Hello my fellow Earthlings. We think we’re so fucking clever, don’t we. We’ll probably revert to our rodent instincts and burrow underground when the shit really hits the fan. With the eco-apocalypse fast approaching, the best way for the human species to redeem itself would be to voluntarily undergo a cultural and spiritual transformation on a global scale. When I say spiritual, I mean honoring the ground we walk on and not some false deity. Science, not mythology, is the basis for my beliefs. This Earth is all we really have. Start caring for it and respecting it with the same reverence and homage we pay to our electronic toys of mass distraction, i.e. TV, iphones, video games, computers, etc…
Know that this culture of self-worship and materialism is sending our species to the dustbin of failed evolutionary experiments, most certainly by the end of this century if not mid-century. The evidence is all around us if only we care to open our eyes.
Below is a video I put together to illustrate the suffocation of the real world beneath the concrete, steel, and asphalt world humans have superimposed on it. We have worked to replace what is genuine and long-lasting with something that is artificial and unsustainable. And all the science says this world we have created from fossil fuels cannot be maintained in the long run, not even with so-called renewable energy. On top of that mess, we are wrecking the planet’s biosphere and ensuring that our descendants will have no chance to experience nature or a habitable planet. We have quite literally destroyed our only true home, leaving us vulnerable to the vicious elements of the outside world which are growing ever worse in the form of climate change, resource depletion, and environmental degradation.
I’m afraid that confronting this civilization-ending calamity is not a solo endeavor, but must be a global undertaking. As someone said on this site before, the success of a society, be it an ancient tribe or a technologically advanced people, depends on whether there is cooperation and shared sacrifice. I don’t have to tell you that in today’s world, such traits are in short shrift. Individualism and self-interest dominate over any sort of collectivism and altruism. Self-glorification and the almighty profit motive are not going to solve these problems. The solution for global ecological destruction will not be found in an accounting scheme or any other such capitalist interest.
It’s time to face what we have done to the planet and ourselves. I don’t expect any such great awakening to occur. I’m fairly confident that we will stumble along into total collapse with all the usual mayhem that ensues in such an event – drought, famine, pestilence, and war. We humans had such promise, but we’re throwing it all away. If only we would grow up.
In order to understand why the world is locked into a blind stampede over a cliff, you have to understand how the world runs, i.e. its socio-economic system. A large percentage of the population doesn’t understand that the world is ruled by multinational corporations or that the citizenry are simply disposable pawns with no voice in their fate.
The capital that flows around the world, betting on essential staples of life and demanding that barbaric austerity measures be imposed upon the masses, is an entity of its own. It’s a massively destructive force that enslaves people and rips apart the environment. In the Banana Republic of America where a once thriving middle class was sold down the river, nearly half of workers will have a budget of $5 per day when they reach retirement age. Maybe McDonald’s will create a 99 cent meal to cash in on that starving demographic. Oh, they already have…
As far as the environment goes, it is a doormat for the creation of money:
When you have such an immovable supersystem of puppet governments and marauding transnational corporations running the show, radical movements questioning and trying to change the status quo are easily co-opted or crushed, a recent example being the Occupy movement. In a world where extinction of the human species is guaranteed by climate chaos and the myriad of other crises created by industrial capitalism, a slow and incremental regimen of change is not what is needed to stave off collapse. Unfortunately, the entrenched interests of the financial elite and the nation-states they control won’t allow for any sort of abrupt and profound transformation. As Professor Julian Cribb has correctly identified, a culture of money worship and the mass delusion of money’s illusory value is at the heart of the global crisis. The high priests of money are protected at the expense of all else:
Show me a democracy that has an impoverished public life and I will show you one dominated by oligarchs and plutocrats driven by profit maximization that will do anything to get over. Gangster activity is what it is. Scandal after scandal and when you get caught, you PAY MONEY, you don’t go to jail. Plutocrats wage class war, getting away with CRIMES (mortgage fraud, market manipulation, insider trading, securities fraud) every day. But get caught with a bag of weed in the hood and you are in the system, for LIFE. ~ Cornell West
For humans living under such a capitalist society, money determines whether you can eat or not, whether you have shelter or not, whether you can clothe yourself or not, or whether you can afford medical treatment or not. Quite literally, if you have no money in a capitalist society, you die. Money in today’s globalized capitalist system is everything.
When President Obama speaks about confronting climate change, he does so with the mindset of keeping the current capitalist power structure in place. Because of this self-defeating approach, everything he says is rendered useless rhetoric.
Putting aside the gross social inequalities and injustices of our current system, you tell me how we can avert disaster with the following realities:
Without changing the socio-economic system under which we live, no real solutions for the multiple civilization-ending crises we face can be properly addressed. There is an expiration date for this unending conversion of the natural world into fake symbols of wealth hoarded and squandered by a greedy few…
Hello dominant life form of planet Earth. Yes, that means you Homo Sapiens. I’ve watched as over the millennia you evolved from a primitive ape-like hominid species, surviving purely by instinct, to the technology-wielding, sophisticated-thinking creature of today. Truly, the planet became your smorgasbord and you have partaken freely. As a matter of fact, you have very nearly emptied the planet’s entire refrigerator and cupboards and are now preparing to lick your plate clean. I’ve been throwing up some warning signs, especially this past year, to try to get your attention and perhaps make you reconsider your current omnivorous appetite. After all, you do share the planet with other life forms who have been hoping someone or something will put an end to your callous industrial rampage. I’ve even set in motion a sort of evolutionary check-and-balance, a doomsday device if you will, in the form of atmospheric heat-trapping gases, ensuring your demise just in case you don’t get the message of behavior modification. In other words, your dominant socio-economic paradigm of capitalism is fatally flawed.
Your voracious appetite for the world’s natural resources — fish, timber, potable water, arable land, minerals, et al. — continues unabated. And after consuming them, you leave behind mountains of waste and destruction. Does it always take a crisis before you creatures take action? Instead of waiting until you suffocate to death in a world of hypoxic oceans and dead forests, try listening to those lone voices of dissent screaming for your attention:
Look, I have news for you. The human economy does not take precedence over the Earth’s natural ecological processes which have evolved over millions of years to provide you with clean water, clean air, fertile land, and productive plant and animal life. All of these priceless necessities have been given to you at no charge to your accounting ledger. I guess free lunches are something no human can refuse, but the bill will come due no matter how you try to hide it by pushing it off onto the environment and future generations. In a planet without a stable biosphere, your glimmering metropolises with their megalithic concrete and steel structures reaching heavenward are nothing more than fleeting sand castles to be washed away by the next rogue wave of a surging sea… Sandy was just a warm-up event. Perhaps a new ‘Dust Bowl’ event and heat waves down under demanding a new color code on the weather map and droughts rendering useless a nation’s hydroelectric power will do the trick. I suppose as long as the $tock exchanges of the world are operable, your “business as usual” scheme of perpetual growth and converting all the natural world into capitalist symbols of wealth will carry on its merry way right over the edge of global extinction. And you thought the “fiscal cliff” was something to worry about?
As a mentor and intellectual peer of this site said recently, “tribes and societies that did master effective class consciousness thrived, for a very long time. Those that didn’t, don’t.” At today’s massive scale of production and consumption, the human and environmental exploitation characterized by modern industrial capitalism undermines the long-term existence of mankind along with every other living organism on the planet. Capitalism shoehorns everything into its profit-seeking regime, no matter if that means global genocide on a scale never heretofore seen:
…Actually, the more I reflect on it, the clearer I see the logic, the rationale, behind the bankers’ and the capitalists’ push for privatization. It is not just more profits they are after, not just share price or corporate valuation; no! They are after mass extermination, genocide on a grand scale – of the world’s needy, the under-funded, the unwanted, the uncivilized, the savages and the barbarians, the commies and the Islamists, in short, elimination of all of the Others.
The big boyz have seen all the data and crunched all the numbers, and it is clear to them – the earth is running out of resources, Mars is -50 C all of the time, and we can no longer afford to carry all of this excess baggage here on the planet — all of these miserable, thankless, do-nothing mouths to feed. So the plan is brilliant. You reduce the number from 7+ billion by at least 33% without firing one shot. You simply privatize all natural resources and then price access so that the bottom third of the globe’s population cannot afford it. And so, they die; it will be the biggest die-off of the Anthropocene epoch…
Dissecting some recent New York Time’s propagandist cheerleading on the fiscal cliff deal as “progressive taxation”, Yves Smith calls it as it is – ‘A Big Lie’. Her article appears in the NYT Examiner which is a site dedicated to analyzing the corporate spin of the New York Times.
When you have an economic system that rewards those who can most effectively exploit society and the environment, then psychopaths invariably rise to the top of the socio-economic heap. That’s why Obama has no hesitation in carrying out extrajudicial assassinations, or that former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo lead the charge on profiteering from sub-prime mortgages, or that BP CEO Tony Hayward can set off an epic ecocide in the Gulf of Mexico and call it “tiny” and then complain that he “wants his life back.” The book ‘The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success’ lists the top four jobs for psychopaths as:
1. CEO
2. Lawyer
3. Media (TV/radio)
4. Salesperson
I can’t believe that politicians didn’t even make it into the top ten.
Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths,” says clinical psychologist and author Dr. Martha Stout…”I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this,” Stout continued. “That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.” – link
But since America is a corporation or corporatocracy, essentially captured 100% by business interests, you can interchange the number one spot of CEO for the POTUS. Corporations write the legislation through bought-off politicians, control public opinion through mainstream media and policy institutions, degrade the education system into a conveyor belt of unthinking corporate drones for a life of corporate consumerism, and manipulate society through all other levers of power while crushing any uprisings with its panoptic security/surveillance apparatus.
In the video below, Chris Hedges talks about sacrifice zones like mountain top removal for coal in West Virginia, but knowing what we know about the state of the biosphere, in particular climate change and ocean acidification, we can say that the entire planet will soon be one big sacrifice zone. The “rapacious, immoral elites” are on track to take the entire planet down. What makes this oppressive system so immovable is that everyone is a participant, whether by choice or not.
While many liberal blogs were celebrating what looked on the surface to be an Obama victory of raising taxes on the über wealthy, they apparently did not notice what was being slipped up their behind.
For starters, the payroll tax, which was lowered in 2011 from 6.2% down to 4.2% in an effort to breathe some life into a moribund middle class, has jumped back up by 2% to its original rate. 160 million American workers will now shell out another $35 to $180 per week depending on their income level. The payroll tax is capped for incomes greater than $113,000 at $2,274. This means that it’s a regressive tax –anyone making over $113,00 will pay less as a percentage of their income, while for everyone else the tax is a net increase of 2%.
So while the plebs are scrounging around to pay that extra tribute to the Empire, our corporate overlords have extracted more blood from the serfs:
The “fiscal cliff” legislation passed this week included $76 billion in special-interest tax credits for the likes of General Electric, Hollywood and even Captain Morgan. But these subsidies weren’t the fruit of eleventh-hour lobbying conducted on the cliff’s edge — they were crafted back in August in a Senate committee, and they sat dormant until the White House reportedly insisted on them this week…
In late July, Finance Chairman Max Baucus announced the committee would soon convene to craft a bill extending many expiring tax credits. This attracted lobbyists like a raw steak attracts wolves. …
General Electric and Citigroup, for instance, hired Breaux and Lott to extend a tax provision that allows multinational corporations to defer U.S. taxes by moving profits into offshore financial subsidiaries. This provision — known as the “active financing exception” — is the main tool GE uses to avoid nearly all U.S. corporate income tax.
Corporations also got another legalized tax avoidance here:
As part of the fiscal cliff deal, Congress also extended another little-known tax break that benefits large multinationals selling products through overseas affiliates. This “pass-through” exemption permits a U.S.-based company to set up a new corporation in a tax haven like the Cayman Islands and sell it a patent owned by the U.S. parent company. Royalties on overseas licensing of that patent would then route to the tax-sheltered firm, instead of the U.S. parent company. The Joint Committee on Taxation says the two-year cost of extending this shelter is $1.5 billion.
The financial services industry, whose leaders had earlier joined a group of other corporate executives pushing for a “fair” solution to the fiscal crisis, is one of the primary beneficiaries of special-interest tax breaks. The active-financing exception, for example, permits banks like Morgan Stanley to avoid the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate on interest income from money lent overseas. A handful of other U.S.-based multinational companies with financing arms, such as Ford Motor Co. and General Electric, also use that exemption to lower their tax bills…
…[T]he “active financing” exception … permits businesses earning interest on overseas lending to defer U.S. taxes on that income indefinitely…
Vampire-squid Goldman Sachs and too-crooked-to-fail Bank of America also get tax breaks for moving into the new World Trade Center that replaced the pre-9/11 one:
…This tax provision was created to help revitalize Lower Manhattan’s small businesses but instead helped out these two mega-bailed-out banks and helped to subsidize the construction of luxury apartments. Goldman Sachs alone was reported to have received $1.6 billion in tax-free financing of its new building…
There are many more corporate giveaways in the fiscal spiked dildo that was rammed into Main Street, but you get the idea. America is just one big plantation for our corporate masters to harvest from on a perpetual basis. Yves Smith has a post discussing the permanent cementing-in of a class structure composed of the ‘have all’ and ‘have nothing’:
…The newest chat, with economist James Henry, focuses on how the deal on estate taxes allows the rich to pass on wealth to their children, allowing inequality to persist across generations. And he reminds us that a lot of Congressmen are rich enough that this provision will benefit their families…
I could not have summed up the situation better than the first commenter:
In their mad dash to cling to a sinking ship’s last remaining point above water, the callus elite won’t hesitate to trample all over women and children. In a world of ‘peak everything’ and a dying biosphere, the venal nature of man will surely surface in spades.
An interesting article came to my attention via a referral from The Big Picture. The economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Ross Gittins, has written an article, The four business gangs that run the US, which is a review of Jeffrey Sachs book, The Price of Civilisation. Sachs should have entitled his book ‘The Price of Capitalism’. In order to protect corporate interests, the exploiters will always use their wealth to bribe the political system (such as campaign contributions and promises of lucrative positions in the private sector after leaving government posts). We are all familiar with feedback loops in terms of climate change,but there also exists one within our socio-economic system which is extremely destructive. I refered to this feedback loop as the government-corporate-lobbyist complex in my postGuns, God, and Greenback$.Sachs describes this pernicious feedback loop, which has accelerated wealth to the top 0.001%, as follows:
Sachs says…
Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth.
Sachs even uses the term corporatocracy to describe the four primary U.S. business sectors which have usurped our government:
1.) Military-Industrial-Complex
Sachs says…
As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then.
2.) Wall Street-Washington complex
This group, comprised primarily of the big financial corporations (i.e. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley), systematically worked to “capture” regulation and take control of the money system which, Sachs says, “paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis and the mega-bailouts that followed, through reckless deregulation followed by an almost complete lack of oversight by government”.
3.) Big Oil-transport-military complex
Sachs says…
Since the days of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust a century ago, Big Oil has loomed large in American politics and foreign policy. Big Oil teamed up with the automobile industry to steer America away from mass transit and towards gas-guzzling vehicles driving on a nationally financed highway system.
Now you know why America has a rail system that even the Bulgarians would be ashamed of, as Kunstler is fond of saying. Next time you fill up your tank, think of the perpetual oil wars in the Middle East as an externalized cost of subsidizing America’s car culture. Anita Dancs calculated the cost of securing our liquid fuel addiction back in 2010:
…Put all these numbers in perspective: The price of a barrel of oil consumed in the United States would have to increase by $23.40 to offset military resources expended to secure oil. That translates to an additional 56 cents for a gallon of gas, or three times the federal gas tax that funds road construction.
If $166 billion were spent on other priorities, the Boston public transportation system, the “T,” could have its operating expenses covered, with commuters riding for free. And there would still be money left over for another 100 public transport systems across the United States. Or, we could build and install nearly 50,000 wind turbines. Take your pick.
Sachs also reminds us that “Big Oil has played a notorious role in the fight to keep climate change off the US agenda. Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries and others in the sector have underwritten a generation of anti-scientific propaganda to confuse the American people.”
4.) Healthcare Complex
Sachs says…
The key to understanding this sector is to note that the government partners with industry to reimburse costs with little systematic oversight and control. Pharmaceutical firms set sky-high prices protected by patent rights; Medicare [for the aged] and Medicaid [for the poor] and private insurers reimburse doctors and hospitals on a cost-plus basis; and the American Medical Association restricts the supply of new doctors through the control of placements at medical schools.
‘The result of this pseudo-market system is sky-high costs, large profits for the private healthcare sector, and no political will to reform.
We are the only industrialized country on Earth without universal healthcare. We pay more than anyone else and get less for the money spent. One of every five or six GDP dollars goes to feed this beast, but our life expectancy doesn’t reflect it:
Sachs says the elite take care of their own and have no concern for the plebs down below:
There is absolutely no economic crisis in corporate America. Consider the pulse of the corporate sector as opposed to the pulse of the employees working in it: corporate profits in 2010 were at an all-time high, chief executive salaries in 2010 rebounded strongly from the financial crisis, Wall Street compensation in 2010 was at an all-time high, several Wall Street firms paid civil penalties for financial abuses, but no senior banker faced any criminal charges, and there were no adverse regulatory measures that would lead to a loss of profits in finance, health care, military supplies and energy.
Ross Gittins concludes his review of Sachs’ book by briefly summarizing the path the elite took to amass their incredible wealth:
The 30-year achievement of the corporatocracy has been the creation of America’s rich and super-rich classes, he says. And we can now see their tools of trade.
It began with globalisation, which pushed up capital income while pushing down wages. These changes were magnified by the tax cuts at the top, which left more take-home pay and the ability to accumulate greater wealth through higher net-of-tax returns to saving.’
Chief executives then helped themselves to their own slice of the corporate sector ownership through outlandish awards of stock options by friendly and often handpicked compensation committees, while the Securities and Exchange Commission looked the other way. It’s not all that hard to do when both political parties are standing in line to do your bidding, Sachs concludes.
There was a comment that Darbikrash made on another website a year ago which pertains to this subject and clearly explains the corrupting influence that money has on government. Here is an excerpt:
As I’ve explained in the past, my peculiar work routine really makes this site a sort of biweekly affair. So in keeping with that loose schedule, I’ll be taking the next several days off and will post again in earnest after Christmas. In the meantime, I’ll be partaking in the traditional family yuletide activities such as drinking funky-tasting eggnog and cruising through the neighborhood to take in all the lit up decorations like inflatable Walmart snowmen and Santas. Notwithstanding everything I’ve blogged about here, the world’s not coming to an end, right? Putin apparently had a 4 hour news conference which included this very subject:
So all these observable facts that we’ve been documenting here are just our own personal viewpoint of the world and certainly not the perspective held by the vast majority of the population, including world dictators leaders. We should just take a ‘glass is half full’ point of view, shouldn’t we?:
1.) Peak Oil? Not a problem… We’ve got more fossil fuels to exploit as revealed by the melting Arctic. And of course we can always fall back on our seemingly endless supply of coal:
2.) Overpopulation? Not a problem. Endocrine disrupting chemicals and other stressors of industrial civilization are decimating the sperm count of the global male population:
3.) Climate Change? The top minds of science are right on top of this one. Who said you can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again:
4.) And the most dire threat of all… The Fiscal Cliff. Are you kidding? The bankers and corporate elite already have that one solved. Three for them and none for you:
…Over 20 million Americans live in extreme poverty – with cash incomes as low as $10,000 a year for a family of four. Is it any wonder that the US has the third highest poverty rate out of 30 leading industrial nations?
The problem is exacerbated by decades of economic and political policies that have resulted in a massive shift of national wealth from working people to the corporate boardrooms and the yacht owners. One result: real wage growth for workers has stagnated for 30 years; median household income has steadily fallen since the Wall Street produced economic crash of 2008. Much of the limited job growth since then has been in the lowest wage sectors, primarily food service and retail.
Sadly, the issue remained almost as invisible on the 2012 campaign trail as it was when Harrington shocked the nation in 1962. But it is not a surprise to nurses who, every day, see the faces of poverty and the suffering of families left behind – even as corporate profits once again soar and the parties and good times are back on Wall Street…
Well, we can always take up dumpster diving in the wealthy neighborhoods. I hear they “throw a lot of good shit away.”
Have a merry Christmas and don’t let the bastards wear you down!!!
I find it interesting that we are living in a time where the average person can, with a little research every night, have a good idea of what is going on globally with the economy, the environment, and societal structures. But with that knowledge comes the realization that you are essentially powerless to change the big picture. And so it is with our slide into a truly barbaric future. Having avoided any news this past week, I slept well. Tonight, however, is a different story as I start back into reading up on the latest world events and perspectives from prominent authors. It’s a real horror show developing these days.
We know that our ‘political economy of aristocracy‘ is a major impediment in moving away from our fossil fuel-based system and creating a socially just society, but the elite will do whatever is within their power to hold onto their place in the capitalist hierarchy:
…It is in any individual’s self-interest to preserve that in which they are most invested; but the rich pose a particular danger because their self-interest often leads them to attempt to protect and preserve entire modes of economic activity that society needs to move past in order to avoid colliding with the limitations of natural resources inherent in any specific mode of technology. No more clear example can be imagined that the Koch family interest pouring hundreds of millions and billions of dollars into conservative think tanks and political lobbies that not only deny global climate change, but also actively oppose the development of clean energy technologies. But a more instructive example may be the Walton family interests, which seek to avoid the development of public understanding of how the Wal-Mart business model shifts much of its employment costs onto the government – a modern twist on the methods by which the wealthy “pauperize the multitudes” identified in the Founders’ political economy of aristocracy…
Professor David McNally has an insightful new essay spelling out the machinations of capitalism which the elite have and will continue to carry out in order to preserve the status quo and gross inequality of our political economy. Some excerpts:
…Of course it is better for businesses if there is lots of demand for their goods. But the purpose of a capitalist enterprise is not to make sales; it is to make profits. The ability of firms to accumulate, invest, grow and beat out their competitors depends on profitability. And once capitalism gets into a systemic crisis of the sort that broke out in 2008, profitability cannot be restored without enormous destruction. There are two key mechanisms by which this happens.
The first involves destroying excess or unproductive capital. If firms in one industry after another are forced into bankruptcy and/or gobbled up by the competition, those that remain will eventually restructure and reorganize themselves to produce at lower cost (and higher profits). Having bought up bankrupted assets on the cheap, and having taken over the market shares of failed companies, they will be in a position to invest again.
The second capitalist mechanism for exiting a crisis involves driving down working people’s living standards. Put simply, by devaluing human life and the costs of reproducing people – via lower wages and benefits and reduced “social wages” (the public services available by way of pensions, social assistance, health care and education) – capital reduces its costs of doing business. And it is the latter strategy, reducing the costs of reproducing people, that has dominated thus far.
The reason for this is simple. In addition to funneling trillions of dollars to bail out the financial sector, the world’s central banks, particularly those in the Global North, have lowered borrowing costs to just a hair above zero. This means that faltering companies can stay alive by borrowing money that is virtually free. That is why there has been nothing so far like the wave of corporate bankruptcies witnessed during the Great Depression or across the 1980s. And because such a wave of bankruptcies would once again rock the financial system, nothing like it should be expected in the short term.
That leaves austerity as the capitalist class’ principal strategy. Here, they have racked up considerable success. Not only have public services been drastically curtailed, so have living standards generally. In the U.S., median incomes contracted more than four percent during the “recovery” since 2010 and have now declined to where they stood in 1995. That represents the elimination of all wage gains in the past 17 years. In the U.K., meanwhile, living standards have been pushed 13 percent below their 2008 levels.[4] Now, all of this may be bad for “the economy” in the abstract: reduced incomes mean less spending and less employment. But we don’t live in an economy in the abstract. We live in a capitalist economy whose imperative is profit. And reduced incomes are highly functional for capital.
To that end, governments everywhere have embarked on programs designed to increase the precariousness of everyday life. They know that insecurity makes it harder for workers to fight back, and so they are using every weapon in their arsenal to render workers less comfortable, confident and secure. They are attacking labour rights, undermining job security, driving down wages, benefits and social entitlements, and relying heavily on migrant labourers. Indeed capital’s ideal precarious worker for the age of austerity is the migrant who enters a country bound to a single employer, with no rights to live and stay beyond the length of their employment contract. In Canada, the proportion of entrants admitted under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is skyrocketing, and the same is true for similar programs elsewhere.
Not surprisingly, austerity and growing precariousness have done wonders for corporate profits, which have risen persistently since 2009. However, in the absence of significant destruction of capital, those profits are sitting idle rather than being invested in new means of producing wealth. By early 2012, U.S. corporations were sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash, a record amount. European firms were doing the same, holding around two trillion euros. And that is the dilemma capital faces at the moment. Austerity has boosted profitability, but it has not made investment attractive. Moreover, the lack of a new investment boom sets limits to just how high profits can rise (indeed, by mid-2012 corporate earnings seemed once again to be faltering). Consequently, the system keeps spinning its wheels unable to acquire the traction required for a sustained recovery and expansion.
And so, the capitalist class and their governments continue to do what they know best: enforce ever-greater sacrifices on working people. Greece, of course, is the center of the austerity storm. Pensions there have been cut in half, wages slashed by a third. Homelessness is soaring and soup kitchens struggle to keep up with those in need of food. Suicide rates have risen alarmingly. Notwithstanding all that, the “troika” – the European Central Bank, the IMF and the European Commission – demand more blood. Already, the Greek government has tabled a budget for 2013 that will cut billions more from pensions, wages and social benefits, notwithstanding their own forecast that the Greek economy will contract once again by nearly five percent. The whole purpose of these cuts is to prove to international capital that Greece will abide by the discipline of financial markets and that, should it receive new “loans” from the troika, it will use this money only to pay back global banks. Perish the thought that some of these funds might find their way to teachers, nurses or pensioners. Indeed, to say the money is “loaned” to Greece is entirely false: these funds enter a special account through which they are channelled directly to banks. And for that purpose the Greek people are being bled dry.[5]…
We now see the corporate elite in America, the beneficiaries of taxpayer bailouts, off-shore tax havens, government contracts, as well as near zero Fed loans, sharpening their blades to cut the throats of the American people:
The corporate CEOs who have made a high-profile foray into deficit negotiations have themselves been substantially responsible for the size of the deficit they now want closed.
The companies represented by executives working with the Campaign To Fix The Debt have received trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies and bailouts, as well as specialized tax breaks and loopholes that virtually eliminate the companies’ tax bills.
The CEOs are part of a campaign run by the Peter Peterson-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to spend at least $30 million pushing for a deficit reduction deal in the lame-duck session and beyond.
During the past few days, CEOs belonging to what the campaign calls its CEO Fiscal Leadership Council — most visibly, Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and Honeywell’s David Cote — have barnstormed the media, making the case that the only way to cut the deficit is to severely scale back social safety-net programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — which would disproportionately impact the poor and the elderly.
Yet the CEOs are not offering to forgo federal money or pay a higher tax rate, on their personal income or corporate profits. Instead, council recommendations include cutting “entitlement” programs, as well as what they call “low-priority spending.”
Many of the companies recommending austerity would be out of business without the heavy federal support they get, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, which both received billions in direct bailout cash, plus billions more indirectly through AIG and other companies taxpayers rescued.
Just three of the companies — GE, Boeing and Honeywell — were handed nearly $28 billion last year in federal contracts alone. A spokesman for Campaign To Fix The Debt did not respond to an email from The Huffington Post over the weekend…
Now this brings me to Chris Hedges’ last essay which I just read tonight. He’s becoming more apocalyptic as time goes on. Chris knows what I know: we are headed towards a hellish future in which a tiny elite will try to hang on to their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else, including the planet. High tech weaponry and surveillance technology will be used to enslave and control the masses while maintaining capitalism’s grip on society:
…The impending collapse of the international economy, the assaults on the climate, the resulting droughts, flooding, precipitous decline in crop yields and rising food prices are creating a universe where power is divided between the narrow elites, who hold in their hands sophisticated instruments of death, and the enraged masses. The crises are fostering a class war that will dwarf anything imagined by Karl Marx. They are establishing a world where most will be hungry and live in fear, while a few will gorge themselves on delicacies in protected compounds. And more and more people will have to be sacrificed to keep this imbalance in place…
…As the world breaks down, this becomes the new paradigm—modern warlords awash in terrifying technologies and weapons murdering whole peoples. We do the same in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Market forces and the military mechanisms that protect these forces are the sole ideology that governs industrial states and humans’ relationship to the natural world. It is an ideology that results in millions of dead and millions more displaced from their homes in the developing world. And the awful algebra of this ideology means that these forces will eventually be unleashed on us, too. Those who cannot be of use to market forces are considered expendable. They have no rights and legitimacy. Their existence, whether in Gaza or blighted postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., is considered a drain on efficiency and progress. They are viewed as refuse. And as refuse they not only have no voice and no freedom; they can be and are extinguished or imprisoned at will. This is a world where only corporate power and profit are sacred. It is a world of barbarism…
Evil unencumbered by the slightest conscience seems to me to be what has been described above. By comparison, the droogs in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ appear quaint.
Bloomberg Businessweek’s rendition of the toll taken on the President dealing with the stress of the next four years. King Romney was the alternative cover:
…the road ahead for President Obama as he faces the fiscal cliff and crucial decisions for the future of the economy, business, and defense,” writes Businessweek. “The opposition remains considerable, and no matter how successful he is, the hardest job in the world will take its toll.
…and the fate of the human species (you wouldn’t expect Bloomberg Businessweek to mention this, would you?):
Train wrecks, even one that appears to be happening in slow motion, usually are ‘shocking’. Great speech by Chomsky, especially the climate change segment:
…maybe humans are somehow trying to fulfill a prediction of great American biologist who died recently, Ernst Mayr. He argued years ago that intelligence seems to be a lethal mutation. He—and he had some pretty good evidence. There’s a notion of biological success, which is how many of you are there around. You know, that’s biological success. And he pointed out that if you look at the tens of billions of species in human—in world history, the ones that are very successful are the ones that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or the ones that have a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They seem to make out fine. But as you move up the scale of what we call intelligence, success declines steadily. When you get up to mammals, it’s very low. There are very few of them around. I mean, there’s a lot of cows; it’s only because we domesticate them. When you get to humans, it’s the same. ‘Til very recently, much too recent a time to show up in any evolutionary accounting, humans were very scattered. There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure. Anyhow, maybe we’re trying to show that humans just fit into the general pattern. We can exterminate ourselves, too, the rest of the world with us, and we’re hell bent on it right now…
…organisms that do quite well are those that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or those that are stuck in a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They do fine. And they may survive the environmental crisis. But as you go up the scale of what we call intelligence, they are less and less successful. By the time you get to mammals, there are very few of them as compared with, say, insects. By the time you get to humans, the origin of humans may be 100,000 years ago, there is a very small group. We are kind of misled now because there are a lot of humans around, but that’s a matter of a few thousand years, which is meaningless from an evolutionary point of view. His argument was, you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it here for very long either because it’s just a lethal mutation. He also added, a little bit ominously, that the average life span of a species, of the billions that have existed, is about 100,000 years, which is roughly the length of time that modern humans have existed.
With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.
So is anything going to be done about it? The prospects are not very auspicious. As you know, there was an international conference on this last December. A total disaster. Nothing came out of it. The emerging economies, China, India, and others, argued that it’s unfair for them to bear the burden of a couple hundred years of environmental destruction by the currently rich and developed societies. That’s a credible argument. But it’s one of these cases where you can win the battle and lose the war. The argument isn’t going to be very helpful to them if, in fact, the environmental crisis advances and a viable society goes with it…
By all accounts, we appear to be racing toward our own expiration date.
A nice example of the disconnection from reality that the elite reside within was exhibited this past weekend between NY Mayor Bloomberg and the survivors of the recent apocalyptic manifestation of human-induced climate change. Apparently the New York climate refugees that Sandy left in its wake felt that diverting much-needed resources to a marathon run was a little heartless and misappropriated as far as priorities were concerned:
What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they know that acknowledging the historic and unprecedented nature of such monster storms will disrupt this big fossil fuel-burning party we have going on here at planet Earth. For Christ’s sake, these new Frankenstorms are just the free market’s way of weeding out the wheat from the chaff. So what if the sea levels are rising faster than expected?!? If you can’t afford a walled fortress that can withstand future climate chaos along with the sky-high insurance premiums that go along with living in such vulnerable seaside spots, then move inland along with the rest of the uncompetitive and undeserving peons. In such a dog-eat-dog world, the wealthy will retreat behind their strongholds, complete with small farms and an army of private security guards to fend off the starving masses.
Some people like to comfort us with the idea that the economy will collapse long before we humans can continue burning all that coal and other carbon energy into the atmosphere. I guess such bloggers forget about all those pesky feedback loops and ecological tipping points we have already unleashed which will come to fruition no matter what we do at this point, or the fact that global dimming by sun-blocking aerosols is masking an additional 2 degrees of warming by some estimates. That kind of thinking – expecting a complete economic collapse to avoid the worst of what is already in the climate change pipeline – is just as hopelessly delusional as those who put their faith in a techno-fix like geoengineering or believe that God would not allow humans to destroy themselves.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 