of India had meditation techniques that preserved the peace, and those are being revived today to reduce stress in society...
Now DK goes on to say that in the absence of plentiful resources, the only logical and sane option is to give up our current exploitive and pathological economic model of capitalism and replace it with something that reflects today’s reality of rampant resource depletion and environmental collapse. Modern weapons of war are infinitely more destructive and, in and of themselves, pose a danger to all of mankind and global civilization; hence the need to get rid of capitalism is even more imperative:
…When superabundance is (inevitably) rendered invalid, it must be supplanted by a means to re-appropriate surplus in a fair and equitable manner- devoid of exploitation and informed by tangible limits, such as those posed by the environment and population limits. Such a system is not compatible with profit seeking, as many in the environmental movement are now discovering- nor has it ever been put successfully into practice.
One could say that mankind’s ability or inability to successfully transition away from the self-destructive nature of capitalism will determine the fate of the whole human species. Tragedy of the commons, as I said previously, is on a global scale now. Hathaway goes on to elaborate a little on capitalism’s dog-eat-dog tendencies and the need to move away from this paradigm:
Our society, though, has a deeply entrenched assumption that stress is essential to life. Many of our social and economic structures are based on conflict. Capitalism’s need for continually expanding profits generates stress in all of us. We’ve been indoctrinated to think this is normal and natural, but it’s really pathological. It damages life in ways we can barely perceive because they’re so built into us…
…We can create a society that meets human needs and distributes the world’s resources more evenly… But that’s going to take basic changes…
These changes threaten the power holders of our society. Since capitalism is a predatory social and economic system, predatory personalities rise to power. They view the world through a lens of aggression. But it’s not merely a view. They really are surrounded by enemies. So they believe this false axiom they are propagating that wars are inevitable.
In the past their predecessors defended their power by propagating other nonsense: kings had a divine right to rule over us, Blacks were inferior to Whites, women should obey men. We’ve outgrown those humbugs, and we can outgrow this one.
Of course, as Gail of ‘Wit’s End’ pointed out, we will inevitably need to address the problem of overpopulation:
…although once upon a time some tribes (arguably) may have lived cooperatively and harmoniously (although the opposite is certainly more common) the only reason they could do so is because their numbers were so low and food was plentiful and relatively easy to obtain. Once human population outstrips resources, things get ugly no matter what social or cultural system is in place. And I don’t know of a place where human population didn’t eventually overrun the environment, with the possible exception of cultures that practiced infanticide, or had the ability to export people willing to emigrate.
It seems to me the problem is that we have filled every corner of the globe that is remotely habitable, and then some, and yet our population and levels of consumption continue to increase. There is no place left to emigrate to. It can’t last.
Resource constraints(i.e. peak oil, peak fertilizer, peak water) on our fossil fuel based agricultural system as well as environmental degradation(i.e. climate change and ocean acidification) are going to cause an epic population crash during this century before we have time, or for that matter the cooperation and agreement, to implement any sort of voluntary population reduction.
As far as implementing this egalitarian distribution model, I also agree that the odds of that happening are slim to none, as DK said:
…Such a system[egalitarian and respective of resource limits] is not compatible with profit seeking, as many in the environmental movement are now discovering – nor has it ever been put successfully into practice.
Nor is it likely to be.
Unfortunately, the world’s stockpile of thermonuclear weapons may not stay on the shelf forever, especially in a world where the Four Horsemen of Industrial Civilization are quickly converging: Climate Change, Peak Net Energy, Ocean Acidification, and Peak Water. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try everything we can to stop what seems to be our inevitable fate; I’m just saying that the prognosis is grim.
Wrapping your head around the seemingly unstoppable upward march of CO2 emissions is like trying to comprehend all those zeros in the expanding global debt bubble; both are so far beyond human scale that people cannot put them into a frame of reference or perspective. They have taken on a life of their own, a force of nature that defies all attempts to control and subdue them. Brian Merchant takes a stab at trying to frame the CO2 numbers behind industrial civilization’s conundrum of catastrophic climate change:
And 2012 is on track for another 2.6 percent increase. Why can’t we stop it? Perhaps the problem is structural and embedded in our economic system.
In a recent interview, dissident Julian Assange commented on the degree of intertwinement between government and corporations, i.e. fascism or more aptly called inverted totalitarianism in our times. Regulatory capture, the revolving corporate/government door, and K Street lobbying(legalized bribery) are examples of the monied interest$ of capitali$m having taken over government.
There’s not a barrier anymore between corporate surveillance, on the one hand, and government surveillance, on the other. You know, Facebook is based—has its servers based in the United States. Gmail, as General Petraeus found out, has its servers based in the United States. And the interplay between U.S. intelligence agencies and other Western intelligence agencies and any intelligence agencies that can hack this is fluid. So, we’re in a—if we look back to what’s a earlier example of the worst penetration by an intelligence apparatus of a society, which is perhaps East Germany, where up to 10 percent of people over their lifetime had been an informer at one stage or another, in Iceland we have 88 percent penetration of Iceland by Facebook. Eighty-eight percent of people are there on Facebook informing on their friends and their movements and the nature of their relationships—and for free. They’re not even being paid money. They’re not even being directly coerced to do it. They’re doing it for social credits to avoid the feeling of exclusion. But people should understand what is really going on. I don’t believe people are doing this or would do it if they truly understood what was going on, that they are doing hundreds of billions of hours of free work for the Central Intelligence Agency, for the FBI, and for all allied agencies and all countries that can ask for favors to get hold of that information.
William Binney, the former chief of research, the National Security Agency’s signals intelligence division, describes this situation thatwe are in now as “turnkey totalitarianism,” that the whole system of totalitarianism has been built—the car, the engine has been built—and it’s just a matter of turning the key. And actually, when we look to see some of the crackdowns on WikiLeaks and the grand jury process and targeted assassinations and so on, actually it’s arguable that key has already been partly turned. The assassinations that occur extrajudicially, the renditions that occur, they don’t occur in isolation. They occur as a result of the information that has been sucked in through this giant signals interception machinery.
Corporations are the ultimate expression of capitalism. Libertarians decry that what we have is not capitalism, but a corrupted form of it, aka crony capitalism. The opposite is true – unfettered, unregulated capitalism is the purest form of this profit-driven system where economic activity is structured around the accumulation of capital. This is what we get when economic power(money) inevitably usurps all branches of government. Corporate greenwashing, carbon credit schemes, privatization of the commons, and externalizing environmental costs are examples of capitalism’s incompatibility with sustainability and its inability to deal with the degradation of the planet. Corporate power rules the world and it’s what is destroying the planet:
Ecocide is permitted (as genocide was in Nazi Germany) by the government and, by dint of the global reach of modern-day transnational business, every government in the world. Corporate ecocide has now reached a point where we stand on the brink of collapse of our ecosystems, triggering the death of many millions in the face of human aggravated cataclysmic tragedies. Over the passage of time, tyranny revisits. Tyranny is the cruel, unacceptable, or arbitrary use of power that is oblivious to consequence. Whilst the use of coal stations may not be deemed an intentional cruelty, it is certainly an unacceptable use of corporate power. Our governments collude by encouraging excess emissions, contrary to their UNFCCC commitment to stabilize “greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”60 years ago the tyranny was Nazism. Today it is pursuit of profit without moral compass or responsibility.
…There are several points to make in response to the belief that capitalism is compatible with a flourishing environment. Firstly, environmental activism can’t alter capitalism’s integral growth dynamic, it’s “grow or die” impulse, as the social ecologist Murray Bookchin put it. As a result the best environmentalism can do is ameliorate the worst effects. “Things getting worse at a slower rate”, is how the late environmental activist, Donella Meadows, described the situation.
Secondly, in the low or no growth world we are entering, environmental priorities are being sacrificed to meet the short-term need to revive growth. “We can’t be ambivalent about growth,” is how the UK government’s “planning” minister, Greg Clark, justified reducing regulations to make it much easier to approve building development in the countryside.
Thirdly, many polluting practices in western countries that have become culturally unacceptable have been exported to poorer countries, where people have less power to make their objections count.
Lastly, the experience of the 21st century has shown that when environmental activism directly confronts huge capitalist industries like oil, automobiles and mining, it does not win. The 1987 Montreal Protocol was the last successful international agreement to change capitalist behaviour. The protocol called for strict restrictions on chemicals that deplete the ozone layer (chlorofluorcarbons) and the results have been impressive. But, says Schweickart, the industries affected had substitutes to hand, and the protocol “should not lull us into thinking capitalism can accommodate all sensible environmental solutions.”…
…The consequence of the conflict between environmental sanity and profit has been that many capitalist countries – most notably the US – have been unable to change course to ameliorate climate change. Not only this, a political culture has developed that denies the existence of climate change even when its effects become harder and harder to ignore.
Of course the prospects of thinking outside-of-the-box on economic and foreign policy issues has always been heresy. As long as we think we can fix the ecological problem with the same tools that caused the problem, we can expect the Eco-Apocalypse, a tragedy of the commons on a global scale, to unfold as predicted:
Zizek:…………… the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.
The following thoughts were emailed to me by Adam at speciesurvivalibrary and they appeared as a comment on the message board of Nature Bats Last dated November 28. The readers “found it quite moving”, as did I. Therefore, I compiled a video at the end to go along with Daniel’s articulate and resonating words. The scientific confirmations this year of the havoc industrial civilization has wrought to our one and only home have truly been life-altering for me, forcing me to question and re-evaluate everything. For those who have begun to internalize the cold reality of what lies in the not too distant future for mankind, the proverbial rug has been pulled out from under your world. We have unleashed Pandora’s box and the demons are methodically throwing off balance and unravelling the world we once knew, shattering the illusion of man’s dominion over nature.
In a previous post, New C.I.A.-Commissioned Report on Climate Change Stresses to Civilization, we were given a window into dangers created by human-induced climate change. Now we learn that President Obama has axed that program. Why study the ultimate existential threat to industrial civilization when you can just build more weapons to fight the social instability and wars brought on by abrupt, chaotic and extreme weather patterns. This mindset would be in keeping with the American ruling establishment’s practice of treating the symptoms rather than the root cause – ignoring the fact that we, aka industrial ‘civilized’ humans, are the destabilizing force of the biosphere and the primary cause behind climatic disasters to civilization. We’ve pumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere that it has now gained an intractable foothold as a driving force behind possible runaway climate change.
Excerpt…
CURWOOD:…One of the more startling scientific reports presented at Doha — based, so far, on preliminary data – suggests that emissions from the melting Arctic are heading for a tipping point that could lead to runaway warming...
CURWOOD: Now we understand that the CIA has shut down its center for climate change and security – why did they have the center in the first place, do you think?
ROMM: Well, there has been increasing awareness in the intelligence community and the Pentagon that global warming and climate change was going to have an impact on US national security interests. Whether it is military bases that are seeing sea level rise or countries that are subject to worse droughts and famines, so, you know, I think many countries around the world had come to the view that climate change was going to have a big impact on security.
CURWOOD: Why shut this unit down now?
ROMM: Apparently the unit didn’t have much support when Panetta left and General Petraeus took over at the CIA. Petraeus was very focused on terrorism, and there’s a lot of congressional Republicans, who, you know, deny climate science and therefore attack any action by the federal government to study climate change and its impacts.
CURWOOD: Some suggest that the CIA shutting down its Center for Climate Change and Security is a budget matter. What’s your analysis?
ROMM: Well, I think that everyone knows that budgets are under duress. We have this fiscal cliff, in all likelihood, discretionary spending, even for intelligence, is going to be cut. Some were saying that the CIA was trying to make nice with Congressional Republicans and not continue this center that kind of annoyed them.
I hope that’s not the case, because, this is a matter of pretty basic science and it would be a shame if our intelligence organization, whose job is to sift through the facts and be completely separate from ideological spin, it would be a shame if they were getting pressured to not look at science and facts…
ROMM: Closing the center was absolutely a mistake. If the intelligence apparatus in this country with its $75 billion dollar budget can’t have a small center to study one of the gravest threats facing the world, that’s a pretty sad state of affairs…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That’s a pretty sad state of affairs. The weapons of mass destruction have been in plain site all along…
Listen to the real reasons…
…Our national security has been reduced, in large part, to energy security which has led us to militarizing our access to oil through establishing a military presence across the oil-bearing regions of the world and instigating armed conflict in Iraq and sustaining it in Afghanistan…
The claims of near term extinction for mankind are getting stronger and stronger as new scientific evidence is released. Sometime before the end of this century, we’ll all be toast, so any measures we take now at “building resilience” will only be short-lived exercises in self-preservation. That’s how short-sighted we humans are: no consideration for the children and future generations. As long as we can stay comfortably cocooned within the wasteful amenities and faux culture distractions of industrial civilization, we’ll keep sucking on the great ‘carbon energy’ cigar to keep the illusion going, despite the fact that we’re committing species suicide. We are like the domesticated animal that can no longer survive in the natural world. Our addiction to fossil fuels has literally become an ingrained trait, selectively advantageous in the short-term but ultimately leading to our own evolutionary dead end.
If you missed it, the latest news is that, contrary to the propaganda put out by climate change deniers, the Antarctic is not gaining ice, but losing ice:
This is not good news. A new international study—done by 47 experts using data from multiple satellites and aircraft—shows that the Earth is losing ice at an ever-increasing rate from both poles. We’ve known for years that the Arctic has been suffering massive ice loss, with the record low broken more than once in recent years. What’s devastating about this new report is that it shows unequivocally and quantitatively that the Antarctic is also losing land ice, with the critical West Antarctica ice sheet losing on average 65 billion tons of ice every year.
Measuring ice is difficult to do and uncertainties are generally pretty big. By combining several different methods from several different sources, the scientists were able to get the best, most accurate measurements ever made. These new data show that the ice loss from both poles has increased by a factor of three since the 1990s. Just Greenland—the largest source of fresh water ice in the Northern Hemisphere—is losing ice at a rate five times what it did just in the 1990s: about 142 billion tons per year.
Together, since 1992, this ice melt has added over a centimeter (about a half inch) to sea level rise. That may not sound like much, but it doesn’t take much rise in sea levels to start causing catastrophic changes in erosion, storms, and flooding. Worse, this accounts for only about one-fifth of the total amount of sea level rise. Much of the rise is due to the water in the oceans expanding due to warming and other sources.
There’s a double whammy for you: Global warming is increasing the amount of water in the oceans from melting ice, and also increasing the sea level rise by heating up the water itself…
…This new study wipes out yet another false claim from climate change deniers, too. A common refrain from them is that Antarctic ice is increasing, not decreasing. However, this is not true for two reasons. The first is that they count sea ice in that measure. However, Antarctic sea ice tends to melt away completely every year in the spring and summer, and then it reforms in the winter. It therefore on average does not contribute to sea level rise or to the heat budget of the Earth. Second, this new study shows the claim is wrong anyway. We are losing ice from Antarctica every year, and it’s the critical land ice…
I’m sorry to say this, but all the ghastly visions of runaway climate change may very well come to fruition, wiping any trace of humans off the face of the Earth. In the end, man wasn’t really any different from lowly bacteria overwhelming the confines of a petri dish and extinguishing themselves. I’m sure we’ll have amassed an amazing trove of video, literature and other media documenting the horrors to come so that when some alien race visits the planet in the future, they will be able to watch bemused at how humans killed themselves off in the name of “progress” and a dollar.
Michael Sandmel:
“We make up half the world’s population, and frankly, we’re being screwed. We’re being denied a future by a lack of ambition, a lack of vision, and governments that are far too beholden to the interests of big fossil fuel companies, big coal companies, the banks that fund them.”
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 