Reform Movement in the West and Confusion with ‘Capitalism'

Reform Movement in the West and Confusion with ‘Capitalism'

A great people’s movement is sweeping around the world without easy equals in recent times short of the democratic strides that were made the world over in the 1830s and 1840s.

Even with that in mind it is unique because this time the Bolivarian reforms in Latin

America, the Arab and muslim movements are ahead of the Western intellect and initiative that eventually resurfaced with the occupy movement.

And that is fine, except that its not yet worked out in which ways our Western reform thinking and activism are still to weak to actually break through. The movement will go where it goes but there is one small step ahead we can take. I am examining a very popular but a bit inaccurate approach that is quite typically used, especially as a way of summing up a situation. I think there is a downside in continuously confronting injustice by naming it as the so called ‘capitalism’. I am trying to show how this prevents a process of clarification and the building of a forceful momentum. By way of deep organizing, political, labour and rural movement grew powerful in times past exactly to such game changing levels.

The West is still the West for better or worse, from Spain to Greece to Italy, to Ireland, Germany, the US, Canada and many other great countries. Now as in the 1840s there is a remarkably common set of perceptions and also misperceptions that circumscribe the scene. It is a different narrative in Latin America and the illegal but successful mass strikes in China against sweatshop working conditions seem to remember European and North American labour history better than we do.

What is the Gordian knot problem in the story? What we have not quite inherited from movements before our time and in other places is the authentic bite in word and direction that gave and gives them positive populist ascendency. In the 17 and 18 hundreds middle class and capitalist sectors in society demanded from kings and feudal elites to scale back militarism, financial manipulation and real estate speculation. The first British PM Robert Walpole stopped the ruinous Great South Sea real estate bubble in Britain and launched infant industry investment by government initiative with phenomenal success. New found power and confidence engaged in and merged into many progressive trends. By way of struggle and also consensus, goals like education, children’s rights, suffrage, old age security and access to medical treatment materialized over time. New ways of a social contract emerged. Social rights morphed out of a slow swap with common wealth of in many situations once free pastures, security providing village life and treasures of the woods of a rural world that was invaded by industries.

Political and economic rights were achieved against feudal elites sometimes allied with industrial elites. But many capitalists like Robert Owen, Friedrich Engels and Andrew Carnegie but also Henry Ford and others supported workers partly because they were aware that their own means grew because of worker productivity as close twin to worker well being.

If there is a crisis of capitalism it means exactly that, a crisis in which two centuries of progressive trends, a lot of constructive, dynamic but also adversarially arrived at  achievements and characteristics are given up in favour of a pre industrial reach back. From a vantage point of consideration and heritage of who we are it hurts to hear from well meaning people the repetitious verbalism of challenging so called ‘capitalism’, regardless of how empty and misleading the false front has become. It follows that the capitalism criticism has a habit of calling crime proceeds profits, and there is more costly beautification.

What is the effect of this, how does confusion stall reform? Its not helpful to provide, with the capitalist label, unintentional acceptance or slack opposition to a wide range of reactionary trends of militarism, mercantilism and morbid banking monopolies. Further there is subsidization of outdated energy technology and marginalization of entrepreneurial infant industry. We see a revival of 18th century inspired commons enclosures in the privatization of commons spheres like water and generally in the destruction of ecological survival. In best feudal tradition discourse has become stilted and ritualized through the fabrication of free-trade foundations that never existed, anti science magic and anti literacy oriented image obsession. All these represent, significantly so, neo-feudal, anti democratic illnesses which are not actively clarified. Their proponents receive a free ride with the endorsement of being called capitalist. The imposter image of ‘capitalism’ is waterproofed by way of having it certified by its critics. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by validating totalitarian class warriors, criminals and ideologues who parade as market based entrepreneurs. In short, don’t empower the SOB positions. 

Michael Moore made a doc film presenting a notion which is well captured in the film’s title “Capitalism a Love Story”. And then his empathetically told stories of injustice caused by robbery evaporated somewhat by barking up the wrong tree.

Who is in love with what and who can’t let go of it?

Just look at the downward spiral of manufacturing in North America, capital investment in the production of goods which constitutes, which defines capitalism, is in full retreat. Feudal colonialism really comes home to many places in the West with a gas fracking craze that reminds of King Leopold’s obsession for resource extraction in the Congo. A hasty industrial retreat is not without consequences as exporting jobs and giving up on infrastructure progress here also means to literally poison labour and life conditions as well as land and water and invade self determination for people in China and other developing countries; Aside to blindly burning away, as transport diesel, the petrochemical production base of their and our future generations in the name of a giddy shipping frenzy, called globalization that has run its course.

Totalitarian democracy like other dictatorial systems tend to build on false populism, on the demonization of government and its representative purpose. Sounds like incoherent nonsense?  Yes, because incoherency, magical thinking, anti literacy without memory deploying a drunken populism has always been the game of authoritarian rule.

The occupy movement has not yet grown out of the mesmeric impact of overwhelming media mind control in the west, embedded in plenty of false imagery from the ‘capitalism’ road show. Somewhere in that particular culture wasteland the emergence of a galvanizing and grounded narrative for progress is stuck so far.

Let’s  find a way to escape this long lasting flatness of pop culture, of the soaps and the Simpsons, of a teenage way of relating to the world without attention to elders, without carrying memory and without admiring wonder.

Our problems with relativism and false populism go on in the digital era with an uncritical enthusiasm for distorted rightwing and racist interpretations in movies like Zeitgeist and Strive. It shows how vulnerable we are to confusion tactics that sow doubt into our minds and distrust into our ability to produce true leadership.

In contrast the Bolivarian, the social democratic reformers in Latin America evolved by very carefully thinking through a difference between capital investment in production and innovation and education, be it private or public, and the destruction of neoliberal thinking. Because they understood the latter as an anti democratic, anti justice orientation towards outdated ways of speculation and colonialism. Consequently there was and is no lack of intellectual dynamics that would limit a reform process from becoming a transformative and self determining movement. 

Its not easy for us after decades of hypnotic saturation exposure to neoliberal media propaganda defrauding us from much of memory and reality. 

But galvanizing power, leadership and vision in a democracy movement is always possible if the narrative has the courage of a Midas touch. Think about the Matewan miner strike in West Virginia or the far reaching reforms that came out of the Mackenzie Papineau rebellion in Upper Canada. Overcome was a laziness to think, to debate, or even look.

From there the virtues, the vitality of communities together with investment in infant industries, like green energy, intense ecological agriculture, commons spheres like transportation, healthcare and education and remembering freedom of association for workers and neighbourhoods, can be renewed.

We have no time to loose in building strength and rolling with the punches. There is peace to achieve and to keep, as war and jingoism are the methods with which wounded empires attack solidarity.

Lincoln's Farm Dirt and Obama's Harvard Dust in ten raw points

1. Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama both stand out as presidents with necessary scholarly and oratory attributes in a time of crisis.

2. Lincoln appointed a team "Team of Rivals" (book title by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on Lincoln and his government) who became both, critical debaters and loyal collaborators.
Obama may have his 'team of rivals' who behave like a team of traitors. (Since I wrote the essay this aspect has been documented by a veteran Washington journalist, I'll try to remember who it was)

3. Lincoln was not afraid to stare down anyone in the market square, think of the Douglas debates. At the height of the Civil War Lincoln met personally with Christopher Spencer, the inventor of the Spencer repeating rifle and carbine in an era of muzzle loaders. This was after the design had been rejected by the war department and was followed up on by Lincoln himself trying the rifle out on the White House lawn; 150 000 Spencer rifles performed a decisive argument in freeing the slaves.
On a similar note regards visionary technology the Obama administration gives zero emission transportation and therefore green industries no real chance. Despite an auto industry bail out GM was encouraged to continue to build vehicles within the game of the oil industry. Some time after the GM bail out GM announced a release date of November 2010 for the Chevy Volt electrical car. Its plug in range of 40 miles is a joke because it is about a quarter only of the range of the GM EV1 and Chevy Volt S-10 EV pick up trucks that were built in the 1990s before all of them were pulled back from their lessees and crushed, quasi as a signal to de-industrialize North America. Transportation technologies have always been the catalyst for overall industrial standards and this renewed blow to zero tailpipe emission transportation represents a serious set back for renewable energy technology. Fluffy thinking is wasting the opportunity for crucial green infant industry planning. Contrary to 'free' market and globalization ideologues from the Chicago business school the nurture and seed planting rules for public investment are no different now than for at one time kick starting fledgling coal, steel, shipping, military equipment, cotton and every other market. Weak industrial seedlings die and the ones nurtured to start up strength may live in a diverse market when government stops subsidizing and interfering on behalf of senile monopolies who are choking the market competition. Wall Street and Walmart, Fox News, the oil oligarchy and Eisenhower's "military industrial congressional complex" suffocate market activities with an anti entrepreneurial lobby culture driven stranglehold. This extends also to the so called agribusinesses like Monsanto, where lobby experts for a hellish genetic fascism had legislation changed in order to attack the essence of life, food. Such anti industrial financialism is not good for business, it just wiped close to half the world's wealth off the book. Entrepreneurial capitalism can return. 'Free' market means anti-market, an Orwellian code word, a demagogue's clever juggler trick. However, there is a little problem. Obama himself is an ivory tower 'free' trader, so when the Tea Party says that America was founded on 'free' trade and 'free' market principles he has nothing to come back with. Without ideological tie in it would be easy to point out that these are fairy tales, only some time after after WW2 did so called 'free' trade, 'free' market dogma, Washington Consensus and a variety of other globalization schemes start to play a dominant role. These constructs describe something very different than a market economy, they describe a radical elitism, a bankster feudalism where being born poor means to die poor, the exact opposite of the American traditions. With some gravity Obama needs to confront the demagogic extremisms of his time which is exactly what Lincoln did, recognize ecological limitations together with economic opportunities of the future. From there will come less momentum for foreign oil wars which undermine constitutional rights at home. A 'full measure of devotion' (Gettysburg Address) and conflicting technocratic measures are very different.

4. Lincoln's Secretary of State William H. Seward and others in his cabinet were even more impatient abolitionists than the President.
Whereas Obama's vice president Joe Biden is a strong supporter of George Bush's bankruptcy law targeting little people, a step towards new debt slavery. Obama left it to the banks to eventually stop fraudulent foreclosures, far too late. A lost opportunity 'to cross the aisle' on a people's level. Compromise in policy is possible on the basis of the constitutional representative, legislative, executive and judicative structure but not with totalitarian sentiment of false populist instigators, like Rupert Murdoch for example who have severed loyalty with all democratic institutions; be it public schools and libraries, be it the judiciary and the law of the land like obligations under US broadcasting laws not to censor news, be it free and fair elections, a military that follows orders and not attempts to dictate to government.

5. Lincoln who was conscious of the danger that can come from influence of banks on government has famously expressed the notion that: "... facing the Confederate army with the banks behind me I fear the banks more."
Obama appointed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner who takes sides with financial free trade by opposing or even ignoring the possibility of a return of the Glass-Steagall legislation with which Franklin Delano Roosevelt controlled cancerous speculation that had lead to the Great Depression. Until 1999, when it was repealed under Bill Clinton, Glass-Steagall had protected people's savings and pensions but also commercial banking from theft hiding behind fancy titles. Obama's and Geitner's refusal to bring back this proven protective measure against crime continues to be an agent of chaos but also serves as the 'bail out' pathway for the greatest wealth shift of history into a 21th century feudalism.

6. Abraham Lincoln, as did Jefferson ("Light and Liberty go together" T. Jefferson 1795), supported the modern idea of public education, understood broad access to education as vital for a democratic society and for prosperity.
Obama adopts some of the worst of Democrat's heritage while ignoring the best of Republican's legacy in favoring the old class oriented concept of privatized schools, which nowadays appear largely in the form of Charter Schools. These Charter Schools are not just derived from 17th/18th century European aristocracy, in 19 century America private schools were founded to keep black children out.

7. President Lincoln opposed military adventurism when William Seward wanted to declare war on Spain and France and compromised domestically with great skill in order prevent a civil war, while this was possible.
Obama escalated the Afghanistan conflict, and in foreboding Vietnam War reminiscence widened the war of occupation and of bombing people, in this case into Pakistan. A futile calculation of gains from control of Central Asia and perhaps more from domestically playing a 'war on terror' propaganda is also behind his threats of war against Iran; and revenge regarding democratically elected Mosaddegh's nationalization of Persian oil in 1951 of course. Sowing wind in the Inner Asian Steppes right on the door steps and/or land borders of four nuclear powers, India, Pakistan, China and Russia, may yet reap storm.

8. Lincoln at times had an uncanny intuition of things to come. In a speech he gave to the Illinois House of Representatives on Dec., 18 in 1840 he said: "Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."


Different to Lincoln being able to look back at the great prohibition failure from 1920 - 1933, Obama continues Nixon's dirty war on drugs which polices and incarcerates almost exclusively low income people, who as a fact, consume no more street drugs than the well to do. It practically is "The New Jim Crow" (report by Michelle Alexander), which eats the wealth of nations and single handedly creates crime cartels that destroy entire countries such as Mexico.

9. Lincoln was good at timing, he knew a window of opportunity when it presented itself.
Obama still has one, he can prosecute the banksters, bring the Glass-Steagall legislation back, the appointment of Elizabeth Warren in connection with the new Consumer Protection Bureau was a hopeful sign. Since Van Jones, Special Advisor for Green Jobs, was ousted, she is a lonesome first in a 'team of rivals' that has Abraham Lincoln smiling.

10. In his appointments Lincoln played intentionally with fire but shrewdly guided and wisely harnessed its power on behalf of the people who he took great effort to win over; that is why Abraham Lincoln was re-elected for a second term in 1864. He would have known how to sort out the leadership of the Republican Fox Tea-V party especially when and where old or new slavery propaganda attacks the constitution. By breaking up totalitarian measures of predecessor Bush, like the off shore concentration camps of Bagram and Guantanamo and the Military Commissions Act and by remembering freedom of speech and association is not just for elites but also for working people? Its not just about Obama, if he fails another chance at a democratic revival may be generations away. In the presidential election of 2012 first African-American president and reluctant Lincoln scholar ...

Carbon Pricing Backfires

Carbon Pricing Backfires 

The basic premise of carbon pricing policies is simple, make fossil fuels more expensive to discourage and reduce their use and with that reduce CO2 emissions, pollution and other associated problems. A range of NGOs and political parties with an ecological mandate support such concepts. Off course even a simple sounding strategy involves some assumptions to make it work, some understanding of the situation. The one premise that appears to go without saying is the idea of a more or less functioning market place where punitive or subsidy measures would achieve their desired effect.
So what is the working order of the market mechanism in terms of oil, gas and coal extraction and use?
What stands out is that especially oil is already higher priced than the market can afford, and increasingly uncompetitive in a variety of road, rail, agricultural and other applications. Net energy returns and production in tired fossil fuel reserves are diminishing dramatically, shifting the focus to crazy energy. In the tar sands example net energy return is around zero. Far too much energy doesn’t benefit the economy but goes straight back into the brinksmanship of heavily subsidized, speculation prone energy operations like gas fracking, tar sands mining and deep sea drilling. Such a financially, ecologically and operationally instable and generally lawless bent translates into an energy volatility that causes jarring impacts to the world economy. It comes in a cyclical pattern since the big financial melt down and the preceding end of the critical oil production increases overall. Since then a cycle plays out starting with shortage and price spikes, then contraction and demand destruction before economic activity picks up following lower oil prices, and then deflecting back down again repelled by an energy and specifically transportation ceiling of high priced oil that is in short supply.

Now, what carbon taxes, carbon emission trade premiums and such achieve is to increase and destabilize the end user price for carbon even further and with that increase the economic volatility in economy and oil market. This is bad for infant industry initiatives like renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and for industrial and value adding sectors in general which need predictability and vitality for their business plans. Its one more way in which carbon pricing measures defeat their own stated purpose of reducing green house gas emissions. What about the unfairness of handing out free carbon permits to big polluters and a flat tax like burden to small businesses and families?

Then, among a host of problems, there is the mathematical near impossibility to minimize GHG emissions with an emissions credit trade system. What is capped are GHG reductions, naturally emissions increase under these regimes. Entities who emit less trade with those who emit more with the process aiming to remain under a ceiling of minimum effect. Futility of an ideological still picture unable to describe dynamic events. 

Unlike acid rain or ozone depletion the climate problem cannot be addressed with a bit of tinkering and regulation. Carbon pricing comes with a share of naivete regarding the inertia and depth of global energy systems which are much bigger even than in any other industrial sector that can be cited or remembered. It requires not just sustainable farming with soils that are alive and sink the carbon they lost through agribusiness mistreatment, also in the energy sector a generational change over of technology is overdue. And those technology waves like the coming on of computers, microsurgery, newspaper print etc. never happen by quota, conferences or agreements. 

Except for a few major centres, vehicle charge points for electric vehicles for example are not available and carbon taxes and fees are therefor perceived as cynical. There often simply are no low carbon options that can be reasonably accessed by people. Feed in tariffs and other democratic elements of energy industry that allow participation of renewable energy producers, small and large, to sell renewable power back to the grid only exist in Ontario, as far as Canada is concerned. There are close to 50 countries now that have a concept like Ontario where sustainability and energy security are spelled out in terms of action, not ideology. What an outdated energy policy of subsidizing the oil, gas and nuclear industry (oil and gas to the tune of 200 billion dollars annually according to the 2011 KAIROS report “Pumped Up”) and carbon pricing like cap and trade systems unfortunately have in common is this.
Carbon pricing and masked subsidizing of carbon, both imply to hide away the most basic of facts that carbon becomes increasingly too expensive as fuel; and this is before externalized environment and health costs are counted. This compares to renewable energies that in case of wind, geothermal and photovoltaics are unlimited and free with the harnessing gear getting cheaper, wind power now often beating out every alternative.

Its not that hard to see how carbon pricing ideas lock up the thinking inside the fossil fuel bubble. But this neoliberal failure in the method of phony market tools that do not tackle green house gas emissions also hands the political momentum to the extreme carbon fuel proponents. A reality gap on the side of ecologically minded community leaders could become a decisive weakness for Southern Yukon and other areas in the face of a proven to be consistently destructive gas fracking onslaught ready to sacrifice our surface and ground water.