I mentioned earlier that I’d talk about my reading list. I’ve got a few books I’ll review for this site. The one I’m reading currently is about how the U.S. Southwest, where I live, will be affected by anthropogenic climate change. The book is ‘A Great Aridness‘ by William deBuys.
A few excerpts from the intro:
As deBuys mentions in his intro, the housing market in the Southwest, in particular Phoenix, took a hit in 2008 but is expected to get back on the [population] growth track in the near future.
I will go so far as to say that not only growth but capitalism itself may be in part dependent on a growing population,” Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Bill Gross wrote. – link
Capitalism is fueled by population growth. More people = more consumption = increased GDP and tax revenues.
Elliott D. Pollack, CEO of the economic and real estate consulting firm Elliott D. Pollack & Co., said Arizona’s economic growth depended on adding 100,000 people every year. The population boom fueled growth in “people–serving” jobs, such as doctors, real estate agents and salespeople, he said.
Pollack said he doesn’t expect Arizona to return to the job growth of 2007, just before the crash, until 2015.
“It will be almost a lost decade,” he said. – link
The following satellite pictures tell the tale of the exploding population in Phoenix, even coining a new phrase to describe such explosive growth suburbs as “Boomburbs“…
In the early twentieth century, when big American cities spawned satellite cities, those satellites were often downscaled mimics of the cities they surrounded. Like New York City, for example, its suburb Newark, New Jersey, had its own downtown. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, a different kind of satellite city emerged: a populous suburb with no central business core. “Boomburbs”—suburbs with populations of 100,000 or more that have maintained double-digit growth over decades—are primarily a phenomenon of the southern and western United States….
…Like much of the American Southwest, southern Arizona is arid, and agriculture depends on irrigation. As a result, cultivated fields—rectangles of green and brown—contrast with the pale tan of the naturally bare desert soil. In the 1989 image, most of the land east of Chandler is agricultural. Between 1989 and 2009, however, most of the fields give way to the blue-gray colors of buildings and pavement. In 2009, only a small number of agricultural fields remain, mostly east and south of Route 202. Because many of the United States’ boomburbs occur in the arid Southwest, planning for their water needs is particularly challenging for metropolitan and municipal governments. – link
Getting back to the book’s theme of climate change and the U.S. Southwest, a ballooning population is running headlong into a future characterized by a “new form of desertification… [brought on by] industrial society’s abuse of the atmosphere.” Radical transformation of our corporate-monopolized economy is the only way that climate change can effectively be dealt with. This would, however, appear all but impossible when any form of true government oversight and responsiveness to the citizens has been thoroughly corrupted and sidelined by corporate interests. According to a review in Truth-Out, deBuys illustrates in detail how corporate power is preventing any such changes:
…Of all his stories documenting the choppy and chaotic effects of global warming in the Southwest, especially the rising temperatures and the plagues of droughts, fires, and bark beetles killing thousands of acres of forest trees, I found the natural history and political drama of Mount Graham the most compelling. This is an example where political corruption and higher temperatures collude in unleashing the decline and fall of the Southwest…
…DeBuys sums up both the science and the biopolitics (ruthless politics) sealing our fate. He sees the triumph of corporate power as a resurrection of the 1520 Requerimiento, Spain’s legal justification for the enslavement and murder of the resisting indigenous people to clear the way for Spanish plunder and political control in the Southwest and Latin America. Indeed, the Requerimiento marked “the momentum of Spain’s imperial impulse,” no different than “the momentum of contemporary climate change today.”
The connection of past colonialism with its present variety, triggering and making global warming possible, is an insight into and a lesson on how the future is likely to be…
There are two major differences between the avarice of the Gilded Age Robber Barons and that of today’s all-powerful multinational corporations. Firstly, the corporations of today are much more omnipotent and control society through a form of despotic rule called ‘inverted totalitarianism‘. As Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer exclaimed last summer, “They were pikers compared to what we’re doing now.” Secondly, an egregious wealth gap and the political disenfranchisement of the worker do characterize both periods, but now the world must contend with climate chaos along with a host of other environmental problems, any one of which can bring down modern civilization.
Thanks Mike. There is a very significant – and most likely suppressed, ignored, or flippantly dismissed source of scientific literature. Very few Americans are prepared to learn much from indigenous (read: backward) peoples. The first citation is my favorite and I was first alerted to it by Vandana Shiva since much of this literature has so far focused on India but I know of other examples from Africa, the Middle East, and native North and South America. It is a fairly standard and widely accepted fact among ethnobotany experts. I’ve attached one pdf for your perusal:
That said, share these citations with your reader. (if you do not have access) I can track down my pdf copies and email them to you, but it’ll have to wait till I get back to my campus computer; I don’t think I have any of those sources at home.
Best regards, and keep sharing as much of my work as you see fit; nice blog by the way! If you all need anything else, please let me know…
I [also] wanted to explain what I know about Zapotec women’s use of plants and herbs for various treatments because some of the abortifacients have other applications.
The Zapotecs use several tall weedy shrubs to small trees, prototypically Solanum lanceolatum, sosa and/or berenjena. yàg-guièdz-zân [`tree/shrub´ + `disease´ + `child birth´], are included here. The fruits are yellow to orange when mature; the name refers to the use of the plant as medicine to treat post-partum weakness and pain; for example, a woman in labor is referred to as mén̲w-zân(`person´ + `childbirth´), disease is guièdz; the woman is bathed in an infusion of the leaves, beginning 15 days after the birth.
It also works as an abortifacient if you drink as tea: three tablespoons three times (se friega `it scours´ the uterus). It is also used to treat wounds and cáncer, i.e., a badly infected wound. In that case, boil, use the whole plant; mix with gordolobo (Gnaphalium spp., Asteraceae) and hierba de cáncer (blàg-chòg, prototypically Tournefortia spp., Boraginaceae) or with canfor; also for swelling (guì); wash with the infusion; it is “hot” (nzæ̌æ); two widely recognized varieties are “smooth” yàg-guièdz-zân-zhǐil and “spiny” yàg-guièdz-zân-guièts. The smooth variety is the best medicine; a very large and very spiny variety grows in neighboring communities, but is not named and is not used as medicine. I hope that is not too much detail, but you did ask.
Devon G. Peña, Ph.D. 2013 NACCS Scholar Professor American Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, and Program on the Environment University of Washington EMAIL| dpena@uw.edu UW OFFICE| 206-543-1507 MOBILE| 206-228-4876 NGO WEBSITE| The Acequia Institute BLOGS| Environmental and Food Justice and History and Politics of Mexican Immigration
“Memory is a moral obligation, all the time.” – J. Derrida
Native cultures appear to have much more knowledge than ‘techno-fix carbon man’ gives them credit for.
I wanted to comment on XrayMike’s excellent and provocative post “Earth to Humans”, as well as some of the follow up comments, but the response got a little lengthy so I am guest posting my remarks.
This linkage between capitalism and the economy, labor exploitation, environmental sustainability, population growth and various and sundry other issues is so complex that it defies deterministic explanation.
Attempts to assign single variable responsibility to any culture, economic system or similar set of circumstances are inherently flawed. These phenomena are overdetermined, which is to say that they contain dialectic influence between each other, which is in effect multi-variable causality. Very difficult to resolve, and there are but two fields that can do this (dynamic, non linear interactions), mathematics and philosophy. It is interesting that the field of philosophy was the first to resolve these methods, in the absence of mathematical tools.
Dialectic philosophy can mean many things, but in this context it is the ever changing relationship of causality between a political economy and the environment, population growth, and resources.
To cite an example, I’m reminded of an excellent PBS special that I saw a few months ago, “The Dust Bowl” which provides ample (and contemporary) illustration of the interaction between capitalism and the environment.
The Dust Bowl was the worst man made environmental disaster in recorded history, and illustrates the nebulous and overdetermined link between population, capitalism, and the political economy.
Hard on the heels of the Great Depression, the ‘30’s brought the convergence of several influential factors to the travesty of population settlement in the American Great Plains. Fueled with the intoxicant of Manifest Destiny, the dynamics of the era were remarkable, as simultaneously and with varying degrees of import, we saw the following:
1.) A ceaseless expansion of population from the East and South westward into the Plains and onwards to the Pacific. There were many factors contributing to this westward expansion, but central was the fresh memory of the Mexican-American war, the ongoing dispute over the Oregon border with the British empire, and other land grab type concerns on the part of the US Government. By now the native Americans were suitably marginalized by the offshoot of Manifest Destiny, namely, the machinations of Accumulation by Dispossession, the time honored means to justify a good old fashioned land grab. What was left was a State sponsored occupation of these territories under the Lockean theory of ownership by virtue of land cultivation.
2.) To accomplish this, we had a series of “Homestead Acts”, legislation which essentially gave away land parcels in the Great Plain regions ranging from 160 acres (circa 1860) initially, then gradually expanded to 640 acres (circa 1930). Basically free land for any who might ask. These were typically settled by families, who raised sufficient numbers of children to work the land plots as productive farms, it being key to the number of family members relative to the size of the plot. These small independent farms were decidedly non-capitalist, although they did contain internally, strong elements of class structure, mostly feudal class. This arrangement (homesteading) was preferred by the capitalists of the North, as they were concerned about the Southern states rampant success with large scale plantations using slaves, (circa 1860) as the Northerners (with the Industrial Revolution now underway) could not compete with free slave labor. They knew full well in a few decades time that these independent homesteaders would be subsumed into the capitalist mode of production with the emergence of new factories and the spectre of large scale competition from massive factory farms, ultimately rendering the small family farmer obsolete.
3.) What these farmers did not know was that the arid land in the Great Plains had evolved over the centuries to include a ground cover of prairie grass, a drought tolerant plant that covered the vast majority of this enormous land mass East of the Rockies.
4.) At the same time, Industrialization of the Northern states and Great Lakes regions began to take hold to a very significant scale, and the transition to mechanized farming was begun in earnest. Companies like John Deere, Caterpillar, and many others began where Eli Whitney had left off, and brought massive mechanization to the farm business. Capital again plays a multi-faceted role, exhibiting it’s curious ability to simultaneously fund the enormous factories (modes of production, including entire supply chains) and at the same time to fund the customer base as well. And the customer base was the small 160 acre farmer run by a traditional family. So how does this work, how does a dirt poor farmer obtain a piece of capital equipment? Why he borrows the money of course, and this era has the interesting attribute of the emergence of a third arm of Capitalism, the Money Lending Capitalist, to the retail farm sector. They borrow the money using the Government supplied Homestead Act land as collateral. The same money lending capitalists also lent money to the John Deere’s of the world to expand the mode of production, and lending to large scale factory farmers at the same time. But perhaps most interesting to me anyway, was the legacy of farm equipment manufacturer John Deere, who during this period filled the role of Money Lending Capitalists, as they built scores of community based local dealerships and get this, gave out the tractors to whoever wanted one (for a small monthly payment of course). This circular monetary flow is a critical illustration to how capital works, funding both expansive modes of production, as well as the customer base. It also illustrates the ingrained tension between separate money lending capitalists (such as banks) and industrial capitalists, (in this case John Deere) as Deere wanted desperately to control the financing of their equipment, using both the machines and the land as collateral. How can you lose?
The irony though is how the recipients of these “factory” loans from John Deere perceived the fleecing of their surplus value, unlike the banks which were largely reviled during and after the Great Depression, especially by the farm community, the reputation of John Deere rose like a shooting star, with it’s fanatical customer base ever grateful for the “neighborly” largesse the corporation showed, even as it was repossessing failed farms. Those suckers never knew what hit them.
5.) If this was not enough, the world was undergoing a massive shortage of wheat production, largely due to the loss of Russian wheat farming, which was having a few problems of its own what with Stalin’s antics. At the time, Russia was the largest producer of wheat in the world, and this capacity suddenly went off line. This prompted a near panic in the ‘30’s, with the US government facing the very real possibility that it could not access sufficient wheat to feed its population, and as such offered incentives to homesteaders to grow wheat with highly subsidized wheat pricing.
Hopefully the point is made that these five factors combine simultaneously to unleash a set of conditions that results in the worst man made environmental disaster ever recorded. No one single factor is to blame, rather the interaction at precisely the right time and exactly the right proportion was needed to create this disastrous result. Dialectic reasoning allows one to consider these multiple factors that are constantly interacting and changing, and to assess the system as a whole, as well as to derive meaning.
The small farmer, flush with opportunity to provide for his family and at the same time to raise his standard of living significantly, went with the program and borrowed money to buy farm equipment. At the turn of the last century, these types of purchases were made by collective, as any fool knew that a small farmer did not need expensive capital equipment that was used 2 weeks a year for harvest and then sat idle for the remainder. These machines were shared, and where possible, harvests were time phased to allow a harvester or combine for example, to serve a number of nearby farms. One of the key attributes of the early and mid 20th century was the atomization of collective groups into individual consumers, effectively turning them away from collective sharing into not just stand alone consumers, but consumers competing with each other (for status) as well as capitalist aspirations. (A Dodge in every garage)
What with all these new tractors, what is one to do but to start tearing up the ground and plant, you guessed it, wheat. So all that centuries old prairie grass was quickly dispensed with, and one got about the business of rutting up the earth as fast as possible to plant wheat in order to get some of the subsidized wheat pricing in order to buy some consumer goods. At first, it was a “bumper” crop, so named as the bounty was often so large as to weigh down the bumper of the vehicle when it went to market.
Now all that was missing was an inflection point, and this came in the form of a massive drought which commenced in 1930 and lasted for more than a decade. Now that the prairie grass was removed by damaging farming practices (largely by tractor) over millions and millions of acres of land, there was no ability to retain any moisture, nor to hold and maintain topsoil.
And then the winds began.
In November, 1933, the Great Plains were besieged with truly incomprehensible wind storms that lifted up the newly exposed top soil and blew it hundreds, and in some cases thousands of miles. This went on with great frequency, often several times a week for 5, 6 , 7 years. The clouds were truly frightening and the dust permeated every pore of a house, caused massive lung infections and death (mostly of children), and resulted in the slaughter of millions of cattle as they had no food to eat. Large trenches were dug in farm fields, starving cattle herded into the trenches and shot to death by the hundreds of thousands. It was common to run a rope from the kitchen porch to the barn, as during the daytime dust storms it was impossible to see the “arm in front of your face” and people could get lost and die in their own backyard. The density of the black was described as “two midnights in a jug” hence the title of this post.
So how does one interpret this calamity? Is this a natural result of population growth, a symbol of man’s disrespect for the environment, a reveal of the vagaries of capitalism, or as some might say, an example of government intervention gone wrong. All have credible narratives around them, but the right answer is neither in the singular, the right answer considers that these effects occurred in synchronization with each other, and all had varying degrees of causality. All the listed factors are contributors, as well as some not listed.
But the illustrative lesson of the Dust Bowl may be distilled down to several key contributors, one of which might be the notion that man acting in his own best interests does not in fact benefit society as a whole. If farmers all around you practice destructive farming, and you do not, you are affected, and so are other non participants. These types of discussions lead to a thought domain characterized by John Rawls (Theory of Justice) and Robert Nozick’s (Anarchy, State, and Utopia) wherein the principle of side rights of the individual is broached effectively.
This type of thinking is an essential step to recognizing that governance and political philosophy have moved on substantially from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Particularly, the realization that “side rights” or the influence of a neighbor reducing your utility while in pursuit of his so called “liberty” is an intellectual dead end and is contradictory to the principle of any meaningful freedom. So is the prospect of being forced to sell your labor power for sustenance, to those that would exploit you- the very antithesis of freedom. Modern conservatives do not acknowledge side rights, principally because they are stuck with a paradigm where ostensibly the government is to blame for all that is wrong.
In fact, the opposite is often the case, and history illustrates many examples where government intervention, central planning, and other types of consolidated (as in not local) government edicts were essential to provide corrective action. We can again look to the Dust Bowl for evidence, as we have another contemporary example. These settlers were fiercely independent and reliably self sufficient, every bit what the modern libertarian would strive for, yet only with substantial government intervention were the ravages of the Dust Bowl finally mitigated through, among other initiatives, government demonstrated upgraded farming practices that rectified the environmental damage precluding it from happening again. After nearly a decade of this self realized environmental disaster, the settlers were, literally, begging for government support and guidance to get back on their feet.
This also occurred in the late 19th century, with the start of the Progressive Era and the time of the Robber Barons, wherein the population begged and demanded that the capitalists of the day be brought to heel. This worked until the ‘20’s and the Gilded Age, when Capital shed the chains of progressive influence, and once again blew the place up with the 1929 Crash, which brings us full circle back to the Dust Bowl.
Yes, everyone will die, every empire will fall, every monetary system will collapse, and ultimately we will in fact consume all of the finite resources on our planet. To this ultimate end, no one can offer a panacea, not Marxism, not Communism, and certainly not Capitalism, all will ultimately collapse if for nothing else but lack of resources. But it is our lot to Reason, it is human to better oneself.
We have been infected with a malaise that has altered our very DNA, it has damaged our ability to reason, it has blinded us to the contradictions that are self evident, it has promoted false consciousness, and it has denied the very discussion of alternatives.
Why, then, are radicals so hesitant to talk about what a different system might look like? One of the oldest and most influential objections to such talk comes from Marx, with his oft-quoted scorn toward utopian “recipes” for the “cookshops of the future.” The moral of the quote, supposedly, is that a future society must emerge from the spontaneous dynamics of history, not from the isolated imaginings of some scribbler. This isn’t without some irony, since two years later Marx the scribbler wrote his own little cookshop recipe in his Critique of the Gotha Program — it involved labor tokens, storehouses of goods, and an accounting system to determine how much workers would get paid.
As it happens, Marx’s comment was a riposte to a negative review he’d received in a Paris newspaper run by devotees of the philosopher Auguste Comte, criticizing Marx for offering no concrete alternative to the social system he condemned. (That’s why, in the original quote, he asks wryly if the recipes the reviewers had hoped to see happened to be “Comtist” ones.) To grasp the context, you have to understand that like many utopian writers of the era, Comte proffered scenarios for a future society that were marked by an almost deranged grandiosity, featuring precise and fantastically detailed instructions on practically every facet of daily life. It was this obsessive kind of future-painting that Marx was really taking aim at.
(…)
Maybe the most fundamental reason the Left has been suspicious of such visions is that they have so often been presented as historical endpoints – and endpoints will always be disappointing. The notion that history will reach some final destination where social conflict will disappear and politics come to a close has been a misguided fantasy on the Left since its genesis. Scenarios for the future must never be thought of as final, or even irreversible; rather than regard them as blueprints for some future destination, it would be better to see them simply as maps sketching possible routes out of a maze. Once we exit the labyrinth, it’s up to us to decide what to do next.
There is much ongoing dialogue on how to fold some of the more contemporary concepts of political philosophy into actionable lifestyle choices, and I am a big fan of these types of discussions- even if they do turn circular (which they often do). But nevertheless, initiatives like Richard Wolf’s worker funded exchanges wherein surplus value is distributed to workers, and managers are elected democratically, and (as in the excerpt above) centrally planned command economies are hybridized by using free market demand signals to inform production volumes and regional needs. Reintroducing class consciousness as a repetitive topic of discussion reinforcing where and when exploitation occurs is another example.
The major impediment of any refined approach to political philosophy is not so much what we don’t know, it’s discarding the nonsense that we do know.
I think the circumstances on Easter Island although not capitalistic, were similar to what happened in the Dust Bowl, one factor was inadequate and (at times) inappropriate command level decisions. I think if you trace most of the pre-capitalist failures of societal endeavors you will find similar themes, improper or missing command authority, reliance on principles of self liberty over common good, lack of class consciousness, etc.
Capitalism just adds rocket fuel to a fire that is already smoldering.
Hello dominant life form of planet Earth. Yes, that means you Homo Sapiens. I’ve watched as over the millennia you evolved from a primitive ape-like hominid species, surviving purely by instinct, to the technology-wielding, sophisticated-thinking creature of today. Truly, the planet became your smorgasbord and you have partaken freely. As a matter of fact, you have very nearly emptied the planet’s entire refrigerator and cupboards and are now preparing to lick your plate clean. I’ve been throwing up some warning signs, especially this past year, to try to get your attention and perhaps make you reconsider your current omnivorous appetite. After all, you do share the planet with other life forms who have been hoping someone or something will put an end to your callous industrial rampage. I’ve even set in motion a sort of evolutionary check-and-balance, a doomsday device if you will, in the form of atmospheric heat-trapping gases, ensuring your demise just in case you don’t get the message of behavior modification. In other words, your dominant socio-economic paradigm of capitalism is fatally flawed.
Your voracious appetite for the world’s natural resources — fish, timber, potable water, arable land, minerals, et al. — continues unabated. And after consuming them, you leave behind mountains of waste and destruction. Does it always take a crisis before you creatures take action? Instead of waiting until you suffocate to death in a world of hypoxic oceans and dead forests, try listening to those lone voices of dissent screaming for your attention:
Look, I have news for you. The human economy does not take precedence over the Earth’s natural ecological processes which have evolved over millions of years to provide you with clean water, clean air, fertile land, and productive plant and animal life. All of these priceless necessities have been given to you at no charge to your accounting ledger. I guess free lunches are something no human can refuse, but the bill will come due no matter how you try to hide it by pushing it off onto the environment and future generations. In a planet without a stable biosphere, your glimmering metropolises with their megalithic concrete and steel structures reaching heavenward are nothing more than fleeting sand castles to be washed away by the next rogue wave of a surging sea… Sandy was just a warm-up event. Perhaps a new ‘Dust Bowl’ event and heat waves down under demanding a new color code on the weather map and droughts rendering useless a nation’s hydroelectric power will do the trick. I suppose as long as the $tock exchanges of the world are operable, your “business as usual” scheme of perpetual growth and converting all the natural world into capitalist symbols of wealth will carry on its merry way right over the edge of global extinction. And you thought the “fiscal cliff” was something to worry about?
As a mentor and intellectual peer of this site said recently, “tribes and societies that did master effective class consciousness thrived, for a very long time. Those that didn’t, don’t.” At today’s massive scale of production and consumption, the human and environmental exploitation characterized by modern industrial capitalism undermines the long-term existence of mankind along with every other living organism on the planet. Capitalism shoehorns everything into its profit-seeking regime, no matter if that means global genocide on a scale never heretofore seen:
…Actually, the more I reflect on it, the clearer I see the logic, the rationale, behind the bankers’ and the capitalists’ push for privatization. It is not just more profits they are after, not just share price or corporate valuation; no! They are after mass extermination, genocide on a grand scale – of the world’s needy, the under-funded, the unwanted, the uncivilized, the savages and the barbarians, the commies and the Islamists, in short, elimination of all of the Others.
The big boyz have seen all the data and crunched all the numbers, and it is clear to them – the earth is running out of resources, Mars is -50 C all of the time, and we can no longer afford to carry all of this excess baggage here on the planet — all of these miserable, thankless, do-nothing mouths to feed. So the plan is brilliant. You reduce the number from 7+ billion by at least 33% without firing one shot. You simply privatize all natural resources and then price access so that the bottom third of the globe’s population cannot afford it. And so, they die; it will be the biggest die-off of the Anthropocene epoch…
While many liberal blogs were celebrating what looked on the surface to be an Obama victory of raising taxes on the über wealthy, they apparently did not notice what was being slipped up their behind.
For starters, the payroll tax, which was lowered in 2011 from 6.2% down to 4.2% in an effort to breathe some life into a moribund middle class, has jumped back up by 2% to its original rate. 160 million American workers will now shell out another $35 to $180 per week depending on their income level. The payroll tax is capped for incomes greater than $113,000 at $2,274. This means that it’s a regressive tax –anyone making over $113,00 will pay less as a percentage of their income, while for everyone else the tax is a net increase of 2%.
So while the plebs are scrounging around to pay that extra tribute to the Empire, our corporate overlords have extracted more blood from the serfs:
The “fiscal cliff” legislation passed this week included $76 billion in special-interest tax credits for the likes of General Electric, Hollywood and even Captain Morgan. But these subsidies weren’t the fruit of eleventh-hour lobbying conducted on the cliff’s edge — they were crafted back in August in a Senate committee, and they sat dormant until the White House reportedly insisted on them this week…
In late July, Finance Chairman Max Baucus announced the committee would soon convene to craft a bill extending many expiring tax credits. This attracted lobbyists like a raw steak attracts wolves. …
General Electric and Citigroup, for instance, hired Breaux and Lott to extend a tax provision that allows multinational corporations to defer U.S. taxes by moving profits into offshore financial subsidiaries. This provision — known as the “active financing exception” — is the main tool GE uses to avoid nearly all U.S. corporate income tax.
Corporations also got another legalized tax avoidance here:
As part of the fiscal cliff deal, Congress also extended another little-known tax break that benefits large multinationals selling products through overseas affiliates. This “pass-through” exemption permits a U.S.-based company to set up a new corporation in a tax haven like the Cayman Islands and sell it a patent owned by the U.S. parent company. Royalties on overseas licensing of that patent would then route to the tax-sheltered firm, instead of the U.S. parent company. The Joint Committee on Taxation says the two-year cost of extending this shelter is $1.5 billion.
The financial services industry, whose leaders had earlier joined a group of other corporate executives pushing for a “fair” solution to the fiscal crisis, is one of the primary beneficiaries of special-interest tax breaks. The active-financing exception, for example, permits banks like Morgan Stanley to avoid the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate on interest income from money lent overseas. A handful of other U.S.-based multinational companies with financing arms, such as Ford Motor Co. and General Electric, also use that exemption to lower their tax bills…
…[T]he “active financing” exception … permits businesses earning interest on overseas lending to defer U.S. taxes on that income indefinitely…
Vampire-squid Goldman Sachs and too-crooked-to-fail Bank of America also get tax breaks for moving into the new World Trade Center that replaced the pre-9/11 one:
…This tax provision was created to help revitalize Lower Manhattan’s small businesses but instead helped out these two mega-bailed-out banks and helped to subsidize the construction of luxury apartments. Goldman Sachs alone was reported to have received $1.6 billion in tax-free financing of its new building…
There are many more corporate giveaways in the fiscal spiked dildo that was rammed into Main Street, but you get the idea. America is just one big plantation for our corporate masters to harvest from on a perpetual basis. Yves Smith has a post discussing the permanent cementing-in of a class structure composed of the ‘have all’ and ‘have nothing’:
…The newest chat, with economist James Henry, focuses on how the deal on estate taxes allows the rich to pass on wealth to their children, allowing inequality to persist across generations. And he reminds us that a lot of Congressmen are rich enough that this provision will benefit their families…
I could not have summed up the situation better than the first commenter:
In their mad dash to cling to a sinking ship’s last remaining point above water, the callus elite won’t hesitate to trample all over women and children. In a world of ‘peak everything’ and a dying biosphere, the venal nature of man will surely surface in spades.
An interesting article came to my attention via a referral from The Big Picture. The economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Ross Gittins, has written an article, The four business gangs that run the US, which is a review of Jeffrey Sachs book, The Price of Civilisation. Sachs should have entitled his book ‘The Price of Capitalism’. In order to protect corporate interests, the exploiters will always use their wealth to bribe the political system (such as campaign contributions and promises of lucrative positions in the private sector after leaving government posts). We are all familiar with feedback loops in terms of climate change,but there also exists one within our socio-economic system which is extremely destructive. I refered to this feedback loop as the government-corporate-lobbyist complex in my postGuns, God, and Greenback$.Sachs describes this pernicious feedback loop, which has accelerated wealth to the top 0.001%, as follows:
Sachs says…
Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth.
Sachs even uses the term corporatocracy to describe the four primary U.S. business sectors which have usurped our government:
1.) Military-Industrial-Complex
Sachs says…
As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then.
2.) Wall Street-Washington complex
This group, comprised primarily of the big financial corporations (i.e. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley), systematically worked to “capture” regulation and take control of the money system which, Sachs says, “paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis and the mega-bailouts that followed, through reckless deregulation followed by an almost complete lack of oversight by government”.
3.) Big Oil-transport-military complex
Sachs says…
Since the days of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust a century ago, Big Oil has loomed large in American politics and foreign policy. Big Oil teamed up with the automobile industry to steer America away from mass transit and towards gas-guzzling vehicles driving on a nationally financed highway system.
Now you know why America has a rail system that even the Bulgarians would be ashamed of, as Kunstler is fond of saying. Next time you fill up your tank, think of the perpetual oil wars in the Middle East as an externalized cost of subsidizing America’s car culture. Anita Dancs calculated the cost of securing our liquid fuel addiction back in 2010:
…Put all these numbers in perspective: The price of a barrel of oil consumed in the United States would have to increase by $23.40 to offset military resources expended to secure oil. That translates to an additional 56 cents for a gallon of gas, or three times the federal gas tax that funds road construction.
If $166 billion were spent on other priorities, the Boston public transportation system, the “T,” could have its operating expenses covered, with commuters riding for free. And there would still be money left over for another 100 public transport systems across the United States. Or, we could build and install nearly 50,000 wind turbines. Take your pick.
Sachs also reminds us that “Big Oil has played a notorious role in the fight to keep climate change off the US agenda. Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries and others in the sector have underwritten a generation of anti-scientific propaganda to confuse the American people.”
4.) Healthcare Complex
Sachs says…
The key to understanding this sector is to note that the government partners with industry to reimburse costs with little systematic oversight and control. Pharmaceutical firms set sky-high prices protected by patent rights; Medicare [for the aged] and Medicaid [for the poor] and private insurers reimburse doctors and hospitals on a cost-plus basis; and the American Medical Association restricts the supply of new doctors through the control of placements at medical schools.
‘The result of this pseudo-market system is sky-high costs, large profits for the private healthcare sector, and no political will to reform.
We are the only industrialized country on Earth without universal healthcare. We pay more than anyone else and get less for the money spent. One of every five or six GDP dollars goes to feed this beast, but our life expectancy doesn’t reflect it:
Sachs says the elite take care of their own and have no concern for the plebs down below:
There is absolutely no economic crisis in corporate America. Consider the pulse of the corporate sector as opposed to the pulse of the employees working in it: corporate profits in 2010 were at an all-time high, chief executive salaries in 2010 rebounded strongly from the financial crisis, Wall Street compensation in 2010 was at an all-time high, several Wall Street firms paid civil penalties for financial abuses, but no senior banker faced any criminal charges, and there were no adverse regulatory measures that would lead to a loss of profits in finance, health care, military supplies and energy.
Ross Gittins concludes his review of Sachs’ book by briefly summarizing the path the elite took to amass their incredible wealth:
The 30-year achievement of the corporatocracy has been the creation of America’s rich and super-rich classes, he says. And we can now see their tools of trade.
It began with globalisation, which pushed up capital income while pushing down wages. These changes were magnified by the tax cuts at the top, which left more take-home pay and the ability to accumulate greater wealth through higher net-of-tax returns to saving.’
Chief executives then helped themselves to their own slice of the corporate sector ownership through outlandish awards of stock options by friendly and often handpicked compensation committees, while the Securities and Exchange Commission looked the other way. It’s not all that hard to do when both political parties are standing in line to do your bidding, Sachs concludes.
There was a comment that Darbikrash made on another website a year ago which pertains to this subject and clearly explains the corrupting influence that money has on government. Here is an excerpt:
The Earth’s population of efficient Human termites continues to devour the planet out of house and home. Similar to the oil industry racing to the Arctic to suck out any newly revealed deposits of fossil fuels, we have mining companies racing to exploit a dying Amazon forest. Just like the vanishing ice sheets and glaciers of the Arctic and Antarctic, the trees of the Amazon are succumbing to a warming planet:
A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1 sheds light on the long-term effects of drought on the Amazon rainforest — giving clues about how the rainforest might be affected by global warming in the future. The researchers report that the severe drought that hit the rainforest in 2005 had lasting effects on the forest canopy, such that it remained damaged at least four years later…
…The latest analysis paints a grim picture for Amazonian rainforests should severe droughts become more frequent. Most Amazonian droughts are driven by warmer surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, but the severe droughts of 2005 and 2010 seem to have been influenced by warmer sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean.
It could change the drought outlook in the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due in 2014…
After reading that, a wise caretaker of the Earth would step back and contemplate serious conservation efforts for preserving this critical environmental feature of the planet. Many have called the Amazon rainforest the “Lungs of the Earth”‘, a “jewel of the Earth”, the ”world’s largest pharmacy”, and a “biodiversity hotspot”. Those phrases sound like they refer to something that is highly regarded and vital. But in the world of industrial capitalism, the response is to do this:
…All together, mining companies will spend some $24 billion between 2012 and 2016 to boost production of iron ore, bauxite and other metals found in the Amazon basin, according to Brazil’s mining association, Ibram. Already, Brazil is attracting a fifth of all mining investment globally, and for many the Amazon represents the country’s greatest untapped potential.
“The Amazon will be our California,” said Fernando Coura, Ibram’s president.
The push by miners into the Amazon fits with Brazil’s broader strategy to tap the rain forest’s natural resources to drive economic growth. Brazil is building hydroelectric dams on Amazon rivers, improving roads between far-flung Amazon towns and connecting them to the national power grid. Legal changes and government-backed lending will help pave the way for more Amazon mines…
And so the unending destruction of the planet steamrolls onward in the name of “developement” and “progress”. The conversion of the real world into profitable commodities leaves in its wake a toxic and barren wasteland. For those whose eyes have been opened to such ecocide, how much more can you take before you simply become numb to it, zombified to the death and destruction inherent in our socio-economic system of industrial capitalism.
Gold Mining in the Amazon:
…One cannot disdain all other living beings, grind mountains to extract minerals, build roads without a thought for habitat fragmentation, design gardens to please only human aesthetics, or harvest monocultures that serve solely human needs, and expect one’s world to continue for long. There is room for humans at Earth’s banquet, but only those who have lived in place long enough to have learned the contours of their terrain, the language of their plant and animal neighbors and, more than anything, the needs of non humans… –Biodiversity and Sustainability Are Closely Linked to Language and Culture
You better believe that the financial elite who run this country do have OWS and any other social movement under 24/7 surveillance. Anything that strives to change the status quo of neoliberal capitalism will be undermined and crushed, whether through covert actions or co-optive schemes. Social justice, the environment, and the very habitability of planet earth are not on the agenda of the 1%’ers.
Now we have official confirmation that this indeed was and is the case. Surprise, surprise:
Newly obtained documents confirm that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was monitoring peaceful protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement before the first OWS demonstrations even began…
…The list of documents, says Verheyden-Hilliard, “is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement.”
“These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity,” she writes. “These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.
What more proof do you need that we live under a corporatocracy? Since solving dire problems like climate change would require a complete dismantling of the current capitalist system, i.e. an economic system driven by the profit motive is incompatible with ecological sustainability, we can see why the financial and corporate elite would be hostile to a grass-roots movement which seeks social and environmental justice. Such issues don’t compute with the bottom line of corporations or our war-based economy. Interestingly, the only real attention that was given to OWS by those in power was on how their discontent could be co-opted by the status quo:
As I [Glenn Greenwald] noted several weeks ago, White House-aligned groups such as the Center for American Progress have made explicitly clear that they are going to try to convert OWS into a vote-producing arm for the Obama 2012 campaign, and that’s what “Occupy Congress” is designed to achieve.
Of course the Tea Party was never really a threat to Corporate America because it’s what is termed an astroturf group, as was first reported a few years ago by Australian filmmaker Taki Oldham:
Do you think these free-market idealogues of capitalism are going to clean up the mess left in the wake of climate chaos? Hell no. The unwashed masses are on their own. As long as the elite have the money to insulate themselves from the ravages of our fossil fuel-dependent economy, they will have no real concern for the catastrophes that lie ahead. A case in point is the recent aftermath of the Hurricane Sandy Frankenstorm:
Billionaire David Koch’s prime political organization, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), having failed in its $125 million quest to oust President Barack Obama, is now aiming at a slightly less sophisticated political target: victims of Hurricane Sandy. […]
Earlier this week, AFP, which is chaired by Koch and believed to be financed by several other plutocrats from the New York City region, released a letter warning members of Congress not to vote for the proposed federal aid package for victims of the storm that swept New Jersey, New York City and much of the surrounding area in October. An announcement on the group’s website says that the vote next week for the Sandy aid package will be a “key vote” — meaning senators who support sending money for reconstruction could face an avalanche of attack ads in their next election. Already, opposition to the bill is growing, although it passed one procedural hurdle last [Friday] night. […]
Koch’s top deputy in New Jersey, a surly gentleman named Steve Lonegan, who heads the local AFP state chapter, called the aid package a “disgrace.” “This is not a federal government responsibility,” Lonegan told reporters. “We need to suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves.
‘Change’ will always be an empty campaign slogan when you have a federal government which:
…wastes resources on a multi-trillion dollar Security and Surveillance apparatus to spy on its entire citizenry, in particular OWS protestors, minorities, and government critics/whistleblowers.
…pumps more than half of every tax dollar into the military industrial complex and its war-profiteering cronies who perpetuate our war economy.
…is not alarmed that 50 million Americans are dependent on food stamps while U.S. corporations hoard $22 trillion in secret offshore bank accounts.
…thinks that tax revenues can be maintained while its manufacturing base is off-shored to exploit cheap foreign labor pools.
…uses the growth in corporate profits as the only yardstick for societal well-being.
…marginalizes and prevents the participation of third party candidates within our two-party oligopoly.
…believes that the system described above should be bailed out for its criminal excesses from the billfold of a now beaten-down middle class.
New ‘smile guards’ will soon become mandatory in the work environment of the corporate state:
Amongst all the drama of the fiscal cliff, the story that should have gotten front page space this week is that the Antarctic is melting much faster than previously thought. In my post ‘Burning the Candle at Both Ends‘, the recent finding that the Antarctic was indeed losing ice came as a revelation to many and dispelled the popular belief amongst the global warming ‘denialist’ crowd that the South Pole ice sheet was increasing. The situation has now gotten more dire:
What are the ramification of this? We’ve released another ticking methane time bomb and opened up one more pandora’s box of known and unknown feedback loops:
…Half the West Antarctic ice sheet and a quarter of the East Antarctic sheet lie on pre-glacial sedimentary basins containing around 21,000bn tonnes of carbon, said the scientists, writing in the journal Nature.
British co-author Prof Jemma Wadham, from the University of Bristol, said: “This is an immense amount of organic carbon, more than 10 times the size of carbon stocks in northern permafrost regions.
“Our laboratory experiments tell us that these sub-ice environments are also biologically active, meaning that this organic carbon is probably being metabolised into carbon dioxide and methane gas by microbes.”
The amount of frozen and free methane gas beneath the ice sheets could amount to 4bn tonnes, the researchers estimate…
And what will happen to coastal communities? If one were to perform a linear projection of sea level rise from recent records, then you would get the following results:
…Currently, sea level is rising at the rate of 3 mm each year. Given 1″ = 25 mm, this means by the end of the century a rise of 87 (yrs) x 3 mm / yr. = 261 mm or (261 mm/ 25 mm/in) = 10.44 inches – enough to wash away roughly one third of S. Florida and most of the sea level areas of the Atlantic coast…
…IPCC (2007) suggested a most likely sea level rise of a few tens of centimeters by 2100. Several subsequent papers suggest that sea level rise of ~1 meter is likely by 2100. However, those studies, one way or another, include linearity assumptions, so 1 meter can certainly not be taken as an upper limit on sea level rise…
…Hansen (2005) argues that, if business-as-usual increase of greenhouse gases continue throughout this century, the climate forcing will be so large that non-linear ice sheet disintegration should be expected and multi- meter sea level rise not only possible but likely. Hansen (2007) suggests that the position reflected in IPCC documents may be influenced by a “scientific reticence”…
…Perceived authority in the case of ice sheets stems from ice sheet models used to simulate paleoclimate sea level change. However, paleoclimate ice sheet changes were initiated by weak climate forcings changing slowly over thousands of years, not by a forcing as large or rapid as human-made forcing this century. Moreover, in a paper submitted for publication (Hansen et al., 2013) we present evidence that even paleoclimate data do not support the degree of lethargy and hysteresis that exists in such ice sheet models…
…The increasing Greenland mass loss in Fig. 1 can be fit just as well by exponentially increasing annual mass loss, a behavior that Hansen (2005, 2007) argues could occur because of multiple amplifying feedbacks as an ice sheet begins to disintegrate. A 10-year doubling time would lead to 1 meter sea level rise by 2067 and 5 meters by 2090. The dates are 2045 and 2057 for 5-year doubling time and 2055 and 2071 for a 7-year doubling time.
However, exponential ice loss, if it occurs, would encounter negative (diminishing) feedbacks. Our simulations (Hansen and Sato, 2012) suggest that a strong negative feedback kicks in when sea level rise reaches meter-scale, as the ice-melt has a large cooling and freshening effect on the regional ocean. Such a slowdown in the rate of sea level rise would be little consolation to humanity, however, as the high latitude cooling would increase latitudinal temperature gradients, thus driving powerful cyclonic storms (Hansen, 2009), and coastlines would be continually moving landward for centuries.
West Antarctic ice is probably more vulnerable to rapid disintegration than Greenland ice, because the West Antarctic ice sheet rests mainly on bedrock below sea level (Hughes, 1972). The principal mechanism for mass loss from West Antarctica is warming of the ocean, melting of West Antarctic ice shelves, and thus increased flux from the ice sheet to the ocean.
The several analysis methods compared by Shepherd et al. (2012) concur that the West Antarctic ice sheet mass imbalance has grown since 2005 from an annual mass loss of 0-100 Gt ice to a recent annual mass loss of 100-200 Gt ice (Fig. 4 of Shepherd et al.)…
There are roughly seven billion humans on Earth at this time, all of whom have a death sentence hanging over their head via anthropomorphic climate change. Perhaps this partly explains the recent popularity of zombies and the ‘walking dead’ in our culture. Forthright thoughts on this subject from a scientist commenting at the Arctic Sea Ice Blog:
The first signs have appeared of what will be a mass culling of the human population by way of famine in the decades to come:
…According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, global wheat production is expected to fall 5.2% in 2012 and yields from many other crops grown to feed animals could be 10% down on last year.
“Populations are growing but production is not keeping up with consumption. Prices for wheat have already risen 25% in 2012, maize 13% and dairy prices rose 7% just last month. Food reserves, held to provide a buffer against rising prices, are at a critical low level. It means that food supplies are tight across the board and there is very little room for unexpected events,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the FAO…
My youngest son, who is eight years old, shocked me last week with a certain question. I don’t talk about the subject matter of this blog to him for obvious reasons. He asked me whether in the future the world would become a sort of technological paradise or a destroyed planet. I couldn’t answer his question. I didn’t even want to try.
…pumps more than half of every tax dollar into the military industrial complex and its war-profiteering cronies who perpetuate our war economy.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 