Posts
For our liberty to survive in this fearful post-9/11 world, the government’s lawless behavior must be rejected not just by the words of dead people, but by the deeds of we the living. When the president violates the Constitution and the Congress and courts do nothing to stop him, we have effectively amended the Constitution with a wink and a nod — by consent, if you will.*
(Catch Ralph Nader's "Unstoppable" on "The Emerging Left-Right Alliance" on LINK TV at 8:00 and 11:00 PM EDST on Saturday (today), and "Capitalism and Socio-Pathology: Earth at Risk" on LINK TV at 9:30 PM EDST on Saturday and at 12:30 AM EDST on Sunday. See also "White Like Me: White Privilege" at 2:00 AM EDST on LINK TV Sunday, and "Confronting Misogyny: Earth at Risk" at 3:30 AM EDST on Sunday at LINK TV if you get a chance. It's terrific TV for the knowledgeable viewer.)
Like how the Obama Cabinet picks all seem to end up working and making millions for themselves and those they were supposed to regulate? Yeah. I'm thrilled with their continuing "private" performance since they have served US so well publicly. (/snark) And they do keep on keeping on.
Two weeks after a former Obama administration official who helped engineer the bailout of General Motors sought a seat on GM’s Board of Directors to force an $8 billion share buyback to benefit hedge funds, General Motors joined the also bailed out Ford Motor Company to announce the intention to add yet one lower paid tier to the existing two-tiered wage structure. Citing overseas ‘competition,’ General Motors executives are using $8 billion in retained earnings to raise the value of company shares owned by hedge funds and to benefit themselves directly. The role of the Obama administration in retaining the two-tiered wage structure when bailing out General Motors and in sending one of its former members to ‘harvest’ the residual should raise fundamental questions about the intersection of politics and economics.Read the entire essay here.
This intersection is supported by the economic theology of neoliberalism now some decades embedded into the major institutions of the West. Through its reduction of the breadth of human experience to the dull economism of market relations, neoliberalism most closely resembles economic pornography. A defining characteristic is de-contextualization for re-contextualization, removal from the breadth and depth of human relations to posit family, friends, neighbors and community as consumers to be conned, scammed and exploited.
And to provide the punchline at the outset: there is nothing brilliant or insightful about the political success of neoliberalism. History is replete with totalizing ideologies that support an existing status quo until their limitations force reclamation of broader possibility.
When they cross over for money, they do cross over, don't they?
According to EcoWatch, Moore was an early member of Greenpeace before becoming a consultant for “the polluting companies that Greenpeace works to change: Big Oil, pesticides and GMO agribusiness, forestry, nuclear power … anyone who puts up the money for truth-benders who appear to carry scientific and environmental authority.”
GMWatch noted that Moore has also recently used social media to cast doubt on the World Health Organisation’s conclusion that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen.
Lobbyist Claims Pesticide Safe to Drink; Bolts When Offered a Glass
By David Edwards, Raw Story
27 March 15
ALSO SEE: WHO Finds Roundup Causes Cancer; Monsanto Demands They Retract Report
Monsanto's Roundup. (photo: The Hive)
_ _ _ _ _ _controversial lobbyist who claimed that the chemical in Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer was safe for humans refused to drink his own words when a French television journalist offered him a glass.
In a preview of an upcoming documentary on French TV, Dr. Patrick Moore tells a Canal+ interviewer that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup herbicide, was not increasing the rate of cancer in Argentina.
“You can drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you,” Moore insists.
“You want to drink some?” the interviewer asks. “We have some here.”
“I’d be happy to, actually,” Moore replies, adding, “Not really. But I know it wouldn’t hurt me.”
“If you say so, I have some,” the interviewer presses.
“I’m not stupid,” Moore declares.
“So, it’s dangerous?” the interviewer concludes.
But Moore claims that Roundup is so safe that “people try to commit suicide” by drinking it, and they “fail regularly.”
“Tell the truth, it’s dangerous,” the interviewer says.
“It’s not dangerous to humans,” Moore remarks. “No, it’s not.”
“So, are you ready to drink one glass?” the interviewer continues to press.
“No, I’m not an idiot,” Moore says defiantly. “Interview me about golden rice, that’s what I’m talking about.”
At that point, Moore declares that the “interview is finished.”
“That’s a good way to solve things,” the interviewer quips.
We know that the NSA can listen to all we say if we are near enough to a device it can turn on. (Quick: How close are you as you read this to an electronic device that the NSA can access and use as a listening device?) And we also know that the feds gave secret roadside listening devices to about 50 local police departments, which acquired them generally without the public consent of elected officials in return for oaths not to reveal the source of the hardware. It came from the secret budget of the CIA, which is prohibited by law from spying in the U.S.
What’s going on here?
What’s going on here is government’s fixation on spying and lying.
Think about it: The Israeli Mossad was spying on Kerry while the CIA was spying on the Mossad. Hillary Clinton thought she could destroy her emails just because she is Hillary Clinton, yet she forgot that the administration of which she was an integral part dispatched the NSA to spy on everyone, including her. And though it might not voluntarily release the emails she thought she destroyed, the NSA surely has them. The police have no hesitation about engaging in the same warrantless surveillance as the feds. And when Hayden revealed a cat-like smile on his face when challenged about the feds in our bedrooms, and the 10,000 folks in the audience did not reveal outrage, you know that government spying is so endemic today that it is almost the new normal.
The State Is Spying On You Right Now. Where’s The Outrage?
Here is a short pop quiz: When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress earlier this month about the parameters of the secret negotiations between the United States and Iran over nuclear weapons and economic sanctions, how did he know what the negotiators were considering? Israel is not a party to those negotiations, yet the prime minister presented them in detail.
When Hillary Clinton learned that a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives had subpoenaed her emails as secretary of state and she promptly destroyed half of them — about 33,000 — how did she know she could get away with it? Destruction of evidence, particularly government records, constitutes the crime of obstruction of justice.
When Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of both the CIA and the NSA in the George W. Bush administration and the architect of the government’s massive suspicionless spying program, was recently publicly challenged to deny that the feds have the ability to turn on your computer, cellphone, or mobile device in your home and elsewhere, and use your own devices to spy on you, why did he remain silent? The audience at the venue where he was challenged rationally concluded that his silence was his consent.
And when two judges were recently confronted with transcripts of conversations between known drug dealers — transcripts obtained without search warrants — and they asked the police who obtained them to explain their sources, how is it that the cops could refuse to answer? The government has the same obligation to tell the truth in a courtroom as any litigant, and in a criminal case, the government must establish that its acquisition of all of its evidence was lawful.
The common themes here are government spying and lawlessness. We now know that the Israelis spied on Secretary of State John Kerry, and so Netanyahu knew of what he spoke. We know that the Clintons believe there is a set of laws for them and another for the rest of us, and so Mrs. Clinton could credibly believe that her deception and destruction would go unpunished.
We know that the NSA can listen to all we say if we are near enough to a device it can turn on. (Quick: How close are you as you read this to an electronic device that the NSA can access and use as a listening device?) And we also know that the feds gave secret roadside listening devices to about 50 local police departments, which acquired them generally without the public consent of elected officials in return for oaths not to reveal the source of the hardware. It came from the secret budget of the CIA, which is prohibited by law from spying in the U.S.
What’s going on here?
What’s going on here is government’s fixation on spying and lying. Think about it: The Israeli Mossad was spying on Kerry while the CIA was spying on the Mossad. Hillary Clinton thought she could destroy her emails just because she is Hillary Clinton, yet she forgot that the administration of which she was an integral part dispatched the NSA to spy on everyone, including her.
And though it might not voluntarily release the emails she thought she destroyed, the NSA surely has them. The police have no hesitation about engaging in the same warrantless surveillance as the feds. And when Hayden revealed a cat-like smile on his face when challenged about the feds in our bedrooms, and the 10,000 folks in the audience did not reveal outrage, you know that government spying is so endemic today that it is almost the new normal.
Yet government spying is not normal to the Constitution. Its essence — government fishing nets, the indiscriminate deployment of government resources to see what they can bring in, government interference with personal privacy without suspicion or probable cause — was rejected by the Framers and remains expressly rejected by the Fourth Amendment today.
*For our liberty to survive in this fearful post-9/11 world, the government’s lawless behavior must be rejected not just by the words of dead people, but by the deeds of we the living. When the president violates the Constitution and the Congress and courts do nothing to stop him, we have effectively amended the Constitution with a wink and a nod — by consent, if you will. Its guarantees of liberty are only guarantees if the people in whose hands we repose it for safekeeping honor them as guarantees and believe and behave as such because the Constitution means what it says.
Where is the outrage? If you knew the feds were virtually present in your bedroom or your automobile, and your representatives in Congress did nothing about it, would you buy the nonsense that you should have nothing to hide? Would you send those weaklings back to Congress? Or would you say to a lawless government, as the Founders did to the British, “Thou shalt not enter here”? Does the Constitution mean what it says in bad times as well as in good times?
These are not academic questions. They address the most important issue of our day. For nothing will destroy our personal liberties more effectively than the government refusing to honor them and Americans sheepishly accepting that. And without freedom, what are we?
- Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey.
I've always wondered about what Obama learned during his "community organizing" days. Probably the type of organizing that has led US to the TPP Trade agreement.
He is well paid for it.
So, there's that.
But will any of the rest of US be?
_ _ _ _ _ _ _"WikiLeaks" Releases Classified Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Proposal
By Jonathan Weisman, The "New York Times"
27 March 15
The Trans-Pacific Partnership — a cornerstone of Mr. Obama’s remaining economic agenda — would grant broad powers to multinational companies operating in North America, South America and Asia. Under the accord, still under negotiation but nearing completion, companies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings — federal, state or local — before tribunals organized under the World Bank or the United Nations.
Backers of the emerging trade accord, which is supported by a wide variety of business groups and favored by most Republicans, say that it is in line with previous agreements that contain similar provisions. But critics, including many Democrats in Congress, argue that the planned deal widens the opening for multinationals to sue in the United States and elsewhere, giving greater priority to protecting corporate interests than promoting free trade and competition that benefits consumers.
READ MORE
Comments:
# 2015-03-27 11:06
The free trader globalists are going for it all now even though free trade economics has failed. This was validated by President Obama having to bail out the process. He bailed out the big money interests who were responsible for the failure and put them back in charge.
We do not need any conspiracy theories to know free trade has been driven by powerful forces outside the will of the people & global entities like the WTO were created outside of any democratic process.
It is obvious if free trade was subject to a popular vote it would have never passed.
Free trade economics is about making production portable and moving it anywhere in the world for the sake of cheaper labor costs. It separates investments from production for the sake of profit at the expense of the value of workers and labor.
The value of workers and labor has been discounted and deflated. Along with the trade deficit this represents trillions of dollars in value lost forever. With the bail out costing trillions of more dollars, free trade economics is a very bad concept. It is now an economic cancer that spreading across the globe.
President Obama use the term the "new world order" more than once at international money conferences without ever defining what it meant.
The first question to ask is this... Who said we had to compete like this with one another for the same jobs in a global economic arena?
http://tapsearch.com/free-trade-economics http://tapsearch.com/flat-world
I've thought from the first glimpse that Hillary was secretly smirking every time she got caught in a self-serving lie.
I hope all her supporters enjoy being smirked at.
Leaking Government Secrets Is Fine - As Long as It Benefits Politicians
By Trevor Timm, Guardian UK
27 March 15
It is hypocritical that some leaks will land you in jail, while others just lead to a slap on the wrist
hen it comes to classified information, some leaks are more equal than others. If you are a whistleblower like Edward Snowden, who tells the press about illegal, immoral or embarrassing government actions, you will face jail time. But it’s often another story for US government officials leaking information for their own political benefit.
Two stories this week perfectly illustrate this hypocrisy and how, despite their unprecedented crackdown on sources and whistleblowers, the Obama administration - like every administration before it - loves to use leaks, if and when it suits them.
Consider a government leak that ran in the "New York Times" on Monday. The article was about 300 of Hillary Clinton’s now notorious State Department emails, which had been hidden away on her private server for years and were turned over to Congress as part of the never-ending Benghazi investigation. “Four senior government officials” described the content of her emails to "New York Times" journalists in minute detail “on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to secret information”.
Surely the Obama administration will promptly root out and prosecute those leakers, right? After all, the emails haven’t gone through a security review and the chances of them discussing classified information are extremely high. (Even if they don’t, the Espionage Act doesn’t require the information to be classified anyways, only that information leaked be “related to national defense”.) But those emails supposedly clear Clinton of any wrongdoing in the Benghazi affair, which likely makes the leak in the administration’s interest.
But that disclosure was nothing compared to what appeared in the "Wall Street Journal" a day later, in the wake of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s underhanded attempts to derail a nuclear deal with Iran. The "Journal" reported on Tuesday that not only did Israel spy on Americans negotiating with Iran, but they gave that information to Republicans in Congress, in an attempt to scuttle the deal.
How does the US know this? Well, according to the "Journal" and its government sources, the US itself intercepted communications between Israeli officials that discussed information that could have only come from the US-Iran talks. The disclosure of this fact sounds exactly like the vaunted “sources and methods” - i.e. how the US conducts surveillance and gets intelligence - that the government continually claims is the most sensitive information they have. It’s why they claim Edward Snowden belongs in jail for decades. So while it’s apparently unacceptable to leak details about surveillance that affects ordinary citizens’ privacy, its OK for officials to do so for their own political benefit - and no one raises an eyebrow.
We can be quite certain that no one will be prosecuted for the leaks given that they benefitted the administration’s powerful former Secretary of State, and bolsters its position in its public dust-up with Israel.
. . .
When it comes to leaks, the powerful play by different rules than everyone else - despite the fact that they’ve violated the same law they’ve accused so many other leakers of breaking. That’s why David Petraeus was given a sweetheart plea deal with no jail time after leaking highly classified information to his biographer and lover. (He’s apparently already back advising the White House, despite leaking and then lying to the FBI about the identities of countless covert officers).
It’s also the same reason why investigations into a leak suspected to have involved General Cartwright, once known as “Obama’s favorite general”, have stalled. As the "Washington Post" reported: the defense “might try to put the White House’s relationship with reporters and the use of authorized leaks on display, creating a potentially embarrassing distraction for the administration”.
Former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling faces sentencing next month after being found guilty of leaking information to New York Times reporter James Risen. Sterling’s problem is that he leaked information showing a spectacular and embarrassing failure on the CIA’s part - which did not help a powerful politician score points. He is also not a general.
As a result, he faces decades in jail.
"WikiLeaks" Publishes Controversial Investment Trade Chapter
Educate! Corporatism, TAFTA, TPP, TTIP
By Staff, www.wikileaks.org
March 25th, 2015
Note: Below is the press release from "WikiLeaks" describing the controversial Investment Chapter of the TPP. The "New York Times" also had an article about the chapter, Trans-Pacific Partnership Seen as Door for Foreign Suits Against U.S., which predicted that the leak would “kindle opposition from both the political left and the right.” The "Times" describes tens of thousands of corporations that would be able to sue for expected profits and a very broad definition of investment making it easy for them to sue. "Public Citizen" has also put out a press release, TPP Leak Reveals Extraordinary New Powers for Thousands of Foreign Firms to Challenge U.S. Policies and Demand Taxpayer Compensation.
Classified Chapter that Gives Corporations the Right to Sue Governments Was Supposed to be Kept Secret for Four Years After TPP Became Law
"WikiLeaks" releases today the “Investment Chapter” from the secret negotiations of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) agreement. The document adds to the previous "WikiLeaks" publications of the chapters for Intellectual Property Rights (November 2013) and the Environment (January 2014).
The TPP Investment Chapter, published today, is dated 20 January 2015. The document is classified and supposed to be kept secret for four years after the entry into force of the TPP agreement or, if no agreement is reached, for four years from the close of the negotiations.
Julian Assange, "WikiLeaks" editor said: “The TPP has developed in secret an unaccountable supranational court for multinationals to sue states. This system is a challenge to parliamentary and judicial sovereignty. Similar tribunals have already been shown to chill the adoption of sane environmental protection, public health and public transport policies.”
Current TPP negotiation member states are the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei. The TPP is the largest economic treaty in history, including countries that represent more than 40 per cent of the world´s GDP.
The Investment Chapter highlights the intent of the TPP negotiating parties, led by the United States, to increase the power of global corporations by creating a supra-national court, or tribunal, where foreign firms can “sue” states and obtain taxpayer compensation for “expected future profits”. These investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals are designed to overrule the national court systems. ISDS tribunals introduce a mechanism by which multinational corporations can force governments to pay compensation if the tribunal states that a country’s laws or policies affect the company’s claimed future profits. In return, states hope that multinationals will invest more.
Similar mechanisms have already been used. For example, US tobacco company Phillip Morris used one such tribunal to sue Australia (June 2011 – ongoing) for mandating plain packaging of tobacco products on public health grounds; and by the oil giant Chevron against Ecuador in an attempt to evade a multi-billion-dollar compensation ruling for polluting the environment. The threat of future lawsuits chilled environmental and other legislation in Canada after it was sued by pesticide companies in 2008/9. ISDS tribunals are often held in secret, have no appeal mechanism, do not subordinate themselves to human rights laws or the public interest, and have few means by which other affected parties can make representations.
The TPP negotiations have been ongoing in secrecy for five years and are now in their final stages. In the United States the Obama administration plans to “fast-track” the treaty through Congress without the ability of elected officials to discuss or vote on individual measures. This has met growing opposition as a result of increased public scrutiny following "WikiLeaks"’ earlier releases of documents from the negotiations.
The TPP is set to be the forerunner to an equally secret agreement between the US and EU, the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership).
Negotiations for the TTIP were initiated by the Obama administration in January 2013. Combined, the TPP and TTIP will cover more than 60 per cent of global GDP. The third treaty of the same kind, also negotiated in secrecy is TISA, on trade in services, including the financial and health sectors. It covers 50 countries, including the US and all EU countries. "WikiLeaks" released the secret draft text of the TISA’s financial annex in June 2014.
All these agreements on so-called “free trade” are negotiated outside the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) framework. Conspicuously absent from the countries involved in these agreements are the BRICs countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Read the Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) – Investment chapter
Related Posts:
- FCC Net Neutrality Rules Published, Restores Common Carriage March 12, 2015
- I Can’t Breathe: Team Banned For Wearing Controversial T-shirts December 30, 2014
- Campus Divestment Campaign’s Investment In Young Activists February 15, 2015
- Banks Fear Risk Of Investment In Fossil Fuels December 10, 2014
- Vermont Pushes For Public Bank, Wins Local Investment January 13, 2015
Finishing School For Pickets; Learning Insubordination →
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
March 17, 2015
This Changes Some Things
How do we imagine the climate changing?
Some scenarios involve techno-fixes like cloud-seeding or new kinds of carbon sinks. Cool tech, usually backed by even cooler entrepreneurs, saves the day -- Iron Man plus Al Gore plus Steve Jobs. In green.
Other scenarios are apocalyptic: blizzards, floods, tsunamis, and droughts; crashing planes; millions of migrants moving from south to north only to be shot at armed borders. The poor fight and starve; the rich enclave themselves in shining domed cities as they document the extinction of charismatic species and convince themselves they aren't next.
And there is climate change as unconscious: the stuff of stress, inconvenience, anxiety, and repression; the relief at not having to manage anymore; the enjoyment of change, destruction, and punishment. There will be a last judgment after all. Here those of us who follow the reports of emissions, temperature increases, and political failure get to enjoy being in the know, being those with access to the truth. We can't do anything about it, but we can judge everyone else for their blind, consumerist pleasures. We can name our new era, marking our impact as the Anthropocene (hey, we have changed the world after all.) Anticipatory Cassandras, we can watch from within our melancholic "pre-loss," to use Naomi Klein's term, comforted at least by the fantasy of our future capacity to say we knew it all along. We told you so.
The hardest thing is doing something about it. Coming together. Fighting against the multiple centrifugal forces that have produced us as individuals preoccupied with our particular freedoms, preferences, conveniences, and choices. It's no wonder in this setting that market approaches to climate change have appeared as popular options. They affirm the selves we've become and promise to solve the problems all in one new light-bulb or electronic car.
Some of our present difficulty comes from the challenge of imagining a better future. Does it involve a kind of re-peasantization? The elimination of all industry, of all the advantages accrued to some of us under late capitalism? Or is it closer to what we have now, but with windmills and bicycles, the Dutchification of everything? Or is it really not that big a deal at all, a few tweaks here and there so that society looks pretty much like it did in the 70s ("Taxi Driver?" New York told to drop dead?).
Naomi Klein's bold attempt in This Changes Everything is to take up the challenge of creating an alternative to the grim inequalities of our present trajectory by using climate change as a frame for galvanizing left politics. What the economic crises of the seventies and eighties were for the right (opportunities to deepen and extend neoliberalism), climate change can be for the left (an opportunity to "pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty"). If the left fails to take this opportunity, that is, if we don't take advantage of the "existential urgency" that climate change provides to develop a more focused left strategy, we are doomed to "climate-change-fueled disaster capitalism--profiteering disguised as emission reduction, privatized hyper-militarized borders" etc (154). What we need, she tells us, is a "People's Shock."
Rejecting narrow market-based approaches like cap and trade, Klein argues that climate change
could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deal and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights -- all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them. (7)Just as Marx and Engels linked communism to the workers movement, making communism the mission of the working class, so does Klein link a vision of a progressive future to the climate movement. If the only way to eliminate the exploitation of the workers is the abolition of capitalism, the only to eliminate the exploitation of the planet is .... multiple, dispersed activities combined within a diffuse policy framework oriented toward long-term planning and inspired by an essentialist, overly romantic vision of locality, indigeneity, and democracy (that is to say, populism).
Klein's attempt to make climate change the basis for a stronger left politics is a crucial political move. But she weakens it. She fails to see it through. At the site of this failure is a red hole, a missing communism that distorts her vision. She invokes radical politics, but ultimately pulls back into the formula of the alter-globalization movement: in a movement of movements, multiple communities can solve their problems democratically.
Klein presents the "core problem" preventing adequate response to climate change as "the stranglehold of market logic" and "unfettered corporate power." She says that "our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life." (21) We are in the midst of a battle between capitalism and the planet. If capitalism wins, and at this point it is winning, extremely dangerous warming will lock-in, threatening the habitability of the planet. What is to be done? We have to change everything.
Everything rides on how we understand "everything." Klein seems to understand it in terms of neoliberalism, where neoliberalism involves privatization, deregulation of the corporate sphere, lowering of taxes within a broader setting of global trade. By rendering the problem in terms of neoliberalism, she doesn't have to advocate the abolition of capitalism, even when her arguments tend in that direction. So her solution is a kind of global Green Keynesianism, a step back into the time before neoliberalism dismantled the welfare state. It is hard to say exactly what Klein has in mind, though, since she offers so many options in a giant menu of change. It's like she thinks "everything" should be on the table and we (each "community") should be able to pick what we want (perhaps in a truer, more democratic market).
Klein's sense of "everything" is limited by the absence of a communist alternative. For example, even as she criticizes market fundamentalism, she sometimes seems fully ensconced in it. She wants to "buy time for clean energy sources to increase their market share and to be seen as more viable alternatives, weakening the power of the fossil fuel lobby" (349). But if we have to change everything, why not just nationalize the fossil fuel industries and undertake a 5-10 year process of dismantling them? Or why not nationally fund clean energy and inject so many taxes and regulations into the carbon economy that it withers away? It's like Klein feels so fully trapped within the economic system we have that she can't break free even as she insists we must break free. There has been and still is a name for this break -- communism.
Some of the components of Klein's new Green Keynesianism would likely include: a carefully planned economy; basic annual income; big public sector expenditures; higher taxes on the rich; and tougher business regulations. The Green justification for the higher taxes on the rich is that they are the ones who need to curb their consumption. The big expenditures would include better public transit, energy efficient housing, and changes in land use to encourage local agriculture. Klein also favors doing a lot with taxes, following the "polluter pays" principle applied to corporations and the rich. It was never clear to me who or what was engaged in the long-term planning she advocates and what sort of force these plans would have. I expect that planning would occur on multiple levels. Given Klein's insistence on local, decentralized communities, it also isn't clear to me how the plans would be integrated.
Klein opposes the nationalization of energy. She advocates instead the model of democratically run, community-based utilities -- let a thousand renewable energy providers bloom! She treats this as a project of the commons (her models are Germany and Denmark). Governments provide a national framework within which decentralized, small-scale, local providers supply renewable energy.
Accompanying the core problem of market fundamentalism is a cultural narrative regarding human domination of the earth. This narrative, Klein argues, underlies much of the left as well as the capitalist right. The former Soviet Union, Mao's China, and contemporary extractivist left-wing governments in Latin America are clear examples, but so are trade unions fighting for "dirty" jobs instead of clean ones, and so are any left Keynesians who continue to think in developmentalist terms. In place of this narrative of domination, Klein's Green Keynesianism would emphasize regeneration, "relationships of reciprocity and interconnection with the natural world" (182).
How, then, can we make the change we want to see? Not with big Green: "the 'market-based' climate solutions favored by so many foundations and adopted by many greens have provided an invaluable service to the fossil fuel sector as a whole" (199). These include consumer-based solutions (buy Green!) as well as carbon trading schemes, and fracking as a clean energy bridge to renewables. In addition to having done little to nothing to lower emissions over the last twenty years, these approaches, she argues, make the problem worse by failing to challenge the hegemony of the market.
Klein has more confidence in the "movement of many movements" that she calls "Blockadia." These include anti-fracking, anti-extractive industry, and pipeline protests all over the world. Klein rightly emphasizes how the contemporary resistance movement is more than a NIMBY struggle. Across multiple sites, activists share the conviction that fossil fuels must remain in the ground. They use local issues (health, safety, livelihood) as instruments for getting at the global problem of climate change.
The struggles of Blockadia are the flip side of the extreme energy boom going on for the last decade (the one with Sarah Palin's tagline, "drill, baby, drill!"). In the US and Canada, this boom has made more visible the war that the fossil fuel industry has long tried to hide, namely, that the carbon economy--and the capitalist economy more generally--relies on sacrifice zones. Klein writes:
for a very long time, sacrifice zones all shared a few elements in common. They were poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lacks political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language, and class (310).With the "extreme energy frenzy," the sacrifice zone has expanded. More people--and more people in the north and west, in areas formerly privileged enough to think they were entitled to turn their heads--are now in the zone of allowable sacrifice. From the vast reach of the Bakken, Marcellus, and Utica shale plays, to the Alberta tar sands, to the continent crossing pipelines, to deep-water oil rigs, to the exploding bomb trains, the intensification of the carbon economy has extended the range of expendable people and places.
Although Klein doesn't use these terms, climate change makes clear the scale of expropriation underpinning the carbon economy. The surplus value captured by the top-- by the owners, shareholders, and executives of the fossil fuel industry -- is expropriated not just from the workers in the industry (which it is), and not just from those living nearby (which it is), but from those living hundreds and thousands of miles away (which is a characteristic also of nuclear power). "Sacrifice zone" has the capacity to be a key concept for knitting together anti-capitalist and climate struggles.
It's correlative concept could then be the "commons." For example, we would want to eliminate sacrifice zones and treat the entire planet as a commons. Having disallowed communism, Klein can't get us to this point. More specifically, in the place in her argument where Klein could -- and should -- point to an internationalist egalitarian vision such as that championed by communists she appeals to a vague notion of democracy understood as multiplicity combined with a romantic vision of indigenous people. This combination embeds unresolved tensions in her argument.
The first problem is the equation of the Blockadia movements with a struggle for democracy. Klein writes: this emergent network of resistance is "driven by a desire for a deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival--the health of the water, air, and soil" (295) and "the fight against violent resource extraction and the fight for greater community control, democracy, and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin" (309). Klein displaces particular struggles (pipeline, fracking, climate) into the political field rather than seeing how the struggles themselves change the field by contesting its terms. Most of the time, activist groups aren't majorities. They are small groups trying to force a position and bring more people over to their side -- as well they should!
Additionally, Klein implies that communities are somehow unified and that they encounter an external force (state or corporation) that is violently extracting resources from them. But division goes all the way through communities. The communities themselves are divided. The deadlocked political system that we have is both a cause and an effect of this division.
Marxists refer to this division as class conflict (which works well enough if we have a loose understanding of 'class'). By omitting the constitutive place of division, Klein can suggest that community sovereignty is a goal, again, as if the community were united against fossil fuels -- but the fact that we are not united is precisely the problem the book, and the movement, encounters.
To use a local example, in the battle against the expansion of methane gas storage and LPG storage in the fragile salt caverns adjacent to Seneca Lake, the Town of Reading -- where the facility is located -- endorses the gas storage plan. Schuyler County -- where the facility is located -- also supports the plan, although the vote came down to 1 person in their local board and the community is clearly divided. All the other counties surrounding the lake oppose the plan, but most of this opposition came from votes by city or county boards after petitions from activists. The state is considering the issues, and will make a decision.
The federal government has already agreed to let the methane storage proceed, but might reconsider. Which level counts as the community? Why? And what sense does this make in a global setting? No one involved has said that the process has not been democratic. This is what democracy looks like. We just don't think it has yielded the right outcome.
The second problem is Klein's association of communities with indigeneity and land. Klein writes, "communities with strong ties to the land have always, and will always, defend themselves against businesses that threaten their ways of life" (309). Here again she denies division, as if everyone in a community agreed on what constituted a threat, as if they were all similarly situated against a threat, as if they were never too deluded, tired, or exploited to defend themselves, as if they could never themselves constitute a threat to themselves.
Cities, towns, states, and regions make bad decisions all the time; they stimulate industries that destroy them. Klein, though, has something else in mind, "a ferocious love" that "no amount of money can extinguish." She associates this love "with an identity, a culture, a beloved place that people are determined to pass on to their grandchildren, and that their ancestors may have paid for with great sacrifice." She continues, "And though this kind of connection to place is surely strongest in Indigenous communities where the ties to the land go back thousands of years, it is in fact Blockadia's defining feature" (342).
Participants in my seminar found this description racist or fascist. Even though this is not Klein's intent, her rhetoric deploys a set of myths regarding nature, and some people's relation to nature, that make some people closer to nature (and further from civilization) than others. It also justifies an intense defense of blood and soil on the part of one group's attachment to a place such that others become foreign, invaders, rightly excluded as threats to our way of life, our cultural identity. Given that climate change is already leading to increased migration and immigration and that the US and Europe are already responding by militarizing borders, a language of cultural defense and ties to the land is exactly what we don't need in a global movement for climate justice.
Klein's argument, though, gets worse as it juxtaposes indigenous people's love of place with the "extreme rootlessness" of the fossil fuel workforce. These "highly mobile" pipefitters, miners, engineers, and big rig drivers produce a culture of transience, even when they "may stay for decades and raise their kids" in a place. The language of rootless echoes with descriptions of cosmopolitan Jews, intellectuals, and communists. Some are always foreign elements threatening our way of life.
In contrast, I imagine climate politics as breaking the link between place and identity. To address climate change, we have to treat the world itself as a commons and build institutions adequate to the task of managing it. I don't have a clear idea as to what these institutions would look like. But the idea that no one is entitled to any place seems better to me as an ethos for a red-green coalition. It requires us to be accountable to every place.
I should wrap this up. The final tension I want to address comes in Klein's conclusion, as she emphasizes mass social movements. Invoking the abolition movement, Klein is inspiring, properly crediting Chris Hayes for his influential Nation article linking climate change and the emancipation of the slaves in the US. Nonetheless, her argument is strange. She calls for societal transformation but refuses the term "revolution." Throughout the book, she has said that we are running out of time to stop a warming trend so severe as to destroy civilization as we know it if not eliminate the human species altogether. She invokes Brad Werner's famous paper announcing that earth is basically fucked. But she writes:
And let's take it for granted that we want to do these radical things democratically and without a bloodbath, so violent, vanguardist revolutions don't have much to offer in the way of roadmaps (450).This lets her completely discount the revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, as if there is nothing to learn from any of the large scale organizing undertaken by communists, socialists, wobblies, and unionists. Her model for the left thus relies on extracting from the left a central component of our history. Frankly, at the level of tactics alone, this is a bad call: why sign on to a political project premised on the rejection of working class achievements (a move which repeats a ubiquitous gesture of erasure since 1989).
Wouldn't incorporating these achievements be fundamental to any effort to reinvent "the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect" (460)? Klein is trying to open up a collective desire for collectivity, but without communism.
It is also without revolution, which Klein dismisses as vanguardist, as if her Blockadians weren't themselves at the vanguard of climate struggle. But what does it mean to reject revolution? If the movements are mobilized as she suggests, what will stop them? What would block or hinder the people after they are moving? Perhaps the state, since Klein hasn't said anything about seizing it. Perhaps each other, since she thinks of us as divided into local communities. Perhaps the capitalist system, since she hasn't called for its abolition. Or perhaps this isn't the worry, since we are unlikely to be mobilized enough in time at all -- and for enough of us in the north, that will be okay, at least for a while.
These are the same "Free Market" bullshit artists who want EASY MONEY, GUARANTEED FOR THEMSELVES -- certainly not THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
The same bullshit artists who "know" economics, but crashed the economy.
They want that lazy-black-man, free-government handout, food stamp money; except, instead of food stamps, the "TRADING PARTNERS" want billions of dollars... ... CASH... or likely even credit, as long as it is in the billions ... or trillions.
They want government money without the stigma of being labeled lazy niggers.
So they "negotiate" secretly.
They have learned that nickels and dimes do add up. And if you stick to the right circles, there is no shame with the like-minded, the sychophantic, and the blind.
And now that they are caught, they will continue undaunted in broad daylight.
What they are negotiating is the freedom to exploit -- likely with: reduced environmental obstacles, oversight, regulation, etc. -- without being pursued as criminals or burdened with the penalties and difficulties of being caught polluting, stealing, corrupting, etc.
This is the new era of pre-emption.
Won't likely be a lot of black fellers at these shindigs, 'cep'in' the right kind.