Capitalism Cloaked in Corporate Greenwashing

23 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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Chris Williams, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Globalization, Inverted Totalitarianism, John le Carré, Multinational Corporations, Neoliberal Capitalism, Poverty, Rio Earth Summit, The Elite 1%, United Nations, Wall Street Fraud

…many of our official pronouncements – echoing those of most elite institutions and organizations – proudly and confidently insist that our future lies in “globalization.” Globalization – for lack of a better term – is, in actuality, the building out of a monoculture, a singular culture based upon basic presuppositions of modern political, economic and social theory.

Nature abhors monocultures. Nature abhors them so much that they do not exist in accordance with nature. They would be unknown but for modern man.

A monoculture is a single form of life – or, by extension, a single culture – that exists over a large expanse of space, even globally. Nature abhors monocultures because they are so susceptible to annihilation by one agent of destruction. In plant or animal life, for example, a single virus or bacteria, a single destructive fungus or disease, a single hostile predator or pest would wipe out an entire monoculture without the barest resistance. It is the very nature of nature to avoid monocultures – indeed, it cannot be otherwise since any form of monoculture cannot long exist in nature. Life in the natural realm is manifold and varied, precisely so that some life will weather the inevitable deadly challenges that arise. – Patrick J. Deneen

The following is an excellent essay by Chris Williams, a professor in the Dept of Chemistry & Physical Science, Pace University and author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2010). It goes well with my previous post on the corporatized Rio Earth Summit. In the last two decades only four out of ninety United Nation environmental sustainability pledges have been fulfilled, a pretty dismal failure by anyone’s standards. The four were: reducing ozone depletion, removing lead from gasoline, improving access to water supplies and boosting research for marine pollution. The reason for its epic failure is that the whole process of sustainability and scaling back ecologically destructive megatrends have been co-opted by our economic system, i.e. capitalism. The need for continuous growth and expansion into new markets is inherent in capitalism. It has come to define our culture and relationship with nature and our fellow man. As history has clearly shown, capitalism will be the death of us all if we allow this ethic-less system to define ourselves and to continue its rampant, unbridled destruction in the name of ‘development’ and profit.

A Tale of Two Conferences: The Social and Ecological Crises of Capitalism

Sometimes, the calendar of international conferences attended by global elites serves up potent lessons for the rest of us, when they shine a spotlight on the deliberately murky affairs of the people who run the system. As the 20 most powerful world leaders deliberate on economic issues in Los Cabos, Mexico for the G20 summit, representatives of the rest will be simultaneously converging on Rio de Janeiro to consider how to follow up on the original Earth Summit, 20 years ago this year.

At these seemingly separate gatherings, we in truth observe the two sides of the capitalist coin. Namely, how can the capitalist elite continue the necessary work of exploiting both humans and the natural world in the service of profit, while cloaking their intentions in the benign language of growth, development and sustainability? Fine words to cover nefarious ends. No doubt, as people’s livelihoods and world decay around them as a direct consequence of the system the elite oversee, and in response the flame of revolt is rekindled from Cairo to Athens, political elites in the two locations will reflect on the fact that it’s not getting any easier. From the other side, critics and commentators of the two conferences are missing an important and significant lesson when they consider them in isolation.

At the original Earth Summit in Rio, it was generally accepted that environmental questions could not be separated from economic ones. This year, the two conferences, occurring concurrently at different ends of the South American continent, bring to light how this thinking has been undermined. Furthermore, they indicate with geographical and political precision where the priorities of the global elite lie. While the most important world leaders hot-foot it to Mexico to discuss global economic development, they send low-level delegates to Brazil to discuss issues they deem less vital; to be exact, planetary ecological crisis.

Indeed, so desperate were the Brazilian organizers of Rio+20 to cajole the British premier to attend, they changed the date of the conference so as to avoid conflicting with the much more important and worthy 60^th anniversary celebrations of the Queen of England’s ascension to the throne. An attempt that proved ultimately and embarrassingly futile, as British Prime Minister, David Cameron, chose to cling to the coattails of President Obama and other G20 leaders in Los Cabos, as they calculate, connive and concoct the further dismemberment and disenfranchisement of communities of workers and peasants around the world.

In a further sad irony, to enhance attendance at Rio, Brazil is providing flights courtesy of the Brazilian air-force to those countries too poor to send delegates. It’s hard to imagine that the countries who can’t afford to send delegates to an environmental conference will have the financial capacity to take action to preserve biodiversity and a stable climate without international funding and technology transfer. But the concept or even use of the word “transfer” is exactly what the United States delegation is trying to excise from any document emerging from Rio+20.

In Los Cabos, 20 people wielding enormous economic power gather to ensure that nothing stands in the way of the international accumulation of money by their respective corporations; that capitalist growth continues, uninterrupted by paltry considerations such as democracy. Scheming and plotting in Los Cabos, the 20 leaders will huddle, concerned that their plans have been exposed by the people of Greece. As they jet to Mexico, one of the first countries to be devastated by the neoliberal prescription of privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending, the election results in Greece ring in their ears as a collective rebuke to austerity and unemployment. In unprecedented numbers, Greeks exercised their democratic rights by voting for a previously obscure and marginal left coalition, SYRIZA and against handing the welfare of their country over to unelected technocrats governing from afar. A vote, it should be emphasized, carried out in the teeth of apocalyptic warnings of doom from central bank acolytes of the 1%, desperate to stop the people voting ‘the wrong way’.

As for the Global South, capitalist economic development, particularly since its neoliberal mutation, has been a disaster of gigantic proportions as money and natural wealth are siphoned into Western financial institutions. According to Oxfam, gross capital flows to developing countries fell from $309 billion in 2010 to $170 billion in 2011. Last year, aid donations from major donors experienced the first decrease in 14 years, dropping by $3.4 billion; overall aid was $16 billion below what the G8 committed to delivering in 2009. The drop in aid, along with legal and illicit financial transfers out of the developing world, mean that for every dollar received in aid (much of it tied to the purchase of materials from the West), 7-10 dollars go out. In 2009 alone, the developing world saw $903 billion disappear overseas thanks to a rigged system from which the majority cannot benefit. While 16 of the 20 members of the G20 have seen inequality increase over the last 20 years, as complement to that process, is it any wonder that developing countries seem to be permanently ‘developing’ even as social and ecological conditions there also worsen?

The violent dispossession that characterized the bloody dawn of capitalism captured by Marx in his writings on the enforced removal of peasants in the 1500’s amid the first acts of privatization – the land enclosures, is repeated in contemporary form through land grabs; his writing has a remarkably contemporary ring to it: “Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.”

In the 20 years since the optimism of the first Earth Summit in Rio, carbon emissions have increased by 50% and, since 1950, while the rest of the world has seen an average increase in temperature of 0.7⁰C, the arctic, due to various positive feedback loops, has experienced double that. Absent serious action, whereas the world is now on track for 2⁰C of warming, the arctic is on course for a truly calamitous 3-6⁰C. The June 16^th 2012 special edition of The Economist pondered an ice-free arctic with a mixture of trepidation, casual racist indifference and a general leaning toward monetary excitement: “In the long run the unfrozen north could cause devastation. But, paradoxically, in the meantime, no arctic species will profit from it as much as the one causing it: humans. Disappearing sea ice may spell the end of the last Eskimo cultures, but hardly anyone lives in an igloo these days anyway. And the great melt is going to make a lot of people rich.” Yes, to The Economist, while the change may be “devastating” to ancient and indigenous cultures, along with cold-adapted species, a certain small subset of humans will become rich while ‘making a killing’ – in all senses of the phrase.

We and the land have certainly changed and the continuation planned by the capitalists and their political representatives has unquestionably become impossible, as further capitalist development begins to contradict not just human rights or a sense of social progress, but the thermodynamic laws of the universe, which underpin a stable biosphere, upon which all life ultimately depends.

To quote British journalist George Monbiot on the reasons for the failure of so many environmental conferences, “These summits have failed for the same reason that the banks have failed. Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires. The past 20 years have been a billionaires’ banquet. At the behest of corporations and the ultra-rich, governments have removed the constraining decencies – the laws and regulations – which prevent one person from destroying another. To expect governments funded and appointed by this class to protect the biosphere and defend the poor is like expecting a lion to live on gazpacho.”

From the other side of the political spectrum, representatives of the US environmental organization, Environmental Defense Fund, writing in a New York Times op-ed concede that “As the Arctic becomes ice-free, we can expect that it will be drilled for oil”. But, nevertheless, despite two decades of failure, hold out hope that with just a little more effort and market reforms such as cap and trade, 10 years from now we’ll be okay “with determination and the right policies, by the time Rio+30 rolls around, optimism might be the order of the day.”

Now, socialists are often decried as Utopians. We are told, our ideas may sound good in theory, but humans living equitably with one another in a democratic system based on cooperation, in a society that lives in harmony with the natural world, will simply never work in practice. Is it more realistic to believe that the same system that got us to this point will extricate us? The message from the ‘realists’ seems to be that while we may well have covered the arctic in drilling rigs by then, just give it another 10 years and things will be fine. Going beyond the wrong-headed pronouncements of the EDF, UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon managed a level of fervor that would have put Dr. Pangloss himself to shame, “Increasingly, we understand that, with smart public policies, governments can grow their economies, alleviate poverty, create decent jobs and accelerate social progress in a way that respects the earth’s finite natural resources.”

One has to ask, who are the real Utopians? To many people around the world, leftwing and explicitly socialist ideas, along with class-based revolt, are re-emerging as real alternatives precisely because our rulers quite clearly have no answer other than an extension of the market into whole new areas. Meena Raman of the Malaysia-based Third World Network, was unequivocal in her denunciation of the US’s role in derailing climate negotiations in Durban in 2002 and in Rio+20: “Given the US stance, we do not want President Obama or any US leader to come to Rio to bury what was agreed in 1992 in Rio. We cannot expect the US to show any leadership in truly wanting to save the planet and the poor. So it is better for President Obama to stay at home.”

Meanwhile, 105 scientific institutions are urging action at Rio on population and consumption “For too long population and consumption have been left off the table due to political and ethical sensitivities. These are issues that affect developed and developing nations alike, and we must take responsibility for them together,” said Charles Godfray, a fellow of the Royal Society. Except that population growth is a function of poverty and it is in fact the countries with the largest levels of consumption, such as the United States and Europe, that not only are the historical cause of the ecological crisis, but are helping to drive it to its logical conclusion – a cascading collapse of ecosystems – by advocating continual economic expansion and the generation of poverty through the promotion of financial and trade agreements that accentuate inequality. Capitalism is like a shark; just as these animals can never stop moving forward for fear of drowning, so capitalism must grow or die.

It’s important to understand why negotiators see the primary way to save the environment is through putting a price on it. This is the main thrust of the talks and accepted by all negotiating parties inside the conference, representing a major schism with the tens of thousands of protesters attending the Rio+20 People’s Summit who are being forcibly kept out of the deliberations by armed riot police.

The argument goes that only by giving natural resources “value” in monetary terms can the environment be protected. On the one hand, it’s easy to see the further privatization of every molecule of water, every tree and every piece of land as dovetailing beautifully with the desires of the corporations. Extending the “free” market to new areas for exploitation is a tried and true method to enhance profits. Those who run the corporations are not slow to catch on and self-advocate: “For companies this is enlightened self interest…Those who can afford water should pay. Water is essentially over exploited because we are not valuing it as an economic good. Introducing methodologies such as escalating tariffs, which some countries have already done, will help in terms of using water intelligently, often for the first time.” So said, Gavin Power, deputy director of the UN Global Compact, which is acting as an umbrella group for 45 of the most powerful CEO’s, from such well-known environmentally conscious concerns as Coca Cola, Glaxo-SmithKline, Nestle, Merck and Bayer, to ensure their voice is heard at Rio+20.

But advocacy for the “valuation” of natural resources occurs not just or even primarily because it coincides with what corporations want. Many of the people arguing for such quantization of nature genuinely believe it will help preserve biodiversity, slow climate change and reduce the pressure on natural resources.

More fundamentally, the need to place “fair value” on everything is part of the ideological foundation of capitalism. Within the philosophy of capitalism, if something does not have a price, it cannot have value. Hence, putting the correct price, otherwise known as internalizing the cost, of a natural good, is to make possible its rational exploitation and simultaneous conservation. To those mired deep within the labyrinth of a capitalistic value system, there is no contradiction between these two aims: the commodification of nature can be seen both as a way of making money from it, and as a way of saving it, as perfectly expressed by Ban Ki-moon.

The quantification of nature is the rational end-point of capitalism’s philosophical approach to nature and hence a practical approach to ‘saving nature’. The non-quantifiable, qualitative side of nature, the purely spiritual and awe-inducing beauty of watching a sunrise for example, is not only entirely absent, or under-appreciated, it is essentially unknowable. Hence, assuming you’re not prepared to advocate regulatory reforms to place limits on the operation of corporations and boundaries beyond which they cannot cross, or you’re not advocating revolution, then extending the market becomes the only option left, consequently the focus at Rio+20 on doing exactly that.

However, for those of us who truly want to see a better world, the extension of its commodification to every single particle of nature cannot be an answer. Taking our inspiration from the rising struggles of 2011 around the globe, it is imperative that we link up the movements of social resistance, and forge new alliances with organized labor and the disenfranchised of the planet to force regulatory changes onto those who would foist false solutions on us. Only by linking social and ecological change and fighting on both fronts, autonomous of mainstream political parties, while creating our own independent battle organizations, can we hope to make progress.

Ultimately, however, it is just as vital that fighters for social emancipation, human freedom and ecological sanity, recognize that capitalism represents the annihilation of nature and, thus, humanity. A system based on cooperation, real democracy, long-term planning, and production for need not profit, i.e., socialism, represents the reconciliation of humanity with nature. And its achievement will, as Marx pointed out, of necessity be much less violent than the process by which capitalism was born in the first place:

“The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labor, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized [common] property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.”

We currently live in an age that has been characterized as the Anthropocene, the Age of Man, by some scientists to take into account how drastically human civilization has altered the biosphere on a geological time scale. Only by overthrowing capitalism and moving toward a cooperative, planned economy based on democracy and sustainability can we move toward an age characterized, after Epicurus, as the Oikeiotocene – The Age of Conformity to Nature.

Rio+20 Summit: the Denial of Reality in the Name of the Free Market

22 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution

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Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Danny Chivers, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, IMF, Neoliberal Capitalism, Overpopulation, Resource Wars, Rio+20 Summit, Social Injustice, The People Summit, Transnational Corporations, United Nations, WTO

The following article is perhaps the most important one I have posted thus far on ‘Collapse of Industrial Civilization’ because it gets at the root cause from which all the global crises have emerged, threatening not only the mass extinction of all flora and fauna, but also mankind’s own annihilation. This is the final act in the tragedy of the commons and it’s capitalism’s last gasp to commodify the rest of the planet for GDP growth, profits and the externalization of costs onto communities and the environment. There can be no price tag put on ecosystems because they are a finite entity priceless to the existence of life as we know it. But this is what is being created by the profit-at-any-cost transnational corporations in a so-called ‘green economy’ and its ‘sustainable development’. We can see this in the global land grab that was discussed in my post Hydro-Colonialism.

The Church of the Almighty Free Market is sending out its missionaries to ensure that neoliberal capitalism extracts the last bit of life from a ravaged planet teetering on the verge of ecological bankruptcy. If you want the unvarnished, non-commercialized report of the Rio Earth Summit, go here.

Big business goes to Rio – Climate and Capitalism

The upcoming Rio Earth Summit gives us a window into a fierce battle for the future of global environmental action. Danny Chivers explains what it’s all about.

Many people don’t even know it’s happening. But from 20-22 June more than a hundred heads of state, along with an estimated 50,000 representatives from businesses, NGOs, trades unions, local government and others will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the 2012 UN Earth Summit.

The conference’s official website makes it look like a friendly gathering of world leaders and other ‘stakeholders’ from business and civil society. However, underneath the surface layer of polite discussion documents and optimistic press releases, a battle is raging.

Harmless-sounding phrases like ‘green economy’ and ‘sustainable development’ have become grounds for bitter dispute, as different governments and business interests attempt to redefine these terms to meet their own agenda.

Like a door that swings unexpectedly open to reveal a family squabble, the 2012 Rio Summit gives us a glimpse of an argument that’s been rumbling away largely out of the public eye – an argument about the future direction of intergovernmental environmental action.

This year’s event is commonly referred to as Rio+20 as it falls exactly two decades after the famous 1992 Earth Summit in the same city. That earlier UN conference is often cited as a key moment in the history of environmental politics: it established the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21.

The price of everything

While these measures contained many fine words and good ideas, they didn’t have much regulatory force behind them and relied on voluntary actions by governments, business and civil society.

This row of well-meaning policy sandcastles have spent the past 20 years being eaten away by a rising tide of fundamentalist free-market economics, unfettered financial speculation, and consolidated corporate power.

As a result, any environmental and social gains from the first Rio summit look small next to the destruction wrought by a voracious corporate sector and by governments obsessed with growth in GDP before all else.

Global inequality has increased, natural habitats have been degraded and climate talks have been stalled by a mix of corporate lobbying and self-interested political horse-trading.

Much of this has been done by companies and politicians under the banner of ‘sustainable development’ – sustainable in this case meaning ‘able to keep making money into the future’.

A shift to a genuinely sustainable society will require us to challenge these negative forces, rein in the excesses of corporations and markets, and build an entirely different economy based on wellbeing for the many rather than profits for the few.

But Rio+20 shows little sign of achieving this. It could make things worse. The preparatory Green Economy Report launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2011 provoked outrage among NGOs by focusing on market-based and technological responses to the environmental crisis, rather than the underlying economic and political causes.

Silvia Ribeiro from the campaign group ETC Mexico points out: ‘Collapsing financial markets in Northern countries mean that banks and other investors are now looking desperately for new areas of expansion and speculation. We can see these desires leaving their mark on the Rio+20 process. The “Green Economy” now under discussion would unleash a wave of risky but lucrative new technologies such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and climate technofixes. This isn’t about finding the best environmental solutions: it’s about creating profitable new investments.’

Another key theme of the 2011 UNEP report – which had investment banker Pavan Sukdhev as a lead author – was that placing a financial value on natural systems, cycles and habitats would allow markets to price them properly, and thus prevent them from being degraded.

Large polluting industries… like mafia bosses invited to a meeting on reducing gang violence

This approach has broad support from many Northern governments and institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but has set off alarm bells elsewhere.

Thomas Barlow from the World Development Movement says: ‘The global market is a fundamental part of the problem. Through its quest for never-ending growth, it helps to drive our insatiable appetite for the things – like clean air, water, biodiversity – that nature provides.

‘Protection of these cannot be left in the hands of this market – we cannot afford to live in a world where ecosystems are protected if, and only if, there is more profit to be made by protecting them than by trashing them.

‘Protection of natural systems will only happen through bringing the market under control, not by giving it yet more power over nature.’

Unacknowledged power

What price a gliding treefrog in the costing of ‘eco-system services’ that the Rio+20 process seems to be heading towards?

How has this controversial vision of the green economy crept into the Rio+20 process? Part of the problem is that the UN is attempting to figure out a global governance system that would prevent environmental destruction, but is allowing those most responsible for that destruction to claim a disproportionate voice within the process. Large polluting industries, business lobby groups and financial institutions are welcomed in as well-meaning ‘stakeholders’ – like mafia bosses invited to a meeting on reducing gang violence.

While the UN’s stated commitment to dialogue and consensus is laudable, the process fails to acknowledge the imbalances of power that allow the wealthiest governments to wield greater influence within the negotiations, while small farmers, indigenous groups, and other representatives of affected communities are given token representation but largely ignored.

The businesses with the most wealth and power are those that have flourished in an economy based on the unrestricted use of natural resources and the exploitation of many of the world’s people. Those with the most to lose from a shift to true sustainability are therefore those with the most power to block that change. Some, like South African petrochemical giant Sasol, influence the UN process through cosy relationships with national governments. Some, like Brazilian miner Vale, muscle in on civil society networks and influence their input in the Rio process. Still others work via lobbying organizations such as the International Emissions Trading Association. Meanwhile, industry groups, like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, have had an organizing role within the various Rio+20 pre-meetings.

this kind of research accepts and reinforces the terms laid down for us by the existing system – the idea that nothing can be valued unless it has a price tag

The scientific community has also been getting increasingly vocal. A major conference called Planet Under Pressure brought together almost 3,000 scientists in London in March, with the aim of giving some stark warnings and policy advice to politicians in the run-up to Rio. The ‘State of the Planet’ declaration issued from the conference didn’t mince its words: ‘Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the wellbeing of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk… creating the potential for a humanitarian emergency on a global scale.’

The accompanying policy papers recognized the need for social change and better environmental governance, not just more technology. Useful concepts like planetary boundaries and the ‘Inclusive Wealth Index’ (an alternative to GDP) were presented, and speakers from the stage spoke repeatedly for the need for a ‘paradigm shift’ in society.

However, there was little acknowledgement of what this would mean in practice, that there are powerful interests working against such a shift and that they will need to be challenged. Instead, the general plan seemed to be just to keep on telling people about the problem and hoping that good folks from across society will agree to work together to fix it – including the big corporations.

The waters were particularly muddy in the discussions around ‘valuing ecosystem services’. Researchers have been assessing the monetary value of crucial environmental services such as the water-filtering properties of wetlands, in order to explain to policymakers just how much would be lost by damaging or destroying them. For example, the Stockholm Environment Institute calculated that the economic value of the oceans could be reduced by up to $2 trillion per year if climate change is left unchecked.

These studies are doubtless carried out with the best of intentions and may help to protect some ecosystems in the short term. However, they could also represent a dangerous first step towards the ‘costing’ of ecosystem services for trade on the open market. Rather than seeking that much-vaunted paradigm shift, this kind of research accepts and reinforces the terms laid down for us by the existing system – the idea that nothing can be valued unless it has a price tag.

Timid monstrosity

Of course, scientists aren’t a lab-coated homogeneous mass. Nor are activists all of one mind. Some NGOs and civil society groups have fully engaged with the Rio+20 process, sending submissions into the draft document and delegates to the meetings; others have preferred to spend their time mobilizing people elsewhere, including at a parallel People’s Summit which will take place in Rio during the UN talks. Many are pursuing a dual strategy, both inside and outside the talks.

However, most are united in their criticism of the draft declaration that’s been put together so far – the ‘outcome document’ that governments will sign up to at the end of Rio+20. An initial 19-page ‘zero draft’ document was launched in January as a starting point for discussion. It contained no binding resolutions of any kind, just a wish-list of voluntary actions that business and government would be ‘encouraged’ to take, and lots of mentions of a poorly defined ‘green economy’.

In response, civil society and industry groups put forward their own suggested amendments. Environmental campaigners, indigenous peoples and Southern farmers’ groups called for major changes; meanwhile, the business lobby were generally happy with the document, asking for adjustments like the removal of references to technology transfer and the role of small farmers.

Governments – often grouped into ‘blocs’ – then submitted formal amendments to the draft, with suggested additions and removals. These suggestions swelled the document from 19 to over 150 pages, reflecting the level of disagreement involved. Derek Osborn of the Stakeholder Forum has described the new draft as a ‘monstrosity’ full of ‘timidity, caution, suspicion, protection of vested interests, and even attempts to undermine and go backward on rights, actions and issues already agreed.’

Groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and La Via Campesina are calling for a very different Rio+20 agreement based on respect for people’s rights to land, food and clean water. Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of IEN, said: ‘Systems such as “payment for ecological services” and using forests in carbon offset markets do nothing but make Mother Earth into the World Trade Organization of nature.’ He stated that Indigenous Peoples from around the world would be coming together at Rio to ‘oppose an agenda based on the privatization and commodification of nature’. Campaigners like theETC Group are calling for proper technology assessment measures to be built in to any agreement, before untested geo-engineering and synthetic biology techniques are unleashed in the name of the green economy.

Quite how all of this will be boiled down into any kind of coherent final statement remains to be seen. However it emerges, the new Rio declaration will give us a snapshot of where we’re at with these crucial debates, and how far we still need to go.

Moving forwards

On a more positive note, Rio+20 has been a good opportunity to raise the profile of some interesting and potentially useful sustainability ideas. It’s also helped to bring together disparate groups and build important new alliances. For example, an international pre-Rio+20 conference organized by the Central Workers of Argentina reinforced alliances between trades unions and environmental movements. According to Lucia Ortiz of Friends of the Earth Brazil: ‘Trades Unions are getting very concerned about the “green economy” agenda, because it represents a deepening of neoliberal policies, and threatens to undermine the social rights already secured by past struggles. They are working in solidarity with environmentalists, indigenous peoples, farmers and women’s rights activists, calling instead for a transition to a sustainable and just society free from the exploitation of workers and of nature.’

The best thing to come out of Rio+20 could be the strengthening of social movements in opposition to one of its core ideas. The false green economy’s grand Brazilian showcase might just be the event that helps to trigger its downfall.

Danny Chivers is the author of The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change: The Science, the solutions, the way forward (New Internationalist, 2010)

Oil-Drenched Politics and Imperialism

20 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

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Alastair Campbell, Arms Dealers, Capitalism, CIA, Colin Powell, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Dick Cheney, Empire, FBI, Financial Elite, George Bush, Halliburton, Homeland Security, Imperialism, Inverted Totalitarianism, KBR, Military Industrial Complex, Neoliberal Capitalism, NSA, Peak Oil, Police State, Privatization of War, Rupert Murdoch, The Elite 1%, Tony Blair, War on Terror

“The Saudis have a saying that acknowledges their luck in being born on top of billions of barrels of oil and the inevitability of its depletion:

“My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son flies a jet plane, his son will ride a camel.”

Delusional Americans believe they have a right to cheap plentiful oil forever. They refuse to acknowledge that luck has played the major part in their rise to economic power. The American saying will be:

My great grandfather rode a horse, my grandfather drove a Model T, my father drove a Buick, I leased a Cadillac Escalade, my son died in the Middle East fighting for my oil, his son will never be born.” – Jim Quinn

If you needed further proof of the ulterior motives behind the invasion and destruction of Iraq, I give you this post from Farooque Chowdhury’s Diary. [I have embedded links in the article and done some grammatical edits.]

Murdoch’s Iraq War

“Mysteries” of the Iraq War are getting exposed: Rupert Murdoch, the media Moghul, pressed Tony Blair, the British prime minister, to hasten joining the Iraq War. Murdoch did it on behalf of the US Republicans. And, the war took over 100,000 lives.

It is not only the interests behind waging the war, but also the principles and interests the bourgeois press uphold, and the secretive and conspiratorial way the bourgeois democracy works, the lies that are fabricated, how the readers are misinformed, and the manipulation of mass psychology that is being divulged.

The Guardian, British newspaper and AFP, news agency, reported the facts.

The news reports said:

“Rupert Murdoch took part in an ‘over-crude’ attempt by US Republicans to push Tony Blair into action before the invasion of Iraq, the former British prime minister’s ex-media chief claimed [Alastair Campbell…].

“Alastair Campbell said the News Corporation media baron warned Blair in a phone call of the dangers in delaying signing up to the March 19, 2003 invasion, as part of an attempt to speed up Britain joining the military campaign.”

Campbell’s assertions were made in The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq, diaries from his years at Blair’s side. [Here is his blog]

The news reports said:

“Campbell suggested Murdoch made moves to help the right-wing Republican Party of then US president George W. Bush before the March 18 vote in the […] House of Commons on deploying troops to Iraq, which was passed.”

Citing Campbell the news reports said:

On March 11, 2003, Blair “took a call from Murdoch who was pressing on timings, saying how News International would support us […]”

The reports said:

“‘Both TB [Tony Blair] and I felt it was prompted by Washington, and another example of their over-crude diplomacy. Murdoch was pushing all the Republican buttons, how the longer we waited the harder it got.’

“Campbell said Murdoch’s intervention came ‘out of the blue’.

“‘On one level (Murdoch) was trying to be supportive, saying ‘I know this is a very difficult place, my papers are going to support you on this’. Fine.
“‘But I think Tony did feel that there was something a bit crude about it. It was another very right-wing voice saying to him: ‘Look, isn’t it about time you got on with this?’”

The news reports said:

“Gordon Brown agitated so aggressively against Tony Blair – demanding a departure date soon after the 9/11 attacks – that Downing Street concluded in 2002 that the then chancellor was ‘hell-bent on TB’s destruction’.

Murdoch’s “worldwide contacts through the businesses that” he operated should not be missed while going through the news items. However, in his witness statement to the Leveson inquiry Murdoch said: “As for the three telephone calls with the then prime minister, Tony Blair, in 2003, I cannot recall what I discussed with him now, […] or indeed even if I spoke with him at all. I understand that published reports indicate that calls were placed by him to me. What I am sure about is that I would not in any telephone call have conveyed a secret message of support for the war; the NI titles’ position on Iraq was a matter of public record before 11 March 2003.” His famous declaration: “I’ve never asked a prime minister for anything.” He cited “four articles from the Sun and the News of the World which illustrated their ‘pro-war stance’ before 11 March 2003 when the main phone call took place.” The media Moghul’s company termed the assertion that he lobbied Blair over the Iraq War on behalf of the US Republicans as “complete rubbish”. It said: “Furthermore, there isn’t even any evidence in Alastair Campbell’s diaries to support such a ridiculous claim.” It should be mentioned that News International is News Corp.’s British newspaper arm, publishing The Times, The Sun and The Sunday Times. Blair faced a challenge getting his Labour Party lawmakers to back UK’s involvement. Many of them rebelled. (“Murdoch pushed Blair on Iraq: ex-media chief” and “Rupert Murdoch pressured Tony Blair over Iraq, says Alastair Campbell”, June 16, 2012)

Already known is the Bush – Blair 2003 Iraq memo or Manning memo, a secret memo of a meeting between Bush and Blair. The historic meeting took place on January 31, 2003 in the White House. The memo, written by David Manning, Blair’s chief foreign adviser, showed that the US had already decided on the invasion of Iraq at that point. Manning participated at the meeting. The memo showed Bush and Blair made a secret deal to carry out the invasion regardless of whether WMD were discovered by UN inspectors. The fact contradicts statements Blair made to the British parliament that Saddam Hussein would be given a final chance to disarm. Existence of the memo was made by Philippe Sands in his book Lawless World. The New York Times collected the memo and confirmed its authenticity.

Then, there is the Colin Powell case. While arguing for invading Iraq Powel claimed that Saddam was hiding a secret biological weapons program. Powell dramatically and confidently held up a vial he said could contain anthrax during his presentation of the Iraq case at the UN in 2003. But, later, the claim proved bogus.

Powel relied on information provided by an Iraqi defector. The defector was code-named “Curveball”. CBS News identified Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi as “Curveball”. Rafid made the false claims to German intelligence officials. The US used the claim that ultimately turned out to be a lie. But the Empire used the false information to start the war. The UN inspectors found no evidence of a biological weapons program, which was claimed.

In interviews with The Guardian, Rafid told the way he sought asylum in Germany and wanted to see an end to Saddam’s regime. “They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that […]”

Man whose WMD lies led to 100000 deaths confesses all (4-1-2012)

Defector tells how US officials ‘sexed up’ his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion.

The “story” of falsehood and fabrication doesn’t end there.

Citing Britain’s The Independent, Thomas Ferguson, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, wrote: The Independent news report “buries forever all claims that the US, the UK, and other governments did not have oil on their minds as they prepared to invade Iraq.” He referred to a book that drew on more than a thousand secret government documents. These show meetings between the UK government and British oil companies in the run up to the war. “These demonstrate that all the denials in London and Washington that policymakers were not concerned about oil as they invaded were as false as the famous cover story about weapons of mass destruction.” These also show that all the governments were negotiating over rights to oil long before the invasion and that they were working closely with their companies. Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force was reviewing documents on Iraqi oil well before the attack on 9/11. (“Oil-Soaked Politics: Secret U.K. Docs on Iraq”)

So, the profit issue emerges. The Iraq war brought profit to all interested: weaponeer, supplier, infrastructureer, defense contractor, mercenary companies, and a section of media and politicians.

According to MSN Money(link to Cheney and his war profits), Halliburton’s KBR, Inc. division made $17.2 bn in the desert war in the 2003-2006 period, which was one-fifth of KBR’s total revenue for the 2006 fiscal year. Halliburton was involved with construction and maintenance of military bases, oil field repairs, and infrastructure rebuilding projects in the country.

Veritas Capital Fund/DynCorp, the private equity fund, gathered $1.44 bn through its DynCorp subsidiary by imparting training to new Iraqi police forces. The company is termed by many as a ‘state within a state’.

Through repair, maintenance, etc. work in Iraqi oil fields the Washington Group International gathered $931 mn in the period 2003-2006. Through the work of munitions disposal the Environmental Chemical got $878 mn by the end of fiscal 2006. The Aegis of the UK made $430 mn. (“25 Most Vicious Iraq War Profiteers”)

And, after the Bush Blair, Murdoch, Halliburton war business, where stood Iraq?

Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post Pentagon correspondent quoted Mohammed Abdullah, an Iraqi in his Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq: “They said they came to liberate us. Liberate us from what? They came and said they would free us. Free us from what? We have traditions, morals, and customs. We are Arabs. We’re different from the West. Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture, and they want to wipe out our culture, absolutely.”

Iraq now stands devastated, a bold sign of Naked Imperialism (title of a book by John Bellamy Foster). Parts of life in the land have been wiped out. Does imperialism have the power to restore what has been lost in Iraq? It’s incapable. Imperialism’s devastating power lacks power to create and nourish life and nature. Iraq is one of the monuments of destruction imperialism has constructed in many parts of the world.

King Romney and the Oligarchy Versus the Cannon Fodder Peasantry

17 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Corporate Neo-Colonialism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Empire, Financial Elite, Military Industrial Complex, Mitt Romney, Neoliberal Capitalism, Obama, Poverty, Privatization of War, Regulatory Capture, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, War for Profit

I haven’t done any ~~bashing~~ truth-telling on Mitt Romney yet, so now would be a good time since it looks like King Romney is closing the gap in war chest funds. As Matt Taibbi pointed out earlier this year, “the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America.” And Romney appears to be the golden boy for our financial oligarchs. According to the experts in such matters of our staged elections, Romney has the backing of the 1%:

..Romney will certainly have the advantage as Wall Street tycoons and conservative billionaires line up to contribute. One billionaire, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, was reportedly ready to make “limitless” contributions, more than $100 million, to Romney to defeat the president….

“…Romney and his allies are certain to hold the financial upper hand, not least because the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 allowed for a flood of corporate cash. The unspoken hope in Chicago is that superior strategy and a shrewd use of technology can make up for Obama’s diminished stature and more formidable opponent.”

Now as I explained in my post ‘Obama: Figurehead for the Corporatocracy‘, the job of the President is more of a PR position for who really runs the country, i.e. the corporatocracy. If you look at Obama’s record, he is indistinguishable from his predecessor in all issues that matter to the common person. For instance, contrary to Obama’s pre-election populist rhetoric, he has escalated America’s militarism such as in drone and cyber warfare, and he has widened even further the wealth gap. Having previously signed trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia, Obama continues to sell out the American worker to multinational corporations as revealed in a recently leaked document of a trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (also known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP). Like all trade agreements before, this one is no different in the way that it was created, i.e. solely by corporate lobbyists, leaving the American public completely shut out. Compare that with what Obama said in 2008:

We can’t keep passing unfair trade deals like NAFTA that put special interests over workers’ interests…

Rest assured, King Romney will continue the dismantling of America and its Third Worldization in favor of the parasitic financial sector and transnational corporations. He says this TPP tade agreement should be passed through as soon as possible:

Reinstate the president’s Trade Promotion Authority

Complete negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Pursue new trade agreements with nations committed to free enterprise and open markets

Create the Reagan Economic Zone

King Romney will also continue to support the military-industrial-complex and America’s war economy, painting himself as a pro-military, self-sacrificing patriotic citizen. But as Cenk Uygur notes, the truth is somewhere 180 degrees from what is painted for mass consumption:

Now after the 2012 political circus concludes, we will have had twelve years of rule by a president with no military service, and with another 4 more years to come. War is not for the privileged wealthy, but for the children of the impoverished 99% in America’s hinterland.

About 1 in 5 current members of Congress is a veteran, but less than 1% of their offspring are. – David Freed

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, author and Associate Professor of Justice and Peace Studies at the University of St. Thomas, clarifies for us the ugly reality behind the wars sold to us today:

Hidden in these tragic figures[cost and lives lost] is war’s dirty secret. As historian and former U.S. Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich clearly states, “War is a source of enormous wealth and power [that delivers] profit, power, and privilege to a long list of beneficiaries.”[2] These beneficiaries find it expedient and surprisingly easy to sell war and militarized priorities to a reluctant public using deception, fear, and patriotism.

The politicos no longer represent us, only themselves and the elite monied interests. So no matter who wins this election, expect more of the same from our corporate overlords.

Disaster Capitalism and its Aftermath

15 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

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Arms Dealers, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Empire, Glenn Greenwald, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jesselyn Radack, Military Industrial Complex, Neoliberal Capitalism, Obama, Peter Van Buren, Privatization of War, Resource Wars, War on Terror, War on Whistleblowers

I first heard about Peter Van Buren through a guest post by Jesselyn Radack on Glenn Greenwald’s blog discussing another case of Obama’s ever-widening war on whistleblowers:

Today, I’m not writing about the Espionage Act being used to chill journalists and whistleblowers, but something equally as troubling: the assault on whistleblowers’ First Amendment rights, illustrated by the creepy case of Peter Van Buren.

Van Buren is a Foreign Service Officer with the State Department who wrote a book critical of U.S. reconstruction projects in Iraq, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (Metropolitan Books 2011). He also maintains a personal blog at www.wemeantwell.com….

Here is Peter discussing the outright corruption of what I call our military-media-congressional complex:

And another interview he did recently with Eliot Spitzer on CurrentTV:

Van Buren has a sardonic, humorous writing style with many of his posts which makes them enjoyable to read. As Van Buren explains in the following blog entry, the vast black hole that is Iraq continues to milk American citizens dry through the privatization of war via guns-for-hire eager to project America’s increasingly militarized foreign policy. Besides having our pocketbooks raided by this outsourcing of war for profit, these paid mercenaries aren’t the best of ambassadors for spreading good will and a positive image for America, if there ever existed such a thing from our naked grab for resources by way of military invasion. But in a land of such high rhetoric and such low character, when you need someone to carry out the dirty work of our economy, extrajudicial assassins are a President’s best friend. A case in point is the infamous war profiteer Blackwater, then changed to Xe, and now metamorphosized into Academi (still operating with the testosterone-laced, self-righteous warrior-of-God mentality):

God’s Will: Academi and Mercs at State

June 14, 2012

I wrote recently about the return of Blackwater to the State Department, with the mercenary guns-for-hire company changing its name once again (now called Academi in a homage to bad spelling) and buying an existing contract to put it back into the State Department’s world.

It gets creepier, as government seems to get these days.

Slam Dunk on Inman

Academi now boasts two celebrities on its Board of Directors, former attorney general John Ashcroft and retired admiral Bobby Inman. Ashcroft of course is Mr. Homeland Security, the guy who set in motion the smorgasbord of unconstitutional wiretapping, spying and detentions without trial that followed 9/11. He is also the guy who was so offended by the marble statues at the Department of Justice that he had them draped to hide classical nude details.

From a State Department-Blackwater love fest perspective, Inman is a slam-dunk. Inside Foggy Bottom, Inman is permanently associated with the up-armoring of embassies abroad through the 1985 “Inman Report,” a call to arms that resulted in the moated, blast-proof, unapproachable fortress embassies America promotes its image through today. The Report was also the catalyst for the establishment of the part of the State Department which titularly oversees the deployment of mercenaries, everyone’s favorite Bureau of Diplomatic Security, DS. Inman’s word is gospel to DS, so his appearance on the Academi Board is no accident.

Small World

Keeping the circle of life theme going, Academi’s CEO Ted Wright used to be president of mega-contractor KBR, the firm Dick Cheney worked for and the firm that made billions running the backstage logistics portion of the Iraq and Afghan crusades. One of Academi’s VPs worked for Queen Noor of Jordan, and has ties to the Bush dynasty. It is indeed a small world.

More creepiness?

Academi, on its “pro shop” web site, sells God’s Will T-shirts, pictured above. Just the thing for the budding merc crusader to wear while gunning down Muslims for profit. Jeez, and people wonder why we’re not winning.

A Devil’s Bargain

In the days since 9/11, State has undergone a fundamental shift, one that has required the organization to make a Devils’ Bargain with mercenaries like Academi. Prior to 9/11, State’s policy was generally to evacuate embassies in countries at war, reinserting diplomats when things quieted down to the point that diplomacy was again possible. This strategy worked well for some 220 years of American history.

After 9/11, State felt compelled to out-macho the military, to prove its manliness in the testosterone-fueled Bush (and now Obama) years. This meant opening and/or keeping open embassies in the midst of shooting wars, originally just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now spread alongside America’s increasingly one-tune foreign policy of belligerence to places like South Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere in drone land. The US military, already stretched thin by endless war, has neither the forces nor the interest in guarding State’s pasty pseudo warriors, and so the Department of State is forced to turn to private armies, like Academi, mercenaries, to enable its macho posture abroad.

I saw groups like Blackwater in action in Iraq, often alongside our own military. The mercs were what our military would be like without the NCO corps to enforce discipline, a frat house with guns, lots of guns. While State makes wordplay out of claiming to supervise its mercs, overpaid, ‘roided ‘dudes with guns named Smitty, J-Dub, Spider and the like take little notice when requested to follow the laws of war in protecting diplomats so far out of their environments. It is a situation that isn’t just likely to go wrong, it is one that practically demands to devolve into crisis.

The solution is straightforward. State should understand and admit that it is neither equipped, trained nor needed for combat situations. State should take a step back from adventures that assure its role as negotiators, diplomats, public diplomacists and the like will be misunderstood at best, and refocus its resources away from spending billions on private armies. Until then, State is forced into bed with creepy organizations like Academi, and will suffer for it.

How are things in Iraq these days in the aftermath of our implementation of disaster capitalism? … just peachy. This video best describes the privatization of the Iraqi economy and its oil that is presently going on:

Filling the Skies with Industrial Killing Machines

14 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex

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Arms Dealers, CIA, Corporate State, Drone Warfare, Empire, FBI, Homeland Security, Inverted Totalitarianism, Medea Benjamin, Military Industrial Complex, Police State, Predator Drones, Reaper Drones, Security and Surveillance State, Switchblade Drones, War for Profit, War on Terror

What to talk about… Well I could talk about the presidential cufflinks that JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon wore to Capital Hill this week. The oligarchs like to show who really runs the show. …Or I could talk about the Fed’s new study showing the evisceration of the Middle Class. Do we really need them telling us how badly we’ve been screwed? …Or the traumatized people of Greece hoarding canned food. We’re all preppers now.

I’d rather talk about something that’s going to create blowback for the U.S. down the road that will make 9-11 look pedestrian by comparison – Drone warfare. Not only are these mindless killing machines causing worldwide anger outside the ivory towers in which our plutocrats sit, but this technology is being turned inwards on the Empire’s own peasants, i.e. you and me. Take a look at this DoD Current and Future U.S. Drone Activities Map. And would you trust these guys operating such weapons?

Before I get to the main article of this post, take a look at how commonplace and ‘user-friendly’ these deadly drone weapons are fast becoming:

Switchblades in the Sky

The US military has issued soldiers in Afghanistan with a new class of lightweight unmanned drone known as the Switchblade, which can be carried in a backpack and used on the battlefield in place of an air strike.

The Switchblade, manufactured by the AeroVironment Corporation in Monrovia, California, weighs just under six pounds (2.7kg) and can be rapidly launched and sent over the nearest ridge to circle above the battlefield before being sent to zero in on the enemy – usually the chest or head of an enemy combatant.

The weapon, which commanders have dubbed the “Flying Shotgun”, has been widely tested by the US Army, US Marines and US Air Force. It has proved so effective that AeroVironment has announced more than US$14m (£9m) worth of Switchblade systems and related engineering contracts in the past 10 months….

While drone strikes from fixed-wing aircraft have a chain of command that stretches from Afghanistan to the United States, with multiple steps to avoid civilian casualties or friendly fire casualties, these ultra-light, portable drones bring the decision to kill down to the level of platoon commander or even individual soldier….

“Technology is moving at lightning speed and policy is moving at glacial speed,” said PW Singer, the author of Wired for War, a critical analysis of the military use of robotic technologies. “This tech is proliferating, with more than 50 countries now building, buying and using military robotics. The cat is already out of the bag.

These weapons will be as ubiquitous as guns with no more than a single person necessary to operate it. I can imagine these things getting into the hands of people who will want to use them in places other than “battlefields” in order to terrorize a population, but this scenario is already a reality since the U.S. has declared the entire planet a battlefield in its War on Terror. That’s not something we had to really worry about with tanks and jet fighters, but this drone technology is cheap and readily available. The larger drones like the Predator and Reaper require a network of people to operate and keep in the sky, but the smaller ones like the Switchblade do not. Nonetheless, both have the same thing in common – the ability to kill without proper forethought, reason, evidence, or moral compunction. Drones can and do kill innocent people remotely, leaving the operators of the device free from the scene of carnage and the brutal reality of what they have committed. And as you will read, what is even more frightening is that future plans call for drones to be completely autonomous, preprogrammed to find and kill targets using predetermined criteria.

…US major Bryan Callahan say(s) that drone pilots are taught ‘early and often’ to compartmentalise their lives, to separate the time they spend firing missiles on battlefields from the time they spend at home. This is perhaps the essence of the problem. The idea that we can separate ourselves off (at the personal and political level) from the economic, political, moral and human consequences of our actions has been taken to a new level by this new way to wage war.

Here is that article from The New Left Project:

Drones: The Lethal Idiot in the Sky

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, by Medea Benjamin, OR Books, 2012.

The United States, the most prolific user of drones to carry out targeted killings, asserts its attacks are legally justified as it is engaged in a global war against Al Qaeda and associated terrorist groups. By this rationale, the CIA would be justified in dropping a Hellfire missile on a suspected terrorist in an apartment in Hamburg, a restaurant in London or a mosque in upstate New York. Why stop at merely dropping bombs in poor countries dominated by people of color? (page 135)

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK, presents a readable, enlightening and alarming account which spells out the many reasons why drones are such an abomination. She explains the history of drones; the vast sums expended in lobbying by the arms corporations, and returned in lucrative government contracts; the secrecy in which the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conduct the undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; the crucial role of private contractors such as Academi (formerly Xe, and before that Blackwater) in operating the drone wars; and the moral dimension by which Obama and his henchmen flatter themselves with the words of Thomas Aquinas in pursuing what they present as “just war”.

The book returns again and again to the stories of the victims – both the “targets”, denied due process, and the thousands of innocent civilians who are being killed, maimed or their lives shattered under the shadow of the killer drones. People like Malik Gulistan Khan, a member of a local pro-government peace committee in Pakistan, killed, along with four members of his family in the first drone strike of the Obama presidency, on 23 January 2009. Or Roya, a 13-year old Afghan girl who became the family breadwinner after US missiles killed her mother and brothers following the 2001 invasion.

Gravesites throughout Asia and the Middle East are filled with testaments to drone attacks gone bad. And drones are not named Predators and Reapers for nothing. They are killing machines. With no judge or jury, they obliterate lives in an instant, the lives of those deemed by someone, somewhere, to be terrorists, along with those who are accidentally – or incidentally – caught in their cross-hairs. Think how terrifying it must be to live under the constant threat of a drone attack. Sometimes you’d see them flying menacingly overhead; sometimes they’d disappear but you could still hear their frightening, buzzing sound. (page 28)

The book’s publication coincides with much huffing and puffing about Barack Obama’s drone war policy, prompted by revelations last month in the New York Times about the president’s personal involvement in picking out targets from the “kill list”, presented to him at the weekly counterterrorism briefing (“Terror Tuesday”). As Dennis Perrin argued during the 2008 Obama presidential campaign,[1] no one can be surprised at the sight of another Democrat president eagerly outdoing his GOP predecessor and rivals in advancing the technological frontiers of industrial-scale death and destruction. Especially as BHO was a noisy advocate of drone strikes during that same campaign.

Even a casual observer will be aware that drones represent a particular, and particularly disturbing, shift. Obama’s weapon of choice in his ever-expanding, but undeclared and secret wars, is attracting increasing opposition from unlikely quarters, including the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne and former CIA counter-terrorism chiefs.

Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are presented by the White House, and by a faithful media, as a new generation of smart weapons, able to spot, target and kill terrorists in remote areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and Yemen, and Somalia, and Gaza, and Libya, and the Philippines, the list goes on) while being controlled remotely from the safety of an Air Force base in the US. Yet, as Benjamin documents in her book, drones are anything but smart.

Of course, by themselves, drones are simply an assembly of metal and high-tech electronics, unable – for the moment – to do anything on their own. They rely on humans to launch, fly, navigate, spy, target and kill. In fact, as Benjamin notes, it takes 168 people to keep a single Predator in the air for 24 hours, while the Global Hawk surveillance drone needs 300: some on the ground, in the minority of cases where drones are deployed in a declared battle zone, but most, and more often than not, in bases hundreds and usually thousands of miles away. They collate “intelligence” from various sources, and analyse the 1500 hours of video and 1500 still images which the drones beam back each day. Finally, they make life or death decisions to launch Hellfire missiles from drones on the basis of the real-time images of people fed from the same drones’ spy cameras. Those people may or may not be the targets who got the presidential thumbs down that Tuesday, may or may not be engaged in hostile activity, may or may not be male or female, may or may not be 17 or 75, may be carrying an Improvised Explosive Device or simply walking the dog. The drone doesn’t know. The pilot on a 12 hour shift, sitting watching hour upon hour of blurry blobs on a screen at Creech Air Force base in Nevada, doesn’t know either. Far from being smart, the drone is more like a lunatic with a loaded gun.

What then is driving the shift towards drones? The first thing to understand is the big money that “cheap” drones represent for the weapons manufacturers, the military, the CIA, the JSOC and the private contractors. At $5 million for a Predator and $28.4 million for each Reaper, drones look cheap by comparison to fighter jets which can cost ten times as much. But, according to Benjamin, a drone costs between $2000 and $3500 every hour it is in the air, while usage has shot up – USAF drone flying missions alone increased by 3000 per cent between 2001 and 2010. Add in the cost of Hellfire missiles ($68000 a pop), and the unknown sums in the “black budget” of the CIA, which runs much of the drone war in Pakistan and Yemen, and it’s easy to see why drones are so popular among the military-industrial complex and their friends in Washington. Weapons manufacturers such as General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which has benefited more than any rival from the drone boom, have adopted the “freebie marketing” business model from manufacturers of printers and razors.

Global spending on the research and manufacture of drones is expected to total more than $94 billion between 2011-2020. (page 32)

Competition for that money, most of which goes from federal US budgets to American corporations, is understandably fierce, and drives a relentless wave of technological innovation. Take for example, Boeing’s Phantom Ray, a fighter-sized drone which flies itself – autonomously, in the industry jargon. Or the General Atomics Gray Eagle, which “thinks for itself”, according to a GA press release quoted in the book. Benjamin makes clear that the way is clear for larger, faster, more autonomous drones which will, in the near future, be targeting not only unarmed civilians but conventional aircraft and other military forces of traditional enemies like Iran and China. Their increasing autonomy also heralds a generation of drones that not only fly by themselves, but use software to make the kill decision without any human intervention whatsoever. Meanwhile, pressure is building on the Federal Aviation Administration, not least from the White House in the form of the 2012 FAA Reauthorization Bill, to extend the integration of drones into US airspace beyond areas such as the Mexican border, where surveillance drones have been deployed at a cost of over $7000 for each undocumented immigrant or smuggler caught. Police departments across the country are queuing up to get their hands on the new toy.

Politically, back in the USA, the far-off drone wars play very well. A recent poll put support for Obama’s counter-terrorism policy at 83 per cent among all voters, and no less than 77 per cent among his liberal base. In embracing drone war, Obama has eschewed the messy business of capturing supposed terrorists (all that Guantanamo and rendition business didn’t look good, not that he has closed the former or discontinued the latter), in favour of quick kills which present no risk to American troops and, crucially, leave no evidence behind. As many have pointed out, carefully constructed election-year coverage plays his killer drones up rather than down, which testifies to their political utility.

So far, so depressing. Powerful forces are propelling us into the Drone Age. What to do about it? Benjamin is not without her critics, who accuse CODEPINK of being in the orbit of the Democratic Party. And certainly, there is a whiff of liberal, “awareness raising” activism throughout this book. But Benjamin’s closing chapters set out the serious opposition that is building to the Drone Age, both in the US and internationally. Corporations, governments and universities around the world are complicit in the drone wars, and the book closes with extensive references and links to sources of further information and groups engaged in direct action. A model for the fight against drones, Benjamin argues, is the campaign to ban landmines in the 1990s, which credits its success to “several factors”:

It had a clear message and goal. Signature states agreed to six major commitments, among them the destruction of their mine stockpiles within four years and their mine areas cleared within ten years.
It had a campaign structure that was non-bureaucratic and strategy that was flexible.
It put together an “unusually cohesive and strategic partnership” of non-governmental organizations, United Nations agencies, and governments.
There was a favourable international context.

Benjamin’s sources concede that the forces pushing drones are probably too powerful, and have too much to gain, for a ban on all drones to be a realistic prospect. But the fight to stop the new generation of “autonomous” drones can be won, and needs to start now.

Further information

www.thebureauinvestigates.com

www.codepink.org

www.dronecampaignnetwork.org.uk

www.dronewarsuk.wordpress.com

www.reprieve.org.uk

www.droneswatch.org

The Ethos of Capitalism: The Straitjacket of Our Demise

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality

≈ 1 Comment

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Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gil Smart, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Leonardo Boff, Neoliberal Capitalism, Peak Debt, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Poverty, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%

A recurrent theme in the reality based community is the continued assertion that infinite growth cannot happen on a finite planet. This simple statement seems to be quite self-evident to those announcing it, yet the powers that be cannot seem to be able to wrap their head around it. We live in a society awash with advertisements that seek to sell you something at some price. Capitalism commodifies everything and its ethos of mandatorily attaching some arbitrary, imagined worth to all things has permeated every aspect of our lives, our ethics, and our value system. We are a society that projects a cost/price analysis on everything, including relationships with fellow humans. According to ‘Save the Children’ charity chief executive, Justin Forsyth, half a billion children over the next 15 years will suffer long-term mental and physical harm due to stunted growth by malnutrition. Surely if we valued the future life of our grandchildren more than profit, then we would not allow such a thing to happen. If our own children’s future is not valued enough to save them from our greed and shortsightedness, then why would the environment be treated any differently, despite its importance to the survival of every living thing on the planet. The scientist James Lovelock once said that Green is the color of mold and corruption. If we cannot separate the needs of capitalism from the needs of our planet, then every last bit of resources and life-sustaining gift from the earth will be chopped up into tradable, sellable units and thrown into the gaping jaws of the free market. Philosopher Leonardo Boff notes:

The fundamental defect in the UN’s document for Rio+20 is the total absence of a new vision or new cosmology that would create the hope of the «future that we want», the motto of the great gathering. As such, it belies a promising future.

To those who drafted it, the future depends on the economy. There is little value in the adjectives they attach to it: sustainable or green. The green economy in particular constitutes a great assault on the last bastion of nature: transforming into merchandise and putting a price on everything that is common, natural, vital and indispensable to life, such water, the soil, fertility, jungles, genes, etcetera. That which pertains to life is sacred and must not be passed to the sphere of business. Instead, it becomes part of the market place, under the categorical imperative: take all you want, make business with everything, especially with nature and with her goods and services.

This is the supreme egocentrism and arrogance of the human being, or, as it is also called, anthropocentrism. Human beings see the Earth as a warehouse of resources only for them, without realizing that we are not the only ones who inhabit the Earth, nor do we own her; we do not feel that we are part of nature, but outside and above her, as her «lords and masters». We forget, however, that there exists a whole visible community of life (5% of the biosphere) and quadrillions of quadrillions of invisible microorganisms (95%) that guarantee the vitality and fecundity of the Earth. They all belong to the Earth/condominium and have the right to live and coexist with us. Without interdependent relationships with them, we could not even exist. The Rio+20 document does not take any of this into account. We can then safely say that with that document there is no salvation. It opens a path towards the abyss…

This straitjacket of capitalism will not release its grip on civilization until the needs of this ever-consuming, ever-growing, ever-alienating economic system kills its host. Gil Smart gives insight into this dead-end thinking taking us all over the cliff in his short writing called Faith of our fantasies:

…we face a coming era of constrained resources. Fiscal resources; energy; environmental resources. Continual growth, the type we have conditioned to believe as natural and inevitable, is neither.

I read Megan McArdle’s stuff in the Atlantic, where recently she opined about Europe’s changing demographics (i.e. fewer births, more oldsters) and how this makes robust growth more difficult. She got a letter in return from someone questioning the premise – saying that perpetual growth isn’t possible. This was her response:

Whether or not continuous economic growth is possible, or desirable, the fact remains that modern economies are predicated on the assumption that it will happen. Both individuals and governments have planned for a future in which incomes steadily rise, allowing people to enjoy lengthy retirements, advanced health care, independent living, and of course, repayment of the massive debts that almost everyone has accumulated over the past few decades.
If that growth doesn’t materialize, the shock will be enormous. Generational battles over things like pensions have occurred in the context of rising incomes; they will become bitter indeed if young and old are fighting over a shrinking economic pie. The most brutal shock will of course be over debt. If incomes fall, debt will become an ever larger burden. But if countries default, they will merely shift the shock to someone else — too often, to pensioners at home or abroad.
However laudable Europe’s demographic decline may be from an environmental point of view, it will be an economic disaster for many who expected a stable, prosperous future.

Get it? This is the idea on which we’ve staked our future. And if the idea’s wrong?

Well. I guess that means you’re up shite creek, then.

If we plow blindly down this path, infused with the faith that what we want is what will actually happen – we’re doomed. But not charging down this path requires a fundamental restructuring of the way we think – not bloody likely in this society. Or maybe any society.

Well, Mr. Smart, along with a restructuring of our way of thinking will also be required a restructuring of society. And the elite who sit atop our current social hierarchy of capitalism, benefiting the most from its exploitation and theft, will not let go of the power they hold until it’s ripped from their cold, dead hands, whether by an angry mob or the wrath of an abused and ravaged Mother Earth.

“Get ’em Dead!”

11 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex

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CIA, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Death by Drone, Empire, FBI, Homeland Security, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Neoliberal Capitalism, Obama, Police State, Predator Drones, Security and Surveillance State, The Gangster Elite, The Mafia, The Sopranos, War for Profit, War on Terror

Apparently the Mafia gang in the oval office decided it would be a good idea to employ the same tactics used by those they decide to ‘off’. As in the days of yore when Romans would usurp a foreign army and incorporate the best of that foe’s weapons and tactics, so it is that the American Empire follows in the footsteps of its long deceased predecessor, the Roman Empire. It’s called the “double tap” — sending in a second predator drone strike shortly after the first responders come to the scene of the initial assassination strike to rescue any survivors or retrieve the dead, including the mourners of resultant funerals held days later. This is a policy of treating the population as guilty by association, exterminating any and all who might be linked, however remotely, with the intended target:

According to the NYT, the Administration assumed that, “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good” and therefore all military age males in a strike zone could be targeted. A former senior counterterrorism official calls earlier drone targeting, “guilt by association.” Of signature strikes in Pakistan, a senior (apparently still-serving) official joked “that when the C.I.A. sees ‘three guys doing jumping jacks,’ the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp.” And one of Obama’s top political advisors, David Axelrod, was attending targeting meetings, injecting a political taint on the program…

There is no due process for a “suspicious” person to be marked for death by drone. Ask George Zimmerman about that. The only requirement is vague and ethereal intelligence information which, if it’s as reliable as the Iraq WMD intel, appears by all accounts to be radicalizing the affected population tenfold. This boomerang effect will inevitably please our Military Industrial Complex’s constant search for new enemies to grind into profits of war. Death by Drone smacks of a street thug mentality similar to some cheesy gangster movie script. Francine Prose notes :

As drama, the scene is reminiscent of great moments in cable TV: Tony Soprano and his colleagues deciding whom to whack, The Wire’s Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell conferring on which of their child employees must be eliminated. But it’s one thing to see murders planned on television and quite another to read that this planning session is occurring in the White House Situation Room in January, 2010, and that President Obama has assumed the grim responsibility of casting the final vote on every death sentence that this jury (so obviously outside traditional legal channels) is handing down…

..[consider] the following quote from Michael Leiter, former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center:

You can pass a lot of laws,” Mr. Leiter said, “These laws are not going to get Bin Laden dead.

Get Bin Laden dead? With its execrable grammar, its calculated thuggishness, and, for all that we have been reading about the assumption of personal responsibility, its euphemistic avoidance of what is really at issue (to get dead is not the same as to kill, and it’s never laws but people who get other people dead), the quote suggests a new dispensation in which our government, at the highest level, has given Tony Soprano license to ignore the rule of law and murder actual human beings, some of them harmless civilians. Shouldn’t we feel more frightened than reassured by the knowledge that the leader of our country holds himself accountable for every one of these deaths?

How Far Gone Are We? …. We’re living in a FantasyLand, Completely Detached from Reality

10 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Wall Street Fraud

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Aldous Huxley, Bill Moyer, Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Economic Collapse, Empire, Financial Elite, George Orwell, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Marty Kaplan, Mass Media, Neil Postman, Neoliberal Capitalism, Oligarchy, Regulatory Capture, The Elite 1%, TV, Wall Street Fraud

The above montage of clips from the satirical movie ‘The Distinguished Gentleman‘, in which Freshman Congressman (and con man) Thomas Jefferson Johnson (Eddie Murphy) is schooled in the ways of Washington by legendary lobbyist Terry Corrigan (Kevin McCarthy), is as true today as it was back when that movie was made more than twenty years ago, so says Marty Kaplan. The following excerpts from the transcript of Bill Moyer’s latest report – Big Money, Big Media, Big Trouble – tells the sorry and sordid tale of our political economy/society. This Moyer’s interview with Kaplan, a true insider to our political and media complex, is quite extraordinary. He affirms what the general populace is unable to comprehend… that we live in a society in which the news media and government institutions are entirely owned by the corporate oligarchs. The government regulators are owned by the very companies they are charged with over-seeing by way of Wall Street’s army of lobbyists and the revolving door that exists between government and private sector positions. Actual news to inform the public on the state of affairs and issues affecting them is virtually nonexistent on the media airwaves.

…what’s really driving it, if you think of this as a symptom and not a cause, I think what’s really driving it is the absolute demonization of any kind of idea of public interest as embodied by government. And at the same time, a kind of corporate triumphalism, in which the corporations, the oligarchs, the plutocrats, running this country want to hold onto absolute power absolutely. And it’s an irritant to them to have the accountability that news once used to play.

…the notion of spectator democracy has, I think, extended to include the need to divert the country from the master narrative, which is the influence and importance and imperviousness to accountability of large corporations and the increasing impotence of the public through its agency, the government, to do anything about it. So the more diversion and the more entertainment, the less news, the less you focus on that story, the better off it is.

And the self-serving triviality of corporate-run ‘news’ media has become a self-reinforcing mechanism whereby stats are being kept of what is the most popular story which then gets kicked up to the top and influences what that corporate news channel reports on in the future. It’s all driven by ratings and profit rather than educating and informing people on facts and real issues. So Neil Postman was right… We are being entertained to death, literally. This nihilism plays right into the hands of those controlling the levers of power who would not benefit from a well-informed, well-eduated public. The vast majority of public discourse has been reduced to an echo chamber of the crap (divisive ‘wedge issues’, celebrity gossip, sensationalist stories, corporate propaganda, consumerist materialism, valorization of the predatory skills of the modern competitive capitalist, etc.) that fills the corporate-controlled airwaves.

…

BILL MOYERS: You wrote The Distinguished Gentleman 20 years ago. Could you write it today?

MARTY KAPLAN: Oh God, it still is the same. All you have to do is add a couple of zeros to the amount of money. And the same laws still apply. It is fabulous and miserable at the same time.

BILL MOYERS: Was Washington then, and is it now, the biggest con game going?

MARTY KAPLAN: It is the biggest con game going. And the stakes are enormous. And the effort to regulate them is hopeless, because the very people who are in charge of regulating them are the same people who are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the lobbies that run them.

BILL MOYERS: I have it on very good authority that a prominent Washington senator recently told a group of lobbyists in Washington, a room full of lobbyists, that they are the lifeblood of the city. And I thought, “Kaplan has to do a vampire movie now.” Right?

MARTY KAPLAN: Exactly. The connection between the legislators and the lobbyists is so intimate that it’s not even embarrassing for a senator to say that in front of a room. The culture is so hermetically sealed from the rest of the country that it doesn’t occur to them that there is something deeply outrageous and offensive and corrosive of democracy to admit that the money side of politics and the elected side of politics belong to each other.

BILL MOYERS: You wrestle with this, you and your colleagues at the Norman Lear Center, and all the time, on how, on what the system is doing to us. So let me ask you, “How did this happen in America? How did our political system become the problem instead of the answer?”

MARTY KAPLAN: Part of it is the nexus of media, money, and special interest politics. The citizens have given the airwaves to the station. We own the electromagnetic spectrum and for free we give out licenses to television stations. Those stations, in turn, use that spectrum to get enormous amounts of money from special interests and from members of Congress in order to send these ads back to us to influence us. So we lose it in both ways. The other day, the president of CBS, Les Moonves, was reported by “Bloomberg” to have said “Super PACs may be bad for America, but they’re … good for CBS.” I mean, there it is. This is a windfall every election season, which seems not to even stop ever, for the broadcast industry. So not only are they raking it in, they’re also creating a toxic environment for civic discourse. People don’t hear about issues. They hear these negative charges, which only turn them off more. The more negative stuff you hear, the less interested you are in going out to vote. And so they’re being turned off, the stations are raking it in, and the people who are chortling all the way to Washington and the bank are the ones who get to keep their hands on the levers of power. So one of the big reasons that things are at the pass they are is that the founders never could have anticipated that a small group of people, a financial enterprise and the technology could create this environment in which facts, truth, accountability, that stuff just isn’t entertaining. So because it’s not entertaining, because the stations think it’s ratings poison, they don’t cover it on the news.

BILL MOYERS: They don’t cover the news.

MARTY KAPLAN: They don’t cover politics and government in the sense of issues. They’re happy, occasionally to cover horse race and scandal and personality and crime and that aspect of politics. But if you look at a typical half hour of news, local news, because local news is one of the most important sources of news for Americans about campaigns. A lot—

BILL MOYERS: You and your colleagues have done a lot of research on local news.

MARTY KAPLAN: Yes, we’ve been studying it now since 1998. And each year it gets more depressing and it’s hard to believe. We, not long ago, did a study of the Los Angeles media market. We looked at every station airing news and every news broadcast they aired round the clock. And we put together a composite half hour of news. And if you ask, “How much in that half hour was about transportation, education law enforcement, ordinances, tax policy?” everything involving locals, from city to county. The answer is, in a half hour, 22 seconds.

BILL MOYERS: Twenty-two seconds devoted to what one would think are the serious issues of democracy, right?

MARTY KAPLAN: Yes. Whereas, in fact, there are three minutes about crime, and two and a half minutes about the ugliest dog contest, and two minutes about entertainment. There’s plenty of room for stuff that the stations believe will keep people from changing the dial.

BILL MOYERS: What is the irony to me is that these very same stations that are giving 22 seconds out of a half hour to serious news, are raking— and not covering politics, are raking in money from the ads that the politicians and their contributors are spending on those same papers.

MARTY KAPLAN: Yes, they’re earning hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars from the ads that they are being paid to run. And not even risking running a minute of news, which might actually check on the accuracy of an ad. Truth watches, they’re almost invisible now.

BILL MOYERS: So they will tell you, however, that they’re in the entertainment business. That they’re in the business to amuse the public, to entertain the public. And if they do these serious stories about the schools or about the highways or about this or that, the public tunes out. That the clicks begin to register as—

MARTY KAPLAN: It’s one of the great lies about broadcasting now. There are consultants who go all around the country and they tell the general managers and the news directors, “It is only at your peril that you cover this stuff.” But one of the things that we do is, the Lear Center gives out the Walter Cronkite award for excellence in television political journalism every two years. And we get amazing entries from all over the country of stations large and small of reporters under these horrendous odds doing brilliant pieces and series of pieces, which prove that you can not only do these pieces on a limited budget, but you can still be the market leader.

…

MARTY KAPLAN: Well, what’s really driving it, if you think of this as a symptom and not a cause, I think what’s really driving it is the absolute demonization of any kind of idea of public interest as embodied by government. And at the same time, a kind of corporate triumphalism, in which the corporations, the oligarchs, the plutocrats, running this country want to hold onto absolute power absolutely. And it’s an irritant to them to have the accountability that news once used to play.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean by that? News challenges their assumptions, challenges their power?

MARTY KAPLAN: It used to be that the news programs that aired, believe it or not, had news on them. They had investigative stories.

But then somewhere in the 1980s, when 60 Minutes started making a profit, CBS put the news division inside the entertainment division. And then everyone followed suit. So ever since then, news has been a branch of entertainment and, infotainment, at best.

But there was a time in which the press, the print press, news on television and radio were speaking truth to power, people paid attention, and it made a difference. The— I don’t think the Watergate trials would have happened, the Senate hearings, had there not been the kind of commitment from the news to cover the news rather than cutting away to Aruba and a kidnapping.

BILL MOYERS: What is the basic consequence of taking the news out of the journalism box and putting it over into the entertainment box?

MARTY KAPLAN: People are left on their own to fend for themselves. And the problem is that there’s not that much information out there, if you’re an ordinary citizen, that comes to you. You can ferret it out. But it oughtn’t be like that in a democracy. Education and journalism were supposed to, according to our founders, inform our public and to make democracy work.

You can’t do it unless we’re smart. And so the consequence is that we’re not smart. And you can see it in one study after another. Some Americans think that climate change is a hoax cooked up by scientists, that there’s no consensus about it. This kind of view could not survive in a news environment, which said, “This is true and that’s false.” Instead we have an environment in which you have special interest groups manipulating their way onto shows and playing the system, gaming the notion that he said she said is basically the way in which politics is now covered.

It’s all about combat. If every political issue is the combat between two polarized sides, then you get great television because people are throwing food at each other. And you have an audience that hasn’t a clue, at the end of the story, which is why you’ll hear, “Well, we’ll have to leave it there.” Well, thank you very much. Leave it there.

BILL MOYERS: You have talked and written about “the straightjacket of objectivity.” Right? What is that?

MARTY KAPLAN: Well, the problem with telling the truth is that in this postmodern world, there’s not supposed to be something as truth anymore. So all you can do if you are a journalist is to say, “Some people say.” Maybe you can report a poll. Maybe you can quote somebody. But objectivity is only this phony notion of balance, rather than fact-checking.

There are some gallant and valiant efforts, like PolitiFact and Flackcheck.org that are trying to hold ads and news reports accountable. But by and large, that’s not what you’re getting. Instead the real straightjacket is entertainment. That’s what all these sources are being forced to be. Walter Lippmann in the 1920s had a concept called “spectator democracy” in which he said that the public was a herd that needed steering by the elites. Now he thought that people just didn’t have the capacity to understand all these complicated issues and had to delegate it to experts of various kinds.

But since then, the notion of spectator democracy has, I think, extended to include the need to divert the country from the master narrative, which is the influence and importance and imperviousness to accountability of large corporations and the increasing impotence of the public through its agency, the government, to do anything about it. So the more diversion and the more entertainment, the less news, the less you focus on that story, the better off it is.

BILL MOYERS: Are you saying that the people who run this political media business, the people who fund it, want to divert the public’s attention from their economic power? Is that what you’re saying?

MARTY KAPLAN: Yes.

Let us fight about you know, whether this circus or that circus is better than each other, but please don’t focus on the big change which has happened in this country, which is the absolute triumph of these large, unaccountable corporations.

This is about as dismal and effective a conspiracy, out in plain sight, as there possibly could be. So I don’t say that this is going to be solved or taken care of. What I do say is the first step toward it is at least acknowledging how toxic the situation has become.

…

BILL MOYERS: What you’re saying is that the political square is now a commercial enterprise, owned and operated for the benefit of the brand, CNN, Fox, all of those, right?

MARTY KAPLAN: That’s correct.

BILL MOYERS: How did it happen? How did we sell what belonged to everyone?

MARTY KAPLAN: By believing that what is, is what always has been and what should be. The notion that what goes on is actually made by people, changes through time, represents the deployment of political power. That notion has gone away. We think it’s always been this way. People now watching these CNN and Fox. They think this is how it works. They don’t have a sense of history. The amnesia, which has been cultivated by journalism, by entertainment in this country, helps prevent people from saying, “Wait a minute, that’s the wrong path to be on.”

BILL MOYERS: Amnesia, forgetfulness? You say that they’re cultivating forgetfulness?

MARTY KAPLAN: Absolutely.

…

BILL MOYERS: You made a very important speech not long ago at a media conference in Barcelona. And you tried and did draw the distinction between— you said the battle of the future is between big data and big democracy. In layman’s language, what is that?

MARTY KAPLAN: Big data, the age of big data that we’re supposed to be in, refers to the way in which, as we go on the internet, as we do all these media activities, watching television, which are at the center of our lives, we’re leaving a trail behind. We’re giving bits of ourselves up. And that set of bits is being collected and mined relentlessly.

So every time we buy a product or send an e-mail or vote how many stars to a restaurant, all this stuff creates a profile that companies buy and sell to each other. And that stuff is being used currently not only to market to us, to target ads toward us, but it’s also being used to profile us. There’s something called “web lining.” Which is similar to what used to be called “red lining.” The— that phenomenon, which is now illegal, in which people who were discriminated against because of the neighborhoods they live in. Right now—

BILL MOYERS: Banks drew a red line around impoverished neighborhoods that they would not then serve.

MARTY KAPLAN: Exactly. And so today imagine if you were to permit a private detective to follow you as you went to your drug store and bought a medication to help you with depression or as you made a phone call to a bankruptcy lawyer, because you needed one. Imagine if that kind of information could be put together and used against you to decide that you’re a bad credit risk or that maybe your insurance company should turn you down, because you suffer from this problem.

That kind of information, that kind of digital profiling is something which is emerging as a huge industry. And unless there are controls on it and constraints, as they have to some degree in Europe but not nearly enough even there, we are about to kiss goodbye our ownership of our privacy and also even the ownership financially of our information. We are the people who make Facebook and Twitter worth the billions of dollars that they’re worth, because we are giving up our information to them, which they are then selling and raising capital around.

BILL MOYERS: But in a libertarian era, what are the restraints and constraints against that? Where are they going to come from?

MARTY KAPLAN: Well, right now, the constraints in this country are voluntary. The Obama White House not long ago issued a digital code of conduct, which included privacy. In which they asked companies and companies did step up to it to say, “We’re not going to track people if they don’t want to be tracked.” And other such efforts to get people in control.

But what we do know, the record of just the past couple of months, is that company after company was doing stuff to us that’s astonishing, that we didn’t know about. The ways in which the apps that you use on your smartphones were vacuuming up information about you, your address book and all your pictures.

Stuff that you had no idea you had consented to, which in fact usually you had not, suddenly was all owned by other people, as well. You have not given permission, but that essential part of you is now not yours. That’s the name of the game now. This is baked into the business model of data mining, which is at the heart of so much of the digital economy.

BILL MOYERS: But that’s big data. You talked about big democracy.

MARTY KAPLAN: So at the same time as our data is being mined, there is this movement to protect people using technology to give them the power to say, “I’m not going to opt into this stuff.” We’re still at the beginning of this industry. And there has to be rules of the road. And part of those rules include my attention rights. My rights to control my identity, my privacy, and my ownership of information.”

BILL MOYERS: In your speech in Barcelona, you pointed to two simultaneous covers of TIME Magazine appearing the same week. One for the editions in Europe, Asia, and South Pacific, and it was about the crisis in Europe. The other, which appeared in the American edition, featured a cover about animal friendships. You use these two covers to illustrate the difference between what you call “push journalism” and “pull journalism.” What’s the difference?

MARTY KAPLAN: Push journalism is the old days, which seem no longer to apply in the era of the internet, in which an editor, a gatekeeper, says, “Here’s the package which you need to know.” All of that is ancient history now.

Instead, now, it’s all driven by what the consumer is pulling. And if the consumer says, “I want ice cream all the time.” And whether that ice cream is Lindsay Lohan, or the latest crime story, that’s what’s delivered. And as long as it’s being pulled, that’s what is being provided. So it’s quite possible that in the U.S., the calculation was made that the crisis in Europe and the head of Italy would not be a cover that one could use. But that pet friendships would be the sort of thing that would fly off the newsstand.

BILL MOYERS: So the reader is determining what we get from the publication?

MARTY KAPLAN: On a minute by minute basis, stories that the reader’s interested in immediately go to the top of the home page. There are actually pieces of software that give editorial prominence to stuff that people by voting with their clickers have said is of interest to them. No one is there to intervene and say, “Wait a minute, that story is just too trivial to occupy more than this small spot below the fold.” Instead, the audience’s demand is what drives the placement and the importance of journalistic content.

BILL MOYERS: So George Orwell anticipated a state as big brother, hovering over us, watching us, keeping us under surveillance, taking care of our needs as long as we repaid them with utter loyalty. Aldous Huxley anticipated a Brave New World in which we were amusing ourselves to death. Who’s proving the most successful prophet? Huxley or Orwell?

MARTY KAPLAN: Well, I think Huxley is probably right, as Neil Postman said in—

BILL MOYERS: The sociologist, yes.

MARTY KAPLAN: —in Amusing Ourselves to Death. That there’s no business but show business. And we are all equally guilty, because it’s such fun to be entertained. So you don’t need big brother, because we already have big entertainment.

BILL MOYERS: And the consequences of that?

MARTY KAPLAN: That we are as in Brave New World, always in some kind of stupor. We have continual partial attention to everything and tight critical attention on nothing.

…

According to stats from 2010 for TV viewing by adult Americans, we’re glued to the boob tube in our waking hours. This explains why having an intelligent conversation with most Americans is an impossible task. All they can do is regurgitate what has been constantly programmed into their heads.

• The average American watches 35:34 (hours/minutes) of TV per week

• Kids aged 2-11 watch 25:48 (hours/minutes) of TV per week (Q1 2010)

• Adults over 65 watch 48:54 (hours/minutes) of TV per week (Q1 2010)

And according to the latest Nielsen study, TV viewing is on the increase, notwithstanding a tiny drop in the number of households who own a TV:

REPORT: THE INTERNET POSES NO CHALLENGE TO TV — YET …

…despite all the competition from cable TV, videogames, and the Internet, the average household watched 59 hours, 28 minutes of broadcast TV per week during the 2010-2011 season, setting a new record. Lanzano drew particular attention to the competition — or lack of it — from Facebook, noting that while the average person spends about 13 minutes a day on Facebook, they spend 297 minutes watching TV. “No wonder our friends at [General Motors] are making some changes,” he said. [Last month GM announced that it will stop placing ads on Facebook, after determining that they had little impact.]

An Economic and Social System that Undermines Life Itself

09 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality

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Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Neoliberal Capitalism, The Elite 1%

It’s important to keep in mind that at the root of industrial civilization’s problems is an economic system called capitalism which requires infinite growth at the expense of our global life support system, the earth. The end game is a spent and destroyed environment in which a small global elite control the overwhelming percentage of the planet’s extracted wealth while the vast majority of the world’s population exist in squalor and debt peonage. The social hierarchy of our system can be visualized as a large pyramid with the wealthiest of society represented as the eye of a thin needle sitting atop the massive base that represents the rest of humanity. It seems the only impediment to capitalism is its own unstoppable path to self-destruction. For the power that accumulated capital wields has taken over all aspects of societal behavior – cultural, spiritual, political, legal, and analytical – to the detriment of us all.

Of Birds, Rivers And Greed By Farooque Chowdhury

“…About two years ago, WWF, the international organization involved in the area of ecology, said in its Living Planet report: A second planet will be required by 2030 to meet our needs as over-use of Earth’s natural resources and carbon pollution have become critical. If all human being in this world used resources at the same per capita rate as the US or the UAE, four and a half planets would be needed. More than 70 countries were exhausting their freshwater sources at an alarming, unsustainable rate. About two-thirds of these countries experience water scarcity ranging from moderate to severe. In 2007, the world’s 6.8 billion humans were living 50% beyond the planet’s threshold of sustainability. The report highlighted the rich-poor ecological gap. In 1970-2007, an index of biodiversity showed a world decline of almost 30%. In the tropics, it was alarming: 60%.

No brain with logic will claim that the acts are isolated from the world economic system: capitalism. “From the outset,” Joe Bageant, author of the book about working class in America Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War , writes, “capitalism was always about the theft of the people’s sustenance. It was bound to lead to the ultimate theft – the final looting of the source of their sustenance – nature.” (“Our Plunder of Nature will End up Killing Capitalism and Our Obscene Lifestyles”, Countercurrents , July 13, 2010 )

“The main feature of capitalism is the seductive assertion that you can get something for nothing in this world.” (ibid.) Owners of this system, the capitalists, Joe continues, “hate any sort of cost.” They, he describes, “remain unimpressed by global warming, or melting polar ice caps, or Southwestern desert armadillos showing up in Canada , or hurricanes getting bigger and more numerous every year.”

These are the elites in control of the world environment in continents and countries. “Just before the economy blew out,” according to Joe, “these elites held slightly less than $80 trillion. After the blowout/bailout, their combined investment wealth was estimated at a little over $83 trillion. To give some idea, this is four years of the gross output of all the human beings on earth.”

This massive money power takes hold of political power. Owning this unimaginably monstrous money-political power system they put their footprint on ecology that is changing the planet’s environment irreversibly.

This system, the masters of the system in the center, in the periphery, in between the center and the periphery, try their best to maximize profit by minimizing cost, by appropriating labor, robbing nature, grabbing everything within their reach, putting costs on public. Pollution, destruction of ecology and ruination of nature thus creep into public domain – a human concern.

Acts of the masters are turning into crime, crime against the planet, against posterity, against humanity.

The World Future Council leaders said: “These are crimes against the future … These are crimes that will not only injure future generations, but destroy any future at all for millions of people.”

The Council has called for appointing “ombudspersons for future generations”, “guardians appointed at global, national and local levels whose job would be to help safeguard environmental and social conditions by speaking up authoritatively for future generations in all areas of policy-making. This could take the shape of a parliamentary commissioner, a guardian, a trustee or an auditor, depending on how it best fits into a nation’s governance structure.”

But questions are there: How far the ombudspersons can act where power structure, economy and political power is of, by and for polluters, grabbers, eco-murderers? If they can act, then, why do environment law/court/ministry/inspectors, depending on arrangement in countries, can’t act? What will happen if polluters grab that proposed holy post as have happened in countries by different lobbies/interests/gangs? What’s the guarantee that the proposed holy persons’ observations/edicts/verdicts will be implemented? Are not there instances of trampling/violation of all basic, fundamental, moral, ethical, human, natural, principled rights/practices/conventions/laws/rules around the world, in countries?

Out of their sense of urgency the WFC leaders’ suggestion sounds nice, but not functional. It’s detached from reality, the socio-economic-environmental -political reality.

What’s the reality?

An answer is provided by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster in their seminal analysis What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism: A Citizen’s Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (2011): Capitalism is a system that must continually expand, a system that, by its very nature, will eventually come up against the reality of finite natural resources, a system geared to expansionist growth in the search for profits that will inevitably transgress planetary boundaries.

By its very nature the system stands against ecology and environment as its only concern is profit, nothing else. Standing for environment will lead to questioning the ever hungry system.

Pushing 1 billion persons down to extreme poverty, and enriching a few, whose consumption is threatening the planet is one of the major “contributions” of the system. Other than the hungry and starved, there are energy poor, electricity poor, water poor, information poor, basic rights poor, safety poor, they are the poor masses deprived of honor and dignity, and there are the food rich, energy rich, electricity rich, water rich, information rich, luxury rich, power and privilege rich, resource rich, consumption rich, the rich few controlling everything.

Imbalance and inequity at this level can’t sustain environment and ecology. The first one, imbalance and inequity, is linear, ever expanding while the later one, environment and ecology, demands diversity, tolerance, consideration, accommodation. Observance related to environment turns hollow and chattering if this aspect of political economy is ignored…