Three days. Nine meals. The ledger doesn’t lie. The trucks stop rolling. Warehouses run dry. The freezer coughs, then stills. Time to flee. Just-in-time was the plan. There was no Plan B.
First meal missed: a joke. The second: doubt. Third: the deadbolt slides. Fourth: the lights go out. By nine, the street belongs to what we hid. Civilization was a thing we did.
The trucks run the highways. The ships split the sea. A just-in-time miracle. A mortgaged guarantee. A cyclone. A drone strike. A server blinks red. The Age of Abundance hung by a thread.
First empty cart. First price that no one pays. Day two: the register dies. Day three: the blaze. The pump clicks dry. The dollar is a joke. The contract was a promise. The promise turned to smoke.
Nine meals. The primate wakes inside the eye. The handshake curls to fist. We learn the reason why. Three sunsets from the thing we swore we weren’t. The mask slipped off. The face was always burnt.
The shelves are full tonight. Tomorrow: who can say. The trucks run now. The thread holds one more day. Nine meals from silence. Three sunsets from the dark. The ice was never thick. Tread lightly. Leave no mark.
As I take a break between the chapters of my dystopian book, let’s look at our present state of political turmoil and lurch toward authoritarianism. What we currently see developing is a merger between far right-wing tech magnates who want their own corporate thiefdoms and MAGA who want a white Christian nationalist theocracy. Trump, a silver spoon grifter and sociopath who is in the process of turning America into an oligarch-run mafia state like Russia, happens to be the convenient ‘charismatic’ figurehead for the MAGA movement. Our Conman-in-Chief reads at the level of an eleven-year-old and, despite wrapping himself in the cloak of religion, cannot even quote a single line from the Bible. Yet, a majority of his followers say they believe he is their god’s anointed one, as hypocritical and preposterous as that sounds. More than half of American adults read below a 6th grade level, thus the fertile ground that would give rise to such an illiterate and deceitful character as Trump. As an old Turkish Proverb states:
“The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.”
Trump’s first term was simply a trial and error period for how to corrupt and subvert the levers of government to his bidding. His second term will be much more effective at doing so. Among the most alarming moves by Trump and the so-called Project 2025 thus far are the dismantling of environmental regulations and science research and funding. Typical of authoritarian dictators who often disregard scientific consensus when it contradicts their political agenda, prioritizing the maintenance of their power over evidence-based decision making, Trump is suppressing information to suit his narrative of expanding fossil fuel consumption. What I find most interesting, however, is this far right faction of the tech industry which is swiftly and precisely carrying out its agenda, exploiting Trump exactly as they had so openly discussed and planned. A linked video above explains it in detail, but here is a very condensed synopsis:
Just watch the videos above and you will understand that what we have witnessed since Trump 2.0 began on January 20, 2025 follows the Tech oligarchs’ playbook to a T. Their plan of hollowing out and taking over the US government is characterized by attacking swiftly and breaking things in order to sow chaos, destabilize institutions, and demoralize public servants. This also plays to the MAGA crowd who have been fooled into believing their fate and well-being is better served by corporate interests unfettered by any regulations and rules designed to protect the public. And nevermind that the global population is seen by these oligarchs as mere parasites whose sole purpose is to generate profits from consumption of corporate products.
Coupled with the increasingly chaotic and collapsing biosphere, we are ushering in a dystopian future I shudder to even imagine. Also, keep in mind that what the Trump administration is doing to Ukraine is exactly what Britain and France did to Czechoslovakia in an attempt to appease an imperialistic Nazi Germany in 1938. See video below for a clear-eyed explanation of why we are repeating history:
Where do we go from here? Nowhere but into the abyss as long as there is a large swath of the public so easily manipulated and a government and news media that is beholden to the highest bidder.
Another election cycle passes and the American people responded with the lowest voter turnout since WWII. The staged events of today’s political rallies will soon be composed solely of people paid off with corporate bribes to wave flags and chant slogans. As ever more corporate money floods into the faux democratic process, participation by the average citizenry has plummeted. Americans are now more disillusioned with the charade of “American democracy” than at any time in history:
Confidence in Congress as an institution is at 7%, the lowest measurement in history and lower than any other institution tested, including organized labor, banks and big business. Views of the honesty and ethics of members of Congress are at 8% on average, one percentage point above lobbyists, but one point below car salesmen… – link
We are also undoubtedly becoming more callous and insensitive to our fellow-man when a 90-year-old gentleman is arrested for feeding the homeless from a church kitchen. In fact, we’ve lost all our humanity and exchanged it for the almighty dollar. Neoliberal capitalism has permeated very aspect of social and civic life, creating a new epitaph for the demise of such a mean-spirited culture —‘death by dollars’.
You Are What You Eat
I just became aware of Dr. Suzanne de la Monte’s studies on the food industry’s use of sugar in all its products in order to fabricate a consumer “bliss point” for maximizing sales. Capitalist industrial civilization has bred a morbidly obese creature conditioned to overeat processed food spiked with sugar, fat, and salt. A high-fructose diet has undoubtedly turned the cognitive skills of many into mush. John Oliver recently used a clip from her work in his takedown of the sugar industry:
“De la Monte has done her research by feeding healthy rats the equivalent of a North American diet, complete with all the sugars and fat. All her rats ended up demented.” – from the documentary The Secrets of Sugar
The IPCC stated back in 2007 that emissions would have to peak in 2015 to avoid a rise of 2°C, but since that is not going to happen, they are putting their hopes in technology that could pull CO2 out of the atmosphere while conceding that such techniques are “uncertain” and “limited”. Mankind’s grave is already deep enough, yet we keep digging. Just as China’s coal consumption has registered a drop for the first time this century, India has announced it will pick up the slack by planning to double its coal production to meet the country’s soaring energy demand. Poland has rejected the IPCC target of zero emissions by 2100. In the U.S., new data has revealed that climate change has become the most politically divisive issue in the U.S.
According to energy expert Nate Hagens, modern-day carbon man’s metabolic energy consumption makes each of us a 30-ton primate. It appears the Pavlovian conditioning of modern man to energy dense fossil fuels and capitalist wealth have irrevocably hacked and rewired his brain’s reward system. The autopsy results for the age of the Anthropocene will read: “fossil fuel overdose” and “suicide by CO2”.
…In 2012 study, researchers in Singapore found that greenhouse gas emissions from hydropower reservoirs globally are likely greater than previously estimated, warning that “rapid hydropower development and increasing carbon emissions from hydroelectric reservoirs to the atmosphere should not be downplayed.”
Those researchers suggest all large reservoirs globally could emit up to 104 teragrams of methane annually. By comparison, NASA estimates that global methane emissions associated with burning fossil fuels totals between 80 and 120 teragrams annually…
The WWF(World Wildlife Fund) released its biennial ‘Living Planet Report’ which some on Twitter are calling the ‘Dead Planet Report’. The silence of mass extinction draws ever nearer…
The report writers, based on data kept by the Zoological Society of London, studied 10,380 populations of 3,038 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles from 1970 to 2010. Over these four decades, the average decline of these vertebrate species was 52 per cent – all in less than two human generations.
Amongst freshwater species the population decline was a staggering 76 per cent, owing to habitat loss, land fragmentation, pollution and invasive species.
In the same period terrestrial species declined by 39 per cent through unsustainable land use and increased poaching, often spurred on by wildlife crime syndicates.
Marine species declined also by 39 per cent, to include large migratory seabirds, many shark species and also sea turtles.
A major contributory factor to marine loss of life was through by catching (accidentally catching, in certain fish net sizes, species which were of no market value and then casting these dead fish overboard), illegal fishing and overfishing of the same fishing grounds.
Currently we need a 50 per cent bigger Earth to allow the regeneration of the natural resources we consume…
…By 2050, we will have an extra 2.4 billion people in our world, with urban populations increasing from 3.6 billion in 2011 to 6.3 billion. In 1970, there were only two megacities (over 10 million people) – New York and Tokyo; in 2014 there are 28 such cities – 16 in Asia, three each in Europe and Africa, four in Latin America and two in North America, all totalling 12 per cent of the world’s urban population.
The United Nations (UN) predicts that in 2025, there will be 37 megacities with eight new ones in Asia. Also in the pipeline are meta-cities – conurbations of over 20 million people – through the amalgamation of megacities…
…The report interestingly mentions that the diversity of human languages in our world is strongly correlated to areas of high plant diversity. Some linguists have predicted that 90 per cent of the world’s languages will expire by the end of this century…
Here is an interesting graph created by Paul Chefurka which shows that the combined biomass of humans with their farm animals exceeds the natural carrying capacity of the earth sevenfold:
In the graphic, the “wild animal” biomass doesn’t include insects, bacteria, or marine organisms.
I used three data sources to develop the chart: a paper by world-respected ecological scientist Vaclav Smil, called “Harvesting the Biosphere”, linked below; world population estimates from the Wikipedia articleof the same name; and the UN’s Medium Fertility variant for the human population in 2050 (9.6 billion).
The definition I used for Global Carrying Capacity is, “The biomass the planet can support without the assistance of human technology or fossil fuels.” The impact of human activity has gradually eroded the Earth’s carrying capacity over time, which is why I show the red dotted line sloping down to the right. The degree of erosion is very hard to estimate. My guess is that we may have lost around 25% by this point, some of which would of course be naturally regenerated over time in the absence of human activity. Any biomass above that dotted line has to be supported by human technology and energy supplies (which at this point are mostly from fossil fuels).
The conclusion is that we have been living in the midst of an accelerating Global Mass Extinction Event for over 100 years already. Unfortunately we’ve been too fixated on human issues like economics and politics to even notice, let alone realize what it means. Those who did realize the significance, both to wildlife and the human species, have been powerless to act in the face of economics and politics.
Paul gives the following further explanation for the graph:
The definition one uses for “carrying capacity” is so loose as to make it quite arbitrary. Here’s the definition I used: “The global carrying capacity is the total biomass of the organisms under consideration that the planet can support without the assistance of technology or fossil fuels.”
Accordingly, I estimated the carrying capacity in this case as being about the same as the world’s wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE, with the assumption that the unassisted carrying capacity of the world would have been fully utilized at that point. I estimated the wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE as being somewhat less than the combined wild and domestic animal biomass in 1900, per Smil. I made it lower in order to account for the technological intensification of farming already well under way by that time.
The slope of the carrying capacity line is arbitrary, because it’s impossible to determine how much we have actually eroded the world’s unassisted carrying capacity. We just know that we have. I chose the slope to correspond to my belief that we’ve eroded it by about 25% at this point. The actual slope is therefore somewhat editorial.
The Dalai Lama says, “Affection, a sense of community and a sense of concern for others are not some kind of luxury. They’re about the survival of humanity,” but the socio-economic system that rules the world is characterized by hyper-individualism and self-interest devoid of moral constraints. A system that enshrines greed and mocks equity and the public good will never be able to find a solution to the tragedy of privatizing the commons.
All lights are about to go out. No more electricity. All forms of transportation are about to stop, and the planet Earth will soon have a crust of skulls and bones and dead machinery. And nobody can do a thing about it. It’s too late in the game. Don’t spoil the party, but here’s the truth: We have squandered our planet’s resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn’t going to be one.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
Although I agree with much of what J. H. Kunstler has to say, particularly on his analysis of energy and his critiques of American suburbia, when it comes to his views on the human-made system that is driving this entire train wreck, he gets it dead wrong. Here is a quote from his last blog post:
Now I am, going to reveal to you why it is so difficult to get a live human being on the telephone at these important places: because the more of a racketeering matrix medicine becomes, the more it seeks to evade responsibility for the consequences. That is, the more medicine becomes a criminal enterprise, the less it wants to hear from its client/victims. The same ethos is at work in just about every other realm of corporate enterprise in the USA. Our problem in the USA is not “capitalism,” it’s racketeering. Why we fail to comprehend it is one of the abiding mysteries of contemporary life.
…It ought to be self-evident that this could only happen in a profoundly corrupt, dishonest, and degenerate society, because it took the form of a social compact that accepted this sort of behavior as okay…
Kunstler is perpetuating a deep-seated myth about capitalism that many in American society repeat. Laying the blame on those victimized by an economic system, which by design exploits, disenfranchises, and discards its subjects, overlooks the fact that the problem is the system itself. Capitalism is not an ethical system, and its overriding force of motivation is always the bottom line. Inequality, conflict, and regulatory corruption are all part and parcel of capitalism. History has borne this out numerous times. Unless someone steps in to break them up, monopolies are the natural result of unbridled capitalism (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):
Corporate money greases the wheels of the political system which then passes regulations discouraging competition and favoring large corporations. Regulatory capture is inevitably what happens when successful capitalists amass wealth and buy off the political class whose lifeblood is, after all, money. Under the present system, we will never see a candidate elected to office without a substantial war chest of funds stuffed with corporate ‘donations‘. Government does the bidding of capitalists, not vise versa. We saw this in spades with the election of Obama when all his campaign promises of “hope and change” evaporated into thin air as he filled his cabinet with Wall Street and Goldman Sachs cronies. Who wrote the legislation for Obama’s healthcare reform? — lobbyists for the healthcare industrial complex where, not surprisingly, “the big bucks are currently earned not through the delivery of care, but from overseeing the business of medicine.” The corruption that Kunstler decries is not an aberration of capitalism, but a natural feature of it:
…What chiefly drives this sort of political corruption today is capitalism’s structure. For many capitalist enterprises, competitive and other pressures exist to increase profits, growth rates, and/or market share. Their boards and top managers seek to find cheaper produced inputs and cheaper labor power, to extract more output from their workers, to sell their outputs at the highest possible prices and to find more profitable technologies. The structure provides them with every incentive of financial gain and/or career security and advancement to behave in those ways. Thus, boards and top managers seek the maximum obtainable assistance of government officials in all these areas and also try to pay the least possible portion of their net revenues as taxes. Boards of directors tap their corporations’ profits to corrupt mostly the top echelons of the government bureaucracy, those needed to make advantageous official decisions.
Individual capitalists act to corrupt government officials to serve their enterprise’s needs. Grouped into associations, they do likewise for their industries. When organized as a whole (in “chambers of commerce” or “manufacturers alliances,” etc.), they corrupt to secure their class interests. When such corruption is not secret, capitalists articulate their demands to corrupted officials as “good for the economy or society as a whole.” Such phrases constitute the “appropriate language” that enables officials publicly to disguise and hopefully to legitimate their corrupt acts.
Strict moral codes, regulations and laws have been imposed to prevent individual or grouped capitalists from corrupting government officials. Evidence suggests, however, that neither civic-minded ethics, nor regulations nor laws have come close to ending capitalists’ corruption. Countless government courts, commissions, etc., have hardly ended official complicities in that corruption. Mainstream economics mostly proceeds in its analyses and policy prescriptions as if rampant corruption did not exist. Mass media tend to treat capitalist corruption (at least in their home countries) as exceptional and government efforts to stop it as serious. These, too, are further examples of that “appropriate language” with which modern capitalist societies mask systemic corruption.
~ Richard D Wolff
Noam Chomsky uses the acronym RECD (Really Existing Capitalist Democracy, pronounced ‘wrecked‘) to describe the capitalism that exists in the real world, and he doesn’t hold out much hope for civilization surviving it. Any sort of idyllic form of capitalism only exists in people’s heads and is kept alive by the myth of laissez-faire capitalism (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):
A democracy cannot exist without an informed and intelligent electorate, and when corporations and monied interests intentionally spin the news, the populous are reduced to conspiracy mongers and what Gore Vidal scoffingly called ‘consumer-depositors’ in thrall to the financial elite. Alas, the institution intended to educate the public, aka the Fourth Estate, on matters of vital importance has been thoroughly dismantled and perverted by capitalism. The internet, the last bastion of independent and alternative news, is soon to follow suite (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):
If the masses are unable to see through the spin and distortion propagated by a class of greedy parasites, there is one entity that will not suffer the fate of the dispossessed, dying quietly in some dark corner. The Earth is not so forgiving to such continued capitalist assaults, and it’s not fooled by propaganda such as ‘sustainable development’, ‘green growth’, or ‘corporate social responsibility’. Since pre-industrial times, the global temperature has ‘only’ risen 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit), and we can already see the havoc to civilization’s infrastructure that climate chaos is wreaking. With forecasts of average global temperature to be many fold greater by mid century, it would seem that only a miracle will save us.
Systemic Disorder published an important essay yesterday on the systematic destruction of labor rights throughout the world. How long will these myths about capitalism persist until the exploited finally wake up and realize their blood, sweat, and sacrifice are what fills the coffers of the über rich? Many at the bottom of the economic hierarchy bend over backwards to apologize for our current system, calling it everything but capitalism. No matter how often capitalism fails, no matter how many people it kills, it is religiously touted as the only and the best economic system available despite its flaws. Will humans continue to amuse themselves to death, defending a systemically self-destructive system?
…
We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We ohhed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah
And when they found our shadows Grouped ’round the TV sets They ran down every lead They repeated every test They checked out all the data on their lists And then the alien anthropologists Admitted they were still perplexed But on eliminating every other reason For our sad demise They logged the only explanation left This species has amused itself to death . . .
Humans live on hope and without it they fall into depression, oftentimes taking their own lives. In ‘The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception‘, optimism bias is said to be a defense or coping mechanism for survival. Most turn to religion for the ultimate hope of an afterlife nirvana. Voluntarily and unflinchingly holding one’s eyes open to the searing light of reality is an unnatural act for humans. For many, simply dealing with everyday life and the stress of surviving the concrete jungle is enough to drive them to despair, madness, and suicide. Whether they realize it or not, any normal person taking in the full scope of the multiple crises we face is surely prone to depression to some degree or another. I am now finding that I have to periodically distance myself from blogging on these subjects because it’s affecting my personal relationships as well as my mental/physical health. Suicide is on the rise in the modern world:
Death on the Farm:
…Since that crisis, the suicide rate for male farmers has remained high: just under two times that of the general population. And this isn’t just a problem in the U.S.; it’s an international crisis. India has had more than 270,000 farmer suicides since 1995. In France, a farmer dies by suicide every two days. In China, farmers are killing themselves to protest the government’s seizing of their land for urbanization. In Ireland, the number of suicides jumped following an unusually wet winter in 2012 that resulted in trouble growing hay for animal feed. In the U.K., the farmer suicide rate went up by 10 times during the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, when the government required farmers to slaughter their animals. And in Australia, the rate is at an all-time high following two years of drought.
Suicide Rate Rises Sharply in U.S.:
From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7. Although suicide rates are growing among both middle-aged men and women, far more men take their own lives.
Why Suicide Has Become an Epidemic–and What We Can Do to Help:
…We know, thanks to a growing body of research on suicide and the conditions that accompany it, that more and more of us are living through a time of seamless black: a period of mounting clinical depression, blossoming thoughts of oblivion and an abiding wish to get there by the nonscenic route. Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death. In much of the world, it’s among the only major threats to get significantly worse in this century than in the last…
…This year, America is likely to reach a grim milestone: the 40,000th death by suicide, the highest annual total on record, and one reached years ahead of what would be expected by population growth alone. We blew past an even bigger milestone revealed in November, when a study lead by Ian Rockett, an epidemiologist at West Virginia University, showed that suicide had become the leading cause of “injury death” in America. As the CDC noted again this spring, suicide outpaces the rate of death on the road—and for that matter anywhere else people accidentally harm themselves. Somewhere Ralph Nader is smiling, but the takeaway is darkly profound: we’ve become our own greatest danger.
This development evades simple explanation. The shift in suicides began long before the recession, for example, and although the changes accelerated after 2007, when the unemployment rate began to rise, no more than a quarter of those new suicides have been tied to joblessness, according to researchers. Guns aren’t all to blame either, since the suicide rate has grown even as the portion of suicides by firearm has remained stable.
The fact is, self-harm has become a worldwide concern. This emerged in the new Global Burden of Disease report, published in The Lancet this past December. It’s the largest ever effort to document what ails, injures, and exterminates the species. But allow me to save you the reading. Humankind’s biggest health problem is humankind…
That last article I quoted above, from a mainstream periodical, has more truth written between the lines than its author even realizes. Humans are their own worst enemy and perhaps the rise of suicides across the globe is a reflection of our ecocidal culture, one that values money over life and reduces everything to a financial statistic. Capitalism is the most pervasive religion on the planet today. Most living at the end of modern history have adopted the ruling elite’s belief system which says that all problems can and will be solved via the “free market” and human ingenuity, but as one Indian philosopher of the 21st century wisely observed:
“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.” ~ Vandana Shiva
People are a reflection of their environment, and so it is in the waning days of industrial civilization and predatory capitalism that many will no longer have the will to go on. From an interesting obituary written by a friend of Michael C. Ruppert:
…I look at Ruppert’s life, his hard struggle, his victories and his short-comings. I wish we were closer in his final couple of years. I loved him. I say the following with love. I say the following because I don’t want to know any more great truth-loving writers to die this way. If you have a drinking problem, hit a meeting. Reach out. It worked for me, to stop flailing about, running from city to country to city, always moving, thinking a big move is going to change things. Get centered. Pray and meditate. Be still.
Something snapped in Ruppert sometime later in that decade, after the book. He moved to Venezuela, in rushed effort to seek political asylum from the Chavez government. Ruppert probably wasn’t anti-imperialist enough for their tastes, at least not in a leftist way. Oh, and the CIA/DIA family background probably didn’t help.
I wept. I felt rage today. I was mad at you, Mike, going out this way. It was too similar to Gary Webb, to Jim Hatfield the Bush biographer. I don’t want this pattern. Tell me it’s not the fate for writers of deep truth, to die, alone, shooting their brains out, because they went deep and hard after the invisible forces, the slithering stag. The hunter became hunted by the dragon.
No. Mike will be remembered for his discipline, his writing, his development of a critical paradigm. Our society is stronger for the deep analysis. In the same way that Ruppert investigated Gary Webb’s death, it’s up to us now to do the scientific and careful analysis of the crime scene. To pick up where he left off, and wake up to a new view of the matrix…
In their search for the truth, perhaps some travel too far down the rabbit hole of civilizational and environmental collapse to ever escape its malignant shadow; it consumes them like a cancer. A copy of Ruppert’s suicide letter can be read here. His research and thinking lead him to the inner sanctum of dark revelation and the unsettling details of civilization’s trajectory. The vaporware dreams of a technological utopia will most certainly go up in smoke as social unrest and resource wars consume the nations of the world in an age of climate chaos. The evil genius of mankind will be revealed in evermore lethal and destructive ways to kill his fellow man. And waiting in the wings of industrial civilization’s collapse is the toxic and radioactive tsunami from an aging fleet of nuclear reactors dependent on a functioning electric grid. Humans are capable of great acts of compassion and selflessness as well as great acts of cruelty and violence. The system rewards sociopathic behavior at the expense of the health of the whole. Ignoring such stark realities won’t change our odds for survival.
RIP Michael C. Ruppert, Feb. 3, 1951- April 13, 2014
While the false debate continues in mostly right-wing circles that today’s Capitalism is some aberrant form of “true” Capitalism, the end game and final victory of Capital continues to play out with multinational corporations becoming the ‘winner take all’ in their complete takeover of the world’s economies and governments. As discussed before, the TTIP and TPP are the latest maneuvers in this corporate grab for power, wealth, and resources. Any last vestiges of environmental protection, worker rights, and sovereignty will be shredded. No illusions of democracy should be maintained in a world of corporate feudalism where gross social inequality will have become irreversible and the will of common people smothered by the abuses of great wealth:
“[The TTIP] proposes to establish a Regulatory Co-operation Council combining US and EU regulatory agencies with the purpose of working towards deeper ‘regulatory co-operation and increased compatibility for future and existing regulatory measures’. For example, health and safety regulations and food standards between the US and the EU will be made ‘compatible’, or more simply put, downgraded or removed.
The TTIP and TPP are intended to include investor-state dispute settlement clauses. When a corporation considers its expected future profits are being harmed by a government it can lodge a case before these tribunals consisting of three lawyers who represent corporate interests. These lawyers have no conflict of interest restrictions on their operations. There are no limits on the awards that can be claimed against governments and very limited rights of appeal for governments. Even if a government wins a case it must pay the tribunal’s costs and legal fees – averaging $9m a case. UNCTAD reports a tenfold increase in such cases since 2000. Any health or environmental policy that conflicted with corporate interests would be subjected to these extra-judicial tribunals. Tribunals are currently organised under World Bank and United Nations rules. The compensation is taken from the taxpayers.
Of the world’s ten biggest law firms, ranked by revenue, four are British and six are US. A golden age for corporate lawyers beckons! ConDem Coalition government Minister without Portfolio Ken Clarke explained, ‘Investor protection is a standard part of free-trade agreements – it was designed to support businesses investing in countries where the rule of law is unpredictable, to say the least.’
Legalised plunder
The following are just a few of the cases that corporations have brought to the investor-state dispute settlement tribunals: …” – link
The PR machine continues to churn out lies even under the glaring reality of today’s obscene wealth disparity. One particular study, entitled Your Fate? Thank Your Ancestors, was discussed in the New York Times recently, proclaiming that an individual’s path to success or failure in any society is foreordained in their genetic make-up and family lineage. Of course genes do play a part in the intelligence, talents, and behavior of every individual, but this particular meme is based on the myth that people in present day capitalist economies live and operate within “modern meritocracy societies” wherein everyone has the freedom and opportunity to develop and utilize the full potential of their talents. As one commenter at the New York Times rightly stated:
“This [study] appears to be one of a growing number arguing for the inherent superiority of some people over others while strenuously avoiding terms like superiority. The claim that some are born to lead and rule and others to be ruled over is as old as human civilization.”
Such propaganda serves the purpose of those at the top of the capitalist social hierarchy, allowing them to justify capitalism’s grotesque social inequality while at the same time preaching to the masses that their poor standing in society is a result of their genetic heritage and not the result of a structurally unjust and undemocratic system. In other words, those at the top deserve to be there and so do those at the bottom.
Many people remain under the spell of the American Dream which promises they can rise to the top of this corrupt system or at least receive the trickle down benefits it claims to offer, but the stark reality of shrinking wages and pensions, persistent unemployment, and rising costs of bare necessities prove otherwise. It’s known as “the meritocracy myth” and one book with that title, written by two professors, explains that a person’s social status is based more on factors such as class structure, politics, and race rather than on individual merit and initiative. Their major arguments are summarized below:
“Factors associated with Individual “Merit”
1.) Money makes money.
Sources of revenue that are unrelated to jobs, such as income from capital gains, dividends, interest payments, government subsidies as well as appreciating assets of wealth such as businesses, real estate, and stocks are predominantly owned by a small fraction of society’s upper echelon. This maldistribution of wealth illustrates that America is not a “middle class society”, but one of the haves and have-nots where wealth is concentrated at the very top of the system.
“…the shape of the distribution of merit resembles a “bell curve” with small numbers of incompetent people at the lower end, most people of average abilities in the middle and small numbers of talented people at the upper end. The highly skewed distribution of economic outcomes, however, appears quite in excess of any reasonable distribution of merit. Something that is distributed “normally” cannot be the direct and proportional cause of something with such skewed distributions…”
“Most experts point out, for instance, that ‘intelligence,’ as measured by IQ tests, is partially a reflection of inherent intellectual capacity and partially a reflection of environmental influences. It is the combination of capacity and experience that determines ‘intelligence.’ Even allowing for this ‘environmental’ caveat, IQ scores only account for about 10% of the variance in income differences among individuals (Fisher et al. 1996). Since wealth is less tied to achievement than income, the amount of influence of intelligence on wealth is much less. Other purportedly innate ‘talents’ cannot be separated from experience, since any ‘talent’ must be displayed to be recognized and labeled as such (Chambliss 1989). There is no way to determine for certain, for instance, how many potential world-class violinists there are in the general population but who have never once picked up a violin. Such ‘talents’ do not spontaneously erupt but must be identified and cultivated.”
3.) Hard work does not necessarily equate to economic success.
“Applying talents is also necessary. Working hard is often seen in this context as part of the merit formula. Heads nod in acknowledgment whenever hard work is mentioned in conjunction with economic success. Rarely is this assumption questioned. But what exactly do we mean by hard work? Does it mean the number of hours expended in the effort to achieve a goal? Does it mean the amount of energy or sheer physical exertion expended in the completion of tasks? Neither of these measures of “hard” work is directly associated with economic success. In fact, those who work the most hours and expend the most effort (at least physically) are often the most poorly paid in society. By contrast, the really big money in America comes not from working at all but from owning, which requires no expenditure of effort, either physical or mental. In short, working hard is not in and of itself directly related to the amount of income and wealth that individuals have.”
4.) Mental Attitude
“According to the culture of poverty argument, people are poor because of deviant or pathological values that are then passed on from one generation to the next, creating a “vicious cycle of poverty.” According to this perspective, poor people are viewed as anti-work, anti-family, anti-school, and anti-success. Recent evidence reported in this journal (Wynn, 2003) and elsewhere (Barnes, Gould ;1999, Wilson, 1996), however, indicates that poor people appear to value work, family, school, and achievement as much as other Americans. Instead of having “deviant” or “pathological” values, the evidence suggests that poor people adjust their ambitions and outlooks according to realistic assessments of their more limited life chances.
An example of such an adjustment is the supposed “present-orientation” of the poor. According to the culture of poverty theory, poor people are “present-oriented” and are unable to “defer gratification.” Present orientation may encourage young adults to drop out of school to take low wage jobs instead staying in school to increase future earning potential. However, the present orientation of the poor can be an “effect” of poverty rather than a “cause.” That is, if you are desperately poor, you may be forced to be present oriented. If you do not know where your next meal is coming from, you essentially have no choice but to be focused on immediate needs first and foremost. By contrast, the rich and middle class can “afford” to be more future oriented since their immediate needs are secure. Similarly, the poor may report more modest ambitions than the affluent, not because they are unmotivated, but because of a realistic assessment of limited life chances. In this sense, observed differences in outlooks between the poor and the more affluent are more likely a reflection of fundamentally different life circumstances than fundamentally different attitudes or values.”
5.) Moral character and integrity
“Although ‘honesty may be the best policy’ in terms of how one should conduct oneself in relations with others, there is little evidence that the economically successful are more honest than the less successful. The recent spate of alleged corporate ethics scandals at such corporations as Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Adelphia, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Duke Energy, Global Crossing, Xerox as well as recent allegations of misconduct in the vast mutual funds industry reveal how corporate executives often enrich themselves through less than honest means. White-collar crime in the form of insider trading, embezzlement, tax fraud, insurance fraud and the like is hardly evidence of honesty and virtue in practice. And neither is the extensive and sometimes highly lucrative so-called ‘irregular’ or ‘under the table’ economy—much of it related to vice in the form of drug trafficking, gambling, pornography, loan sharking, or smuggling. Clearly, wealth alone is not a reflection of moral superiority. To get ahead in America, it no doubt helps to be bright, shrewd, to work hard, and to have the right combination of attitudes that maximize success within given fields of endeavor. Playing by the rules, however, probably works to suppress prospects for economic success since those who play by the rules are more restricted in their opportunities to attain wealth and income than those who choose to ignore the rules.”
Nonmerit Barriers to Mobility
1.) The effects of initial class placement at birth on future life chances.
“…those born into great wealth start far ahead of those born to poor parents, who have a huge deficit to overcome if they are to catch up. Indeed, of all the factors that we might consider, where we start out in life has the greatest effect on where we end up. In the race to get ahead, the effects of inheritance come first and merit second, not the other way around.
Inheritance provides numerous cumulative nonmerit advantages that are available in varying degrees to all those born into at least some relative advantage, excluding only those at the very bottom of the system. Included among these nonmerit advantages are high standards of living from birth, inter vivos gifts (gifts between the living) such as infusions of cash and property bestowed by parents on their children at critical junctures in the life course (going to college, getting married, buying a home, having children, starting a business, etc.), insulation from downward mobility (family safety nets which prevent children from skidding in times of personal crises, setbacks, or as the result of personal failures), access to educational opportunities as well as other opportunities to acquire personal merit or to have merit identified and cultivated, better health care and consequently longer and healthier lives (which increases earning power and the ability to accumulate assets during the life course).
Another advantage of inheritance is access to high-powered forms of social and cultural capital. Social capital is one’s ‘social resources’ and refers to essentially to the value of whom you know. Cultural capital is one’s cultural resources and refers essentially to the social value of what you know. Everyone has friends, but those born into privilege have friends in high places with resources and power. Everyone possesses culture—bodies of knowledge and information needed to navigate through social space. Full acceptance into the highest social circles, however, requires knowledge of the ways of life of a particular group…”
2.) Bad Luck
“Bad luck can take many forms but two very common forms of bad luck are to be laid off from a job that you are good at or to spend many years preparing for a job for which demand either never materializes or declines. In looking at jobs and job opportunities, Americans tend to focus on the ‘supply’ side of markets for labor; that is, the pool of available people in the labor force. Much less attention is paid to the ‘demand’ side, or the number and types of jobs available. In the race to get ahead, it is possible and all too common for meritorious individuals to be ‘all dressed up with no place to go.’ For the past twenty years, the ‘growth’ jobs in America have disproportionately been in the low wage service sector of the economy. At the same time, more Americans are getting more education, especially higher education. Simply put, these trends are running in opposite directions: the economy is not producing as many high-powered jobs as the society is producing highly qualified people to fill them (Collins 1979, Livingstone 1998).
In addition to the number and types of jobs available, the locations of jobs both geographically and within different sectors of the economy also represent non-merit factors in the prospects for employment. For instance, a janitor who works for a large corporation New York City may get paid much more for doing essentially the same job as a janitor who works for a small family business in a small town in Mississippi. These effects are independent of the demands of the jobs or the qualifications or merit of the individuals holding them. Differences in benefits and wages between such jobs are often substantial and may mean the difference between a secure existence and poverty… rates of poverty in the United States continue to vary by region and locations within regions suggesting that geography is still a major factor in the distribution of economic opportunity.”
3.) Education
“…those with more education, on average, have higher income and wealth. Education is thus often seen as the primary means of upward social mobility. In this context, education is widely perceived as a gatekeeper institution which sifts and sorts individuals according to individual merit. Grades, credits, diplomas, degrees, and certificates are clearly “earned,” not purchased or appropriated. But, as much research has demonstrated, educational opportunity is not equally distributed in the population (Bowles and Gintis 1976, 2002, Bourdieu and Passeron 1990, Aschaffenburg and Maas 1997, Kozol, 1991, Sacks, 2003, Ballantine 2001). Upper class children tend to get upper class educations (e.g. at elite private prep schools and ivy league colleges), middle class children tend to get middle class educations (e.g. at public schools and public universities), and working class people tend to get working class educations (e.g. public schools and technical or community colleges), and poor people tend to get poor educations (e.g. inner city schools that have high drop out rates and usually no higher education). Educational attainment clearly depends on family economic standing and is not simply a major independent cause of it. The quality of schools and the quality of educational opportunity vary according to where one lives, and where one lives depend on familial economic resources and race. Most public schools, for instance, are supported by local property taxes. The tax base is higher in wealthy communities and proportionally lower in poorer areas. These discrepancies give rise to the perpetual parental scramble to locate in communities and neighborhoods that have reputations for “good schools,” since parents want to provide every possible advantage to their children that they can afford. To the extent that parents are actually successful in passing on such advantages, educational attainment is primarily a reflection of family income. In sum, it is important to recognize that individual achievement occurs within a context of unequal educational opportunity.”
4.) Loss of Self-Employment Opportunities and the Offshoring of Jobs
“…self-employment is popularly perceived as a major route to upward mobility. Opportunities to get ahead on the basis of being self-employed or striking out on one’s own to start a new business, however, have sharply declined. In colonial times, about three-fourths of the non-slave American population was self- employed most as small family farmers. Today, only seven percent of the labor force is self-employed (U.S. Census Bureau 2002). The “family farm,” in particular, is on the brink of statistical extinction. As self-employment has declined, the size and dominance of corporations has increased. This leaves many fewer opportunities for “self-made” individuals to enter existing markets or to establish new ones. America has witnessed the sharp decline of “mom and pop” stores, restaurants, and retail shops and the concomitant rise of Wal-Marts, Holiday Inns, and McDonalds. As more Americans work for someone else in increasingly bureaucratized settings, the prospects of rapid “rags to riches” mobility decline.
In addition to the decline of self-employment, manufacturing has also experienced drastic workforce reduction as production facilities have increasingly moved to foreign countries in efforts to reduce costs of production. This is a significant trend since the United States became a world power based on its industrial strength, which supported a large and relatively prosperous working and middle class. Some service jobs, such as customer service and computer programming, are also being moved to foreign countries in increasing numbers. All of these trends are occurring quite independent of the merit of individuals but nevertheless profoundly impact the opportunities of individuals to get ahead…”
5.) Discrimination
“Discrimination not only suppresses merit; it is the antithesis of merit. Race and sex discrimination have been the most pervasive forms of discrimination in America, [but others include] sexual orientation, religion, age, physical disability (unrelated to job performance), physical appearance…”
In addition to the worsening inequality endemic to the system, the social fabric of society will be torn apart by a world now in the throes of multiple ecological crises. The availability and affordability of food and water will be magnified by anthropogenic climate change as the agricultural regions of an overpopulated world are ravaged by drought, flood, and fire. Infrastructure will begin to fail more frequently as extreme weather begins to rack up damage. The aloof elite, who ensconce themselves behind gated walls and the luxury that their wealth buys, will fan the flames of resentment and civil unrest in a desperate population scrambling just for the necessities of life. The cultural myths of capitalism are fraying and the collapse of industrial civilization, unable to change its omnicidal course for sundry reasons, is seemingly written in stone.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. I plan on doing an essay on conspiracy theories and the dangers they impose when large numbers of people subscribe to them. I decided on this idea the other day after trying to have a discussion with a coworker about the state of the world. I quickly discovered that his head was filled with UFO’s, lizard illuminati, climate change denialism, chip implants for all under Obamacare, and a one-world totalitarian government. The only place in his fantastical worldview I could find any connection with reality was in the idea that governments are becoming more authoritarian. Perhaps this is where so many conspiracy theories spring forth. With only the interests of a small elite being served and nearly everyone else disenfranchised from the institutions of government, people are desperate to find meaning in such an exploitative and fraudulent system that they grasp at any story, no matter how outlandish and otherworldly it may be. And with a faux democratic government fictitiously “serving the people” and becoming increasingly dictatorial as the economy craters, the wealth gap continues to skyrocket, the environment melts down, peak net energy bites, and climate change worsens, such conspiracy theories will only continue to supplant the real world in the minds of the unwashed masses.
The Future: Delusional Hope vs. Stark Reality
Cassandra’s Revenge?
The Corporate State (aka the military–industrial–congressional complex) : It’s own worst enemy…
While many liberal blogs were celebrating what looked on the surface to be an Obama victory of raising taxes on the über wealthy, they apparently did not notice what was being slipped up their behind.
For starters, the payroll tax, which was lowered in 2011 from 6.2% down to 4.2% in an effort to breathe some life into a moribund middle class, has jumped back up by 2% to its original rate. 160 million American workers will now shell out another $35 to $180 per week depending on their income level. The payroll tax is capped for incomes greater than $113,000 at $2,274. This means that it’s a regressive tax –anyone making over $113,00 will pay less as a percentage of their income, while for everyone else the tax is a net increase of 2%.
So while the plebs are scrounging around to pay that extra tribute to the Empire, our corporate overlords have extracted more blood from the serfs:
The “fiscal cliff” legislation passed this week included $76 billion in special-interest tax credits for the likes of General Electric, Hollywood and even Captain Morgan. But these subsidies weren’t the fruit of eleventh-hour lobbying conducted on the cliff’s edge — they were crafted back in August in a Senate committee, and they sat dormant until the White House reportedly insisted on them this week…
In late July, Finance Chairman Max Baucus announced the committee would soon convene to craft a bill extending many expiring tax credits. This attracted lobbyists like a raw steak attracts wolves. …
General Electric and Citigroup, for instance, hired Breaux and Lott to extend a tax provision that allows multinational corporations to defer U.S. taxes by moving profits into offshore financial subsidiaries. This provision — known as the “active financing exception” — is the main tool GE uses to avoid nearly all U.S. corporate income tax.
Corporations also got another legalized tax avoidance here:
As part of the fiscal cliff deal, Congress also extended another little-known tax break that benefits large multinationals selling products through overseas affiliates. This “pass-through” exemption permits a U.S.-based company to set up a new corporation in a tax haven like the Cayman Islands and sell it a patent owned by the U.S. parent company. Royalties on overseas licensing of that patent would then route to the tax-sheltered firm, instead of the U.S. parent company. The Joint Committee on Taxation says the two-year cost of extending this shelter is $1.5 billion.
The financial services industry, whose leaders had earlier joined a group of other corporate executives pushing for a “fair” solution to the fiscal crisis, is one of the primary beneficiaries of special-interest tax breaks. The active-financing exception, for example, permits banks like Morgan Stanley to avoid the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate on interest income from money lent overseas. A handful of other U.S.-based multinational companies with financing arms, such as Ford Motor Co. and General Electric, also use that exemption to lower their tax bills…
…[T]he “active financing” exception … permits businesses earning interest on overseas lending to defer U.S. taxes on that income indefinitely…
Vampire-squid Goldman Sachs and too-crooked-to-fail Bank of America also get tax breaks for moving into the new World Trade Center that replaced the pre-9/11 one:
…This tax provision was created to help revitalize Lower Manhattan’s small businesses but instead helped out these two mega-bailed-out banks and helped to subsidize the construction of luxury apartments. Goldman Sachs alone was reported to have received $1.6 billion in tax-free financing of its new building…
There are many more corporate giveaways in the fiscal spiked dildo that was rammed into Main Street, but you get the idea. America is just one big plantation for our corporate masters to harvest from on a perpetual basis. Yves Smith has a post discussing the permanent cementing-in of a class structure composed of the ‘have all’ and ‘have nothing’:
…The newest chat, with economist James Henry, focuses on how the deal on estate taxes allows the rich to pass on wealth to their children, allowing inequality to persist across generations. And he reminds us that a lot of Congressmen are rich enough that this provision will benefit their families…
I could not have summed up the situation better than the first commenter:
In their mad dash to cling to a sinking ship’s last remaining point above water, the callus elite won’t hesitate to trample all over women and children. In a world of ‘peak everything’ and a dying biosphere, the venal nature of man will surely surface in spades.
The following thoughts were emailed to me by Adam at speciesurvivalibrary and they appeared as a comment on the message board of Nature Bats Last dated November 28. The readers “found it quite moving”, as did I. Therefore, I compiled a video at the end to go along with Daniel’s articulate and resonating words. The scientific confirmations this year of the havoc industrial civilization has wrought to our one and only home have truly been life-altering for me, forcing me to question and re-evaluate everything. For those who have begun to internalize the cold reality of what lies in the not too distant future for mankind, the proverbial rug has been pulled out from under your world. We have unleashed Pandora’s box and the demons are methodically throwing off balance and unravelling the world we once knew, shattering the illusion of man’s dominion over nature.
