War and Empire Links May 2019

The US Army Asked Twitter How Service Has Impacted People. The Answers Were Gut-Wrenching. Caitlin Johnstone. May 25, 2019.

After posting a video of a young recruit talking to the camera about how service allows him to better himself “as a man and a warrior”, the US Army tweeted, “How has serving impacted you?” 

As of this writing, the post has over 5,300 responses. Most of them are heartbreaking. 

“My daughter was raped while in the army,” said one responder. “They took her to the hospital where an all male staff tried to convince her to give the guy a break because it would ruin his life. She persisted. Wouldn’t back down. Did a tour in Iraq. Now suffers from PTSD.” 

~  

“I’ve had the same nightmare almost every night for the past 15 years,” said another. 

Tweet after tweet after tweet, people used the opportunity that the Army had inadvertently given them to describe how they or their loved one had been chewed up and spit out by a war machine that never cared about them. This article exists solely to document a few of the things that have been posted in that space, partly to help spread public awareness and partly in case the thread gets deleted in the interests of “national security”. Here’s a sampling in no particular order: 

“Someone I loved joined right out of high school even though I begged him not to. Few months after his deployment ended, we reconnected. One night, he told me he loved me and then shot himself in the head. If you’re gonna prey on kids for imperialism, at least treat their PTSD.” 

~ 

“After I came back from overseas I couldn’t go into large crowds without a few beers in me. I have nerve damage in my right ear that since I didn’t want to look weak after I came back I lied to the VA rep. My dad was exposed to agent orange which destroyed his lungs, heart, liver and pancreas and eventually killing him five years ago. He was 49, exposed at a post not Vietnam, and will never meet my daughter my nephew. I still drink to much and I crowds are ok most days but I have to grocery shop at night and can’t work days because there is to many ppl.” 

~ 

“The dad of my best friend when I was in high school had served in the army. He struggled with untreated PTSD & severe depression for 30 years, never told his family. Christmas eve of 2010, he went to their shed to grab the presents & shot himself in the head. That was the first funeral I attended where I was actually told the cause of death & the reasons surrounding it. I went home from the service, did some asking around, & found that most of the funerals I’ve attended before have been caused by untreated health issues from serving.” 

~ 

“My dad was drafted into war and was exposed to agent orange. I was born w multiple physical/neurological disabilities that are linked back to that chemical. And my dad became an alcoholic with ptsd and a side of bipolar disorder.” 

~ 

“i met this guy named christian who served in iraq. he was cool, had his own place with a pole in the living room. always had lit parties. my best friend at the time started dating him so we spent a weekend at his crib. after a party, 6am, he took out his laptop. he started showing us some pics of his time in the army. pics with a bunch of dudes. smiling, laughing. it was cool. i was drunk and didn’t care. he started showing us pics of some little kids. after a while, his eyes went completely fucking dark. i was like man, dude’s high af. he very calmly explained to us that all of those kids were dead ‘but that’s what war was. dead kids and nothing to show for it but a military discount’. christian killed himself 2 months later.” 

~ 

“I didn’t serve but my dad did. In Vietnam. It eventually killed him, slowly, over a couple of decades. When the doctors were trying to put in a pacemaker to maybe extend his life a couple of years, his organs were so fucked from the Agent Orange, they disintegrated to the touch. He died when I was ten. He never saw me graduate high school. He never saw me get my first job or buy my first car. He wasn’t there. But hey! Y’all finally paid out 30k after another vet took the VA to the Supreme Court, so. You know. It was cool for him.” 

~ 

“Chronic pain with a 0% disability rating (despite medical discharge) so no benefits, and anger issues that I cope with by picking fistfights with strangers.” 

~ 

“My parents both served in the US Army and what they got was PTSD for both of them along with anxiety issues. Whenever we go out in public and sit down somewhere my dad has to have his back up against the wall just to feel a measure of comfort that no one is going to sneak up on him and kill him and and walking up behind either of them without announcing that you’re there is most likely going to either get you punch in the face or choked out.” 

~ 

“Many of my friends served. All are on heavy antidepressant/anxiety meds, can’t make it through 4th of July or NYE, and have all dealt with heavy substance abuse problems before and after discharge. And that’s on top of one crippled left hand, crushed vertebra, and GSWs.” 

~ 

“Left my talented and young brother a broken and disabled man who barely leaves the house. Left my mother hypervigilant & terrified due to the amount of sexual assault & rape covered up and looked over by COs. Friend joined right out if HS, bullet left him paralyzed neck down.” 

~ 

“My cousin went to war twice and came back with a drug addiction that killed him. My other cousin could never get paid on time and when he left they tried to withhold his pay.” 

~ 

“It’s given me a fractured spine, TBI, combat PTSD, burn pit exposure, and a broken body with no hope of getting better. Not even medically retired for a fractured spine. WTF.” 

~ 

“Y’all killed my father by failing to provide proper treatments after multiple tours.” 

~ 

“Everyone I know got free PTSD and chemical exposure and a long engagement in their efforts to have the US pay up for college tuition. Several lives ruined. No one came out better. Thank god my recruiter got a DUI on his way to get me or I would be dead or worse right now.” 

~ 

“I have ptsd and still wake up crying at night. Also have a messed up leg that I probably will have to deal with the rest of my life. Depression. Anger issues.” 

~ 

“My grandfather came back from Vietnam with severe PTSD, tried to drown it in alcohol, beat my father so badly and so often he still flinches when touched 50 years later. And I grew up with an emotionally scarred father with PTSD issues of his own because of it. Good times.” 

~ 

“Hmmm. Let’s see. I lost friends, have 38 inches of scars, PTSD and a janky arm and hand that don’t work.” 

~ 

“my grandpa served in vietnam from when he was 18-25. he’s 70 now and every night he still has nightmares where he stands up tugging at the curtains or banging on the walls screaming at the top of his lungs for someone to help him. he refuses to talk about his time and when you mention anything about the war to him his face goes white and he has a panic attack. he cries almost every day and night and had to spend 10 years in a psychiatric facility for suicidal ideations from what he saw there.” 

~ 

“My best friend joined the Army straight out of high school because his family was poor & he wanted a college education. He served his time & then some. Just as he was ready to retire he was sent to Iraq. You guys sent him back in a box. It destroyed his children.” 

~ 

“Well, my father got deployed to Iraq and came back a completely different person. Couldn’t even work the same job he had been working 20 years before that because of his anxiety and PTSD. He had nightmares, got easily violent and has terrible depression. But the army just handed him pills, now he is 100% disabled and is on a shit ton of medication. He has nightmares every night, paces the house barely sleeping, checking every room just to make sure everyone’s safe. He’s had multiple friends commit suicide.” 

~ 

“Father’s a disabled Vietnam veteran who came home with severe PTSD and raging alcoholism. VA has continuously ignored him throughout the years and his medical needs and he receives very little compensation for all he’s gone through. Thanks so much!!” 

~ 

“I was #USNavy, my husband was #USArmy, he served in Bosnia and Iraq and that nice, shy, funny guy was gone, replaced with a withdrawn, angry man…he committed suicide a few years later…when I’m thanked for my service, I just nod.” 

~ 

“I’m permanently disabled because I trained through severe pain after being rejected from the clinic for ‘malingering.’ Turns out my pelvis was cracked and I ended up having to have hip surgery when I was 20 years old.” 

~ 

“My brother went into the Army a fairly normal person, became a Ranger (Ft. Ord) & came out a sociopath. He spent the 1st 3 wks home in his room in the dark, only coming out at night when he thought we were asleep. He started doing crazy stuff. Haven’t seen him since 1993.” 

~ 

“Recently attended the funeral for a west point grad with a 4yr old and a 7yr old daughter because he blew his face off to escape his ptsd but thats nothing new.” 

~ 

“I don’t know anyone in my family who doesn’t suffer from ptsd due to serving. One is signed off sick due to it & thinks violence is ok. Another (navy) turned into a psycho & thought domestic violence was the answer to his wife disobeying his orders.” 

~ 

“My dad served during vietnam, but after losing close friends and witnessing the killing of innocents by the U.S., he refused to redeploy. He has suffered from PTSD ever since. The bravest thing he did in the army was refuse to fight any longer, and I’m so proud of him for that.” 

~ 

“My best friend from high school was denied his mental health treatment and forced to return to a third tour in Iraq, despite having such deep trauma that he could barely function. He took a handful of sleeping pills and shot himself in the head two weeks before deploying.” 

~ 

“Bad back, hips, and knees. Lack of trust, especially when coming forward about sexual harassment. Detachment, out of fear of losing friends. Missed birthdays, weddings, graduations, and funerals. I get a special license plate tho.” 

~ 

“My son died 10 months ago. He did 3 overseas tours. He came back with severe mental illness.” 

~ 

“I’m still in and I’m in constant pain and they recommended a spinal fusion when I was 19. Y’all also won’t update my ERB so I can’t use the education benefits I messed myself up for.” 

~ 

“My dad served two tours in middle east and his personality changes have affected my family forever. VA ‘counseling’ has a session limit and doesn’t send you to actual psychologists. Military service creates a mental health epidemic it is then woefully unequipped to deal with.” 

~ 

“My best childhood friend lost his mind after his time in the marines and now he lives in a closet in his mons house and can barely hold a conversation with anyone. He only smokes weed and drinks cough syrup that he steals since he can’t hold a job.” 

~ 

“After coming back from Afghanistan…..Matter fact I don’t even want to talk about it. Just knw that my PTSD, bad back, headaches, chronic pain, knee pain, and other things wishes I would have NEVER signed that contract. It was NOT worth the pain I’ll endure for the rest of life.” 

~ 

“My cousin served and came back only to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and ptsd. There were nights that he would lock himself in the bathroom and stay in the corner because he saw bodies in the bathtub. While driving down the highway, he had another episode and drove himself into a cement barrier, engulfing his Jeep in flames and burning alive. My father served as well and would never once speak of what he witnessed and had to do. He said it’s not something that any one person should ever be proud of.” 

~ 

“I was sexually assaulted by a service member at 17 when I visited my sister on her base, then again at 18. My friend got hooked on k2 and died after the va turned him away for mental health help. Another friend serving was exploited sexually by her co and she was blamed for it.” 

~ 

“I spent ten years in the military. I worked 15 hour days to make sure my troops were taken care of. In return for my hard work I was rewarded with three military members raping me. I was never promoted to a rank that made a difference. And I have an attempt at suicide. Fuck you!” 

~ 

“I actually didn’t get around to serving because I was sexually assaulted by three of my classmates during a military academy prep program. They went to the academies and are still active duty officers. I flamed out of the program and have PTSD.” 

~ 

“My father’s successful military career taught him that he’s allowed to use violence to make people do what he wants because America gave him that power.” 

~ 

“While I was busy framing ‘soliders and families first’ (lol) propaganda posters, my best friend went to ‘Iraqistan’ but he didn’t come back. He returned alive, to be sure, but he was no longer the fun, carefree, upbeat person he’d previously been.” 

~ 

“My husband is a paraplegic and can’t control 3/4 of his body now. Me, I’ve got PTSD, an anxiety disorder, two messed up knees, depression, a bad back, tinnitus, and chronic insomnia. I wish both had never served.” 

~ 

“This is one of the most heartbreaking threads I’ve ever read.” 

~ 

“I am so sorry. The way we fail our service members hurts my heart. My grandfather served in the Korean War and had nightmares until his death at 91 years old. We must do better.” 

~ 

“My Army story is that when I was in high school, recruiters were there ALL the time- at lunch, clubs, etc.- targeting the poor kids at school. I didn’t understand it until now. You chew people -- who have nothing at home -- up and spit them out.” 

~ 

“I was thinking about enlisting until I saw this thread. Hard pass.” 

~ 

“I hope to god that the Army has enough guts to read these and realize how badly our servicepeople are being treated. Thank you and god bless you to all of you in this thread, and your loved ones who are suffering too.” 

~ 

There are many, many more.

The U.S. Government is Like a Bad Dad. Caitlin Johnstone. May 23, 2019.

There’s a house on the block where a large family lives, and it gets pretty abusive in there. The kids hardly ever get to see a doctor and there’s never enough money for them to afford decent clothes or go on holiday, and a disproportionately large number of them get locked in their rooms as punishment for silly, arbitrary offenses which could have been prevented with a little more care and attention. They don’t get out much and they have to spend their free time listening to scripture readings about how exceptional their family is. 

Looking at these disheveled, mistreated children, one can’t help wondering what’s going on with their parents. Why aren’t they providing for their kids? Why isn’t money going toward giving their children quality healthcare and education and making sure they have everything they need? Are they poor? Is there some sort of substance abuse problem? 

Actually, if you look at their house you can very quickly see where the problem lies. A huge, opaque fence with barbed wire surrounds the yard, and there are many expensive security cameras scanning the scene, facing both outward and inward. All the doors and windows are barred shut and rigged with fancy alarm systems, and there’s a giant stockpile of firearms in the master bedroom. 

Every spare moment of his free time, the man of the house is either coming home with an expensive new piece of home security equipment or adjusting and tinkering with the ones he already has. He can’t be bothered with his needy children, who he angrily shoves away whenever they dare approach him asking for things. 

“No time for that!” he yells while piling new redundant security systems on top of old redundant security systems. “I’ve got to protect the family from all potential intruders!” 

When he’s not doing that, he’s prowling around the block bullying his neighbors. He forces them to join the neighborhood watch, which he controls with an iron fist and runs around the clock. He insists that they submit to his leadership and relate to their neighborhood with the same aggressive hyper-vigilance that he has, and if any of them refuse to bow to his demands, he sets to work on grinding them into compliance. 

He sabotages their investments and works to get them fired from their jobs so they won’t have any money. He circulates pernicious rumors about them to undermine the possibility of anyone coming to their aid. He patrols the neighborhood with a large loaded pistol in each hand, and if anyone so much as looks at him funny he runs up to them and points both barrels in their face until they lay down on the ground with their hands behind their head and apologize. With particularly noncompliant neighbors he’ll burst into their house late at night and beat them within an inch of their lives until they agree to his demands, then get all his other neighbors to testify in court that he did it in self defense. Sometimes he’ll even stage events to make it look like a neighbor attacked him, then he’ll go to their house and murder them in cold blood. 

He is feared by the entire neighborhood, by his allies and enemies alike. The neighbors who support him only do so because he’s got such tight control over the neighborhood, and they know that their lives will be made easy if they work with him and painful if they work against him. So they do what they need to do to avoid being targeted while secretly wishing that he has a heart attack in his sleep. 

“It’s either us or them,” the father often tells his family. “I need to keep everyone around us in line, because there’s no telling who might come after us. We’ve earned a special place in this neighborhood, so it’s our job to lead it.” 

Once in a great while, if someone’s feeling particularly brave, they might point out that the father is constantly doing the things he’s afraid of his neighbors doing to him. 

“It’s different when I do it!” he always barks in response while adding their name to his personal blacklist. “Our family is exceptional, so we’re the exception to the rules.” 

And the mother, well like most mothers she’s in charge of managing the stories the family tells about what’s going on. Whenever a neighbor turns up wounded or dead, she’s responsible for telling the children that it was the neighbor’s fault, and their father was only protecting them. 

“Your father loves you,” she coos to them at bedtime. “You should be grateful to him for protecting your life and liberty. It’s good that he’s so strong, because if our family wasn’t in charge it would be the Changs around the corner or the Smirnovs down the road. We should always support everything he does and never question him, and never, ever wish for things to be different. This is the only way that things can ever be. Anyone who tells you otherwise is crazy and evil.” 

But the children are growing older, and some of the bigger kids are beginning to open their eyes to what’s going on. They’re beginning to realize that their father is an abusive tyrant and their mother has been lying to them their whole lives. The younger kids are still indoctrinated and put their fingers in their ears when the big kids try to tell them different, but even they are beginning to have their doubts. 

And the parents can smell it in the air. They know they’re beginning to lose control over the stories their children tell themselves about what’s going on in their neighborhood, and they know it will be a problem if they don’t nip that in the bud fast. The mother suddenly becomes far more forceful with her storytelling, saying that the Smirnovs are plotting a home invasion any minute now so the family must unite against them. The father begins making stricter and stricter rules about how the children are permitted to speak to one another, locking them in their rooms if they disobey or separating them from the others so they can’t speak their mind. 

It remains to be seen if the father will succeed in shoring up control of his family or not, but things have definitely changed, and the whole neighborhood is watching.

America in denial: Gabor Maté on the psychology of Russiagate. (Interview transcript). Aaron Maté, Grayzone. May 7, 2019.

Physician, mental health expert, and best-selling author Dr. Gabor Maté sits down with The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté to analyze how Russiagate was able to take hold of U.S. society following Donald Trump’s election.

tongue planted firmly in cheek?
I Am Not A Fan Of America’s 46th President. Caitlin Johnstone. May 16, 2019.

George Mobus' Theory of Sapience available as PDF

A Theory of Sapience: Using Systems Science to Understand the Nature of Wisdom and the Human Mind. Millennium Alliance for Humanity and Biosphere (MAHB), Stanford. May 16, 2019.

Author: George Mobus

Categories:  History, Human Behavior, Independent Publications, Sociology

Humanity faces what can only be called existential threats created by its own hands. We have cleverly built advanced cultures that use extreme amounts of energy to make life easy (at least for some) and that energy, for the last several hundred years, has come from carbon-based fossil fuels. Now we sit on the precipice of a calamity for ourselves and many other species as well.

Why?

If human beings are so clever, why have we not learned to moderate our activities, to consume only in proportion to what the Earth system can sustain in terms of resources and waste removal? We have gained the knowledge to understand what is happening and what we need to do. But we don’t do it in a timely way to avert devastation. What is wrong with us?

The answer to this question is surprising. Society is not wise in its choices – the collective decisions of humans – because individuals are not wise in theirs. And that is because wisdom, the tacit knowledge that develops in human minds through experiences, is lacking in the majority of humans. Most humans do not develop wisdom adequate to deal with the complexities of the modern world. As a result they make choices not based on rational long-range thinking about consequences or how those consequences interact systemically. They tend to look only at short-term gains in their own selfish wellbeing.

This book reports on investigations into the underlying causes of the lack of wisdom in average people. Sapience is the set of nascent mental competencies, situated in the human brain, that make us human. Sapience is the basis of higher-order consciousness experienced by humans. It is linked with the emergence of the language facility and our ability to work in symbols. It is the reason that we can think about future states of the world, especially those that may be different from the current and past states we have experienced. It is the product of a remarkable evolutionary process that produced hyper-social animals with sufficient cleverness to invent tools, languages, symbols, even art. We invented agriculture to help bring stability into our living world and reduce uncertainty in our access to resources. But, we had only just crossed the threshold to sapient thinking.

We need to evolve further.

Sapience is the product of brain structures and functions that set the human species, Homo sapiens, apart from the rest of the animal world. It represents a major leap forward in the evolution of the Universe. It contributed to tremendous boosts in our general intelligence and creativity. It provided the basis for morality and concerns for the wellbeing of others. But, even so, it was just a beginning. It does not go far enough in terms of providing individual minds with the ability to grasp the larger and deeper meanings of their choices and actions.

This book explores the nature and evolution of sapience as it is found in human beings today using systems science. It explores the psychological implications of having some capacity for developing wisdom in one’s life but not enough capacity to fully grasp the big picture of the human condition, and thus, make tragic errors in judgements. It attempts to answer the question of why we are in this predicament. 

Read Professor Mobus’ full book by downloading the PDF. 

Climate Links: May 2019

** updated May 22, 2019; * May 20

** In the Hands of Angry Gods. Ed Simon, The Baffler. May 22, 2019.

The case for hell on earth

And we abolish the idea of hell at the very moment when it could be the most pertinent to us. An ironic reality in an era where the world becomes seemingly more hellish, when humanity has developed the ability to enact a type of burning punishment upon the earth itself. Journalist David Wallace-Wells in his terrifying new book about climate change The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming writes that “it is much, much worse, than you think.” Wallace-Wells goes onto describe how anthropogenic warming will result in a twenty-first century that sees coastal cities destroyed and refugees forced to migrate for survival, that will see famines across formerly verdant farm lands and the development of new epidemics that will kill millions, which will see wars fought over fresh water and wildfires scorching the wilderness. Climate change implies not just ecological collapse, but societal, political, and moral collapse as well. The science has been clear for over a generation, our reliance on fossil fuels has been hastening an industrial apocalypse of our own invention. Wallace-Wells is critical of what he describes as the “eerily banal language of climatology,” where the purposefully sober, logical, and rational arguments of empirical science have unintentionally helped to obscure the full extent of what some studying climate change now refer to as our coming “century of hell.” 

* George Clooney releases PSA against climate change “dumbf**kery”. Melissa Locker, Fast Company. May 8, 2019.

Clooney noted that science has given “unprecedented knowledge of the natural world from subatomic particles to the majesty of space.” Tragically, though, that knowledge is threatened by “an epidemic of dumbf**ing idiots” saying “dumbf**king things.” 

Unfortunately, according to Clooney, “dumbf***ery is highly contagious, affecting the minds of even the most stable geniuses,” leading people to deny climate change, not vaccinate their kids, and not believe in dinosaurs. Now, that “rampant dumbf***ery” threatens “our health, our security and now our planet.”

* Because 'The House Is on Fire,' Naomi Klein Takes Centrism-Obsessed Media to Task for Failed Climate Coverage. Eoin Higgins, CommonDreams. May 1, 2019.

"You can't leave it all to the markets."


* Humanity Is About to Kill 1 Million Species in a Globe-Spanning Murder-Suicide. Eric Levitz, NY Mag. May 6, 2019.
[MW: most headlines captured just the sentiments of the first 9/10ths of this headline, but its the final word of the headline that's crucial.]


* Traditional Economics Has Absolutely Screwed Us. Mitchell Anderson, TheTyee.ca. May 9, 2019.

UN’s biodiversity crisis report screams for new ways of natural accounting.

"Conventional capitalism is failing because it considers the services provided by nature such as oxygen and food production as free and limitless. Only an economist could fail to see how a collapsing biosphere might be bad for business."

* A War Reporter Covers "The End of Ice" -- and it will change the way you think about climate catastrophe. Elise Swain, The Intercept. May 4 2019.

“A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things,” Jamail explains. “I have found that it’s possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace, while enduring the grief and suffering that are inevitable as the biosphere declines.” 

“The End of Ice” readers won’t find calls for technology-based solutions, politicians, mitigating emissions, or the Green New Deal to save us. 

“This global capitalist experiment, this experiment of industrialization and burning fossil fuels rampantly is an utter, abject failure,” Jamail told The Intercept.

415.26 parts per million: CO2 levels hit historic high. Patrick Galey, AFP. May 13, 2019.

Scientists in the United States have detected the highest levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere since records began, sounding new alarm over the relentless rise of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. 

The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has tracked atmospheric CO2 levels since the late 1950s, on Saturday morning detected 415.26 parts per million (ppm). 

It was also the first time on record that the observatory measured a daily baseline above 415 ppm. 

The last time Earth's atmosphere contained this much CO2 was more than three million years ago, when global sea levels were several metres higher and parts of Antarctica were blanketed in forest.

Climate Stasis: German Failure on the Road to a Renewable Future. By Frank Dohmen, Alexander Jung, Stefan Schultz and Gerald Traufetter, Spiegel Online. May 13, 2019.

In 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the country was turning away from nuclear energy in favor of a renewable future. Since then, however, progress has been limited. Berlin has wasted billions of euros and resistance is mounting.

Gray whales starving, washing up dead in startling numbers along SF coast. Peter Fimrite, SanFran Chronicle. May 11, 2019.


Why rapid extinction of plant, animal species matters. Daryl Choo, Today Online. May 12, 2019.

Human activities are putting a million species worldwide at risk of extinction, threatening ecosystems that people around the world depend on for survival, a United Nations (UN) assessment has found. 

The 1,500-page report, compiled by more than a hundred international experts, is the most comprehensive assessment on biodiversity and ecosystems yet.

The problem is capitalism. George Monbiot. April 30, 2019.

It is a weapon pointed at the living world. We urgently need to develop a new system.  

For most of my adult life, I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to see that the problem is not the adjective, but the noun. 

While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I’ve done so slowly and reluctantly. Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism. I was also inhibited by its religious status. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like saying “God is dead” in the 19th. It is secular blasphemy. It requires a degree of self-confidence I did not possess. 

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that it is the system, rather than any variant of the system, which drives us inexorably towards disaster. Second, that you do not have to produce a definitive alternative to say that capitalism is failing. The statement stands in its own right. But it also demands another, and different, effort to develop a new system. 

Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. 

The first is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity. 

Those who defend capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from goods to services, economic growth can be decoupled from the use of material resources. Last week, a paper in the journal New Political Economy by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis examined this premise. They found that while some relative decoupling took place in the 20th century (material resource consumption grew, but not as quickly as economic growth), in the 21st there has been a re-coupling: rising resource consumption has so far matched or exceeded the rate of economic growth. The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and appears impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion. 

A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone, from which materials are taken without full payment, and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases, until capitalism affects everything from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our life support systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all four. 

Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil, an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate. 

The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes three further dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control of non-reproducible assets, which implies either violence or legislative truncations of other people’s rights. Second, the immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting across both space and time. Third, the translation of economic power into political power, as control over essential resources leads to control over the social relations that surround them.

In the New York Times on Sunday, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, that he called “wealth creation”, and bad capitalism, that he called “wealth grabbing” (extracting rent). I understand his distinction, but from the environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing. Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations. 

To point to such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations, many of which are based on this premise: capitalism has rescued hundreds of millions of people from poverty – now you want to impoverish them again. It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth it drives, has radically improved the prosperity of vast numbers of people, while simultaneously destroying the prosperity of many others: those whose land, labour and resources were seized to fuel growth elsewhere. Much of the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and colonial expropriation.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism. 

There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism. Soviet communism had more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit. Both systems are (or were) obsessed with generating economic growth. Both are willing to inflict astonishing levels of harm in pursuit of this and other ends. Both promised a future in which we would need to work for only a few hours a week, but instead demand endless, brutal labour. Both are dehumanising. Both are absolutist, insisting that theirs and theirs alone is the one true God. 

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice, based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth. 

I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system, but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves, that meets our needs without destroying our home.

Our choice comes down to this. Do we stop life to allow capitalism to continue, or stop capitalism to allow life to continue?

One million species at risk of extinction, ... + One. Ian Welsh. May 6, 2019.

So you’ve probably seen all the articles about the UN report which finds that one million species are at risk of extinction, out of the 8.7 million species we believe exist. 

That’s more than 10%. 

The key thing that tends not to be emphasized in this is that ecosystems are chains, or complex webs of interactions. The death of insects, for example (remember when driving caused bug splat? I can’t remember the last time I saw that), will revebrate through the entire web, starting with birds. 

These interactions are complicated and we do not understand them well at all. 

There is a non trivial risk that the algae which are the major oxygen producers in the Oceans will die, for example. They produce 70 to 80% of our oxygen. 

If that happens, humanity will go extinct, along with a lot more than 1 million other species. 

Our actions are insanity. Absolute insanity. We are destroying the web of life which makes our own existence possible. 

We have no escape. We cannot even make biospheres (enclosed environments) work. Without that we cannot try to keep even a small population alive in the collapse (not that that would be anything but a catastrophe anyway.) 

But that we can’t make even a simple enclosed environment which can support human life work is the point. We are playing with systems we don’t understand. We are committing mass genocide of other life forms. 

And there is a better than even chance that it will be a million, or millions, +1. 

We do not exist separate from the web of beings who make life on Earth possible.

Say Goodbye To Permafrost (And Civilization?) Ian Welsh. May 13, 2019.

So, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are now higher than they have ever been since homo sapiens has existed. 

Meanwhile, on Russia’s arctic coast, which is permafrost, the temperature is 29C, 84F. 

That means the permafrost is melting. 

Since we continue to pump greenhouse gasses out, since every scenario includes more significant warning, I will state again: we are not going to avoid permafrost melting. 

Permafrost holds vast amounts of methane. Methane is, short term, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. 

This will likely then lead to methane releases from arctic seas. It will lead to faster melting of glaciers and polar and antarctic ice. As oceans warm, they will expand further, leading to sea level rises.
Increased temperatures will lead to even more extreme weather events such as category 6 hurricanes. 

We will see changes in weather patterns and so on. 

But the key point is that we are about to hit, and there is no actual possibility of avoiding, the accelerator, almost certainly leading to exponential uncontrolled increases in climate change. 

We are, for all practical purposes, past the point of no return. We will lose our coastal cities, for example, the only question is when. The glaciers and snowcap in most of the world will go away, leading to many rivers drying up. 

Etc, etc… 

Climate change is not a question, it is a certainty, and the question is not will it be bad, but “how bad?” 

The answer is almost certainly, “very, very bad.”

Deceptive sustainability: Cognitive bias in people's judgment of the benefits of CO2 emission cuts.
Mattias Holmgren et al, Journal of Environmental Psychology. 2019.

Abstract

People's beliefs in the actions necessary to reduce anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are important to public policy acceptability. The current paper addressed beliefs concerning how periods of small emission cuts contribute to the total CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, by asking participants to rate the atmospheric CO2 concentration for various time periods and emission rates. The participants thought that a time period with higher emission rates combined with a period of lower emission rates generates less atmospheric CO2 in total, compared to the period with high emission rates alone – demonstrating a negative footprint illusion (Study 1). The participants appeared to base their CO2 estimates on the average, rather than on the accumulated sum, of the two periods' emissions – i.e. an averaging bias (Study 2). Moreover, the effect was robust to the wordings of the problem presented to the participants (Study 3). Together, these studies suggest that the averaging bias makes people exaggerate the benefits of small emission cuts. The averaging bias could make people willing to accept policies that reduce emission rates although insufficiently to alleviate global warming.

Introduction 

Anthropogenic climate change (Figueres et al., 2017, Hansen et al., 2005, IPCC, 2014, Oreskes, 2004) has already raised sea levels (Solomon, 2007), increased global mean temperature (Houghton, 1996) and caused extreme weather events (Meehl et al., 2000), and the consequences risk being even more dramatic in the future. To mitigate global warming and climate change by reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is thus one of the most important steps to a sustainable future. However, unless corporate and political opinions reinforce necessary national and international regulations of GHG emissions (Zhao, 2017), this will hardly be possible. Because public opinion influences the direction of corporate and political opinion, people's ability to understand and accept the forces behind global warming is essential to take into consideration. 

People tend to mentally account for climate change as an object, instead of a process characterized by temporal totality and inertia (Chen, 2011). A consequence of this mental construal is that the stock-flow relationship of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere (the “inflow” via anthropogenic CO2emissions, and the “outflow” via natural CO2 absorption; Newell, Kary, Moore, & Gonzalez, 2016, p. 138) becomes difficult to grasp (e.g., Chen, 2011). For example, people tend to mistakenly believe that it is possible to stabilize atmospheric CO2 by keeping the anthropogenic emissions at current rates (Sterman & Booth Sweeney, 2007). The fundamental limitation of people's mental model of global warming is one of the underlying reasons for the erroneous beliefs individuals have about the relationship between the stock of CO2 in the atmosphere, the inflow via anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and the outflow via natural CO2 absorption. The belief that the CO2 concentration can stabilize by keeping CO2 emissions at current rates fails to take the process of accumulation into consideration. Maintenance of current emission rates in fact result in a continuous accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, as long as the emission rates are higher than absorption rates. This insufficient understanding of climate change may be one reason for people's reluctance to take costly and immediate actions to respond to climate change, as people's understanding and perception of climate change, its mechanisms and consequences appears to be one factor that drives climate action and behavioral responses to this phenomenon (Gifford, 2011). 

People's views of climate change and global warming are affected by biases and are easily influenced by extraneous information (Schuldt, Konrath, & Schwarz, 2011). For example, people are more likely to believe in global warming on hot days (Zaval, Keenan, Johnson, & Weber, 2014); they respond differently to the threats of climate change depending on perceived distance to the problem (Ejelöv, Hansla, Bergquist, & Nilsson, 2018); and people tend to think that “environmentally friendly” objects can compensate for more harmful ones (a negative footprint illusion; Holmgren et al., 2018a, Holmgren et al., 2018b). This paper extends research on the negative footprint illusion by exploring it in the context of people's beliefs regarding benefits of small emission cuts. 

People tend to think that ‘climate friendly’ behaviors can compensate for less friendly behaviors (Kaklamanou et al., 2015, Sörqvist and Langeborg, 2019). For example, a common idea is that “I recycle - therefore I can take my car to work”. One possible explanation of these beliefs is that people try to find a balance between good and bad deeds (Sachdeva, Iliev, & Medin, 2009). In other words, people tend to use moral licensing (e.g., Mazar & Zhong, 2010), in which they believe that they can license themselves to act immorally after establishing moral credentials. This manifests in relationships between higher fuel efficiency and increased driving distance (Matiaske, Menges, & Spiess, 2012). Similarly, decreased water use due to a water saving campaign, is related to increased electricity usage (Tiefenbeck, Staake, Roth, & Sachs, 2013); and electric car owners generally feel less obliged to act environmental friendly compared to conventional car owners (Klöckner, Nayum, & Mehmetoglu, 2013).

The idea that ‘environmentally friendly’ or ‘climate friendly’ behaviors can compensate for less friendly behaviors is sometimes applied to ‘friendly’ and ‘harmful’ objects as well. For example, people tend to think that a hamburger combined with an organic apple has a smaller carbon footprint than the hamburger alone (Gorissen & Weijters, 2016), and even experts intuitively think that a set of conventional and “green” buildings are less harmful to the environment compared to the conventional buildings alone (Holmgren, Andersson, & Sörqvist, 2018a). In general terms, when ‘environmentally friendly’ items are added to a category of ‘regular’ items, people tend to think that the environmental impact of the category decreases (Holmgren et al., 2018a). This effect is called the negative footprint illusion and is associated with people failing to take into consideration the simple fact that A + B must necessarily be larger than, or equal to, A. The illusion seems to arise because people base their estimates on the average of the items in the set rather than on their sum, i.e. an average bias (Holmgren et al., 2018a). Because people tend to think that “environmentally friendly” objects can compensate for more harmful ones, the estimated environmental impact become the average of the environmental impact of the objects rather than on their aggregated sum (Fig. 1). It should also be mentioned that the illusion has been shown to arise in both between-participants (Gorissen and Weijters, 2016, Holmgren et al., 2018a, Kim and Schuldt, 2018) and within-participants experimental designs (Holmgren, Kabanshi, Marsh, & Sörqvist, 2018b).

....

11. Conclusions 

Heuristics and systematic biases of the human mind lead to misconceptions about climate change and global warming. We need to develop more effective educational approaches to overcome the barrier of human cognition in order to avoid wicked outcomes in solving environmental problems. Campaigns and consumer information based solely on scientific rationales seem quite ineffective (Stoknes, 2015). For one thing, policy makers, planners and climate-change researchers need to package the message of global warming in more effective ways. As shown here, insights developed within the subject area of environmental psychology have much to offer in this context. What might seem to be logical policy interventions may in fact be quite deceptive interferences for achieving sustainability. Hence, strengthened legislations about information concerning emission cuts and ‘environmentally friendly’ choices could be a necessary tool to overcome the influence that the averaging bias seems to have in people's thinking about the benefits of emission cuts.

Terrawatch: snowball Earth – when glaciers reached the tropics. Kate Ravilious, Guardian. Apr. 30, 2019.

Rock deposits show there have been many times when the planet has been covered in ice

Ian Angus

Fossil capitalism, ecosocialism, and the Anthropocene crisis. Ian Angus, Climate&Capitalism. May 14, 2019.

Consciousness of Sheep

Not so good news. Tim Watkins. Apr. 1, 2019.

Protesters today intend bringing central London to a standstill by blockading several major arterial roads into the capital. For once, this has nothing to do with Brexit. Instead, it concerns the increasingly urgent call for government to “do something” about climate change. Exactly what that “something” is that must be done is a little less clear, since current environmental concerns are almost always pared down to concern about the carbon dioxide emitted by cars and power stations. Although how exactly this relates to the mass die-off of species resulting from industrial agriculture and deforestation, or growing oceanic dead zones and plastic islands, is far from clear.

Protesting environmental concerns involves a high degree of denial and self-deception; as it is based on two gross errors. The first is the irrational belief that governments have the means to respond to the predicament we find ourselves in. As a corrective to this, just look at the dog’s breakfast that the current British government has managed to make out of what is a simple (by comparison) trade negotiation. Anyone who seriously thinks these clowns are going to do anything positive (save for by accident) for the environment is displaying almost clinical levels of delusion. The second error is in believing the often unspoken conspiracy theory that insists that the only thing standing between us and the promised zero-carbon future is corrupt politicians and their corporate backers, who insist on putting the needs of the fossil fuel industry ahead of life on planet earth.
To maintain these deceits, a large volume of propaganda must be put out in order to prove that the zero-carbon future is possible if only the politicians would act in the way the people want. So it is that we are treated to a barrage of media stories claiming that this town, city, country or industry runs entirely on “green” energy (don’t mention carbon offsetting). Indeed, left to their own devices, we are told, the green energy industry is already well on the way to building the zero-carbon future we asked for; we just need the politicians to pull their fingers out and we could easily get there in just a few years’ time. For example, Joshua S Hill at Green Technica tells us that:

“Renewable energy sources now account for around a third of all global power capacity, according to new figures published this week by the International Renewable Energy Agency, which revealed 171 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable capacity was installed in 2018… 

“This brings total renewable energy generation capacity up to a whopping 2,351 GW as of the end of 2018, accounting for around a third of the globe’s total installed electricity capacity. Hydropower remains the largest renewable energy source based on installed capacity, with 1,172 GW, followed by wind energy with 564 GW and solar power with 480 GW.”

Stories like these play into the fantasy that we are well on our way to reversing climate change, and that all we need now is some “green new deal” mobilisation to replace the final two-thirds of our energy capacity with non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies to finish the job. If only it was that simple.

Notice the apparently innocuous word “capacity.” This is perhaps the least important information about electricity. Far more important is the amount that is actually generated. The US Energy Information Administration explains the difference:

“Electricity generation capacity is the maximum electric output an electricity generator can produce under specific conditions. Nameplate generator capacity is determined by the generator’s manufacturer and indicates the maximum output of electricity a generator can produce without exceeding design thermal limits…. 

“Electricity generation is the amount of electricity a generator produces over a specific period of time. For example, a generator with 1 megawatt (MW) capacity that operates at that capacity consistently for one hour will produce 1 megawatthour (MWh) of electricity. If the generator operates at only half that capacity for one hour, it will produce 0.5 MWh of electricity… 

“Capacity factor of electricity generation is a measure (expressed as a percent) of how often an electricity generator operates during a specific period of time using a ratio of the actual output to the maximum possible output during that time period.”

In terms of understanding where we are and where we are heading, “electricity generation” is far more important than “capacity”; which only tells us how wind, wave, tide and solar technologies would perform if it were possible (it isn’t) for them to generate electricity all day (and night) every day. Put simply, if you cannot turn on your lights, operate your business or recharge your electric car, because there is no electricity, it is little comfort to learn that on a good day the grid is capable of supplying more electricity than you might need. From a planning point of view, knowing the capacity factor for various generating technologies matters because it gives an insight into how efficient they are. A nuclear or fossil fuel power plant that runs more or less continuously for more than 60 years is likely to require far fewer inputs and far less land area than, say, vast solar farms (which have to be replaced every 10-20 years) that can only generate electricity when the sun is shining.

So where do non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies stand when it comes to electricity generation? According to the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy, in 2017 human civilisation generated 25551.3 Terawatt hours (TW/h) of electricity. Of this:

• Non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies provided 2151.5 TW/h (8.4%)
• Nuclear provided 2635.6 TW/h (10.3%)
• Hydroelectric dams provided 4059.9 TW/h (15.9%)
• Fossil fuels provided 16521.7 TW/h (64.7%).

What this tells us is that far more non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting capacity has to be installed than the electricity that it can actually generate – it has a low capacity factor. Indeed, Hill’s “around a third” figure includes the much larger capacity of hydroelectric dams (which have environmental issues of their own) for which there is little scope for further installation. Only by adding in nuclear power can we get to a third of electricity generation from low-carbon sources.

Even this, however, misleads us when it comes to environmental impacts. The implicit assumption is that non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies are still valuable despite their inefficiency because they are replacing fossil fuels. But this is not why countries like the UK, Saudi Arabia and (for insane reasons) Germany have been deploying them. In the first two cases, the deployment of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies is primarily to maximise the amount of fossil fuels available for export. In Germany’s case, renewables that might otherwise have weaned the economy off coal were deployed instead as a replacement for nuclear; leaving the economy overly-dependent upon often dirty (lignite) brown coal; and forcing them to turn to Russian gas as a future substitute for coal. These states are not, however, where most of the world’s largely fossil fuelled industrial processes take place. Asia accounts for the majority of global industry, and Asian economies use non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies to supplement fossil fuels rather than to replace them; although Hill does not clarify this when he tells us that:

“Specifically, solar energy dominated in 2018, installing an impressive 94 GW… Asia continued to lead the way with 64 GW — accounting for around 70% of the global expansion last year — thanks to dominant performances from China, India, Japan, and South Korea.”

While, of course, electricity generated from wind, wave, sunlight and tide is energy that might otherwise have come from fossil fuels, the impact should not be exaggerated. According to the 2019 edition of the BP Energy Outlook, in 2017:

• Non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies provided 4 percent of global primary energy
• Nuclear provided 4 percent
• Hydroelectric 7 percent
• Gas 23 percent
• Coal 28 percent
• Oil 34 percent.

Just our additional energy demand since 2015 has been sufficient to account for all of the non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies deployed to date. That is, if we had simply accepted 2015 levels of consumption, we need not have deployed these technologies at all. And, of course, if we had stabilized our energy consumption a couple of decades ago we could have left the bulk of the fossil fuels we now consume in the ground:Source: Global carbon emissions 2007-17

What is really at issue here is that – to quote the late George H.W. Bush – “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” That is, we can have any energy transformation we like, so long as it does not involve any limitation on our continued exploitation and consumption of the planet we live on. The too-big-too-fail banks must have permanent economic growth and that, in turn, means that we have no choice other than to keep growing our energy consumption.

The trouble is that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. Worse still, as the energy return on investment (aka Net Energy) declines, the increased energy and monetary cost of energy production causes the energy and monetary value available to the wider (non-energy) economy to decline. In the first two decades of the century, this has caused an intractable financial crisis coupled to a massive decline in prosperity across the developed economy (resulting in the collapse in consumption of the “retail apocalypse”) which is beginning to generate political instability. In the 2020s the crisis is set to worsen as the energy cost of producing a whole range of mineral resources raises their market price above that which can be sustained in the developed states (where most of the consumption occurs). The result – whether we like it or not – is that we face a more or less sharp drop in consumption in the next couple of decades.

This raises questions about the purpose to which we deploy non-renewable renewable-energy harvesting technologies. For several decades, people in the green movement have engaged in private arguments about whether they should spell out the likely localised and de-materialised economies that giving up or running out of accessible fossil fuels necessarily entails. Since this would be politically toxic, most have chosen to promote the lie that humanity can simply replace coal, gas and oil with some combination of wind, wave, tide and sunlight without economic growth even needing to pause for breath. This, in turn, has allowed our young people to believe that intransigence is the only thing preventing our political leaders from de-carbonising our economies.

Exactly what our politicians are told about our predicament is a matter of conjecture. Most, I suspect, are as clueless as the population at large. Nevertheless the permanent civil services across the planet have produced a raft of reports into the full spectrum of the catastrophe facing us, from the damage we are doing to the environment to the rapidly depleting stocks of key mineral resources and productive agricultural land, and the more imminent collapse in the global financial system. And the more they become aware of this predicament, the more they realise just exactly what the word “unsustainable” actually means. One way or another, six out of every seven humans alive today is going to have to go – either by a planned de-growth or via a more or less rapid collapse of our (largely fossil-fuelled) interconnected global life support systems.

With this in mind, there is something truly immoral about perpetuating the myth that we can maintain business as usual simply by swapping non-renewable renewable-energy harvesting technologies for fossil fuels. This is because maintaining the myth results in precisely the kind of misallocation that we already witnessed in those states that are using renewable electricity to bolster fossil fuel production and consumption. The more we keep doing this, the harder the crash is going to be when one or other critical component (finance, energy or resources) is no longer widely available.

There is a place for renewable energy in our future; just not the one we were promised. As we are forced to re-localise and de-grow both our economies and our total population, the use of non-renewable renewable-energy harvesting technologies to maintain critical infrastructure such as health systems, water treatment and sewage disposal, and some key agricultural and industrial processes would make the transition less deadly. More likely, however, is that we will find the technologies we need to prevent the combination of war, famine and pestilence that otherwise awaits us will have been squandered on powering oil wells, coal mines, electric car chargers, computer datacentres and cryptocurrencies (none of which are edible by the way).

At this stage, all one can say to the climate protestors and to the “green” media that encourage them is, “be careful what you wish for… it might just come true!”

Situating the appreciation. Tim Watkins, May 16, 2019. 

Sir Angus Deaton is the latest apostolic legate of the econometric priesthood to be given the unenviable task of coming up with a cause and a cure for income inequality and its socio-political consequences without challenging the underlying disease. The motivation for appointing Deaton – a Nobel laureate economics professor at Princeton in the USA – to head up a five-year review into the impact of inequality on the democratic process, comes from the unexpected votes three years ago that resulted in Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the USA. In the years since, political discontent with established parties and politicians has swept across the world; resulting in the rise of right wing “strongmen” like Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary and Salvini in Italy. In an interview with the Guardian, Deaton explained:

“There’s a real question about whether democratic capitalism is working, when it’s only working for part of the population.
“There are things where Britain is still doing a lot better [than the US]. What we have to do is to make sure the UK is inoculated from some of the horrors that have happened in the US.”
There is ambiguity in this. When Deaton talks about “horrors” is he talking about the mountain of human faeces building up on the streets of San Francisco, the return of Victorian diseases like typhus and the growing opiate death toll among America’s poor; or is he merely echoing privileged progressive howling over the election of Trump and the accompanying meltdown in the Democrat party? If the former, then there is little to celebrate in the UK, where work no longer pays; where slavery has returned – more of less openly – on our high streets; where millions of families depend on emergency food parcels to stave off starvation; where two homeless people a day die in shop doorways; and where the United Nations has condemned our welfare system as a crime against humanity. Only on the political front – and only by accident – the economic policies put forward by Corbyn and McDonnell in 2017 saved Britain from a majority Tory government that would have rushed headlong into a no-deal Brexit, followed by a massive assault on what remains of our rights and environmental legislation.
The Brexit vote itself owes a great deal to economic inequality. Ex-industrial areas that “ought” to have been in favour of the European Union – or at least the Social Chapter workers’ rights – voted by a large margin to leave. However, the error made by the liberal media has been to focus solely on the callous attacks on living standards perpetrated by Cameron and his Bullingdon Club public schoolboy chums between 2010 and 2016. This is to misunderstand the slow motion economic crisis that has been devouring western societies since the early 1970s.
To be clear, different governments might have adopted milder policies that might have mitigated much of what we can now witness openly on our streets. Cameron did not have to cut taxes and handout lavish corporate welfare to the already wealthy while driving the most vulnerable into penury. On the other side of the Atlantic, Obama could have jailed a few bankers and regulated the rest instead of inviting them to run his administration. But they chose not to; and thereby exacerbated a crisis that has been decades in the making.
Like most baby boomer economists, Deaton’s understanding of how the economy is meant to work is shaped by the unprecedented and never to be repeated 1953-1973 boom brought about by the post-war switch from coal- to oil-based economies. It was the massive explosion of wealth in the western economies during this period that gave rise to the period of (relative) industrial and political peace as, for the only time in modern history, the workers’ share of productivity increased. With prosperity rising, the bitter industrial battles of the 1920s and the depression and political extremism of the 1930s appeared to have been laid to rest. Unfortunately, and despite the economics textbooks, it was a blip. American deficit spending on the Vietnam War together with a slump in oil production brought about the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system and inflicted inflation upon America’s trading partners.
Neoliberalism was the western elite’s response to the crises of the 1970s. Conservative governments under Thatcher and Reagan set about dismantling the economic dimension of the post-war settlement (the series of social democratic reforms introduced to prevent a repeat of the 1929 banking crash, the 1930s depression and the rise of political extremism). Both blamed “greedy workers” for “paying themselves more than they could afford” for a crisis that, in reality, was the result of declining net energy – as more energy had to be expended on producing energy, less was available to power the much larger non-energy sectors of the economy. As the energy cost of energy continued to rise, so standards of living began to fall. The perennial question ever since has been, who will be the losers?
Neoliberalism’s first act was the creation of an underclass – what we know today as the “precariat” – a section of the population whose poverty would both crush inflation and serve to hold down the wages of the wider working class. Its second – almost unconscious – act was to embark on the financialisation of the economy by handing over control of the money supply to private banks. Instead of governments printing new currency and distributing it via public spending on pensions, benefits and public services, banks would create new currency when they made loans to those – mostly wealthy households and corporations – considered “credit worthy.”
In his interview with the BBC’s Today Programme, Deaton touches on one of the consequences of financialisation – what he refers to as “rent seeking.” Deaton gives the example of drug companies lobbying government to allow them to jack up the price of medicines. That is, no new research or production occurs; they are merely using their access to the political system to enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense. This, however, is the natural consequence of handing over the money supply to the banks… it is not a flaw, it is a design feature. The reason that businesses – and, indeed, banks themselves – used to have to be concerned with the health of the wider community and of the nation as a whole was precisely because widespread economic and social health provided the only guarantee that they could secure the additional money required to continue to grow. In a financialised system in contrast, access to new currency requires only that a new loan be taken out; while profit requires only that a business squeeze as much out of its customers, suppliers and the environment as it can to pay back the loan with interest.
This gave rise to the third act of neoliberalism. Since workforce, community and nation no longer mattered, it was far easier to profit by offshoring business activities to areas of the world that permitted child labour; paid low wages; allowed horrendous working conditions; and showed little or no concern for the environment. Free collective bargaining might have benefitted workers when they only had their fellow countrymen and women to compete against; but western workers soon found themselves having to compete with impoverished Africans and Asians if they were to keep their jobs… a futile task for many; and devastating for whole swathes of the ex-industrial regions.
As I pointed out in a recent post about Ebbw Vale in the South Wales valleys, under Thatcher in the valleys alone, tens of thousands of high-paying manual jobs were shipped overseas; devastating communities and leaving families trapped in perpetual poverty. Those who could get out – whether through education or by commuting – did so, leaving the community starved of the very knowledge and skills that might, just, have made a difference. And even the education ladder – the treasured neoliberal solution to poverty – was to be pulled up by Thatcher and her successors via the abolition of grants and the introduction of fees and student loans.
Throughout the Thatcher years (1979-1990) the Labour opposition had sought a route back to power that would reverse at least the harshest of the economic reforms. With Britain entering into the debt-based binge that ended so disastrously in 2008, however, there was little public support for policies that might plunge the country back into the crises of the 1970s. It was in this climate that the Clinton Democrats and Blair’s New Labour chose a route back to power that involved throwing the working class under the bus and adopting and building upon the economic policies of neoliberalism. As one of the architects of New Labour put it, they were “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich so long as they paid their taxes.” As the Dark Lord himself put it:

“Post-war Britain has seen two big changes. First, and partly as a result of reforming Labour governments, there are many more healthy, wealthy and well-educated people than before. In addition, employment has switched from traditional manufacturing industries to a more white-collar, service-based economy. The inevitable result has been that class identity has fragmented.
“Only about a third of the population now regard themselves as ‘working-class’. Of course it is possible still to analyse Britain in terms of a strict Marxist definition of class: but it is not very helpful to our understanding of how the country thinks and votes. In fact, of that third, many are likely not to be ‘working’ at all: these are the unemployed, pensioners, single parents – in other words, the poor.”

In exchange for adopting and institutionalising the economic pole of neoliberalism, Clinton and Blair imposed an enhanced version of the social reforms of the 1960s. As the author of the Flipchart Fairytales blog points out:

“Even during the Thatcher period, when economic policies shifted to the right, the liberal policies initiated during the 1960s, and the social changes that went with them, continued apace. Conservative politicians may have railed against ‘political correctness’ but they didn’t do much about it. Racist and sexist language that would have passed unremarked in 1979 was considered unacceptable by the time John Major left office. Corporal punishment in schools was abolished under Margaret Thatcher and, while there was much tough talk on immigration, her government did little to change the existing laws. The Conservatives even shied away from illiberal legislation that would have been overwhelmingly popular, such as the re-introduction of capital punishment. Voters might have thought they were voting for socially conservative policies but what they got was economic liberalism.”

If Tony Blair’s adoption of economic liberalism – symbolised by the adoption of the Private Finance Initiative which brought the private sector into the heart of government and public services – marked the point at which the right won the economic war, then it was David Cameron’s successful steering of same sex marriage onto the statute book that marked the point when the left won the social war.
The problem for neoliberalism was that it depended upon ensuring that the losers – those who need economic rather than social justice – never become the majority of the electorate. This was doable so long as the banks could keep churning out mountains of debt-based electronic currency backed by nothing more than the false promises of the bankers themselves. But when the real world imposed itself, in the shape of peak production of conventional oil in 2005, the resulting price spike which saw oil rise above $140 per barrel was sufficient to drive sub-prime mortgage borrowers into arrears. And when, in 2006, the central banks began to raise interest rates in an attempt to lower inflation, they made the banking collapse of 2007-8 inevitable. The subsequent recession, from which wages and living standards have yet to (and probably never will) recover, tipped sufficient new households into or on the edge of the precariat, that neoliberalism lost its electoral majority.
Cameron’s defeat in 2016 was a massive wake up call. As Matthew Goodwin explained in an article for Quillette:

“The referendum marked the first occasion in Britain’s history when the culturally liberal middle-class, which orbits London and the university towns, had lost. Until this point, the advocates of double liberalism—a globalized economy accompanied by a highly liberal immigration policy—had gotten all they had wanted. Business got a continuing influx of mass cheap labour that fed a consumption-driven growth model that not only removed incentives for investing in training but exacerbated divides between the high and low-skilled. The liberal middle-class got economic benefits alongside Polish cleaners and membership of the dominant value set but became increasingly detached from the ‘left behind.’”

The election of Donald Trump just five months later demonstrated that this was anything but a small setback or a local difficulty. Unfortunately, most unthinking neoliberals responded in the very worst way possible. While a few sought to understand the coalition of forces that had produced the result, most simply tried to ignore what had happened. The Brexit referendum, we were told, “was only advisory.” The Leave campaigners, they explained, “had lied.” The people, they argued, “didn’t understand what they had voted for.” In the UK, neoliberals turned to the courts in an attempt to strike down the referendum result while in the USA they turned to conspiracy theories and attempts to overturn the Constitution to evict Trump from the White House.
Only a few thinkers within the affluent class regarded Brexit and Trump as the democratic choice of the growing precariat. Some at least sought to understand the social and economic forces that had produced the result with a view to developing the green new deals, circular economies and fourth industrial revolutions that we are beginning to see emerging as the proposed means of maintaining neoliberal privilege while sending the unwashed masses back to sleep.
Writing in the Guardian, Aditya Chakrabortty sets out neoliberalism’s current predicament:

“Brexit proved our economy is broken, but our leaders still have no clue how to fix it…
“It ultimately comes down to this: decades of privatisation, hammering unions and chucking billions at the housing market while stripping the welfare state has effectively ended any semblance of a national, redistributive economy in which a child born in Sunderland can expect to have similar life chances to one born in Surrey. Yet politicians remain fixated on mechanisms that no longer work adequately for those who actually depend on the economy. They obsess over GDP growth when the benefits of that are unequally shared between classes and regions. They boast about job creation when wages are still on the floor.
“Most of all, they brag about London, the one undoubted gleaming success of the British economic model. ‘A pound spent in Croydon is of far more value to the country than a pound spent in Strathclyde,’ to quote Boris Johnson, the Conservative party’s last surviving greyback. But that is to ignore how London itself is rapidly becoming unlivable for many Londoners.”

Chakrabortty sees the symptoms, but neither understands the disease nor offers a cure. This, very likely, is where Deaton comes in. A safe pair of hands to give the masses the impression that something is being done (whether anyone can afford to wait the five years of the investigation is a moot point) while most likely turning to failed neoliberal prescriptions for increased access to university courses that have already outlived their worth, and for minimum wages set so high that they help drive people into the faux self-employment of an exploitative gig economy.
It is highly unlikely, however, that Deaton will prove capable of escaping his academic silo long enough to understand the growing net energy crisis that has rendered further business as usual unsustainable. There isn’t going to be a “fourth industrial revolution” because there is not enough of planet earth left for neoliberal capitalism to rape. Green new deals based on even more debt-based currency spirited into existence from the ether will fail for much the same reason. Rather like the more short-lived quantitative easing and below-inflation interest rate policy, neoliberalism itself was a response to the net energy crisis. And just like those policies, it could only ever be a temporary fix because as soon as the Asian and African people it sought to exploit began to engage in western-style consumption, they would accelerate the crisis.
The economy is failing precisely because it is unsustainable. Growth was only ever a product of rising energy per capita; and since the 1970s, western per capita energy has been in decline. Debt and developing world exploitation kept the game going for a couple of decades – but only at the expense of destroying the living standards of the western working class. In these circumstances, huge blinkers are required in order to fail to see why Cameron telling people that leaving the EU would be bad for the economy, or Clinton telling voters that “America is already great” was bound to end in tears.
In asking Deaton to inquire as to why “capitalist democracy” is failing, the Institute of Fiscal Studies is effectively situating its own appreciation of the crisis. The appreciation is false simply because there is nothing wrong with capitalist democracy… it is doing precisely what we would expect it to do in the face of financialisation and shrinking net energy: it is concentrating wealth in the hands of a tiny elite while impoverishing an ever larger section of the western population (whose continued spending it depends upon to remain solvent). By 2016 the process had reached the point where sufficient numbers were either in or teetering on the edge of the precariat that the electoral balance shifted in favour of anyone regarded as an “outsider” and deemed to be opposed to the prevailing system.
Initially, socially conservative parties of the right have been the beneficiaries of the backlash. However, the growth in support for Britain’s Labour opposition together with recent electoral victories for the left in Spain demonstrate that the rise of the right is not a done deal. Policies such as nationalising transport and utilities, limiting and taxing the income and wealth of the rich, setting higher minimum wages, and limiting the pay of corporate CEOs are at least as popular as socially conservative policies to tighten immigration controls and to impose tougher sentences on criminals.
We can only wait for Deaton to report in 2024 – assuming (and this is far from certain) that we still have a functioning economy by then – to see whether he proves capable of correctly diagnosing the underlying net energy disease or whether, like some wild west snake oil salesman, he trots out the same worn neoliberal prescription for more student loans to fund more useless university courses that – in true cargo cult fashion – continue to fail to generate the high-skilled/high-paid jobs that three decades of centre right politicians promised.

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