Having conquered every last inch of Earth, humans now dream of spilling their burgeoning numbers out into distant planets, even whilst our own blue orb reels from climate chaos and our ever-growing consumption. Every iota of nature is now at the whim of the free market which sees no other path than to convert everything into a profit scheme. Thus a deadly game of musical chairs will be played out in the last days of capitalist industrial civilization as the foreign lands and water reservoirs of indigenous people are stolen to feed the mouths and gas tanks of cash-paying consumers in the First World. As the industrial world clamors for the last pockets of high-density energy sources to feed its energy-starved economic machine, desperate governments and businesses will continue to cut their country’s social safety net, throwing more and more people to the wolves. If you happen to live in a so-called developed country, you will have to run faster and faster on the cutthroat treadmill of the free market in order to stay afloat, lest you fall into the same boat as those of the malnourished and starving Third World. Wary of growing instability, governments will continue to strengthen their security and surveillance apparatus to control the growing unrest. For many, the confines of a prison cell may become the only place that a meal and secure place to sleep can be found. The last remaining chairs of this perverse game will be saved for the cosseted elite who sit at the top of the capitalist pyramid scheme. This social system may seem savage and ‘uncivilized’, but little has changed since the brutal reign of medieval kings up to today’s rule of international bankers and corporate overlords…
…The laws of survival for them are the same now as they were in mediaeval times, when eating above subsistence level was a privilege of those with the means to pay for it… The market economics of the Middle Ages has been brought into the twenty-first century, its brutal indifference unchanged in 500 years…
Thus we are headed for a modern Dark Age: a tyrannical corporate state wielding overwhelming fire power and surveillance capabilities, a collapsing biosphere with unpredictable weather patterns and superstorms, and a blissfully ignorant population eager to find a scapegoat. The time to avert disaster was decades ago, yet the public believes technology is a source of energy as well as a solution to every conceivable problem, that economic growth is a prerequisite to living on Earth, and that anthropocentric climate change is still debatable, if not an outright lie. Our house is on fire and we’re still watching TV. The exit doors have all been super-glued shut with hopium and MSM propaganda. There is no place to run; the deathtrap is foolproof.
Reality filtered through the most effective propagandist tool in history, i.e. the television, has made even climate change a boring non-event for the masses awash in disaster flicks and Hollywood CGI effects.
Some have predicted that we will embrace theocracy as our world falls apart and the myths of modern life can no longer be maintained. The wrath of climate chaos could be interpreted and used as a sign of retribution from God; some already declare such disasters as divine vengeance:
In the absence of government, bishops ruled for decades and even centuries during the Middle Ages with religion as the law and morality system. It’s highly conceivable that the surviving populations will fall back on this authority when governments lose legitimacy, providing that the climate does not spiral too far out of control and allows some humans to reorganize into post-industrial communities. Of course there are other manmade booby traps lying in wait around the globe, as explained by a Guardian reader:
“A sudden cessation of industrial activity, besides financial collapse and the end of a regular and plentiful food supply, will affect every industry from nuclear and chemical to oil and electrical. Deep-sea oil wells, left to themselves when workers desert them to return home to their distressed families, will eventually escape into the oceans. With no-one willing or able to plug them, entire oil-fields will vent until depleted. Nuclear power stations, already the repository of all the nuclear waste of decades of power production will eventually meltdown and every molecule of radioactivity will ultimately escape into the biosphere, irradiating the entire planet to one degree or another while leaving much of it uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years. Poisoned water sources, from chemical leaks and spills as well as polluted underground aquifers created from frenetic and frantic fracking will add to the mess. Returning to even a medieval style of living will be impossible.”
When entire civilizations crumble, megalomaniacs come out of the woodwork to institute their warped agendas and visions of how the world should be. The luxuries and wealth of today’s corporate elite will simply be transferred to this new circle of self-proclaimed holy leaders – televangelists of the post-apocalyptic world. With electricity in short supply, low-tech forms of punishment such as execution by the wheel, quartering, and of course hanging would come back into fashion. Human muscle would make a comeback in a post-fossil fuel world. Given enough time and with the absence of our fossil fuel servants, large-scale human slavery would likely become acceptable again. If you think about it, the wage slaves of today toiling away in mindless, soul-crushing corporate slots are not that far off from forced labor in a rock quarry.
In the mean time, we’ll all be a captive audience to the onslaught of geoengineering schemes soon to commence once governments of the world figure out that food does not grow very well in a destabilized climate and that the 99% will not go quietly into the dark night of ecological overshoot. In a future of catastrophic sea level rise, the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats” will not apply.
This grimly humorous video comes from Mike Sosebee. A small percentage of us just can’t drink the kool-aid and prefer cold, hard reality over the myth telling and Madison Avenue song-and-dance of capitalist industrial civilization. The entire American hologram is dependent on the masses buying the illusion that all is well. Don’t look behind the curtain. There’s a mountain of corpses and ecological horrors hiding behind that thin veneer of our self-reassuring stories… stories about our corporatocracy democracy, our corporate scripted independent news media, our resource-plundering ‘freedom fighting’ military, our exploitive and destructive wealth-building economy, our move towards a “green-washed” sustainable lifestyle, etc. As commenter Dopamine says, we’re on “a dopamine drip line, a natural morphine intravenous of belief that obscures the less rewarding reality of your existence. That humans are going to turn things around is another belief assuaging the fact that our families have to spend the next hundred years walking through a minefield from which many will not emerge, and for those that do make it, there awaits a planet wasted… And we are completely unable to avoid this perilous journey because our brains quickly substitute a “feel good” fantasy whenever we venture too far into the darkness of our reality. We will walk into the darkness surrounded by pink unicorns, omnipotent Gods, visions of unspoiled paradises, the overflowing font of fusion and so on…”
Although colonizing and enslaving foreign lands and people have always been the modus operandi of this country, I’m sure the elites who founded America never could have imagined that their 1% successors would be able to manipulate the social discourse and behavior of nearly 400 million with consumer goods called TV’s and computers, nor could they have imagined the future Malthusian conditions that would eventually end not only the brief experiment of America, but the entire human experience on planet Earth. When Easter Island became uninhabitable, the rest of the planet never noticed, but now the human footprint will be felt in every nook and cranny of Earth for millennium. Paleontologist Louise Leakey, granddaughter of famed archeologist and naturalist Louis Leakey, uses the analogy of a roll of toilet paper to effectively illustrate the brief but devastatingly influential reign of mankind over the planet.
…To put the history of life on planet earth into a time perspective, imagine unrolling a toilet roll down a hillside. If there are 400 sheets of tissue paper in the roll, then the very first life in the oceans is seen at sheet 240. The age of the dinosaurs begins at sheet 19. Dinosaurs in their many forms and great diversity are around for 14 and a half sheets. Dinosaurs are extinct by the end of the Cretaceous, 5 squares from the end, making way for the mammals. Our story and place on the timeline as upright walking apes begins only in the last half of the very last sheet. The human story as Homo sapiens, is represented by less than 2 millimeters of this, some 200,000 years.
Our own individual lifetimes cannot be depicted on this final sheet of the toilet roll as it would be too thin a line, yet we have been witness to more change to the planet, to the diversity of life, global climate and natural habitats in this same time period. We are undoubtedly the cause of the sixth mass extinction event that the planet has seen in its history…
“Doomer”, as in someone concerned with apocalyptic scenarios of global collapse, is definitely a term of modern usage reflecting the growing unease of the population. People who eschew the word “collapse” in favor of “decline” seem to be hoping that the road ahead will be gentle, predictable and somewhat manageable rather than violent, erratic, and uncontrollable. With homo economicus locked into the infinite growth mantra, there appears to be no other outcome other than a sudden crashing into the fast-approaching wall of environmental limits. The aftermath will be as unrecognizable as the mangled metal of a 100 MPH car crash rather than the slow deterioration and failure of a heavily driven automobile. Oh but that’s too horrible of a thought for the masses to entertain, especially since it threatens our tranquil dreams of white picket-fenced homes with well manicured lawns. Things will be as they always have been, with only minor changes or uncertainties. The dopamine drip line is not in danger of running dry any time soon, and as things deteriorate more and more, the dosage of self-delusional drugs will be increased, lest the population starts to wake up from their stupor. The religious fanatic and mass murderer Jim Jones doesn’t hold a candle to the psychos at the helm of capitalist industrial civilization.
Two important papers on capitalism by Richard Smith were published in the last few years explaining how capitalism, due to its structural mechanisms, cannot be reformed in any way to make it “sustainable”. In Smith’s papers, Green Capitalism: the God that Failed and Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism, four primary dictates of capitalism illustrate that no matter how herculean the effort to “green the economy”, whether through energy or other areas, the end result of inexorable environmental destruction as well as incredible social inequality are inevitable.
1.) “Grow or die” is a law of survival in the marketplace:
In capitalism most producers… have no choice but to live by the capitalist maxim “grow or die.” First, as Adam Smith noted, the ever-increasing division of labor raises productivity and output, compelling producers to find more markets for this growing output. Secondly, competition compels producers to seek to expand their market share, to better defend their position against competitors. Bigger is safer because, ceteris paribus, bigger producers can take advantage of economies of scale and can use their greater resources to invest in technological development, so can more effectively dominate markets. Marginal competitors tend to be crushed or bought out by larger firms. Thirdly, the modern corporate form of ownership, which separates ownership from operation, adds further irresistible and unrelenting pressures to grow from owner-shareholders. And shareholders are not looking for “stasis”; they are looking to maximize portfolio gains, so they drive their CEOs forward.
“…relentless and irresistible pressures for growth are functions of the day-to-day requirements of capitalist reproduction in a competitive market, incumbent upon all but a few businesses, and that such pressures would prevail in any conceivable capitalism. Further, I contend that, given capitalism, the first result of any serious reduction in economic output (GDP) to get production back down to some reasonably sustainable level, would be to provoke mass unemployment. So here again, there will never be mass public support for de-growth unless it’s coupled with explicit guarantees of employment for redundant workers, which are unacceptable to capital and would require a socialist economy…”
2.) Maximizing profit and saving the environment are inherently in conflict:
“…Corporations can embrace pro-environmental policies but only so long as these boost profits. Saving the world, however, would require that profit-making be systematically subordinated to ecological concerns…”
“Most of the economy is comprised of large corporations owned by investor-shareholders. And shareholders, even those who are environmentally-minded professors investing via their TIAA-CREF accounts, are constantly seeking to maximize returns on investment. So they sensibly look to invest where they can make the highest return. This means that corporate CEOs do not have the freedom to choose to produce as much or little as they like, to make the same profits this year as last year. Instead, they face relentless pressure to maximize profits, to make more profits this year than last year (or even last quarter), therefore to maximize sales, therefore to grow quantitatively…
In the real world, therefore, few corporations can resist the relentless pressure to “grow sales,” “grow the company,” “expand market share”– to grow quantitatively. The corporation that fails to outdo its past performance risks falling share value, stockholder flight, or worse… And if economic pressures weren’t sufficient to shape CEO behavior, CEOs are, moreover, legally obligated to maximize profits — and nothing else…”
3.) Consumerism and overconsumption are built into capitalism:
“…consumerism and overconsumption are not “dispensable” and cannot be exorcised because they’re not just “cultural” or “habitual.” They are built into capitalism and indispensable for the day-to-day reproduction of corporate producers in a competitive market system in which capitalists, workers, consumers and governments alike are all locked into an endless cycle of perpetually increasing consumption to maintain profits, jobs, and tax revenues. We can’t shop our way to sustainability because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. The global ecological crisis we face cannot be solved by even the largest individual companies. Problems like global warming, deforestation, overfishing, species extinction, the changing ocean chemistry are even beyond the scope of nation states. They require national and international cooperation and global economic planning. This requires collective bottom-up democratic control over the entire world economy. And since a global economic democracy could only thrive in the context of a rough economic equality, this presupposes a global redistribution of wealth as well.”
4.) The masses are dependent on the market:
“Capitalism is a mode of production in which specialized producers (corporations, companies, manufacturers, individual producers) produce some commodity for market but do not possess their own means of subsistence. So in a capitalisteconomy, everyone is first and foremost, dependent upon the market, compelled to sell in order to buy, to buy in order to sell, to re-enter production and carry on.”
To illustrate a case study in how impossible it is for even an “environmentally conscious” corporation to be sustainable, Smith discusses Ray Anderson and his company Interface, Inc.
Saint Ray Anderson and the limits of the possible:
“…CEO Ray Anderson has probably pushed the limits of industrial environmentalism as far as it’s humanly possible to go in an actual factory operating within the framework of capitalism. Ray Anderson is everybody’s favorite eco-capitalist and he and his company Interface Inc. have been applauded by virtually every eco-futurist book written since the 1990s as the eco-capitalist example to emulate. But what Ray Anderson’s case really shows us is the limits of the possible, especially under capitalism. For after almost two decades of sustained effort, the goal of “zero pollutants” is still as unreachable as ever at Interface Inc. It is not in the least to diminish Ray Anderson’s sincerity, his passionate dedication, his efforts or his impressive achievements. But the fact is, according to The Interface Sustainability Report of 2009, Interface has “cut waste sent to landfills by more than half while continuing to increase production,” “reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30%,” “reduced energy intensity by 45%,” while “over 25% of raw materials used in interface carpet are recycled and biobased materials in 2007,” and non-sustainable materials consumed per unit of product have declined from 10.2 lbs/yd2 in 1996 to 8.6 lb/yd2 in 2008. Read that last sentence again. Make no mistake: These are impressive, even heroic industrial-environmental achievements. But if after more than fifteen years of sustained effort, the most environmentally dedicated large company in the United States, if not the entire world, can only manage to cut non-sustainable inputs from 10.2 to 8.6 pounds per square yard of finished product, to inject a mere 25% recycled and biobased feedstock into its production process, so still requiring 75% of new, mostly petroleum-based nonsustainable feedstock in every unit of production, then the inescapable conclusion must be that even the greenest businesses are also on course to “destroy the world.” So if the reality is that, when all is said and done, there is “only so much you can do” in most industries, then the only way to bend the economy in an ecological direction is to sharply limit production, especially of toxic products, which means completely redesigning production and consumption – all of which is certainly doable, but impossible under capitalism.”
Building on a report which came out late last year, the World Bank released another report yesterday with the catchy title of ‘Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience‘. It was prepared for them by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics and describes the effects of present day, 2°C, and 4°C (or 7.2° F) warming on agriculture, water resources, coastal ecosystems and cities across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and South East Asia. Here are the key findings:
– By the 2030s, droughts and heat will leave 40% of the land in Sub-Saharan Africa, presently growing maize, unable to support that crop.
– Rising temperatures threaten major loss of savanna grasslands and the pastoral livelihoods of millions.
– By the 2050s, malnutrition is projected to increase by 25-90 percent compared to the present in various African subregions.
– In South Asia, the critical monsoon season may become erratic and unpredictable, precipitating a major crisis in the region.
– The devastating Pakistan floods of 2010 may become common place, threatening tens of millions.
– Extreme droughts across India may threaten their food system and lead to widespread shortages.
– As a temperature increase of 4°C approaches, rural populations across South East Asia are faced with sea level rise, more intense tropical cyclones, and loss of critical marine ecosystem services.
– Climate refugees fleeing into urban areas may lead to larger numbers of people living in ‘temporary’ camps which will increase their exposure to heat waves, flooding, and diseases.
– Sea level rise has been occurring faster than previously projected and a rise of as much as 50 cm by the 2050s may already be unavoidable as a result of past emissions.
– By the 2030s a sea level rise of 15 cm, coupled with more intense cyclones, threatens to inundate much of Manilla, Mumbai, Kolkata, Ho Chi Minh City, and Bangkok.
Obviously this sort of climatic change is going to increase terrorism and war as well as tax the electric grid and infrastructure of industrial civilization. It may get so unbearable that many will pray for NTE.
World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim had this to say:
This new report outlines an alarming scenario for the days and years ahead – what we could face in our lifetime. The scientists tell us that if the world warms by 2°C — warming which may be reached in 20 to 30 years — that will cause widespread food shortages, unprecedented heat-waves, and more intense cyclones. In the near-term, climate change, which is already unfolding, could batter the slums even more and greatly harm the lives and the hopes of individuals and families who have had little hand in raising the Earth’s temperature.
He goes on to add the following hopium:
I do not believe the poor are condemned to the future scientists envision in this report. In fact, I am convinced we can reduce poverty even in a world severely challenged by climate change. We can help cities grow clean and climate resilient, develop climate smart agriculture practices, and find innovative ways to improve both energy efficiency and the performance of renewable energies. We can work with countries to roll back harmful fossil fuel subsidies and help put the policies in place that will eventually lead to a stable price on carbon.
Spare me the false concern with the world’s poor and destitute. Has the World Bank lifted a finger to stop the global land grab?
…The World Bank has played a decisive role in turning agriculture into an industry, and promoting the ever-increasing incorporation of natural goods into the market. Everything seems to indicate that it remains faithful to this role today, and continues to facilitate land grabs that represent great business opportunities for capitalists but greater dispossession for rural communities. – source
Without a complete paradigm shift, there can be no other outcome except economic collapse, famine, pestilence, war, and a major population contraction. When the wolves are in sheep’s clothing, expect business-as-usual. Reports describing the dire nature of our predicament will continue to be published just as every prediction in said reports becomes reality. Population overshoot, resource depletion, and a destabilized climate cannot be mitigated by making cities “clean and climate resilient.” If you recall, the mega-cities of today are by their very nature unsustainable because they import vast amounts of resources to support their overstretched ecological footprint. The World Bank report even says that 50cm sea level rise is likely already baked into the cake from past emissions, all the while CO2 and methane levels continue to rise. How would you make all the coastal cities, whose residents comprise a major portion of the world’s population, “climate resilient”? Last time I checked, the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy was still visible and many people were rebuilding right where their house previously stood, with the hope that Sandy was a “once in a lifetime event”. “Develop climate smart agriculture practices” is code for GMOing our way out of this problem. A “stable price” for carbon? Is that going to stop China’s coal consumption?
…Despite its efforts to limit coal consumption and focus on alternative fuel sources, China’s thermal coal demand was expected to double by 2030, analyst Wood Mackenzie reported this week.
In a paper titled ‘China: The Illusion of Peak Coal’, Wood Mackenzie reported that the Asian major’s demand would grow to around seven-billion tons a year of thermal coal, which was contrary to speculation that China’s thermal coal demand may reach a peak in the next decade.
“It is very unlikely that demand for thermal coal in China will peak before 2030,” said William Durbin, Wood Mackenzie’s Beijing-based president of global markets.
“Why? Because China’s aggressive investment programme for nuclear, natural gas and renewables capacity is centred in the coastal region while coal-fired capacity grows in the central and western provinces. Indeed, there are also a plethora of coal-intensive conversion projects being built or planned that are significantly adding to demand.”…
…“Government mandates to improve the environment by reducing coal use will require steep investments in alternatives, the use of emission control technology or reduced economic growth rate targets – options which are not currently happening,” Durbin said.
“But what is noteworthy, however, is that there is greater potential for further demand growth beyond our expectations. Failure to meet an aggressive noncoal-power capacity build, investment in more efficient technologies and the expansion of the UHV network will increase the dependence on and use of coal. In the end, China’s thermal coal demand will see persistent growth until 2030, rendering peak coal an illusion.
Humans can talk about becoming sustainable until they are blue in the face, but with a global population growing by more than 200k per day, the rest of the planet striving for a high consumption western lifestyle, and external environmental costs of business(doubling every 14 years) ignored by corporations, how can that ever be possible? It won’t… until it can’t.
More threatening than the recent milestone of reaching 400 parts per million CO2 (ppm) is that of a methane level reaching 1800 parts per billion (ppb) which occured on the morning of June 16, 2013. This is more than two and a half times the methane levels of pre-industrial times.
From a historic perspective, greenhouse gas levels have risen abruptly to unprecedented levels. While already at a historic peak, humans have caused emissions of additional greenhouse gases. There’s no doubt that such greenhouse gas levels will lead to huge rises in temperatures. The question is how long it will take for temperatures to catch up and rise. – source
Robert Scribbler also reports that a persistently stagnant(blocked) and bulging Jet Stream has delivered historic heat waves to that region of Alaska and the Arctic. Melt ponds can be seen from satellite images:
…Yesterday, temperatures in Prince William Sound hit upwards of 93 degrees. Communities there, including Valdez and Cordova, both set new record highs. Talkeetna hit 94 degrees, also an all-time record high for the date. Meanwhile, Seward hit a new record of 88 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures in the interior rose to between the mid 80s and lower 90s.
This pulse of heat was driven by a persistent bulge in the Jet Stream over the Pacific Ocean, the Western United States, and the Pacific Northwest that has been present since mid winter. The bulge has resulted in warmer than normal temperatures and drier conditions for much of the Western US while keeping temperatures warm for western Canada and Alaska. It is a blocking pattern implicated in the ongoing drought conditions in places from Colorado to Nevada and California. A pattern which sees 44% of the US still locked in drought.
Sunday and Monday, this blocking pattern enabled warm air to flood north into Alaska, setting off a record heatwave there. You may not think of 50 and 60 degree temperatures in Barrow, Alaska as a heatwave. But when average highs for June there are about 38 degrees, 50 and 60 degree weather is quite hot for this time of year…
Last month it was reported that America will ‘officially’ see its own first climate refugees within the next four years:
The 350 residents of Newtok, Alaska, will soon be the country’s first “climate refugees.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the village is likely to be underwater in just four years…
…”The snow comes in a different time now. The snow disappears way late,” says villager Nathan Tom. “That’s making the geese come at the wrong time. Now they’re starting to lay eggs when there’s still snow and ice. We can’t even travel and go pick them. It’s getting harder. It’s changing a lot.”…
…The U.S. Government Accountability Office has estimated that the cost of moving Newtok — with 63 homes — might reach $130 million. The people of Newtok do not have that kind of money, Goldenberg says.
“These people are living well below the average income of other Americans. They’re able to live that way because they hunt and fish for what they eat,” she says. “So they can’t all of a sudden go and build and pay for new houses on the other side.”
The money has not been forthcoming from the government either, Goldenberg says. Neither the state nor federal government recognizes climate change as a disaster for the appropriation of relief funds…
Contrast this stark reality with the wildly unrealistic views of man’s technological infallibility. A concept which appeared back in 2008 is the utopia of floating cities, called “Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees”, which would hold 50,000 climate refugees as the coasts become inundated with rising sea water. I wonder how well these things, if they even were feasible and the money, materials, and energy were available, would hold up to the kinds of hurricanes that climate chaos would throw at it. No doubt it would fold up and sink to the bottom of the ocean like a tin pan:
Actually, there is another idea similar to the one above which was/is being planned by a billionaire libertarian. I can’t think of a more elitist view towards the Earth and fellow humans than this libertarian wet dream:
Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”
“There are quite a lot of people who think it’s not possible,” Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009, according to Details. (His first donation was in 2008, for $500,000.) “That’s a good thing. We don’t need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don’t think it’s possible they won’t take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late…
As I said in my previous post, the über wealthy will try to insulate themselves from climate chaos, leaving the masses in their countries as climate refugees and victims of industrial civilization’s climate disaster. And the shit rolls downhill; third world countries and the poor will bear the brunt of it all. As you can see from the first part of this post, Native Americans in Alaska, some of America’s most disenfranchised and poverty-stricken citizens, will be the first to be flushed down the toilet of neoliberal capitalism. Perhaps we should take note of current events in Brazil.
Do they owe us a living- of course they f*cking do!
White Punks on Hope
The fine art of visualization has always been the domain of the artist, savant, musician, and others ostensibly outside of the obfuscation of bourgeois economics. Unfettered by the crushing gravitational pull of media propaganda, mainstream thinking and the lure of cash for the “right” perspective, occasionally an individual, a group, or infrequently, a culture emerges that can shed the blindness of false class consciousness and reveal what is hidden.
Some emergents are forgettable, some pedantic and clichéd, but all can be admired for at least daring to speak freely.
Reconstituted from the false promise of the ‘60’s hippie culture, and responding to the nihilism that infected an entire generation of Reagan and Thatcheresque refugees, a dissident core began to emerge.
The natural format given the disappointments of the ‘60’s was a hardened, cynical and violent counterculture vehemently opposing the peace, love, psychedelics, and innocence doctrine of the earlier eras.
Isolated from the mind numbing bombardment of institutionalized media messaging, alienated by the false promises of a decaying wage labor economy, and profoundly impacted by the specter of diminishing social mobility, the coming of age young adult was left with an inchoate rage against an unknowable and seemingly undefinable malaise.
It is said that the root of anger is fear. Fear of the unknown and unknowable, fear of denial of sustenance income, fear of failure, but mostly fear of prospects of mandatory participation in a system consisting of equal parts alienation, exploitation, and the active and unwilling transfer of wealth from those that produce to those that are the ownership class.
Lacking the clarity of class consciousness, what we are left with is fear and anger.
While much of the mainstream society is content with empty promises of lottery winnings, Las Vegas flights of fancy, and stores stocked with useless goods giving the perception of abundance, choice and liberty, those that are fearful and angry see other perspectives, and from these perspectives we can formulate a different narrative.
One such example was the ‘80’s punk collective Crass, consisting of Steve Ignorant, Penny Rimbaud, Eve Libertine, and Joy DiVerve and artist Gee Vaucher (whose work is featured here). This group was noteworthy as they had a reasonably well organized collective, and took particular satisfaction in critiquing the then active Falklands War, exposing the Thatcher administration as capitalizing on this act of State violence to bolster her home image.
They raised the ire of the US government as well as MI5 when they concocted a staged phone call between Reagan and Thatcher purporting to disclose US targeting of Europe with nuclear weapons as a response to the Soviet cold war threat.
Unfortunately, such antics that reach the highest forms of power are rare, and mostly we are left to view the world through the right side of a telescope, with a viewfinder supplied by the dissident.
From Her to Eternity
In the same vein as Crass, and at the same time, the punk band Poison Girls emerged from the collective with its unlikely front person, radical feminist and middle aged housewife Vi Subversa.
Vi Subversa provided vanguard class consciousness to young women of the day, as well as instructive peer examples questioning authority and male dominated counterculture. Illuminating and ridiculing female subservient expectations were (and still are) important steps to overturning bourgeois politics.
Venom laced vocals coupled with a whiskey toned, gravelly delivery were the hallmarks of the ska infused sound.
Our metaphoric viewfinder gives multidimensional focus to our predicament, a field dimension of time, space, geography, and focal plane, and while connected to a large scale telescope from the vantage point of the proper end, we can see the interconnectivity of capital over space and time, the diffuse tendrils of exploitation and alienation as they span continents.
The heft of the knurled wheel belies its frictionless connection as we spin the focusing knob through a dizzying kaleidoscope of images rapidly scrolling past the optic.
The wheel slows, the images in the telescope coalesce, and we can bring into focus a strange scene of dust, smoke, and the smell of charred wood and bodies. The date is Jan 10th 1860, and the location is Lawrence, Massachusetts, the site of the Pemberton Textile Mill, which has just collapsed and killed 145 workers, mostly immigrant women and children. In what will become a disturbing scene of repetition throughout the next 1 ½ centuries, the factory was expanded in a frenzy of production, with new floors added to substandard codes. The floors were supported by iron pillars, and the new floors were promptly laden with heavy machinery. During that fateful January day, the machines were all running simultaneously, and the cumulative harmonics of the machinery started a destructive oscillation in the iron support beams- and they failed catastrophically, bringing the entire structure down in seconds and trapping nearly 600 people.
Later that evening, in the process of extricating the trapped women and children, who were singing to console each other as the rescuers labored to clear the wreckage, a lantern was kicked over and ignited the oil soaked floor material, incinerating the trapped women.
Capital from the very beginning has sought access to immigrants, minorities and other disenfranchised and marginalized members of society to fulfill its boundless needs for low cost labor, and as a bonus, it prefers those that cannot protest or defend themselves.
The Mercy Seat
Another whimsical spin of the viewfinder knob advances us to March 25th, 1911, in New York City, where once again we image a collapsed building and smell the arid stench of burning flesh. 50 years of Industrial Revolution has changed very little it seems, robber barons are in their ascendancy and the accumulation of profits at enormous social cost is in full swing.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory has just burned to the ground, extinguishing the lives of 146 immigrant women and children. Once again, capital has attached its tentacles to the downtrodden and dispossessed, with wide spread deployments of factories incorporating abominable working conditions- hastily constructed with regard only for profits, blocked safety exits and locked fire escapes, where they existed at all, no doubt to minimize any theft of materials or unauthorized leaving of the workspace, no matter the circumstances.
The conventional wisdom of the 19th and early 20th century was that the working class was essentially a criminal class, particularly children were deemed to be vagrant and much better off in the throes of a 14 hour work day in the factories than “running the streets” getting into trouble. The narrative continued to adult males, who were portrayed as alcoholics, deadbeats, and candidates for debtor’s prisons if not “gainfully” employed in the service of the factories.
In this fashion, capital had begun its now time honored strategy of concocting false narratives meant to valorize and link its banal pursuit of profits at the expense of others, to peer reviewed social behavior “worthy” of the eager to please citizen. At various points the narrative linked religion, purity of purpose, and virtue with populating the various factories at the beck and call of capital.
The impressive aspect of this sham is the degree of acceptance that the calculus of exchanging wage labor for sustenance income is able to achieve. Tens of thousands are drawn off small farms for work in the factories, unwittingly substituting self dependence and true independence for wage servitude.
It is tempting to dismiss these tragic events as anomalies, but in fact the conditions in these factories were widespread, and a good representation of typical conditions.
We’ll close this vignette with a chilling account from Nick Cave (of Birthday Party fame)
as he recounts his appointment with the electric chair.
…….In Heaven His throne is made of gold
The ark of his Testament is stowed
A throne from which I’m told
All history does unfold.
Down here it’s made of wood and wire
And my body is on fire
And God is never far away.
Into the mercy seat I climb
My head is shaved, my head is wired
And like a moth that tries
To enter the bright eye
I go shuffling out of life
Just to hide in death awhile
And anyway I never lied……….
War to the Palaces, Peace to the Huts
It came by mail wrapped in cellophane like some type of indiscreet porn magazine, the spring issue of Jacobin magazine. You can of course get it online, but I prefer the hard copy, the artwork, the acid smell of high quality paper and above all the irony and hypocrisy of receiving such a publication in my predominantly Republican neighborhood.
Emblazoned though the wrapper was the large font, bold lettering from the heading above, the other side a schematic of a guillotine with the notation “some assembly required”.
Indeed.
You might be tempted to think that advances in material science and structural engineering over the last nearly century and a half would preclude the chances of such a disaster such as happened in 1860 Massachusetts from ever happening again, but you would be wrong.
On April 24th of this year, the eight story Rana Plaza garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh, trapping more than 3000 people, and ultimately killing more than 1100, mostly women and children. The building collapsed due to the improper addition of new upper floors necessary to accommodate production expansion. A power outage occurred on the day of the collapse, and when the power generators restarted the machinery oscillations precipitated the building collapse. Sound familiar? Serious structural cracks were observed the day before the collapse, but the recalcitrant workers were threatened with the loss of one month’s pay if they did not enter.
So they went in.
Just a few months prior, the nearby Tanzeen sweater factory caught fire and 117 workers were burned to death.
Bangladesh has about 5000 garment factories, employing about 4 million workers, 90% whom are women. The Bangladeshi workers earn about $37 per month compared to the “extravagant” Chinese wage rate of $350 per month. Because of this wage disparity, Bangladesh is the second largest manufacturer of textiles (and growing) as they displace the more expensive Chinese competition.
The vast majority of these exports are shipped to the US and the UK. A growing percentage of these garments are part of the West’s recent obsession with the so-called “fast fashion” movement, wherein consumers purchase what amounts to disposable clothing items which knock off the latest high couture fashion look at bargain basement prices.
Much of the remaining garments are T shirts and other undergarments for which consumers will not spend money.
About 2 dozen of the Bangladeshi members of Parliament own garment factories.
These facts illustrate the connectivity that the bourgeoisie political economy demands between capital, the levers of government, the exploitation of workers, and to the point of this post, the complicity of the consumer who can’t be bothered if children are being roasted alive in the manufacture of their underwear.
The mortal enemy of capital is transparency. As has been the case since the publication of “Capital” in 1867, the primary weapon of obfuscation is the focus on the means of exchange, e.g. the free market, and to hide the means of production where the atrocities reside.
But beyond this is the ugly, unspeakable truth. The consumer must have 3 for $5 T shirts, $.59 burritos and $1 cheeseburgers- because this my friends is sustenance survival. This is how the capitalist economy stair steps its way down the death spiral. Alternating between investing in production efficiencies in the form of machine automation, labor beat downs in the form of union busting, and dismantling the regulatory environment to further externalize costs, the last rung on the ladder is reducing sustenance costs of the worker. Why? Because profits are determined not by supply and demand as bourgeois neoclassical economics would have you believe, but by labor value. And in the face of an oversupply of willing workers, wage labor is largely determined by how cheaply the worker can be sustained. It is no coincidence that Walmart is the world’s largest company (measured by employee headcount), the capitalist economy makes room for any firm that works hard to globally reduce the sustenance costs for the US labor pool.
The Feeding of the 5000
I often get dragged into dinner party ruminations with libertarians, a hopeless ideology if there ever was one, particularly the Austrian version, and I am regularly subjected to patience shearing metaphors illustrating liberty and a tiny, impotent government as a way to correct the improprieties of global capitalism.
One of the more popular metaphors is the illustration of a marathon race, such as the Boston marathon. It goes something like this, our intrepid racers have a personal responsibility to train for the race, and based on the efficacy of their training and dedication, expect to race against a field of peers. The role of the race organizers (government) is simply to layout effective course markers and to administrate the race, prevent cheating, etc. The government must not interfere with the race, may not assist weaker racers, and may not impede stronger participants.
It’s a meritocracy, where one succeeds or fails on the merits of their own preparation, strength, and moral character. (Note the strong moralistic sub text)
Having put forth such a compelling case for self reliance, the argument quickly reverts to familiar claims of moral decay, lack of self sufficiency, and reliance on a nanny state for prosperity as causality for the contemporary tribulations of capital.
But due to the voluntary nature entering a race for the sole purposes of recreation, I think we can see this is a false narrative.
A better descriptor of the real world might be more accurately likened to the running of the bulls at Pamplona Spain.
With one exception- and that is that the race is now mandatory, and everyone must run. Run until you can run no more and are trampled or gored.
So the masses flee in terror, inches ahead (or sometimes behind) the sharpened point of the bull’s horns. It’s everyman for himself in this valorized blood sport, the low frequency rumble of cloven hooves just behind you, the hot breath of flared nostrils and the spray of animal spittle on the back of your neck. You run.
To the side of you a woman falls, immediately trampled under the cascade and fury of hooves, muscle and fur. A blur of sinew and flank, she disappears amid screams and dust. You run.
Like a bad Camus novel, one by one they fall around you, stricken, stumbling from exhaustion, they fall, as this race has been going on a long time, and will continue until you die. If you should be so lucky as to pull ahead of the masses, pushing and elbowing your way to the fore, you soon learn that you do not have to be faster than the bulls, just faster than the guy behind you. Jostling and pushing- tripping others to buy precious time, the bodies consumed under the stampeding livestock slow the herd so you may advance.
Once ahead you can run unhindered, free of those who would grab your shirt before they are pulled under, selecting short cuts and back alleys, gaining first yards, then blocks of advantage. Some get so far ahead they may stop to enjoy respite in a side café, but the rumble on the horizon, the rising dust, and the distant screams makes these stops short and full of worry.
When you see the tip of the horn and fully appreciate the nature of the race, you will never forget. It damages you in such a way as there is no recovery, remove yourself from the carnage and you will still run reflexively, in fact you will always run reflexively, from this point on.
And a very few get so far ahead they can never be caught by the herd, they are miles ahead in different cities and different countries, some do not even know there is such a race.
And so they buy their own bulls.
Travesty in the Garden of Gethsemane
But the hypocrisy is noticed by the mailman when he delivers my magazine. He chuckles at the irony. The interconnectedness and extant participation in the bourgeois economy cannot be subverted by hollow protest, not rectified by reading or writing.
The focusing wheel on our telescope is spun once more with a mighty thrust. It freewheels, and in the optics we see clouds, oceans, and continents. The continuum in time is passed through, the geography changes, the images begin to settle down.
We see a town that looks familiar. Your town. The focus sharpens and we see a house that seems familiar. Your house. We see a bedroom that seems familiar. Your bedroom. And in the dresser we see a neatly stacked pile of T shirts with blood stains on them. Your shirts.
On a higher level, we have a superorganism, our civilization, which has accessed an energy gradient the same way that old growth forests have.
The human population makes up this superorganism’s myriad of cells. The nervous system is made up of the various mediums that transmit information – internet, television, phone, print media, etc… The circulatory system is the transportation system providing paths of production and distribution – roads, bridges, trains, airline and shipping routes, etc… Of course energy, primarily oil and fossil fuels, are the life-blood that fuels this system. If you have ever tried to fight against this Leviathan, you will have its immune system, the law and security apparatus, thrust upon you so that you may be hammered into conformity or isolated and quarantined in a tiny prison cell. Of course there are many malcontent cells within the belly of the beast, but capitalist industrial civilization is fortified with self-perpetuating social structures which ensure its survival.
Take for instance its education system which churns out countless drones who lack the ability to think critically and are filled with fragmented and specialized knowledge which prepares them as cogs for the corporate world. Everything, including one’s relationship with fellow humans, is reduced to a “business relationship” or “investment”. The various institutions of modern society are configured to reinforce capitalist industrial civilization. The media are corporate mouthpieces and echo chambers for the dominant capitalist system – materialism, conspicuous consumption, atomization and alienation of man from nature and from his own humanity, etc… The entertainment industry fosters an acquisitiveness for high consumption lifestyles. It relies on the corporate state to mass market and mass produce these values. The primary metric of social worth in the corporate state is money, and the class which has managed to accumulate vast sums of it are those who have usurped the levers of governance. You have heard of the two-tiered justice system we have in this country which coddles the elite and discards everyone else. Thus the ethos of society flows downward from those who have at their disposal the power to mold and influence society’s perceptions and norms.
Will man go extinct? He certainly seems to be doing everything in his power to make sure it happens:
…the worship of an economic system that reduces everything to a financial object.
…the continued exploitation and burning of an increasingly more expensive and environmentally damaging energy source which is causing the climate to swing out of control with various feedback loops.
…the dismantling and perversion of regulations and the rule of law to satisfy greed and a grossly unjust social hierarchy.
…the indoctrination of the population into a materialist society detached from the appreciation of nature’s fundamental role in our survival.
…the degeneration of public debate into infomercial sound bites by way of mass media manipulation.
…the wholesale destruction of the natural world and the latest attempts of a so-called green economy to monetize every bit of nature in order to save capitalism.
…and the spread of the above described culture through globalization.
If you think about the modern globalized civilization as a super-organism, then you come to realize how futile it is to think that an organism, any organism, would voluntarily starve itself or constrict its own growth. If you plant a tree in a pot, it will eventually become root-bound or send its roots over the lip of the container or straight through the ceramic wall. This is exactly what our capitalist industrial civilization is doing.
It has utilized every resource available to sustain growth, and now speaks of manipulating the weather in order to avoid the threat that climate chaos poses to its vitality. As far as mineral depletion, there has even been plans drawn up to mine asteroids for their deposits. The next frontier is to break the bonds of Earth itself. But we have irreparably cracked the vase that is our home. The Arctic will soon have an annual “window” in September through which the sun’s rays will work their way inside, prying that annual crack ever wider every year. In addition, we have pushed most other species, the building blocks of biodiversity, out of their habitat and onto the one-way path of extinction. The life-giving fluids of our vase have slowly been poisoned and acidified by the waste from our fossil fuel energy slaves. The hydrologic cycle within our little world has been hopelessly fouled with. The superorganism of capitalist industrial civilization is now starving the majority of its cells in order to keep healthy a few of its privileged cells who sit in places of power and Mammon worship. This potted plant or superorganism we call industrial civilization is looking rather pale and shriveled these days. As a matter of fact, it’s like a tree whose bark has been peeled off. It’s still standing at the moment and it does not know it’s dead, but its days are surely numbered.
The hope of environmentalists can no longer be that this corrupt system will run out of energy(Peak Oil), that the money presses will break down, or that it can be changed through capitalist schemes of “greening the economy”. The only thing that would have stopped the destruction would have been to build a new system that holds the health of the natural world as the primary metric through which all human activity is viewed and planned. Suffice it to say that such a system would not have been capitalism. Of course such a sentiment would brand you as an “eco-terrorist”, but the purpose of this essay is not to give hopium, but to describe the entrenched power structure which has laid waste to the environmental movement and our planet. Although small and ineffective, individual acts of moral courage and sacrifice are all that is left as this Beast of industrialized civilization tumbles to the ground, dying from self-inflicted wounds too numerous to count.
Since I was young, I knew I’d find you
But our love was a song sung by a dying swan
And even now you’ll hear me calling
You’ll hear me calling
And in your dreams you’ll see me falling, falling
Breathe in the light
I’ll stay here in the shadows
Waiting for a sign, as the tide grows
Higher, and higher, and higher…
We’re approaching the one year anniversary of this website and I really have not explicitly stated my core beliefs and ideas. So let me begin by stating ten essential positions of this website:
1.) Anti-Capitalist. Capitalism has several fatal flaws which we’ve discussed here in numerous posts. It is at the root of our social and environmental ills. A system which atomizes society, turning each against the other as competitors and targeting all members of society with a nonstop stream of marketing and advertising propaganda, is the antithesis of a community-building ethos.
…cast your eyes on capitalism as a meme that effectively mutates the thinking of people, turning them into over consumers and profiteers. It is the relentless drive to grow profits that pushes us to do what we do. And that meme has metastasized globally. That is the real disease.
The original capitalism arose as a means to aggregate enough excess harvest so as to re-invest in capital equipment (before formal depreciation entered the scene) for the farm or village. It quickly led to investment in growing the capacity of a community to support more people and have more stuff and that led us, eventually, to what we have today — unbridled avarice and waste… ~ George Mobus
2.) Anti-Imperialist. Imperialism is the economic dominance and exploitation of a country, often underwritten by military force.
3.) Anti-Militarist (not the same as Pacifist). This stance goes along with 1 and 2. The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) has become a branch of government unto itself. ‘War for profit’ is big business with retiring generals becoming consultants to the weapons manufacturers. A large percentage of congressmen and senators are personally invested in the American war machine. With the War on Terror, the tail is wagging the dog.
4.) Man is part of nature, not separate from it. All life forms on Earth have intrinsic worth which cannot be accurately monetized or commodified. Economic activity by humans incurs environmental costs, but these costs are externalized. An economy which internalizes these costs is the only sustainable system able to support human societies long-term. What is the final cost of CO2 emissions, but likely the extinction of the human species along with everything else (6th Mass Extinction).
5.) Technology is not corrupt, the system is. I am not anti-technology. How a society applies a particular technology determines that technology’s social worth. Do we use it to keep vegitative patients alive at great cost? Do we use it to produce energy whose byproduct is toxic waste lingering for eons? Do we use it to annihilate each other under a mushroom cloud?
Many citizens of industrial capitalism have become technophiliacs, developing an unhealthy and unrealistic faith in the ability of technology to solve any and all problems. That’s a failure of a social system which deifies technology, promoting it as a cure-all while also using it to reproduce inequality and injustice.
Speaking on the Arab Spring and the Egyptian Revolution, Professor David Correia says:
…In the end, the particular objects and artifacts of everyday “technology” are the tools of corporations and authoritarian governments. And by now it should be clear that democracy and capitalism do not cohere and the revolution cannot be carried out via “technology.” Rather the struggle must become a struggle over the social, political and economic conditions that have made the everyday objects of technology—our digital campfires—nothing more than the tools of authoritarian despotism and capital accumulation.
6.) We live under a form of growing tyranny called inverted totalitarianism. I first read about the term inverted totalitarianism from journalist Chris Hedges who quotes from political philosopher Sheldon Wolin. Hedges has done a great job of documenting and explaining the rise of the corporate state in this country and around the world. From the Fourth Estate to higher education to all other social institutions and venues, we have literally been ‘occupied’ by corporations.
7.) Climate Change, or more aptly ‘climate disruption’, is human-caused.
Our use of fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution has disrupted the natural carbon cycle of the planet. I have numerous links on this site to scientific findings proving that climate change is happening and is caused by human activity. The evidence is overwhelming and supported by near unanimity amongst the scientific community. The fossil fuel lobby is extremely powerful and has financed a ‘public deception’ campaign to cast doubt on the root cause of climate change.
8.) Peak Oil is real and happening. It’s all about Energy Return on Investment (EROEI), and it’s a liquid fuel crisis. Despite the rampant self-deception of carbon man and the ‘public deception’ campaign by the fossil fuel industry, America is not and will not become energy self-sufficient in its current configuration of ‘urban sprawl to nowhere’ and its capitalist cornerstone of the automobile industry (individualized transportation).
Despite increased efforts to get more drivers to adopt fuel-efficient vehicles, U.S. households spent the highest percentage of their income on gasoline in 2012 than they did in any other year in nearly three decades except for 2008, according to new estimates.
The Energy Information Administration reported that the average household spent $2,912 on gasoline in 2012, or nearly four percent of their pre-tax income. – source
9.) Peak everything is happening. From industrial minerals which serve as the building blocks for modern civilization to the seafood that we eat, humans are eating the planet out of house and home. The energy bonanza of fossil fuels enabled the human population to spread far and wide, becoming a force of nature which now has the dubious distinction of having a geologic era named after it – The Anthropocene – and which has spurred one Professor to start a campaign in order to rename Homo sapiens to something other than ‘wise’. The Four Horsemen of Industrial Civilization (Climate Change, Peak Net Energy, Ocean Acidification, and Peak Water) are converging to bring Homo sapiens reign to an end.
10.) With business-as-usual, humans will likely become extinct by the end of this century or shortly thereafter. Multiple tipping points have already been triggered which will have non-linear and self-reinforcing feedback effects. We have covered many of these feedback loops on this site. Suffice it to say, only the timing of the final consequences is debatable at this point. Massive and radical changes to our society could always be started to lessen the final impacts, but such a proposal is like telling a nicotine addict, who smokes through their tracheostomy, that “it’s never too late to quit.” Ugghh!
So I think we can all agree on most if not all of the above statements. If there are any questions on my core beliefs or if there are ideas which you think should have been included, then let me know. By the way, none of the above positions makes me a “Doomer”. I hate that title. I’m a realist.
Humans are the premier practitioners of hype.
At this very moment, brave conservationists are risking their lives to protect dwindling groups of existing African forest elephants from heavily armed poachers. And here we are in this safe auditorium talking about bringing back the Woolly Mammoth. Think about it… Hype can come back to bite you.
The video below is a talk given on Earth Day this year by Nate Hagens at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. It’s entitled “What if the Future is Real?”. This talk is not just about the issue of resource depletion and the multiple crises facing us, but about human behavior, how we perceive the natural world and our responsibilities to future descendants. Nate Hagens [Masters Degree in Finance from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont] is a former editor of The Oil Drum and worked on Wall Street for a decade before “seeing the light”. I found his talk useful. My notes/summary are below the video.
A good summation of Chris Hedges’ main points in ‘Death of the Liberal Class’ was found on the blog Law and Disorder. I have edited, corrected and changed the list a bit. As wealth has concentrated and taken over every institution of society, social injustice has sky-rocketed. The ruling elite who are benefitting from the current paradigm are blind to its toxic byproducts. As discussed in my previous post, I see such violent outbursts of antisocial behavior as a result of the current system.
The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews.
The following bullet points will explain this belief further:
The pillars of liberal establishment, liberal religious institutions, labor, public education, esp. public universities, culture, the press and finally the Democratic Party, which made incremental or piecemeal reform possible – which watched out for the interests and the grievances of those outside of the narrow power elite – no longer function.
The term neo-liberalism is a reconfiguring of what it means to be a liberal in a democratic society. Neoliberalism is actually an ideology that prizes market fundamentalism and seeks a return to laissez-faire economics, i.e. unfettered capitalism. Community is devalued in favor of unregulated capitalism.
We have figures like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Pelosi and others that continue to speak in the values of social liberalism but have betrayed every one of those values.
The subservience to Wall Street, the slavish catering to the permanent war economy, the failure to defend basic civil liberties, including habeas corpus – all of these have ultimately been embraced by the majority of the power elite so that a liberal is indistinguishable from a conservative on the core structural issues.
The liberal class and liberal institutions are traditionally allowed to function in a capitalist democracy because when there is a crisis within the society, they perform as a formal channel or mechanism within the power structure for injustices to be alleviated.
The New Deal: perfect example of how the liberal class functions.
The interests of the financial elite have usurped all of the pillars of the liberal establishment.
What kept the liberal class honest in the past were the populist movements which held fast to moral imperatives.
With the open-ended ‘War on Terror’, a culture of permanent war psychosis has been institutionalized by America’s ruling elite. Under such an atmosphere, social norms have degenerated, opening the door to demagogues.
With this gradual coup, which corporations have carried out in the United States beginning with Reagan and accelerated by Clinton and Bush, and certainly further by Obama, we’re left powerless; we have no mechanism to fight back.
The ruling elite understood that people were not moved to act primarily by fact or reason but could be manipulated through emotion. This is the result – we live in a society utterly saturated with lies.
The liberal class has been reduced to the status of courtiers to the financial elite. The term ‘limousine liberals’ comes from this situation.
The corporate state is rapidly reconfiguring society into a form of neo-feudalism, where you have these speculators on Wall Street earning 900 thousand dollars an hour while at the same time you have families of four barely able to feed and sustain themselves. The ever-looming threat of medical bills is another scythe hanging over their heads.
The elite institutions of education which charge astronomical sums essentially provide education for the elite, while public education is gutted for the masses.
People are trained to work as cogs in the corporate structure. Inner city schools are turned into boot camps for the corporate machine; that’s what charter schools are about, along with the ability to break teachers unions.
Everybody has their place and a caste system is solidified. There’s no hope for escape. We are fed endless stories of the few rare exceptions of people breaking into the top 1%, to somehow make us think that we’re responsible for our own predicament.
The dismantling and co-opting of the liberal class by the financial elite is one of the most vicious things that has been visited upon the working class.
The weakening and dismantling of a true liberal class explains how we can stand by passively as millions of people are forced from their homes through foreclosures by banks, the wealth gap widens to even more grotesque disparities, and the environment is destroyed for short-term economic growth and profit.
As these grievances mount, there is no mechanism within the structures of power or traditional institutions by which these injustices can be ameliorated.
Social grievances become expressed in these very frightening proto-fascist movements, such as the Tea Party or right-wing demagogues and extremist groups who give legitimacy to this anger, rage and sense of betrayal.
While being cleverly deflected away from Wall Street, the anger of the disenfranchised is directed at government and the present-day hollow mirage of a “liberal class”. The hypocrisy of the so-called “liberal class” is readily apparent from those on the low-end of the economic spectrum.
I’ve often wondered why there are so many conspiracy theorists and paranoid thinkers in today’s society:
The Southern Poverty Law Center released a new report on Tuesday finding that “the number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment ‘Patriot’ groups reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012″ and that the number of hate groups has remained at “near record levels” of more than 1,000…. – source
If you have a mass media which is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the corporations and Empire, then the truth will be nearly impossible to discern. Such a society which cannot tell fact from propaganda or reality from fabricated illusions will be a breeding ground for conspiracy theorists and believers in the absurd. That’s exactly what we have today.
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Collapse of Industrial Civilization 