Why are Certain NGOs Trying to Condemn Rural Residents to an Even Longer Pesticide Fate?

Georgina Downs

When I first started the UK Pesticides Campaign 17 years ago in 2001 I did so largely because I had discovered that there was no specific representation in the UK for rural residents and communities exposed to the vast cocktails of poisons sprayed on crops.

As a resident myself directly affected from pesticide spraying in my locality I had started to attend various conferences and meetings on pesticides and whilst NGOs and environmental groups would make the odd comment here and there about operators health, environmental impacts, or pesticide residues in food, there was no mention of the risks and adverse health impacts for rural residents and communities across the UK.

So began almost two decades so far of doing my upmost–in often very difficult circumstances–to ensure the voices of residents and communities directly affected by one of the biggest public health scandals of our time were heard at every possible turn.

Synthetic chemical pesticides were originally developed as chemical warfare agents in the 1930s and 1940s, but then astonishingly re-manufactured as agricultural pesticides. These highly toxic chemicals have been used in UK farming for around 75 years and are increasingly relied upon by conventional (ie. non-organic) farmers and growers.

Agriculture now accounts for more than 70% of land use in the UK, and has a major influence on our health and environment. Considering that currently only around 3% of farmland in the UK is organic, then the vast majority of the 70% of land that is used in the UK for agriculture will be land that is regularly sprayed with synthetic chemical pesticides under the existing conventional food and farming production system.

From the outset of such pesticide use in farming there has always been a catastrophic failure to protect rural communities from the use of these poisons in the locality of where we live and breathe. Despite a number of significant UK Pesticides Campaign victories and achievements in both the UK and in Europe (including, amongst others, stronger requirements for the protection of residents in EU laws; ensuring residents are now legally defined as a “vulnerable group”recognised as having “high pesticide exposure over the long term”; ensuring that new exposure and risk assessment specifications for residents and bystanders are included in, most importantly, EU Commission Regulation 284/2013), the widespread poisoning of rural residents still continues unabated.

The fact that the chemical poisoning of innocent rural citizens was ever permitted in the first place – let alone to continue for over three quarters of a century with no action – is a national disgrace. (In fact, as this public health scandal also goes on in the majority of other countries around the world then it is indeed an international disgrace!)

Known adverse impacts of pesticides

The dangers of pesticides can clearly be seen on the manufacturers product data sheets themselves that carry various warnings such as “Very toxic by inhalation,” “Do not breathe spray; fumes; vapour,” “Risk of serious damage to eyes,” “Harmful, possible risk of irreversible effects through inhalation,” “May cause cancer by inhalation,” andeven“May be fatal if inhaled.”

Cornell University’s teaching module ‘Toxicity of Pesticides’clearly states that,

“Pesticides can: cause deformities in unborn offspring (teratogenic effects), cause cancer (carcinogenic effects), cause mutations (mutagenic effects), poison the nervous system (neurotoxicity), or block the natural defenses of the immune system (immunotoxicity).”It goes on to warn that “Irreversible effects are permanent and cannot be changed once they have occurred. Injury to the nervous system is usually irreversible since its cells cannot divide and be replaced. Irreversible effects include birth defects, mutations, and cancer.”

It is therefore beyond dispute that agricultural pesticides can cause a wide range of both acute and chronic adverse health impacts. This includes irreversible/permanent chronic effects, illnesses and diseases.Whilst operators generally have protection when using agricultural pesticides – such as use of personal protective equipment, respirators, and will be in filtered cabs – residents and communities have absolutely no protection at all.

The former Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in a 1975 document stated that, “The repeated use of pesticides, even in small quantities, can have cumulative effects which may not be noticed until a dangerous amount has been absorbed.”

This clear statement from 43 years ago shows that successive Governments’ have always been well aware of the cumulative effects of pesticides, but again no action has been taken to secure the health of rural families.

There are many thousands of reports of acute and/or chronic health impacts from rural residents across the UK. Obviously with millions of rural residents exposed in crop sprayed areas there will undoubtedly be many more unreported cases. The most common chronic long-term effects, illnesses and diseases reported from residents include neurological conditions such as neurological damage, Parkinson’s disease, Motor Neurone Disease, as well as various cancers, especially those of the breast and brain, leukaemia, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, amongst many other chronic conditions.

Nearly 6000 people – the majority of which are affected UK residents–have signed a petition calling on the Prime Minister and DEFRA Secretary to urgently secure the protection of rural residents and communities by banning all crop spraying and use of any pesticides near residents’ homes, schools, and children’s playgrounds. This must be in substantial distances, as small buffer zones simply won’t protect anyone considering how far pesticides are known to travel. For example, scientific studies have found pesticides miles away from where they were originally applied and calculated health risks for rural residents and communities living within those distances.

A number of recent major international reports have also detailed the damage to human health from existing industrial and chemical-intensive conventional farming systems:

+ The United Nations report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food in March 2017 that found that chronic exposure to agricultural pesticides has been associated with several diseases and conditions including cancer, developmental disorders, and sterility, and that those living near crop fields are particularly vulnerable to exposure from these chemicals;

+ The IPES-FOOD report that outlines the unacceptable harm caused by the current chemical farming systems; exposes just some of the astronomical health costs externalized by the current system; and finds an urgent and “overwhelming case for action.” The report found that many of the severest health conditions afflicting populations around the world – from respiratory diseases to a range of cancers – are linked to industrial food and farming practices, including chemical-intensive agriculture;

+ The Lancet Commission on pollution and health report on the global deaths and chronic diseases from outdoor air pollution, and which included from the use of pesticides. In fact the lead author was reported as saying that his biggest concern is the impact of the hundreds of industrial chemicals and pesticides already widely dispersed around the world.

Unarguable case

The evidence of harm to both human health and the environment – as itis also well established that pesticides cause substantial damage and pollution to water quality and safety, to biodiversity etc – from the use of pesticides in agriculture is simply unarguable.

Further, the widespread damage that chemical pesticides cause has massive economic, societal and financial implications for all parties, with the exception of the pesticides industry! In relation to some of the already known environmental costs of pesticide use in the UK, it has been estimated to cost £140 million per year removing pesticides from drinking water, and around £4.75 million for monitoring pesticides at 2500 surface and groundwater sites, and £5.4 million for pesticide monitoring in both food and livestock.

Obviously it goes without saying that the personal and human costs to all those suffering from devastating chronic health conditions – including loss of lives – and the impacts on those around them cannot be calculated in financial terms.

Decades of weak and inadequate NGO measures

With all the existing evidence of harm that exists to human health–as well as other species such as bees and birds–and to the environment from the use of pesticides in our food production system, why do certain NGOs and so-called environmental groups such as the Pesticide Action Network (PAN UK) and Sustain continue to call for weak, compromising, and wholly inadequate measures (eg. merely reducing the use of these poisons in farming, reliance on IPM – which is a system that still uses pesticides etc.)?

These NGOs have always been notorious for merely tinkering at the edges of the agricultural pesticide problem, but actually it runs far deeper than that, as by ignoring all the evidence that already exists for action to be taken and saying evidence is needed to ‘make a case’ for action what these NGOs are in fact doing is not only misleading but highly damaging and would condemn us rural residents to an even longer pesticide fate!

Further, the pesticides reduction target advocated by PAN UK, Sustain, other NGOs and affiliates, sends out completely the wrong message, as it is saying that it is okay to use these poisons in farming but just a bit less! When it was never okay to use such toxic chemicals for food production and certainly not for spraying in the locality of innocent rural residents and communities and which includes babies, children, pregnant woman, the elderly, those already ill and/or disabled, amongst other vulnerable groups.

For PAN UK to recently tweet that such a reduction target–and that merely reduces the use of these toxic chemicals–would then be able to deliver a ‘truly sustainable, environmentally friendly, green UK food growing system’ is simply not true, as using such poisons in any capacity cannot be described as sustainable, environmentally friendly or green! As a fellow rural resident, Barbara Robinson, tweeted in response “reduction of pesticide use – inadequate – a poison is a poison no matter how little.” 

It has been reported recently that the agriculture pesticides reduction target in France, along with a pesticides tax (and which again both originated from NGO recommendations) has been a complete failure, as agricultural pesticide use on crops has overall increased over the last decade not decreased! Thus various commentators are quite rightly saying that such inadequate measures have wasted those 10 years.

The weak and inadequate measures proposed by NGOs–often in the name of so-called ‘strategy’–has been a common feature throughout my campaign for real change.

Take for example the ludicrous 5 metre buffer zone recommendation from a then employee of PAN UK to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) in its 2004/5 enquiry and that had been requested by the Minister Alun Michael as a result of my campaign representations. It was groundbreaking for a DEFRA Minister to have gone over the heads of its own Government regulators and pesticide scientific advisors to invite the RCEP to examine not only the issues my campaign had been raising but also the responses to those issues from those same regulators and scientific advisors.

So, although the RCEP report heavily criticised the Government, its regulators and advisors, over its policy failings and for failing to protect rural residents from the health risks of pesticides–and vindicating me and my campaign arguments in the process -the report then contradicted its own findings and was completely undermined by including the 5 metre buffer zone recommendation, as anyone with any knowledge of the dispersion, volatilisation, and the long range transportation of pesticides of many miles would know that such a small distance was not going to be able to protect anyone

Pesticides Forum fiasco

Then in 2012 I spotted that various NGOs including PAN UK and Sustain had been signing up to year after year grossly inaccurate statements in the annual Pesticides Forum reports–and that DEFRA Ministers also rely on to inform them of pesticide harms–including that “the use of pesticides is not adversely impacting on the health of UK citizens or the environment.” After I spotted this the NGOs concerned went into panic mode and hastily tried to distance themselves after publication from the then most recent 2011 report, even though they had already signed up to it before its publication!

In any event trying to subsequently distance themselves from that one report couldn’t excuse the fact that they had signed up to the same erroneous and outrageous statements in all the Pesticides Forum reports since at least 2008 with no dissenting from either before or after publication.

The 2008 Pesticides Forum report was even more infuriating for me personally as at the same time that I had put in a herculean effort working day and night–and spending tens of thousands of pounds in the process–to secure a resounding landmark High Court victory on all 4 grounds against the UK Government over its failure to protect rural residents and communities from pesticides and in which the High Court Judge concluded that there was “solid evidence that residents have suffered harm to their health”, these NGOs were signing up to statements that blatantly denied that the use of agricultural pesticides adversely impacted the health of UK citizens or the environment.

I was absolutely right to expose what was going on with the Pesticides Forum reports, and am led to understand it resulted in various changes regarding the Forum. Indeed Matt Shardlow, the Chief Executive of one of the NGOs involved Buglife conceded in a recent tweet “Of course you did a good thing and I admire your tenacity.”However, I have continued to have to incur the wrath of a number of the other NGOs–and those who work for them–that were involved in the Pesticides Forum debacle as a result.

Yet I will continue to speak up and speak out when I see anything that risks the necessary and long overdue action for rural residents and communities being taken. I did not enter this field of work to win a popularity contest, nor to further my career, or to receive a hefty wage packet (for the record I have never taken a wage in all the 17 years of running the campaign and work entirely voluntarily). As I purely entered the arena out of necessity because no one else was then–or still is now–representing in any other national campaign us residents and communities directly affected in the UK.

Ignoring the existing evidence

The key question is why do certain NGOs continue to push such weak and inadequate measures when it comes to agricultural pesticides? Why are they seemingly ignoring the existing evidence when calling for further research, monitoring, and mere reduction, all of which delay any concrete action to truly protect human health and the environment from pesticides being taken and indeed, as can be seen with the use of agricultural pesticides in France, could delay such action for many years, even decades, to come.

Just to add that regarding monitoring, under existing pesticide laws no pesticide is supposed to be approved for use if it has not been established that there will be no immediate or delayed harm to human health. Therefore it should not be the case that toxic chemicals are approved and then monitoring reports the damage, but that any chemical that poses a risk to human health is not approved in the first place. The principal aim of pesticide policy is clearly based on the risk of harm–not that harm has to have already occurred–and so no one should be put at risk of harm from pesticides.

If there is harm–which of course there is–then the necessary action is supposed to be taken by the Government to immediately stop that harm (eg. by prohibiting use) and not just reducing such harm, as the NGOs PAN UK and Sustain have been wrongly stating.

In stark contrast to the inadequate measures PAN UK advocates regarding the use of pesticides in agriculture the NGO has taken a far stronger stance on the non-agricultural use of pesticides where it has called for a ban on such use. Yet the non-agricultural use of pesticides is only around 4% of the annual pesticide use in this country compared to the whopping 80% used each year in relation to agriculture which is by far and away the largest sector and for which, not surprising, the majority of adverse human health impacts are reported. That is not to say non-agricultural use is not important to tackle, it is more the question why such NGOs are so dismally weak in comparison when it comes to the biggest user of these poisons in the UK and which are used in untested and innumerable cocktails (whereas the non-agricultural sector predominantly uses a small handful of pesticides and which are usually used individually) and for which untold damage to both human health and the wider environment has already taken place.

Ignoring the law

I have previously raised PAN UK’s differential strength of position between the non-agricultural and agricultural use of pesticides with various members of PAN UK in the past. For example, I once asked Nick Mole in an email–and that was copied to a few other fellow campaigners–why PAN UK was backing the seriously erroneous interpretation by the UK Government that Article 12(a) of the EU Sustainable Use Directive did not include the agricultural use of pesticides when it clearly does by any proper reading of it. Indeed the European Commission has recently confirmed to me in writing that there is no legal reason why agricultural application should be excluded from the provisions of Article 12.

So why did PAN UK back the UK Government and industry position that Article 12(a) was only referring to non-agricultural use? Nick Mole of PAN UK said it was “strategy” as non-agricultural use was simpler “in terms of trying to win this particular argument.” So never mind what the legal requirements are then! He then went on to say that including agricultural pesticide use “complicates the matter” and “who will compensate for the large area of land that would not allowed to be sprayed on”. Any resident hearing that and knowing what so many rural families have had to endure from regular exposure to the cocktails of poisonous chemicals sprayed in our localities would point out that it is not about who is going to compensate the farmers for not being able to spray poisons in our air and surrounding environment, but who is going to compensate all the innocent people who have been harmed by this ongoing chemical warfare in the countryside!

It is a criminal offence to knowingly expose someone to poison so there should never have been any exemption on that regarding agriculture and it needs urgently rectifying.

No compromising on public health protection

These are just a few of the many examples that will no doubt explain why my independent campaign does not really associate with certain NGOs and why I have been absolutely right to continue to question and call out their actions, and which risk the necessary and long overdue action for rural residents and communities being taken.

Inevitably, as a result of me speaking up and speaking out there have been various attempts by such NGOs to blatantly misrepresent both me and my campaign. Most commonly the NGOs wrongly say that I don’t cooperate, when in fact it is that I quite rightly do not compromise, and the residents and communities who continue to contact me certainly do not want to see their representative campaign compromise on the action that is needed to provide proper protection for all our families’ health and lives.

Considering all the hard work and efforts and sacrifices made over the last two decades in fighting for proper action and protections from pesticides–especially considering the chronic health problems I have to live with on a daily basis–then it is obviously hugely dismaying when NGOs–who often have no direct experience of the problem–fail to present accurate facts of the true dire state of affairs we are in as a result of the vast damage crop pesticides are already known to be causing to both people and planet.

This is not a game, as these are real human lives we are talking about here.For over 7 decades successive Governments’ have shamefully–and quite frankly criminally–sanctioned the widespread exposure of rural residents and communities to the cocktails of poisons sprayed on crops in our localities. This has to stop and the necessary action taken not mere half measures and compromises that won’t solve anything. We are way past ‘starting points’, which is another term so favoured by numerous NGOs – none of which of course would be directly affected by the inadequate measures they advocate, as they would continue to exist, get their wages paid, get their funding coming in etc., (including for some of these NGOs from the Government itself, as many NGOs have received funding from the Government, and over many years). Yet it will continue to directly affect the many millions of rural residents living in the locality of sprayed crops.

If all these NGOs in the UK actually stood up and shouted the truth from the rafters that the use of poisons in farming is a public health scandal, is unacceptable, and that definitive long overdue urgent action needs to be taken to truly protect human health and the environment then it might well help force such action through. But by continuing to push weak and inadequate measures–such as further research, monitoring, IPM, taxes, mere reduction–none of which will be able to protect either human health or the environment then they are doing a huge disservice to all those who are actually affected by the use of these poisons in our food and farming production system, as well as a disservice to those members of the public who donate to their organisations wrongly thinking that they are actually calling for an end to the use of pesticides in agriculture.

When these NGOs do call for a ban on any pesticides in agriculture it is usually just one individual pesticide such as glyphosate or individual group of pesticides such as neonicotinoids. And even then for glyphosate a number of these NGOs only called for it to be banned for non-agricultural use and regarding agriculture only when it was related to pre-harvest use. Thus all the agricultural use of glyphosate outside of that was simply ignored by a number of NGOs, despite the fact that it is used most widely in agriculture!

In any event focusing calls for action on individual pesticides completely misses the bigger picture and falls into the divide and rule strategy. Those of us residents living in the locality of crop fields and who are in the direct pesticides firing line know only too well that such a strategy is simply not going to prevent the legacy of damage that is being caused by the innumerable cocktails of pesticide poisons sprayed on crops. Particularly as historically once one pesticide has been withdrawn another toxic chemical pesticide will just be introduced in its place. How does that solve anything? The answer is simple, it doesn’t.

Non-chemical farming

The 2017 UN Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food concluded that moving away from pesticide-reliant industrial agriculture to non-chemical farming methods should now be a political priority in all countries globally.

Further, rather surprisingly but most certainly welcome by rural communities was the recent comment made by DEFRA’s own Chief Scientific Advisor that pesticides need to be designed out of farming systems. When I highlighted this comment at a meeting with DEFRA Minister George Eustice last month he said he agreed with that position.

Yet the UK’s new Agriculture Bill that is currently before the Commons–having just finished its stint before the Public Bill Committee–certainly does not reflect this position.

So here’s hoping that Parliamentarians in the Commons and Lords will amend the Agriculture Bill to reflect the health and environmental protections that are so urgently needed, as the new post Brexit UK agricultural bill and policy provides a real opportunity for the UK to clean up agriculture once and for all and adopt a non-chemical farming policy in order to no longer use toxic chemicals in the production of our food. This would then protect not only the health of rural residents and communities, as well as other members of the public, but also the environment, wildlife, pollinators, and other species.

The origins of traditional farming methods did not include dependence on chemical inputs for mass production. Such poisons should never have had any place in the air we breathe, food we eat, and environment we live in.

Therefore it is a complete paradigm shift that is needed to move away from the use of pesticides in farming/agriculture altogether. Such a move is absolutely integral to the health and existence of all those living in the British countryside, as well as other species that are being wiped out from the continued use of such toxic chemicals.

The chemical warfare in the countryside under the guise of ‘conventional farming’ has to stop–and not just a bit less–for the protection of us all now, and for future generations.

Now is the time for rural residents and communities to speak out as loudly as we can and contact our MPs, as we cannot let anyone–whether it be pesticide companies, NFU, or indeed certain NGOs–silence our voice! Don’t let anyone else dictate our fate!

The UK Pesticides Campaign’s written evidence regarding the Agriculture Bill can be seen here. Please write to MPs asking them to support amendments for the inclusion of the following two crucial commitments and actions in the Agriculture Bill: 1) there is an urgent need to secure protection for rural residents and communities from pesticides; and 2) the need to adopt and utilise a truly sustainable non-chemical farming system for the overall protection of human health and the environment.

To sign the petition to the Prime Minister Theresa May, and DEFRA Secretary Michael Gove, to ban all crop spraying of poisonous pesticides near residents homes, schools, and playgrounds see here.

Neoliberalism’s Dark Path to Fascism

Chris Hedges

Neoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity. It had as much validity as past ruling ideologies such as the divine right of kings and fascism’s belief in the Übermensch. None of its vaunted promises were even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism and destroys democracy. You do not need to slog through the 577 pages of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” to figure this out. But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the restoration of class power.

As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism was a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and shut out of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman were groomed in places such as the University of Chicago and given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand. Once we knelt before the dictates of the marketplace and lifted government regulations, slashed taxes for the rich, permitted the flow of money across borders, destroyed unions and signed trade deals that sent jobs to sweatshops in China, the world would be a happier, freer and wealthier place. It was a con. But it worked.

“It’s important to recognize the class origins of this project, which occurred in the 1970s when the capitalist class was in a great deal of difficulty, workers were well organized and were beginning to push back,” said David Harvey, the author of “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” when we spoke in New York. “Like any ruling class, they needed ruling ideas. So, the ruling ideas were that freedom of the market, privatization, entrepreneurialism of the self, individual liberty and all the rest of it should be the ruling ideas of a new social order, and that was the order that got implemented in the 1980s and 1990s.”

“As a political project, it was very savvy,” he said. “It got a great deal of popular consent because it was talking about individual liberty and freedom, freedom of choice. When they talked about freedom, it was freedom of the market. The neoliberal project said to the ’68 generation, ‘OK, you want liberty and freedom? That’s what the student movement was about. We’re going to give it to you, but it’s going to be freedom of the market. The other thing you’re after is social justice—forget it. So, we’ll give you individual liberty, but you forget the social justice. Don’t organize.’ The attempt was to dismantle those institutions, which were those collective institutions of the working class, particularly the unions and bit by bit those political parties that stood for some sort of concern for the well-being of the masses.”

 “The great thing about freedom of the market is it appears to be egalitarian, but there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals,” Harvey went on. “It promises equality of treatment, but if you’re extremely rich, it means you can get richer. If you’re very poor, you’re more likely to get poorer. What Marx showed brilliantly in volume one of ‘Capital’ is that freedom of the market produces greater and greater levels of social inequality.”

The dissemination of the ideology of neoliberalism was highly organized by a unified capitalist class. The capitalist elites funded organizations such as the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce and think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation to sell the ideology to the public. They lavished universities with donations, as long as the universities paid fealty to the ruling ideology. They used their influence and wealth, as well as their ownership of media platforms, to transform the press into their mouthpiece. And they silenced any heretics or made it hard for them to find employment. Soaring stock values rather than production became the new measure of the economy. Everything and everyone were financialized and commodified.

“Value is fixed by whatever price is realized in the market,” Harvey said. “So, Hillary Clinton is very valuable because she gave a lecture to Goldman Sachs for $250,000. If I give a lecture to a small group downtown and I get $50 for it, then obviously she is worth much more than me. The valuation of a person, of their content, is valued by how much they can get in the market.”

“That is the philosophy that lies behind neoliberalism,” he continued. “We have to put a price on things. Even though they’re not really things that should be treated as commodities. For instance, health care becomes a commodity. Housing for everybody becomes a commodity. Education becomes a commodity. So, students have to borrow in order to get the education which will get them a job in the future. That’s the scam of the thing. It basically says if you’re an entrepreneur, if you go out there and train yourself, etc., you will get your just rewards. If you don’t get your just rewards, it’s because you didn’t train yourself right. You took the wrong kind of courses. You took courses in philosophy or classics instead of taking it in management skills of how to exploit labor.”

The con of neoliberalism is now widely understood across the political spectrum. It is harder and harder to hide its predatory nature, including its demands for huge public subsidies (Amazon, for example, recently sought and received multibillion-dollar tax breaks from New York and Virginia to set up distribution centers in those states). This has forced the ruling elites to make alliances with right-wing demagogues who use the crude tactics of racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, bigotry and misogyny to channel the public’s growing rage and frustration away from the elites and toward the vulnerable. These demagogues accelerate the pillage by the global elites while at the same time promising to protect working men and women. Donald Trump’s administration, for example, has abolished numerous regulations, from greenhouse gas emissions to net neutrality, and slashed taxes for the wealthiest individuals and corporations, wiping out an estimated $1.5 trillion in government revenue over the next decade, while embracing authoritarian language and forms of control.

Neoliberalism generates little wealth. Rather, it redistributes it upward into the hands of the ruling elites. Harvey calls this “accumulation by dispossession.”

“The main argument of accumulation by dispossession rests on the idea that when people run out of the capacity to make things or provide services, they set up a system that extracts wealth from other people,” Harvey said. “That extraction then becomes the center of their activities. One of the ways in which that extraction can occur is by creating new commodity markets where there were none before. For instance, when I was younger, higher education in Europe was essentially a public good. Increasingly [this and other services] have become a private activity. Health service. Many of these areas which you would consider not to be commodities in the ordinary sense become commodities. Housing for the lower-income population was often seen as a social obligation. Now everything has to go through the market. You impose a market logic on areas that shouldn’t be open to market.”

“When I was a kid, water in Britain was provided as a public good,” Harvey said. “Then, of course, it gets privatized. You start to pay water charges. They’ve privatized transportation [in Britain]. The bus system is chaotic. There’s all these private companies running here, there, everywhere. There’s no system which you really need. The same thing happens on the railways. One of the things right now, in Britain, is interesting—the Labour Party says, ‘We’re going to take all of that back into public ownership because privatization is totally insane and it has insane consequences and it’s not working well at all.’ The majority of the population now agrees with that.”

Under neoliberalism, the process of “accumulation by dispossession” is accompanied by financialization.

“Deregulation allowed the financial system to become one of the main centers of redistributive activity through speculation, predation, fraud, and thievery,” Harvey writes in his book, perhaps the best and most concise account of the history of neoliberalism. “Stock promotions, ponzi schemes, structured asset destruction through inflation, asset stripping through mergers and acquisitions, the promotion of levels of debt incumbency that reduce whole populations even in the advanced capitalist countries to debt peonage. To say nothing of corporate fraud, dispossession of assets, the raiding of pension funds, their decimation by stock, and corporate collapses by credit and stock manipulations, all of these became central features of the capitalist financial system.”

Neoliberalism, wielding tremendous financial power, is able to manufacture economic crises to depress the value of assets and then seize them.

“One of the ways in which you can engineer a crisis is to cut off the flow of credit,” he said. “This was done in Eastern, Southeast Asia in 1997 and 1998. Suddenly, liquidity dried up. Major institutions would not lend money. There had been a big flow of foreign capital into Indonesia. They turned off the tap. Foreign capital flowed out. They turned it off in part because once all the firms went bankrupt, they could be bought up and put back to work again. We saw the same thing during the housing crisis here [in the United States]. The foreclosures of the housing left lots of housing out there, which could be picked up very cheaply. Blackstone comes in, buys up all of the housing, and is now the biggest landlord in all of the United States. It has 200,000 properties or something like that. It’s waiting for the market to turn. When the market turns, which it did do briefly, then you can sell off or rent out and make a killing out of it. Blackstone has made a killing off of the foreclosure crisis where everyone lost. It was a massive transfer of wealth.”

Harvey warns that individual freedom and social justice are not necessarily compatible. Social justice, he writes, requires social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric, with its emphasis on individual freedoms, can effectively “split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.”

The economist Karl Polanyi understood that there are two kinds of freedoms. There are the bad freedoms to exploit those around us and extract huge profits without regard to the common good, including what is done to the ecosystem and democratic institutions. These bad freedoms see corporations monopolize technologies and scientific advances to make huge profits, even when, as with the pharmaceutical industry, a monopoly means lives of those who cannot pay exorbitant prices are put in jeopardy. The good freedoms—freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job—are eventually snuffed out by the primacy of the bad freedoms.

“Planning and control are being attacked as a denial for freedom,” Polanyi wrote. “Free enterprise and private ownership are declared to be essentials to freedom. No society built on other foundations is said to deserve to be called free. The freedom that regulation creates is denounced as unfreedom; the justice, liberty and welfare it offers are decried as a camouflage of slavery.”

“The idea of freedom ‘thus degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise,’ which means ‘the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property,’ ” Harvey writes, quoting Polanyi. “But if, as is always the case, ‘no society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent, nor a world in which force has no function,’ then the only way this liberal utopian vision could be sustained is by force, violence, and authoritarianism. Liberal or neoliberal utopianism is doomed, in Polanyi’s view, to be frustrated by authoritarianism, or even outright fascism. The good freedoms are lost, the bad ones take over.”

Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. Its logical result is neofascism. Neofascism abolishes civil liberties in the name of national security and brands whole groups as traitors and enemies of the people. It is the militarized instrument used by the ruling elites to maintain control, divide and tear apart the society and further accelerate pillage and social inequality. The ruling ideology, no longer credible, is replaced with the jackboot.

NASA InSight mission successfully lands on Mars

Bryan Dyne

NASA’s InSight mission touched down on the surface of Mars on Monday at approximately 3 p.m. Eastern Time, successfully completing a six-and-a-half month journey of more than 480 million kilometers. InSight, the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport lander, is the first mission to successfully land on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2011, and the eighth successful landing of an unmanned spacecraft on the planet. It is the beginning of the most extensive geological survey of a celestial body beyond Earth.

The first two images from InSight, both confirming that the mission has successfully landed and transmit data from the Martian surface. NASA/JPL-Caltech

As of this writing, all of the probe’s systems are operating as expected. Two initial photos have been sent from the surface of Mars confirming that it is on the ground, its solar panels have been deployed and it is in contact with the fleet of spacecraft orbiting Mars. Its meteorological suite and magnetometer have been deployed while its robotic arm with an attached camera will be deployed in the coming days.

The mission’s primary instrument suite will come online over the next three months. This includes a seismometer to study Marsquakes (tectonic activity on Mars) and a radio science experiment that will calculate the size and rotation of Mars’ core and mantle. InSight is also slated to drill five meters into the surface, deeper than any previous study, and place heat sensors every ten centimeters to learn about the evolution of heat flow in the planet’s interior.

These instruments are designed to collect data for at least the next two years in order to better understand the internal structure and geology of the Red Planet. This in turn will be incorporated into humanity’s more general knowledge of how rocky worlds form, from Earth and the Moon to exoplanets such as those in the Trappist-1 system. All this for a mere $830 million, less than the cost of one of the US military’s nearly two dozen B-2 stealth bombers.

InSight’s design is heavily based on the successful Mars Phoenix Lander, which completed its mission in 2008. They have a similar solar panel and general spacecraft design, though InSight is designed to last more than four times as long as its predecessor. InSight also has cameras similar to Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity, reusing technologies that have both proven robust and provided a large volume of scientific information.

An artist's conception of the InSight lander on the surface of Mars with its seismometer (left) and heat probe (right) deployed. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Like every mission to Mars, InSight would not have been possible without a high level of meticulously planned international coordination involving hundreds of researchers and engineers. InSight’s primary instrument for studying the Martian interior, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, was developed through the coordinated efforts of engineers in France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Its probe to measure heat flow five meters below Mars’ surface was made in Germany and Poland, its weather station in Spain and its laser reflector, which will be used for precision longitude, latitude and altitude measurements, in Italy. The experiment which will map the interior structure of Mars and measure its rotation was developed in the United States. Even launching the mission and operating the spacecraft while it was traveling to Mars required the cooperation of scientists in Australia, Spain and the United States.

InSight arrived at the Elysium Planitia, a low-lying and massive expanse of ancient Martian lava near the planet’s equator. While the geology and chemistry of the region are interesting, the site was chosen more for the ease of landing and large amounts of sunlight than its surface features. The solar panels that provide the lander energy for all of its communications equipment and scientific instruments produce 600 to 700 watts on a clear day, less than what a microwave oven uses.

Coincidentally, InSight is relatively close to Curiosity, about 600 kilometers north from the rover’s position in Gale Crater. Traveling at its maximum speed, it would take Curiosity 3,000 days or just under eight and a half years to reach InSight. They are currently the two closest man-made objects on the surface of Mars.

As with all craft that enter orbit and/or land on Mars, InSight’s final approach to the planet was done automatically. It takes less than seven minutes for the craft to touch down on the surface, but fourteen minutes for signals to be relayed from Mars to Earth and back. As a result of the distance, there could be no human supervision as the lander entered the atmosphere, deployed its parachutes, chose the exact spot to land, fired its landing thrusters and softly touched down. Dozens of operations and thousands of lines of code were pre-programmed into the machinery and memory of the spacecraft and by all accounts they executed perfectly.

The landing of InSight was also a test for Mars Cube One (MarCO), a flyby of two miniaturized and inexpensive satellites called CubeSats that were used to relay InSight’s telemetry to Earth during the spacecraft’s entry, descent and landing, as radio signals directly from InSight to Earth were blocked by Mars itself. Normally, this relaying is done using the already existing spacecraft such as NASA’s Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or the European Space Agency’s Mars Express. Instead, InSight’s team used MarCO A and B to test the much smaller and cheaper communications technologies provided by CubeSats, which successfully relayed mission-critical data during the entire process and for eight minutes thereafter.

An image of Mars taken MarCO-B two days before InSight landed. Even after completing 99.8 percent of its journey, Mars is still only three pixels across to the two CubeSats. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Future deep space missions are now expected to increasingly adopt this technology. CubeSats have been shown to provide an effective and cost-efficient way for spacecraft to relay information to Earth without needing to have previous craft already in orbit around a celestial body or to use the primary mission’s energy to send information all the way back to Earth while it is entering orbit or landing. They have the potential to both cut mission costs as well as provide a new platform for scientific observations.

This latest successful mission to Mars is a welcome demonstration of the power of human foresight and scientific planning, in the face of the promotion of irrationalism and anti-science prejudice by both the political right and the pseudo-left.

Australian prime minister denounces students’ climate-change protests

Oscar Grenfell 

Australia’s Liberal-National Prime Minister Scott Morrison issued an extraordinary denunciation of high school students protesting over climate change from the floor of the federal parliament on Monday.

Morrison’s comments were in the lead-up to a national series of high school “walk-outs for climate action” this Friday, including in Sydney, Melbourne and other capital cities. Protests have already been held involving students in regional and rural areas over the past weeks. The actions have been shared and promoted by thousands of young people on Facebook.

Morrison contemptuously declared, during question time in the House of Representatives, that “kids should go to school.” He stated, “We do not support our schools being turned into parliaments… What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.”

The clear message was the young people should keep quiet and that measures should be taken to discourage students from engaging in political action, and to punish those who do.

Morrison’s comments demonstrated that the Coalition government and the entire ruling establishment are intensely fearful of the entrance of students and youth into political struggle. They are well aware that there is widespread anger among young people over environmental destruction, endless wars, soaring social inequality and a turn to authoritarian and anti-democratic forms of rule.

Every opinion poll of young people has demonstrated growing hostility to Labor, the Liberal-Nationals and the entire political set-up. There is also mounting opposition to capitalism, and an attraction to a socialist alternative.

A report by the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), a right-wing think tank, worriedly noted in June that the overwhelming majority of Australian young people have indicated that they favour socialism over capitalism.

The parliamentary parties know that their agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy, the destruction of public healthcare and education, an offensive against jobs, wages and conditions, and the ever-closer alignment of Australia with the US-led preparations for war with China, will produce mass opposition.

Amid a slowdown of the property market, acute social inequality and mounting poverty, the ruling class is sitting atop a social powder-keg. Throughout the 20th century, and the first two decades of the new millennium, social movements among students and young people have always presaged mass struggles by the working class.

Students at the walk-out in Geelong last Friday

While they have been small thus far, the character of the high school climate protests has no doubt caused concern within ruling circles. They have been organised independently of the official political parties, including Labor and the Greens, as well as the unions, and inspired by similar protests by students in Scandinavia and throughout Europe.

The movement has largely been built through social media, amid an ongoing discussion in ruling circles in Australia, and internationally, on the need to crack down on the dissemination of political information online and the use of the internet to organise the struggles of workers and young people.

The issue of climate change, moreover, points to the urgent necessity for the reorganisation of the world economy in the interests of social need, not private profit.

A report released this week by the US Global Change Research Program found that the impact of climate change is “already being felt” and that it is “expected to further disrupt many areas of life, exacerbating existing challenges to prosperity posed by aging and deteriorating infrastructure, stressed ecosystems, and economic inequality.”

The Coalition government is particularly sensitive to growing concern over the environment. It is dominated by “climate change skeptics” who deny the global consensus of scientists that anthropogenic climate change is a reality, in large part because of the Coalition’s close ties to the coal industry.

While the federal government has responded to the high school protests with unbridled hostility, Labor, the Greens and environmental groups aligned with them are seeking to kill the incipient movement with kindness.

On Tuesday, Labor and the Greens joined to pass a motion through the Senate “commending” the protests. Their aim is to channel the demonstrations behind the official parliamentary establishment, which has always been the graveyard of social movements.

Labor and the Greens’ posturing on climate change is utterly hypocritical and bogus. Both are parties of the corporate and financial elite, hostile to any measures that would impact on the profitability of big business.

The Greens-backed federal Labor government of Julia Gillard did nothing to stem carbon emissions, when it was in office from 2010–2013. Under its signature carbon tax policy, Australia’s carbon emissions actually increased. According to Labor’s own 2012 modelling, if the tax had remained in place from 2012 to 2020, annual national carbon emissions would have grown from 582 million tonnes to 621 million tonnes by 2020.

Emissions trading schemes, touted by the Greens, are no less worthless. Where they have been introduced in Europe and elsewhere, they have succeeded only in establishing lucrative opportunities for “green businesses” and creating new markets based on financial swindling and speculation.

The claims of the Greens that they represent an alternative to Labor and the Liberal-Nationals lie in tatters. Wherever they have had the opportunity, at the state or federal level, they have joined big business coalition governments, committed to slashing social spending, driving up corporate profits and making the working class pay for the deepening crisis of the capitalist system.

This makes clear that the high school climate change walk-outs can only go forward on the basis of implacable hostility to Labor, the Greens and the entire political establishment.

What is required is a new political perspective, oriented towards the mobilisation of the international working class, the revolutionary social force that produces all wealth, and whose objective interests are opposed to the dominance of society by a tiny corporate elite, and the irrational division of the globe into competing capitalist nation-states.

Climate change is a product of the private market and is an inherently global issue. It can only be resolved through the abolition of capitalism, and the socialist reorganisation of society by the working class.

Under socialism, the vast productive forces and technological capacities developed by the working class would be harnessed to resolve all social problems, including climate change. Trillions of dollars would be allocated to ensuring the rapid reductions in carbon emissions required to halt climate change. The technologies for carrying this out, which already exist, would be developed on the basis of the collaboration of scientists from all over the world. The subordination of scientific work and research to the profit demands of the corporate oligarchy would be ended.

Australian government announces early budget

Mike Head

After his Liberal-National Coalition suffered a heavy defeat in last Saturday’s election in the state of Victoria, Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday brought forward the planned date for the 2019 federal budget by a month to April 2.

This is a desperate bid by Morrison to hold onto office until May, the latest possible date for the next election, as his Liberal-National Coalition government tears itself apart in a factional civil war.

Following the Victorian electoral debacle, the Coalition’s most right-wing elements are intensifying their push to transform it into a Trump-style, far-right movement. They are provoking a deepening rift with the self-titled “fiscally conservative, socially progressive” supporters of ex-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was ousted by the right wing in an inner-party coup on August 24.

During the weekend, two prominent right-wing figures made public a potential split. Former military general Senator Jim Molan pulled out of a television appearance, declaring he could not “bring myself to defend” the Liberal Party after being relegated to an unwinnable position on its Senate ticket for the next election. Lower house MP, Craig Kelly, who backed Turnbull’s removal, threatened to stand as an independent if he were defeated in a Liberal Party pre-selection ballot.

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott publicly aligned himself with Molan, saying he was “nauseated” by the Liberal Party’s treatment of the ex-general. Another Abbott supporter said Moylan’s demotion was “suicidal” for the Coalition.

The schisms are widening. Supporters of Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who triggered Turnbull’s ouster before losing the subsequent party leadership ballot to Morrison, are openly agitating against the “progressives,” some of whom publicly blamed the knifing of Turnbull for the Victorian election debacle.

Even as Morrison announced the early budget, a Turnbull supporter, Julie Banks, told parliament she would sit as an independent for the rest of the parliamentary term. “The Liberal Party has changed, largely due to the actions of the reactionary and regressive right wing,” she stated.

Banks said she would support the government on votes of no-confidence and financial supply, but Morrison’s government now holds just 72 of the 150 votes in the House of Representatives, with Speaker Tony Smith, a Coalition member, making that 73 in the event of a tied vote.

The government lost its majority last month when a pro-Turnbull independent won a by-election for Turnbull’s former Sydney electorate. Its loss of control over parliament was illustrated on Monday when it voted for a resolution to establish an anti-corruption body rather than be defeated on the floor of the lower house.

The public feuding has reached the Coalition’s highest echelons. Cabinet Minister Kelly O’Dwyer told colleagues on Monday the Liberals are regarded as “homophobic, anti-women, climate-change deniers” thanks to the “ideological warriors” who hijacked the party’s positions on social issues. Former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who quit that post when Turnbull was axed, demanded that the government strike a deal with the Labor Party to revive the Turnbull government’s proposed National Energy Guarantee, which business leaders are backing in order to provide incentives for investors in renewable energy projects.

Labor, which has 69 MPs, could bring the government down if it gained the support of seven of the eight so-called “crossbench” MPs. They now number four independents, a dissident member of the National Party, one from the Greens, one from Bob Katter’s protectionist, anti-immigrant party and one from the pro-business Centre Alliance.

Labor, however, is intent on holding the government together, rather than take office amid widespread public discontent. In fact, it is working closely with the Coalition in a bipartisan partnership to ram four far-reaching pieces of anti-democratic legislation through parliament in the last brief two-week parliamentary session for 2018.

Significantly, these laws will allow the government to call out the military to put down domestic unrest, crack open encryption codes, fast-track a new “foreign interference” register and strip citizenship from anyone convicted of even a minor terrorism-related offence.

These bills are part of a barrage of measures in preparation to suppress mounting public hostility to the entire political establishment under deteriorating social conditions and the growing danger of frontline Australian involvement in a catastrophic US war against China or Russia.

Because of the chaos and division in the government, elements within the corporate ruling class are moving to back a Labor-led government to stabilise capitalist rule and impose deeper cuts to social spending and living standards.

Monday’s Australian Financial Review editorial warned: “The parties of the Coalition may be on the verge of being pulled apart by the increasing polarisation of Australian politics.” The Liberal Party was “dissolving into a group of warring ideological sects and ambition-driven factions.”

Tuesday’s editorial in the Australian denounced the government’s “disunity and self-obsession” and noted that Labor’s policies had the advantage of “clarity.” This reflects the views of the newspaper’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, who called for Turnbull’s removal, regardless of whether it meant Labor regaining office.

Two inter-connected driving forces are breaking apart the Coalition and the parliamentary order itself. One is the Trump administration’s aggressive trade war and military confrontation with China—Australian capitalism’s largest export market. Combined with a gathering downturn in Australia’s highly-inflated housing market, this could trigger a sharp economic reversal.

An economic collapse could fuel an explosive movement in the working class against years of falling real wages, destruction of permanent jobs, cuts to social programs and deteriorating public infrastructure. The elements around Abbott, Dutton and Molan are seeking to either refashion the Coalition, or form a new far-right movement, based in reactionary nationalism and anti-immigrant xenophobia, backed by repressive police-state powers, to be directed against the working class.

Morrison claimed his government would produce a “surplus” budget next April, for the first time since the 2008 global financial breakdown, but would not say which year would be in surplus. Deloitte Access Economics forecasts a $5 billion deficit for 2018-19. But all these calculations are premised on a continuation of an uptick in export commodity prices, which could reverse rapidly if the US-China conflict intensifies.

“The current global growth cycle may be peaking. Geopolitics have become unstable, and the dangers from that are quite unpredictable,” the Australian Financial Review warned yesterday. The financial elite’s mouthpiece doubted the government’s capacity to enforce austerity measures. “But does the Morrison government have the guile to sell this message of budget prudence in a volatile political atmosphere?” it asked.

Divisions in the Coalition are also being fuelled by Washington’s demand for Australia to line up unconditionally behind its aggressive plans to prevent China from challenging the post-World War II hegemony of the US in the Indo-Pacific region. Morrison and his right-wing backers are intent on enforcing that commitment, whereas Turnbull and his supporters, while totally loyal to the US alliance, were hoping to convince Washington to make some accommodation to China’s rise.

As for the Labor Party, its last government signed up in 2011 to the US military, strategic and economic “pivot” to the region to combat China, and it is totally aligned with Washington, along with the military and intelligence apparatus and most of the corporate ruling class.