Monbiot on Capitalism vs Commerce

 George Monbiot wrote today, 

"One of capitalism's greatest successes is to shut down our imaginations. With the help of its favoured tools - neoliberalism and fascism - it persuades us that 'there is no alternative'. Our first task is to re-ignite our moral imaginations and name our alternatives. I cannot count the number of times I've been told, 'if you're against capitalism, you must be a communist,' or 'you must be a feudalist'. In fact, as in my case, you can be fiercely oopposed to capitalism, to communism, and to feudalism. It helps if you undertstand what capitalism is. This means recognizing that it's true nature is endlessly disguised. It's a distinct economic system which arose around 600 years ago. In The Invisible Doctrine, we give this definition:

Capitalism is not the same as commerce. The Dutch VOC and the British East India Company were not trading with the people whose land, labour and resources they seized. Nor were the slavers in the Caribbean and the Americas. Nor is investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) commerce: nations are forced to surrender resources to corporations or pay compensations. Nor is conversion of rainforests to cattle ranches or  extraction of deep-sea minerals. No one's freely trading or being properly remunerated in such cases. Yes, colonial looters might then trade the wealth they steal: capitalism can intersect with commerce, and can overrun commerce, but it is not the same. 

Never Again?

All this tariff talk is provoking a recession, which seems to be a feature, not a bug. As the economy falls, companies go bankrupt and are cheap to take over by the wealthy. The very rich will be able to take advantage of desperate times to buy businesses and property, and then are even further ahead when (or if) the economy rebounds. More power. More control. More stuff. The suffering of the citizens is not a concern. At all. 

This entire scheme was kick-started back in 1971 by the Powell Memorandum. Chomsky and Chris Hedges have been talking about this forever. And, of course, Ralph Nader. It's the precursor to disaster capitalism. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo attacking "extremists" like Nader who was doing things like trying to get cars to add seatbelts to improve traffic safety. The Memorandum is a push to allow unfettered capitalism without any regulations because, as far as Powell was concerned, businessmen really own the country. They pushed for more business involvement in colleges and universities way back then.  

A couple days ago, Senator Chris Murphy clearly outlined the corruption in the White House. It's all out in the open BECAUSE THEY CAN. Like in Russia, few in positions of power dare call them on it. 

"Trump and Elon Muck and their billionaire friends have engaged in a stunning rampage of open public corruption. It's not fundamentally different than what happened in Russia. These are efforts to steal from the American people to enrich themselves, and their strategy is to do it all out in the open. ...  

Capitalism's Effect on Bird Flu

If you think Covid is bad (or even if you don't), if H5N1 starts passing from human to human, it could be worse. It's not just about the virus's effect on us, but on our food supply. Another four agricultural workers caught it where 800,000 chickens had to be euthanized.

Here are some highlights from Katherine Eban's recent article:

"They stumbled upon hellish scenes out of a horror movie: Feverish cows in respiratory distress producing trickles of milk. Dying cats. enough dead barn pigeons and blackbirds to suggest a mass poisoning. Living birds with twisted necks, their heads tilted skyward. . . . This should be a story of heroism, cooperation, and an all-hads effort to defeat a wily virus. . . . Instead, it is a story of intimidation and obfuscation. The vets who sounded the alarm have been silences. . . . 

The interspecies nature of the outbreak makes combating it a unique challenge that requires a different response form that of Covid-19. We're focused on protecting human and animal health, as well as the food supply. Perhaps the biggest wild card has been the USDA's other mandate, to serve as the government's chief dairy lobbyist. . . . Looming over the USDA's reluctance to conduct a more transparent and proactive campaign against H5N1 in dairy cows are export agreements worth more than $24 billion each year. . . . Rather than moving forcefully to contain and eradicate the virus in dairy cows, critics say, the USDA has tried to control the narrative and spread the message that everything is just fine. . . . Dairy operators are essentially capital asset managers. It's so consolidated. For family farmers, there are only one or two buyers of your milk. If you don't go along with the playbook, your market access is cut off and you go bankrupt. And H5N! was not in the corporate playbook. Dairy farmers, afraid their cows would be quarantines or that they would not be able to sell their milk, simply opted not to test. Some forced veterinarians off their property. "Everyone is so scared shitless." . . . Meanwhile, the USDA was sitting on details about infected farms. . . . 

Most cows that contract H5N1 eventually recover with treatment. The same cannot be said for chickens. . . . With poultry being treated as less important than dairy, the mental health issues that come with killing animals for disease control, the substantial economic impact--to just allow it to continue with no end in sight, that's an untenable situation. . . . It is unclear whether the virus, as it continues to spread and evolve, will ultimately pose a serious threat to human health. But if it does, thre could be a battle no less intense than the one still being fought over who should be held responsible for Covid-19. Looking back at the events of 2019, one thing almost everyone agrees on is that China should have been much more transparent about what it knew and when it knew it. . . . Now only have we not learned, we have regressed.

On Burnout: "Can" is the New "Should"

I started reading about burnout when I walked away from teaching earlier than expected. Suddenly, I couldn't bring myself to open that door after over thirty years of bounding to work. A series of events wiped away any sense of agency, fairness, or shared values. Their wellness lunch-and-learns didn't help me, and I soon discovered I'm not alone.

An article published in JAMA last June looked at rising rates of burnout in healthcare, where 40% of physicians surveyed intended to leave their practice. They suggest, "To prevent a health care worker exodus, experts argue that the emphasis needs to shift from individual resilience to broader system-level improvements." They are looking for standardized methods to affect organizational management with "evidence-based interventions."  

Over 25 years ago, Michael Leiter and Christina Maslach came to the same conclusion. They identified six areas of worklife affecting burnout and created a specific assessment for educators. They determined the cause to be a "mismatch" between employee expectations and employer behaviours leading workers to be closer to the bleak end of a continuum from burned out to engaged. They suggest that "the task for organizations and individuals is to achieve a resolution." This is not just a matter of throwing wellness initiatives or resilience-speak into the mix, but addressing any reasonable expectations of employees with appropriate employer interventions in all six interrelating areas. 

click for clarity

Feels vindicating, right?!

Conspirituality

 George Monbiot has a compelling theory to explain what makes people believe conspiracies.

"Those who believe unevidenced stories about hidden cabals and secret machinations tend to display no interest in well-documented stories about hidden cabals and secret machinations. Why might this be? Why, when there are so many real conspiracies to worry about, do people feel the need to invent and believe fake ones? These questions become especially pressing in our age of extreme political dysfunction. This dysfunction results, I believe, in large part from a kind of meta-deception, called neoliberalism. The spread and development of this ideology was quietly funded by some of the richest people on Earth. Their campaign of persuasion was so successful that this ideology now dominates political life. It has delivered the privatisation of public services; the degradation of public health and education; rising inequality; rampant child poverty; offshoring and the erosion of the tax base; the 2008 financial crash; the rise of modern-day demagogues; our ecological and environmental emergencies. But every time we start to grasp what is happening and why, somehow this understanding is derailed. One of the causes of the derailment is the diversion of public concern and anger towards groundless conspiracy fictions, distracting us and confusing us about the reasons for our dysfunctions. It’s intensely frustrating."

He spoke to one conspiracy theorist, Jason Liosatos, who called Covid a fraud and "called doctors promoting Covid vaccines 'Mengele medics'." Yet Monbiot aligned with him in some ways: 

Capitalism is Slavery

 Listen to Nathan explain the problem with a capitalist structure that forces the elderly to continue working. 

@nathanreo #revolution #deconstruction #deconstructingcapitalism #capitalism #socialism #decentralization #socialprogress #awakening #humanevolution #shiftinconsciousness #consciousness #spirituality ♬ original sound - Reo

"Capitalism is a gross system of slavery and human rights abuse. . . .  It's economic authoritarianism. If you're on a fixed income and now can't afford to live, economic forces have effectively forced the elderly to go back to work. . . .These people shouldn't be driving or part of the labour force. . . . We act like capitalism is a truth of nature, but no. We've only had this kind of capitalism for the last couple hundred years. We should be waking up to that this is real economic slavery. It removes from people the product of their own labour as it's centralized in the hands in a few billionaires. Our system is psychotic, and both political parties are not interested in deconstructing the whole thing. We need a new civil rights movement. MLK recognized he couldn't push this through a couple progressive politicians. . . . The real part of the movement happened outside of politics." 

On Feudalism

Have we ever lived outside of a system of pseudo-feudalism with peasantry, slavery, or the working poor labouring for the benefit of Kings, land barons, or factory owners? 

One perspective of the past thousand years or so might go something like this: Peasants lived on the King's land, first for free, then later in exchange for a portion of the food they grew or products they crafted. A tax on land started when the Lords realized they could profit more from keeping sheep than people, and peasants had to commodify their labour for the privilege of continuing to live where they had been born. Then we had some revolutions to usher in a whole new way of living, to be able to have individual property rights and to choose our leaders. The wealthy expanded their land into plantations and dragged over people from the colonies to work them in exchange for some food and shelter. It was different in tone the King/peasant dynamic but not result: lords allowing food and shelter on their land to people who already lived there in exchange for their labour compared to landowners providing food and shelter to people they kidnapped in exchange for their labour. That type of labour was never abolished; it was merely outsourced to poorer countries and American prisons. More acknowledged today, we have the working poor who make just enough to barely pay for rent and food. Leaving a horrible job at Amazon isn't a realistic choice without any possibility of saving money. They're free in title but not in practice. They might very well still live on land belonging to their overlord! 

So, when did we have a democracy in which each person's unmanipulated and unfettered vote counts as much as any other, or human rights in which we are all have the right to food and shelter and certain freedoms. Did I blink and miss it? I wrote about this five years ago as well. 

Mask Up for Measles!!

The WHO put out this reminder about measles, which is hitting Europe and the UK hard and starting to be seen more in Canada too:

I re-did it to bring more attention to the pandemic we're currently swimming in:

And a few people commented things along the lines of measles being a real disease, or a virus to worry about because it's actually deadly. Measles is somewhere around 4-9 times more contagious than Covid, spreading faster and further. It also can be stopped by wearing an N95. The public health notifications are explaining aerosol transmission, which is identical to Covid. Measles incubates for about 1½ to 2 weeks, and people are contagious for four days before getting a rash. Kinda like Covid is contagious before you have any symptoms. Maybe this will remind us how asymptomatic transmission works. It's great to stay home when you're sick, but it's really, really not enough to avoid spreading either of these viruses. If you're like me and couldn't live with yourself if you realized you gave someone a disease that destroyed their life, then wear an N95 in public places.

Seize the Moment!

Until we redefine prosperity, consumption will continue to drive us down a destructive path (from Joe Tegerdine).

People are going to fly to vacation spots to sit in the sun to get a tan, a bit annoyed when all the smoke blocks the sun and they have to move hotels again because of encroaching fires. This is our current level of obliviousness. And there are some who might read that and think, "That's not me because I hate sitting in the sun," as if it's somehow better to fly somewhere to go to museums or to get drunk next to Dylan Thomas's bar stool or visit Graceland or Jim Morrison's grave, 

We'll kill our children's future to take a selfie with a tombstone. 

Can a Slingshot Down this Goliath?

I read Andreas Malm's book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline a few months ago, then watched the movie, and then was reminded of it all again by Abigail Thorn's latest Philosophy Tube video about being plagiarized by a man.

Thorn explains how subtle sexism led to free labour in the home. Even today, women get the lion's share of household chores, even if they're working the same or more hours outside the home, through "Social Reproduction" - the reproduction of beliefs that enables the continuation of existing power structures, which go so far as to  make up "facts" about a group of people in order to further their exploitation, for instance, by propagating the notion that women are better suited for this type of work. I once dated a guy who, when I suggested he do dishes more often, insisted, "But you're better at doing dishes." This is a version of learned helplessness that serves to reinforce the status quo and keep some men firmly on the couch with their feet up. 

But Thorn further explains a bump in the road that happens when society accepts people who are trans: 

"If Mrs. Mansley can become Mr. Mansley, then the idea of an essential female nature starts to look a little bit shakey. If Burt can become Berta and be happier for it, then the idea that women are inferior also starts to look shaky. If they can both become Mx. Mansley, nonbinary partners in loving communions, then who the fuck is gonna work at the Chrysler dealership?"

I thought a discussion of Locke might come out of all this because he exposed this essentialist specialization of roles bullshit with respect to the questionable inborn ability of the royal class at the time of King Charles II and Oliver Cromwell. His epistemology, that we're all a blank slate from birth, affected his politics: there's nothing inherently special about royalty, and we should vote on the best leaders! He wrote anonymously knowing what a ruckus that would cause!! Now we're in the same situation but instead of the monarchy exploiting the peasant's labour, we're looking at a shift in men's exploitation of women's labour.

But she doesn't go that far down that particular road.

She brings up Malm's book to relate the fight against climate change to the fight against patriarchy. For both, we've been told for decades to spread the word and raise awareness, but WE ALL KNOW already!! We know that people are exploited and that the climate is being destroyed. As long as people can benefit from pretending they don't know this and that more education is all that's necessary, then there will always be people pushing the stories that tell us it's all okay. But we know it's not, and we need to make some noise. Of course, the same could be said for the Covid situation. Denial is a hell of a drug! 

There's Money in Prevention

The insurance companies and finance mags are still openly discussing the problems with ongoing Covid, even if schools and hospitals aren't. Illness affects the bottom line!

Don't be surprised if you try to get insurance and they ask a lot of questions about whether you've had Covid, how many times, how recently, how much exposure you typically get in your workplace, and whether you have any lasting damage that requires treatment. And don't be surprised if your insurance is denied if you live or work in a way that significantly exposes you to getting Covid - like, maybe, you're a grade school teacher trying to get life insurance in case you die, leaving your partner to care for your children alone. 

Having Covid is a pre-existing condition that leads to many other conditions. 

They don't ask about your experiences with colds or flus because they don't lead to all sorts of illness down the road. 

Compassion as the Antidote for Capitalism

A Taylor Swift fan took the brave position of calling out the beloved superstar, and everyone else involved, for the death of Ana Clara and many in need of medical attention at her concert Friday night in Rio:

"First of all, Taylor made sure fans had water during the show. She took a pause a few times and even adjusted her performance in "All Too Well", the 10 minutes version, to include a heads-up to her crew about water supply. There are people blaming the heat wave for Ana Clara's passing, but let's be clear—it's not a "natural disaster." The venue intentionally shut the air vents to block the view from outside. Reports say the heat index hit 120F or 62°C. Despite the scorching conditions felt by everyone, Taylor included, the staff refused to tweak the script. Adding to the discomfort, stage flames blazed on, and local news reports reveal a staggering 1,000 people required medical support. Despite efforts from Taylor's team to provide water consistently, there are reports indicating that the supply eventually ran out, leaving certain areas without water. 

Culture of Uncare or Pandemic of Inhumanity

Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe coined the term "culture of uncare" to explain intentional efforts to sever links from one another and from the environment.

She calls it "severing links," but the word that comes to mind is alienation. We've been alienated from our environment, from our work, from others, and from ourselves. The neoliberal capitalist system has been far too successful at breaking us away from our own sense of integrity, of wholeness, as it works to turns us into unquestioning cogs in the machine.

This manufactured uncaring, the loss of a capacity to care, is at the heart of why we can't actually do anything about climate change, or covid, or all the horrific conflicts going on right this minute. Marx predicted that capitalism would naturally, eventually, self-destruct as inequity got too extreme for people to accept. But that was before (just before) we understood that burning fossil fuels could have a profound effect on the stability of our ecosystems. Marx wrote about alienation in 1855, and John Tyndall started looking at how carbon dioxide concentrations change the climate in 1859. Now we're frozen in place, watching industry continue to expand while the world literally burns. We won't make it to the glorious end of capitalism. 

On Housing and Value(s)

Here's a little story about the house at the end of my street. 

About 30 years ago, it was a bit of a grow-op, with vicious guard dogs, one that actually ate the leg off the neighbour's family dog! When I'd walk down the street with my kids, we'd always cross the street to avoid walking right past the place. 

Then the guy who owned it wanted to buy an RV and leave town for some reason, so he put the place up for sale, and I bought it to fix it up and make the end of the street less sketch.

It was a pretty crazy idea at the time, and sometimes hellish, but I did fix it all up!

Christian Priorities

One for the Christian right. 

Sexual impurity was a two-fold concern in the ancient olden days. First, it was to ensure that everyone's spreading their seed in fertile ground, instructing men to stay away from lieing with other men as if they're women as well as avoiding masturbation and barren women!! Guys like Leonardo DiCaprio who trade in for a new model regularly could be argued to be following this rule of avoiding any woman who's no longer fertile. But now that we have more than enough people in the world, and we can barely afford rent and food for ourselves much less children, we intentionally prevent the seed in fertile ground thing as much as possible anyway. So maybe don't worry so much about people spilling their seed willy-nilly. 

Secondly sexual licentiousness was as much a concern in the Bible as it was for Plato because it distracts citizens from more important things going on. When people allow their passions to take hold, they stop making sure their city is functioning properly and things could fall apart. The big lesson is to measure passions carefully - with reason - so that you can continue to get to work each day and keep the house clean and have space for a bit of contemplation. 

So it's counterproductive to these aims to spend your life distracted by other people's sins! All the people gathering with their children to yell about the sinfulness of others should take the log out of their own eye first. Judge not, remember. Can you feel the love in these videos?

Covid or Climate: Can't it be both?

In a local school board meeting from last June, in which they discussed their plan to remove HEPAs in rooms that had mechanical ventilation added (as if it's and either/or option), they first discussed how far they've overshot their energy budget. There were clear implications that Covid mitigations had forced this increased cost. 

Taking the price tags off for a moment, if we're faced with reducing CO2 emissions by reducing energy usage, OR reducing CO2 in the air by adding HEPA filters, which do we choose??

It can be both! 

But we can't do it within a neolibertarian capitalist framework. I always include that 'neoliberal' part because this current version of capitalism is very different from what Adam Smith and John Locke proposed! We're essentially back to a feudal system with CEOs our new Kings and Queens and workers given scraps like peasants. 

The Weirdness of Now

This morning I listened to a Naomi Klein interview from this week about her very different type of book, while reading a prescient Geroge Monbiot article that he reposted from last March. There's a striking amount of overlap.

Both are about the new right-wing alliances being formed, and the furthest right political parties we've seen in some time creeping up worldwide. 

George Monbiot:

Monbiot blames the influencers who are feeding the young conspiratorial messages, including Russell Brand (hence the recent repost). 

"He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand. . . . He wastes his talent on tired and discredited tales. . . . Such claims are not just wrong. They are wearyingly, boringly wrong. But, to judge by the figures (he has more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube), the audience loves them. . . . 

Lost Counterculture

Henry Madison, just some random dude on twitter, wrote an interesting bit on concerts and the enmeshment of generations. I disagree with several of his claims below:

Blondie

"Imagine a 77-year old favourite of the boomers’ parents, playing at Woodstock in the 1960s. The oldest performer at Woodstock was Ravi Shankar, who was 49. (He didn’t like hippies and never did it again.) There’s a serious point here. A 77-year old artist playing at Woodstock would have been born in 1892. That would be the equivalent of Louis Armstrong or Jelly Roll Morton playing there. We have artists at Glastonbury this week approaching 80 years of age. None of this is ageism, I should add. If people want to keep playing into their 80s, good luck to them. But we’re talking about headlining music festivals, festivals predominantly (like Woodstock) designed for the young. To me this means unhealthy things.

What’s said about the counterculture movement of the 1960s was that it was profoundly anti-establishment. Today the closest beliefs are labelled neoliberalism. It’s strange the bedfellows beliefs keep. And who invented neoliberalism? The same boomers. That was the same movement, as it morphed into a highly profitable middle and old age. The richest generation in all of history, by a mile. Anti-establishment beliefs were great business: the boomers dismantled many of society’s institutions, and then privatised them. Most of the corporate behemoths that now dominate our lives in our ‘neoliberal’ societies were set up by boomers, who also profited the most from them. They monetised the wreckage of their earlier anti-establishment assault. 

I don’t think people see this clearly at all. 

Symbols of Class

The Titan submersible hasn't been found yet, and the supply of oxygen is gone. Some think they perished days ago from pressure or another type of malfunction, all horrific to think about. That likely won't stop anyone from looking for the vessel in order to recover the bodies. 

It's my worst nightmare to be under water in a container, particularly if it's bolted shut from the outside. 

Lots of comparisons are being made between this submersible containing five wealthy men who paid ¼ of a million dollars each to see the Titanic, stuck somewhere about 700 km off the coast of Newfoundland, to another vessel that went down 100 km from Greece, a fishing trawler carrying 750 passengers, some who gave their life savings to get from Libya to Italy, of which 81 bodies have been found so far. Neither vessels met regulations for travel, but if we have extra time and money to be creative, like make a sub that's run with a game controller, it's called innovation. If we do something similarly questionable or reckless for our own basic survival, it's criminal.

Chris Hedges on Our Current State of Paralysis

Hedges writes on Substack now, if you haven't been able to find him lately, and his piece today is excellent. 

He starts by pointing out the growing rich-poor divide that is seeing the top earnings increase by almost 90% in the last decease in the states, while the lowest struggle to find an apartment they can afford. The government is doing nothing about poverty, climate, infrastructure, health care, and violence by police or fearful neighbours. He says, 

Democracies are not slain by reactionary buffoons like Donald Trump, who was routinely sued for failing to pay workers and contractors and whose fictional television persona was sold to a gullible electorate, or shallow politicians like Joe Biden, whose political career has been devoted to serving corporate donors. These politicians provide a false comfort of individualizing our crises, as if removing this public figure or censoring that group swill save us. Democracies are slain when a tiny cabal, in our case corporate, seizes control of the economy, culture and the political system, and distorts them to exclusively serve its own interests.

This analysis helps to explain how many corporations have so easily walked us back to pre-New Deal years, stripping away workers' rights, ignoring environmental regulations, focusing on basic facts while eroding the critical thinking of the humanities in public schools and universities, and removing useful health protections in hospitals. We're already not a democracy, as Hedges has said for years, invoking Wolin's inverted totalitarianism. Today he quotes research from professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page,