Deepwater Capitalism

Quincy Saul

In memory of Gabriel García Márquez, March 6, 1927-April 17, 2014.

In September of 2009, the BP corporation dug the deepest oil well in history. The 35,055-foot deep Tiber prospect, 300 miles off the Texas coast, promised six billion barrels: one of the largest oil fields ever discovered in the country. So of course, they kept looking for more: They moved their massive drilling rig named Deepwater Horizon fifty miles south of the Louisiana coastline, to a prospect called Macondo, named after the setting of the famous book 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez.

On April 20, 2010, as they began to seal the well, something went wrong: a mix of oil and gas escaped, rushing up through earth and water, blowing up the Deepwater Horizon, and killing eleven workers, whose bodies were never recovered. Over the next eighty seven days, the whole world watched as over 200 million gallons of oil erupted from the ocean floor into the Gulf of Mexico.

It was the largest oil spill in history – more than ten times the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska. The images of animals covered in oil began to haunt our screens again, and the scale of death was so great it still seems impossible to quantify – estimates of the number of birds killed within the first hundred days ranges between 100,000 and one million. But the real nightmare was offshore, as riptides and hired hands collected thousands of animal carcasses into “death gyres”. Riki Ott explains:

“Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen managed to get the only footage of what I came to call the ‘death gyres.’ the rip currents that collected dead animals offshore. The Incident Command – BP and the US Coast Guard – kept the media 1,500 feet up in the air so the press couldn’t really capture the situation there. The animal carcasses were corralled, taken out to sea, and dumped at night, according to fishermen who were involved with so-called ‘Night-time Operations.’ Offshore workers reported ‘thousands of dolphins, birds too numerous to count, sea turtles too numerous to count,’ and even whales in the death gyres.” (Earth at Risk, Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet)

Five years later, what can we say? If hindsight is 20-20 then presumably we can learn from our mistakes. How did it happen? Was it BP’s fault? Or is there a bigger picture to blame? Five years later, the common sense of this tragedy has yet to dawn, as if the oil has clogged our hearts and minds along with our oceans and beaches. Like the pioneers of Márquez’s Macondo, searching for a way through the swamp, we seem lost, desperately hacking our way through nature and through our own nature. And the past, like the path, seems to always be disappearing behind us.

“…and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. . . . They could not return because the strip that they were opening as they went along would soon close up with a new vegetation that almost seemed to grow before their eyes.” 

How did it Happen?

“The main thing is not to lose our bearings.” 

Whodunit? What was the crime scene, and who are the criminals? What murder weapon spawned gyres of death? Five years later, we must look through the tangled jungle of events which have grown up behind us, and remember how we got here. Michael Klare’s insightful blow-by-blow of the events leading up to the accident is worth revisiting. 

“When BP first deployed the rig at the Macondo prospect in January 2010, it set a target date of March 7 for completion of that well. However, due to a series of geological obstacles and technical mishaps, drilling was not completed until April 19, producing a cost overrun on the project of approximately $58 million. It is not surprising, then, that BP’s site managers felt particular pressure to seal the well and move the Deepwater Horizon, to its next scheduled location. In their rush, the site managers made several last-minute decisions. . . . When preparing for the final cementing that would prevent natural gas from leaking into the wellbore, for instance, they decided to use only six “centralizers” to position the well’s steel casing, whereas the original design had called for twenty-one centralizers. They also went ahead with the sealing of the well even though several ‘negative-pressure’ tests suggested a dangerous buildup of gas in the wellbore. . . . the desire to complete the job swiftly and move the expensive drillship to its next assignment certainly contributed to the disaster.” (The Race for What’s Left, The global scramble for the world’s last resources)

One way to solve this crime is to blame the workers – the crime scene is the workplace, and the murder weapon is the botched job. They failed to follow industry regulations; using less than half of the recommended number of centralizers, and ignoring the test results indicating a dangerous buildup of gas. But this explanation is not sufficient, and hides another suspect. If the workers pulled the trigger, who gave the order?

As Klare explains, the workers were in a rush. It was the BP site managers – their cost overrun, their “pressure to seal the well and move,” and the “desire to complete the job swiftly,” which created the conditions in which the oil workers made their fateful decisions. So is BP the murderer? Is the crime scene the BP board room?

Sinking of Deepwater Horizon Platform. Photo: US Coast Guard.

Inside BP

At the dawn of the 21st century, BP had a tabloid affair with alternative energy. John Browne, its CEO from 1995 to 2007 re-branded the company, from “British Petroleum” to “Beyond Petroleum”, and urged its shareholders and broader public “to look beyond oil and gas to fuels which can be produced locally and which do not threaten the sustainability of the world’s climate.” In 2008, Browne was replaced by Tony Hayward, whose more sober vision re-branded the company simply “BP”, and clarified that “the energy of the future will be more than oil, but oil will still be a major part of it.” In 2010 he closed BP’s “alternative energy office.” 

Perhaps the public relations team from that office had all been moved to the Gulf Coast, where it has been working overtime since 2010. This has included classroom visits with “hands-on” experiments, substituting cocoa for oil and dish soap for chemical dispersant, to win young hearts and minds to the efficacy of BP’s cleanup efforts. According to the company, the case is closed. A recently released report from BP concluded: “BP has seen no data to suggest a significant long-term population-level impact to any species.” In fact, “BP is claiming that wildlife in the Gulf is thriving and more abundant since the disaster.”  In a recent press conference, BP’s executive vice president for response and environmental restoration in the region Laura Folse said “I personally have no concern about oil washing in from the offshore to the shoreline.”

BP is preparing for the punchline, because currently pending in court is the case which will decide how much money BP has to pay in damages for the disaster. While BP is a giant – listed by Fortune magazine as the fourth largest publicly held company in the world – some on Wall Street have expressed fear that the court’s decision could kill the company. This panic began almost immediately after the spill, and BP began to sell off assets all over the world, in Colombia, Egypt, the US, Canada and Argentina.

But according to forensic accounting expert Ian Ratner who testified recently on the case, BP “actually, has a better balance sheet today than it had before the spill.” Despite around $40 billion in oil spill liabilities, the company is financially better off than before the disaster. What’s more, they are back at the scene of the crime: “We expect to be back and actively drilling during the second half of the year,” said BP Chief Financial Offcer Byron Grote in April 2011. And he kept his promise: like Colonel Buendía in Márquez’s novel, BP gives orders for execution but is isolated and naive about to the results: “Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”  BP seems both all-powerful and powerless, returning to the scene of the crime like a dog unto its vomit, at the mercy of some god or godlessness which demands more drilling.

There is more than meets the eye in this case. Is BP the only culprit on trial? If the workers pulled the trigger, and BP gave the order, who put the gun in its hand? And who made the gun? There is an African saying that “if you want to get at the root of the murder, you have to look for the blacksmith who made the machete.” (Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe, p. 159)

The World System

“That was perhaps the only mystery that was never cleared up in Macondo. . . . A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.” 

What was the blacksmith that built and blew the Deepwater Horizon? Like the mystery of Macondo in Márquez’s story, the trail of blood climbs and descends, turns corners and crosses paths, taking us from the work place, to the board room, to the stock exchange, and from there it seems to flow into the ocean of normal every-day modern life. As Lamar McKay, chairman and president of BP America said, “the deepwater is indispensable to the world’s energy future.” The trail doesn’t go cold, it goes everywhere. Like the war of Colonel Buendía, our search for justice in the death gyres seems to get stuck in a stalemate of business as usual: “’Everything normal, Colonel.’ And normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war.”

In the early 2000s, the deep sea drilling industry boomed. All the big oil corporations competed to dig the deepest wells, at depths and conditions that boggle the imagination – deeper than Mt. Everest is tall, under thousands of feet of water (and pressure). These projects out-compete space exploration in the audacity of their engineering and in their cost: Shell built a rig called Mars that was three times more expensive than the Mars Pathfinder mission, with arguably more complex technology. While their locations are industry secrets – no one knows how many or where they all are – they are everywhere, from the Falkland Islands to the Arctic Circle, from South America to West Africa.

A 2010 report by energy expert Michael Smith estimated that big oil would spend $387 billion on offshore drilling between 2010 and 2014 – 33% more than over the previous five years – building 20,000 offshore wells in ever deeper waters. The Deepwater Horizon explosion, which came nineteen days after President Obama announced plans for more offshore drilling, did little or nothing to change the plan. Three days after the explosion, with Macondo still gushing, a White House spokesperson assured that increase in offshore drilling would continue, promising that it would be done “safely, securely, and without harm to the environment.” 

Before Deepwater Horizon, regulations on the industry had been lax. In the United States, the Interior Department’s Mineral Management Service (MMS) took a hands-off approach to the industry, never, for instance, setting any criteria for minimum-pressure tests, which had such fateful consequences in the Gulf. After a six month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf after the disaster, oil companies began to lobby the courts to being reissuing permits. A new set of safety rules was established, and by April 2011, one year after the disaster, deep drilling in the Gulf, by BP and others, was back online. Everything normal, Colonel.

This is the normalcy of the infinite war on mother earth: While the fallout of the disaster continues to inflict irreparable damage to the Gulf, the industry which created the crisis is allowed to resume the activity which created it. And the same agencies that failed to regulate the industry before are being trusted to do it right this time. How can this be?

The answer can be found by following the money, like the trickle of blood in Macondo, from the scene of the crime, and out into the world-system. In an energy analysis report from several years ago, it was predicted that due to declining reserves of conventional oil, offshore oil output would contribute 35 percent of global supplies by 2020. By 2015, the report continued, deep-offshore fields would be “the only source of growth to power the world’s expanding economy. . . . Any energy firm that intends to continue being involved in the production of hydrocarbons must, therefore, establish a significant presence in the major deepwater drilling zones.” 

In other words, the industry is too big to fail – even if does fail. Big oil cannot be too strictly regulated or restricted – or punished. Their alibi is the world-system; the modern way of life. This logic was recently re-asserted by Justice Department attorney Steve O’Rourke in the buildup to the court case that will decide BP’s punishment, who said that the penalty “has to be high enough that companies of this size won’t let a spill like this ever happen again. But, again, not so high as to be ruinous to their operation.” In the great state of Louisiana, individuals who murder get capital punishment, but corporations who murder get rehabilitation. Questioned about whether the company would attempt to drill at Macondo again, BP senior vice president Kent Wells responded that “there is a good reservoir there,” and there was no reason to rule it out, because if BP didn't, someone else would. 

And so BP and the Gulf and all of us have come full circle, back to the scene of the crime. As death approaches for Márquez’s Ursula Buendía, so does the realization for all of us: “time was not passing. . . . it was turning in a circle.”  As big oil races ever faster and ever deeper, time somehow seems to stand still. The rush put on the workers is the rush put on the managers, is the rush put on the CEOs, is the rush put on the shareholders, is the same rush put again upon the workers. And in this “race for what’s left,” as Michael Klare calls it, we are left standing still, watching death approaching, as the drilling rigs, like monster space-age vultures, circle Macondo once again.

We must ask again, and answer again, to keep our bearings, and to clear a path to the truth: Is the crime scene the workplace, or is it the board room? The stock exchange, or the gas station down the street? Like the trickle of blood weaving through the town of Macondo, the evidence leads everywhere; back to normal modern life. The crime scene is everywhere. The murder weapon is the world-system. The criminal and the culprit is deepwater capitalism.

Deepwater capitalism is a terminal stage in the global metastasis of a social cancer we call the economy. Capitalism has gone to deep water, as it has gone to the hearts of mountains and into the depths of the earth. Offshore oil drilling is but one horseman, in a world-wide apocalypse of extreme resource extraction. The others are fracking, tar sands, and mountaintop removal. If imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, then today’s resource extraction apocalypse reveals the highest stage of imperialism – genocide and extinction.

Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, the insane captain of a whaling ship – distant ancestors of today’s offshore oil rigs – speaks for the system: “all my means are sane, my object and my motive mad.”  With sane means and mad motives, Captain Ahab is both a model and a metaphor for today’s economy, whose command will sink civilization. It is the immense power without direction, the normal infinite war, the gravity at the center of a world-wide death gyre.

BP’s Gulf oil spill. Photo: NOAA.

Conclusions

At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said ‘Macondo’ and another larger one on the main street that said ‘God exists’.” 

Five years later we owe it to ourselves and to the world to come to some conclusions. It may take millions of years for the ecosystems of the Gulf to recover, but in the meantime we must recover our hearts and our minds from a modernity in which such disasters are normal aspects of every-day life. We must come to some conclusions about this world-system, and about the generations of people who will live and die on the front lines of an infinite struggle against an infinite war.

Regardless of the severity of the punishment BP receives, the fact that it is back at the scene of the crime, drilling, gives us an indication of the real scale of the problem. If BP is a psychopathic recidivist criminal, it is not alone. The global economy which depends on this kind of extreme resource extraction, which gives corporations like BP orders and alibis, and which bends executive, legislative and judicial power to its needs, is on the move, and it will strike again. Bhopal, Macondo, Fukushima – the beat will go on until we pull the emergency break. Michael Klare writes in conclusion to his comprehensive global survey of our doomsday terrain: “As the race for what’s left gains momentum, this sort of predatory behavior will become more frequent and more brutal. . . . Only if we abandon the race altogether . . . . can we hope to avoid calamity on a global scale.” 

To abandon the race: This is the conclusion to which we must come. It will, however, require much more of us than the reformist measures Klare proposes – increasing efficiency, developing alternative energies, and supporting “green” versus “brown” capital. These will only buy Captain Ahab more time. It’s time for mutiny. It’s time for the emergency break. It’s time for revolution.

Conclusions on the local level in the Gulf are more difficult. Big picture political conclusions will not bring back the fish and the birds, will not restore livelihoods and dreams swept away by poisoned waters. In a region that the federal government has all but abandoned, the future is wholly in the hands of the common people of the Gulf coast. It is an immense burden for any people, let alone those who are still recovering, ten years later, from Hurricane Katrina, and who live trapped between “cancer alley” and rising ocean levels, with the ground literally sinking under their feet. Thus the struggles of the people of the Gulf symbolize for the entire world a last stand for meaning, in a civilization on the brink of oblivion: “It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.”  After them, the flood.

Like children, many of us are afraid of the dark. We hide from the creeping annihilation even as it seeps ever closer to home. We close off our hearts to the horror, and mute our minds before the madness, even as it consumes us and enlists our complicity. As John W. Tunnell, witness for BP, recently testified, “The images of those dead birds that were oiled, like pelicans, stick in people’s minds more, and so it’s easy to get emotionally involved in those things. . . . you have to step back and critically and unemotionally, objectively to look at what’s going on.”

While BP’s witnesses, as personifications of capital, would have us immerse ourselves in the infamous “icy waters of egotistical calculation,” some people in the Gulf prefigure a different path to the truth. A documentary titled My Louisiana Love chronicles the story of Monique Verdin, a young Native American woman in search of love and life amidst death and indifference: “I want to keep living on our land, but I’m inheriting a dying delta.” She sets out fearlessly into a landscape of annihilation with an open heart, an open mind, and open hands, and in her story there is a universal story.

It is a story of salvation blossoming next to damnation, a story which promises like Holderin that “where danger threatens, that which saves from it also grows.” Like jewelweed growing next to poison ivy, like women’s liberation in Rojava alongside to the patriarchal crusade of ISIS, like God next to Macondo: There is hope here, perhaps the only kind of hope that is real in a world where everything is at least partly toxic, where dioxin swirls in breast milk, and death gyres spiral in the oceanic cradle of life. It is a story that slumbers in a world consumed with cynicism, a world awash in the icy waters of ego. But like the people of Macondo, we await only the right magnet to re-ignite our wonder. As the gypsy proclaimed, “things have a life of their own. . . . It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.” 

Xenophobia in South Africa

Garikai Chengu

South Africa’s Apartheid regime is remembered as one of the worst crimes against humanity of the 20th century. The White monopoly capitalist system that underpinned Apartheid remains alive and well today. White monopoly capitalism is the post-Apartheid economic system, whereby Whites continue to exert disproportional and undemocratic control over the nation’s economy, land, media and judicial system.

The American investment bank, Citigroup, recently ranked South Africa as the world’s richest country, in terms of its mineral reserves, worth an estimated $2.5 trillion. South African Whites and Western foreigners own a staggering 80 percent of this wealth.

South Africa is unquestionably, the world’s most racially unequal society.

Whites comprise only 12 percent of the population. Thanks to the past 350 years of racist exploitation, Whites owned 87 percent of agricultural land by Independence Day, 1994. During these twenty-one post-colonial years, precious little has changed. One exception is that Black people in rural areas have lost 600,000 jobs since Independence. This has created a great wave of migration into urban townships.

South African townships have served as both the location of recent xenophobic violence, as well as the catalytic cause of the violence.

During the Apartheid Era, White monopoly capitalists created the township. The process included evicting Black people from properties that were in areas designated as “White only”, and relocating them into urban townships. Blacks were forced to move into squalid, overcrowded and segregated townships, designed to mould the Black labour force into an orderly, submissive underclass.

Streets of grim “matchbox houses” were arranged in strict grids and surrounded by a fence with only one or two points of entry, allowing the White regime’s police to seal off entire neighbourhoods with minimal effort. In such a setting, violence was both naturalised and easily-instigated for political purposes. To this day, Blacks in townships still have to contend with non-existent sanitation and electricity services, as well as rampant crime.

Far from being a Rainbow Nation, ongoing xenophobic violence in South Africa’s townships exposes the nation’s further entrenchment into two separate and unequal societies: one, predominantly Black and poor, located in the townships; the other, largely White and affluent, located in the suburbs.

What White monopoly capitalists have never quite understood, but what the Black South African can never forget, is the degree to which White capital is deeply implicated in the township. White institutions created it; White institutions maintain it; and White society condones it.

Edgar Pietrise of the University of Cape Town explains how Cape Town for instance, “was conceived with a White-only centre, surrounded by contained settlements for the Black and coloured labour forces to the east, each deliberately hemmed in by highways and rail lines, rivers and valleys, and separated from the affluent White suburbs by protective buffer zones of scrubland.”

When Nelson Mandela was released from 27 years in prison in 1990, the Black townships exploded in endless celebration. Today, after twenty one years of the ANC government, which has been more concerned with appeasing White monopoly capital than redistributing land and resources to poor Blacks, townships have exploded into violence.

The xenophobic Black-on-Black violence spreading across South Africa is a direct result of centuries of White-on-Black violence and oppression.

Franz Fanon, who was an expert on the psychology of colonial violence noted that the historical and current system of White-on-Black violence sends messages of Black inferiority that are so powerful that many Black people succumb to them, ultimately becoming defined by them.

Internalised racism, a term first coined by Black scholar W.E.B. DuBois in 1903, involves accepting a White supremacist social order that places Black people at the bottom, and adopting society’s negative stereotypes about Blacks concerning their lack of abilities, inherent violence and low intrinsic worth.

Internalised racism is a major legacy of Apartheid. South African society historically judges violence inflicted on Blacks less harshly than violence against Whites; consequently, Black people begin to believe that their own life and the lives of other Black African people are worth very little. Thereby creating the preconditions for the ongoing Afrophobic violence.

Filtered through the racist lens of the predominantly White-owned South African media, xenophobia is portrayed as merely further examples of “Black-on-Black” violence by an inherently unruly and violent underbelly of society. The four major media houses are still largely White and male-owned; collectively, they control over 80 percent of what South Africans watch and read. The White media focuses on the symptom rather than the disease by steering the national discourse away from broader issues of income inequality and economic democratisation, towards narrow issues of vandalism, looting and general criminality.

Xenophobia can be defined as a “hatred, dislike or fear of foreigners”; combining the Greek xenos (“foreign”) with phobos (“fear”). Internalized racism demonstrates itself as the absence of attacks against White immigrants because Black African immigrants are pejoratively portrayed by the media as “foreigners”; whereas, Whites are considered “tourists” or “expats”.

Whilst Black immigrants are being brutalized in townships, White immigrants are allowed to visit townships and take advantage of cute spaces carved out for tourists among the shacks and wastelands.

Thanks, in part, to the 2010 Fifa World Cup, major cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg offer so-called “safe streets” where tourists can enjoy the sights and sounds of ordinary township life.

In Soweto, for instance, a pleasant stroll down Vilakazi Street takes in the old house of Nelson Mandela and the current homes of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Desmond Tutu, along with cafes offering cold beer and traditional African cuisine.

All that is required is that you turn a blind eye to the appalling standard of living endured by the slum’s Black inhabitants.

A few kilometers away at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, The Economist newspaper notes that among the 295 companies on the Exchange, only 4 percent of the CEOs are Black. Despite twenty years of South African democracy, five White-owned companies still control 75 percent of South Africa’s stock market. It’s the largest concentration of wealth and power on earth.

Corporate powers, which financially underwrote Apartheid in South Africa, are reminiscent of the great German companies that ran the Third Reich’s economy. The only difference between the Third Reich and Apartheid is that “reconciliation” in Germany did not leave pro-Nazi financiers in business; whereas in South Africa, those financiers are still firmly in control. These White-owned companies benefit immensely from cheap Black labour, tourist revenue and retail profits that stream out of townships everyday.

Neo-Apartheid companies in South Africa made record profits for Western shareholders since democracy in 1994; all the while, they shed hundreds of thousands of jobs. At independence, unemployment stood at 15 percent; today, that figure has skyrocketed to 25 percent. Instead of employing South Africans, major White-owned companies have sought to increase shareholder profits by outsourcing jobs abroad and hiring exploitable, African foreigners at home.

The nation’s largest labour union, Cosatu, has just said that, “White monopoly capital in the hospitality and retail industry” had deliberately chosen to employ foreigners over their South African counterparts in order to exploit foreigners. The United Nations’ Office for Refugees confirmed that the recent wave of xenophobic, “attacks began in late March following an apparent labour dispute involving South African and foreign workers”.

The tragic irony of ongoing xenophobic attacks is that at least six Africans have lost their lives, and yet those Africans all came from nations that harbored South African freedom fighters during the War of Liberation against the White Apartheid regime.

All the while, during Apartheid, Britain was the single biggest investor in South Africa, followed by the United States, both yielding the highest return on capital in the world. The United States and the other Western capitalist governments not only supported, but directly benefited from the racist Apartheid regime. To this day, a large portion of South Africa’s budget pays Apartheid-era debt to Western nations. This means that Black people pay for their oppression twice over.

The power of White monopoly capital to dispossess, oppress and exploit Black people cannot be overstated. The willing and conscious ally, in the form of an African government, routinely places the interests of White capital over Black labour.

Apartheid, literally meaning “apartness”, transformed Black Africans into foreigners on their own land. For as long as Black South Africans continue to be foreigners to their own economy, living outside the borders of affluent neighbourhoods, violence will continue to tear at the very fabric of the so-called “Rainbow Nation”.

A Precarious Moment for Africa

Curtis FJ Doebbler

The upcoming meeting of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights taking place in Banjul, Gambia could be an opportunity for African States and civil society to stand-up for their rights.

The twelve months have not been kind to Africa, although many Africans may not have noticed as economic development seemed to be pushing ahead throughout most of the continent. But while things seemed to be striving on the local and sometimes national level, international diplomats have been busy trying to shape an international order that will disadvantage Africans for the coming decades.

As a consequence the international framework being put into place may be deadly for generations of Africans. These unfortunate diplomatic maneuvers are being taken at several levels and most apparently within the world’s global body of the United Nations. Moreover, these initiatives almost always come from developing countries. Disturbingly African diplomats seemed to be powerless to prevent the damage.

Perhaps the most potent damage is being done in the global climate change talks. While the time to take effective international action ticks past the hour of no-return, developed countries continue to balk on taking adequate action to address the consequences of climate change.

Global climate action is perhaps most important because the world faces a scientific imperative of either taking adequate action or seeing, as G77 coordinator Lamumba Daping warned a half decade ago, a hundred million Africans perish during the 21^st Century due to the adverse effects of climate change.

Given this deadly imperative, developed countries are seeking to use it as leverage against developing countries to effectively replace the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) that they agreed to more than twenty-years ago with language reflecting common obligations for all States in the new climate agreement to be finalized in Paris this December.

This is being done with double-speak. Developed countries say they are not seeking to deny CBDR, but at the same time they are refusing to act in accordance with it. The inaction of developed countries is reflected in their refusing to undertake obligations that are adequate to address climate change.

As the adverse consequences of climate change will most significantly effect developing countries, particularly African countries and some low-lying island States, the result is that these States are left to choose between their development and their survival.

Already, based on estimates that developed countries provided at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009, the bulk of the greenhouse gas emissions cuts are being left for developing countries to undertake. This reality seems confirmed by the Individually Determined National Contributions or INDCs that a few developed countries have submitted to date, which are once again voluntary statements about how much greenhouse gas emissions they will eliminate.

Essentially developed countries are saying to developing countries: ‘We benefited for centuries and we are unwilling to share the advantages we gained. You are own your own’.

In those instances when developing counties have dared to stand up to such actions because they are inconsistent with the terms of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, they have been battered down by back-room political dealings that apparently mix threats with short term incentives.

The Philippines apparently bowed to US pressure to remove its most committed and competent negotiators. Bangladesh and the Maldives became silent after the Nassen initiative and the Climate Vulnerability Forum directed what appear to ‘hush’ money their way. And in Sudan the articulate Ambassador Daping was taken out of the picture when the country was divided in two, another victim of US interference that prioritizes the disorder of member States.

Elsewhere in the United Nations’ General Assembly debate concerning the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) developing countries are trying to put the emphasis on limiting the transfer of funds from North to South by imposing overbearing monitoring and verification requirements while refusing to accept the same control of their obligations to cooperate with developing countries. In fact, to date the biggest problem has been the failure of developed countries to provide the financial assistance, access to technology and affordable capacity building that they have pledged to developing countries. Only a handful of the forty-plus States that pledged to commit 1% and latter .07% of their GDP to overseas development assistance have ever achieved that goal and less than a handful are achieving it today.

In drafting the SDGs, which are intended to guide the Post-2015 Development Agenda, despite a consensus agreement on a set of 17 goals, some developed countries—and only developed countries—are attempting to reopen the goals. One reason for doing this appears clearly to be to weaken the special position of developing countries and to enhance the ability of developed countries to limit their own obligations based on conditionality. While developing countries have fought off this challenge to date there are indications that their resistance is waning under the pressure of the United States, Europe and their allies.

Third, developed countries increasingly appear to be intensifying their attack on developing countries at the United Nations Human Rights Council. To do this they have manipulated the forty-seven State entity based in Geneva, Switzerland to ensure that developed countries interests are prioritized despite the fact that developing countries technically outnumber developed countries by about a two to one margin. One might have thought this body would be a bastion of defense for the less powerful and wealthy developing countries, but especially in last year and even as it had an African President the Council has been turned against developing countries. Consider some recent examples.

Environment and the harmed being caused to it is on of the most important international issues today. Environmental degradation, such as the impending climate disaster that was already mentioned, is also one of the most serious threats to human rights. Nevertheless, developed countries have exerted significant effort to ensure that the Council does not encourage significant action on environment in general or climate change in particular.

The threat to human rights posed by environmental degradation is not new. Already in the mid-1990 the UN’s main human rights forum was adopting resolutions on it. After considering human rights and the environment between 1994 and 1996 the issue was killed by developed countries. In 2011 these same developed countries revived this topic. They did this only when the Council expressed concern about climate change, which unlike the more general topic of the environment, contained numerous binding legal obligations and a deadline for action from Mother Nature that States cannot ignore.

Developed countries did not want a UN special Rapporteur telling them they had to respect the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities that is enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. To prevent this they created the post of an independent expert on the right to a healthy environment. This was a mandate to study the phenomena.

Furthermore, developed countries made sure that the mandate holder was from a develop country, the United States that had opposed the Council consideration of both environment and climate change in relation to human rights. And the mandate holder himself was a skeptic about whether or not a right to a health environment existed.

A recent resolution that was pushed through the Council by Costa Rica acting for the European Union, the US and their allies and ignoring the objection of States representing the overwhelming majority of the people in the world, changed the independent expert’s mandate into that of a Special Rapporteur, a more active mandate usually reserved for rights on which there is consensus and aimed at implementing them. How a mandate holder who does seem convinced that the right at the very basis of his mandate exists will function in this post has yet to be seen.

At the same time, in another related UN forum after having failed to prevent the creation of an UN Decade of People of African Descent, developed countries have hamstrung it by allocating de minimus resources to the Decade and devaluing the call for reparations for colonialism and trans-Atlantic that is championed by a large number of developing countries.

Perhaps most strikingly, in March 2014, the Council chose a new Special Rapporteur on Palestine an issue that has often been a rallying point for developing countries. The Advisory Group of five ambassadors representing each of the five regions of the world, but chaired by the Canadian Ambassador, proposed a person to the Council’s expert on Palestine based on the fact, which they put to paper, that the person had little experience with the Palestinian question. In other words, an expert was suggested because the alleged expert possessed no or little expertise. It was alleged at the time that the Canadian Ambassador exercised her influence over the drafting of the proposal. The proposal itself contravened the Institution-Building package that had been agreed in Council resolution 5/1. The saga eventually ended in a compromise candidate, but the damage had been done, the person with the highest degree of expertise and experience had been eliminated.

The examples of developing countries interfering with the integrity of the UN Human Rights Council are numerous. The common tread of these efforts at interference is that they are almost exclusively contrary to the interests of developing countries, especially African countries.

Nevertheless, it is a shame to be discussing developed countries as opposing developing countries. The Charter of the United Nations in fact calls for all countries to cooperate. But this ideal runs in the face of the reality of politics and the stark reality that the development strategies that have been deployed for the past half century have done relatively very little to provide for a more equitable world order.

Approximately 85% of the world continue to live on less than 10 USD per day and almost all live in developing countries. But event the 15% of the world’s population that live in developed countries aren’t even a good example. The consumptive-capitalist lifestyles of many developed countries has led to the rich getting richer and the poorest getting poorer.

At the same time, developed countries still drain human and natural resources from developing countries. For example, some West African countries struggling to combat Ebola were doing so when most of their doctors and nurses were living abroad having fled their own country for hefty salaries and higher standards of living being offered to them aboard. In stark contrast, when some of the most vulnerable Africans take their chances trying to get to Europe clandestinely, thousands are drown as Europe’s Coast Guards’ and Navies’ fail to take adequate humanitarian action to protect these migrants.

Viewing the way Africans have been treated within the UN it is hard to see much equity and little or no equality emerging in the international community. The message developed countries are sending to Africa seems to be: Either conform or perish.

Developed countries, however, may be sorely misinformed about Africans options. Africans have the option to fight for their own development, their rights, and that their continent be free from interference from the former colonialists and slave traders from Europe and the Americas. While Africans have suffered greatly they have also gained a resilience and a strength that is rarely found elsewhere. If developed countries don’t learn to share their wealth, their technology, and their capacity, one day it may literally be taken from them by the most resilient Africans. Perhaps this would be a fitting next chapter in a centuries old history of exploitation.

Indian Communism and Its Futures

Vijay Prashad

The beach at Visakhapatnam, the largest city in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, was a sea of red this Sunday. Over a hundred thousand communist activists and sympathizers of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI-M, gathered to conclude its 21^st Party Congress. The CPI-M is the largest and most significant Left party in India, although it has been in close alliance with other Left parties with a new emphasis on the creation of a platform of Left Unity.

The CPI-M gathered at a difficult time for the Indian people. Half of India’s 1.2 billion people live in conditions of deprivation. Government policy over the past three decades – inspired by the neoliberal policy slate – has produced a hostile environment for survival. A quarter of a million farmers and peasants have committed suicide across the country, a direct consequence of capitalist agriculture and an adverse global trade order. The current government of the Hindu Right is not only the complete inheritor of such harsh economic policies, but it has the added disadvantage of being culturally suffocating. Attacks on freedom of expression and speech as well as a spectrum of threats against cultural and religious difference have begun to mark the social landscape.

No political force apart from the Left has an alternative to this policy direction. The problem for the Left is that despite its acidic critique and its beneficial policy ideas, it does not have the power to implement these. It will require the growth of the Left across the country to be able to put neo-liberalism in its place and inaugurate an alternative policy trajectory for India.

On the beach at Vizag.

Resources

How should the Left build its bases across the country? Important institutions of working-class power, such as trade unions, have been on the back-foot through these thirty years. Harsh anti-labor judgments from the courts and anti-labor laws from the government came alongside a new landscape for production – now increasingly in fragmented factories with sub-contracted migrant workers. Trade union organizing is not easy in this environment – although the unions continue to bravely push on behalf of the workers. In early April, ten thousand construction and brick kiln workers – under the banner of the CPI-M’s Centre for Indian Trade Unions – marched on India’s parliament to put down its flag against the anti-labor policies.

In 2003, the CPI-M’s Central Committee noted that the inability to grow the farmers and agricultural organizations “constituted one of the most important weaknesses of the democratic movement in the country.” The CPI-M studied the reason why both the trade union and the agricultural workers unions had not been able to expand their influence amidst rising distress. Failure to address issues of caste and gender discrimination, the Central Committee found, “contributed to the slow growth of the movement.” One of the main resources for the Left has been to take up all the demands of the working-class, not only economic demands but also social and cultural demands. These fights are not secondary, but should be regarded as central to the culture of socialism. Struggles against caste and gender oppression “are part of the working class struggle against feudal, bourgeois and extra-economic forms of exploitation,” noted the CPI-M in 2002.

Over the part decades, the communist movement in India has thrown itself into the struggles to defend the gains of the working-class and to expand the social universe to include the dignity and cultures of the entire working class. Mass organizations of the CPI-M, such as the All-Indian Democratic Women’s Association (on which, see Elisabeth Armstrong’s Gender & Neoliberalism, 2013) and the Democratic Youth Federation of India, have been active in these arenas – as have specific communist organizations such as the Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front. These struggles against caste and gender hierarchies are the most important social struggles of our day, which are not merely about identity but always about dignity and survival, as well as the expansion of the imagination – the elements of socialism.

The new General Secretary of the CPI-M, Sitaram Yechury, said in his speech at the close of the Congress that it is imperative for the Left to take up these social fights, particularly the fights for the liberation ofdalits (the oppressed caste communities). An Organizational Plenum will be held later in the year to discuss concrete steps to build the organizational capacity of the CPI-M, which will of course have a major impact on the entire Left.

Communist march.

Realities

During the Congress, the municipal polls took place in Kolkata, capital of West Bengal, which for thirty years was the bastion of the Communists. Over the course of the past five years, the atmosphere in West Bengal has been corroded. The party that took power from the Left Front, the Trinamul Congress (TMC), has more iron in its soul than humanity. Violence against the Left activists and sympathizers has been commonplace. Not long ago, for instance, TMC thugs went on the rampage in Bhatar, Bardhwan district in West Bengal. They caught a few CPI-M workers, killing forty-eight year old Mangal Hembram. I had covered the violence in rural West Bengal during the 2014 parliamentary elections for CounterPunch (here and here). This is a continuation of that.

Violence during these polls has been deadly. Two senior CPI-M leaders (Subhash Mukhopadhyay and Manash Mukhopadyay) were beaten in Belgharia, while another party member, Nanda Bose, was attacked by a TMC mob. “They were carrying rods and sticks, even swords,” said Bose. An hour after the polls closed, a police sub-inspector was shot near Girish Park. The Chief Minister of West Bengal, the TMC’s Mamata Banerjee said that these were “small incidents at a few places.” The city’s main newspaper, however, said, “Barring a few pockets of the southern fringes, the Left watches helplessly as the TMC writ runs across Kolkata.” What does it mean to say that its “writ runs” over the city? That the TMC’s “domination of polling booths is either complete or near-complete.”

It is in this environment of extreme state hostility that the Left has to re-build its momentum. Matters are no less difficult in other parts of India. Building a Left is not the same as conducting a seminar. It requires a great deal of courage to confront the congealed institutions of Power, Property and Privilege. Errors shall be natural, as will a loss of hope. What this Congress of the CPI-M showed, however, is that millions of Indians are ready to continue to defend the rights of the working-class and to imagine an alternative for all of India. “When a woman holds the Red Flag,” said CPI-M leader Brinda Karat at the concluding rally, “no force can take it away from her. The Red Flag will be there in every place where adivasi (tribal) land is being snatched away. Today we renew our commitment to take forward the Left alternative to the people of India.”

The Most Outrageous Fraud Ever Perpetrated on the Canadian People

MURRAY DOBBIN

“Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nation’s laws.  Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation.”

—William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, 1935

Powell River, BC.

You know the old aphorism – “If a tree falls in the forest….?” Well, how about this one:  if citizens win a significant victory in court against an autocratic government involving the fleecing of Canadians of billions of their hard-earned tax dollars and no one in the media actually covers it, did it really happen?

That might well be the question being asked over at the Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER) a very small and low-budget think tank. With their lawyer Rocco Galati (of Supreme Court fame in the Nadon case) they have been steadily winning court battles initiated in 2011 that would oblige the Bank of Canada to return to its pre-1974 practice of lending the government money virtually (.37%) interest free. But the mainstream media, with a single exception, has boycotted the story. Galati believes the Harper government has done some serious arm-twisting to keep the story buried.

The good folks at COMER have for years – decades, actually – been trying to get people to pay attention to what is far and away the biggest, most outrageous fraud ever perpetrated on the Canadian people. I am speaking here of the fact that instead of the Canadian government borrowing money from its own bank, our bank – the Bank of Canada (BoC) – it has, since 1974 chosen instead to borrow from private international and domestic financial institutions providing them with enormous, absolutely risk free profits for almost four decades.

The result, according to economist Ellen Brown: “By 2012, the government had paid C$1 trillion in interest—twice its national debt. Interest on the debt is now the government’s single largest budget expenditure—larger than health care, senior entitlements or national defense.” In the early 1990s, at the height of the media’s deficit hysteria and rhetorical nonsense about hitting a “debt wall,” 91% of the $423 billion debt was due to interest charges. Our real debt – revenue minus expenditures – was just $37 billion.

COMER has been trying to draw attention to this outrageous situation for so long, and have been ignored for so long, that their campaign is often portrayed as an eccentric sidebar, complete with conspiracy theories, to what is happening in the real world. But if you think having squandered a trillion dollars that could have been spent on the public good is a side issue, feel free. And if you think conspiracy theories are unappealing then you’ll have to come up a compelling argument for a coincidence theory that explains why a nation would deliberately impoverish itself in the interests of international finance capital.

The Bank of Canada was established as a private bank in 1935 under private ownership but in 1938, recognizing that money should be created in the public interest, the government amended the Bank Act and turned the Bank into a public institution. The Bank was almost immediately harnessed to finance not only Canada’s war effort (we ranked fourth in production of allied war materiel) but a long list of infrastructure projects including the Trans-Canada highway, the St Lawrence Seaway, and over the decades, hospitals and universities across the country. It was mandated to lend not only to the federal government but to provinces and municipalities as well with a limit of one-third of federal budget and one-quarter of a province’s.

It also created a subsidiary, the Industrial Development Bank  helping create the industrial base that recent Liberal and Conservative governments have all but destroyed through trade and investment agreements. The list goes on and on – and includes social programs like the Old Age Security Act and programs to assist WW2 veterans with vocational training and subsidized farm land. The interest on its loans, of course, simply went back into government coffers.

But after nearly forty years of this incredibly productive use of publicly-created credit, unprecedented economic growth and increasing income equality, international finance got its chance to launch the free market counter-revolution against democratic governance. Stagflation –simultaneous stagnation, unemployment and inflation – was one of the first launching pads for Milton Friedman’s radical free market ideas: putting the creation of credit into private hands and creating debt burdens which would restrict the potential for democratic governance.

Freidman argued that stagflation was the direct result of irresponsible governments issuing too much money or borrowing recklessly from their central banks and sparking inflation. His radical free market ideology was shared by the Bank for International Settlements (the bank of central bankers)  and in 1974 it established a new committee, the Basel Committee, to establish global monetary and financial stability. Canada – that is the Pierre Trudeau Liberals –  joined in the deliberations. The committee’s solution was to encourage governments to borrow from private lenders and end the practice of borrowing interest-free from their own central banks. The rationale was thin from the start:  central bank borrowing was and is no more inflationary than borrowing through the private banks. The only difference was that private banks were given the legal right to fleece Canadians. The effect of the change was to effectively take a powerful economic tool out of the hands of democratic governments.

In 1974 Canada immediately stopped borrowing from the Bank of Canada launching the country on a deficit accumulation path that in 2012 saw interest payments to private lenders top $1 trillion. Fast forward to the present and the lawsuit which seeks to “restore the use of the Bank of Canada to its original purpose, by exercising its public statutory duty and responsibility. That purpose includes making interest free loans to the municipal/provincial/federal governments for “human capital” expenditures (education health, other social services) and / or infrastructure expenditures.”

The COMER suit goes beyond simply demanding that the BoC return to its former practice and original mandate (which was never repealed). It goes to the heart of the scheming of finance capital in the early 1970s when Western governments were becoming increasingly active socially and interventionist in their economies. COMER “…alleges that the Bank of Canada, the Queen, the attorney general, the finance minister, and minister of national revenue are engaging in a conspiracy with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Financial Stability Board (FSB), and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to undermine Canada’s financial and monetary sovereignty.”

Given the claim of a conspiracy one might have expected that the courts would agree with the federal government’s only defence to date: that the suit is frivolous and there is “no reasonable cause of action.” But clearly the facts of the case are so compelling that COMER and Galati keep winning. Not everything, as some of their claims (court costs for example) have been dismissed. But two courts have now refused to throw the case out.  The federal government could have appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada but had to file by the end of March. They didn’t.

For Galati that is a sweet victory because now the government will have to produce substantive arguments.  “They have to actually justify why they haven’t been giving interest-free loans to the government. They have to justify why the Minutes of these Meetings in Zurich are kept secret. They have to justify why the Minister of Revenue is not tabling the true figures of revenue coming in. They have to justify this in law.” Galati argues that not only may the BoC lend interest free to the government, it is obliged to.

Of all the destructive elements of so-called Washington Consensus (the name given to the free market counter-revolution launched in the mid-1970s) this one can actually be challenged in court. Free trade deals, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, privatization, the gutting of social programs, sweeping deregulation – all these either have been or would be deemed by the courts to be the purview of the legislative branch. But the very first initiative in this forty year assault on democracy may actually have breached the law. And the courts seem willing, so far, to agree that this possible breach has to be explained and justified.

Eco Economics Takes on Neoliberalism

Robert Hunziker

Ever since Milton Friedman, American economist (1912-2006), who considered himself the heir to Adam Smith, used the term neoliberalism in an essay “Neoliberalism and its Prospects” in 1951, the world has tilted in that direction, starting with Chile as the “Chicago Boys” lab experiment under the watchful eye of the infamous dictator General Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, president from 1974-90. The world has never been the same.

Today, neoliberalism reigns supreme across the oceans, whereby control of economic principles shifts from the public sector to the private sector with limited governmental interference, the less the better, open markets, free trade for all and deregulation piled upon deregulation as well as austerity for the masses (look at Greece and Spain for major pushback movements, happening today).

With neoliberalism, the market pretty much determines everything. When looked at from another angle, the world becomes a gigantic commoditized sphere spinning around the solar system, as markets set prices for everything, except for the biosphere, a very big “except for,” indeed.

Does it make sense to set prices for everything, except for the biosphere? Since everything, from wheat to space travel, is market-driven, why not the atmosphere, why not oceans, why not soil? Why leave the biosphere out of the realm of the market?

After all, since survival of the fittest is as old as nature, and since neoliberalism, in practice, dictates ‘survival of the fittest economics’ it mirrors nature’s behavior, although, as it happens in real life, neoliberalism is bottom-feeder economics whereby the rich accumulate more and more and more at the expense of lower and lower and lower wages, less benefits, and crushed self-esteem. What could be worse?

There is a better way, a sharper focus found within eco economics, which ties the whole picture together, the externalities outside of markets as well as everything inside markets, thus, integrating important externalities into the market system, e.g., biophysical limits.

As it goes, rather than contest capitalistic tendencies, which never budge, then join the party by recasting neoliberalism as eco economics wherein “natural capital” is an adjunct to labor and human-made capital.

After all, Earth is a finite planet consisting of natural capital, but breaching natural limits brings big trouble, as angst surfaces, morphing into eye-gouging battles and/or large-scale warfare.

The Ecological Footprint

“Ecological footprint can be represented as the aggregate area of land and water in various ecological categories that is claimed by participants in that economy to produce all the resources they consume, and to absorb all their wastes they generate on a continuous basis, using current technology,” Mathis Wackernagel and William E. Rees, Perceptual and Structural Barriers to Investing in Natural Capital: Economics from an Ecological Footprint Perspective, Ecological Economics 20, May 28, 1996.

“Ecological economists acknowledge that industrialized societies depend for survival not only on labor and human-made capital, but also on natural capital,” Ibid.

For example, a forest or a fishery is capable of producing a perpetual harvest, year after year. The forest or fish stock is the natural capital; the sustainable harvest is the natural income.

However, natural capital is not simply an inventory of resources. It is all of the components of the ecosphere, including the structural relationships that make life possible. Natural capital is defined by Sir John Richard Hicks, British economist, 1904-1989, Hicksian natural capital, bringing forth Hicksian natural income, which is the level of consumption that can be sustained from one period to another period without reducing natural wealth, which is key to successful eco economics.

“Our problem is that the capital we have endeavored to maintain intact is humanly created capital only. The category ‘natural capital’ is left out. Indeed it is left out by definition as long as one defines capital as (humanly) produced means of production,”
Herman E. Daly, et al, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, Beacon Press Books, 1994.

By studying the makeup of natural capital, estimates of its ecological footprint and its appropriate carrying capacity indicate whether consumption levels can be sustained via the store of available ecological productivity.

For example, the average person in an industrialized country requires the equivalent of 2-5 hectares (5-12 acres) of productive land to sustain material consumption, derived by resource flows contained in goods and services. However, there are only 1.5 hectares per capita of ecologically productive land on the planet (World Resources Institute).

Ipso facto, there is a sustainability gap, which helps to explain why natural capital depletion is ongoing rather than a sustainable flow of natural capital. In fact, rough calculations “suggest the ecological footprint of all industrial nations, representing less than 20% of the world population, is larger than the available ecologically productive land on Earth (Wackernagel and Rees).

In other words, 20% of the world’s population consumes 100% of the ecological productive capital of the planet, beyond which natural capital goes into deficit, helping to clarify why 2.7 billion people live on $2 per day (source: World Bank), equivalent to one trip to Starbuck’s per day, almost.

“It is simply not possible… for everybody in the world to consume at current industrial levels without risking irreversible resource depletion and ecosphere collapse,” (Wackernagel).

Globalism and self-interests, as embodied, and emboldened, within the tenets of neoliberalism, are dominant factors in the depletion of natural capital, underscoring a particularly pernicious form of market failure as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” effectively maximizes material well-being in an unlimited natural environment, whereas in a finite system like the ecosphere, the competition inherent with the invisible hand serves as a force of destruction.

Aggravating matters, “globalization” implicitly assumes an infinite world, which it is not. Furthermore, and unfortunately, humankind does not succor natural capital.

Eco economics seeks (1) sustainable scale, (2) fair distribution of resources, and (3) efficient allocation (Robert Costanza, Gund Professor of Ecological Economics, Univ. of Vermont, at Yale School of Management, Interview, May 2010).

Neoliberalism does not measure up to Costanza’s standards, rather, it instigates a ‘scorched earth’ modus operandi driven by unrelenting forces of profit for the sake of profits, forgetting sustainable scale, forgetting fair distribution of resources, forgetting efficient allocation.

As a result of the laser-like focus on profits, a win or lose proposition arises, emphasizing neoliberalism’s failure to recognize the scale of a finite planet. Biophysical limits should restrain certain activities, like, for example, industrial drift net fishing techniques (banned but still practiced with certain alternations), whereby nets extend as far as 30 miles, entrapping and killing every living creature of nature’s capital in sight.

Additionally, neoliberalism does not take into account fair distribution of income. But, research has proven that the more unequal income becomes, the less productive the economy. In that regard, mainstream economics is focused on “having more” with the idea that there is more to spread around. However, that “trickle down” theory is a myth. The one percent proves it by capturing and hoarding enormous disproportionate amounts of capital (it’s why there’re called “the one percent”), creating competing groups within society, placing society at odds with itself.

Social externality: e.g. buying a bigger house to compete with other bigger houses creates a ripple effect of others competing and buying bigger homes (keeping up with the Joneses), thus, over-extending themselves, as a result, working harder to support an upscale lifestyle well beyond natural limits. As it happens, often times quality of life actually suffers rather than improves.

To counter the insatiable consumerism compulsion of “buying for glory,” a social externality that drains nature’s capital, Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell, suggests a progressive consumption tax. Luxury costs more whereas investing in socially productive items means no tax at all.

As for example, under sustainability theory, Wal-Mart’s sustainability would consist of 100% renewable energy, zero waste, and selling products that sustain both people and environment. Imagine the quantities of frivolous merchandise that would be eliminated with likely scaled-down stores.

In nature things do not grow forever, if otherwise, sunflowers would grow into the clouds and we’d have 900-pound hamsters, which conversely grow into a “steady state,” staying small. If economies follow the course of nature, growth stages would compensate by moving into a steady state, like all natural systems. This means the end of cutthroat competition to grow, grow, grow; alternatively, going into cooperation and collaboration for a steady state of development, a sustainable ecosphere.

One solution to neoliberalism’s cutthroat principles is common asset trusts as imagined by Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize, American political economist (1933-2012), Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press, 1990, demonstrating how common property could be successfully managed by user associations, making the atmosphere an asset with property rights on behalf of the global community. Anyone who damages the global property is charged for damage, which provides legal justification for carbon tax, which tax is used to pay a dividend to all of the owners (also advocated by Dr. James Hansen, a leading expert on climate change), also helping solve the distribution issue. Additionally, set up ocean trusts, watershed trusts, etc.

An interesting comparison/contrasting case study of allocation of resources is the ‘08 financial meltdown when trillions were spent to save finance, i.e., Wall Street, commercial banks and large insurers. So, why not spend trillions on sustainable future with an ecological consumption tax to supplement the income tax to help finance ecological sustainability? If spending trillions of taxpayer’s money saves Wall Street, then, what of the ecosphere, which is the basic infrastructure, the one and only basic infrastructure, behind everything neoliberalism strives to accomplish?

At the end of the day, it is believed that in a world where degradation of nature is no longer free, no free get out of jail cards allowed, sustainable goods will cost less, and gain market share and become profitable. Nobody should profit from degradation of nature’s capital. Nevertheless, that’s what’s happening right now.

Big Tobacco Increases Investment in Developing World

Cesar Chelala

Facing greater restriction in the USA and other industrialized countries, international tobacco companies are increasingly marketing their products in developing countries, particularly among women and adolescents.

As many developed countries around the world, including the UK, introduce tighter restrictions on tobacco sales, the billionaire and former Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, has told the BBC of his determination to combat the spread of smoking in poorer countries. “We are in this to help countries that cannot defend themselves against an industry that is trying to kill one billion people this century. If that is not a noble cause I don’t know what it is,” said Bloomberg.

While smoking rates in some industrialized countries are decreasing at about 1% a year, those in developing countries are increasing at around 3% per year. It is estimated that, if current trends persist for the next 30 years, seven million people from developing countries will die every year from smoking-related diseases.

For the past several years, international corporations such as Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, and British-American Tobacco have been expanding rapidly in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Tobacco-provoked deaths can only add to the inequities in health of ethnic and minority populations. Jeanette Noltenius, an expert on tobacco and alcohol abuse issues, stated, “In the US, minorities such as Hispanics have been specifically targeted by the tobacco companies since the early 1960s, and have received a double dose of advertising (in Spanish and English).”

According to data from the Bureau of Census, US Department of Commerce, Latino smoking youth will triple in size in 2020 in the U.S., increasing from 9% of the national youth population to 19%.
Since the early 1980s, US trade officials, with help from the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), have led a sustained campaign to open markets in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand among the Asian nations.

In Taiwan, US officials’ efforts to force Taiwan to open its markets to US tobacco products have resulted in increased smoking, particularly among women and children. Talking about US government support for American tobacco companies, a corporation executive remarked, ‘We expect such support. That’s why we vote them in.’

These actions have prompted the Asia-Pacific Association for the Control of Tobacco to protest strongly at what they consider an invasion of their countries by US companies targeting Asian women and children. The Association has complained about the strong-arm tactics used by US government officials in their countries. A report from the US General Accounting Office established that ‘US policy and programs for assisting the export of tobacco and tobacco products work at cross purposes to US health policy initiatives, both domestically and internationally’.

Several studies have shown that in the poorest households in developing countries 10 percent or more of the total household expenditure is on tobacco. As a result, there is less money to spend on some basic items such as food, education and health care needs, thus increasing malnutrition, illiteracy and premature death.

In China, tobacco companies have been moving steadily inland with intense promotional campaigns. It is estimated that of the world’s 1.71 billion smokers, more than 350 million are in China, where lung cancer has been increasing at a rate of 4.75% a year.

The Chinese government is facing the dilemma of promoting tobacco cessation policies while it is heavily dependent on earnings from the state-run monopoly tobacco company. However, researchers with the School of Public Health at the University of California state that raising the tobacco tax fifteen cents per cigarette pack could save more than 13 million lives and generate $9.5 billion in revenue for the Chinese government.

Lured by financial gains from growing tobacco, millions of hectares in China are presently under cultivation. Gains from the sale of tobacco, however, may be just short-term, since the costs of treating lung cancer and other related diseases amply exceed the tobacco profits. According to experts, those excess costs are $200 billion annually on a global scale, one-third of which is incurred by developing countries.

While anti-smoking efforts gather momentum in the USA, those efforts are far less effective in developing countries. Such countries’ policies will not be as effective unless transnational tobacco firms are made to limit their aggressive advertisements.

Countries in Asia and Latin America are conducting health-education campaigns and have passed legislation to control smoking. Up to now, several countries worldwide have enacted legislation to control tobacco consumption. Although in general this legislation has been passed at the national level, in the USA, Canada, and in several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean these laws are being enacted by state or local bodies.

Despite increasing condemnation by public health officials and the World Health Organization (WHO), international companies continue with their indiscriminate tobacco-promotional efforts in developing countries, at a high human cost. As things stand now, only a multidisciplinary strategy including education, taxation, legislation, and regulation of trade practices of transnational corporations will be able to control this pandemic.

“Libertarians” For Ethnic Cleansing

Kevin Carson

Usually when right-libertarians defend gentrification, they do so by framing it as an entirely spontaneous free market phenomenon, and minimizing or ignoring the state’s role in promoting it. That’s bad enough. But we don’t usually expect them to come out explicitly in favor of direct state intervention to evict poor people for the sake of promoting business interests. Walter Block doesn’t do things by halves, though (“Gentrification Makes the World a Better Place,” LewRockwell.com, Feb. 9).

He starts out by defending gentrification as a simple manifestation of autonomous market preferences, of course. The gentrifier does, he admits, drive existing residents — sometimes third or fourth-generation residents — out of their homes. They are forced to retreat to “less preferred real estate. We know this since if they liked their new domiciles more than their previous ones, they would have already moved there, without any pressure being placed on the market by the new gentry.” And the homes they’re driven from “are part of neighborhoods, communities, associations. They have a history there. Their children are wrenched away from their friends.”

But, says Block, so what? Gentrifiers do all these awful things entirely by trying to rent or purchase real estate in a neighborhood, “thus bidding up rents and sales prices higher than would otherwise exist.”

Is this unfair? he asks. “Certainly not. Assume that the rich came by their wealth in an honest way, not through government grants of special privileges, subsidies, bail-outs, a la crony capitalism, but via laissez faire capitalism.” Having thus assumed away the entire real world of privilege enjoyed by actually existing rich people, and the fact that local governments are nothing but showcase properties of the local real estate interests, Block goes on to argue that anything short of inequality and merciless gentrification would be grossly unfair to the rich, because they “have contributed more to everyone else than the poor.”

After this display of pathos on behalf of the poor, suffering rich folks, I halfway expect (with apologies to Blazing Saddles) one of Block’s graduate assistants to step in with “I sure hate to see you like this, Boss. Would it make you feel any better if I was to go and shoot them poor people dead?”

Block doesn’t go quite that far, but he does include in his list of gentrification examples (alongside college students “who often have more money to spend than the people they replace”) the wholesale eviction of poor people from their neighborhoods for the sake of projects like World’s Fairs and the Olympics. In cities that host the Olympics, he notes matter-of-factly, “people are moved en masse to make way for the new stadiums, swimming pools, ball fields, etc…. They, too, export inhabitants with a long history, willy nilly. They, too, eradicate cultures and communities that were thriving before the rampage took place.”

Block neglects to mention that all these things “happen” with the very active involvement of local government using eminent domain to demolish entire neighborhoods (mostly inhabited by poor people of color); we recently saw an example in Brazil, with demolition of favelas for the World Cup on a scale that would put Israel’s operations on the West Bank to shame. The ethnic cleansing extends further, to driving away street vendors and sweeping homeless people out of sight. Olympics bureaucrats are treated like foreign conquerors, with entire lanes of the freeway system closed off for their personal use (if you don’t believe it, just check out the International Olympic Committee’s list of demands for royal treatment in the event Boston is chosen to host the 2024 Summer Olympics).

Block writes that anti-gentrifiers, in attempting to suppress our natural “tendency to truck and barter,” display an ignorance of Adam Smith. But Smith also wrote of the Whig landed oligarchs of his day that landlords “love to reap where they have not sown.” In failing to recognize gentrification as an example of this, Block displays his own ignorance.