Puerto Rico's new hurricane season

SUBHEAD: Puerto Ricans remember inequalities of race, income, and access to U.S. political power.

By Basav Sen on 5 July 2018 for Foreign Policy in Focus -
(https://fpif.org/puerto-rico-confronts-a-new-hurricane-season-and-old-injustices/)


Image above: A couple stare at the destruction of hurricane Maria on where they lived. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: This article underlines the risks to Hawaii. Hawaii is another colonial prize of American expansion into empire. Like Hawaii the island people of Puerto Rico are American citizens. However, they have resisted the invitation of statehood. They have three options - one is remain a commonwealth under US control - another is they could to push for true independence and sovereignty - another is to vote for US statehood. Seeing what tourism, big Ag and suburbanization has done to Hawaii, and seeing how Puerto Rico has been treated after hurricane Maria (Trump tossing paper towel rolls to storm victims) my advice is that Puerto Rico should push for sovereign independence. And so should we.]

The disastrous impacts of Hurricane Maria were made by inequalities of race, income, and access to U.S. political power.

Residents of Puerto Rico are confronting the prospect of a fresh hurricane season, which will likely bring five to nine hurricanes, including one to four major hurricanes. The island, badly battered by last year’s Hurricane Maria, still hasn’t recovered. We continue to learn more about how dire the disaster has been.

A recent academic study showed that the death toll from Maria was likely about 4,700 — or more than 70 times the “official” count of 64. This was no mere “natural” disaster. The impacts of Hurricane Maria were to a large extent attributable to inequalities of race, income and — critically — access to political power.

The majority of deaths in Puerto Rico weren’t from people being hit by flying debris or drowning in floods. The largest number of deaths occurred because hospitals and clinics lost power, rendering them unable to provide treatment to critically ill patients. Others died because water treatment facilities shut down, increasing the risk of potentially fatal waterborne diseases.

This situation persisted for unacceptably long. Only 43 percent of the island’s residents had access to electricity even two months after the hurricane—barely half the global average. That’s on par with the 41 percent share in Benin, and considerably less than the 76 percent share in Bangladesh.

In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, then, access to electricity fell to the level of some of the world’s poorest countries. Even today, thousands of Puerto Ricans remain without electricity.

Puerto Rico is a 99 percent Latinx island. Its 43.5 percent poverty rate is nearly 3.5 times the national average, and its median household income is barely one-third of the U.S. median. Can we stop pretending these facts had nothing to do with the scale of the disaster and the inept official response to it?

Turns out, it wasn’t just the aftermath of the storm, but what came before.

The delay in restoring electricity was partly because the island’s grid hadn’t been maintained over a decade-long recession—a crisis worsened by Washington-imposed austerity policies that prioritize loan repayments over the needs of Puerto Ricans. The hurricane “lifted the veil on the pre-existing crisis,” says Jesús Vázquez of Organización Boricuá, a Puerto Rican food sovereignty organization. “But we knew it was there, because we were living it constantly.”

Puerto Rico is effectively a U.S. colony, with no representation in Congress. Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty who recently toured the United States, explicitly linked the territory’s economic and environmental devastation to its colonial status. “Political rights and poverty are inextricably linked in Puerto Rico,” he said. “In a country that likes to see itself as the oldest democracy in the world and a staunch defender of political rights on the international stage, more than 3 million people who live on the island have no power in their own capital.”

This isn’t the first time the UN has paid attention to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico, either. It holds hearings on decolonization of Puerto Rico every year and produces lengthy reports. The United States doesn’t bother to attend the hearings, blowing one off as recently as this month.

What of the storm itself? The intensity and frequency of hurricanes are increasing because our economy’s addiction to burning coal, oil, and gas is warming our world. Scientists have warned about this for decades, but our political leadership has failed to act.

Every activity of the fossil fuel industry — production, transportation, processing, combustion and waste disposal — is dirty and dangerous. Exposure to these hazards and their consequences fall across striking race and income disparities everywhere in the U.S. and worldwide.

It’s a problem that infects the mainland, too. From residents of the 95 percent Black town of Port Arthur, Texas, who confront extraordinarily high cancer rates because of oil refinery pollution, to the Indigenous Alaskan villages at risk of disappearing because of sea level rise, poor people and people of color disproportionately bear the costs of our unhealthy addiction to fossil fuels. And the consequences of climate change are expected to make poverty and inequality worse.

Our unequal political system places greater value on the profits of polluters than on the basic needs, or even the lives, of most of humanity. Our political leadership gets away with this immoral calculus because of the systematic disenfranchisement of vulnerable people at the bottom and legally sanctioned bribery at the top.

This vicious cycle — in which racial, economic, and other forms of inequality are both a cause and a consequence of environmental devastation — needs to be broken with powerful movements that confront the systemic roots of these inequalities.

The great news is that these movements are happening. People in Puerto Rico and in the Puerto Rican diaspora in places like New York have been demanding a just recovery led by Puerto Ricans and for the benefit of all Puerto Ricans, and working to build community resilience from the ground up.

Here on the mainland, affected communities including Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of resistance to polluting fossil fuel infrastructure in Minnesota, Louisiana, and elsewhere. Indeed, shortly after the latest death toll figures in Puerto Rico were released, thousands marched on state capitals across the country, demanding solutions to poverty and environmental justice as part of the new Poor People’s Campaign.

For Puerto Ricans bracing themselves for more storms and blackouts this summer, Pacific Islanders watching rising seas drowning their homelands, and countless other marginalized peoples in the United States and worldwide paying the price for our dirty energy and economic systems, these movements couldn’t come sooner.

Money should be for Common Good

SUBHEAD: Half the regions in Austria  support companies that implement the Common Goods Balance Sheet.

By Marcin Gerwin on 23 December 2016 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-12-23/all-money-should-be-used-for-public-good/)


Image above: Painting of an Amish Barn Bee where local families gather to frame out a new barn. From (https://www.catsmeow.com/products/amish-barn-raising-scene).

Let’s imagine that you were prime minister of Austria. What would you do to improve the economy? 
Christian Felber, the founder of  Economy for the Common Good, said he would invite people to gather in their communities and discuss the 20 most important cornerstones of the economy – what’s the goal, how do we measure success, what are the types of property, its limits and conditions, what are the models of social security?

So you would start with democracy?
Yes. It’s a kind of constitutional process where people get to participate. And because they know that their will is to be implemented, it is a true constitutional process run by the sovereign citizens.

What would be the outcome of such a process?
On the example of property, the result could be a mixed model of government. There would be public companies but only dealing with strategic resources. Then there would be private companies but they would have to fill in a Common Good Balance Sheet in order not to harm anybody.

A Common Good Balance Sheet?
The Common Good Balance Sheet is a tool to measure the degree to which the company adheres to the fundamental values of democratic society. These are usually anchored in the Constitution: solidarity, justice, sustainability, democracy and dignity.

In a Common Good Balance Sheet every stakeholder evaluates the company based on these principles. We also measure the dignity with which the company treats its suppliers, investors, employees, clients, future generations, the broader community and the planet. This instrument already exists. So far it has been implemented in around 400 companies on a voluntary basis. But the five fundamental values of democracy are identified by the people.

What if the people were given a fully democratic choice, would they create capitalism again?
Absolutely not, there is no chance of that happening.

Why not?
Because I would impose one thing: the procedure of decision-making. And according to this procedure there would be the space for many different proposals, not just one or two. Not capitalism or communism. It is pluralistic. Then we would measure the resistance towards every proposal.
We have empirical evidence that extreme options never win in this procedure. They always lose.

But capitalism is currently a mainstream economic model, not an extreme.
Not according to the people. They live in capitalism, but if they had a choice, they would vote against it. Always and everywhere. In its current form it would be rejected.

For example, in Germany there was a survey on whether the success and progress of economy should be measured by GDP, as it would be in capitalism, or by a Common Good Product. Only 18 per cent of people in Germany supported GDP. And in that same survey conducted by the government, 67 per cent answered: “No, we would like to replace GDP by a Good Life Index.”

Another example: people were asked in China, in the USA, and in Germany whether they were satisfied with the current degree of income inequality. The answer was a resounding “no”, scoring between 70 and 80 per cent in every country. So if the decision were up to them, they would decide to diminish the inequality.

Of course, they would not eliminate inequality completely, because that would be another extreme and there is strong resistance against total equality. It turns out that the highest income difference the people would tolerate is 1:10, from lowest income to the highest. That is the wisdom of the people. I trust them. Capitalism would mean no limit of inequality and I am sure that there isn’t a single part of the economy where people would vote for capitalism.

What is the alternative to capitalism, then?
The alternative is the economy for the common good, of social good and ecological good. Economy should be about the well being of all human beings and all living beings, including nature. Its success is not measured in financial returns, profits or GDP growth, but in the investments the companies contribute towards the common good. It is an alternative that already exists.

However, if your aim is not GDP growth anymore, where would the jobs come from?
Do you think it is possible to create job opportunities for all those who want them within the economy for the common good?

Companies in the private sector can be given incentive to create enough jobs. For example, they would not distribute profit to their owners but they would have to reinvest it within the company itself. And this means opening new positions and a better employment situation.

The state can create public employment as well, for between 10 and 30 per cent of the working population. It can give incentives to private sector to create jobs from public procurement, ranging from tax incentives to conscious technological, regional and industrial policy. Then there is also an informal economy, like subsistence; we can grow things on our own, make things with our own hands or make repairs. That is both fun and meaningful.

Of course, this should not fill up the whole day but as a complementary option it has been proven that it makes us happier. We can also share and cooperate in collaborative networks based on exchange. This is neither the public nor the private sector. The rules of the economy for the common good say ‘let’s create all of these sectors’. And the whole mosaic does not work, and we don’t have full employment, which is the goal, then the last resort is the state.

Another option is, of course, the reduction of working hours. In Austria, the ecological footprint is 4.8 times above the limits of the planet. In the end, we have two options: we can either reduce the working hours by 75 percent or we can increase ecological productivity by 400 percent. Maybe we can meet in the middle.

Maybe it would not be 5 per cent of the population working on farms, but 10 per cent. Currently, farming is part of the private sector because farmers sell goods on the market but there is also space for subsistence.

Who would create money in this system?
We were quite clear about that, all money should be used for the public good. That means several things.

First, democratic society makes the rules of the game. Second, the sole creator of money is the central bank in order to stop the current practice of commercial banks creating 90 percent of the money. Then the profit made by creating money goes to the people rather than to private banks.

What about the interest rates on loans, then?
My personal preference is that loan interests should be principally zero. In order for banks to survive, they can have a margin of 2-3 per cent. Therefore, the interest on saving would have to be minus 2-3 per cent.

If you give it any thought, you will realize it benefits 90 per cent of the population. Today we have 10 per cent of the population being net interest winners and 90 per cent being net interest losers. That is because we have a positive interest system. If you switch to the negative interest system, this relation will be turned upside down. Companies will be free from the obligation to grow.

How much interest is there in creating the Economy for the Common Good?
Half of the regions in Austria now support companies that implement the Common Goods Balance Sheet using public money. There are also municipalities and towns that have decided to implement the Balance Sheet in the companies that they own, and some of them decided to prioritize dealing with companies that use the Balance Sheet.

The European Union is now implementing a directive on non-financial reporting that will be obligatory for companies with at least 500 employees. This is the first step towards the Common Goods Balance Sheet that we have created and that we propose.

.

Equality and Sustainability

SUBHEAD: Life would improve for the ecosystem and human majority if we all lived like Cubans.

By Diego Mantilla on 4 July 2016 for Cassandra's Legacy-
(http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2016/07/equality-and-sustainability-can-we-have.html)


Image above: Impact of the rich and poor are not equal. If we all used the same resources at what level would we be living? Cuba. From original article.

Recently, in this blog, Jacopo Simonetta raised a very important question: Would a fairer distribution of income worldwide diminish the damage humans are doing to the earth? His answer, that it would not and would actually make matters much worse, intrigued me. So, I decided to look at the best available data.

Simonetta specifically looked at the question of whether a fairer distribution of income would reduce global CO2 emissions. In 2015, Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty (henceforth C-P) wrote a paper and posted online a related dataset that dealt with the global distribution of household consumption and CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent = CO2 and other greenhouse gases) emissions in 2013.

The data are not perfect, but they are the best that exist. The C-P dataset captures the Household Final Consumption Expenditures (HFCE) values provided by the World Bank, using the distribution of income in Branko Milanovic's dataset (for the bottom 99 percent) and in the World Wealth and Income Database (for the top 1 percent).

Income is not the same as consumption, and C-P assume that the distribution of income is the same as that of consumption. Also, they assume that the same distribution of income that existed in 2008 also existed in 2013. Like I said, the dataset is not perfect.

The C-P dataset includes 94 countries, which cover 87.2 percent of the earth's population, about 6.2 billion people, who are responsible for 88.1 percent of global CO2e emissions. Generally speaking, C-P divide each country in “11 synthetic individual observations (one for each of the bottom nine deciles, one for fractile P90-99, and one for the top 1%).”

The following chart shows consumption per capita and CO2e emissions per capita in 2013 from the C-P dataset.


Figure 1: Consumption and CO2e emissions per capita by world consumption percentile in 2013. (Some percentiles are missing due to the fact that the country quantiles vary in size and sometimes extend beyond a given global percentile.) (Source: own elaboration from data of Chancel and Piketty (2015).)From original article.


The top 1 percent on the consumption scale spend an average $135,000 (2014 PPP dollars) and emit an average 72 tCO2e per person per year. The threshold for belonging to the top percentile is $54,000. Their consumption is equal to 18 percent of all the money spent by households around the world. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that consumption equals income. If one were to take all the income of the top 1 percent and distribute it among the 99 percent, each person in the 99 percent would get about $1,400.

C-P assume a CO2e emissions to consumption spending elasticity of 0.9. A 10 percent increase in consumption means a 9 percent increase in CO2e emissions. This is a broad generalization, and C-P have a range of elasticities, but they chose that one because it is the median value of the estimates.

Using that elasticity in the C-P dataset, if each person in the bottom 99 percent got $1,400 and those in the top 1 percent were left with nothing, global CO2e emissions would increase by 9 percent.

But, of course, the top 1 percent are only part of the problem. About 22 percent of the world's population lives with a consumption level above the global mean of about $8,000 per year. Let's assume that everyone had a level of consumption equal to the mean.

Going back to the C-P dataset, if one averages the CO2e emissions of everyone within a consumption bracket ranging from $7,700 to $8,300, one gets an average emission of 6.15 tCO2e per person per year.

If everyone had that kind of emission, global CO2e emissions would be practically the same they are today, but, needless to say, that would improve the lot of more than three-quarters of the world's population.

In short, a perfect distribution of income would have a negligible effect on global CO2e emissions.

There remains the question: At what level of consumption would CO2e emissions be reduced dramatically and would this level be compatible with a decent existence?

Cuba offers an interesting example. Moran et al. (2008) looked at the UN's Human Development Index (HDI) and the Ecological Footprint of 93 countries for 2003, and worked on the assumption “that an HDI of no less than 0.8 and a per capita Ecological Footprint less than the globally available biocapacity per person [one planet earth] represent minimum requirements for sustainable development that is globally replicable.” Their survey showed that only one country met both of those requirements, Cuba.

Cuba also has the second lowest fertility rate of the Americas, 1.61 births per woman. Only Canada's is lower. This means that a low-consumption society can be compatible with no population growth.

The average Cuban eats 3,277 calories a day. Cubans have a life expectancy at birth of 79.4 years. This is above the United States and only 1.5 years below Germany. And Cuba's mean years of schooling are above Finland's. And only Monaco and Qatar have more doctors per capita than Cuba. Clearly, a level of consumption compatible with the finite planet that we have does not have to equal penury and destitution for everyone.

I'm not saying life in Cuba is easy for everyone. It isn't, but at some point in the near future, those who live in the developed world and in the rich enclaves of the developing world are going to be faced with a choice between a Cuban lifestyle and, to quote Noam Chomsky, the destruction of “the prospects for decent existence, and much of life.”

I wanted to find out if the findings of Moran and colleagues were still true today, but I made one change. The HDI is built using three dimensions: life expectancy, education, and per capita income. This has always bothered me.

A long, healthy life and an educated population are no doubt hallmarks of human development. But, is driving a Lexus a sign of human development? I think not. Therefore, I used the UN's data to build an index that looks only at life expectancy and education, which I'm calling the truncated human development index (THDI). (The calculation of the HDI is explained here.

 The THDI follows the same procedure used from 2010 onward, but it only takes the geometric mean of the first two variables.) In the following chart, I plot the THDI versus the Ecological Footprint, measured in the number of planet earths the inhabitants of a given country consume, using the most recent data.


Figure 2: THDI and Ecological Footprint of 176 countries. The red dot represents Cuba. (The THDI corresponds to 2014, the Ecological Footprint to 2012.) Source: own elaboration from data of the UN and Global Footprint Network. From original article.

There are only two countries in the vicinity of one earth that have an THDI higher than 0.8, Georgia and Cuba, the red dot. Of the two, Cuba has the highest THDI. It's interesting that Cuba has practically the same THDI as Chile, but Chile uses 2.5 earths.

And it has practically the same THDI as Lithuania, but Lithuania uses 3.4 earths. Furthermore, Cuba uses as many earths as Papua New Guinea, but Papua New Guineans have an average of 4 years of schooling, Cubans 11.5.

This is just to show the possibilities that exist for an egalitarian, sustainable society. As of late, inequality in Cuba has been on the rise.

However, according to the World Bank, CO2e emissions per capita in Cuba are not substantially different today than they were in 1986, when Cuba's Gini coefficient was very low, 0.22 (Mesa-Lago 2005, page 184).

In any case, I'm not advocating that we copy the Cuban model completely. I'm not defending Cuba's crackdown on individual liberties, freedom of speech among them.

All I'm saying is Cuba is an interesting example of the possibilities that an egalitarian society offers.

I, for one, would like to live in a society that is even more egalitarian than Cuba. It seems to me that there is no reason in principle why humans cannot build a society that is more egalitarian than Cuba and just as sustainable, especially when the alternatives are dire.

Cuba is not in the C-P dataset. It is hard to estimate the level of consumption of Cubans in dollars, because the statistics the Cuban government publishes are not comparable with those of the rest of the world, but last year the UN published a GNI per capita number for Cuba for 2014 that seems to be solid and comparable to other countries, 2011 PPP $7,301.

That number is not directly comparable to the C-P data, because C-P looked at household consumption.

Assuming that the share of GNI for household consumption published by Cuba's National Statistics Office is correct, one can estimate household consumption per capita in Cuba to be at around 2011 PPP $3,900.

It's hard to translate that to 2014 dollars, because I don't trust the PPP conversion factor published by the World Bank, but let's assume that the consumption of the average Cuban is around 2014 PPP $4,000.

Going back to the C-P data, one can find that the average CO2e emission for a consumption bracket ranging from $3,700 to $4,300 is 3.14 tCO2e per person per year. If everyone in the world had that level of emissions, global CO2e emissions would be cut by half.

And in a social system similar, but not identical, to Cuba's, no one would starve or be unschooled, and the lot of 61 percent of the world's population would improve.

To recap, an equal level of consumption for everyone around the world at the level of today's Cuba offers the possibility of substantially lowering human impact on the biosphere while at the same time maintaining a rather decent standard of living for all.

According to the Global Carbon Project, in 2014, “the ocean and land carbon sinks respectively removed 27% and 37% of total CO2 (fossil fuel and land use change), leaving 36% of emissions in the atmosphere.” If CO2 emissions were cut by half, all of them would be removed by the earth's sinks, and there would be no net addition of CO2 to the atmosphere.

It is worth pointing out that global mean consumption will reach the level of today's Cuba eventually.

The question is will that happen before humans increase the global temperature to dangerous levels.

Cubans today consume 6 barrels of oil equivalent per person per year of fossil fuels, which is what Laherrère (2015, page 20) forecasts humans will consume around 2075, after the peaks of oil, natural gas, and coal production.

But, by that time, according to Laherrère's forecast (2015, page 22), humans would have emitted about 2,000 GtCO2 since 2015, 800 GtCO2 more than the maximum Rogelj et al. (2016) estimate we can emit to have a good chance of avoiding the 2 °C threshold. (Laherrère is skeptical about anthropogenic climate change, but I'm not endorsing his conclusions, just looking at his data.)

• Diego Mantilla is an independent researcher interested in the collapse of complex societies and social inequality. He has a bachelor's degree in computer networking from Strayer University and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. He currently lives in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
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Climate, Energy, Economy - Pick two

SUBHEAD: Investments of time, energy, and money in resilience will become increasingly valuable.

By Nelson Lebo on 5 July 2016 for the Automatic Earth -
(https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2016/07/climate-energy-economy-pick-two/)


Image above: Painting of futuristic view of Eaarth from the North Pole after peak anthropomorphic climate change. From (http://www.worlddreambank.org/D/DUBIA.HTM).

Introduction by Raul Ilargi Meijer

We used to have this saying that if someone asks you to do a job good, fast and cheap, you’d say: pick two. You can have it good and cheap, but then it won’t be fast, etc. As our New Zealand correspondent Dr. Nelson Lebo III explains below, when it comes to our societies we face a similar issue with our climate, energy and the economy.

Not the exact same, but similar, just a bit more complicated. You can’t have your climate nice and ‘moderate’, your energy cheap and clean, and your economy humming along just fine all at the same time. You need to make choices. That’s easy to understand.

Where it gets harder is here: if you pick energy and economy as your focus, the climate suffers (for climate you can equally read ‘the planet’, or ‘the ecosystem’). Focus on climate and energy, and the economy plunges. So far so ‘good’.

But when you emphasize climate and economy, you get stuck. There is no way the two can be ‘saved’ with our present use of fossil fuels, and our highly complex economic systems cannot run on renewables (for one thing, the EROEI is not nearly good enough).

It therefore looks like focusing on climate and economy is a dead end. It’s either/or. Something will have to give, and moreover, many things already have. Better be ahead of the game if you don’t want to be surprised by these things. Be resilient.

But this is Nelson’s piece, not mine.

---

Article by Nelson Lebo

There appear to be increasing levels of anxiety among environmental activists around the world and in my own community in New Zealand. After all, temperature records are being set at a pace equal only to that of Stephen Curry and LeBron James in the NBA Finals. A recent Google news headline said it all: “May is the 8th consecutive month to break global temperature records.”

In other words, October of last year set a record for the highest recorded global monthly temperature, and then it was bettered by November, which was bettered by December, January, and on through May. The hot streak is like that of Lance Armstrong’s Tour De France dominance, but we all know how that turned out in the end.

Making history – like the Irish rugby side in South Africa recently – is usually a time to celebrate. Setting a world record would normally mean jubilation – not so when it comes to climate.

Responses to temperature records range from sorrow, despair, anger, and even fury.

Anyone with children or grandchildren (and even the childless) who believes in peer review and an overwhelming scientific consensus has every right to feel these emotions. So why do I feel only resignation?

We are so far down the track at this point that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Remember the warnings 30 years ago that we needed 30 years to make the transition to a low carbon economy or else there would be dire consequences? Well, in case you weren’t paying attention, it didn’t happen.

While these warnings were being issued by scientists much of the world doubled down – Trump-like – on Ford Rangers, Toyota Tacomas, and other sport utility vehicles. The same appears to be happening now, with the added element that we are experiencing the dire consequences as scientists issue even more warnings and drivers buy even more ‘light trucks’. Forget Paris, the writing was on the wall at Copenhagen.

The bottom line is that most people will (and currently do) experience climate change as a quality of life issue, and quality of life is related to a certain extent to disposable income. Acting or not acting proactively or reactively on climate change is expensive and gets more expensive every day.

If the international community ever takes collective action on climate change it will make individuals poorer because the cost of energy will rise significantly. If the international community fails to act, individuals will be made poorer because of the devastating effects of extreme weather events – like last year’s historic floods where I live as well as in northern England, etc – shown to be on the increase over the last 40 years in hundreds of peer-reviewed papers with verifiable data.

And here is the worst part: most economies around the world rely on some combination of moderate climate and cheap fossil fuels. For example, our local economy is heavily dependent on agriculture and tourism, making it exceptionally vulnerable to both acting AND not acting on climate change.

Drought hurts rural economies and extreme winds and rainfall can cost millions in crop damage as well as repairs to fencing, tracks and roads. As a result, both farmers and ratepayers have fewer dollars in their pockets to spend on new shoes, a night out, or a family trip. This is alongside living in a degraded environment post-disaster. The net result is a negative impact on quality of life: damned if we don’t.

On the other hand, tourism relies on inexpensive jet fuel and petrol to get the sightseers and thrill seekers to and around the world with enough dollars left over to slosh around local economies.

Think about all of the service sector jobs that rely on tourism that in turn depend entirely on a continuous supply of cheap fuel. (This is not to mention peak oil and the lack of finance available to fund any long and expensive transition to an alternative energy world.) I’m told 70% of US jobs are in the service sector, most of which rely on inexpensive commuting and/or a highly mobile customer base.

Any significant approach to curbing carbon emissions in the short term will result in drastic increases to energy prices.

The higher the cost of a trip from A to Z the less likely it is to be made. As a result, business owners and ratepayers at Z will have fewer dollars in their pockets to spend on new shoes, a night out, or a family vacation of their own.

The net result is a negative impact on their quality of life: damned if we do.

I suppose it deserves repeating: most OECD economies and the quality of life they bring rely on both moderate climate and cheap fossil fuels, but these are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, regardless of emissions decisions made by the international community, we are already on track for decades of temperature records and extreme weather events that will cost billions if not trillions of dollars.

The response in many parts of the world has been to protest. That’s cool, but you can’t protest a drought – the drought does not care.

You can’t protest a flood – the flood does not care. And even if the protests are successful at influencing government policies – which I hope long-term they are – we are still on track for decades of climatic volatility and the massive price tags for clean up and repair.

Go ahead and protest, people, but you better get your house in order at the same time, and that means build resilience in every way, shape and form.

Resilience is the name of the game, and I was impressed with Kyrie Irving’s post NBA game seven remarks that the Cleveland Cavaliers demonstrated great resilience as a team.

As I wrote here at TAE over a year ago, Resilience Is The New Black. If you don’t get it you’re not paying attention.

This article received a wide range of responses from those with incomplete understandings of the situation as well as those in denial – both positions dangerous for their owners as well as friends and neighbours.

The double bind we find ourselves in by failing to address the issue three decades ago is a challenge to put it mildly. Smart communities recognize challenges and respond accordingly. The best response is to develop resilience in the following areas: ecological, equity, energy and economic.

The first two of these I call the “Pope Index” because Francis has identified climate change and wealth inequality as the greatest challenges facing humanity. Applying the Pope Index to decision making is easy – simply ask yourself if decisions made in your community aggravate climate change and wealth inequality or alleviate them.

For the next two – energy and economics – I take more of a Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight (credit, Thom Hartmann) perspective that I think is embraced by many practicing permaculturists.

Ancient sunlight (fossil fuels) is on its way out and if we do not use some to build resilient infrastructure on our properties and in our communities it will all be burned by NASCAR, which in my opinion would be a shame.

As time passes, everything that is not resilient to high energy prices and extreme weather events will become economically unviable and approach worthlessness.

On the other hand, investments of time, energy, and money in resilience will become more economically valuable as the years pass.

Additionally, the knowledge, skills and experience gained while developing resilience are the ultimate in ‘job security’ for an increasingly volatile future.

If you know it and can do it and can teach it you’ll be sweet. If not, get onto it before it’s too late.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: The Solution Space - Part 1 8/15/15
The cost of capital will be very high and solutions which need it will lie outside solution space.

Ea O Ka Aina: The Solution Space - Part 2 8/16/15
If solutions depend on cooperation at a large scale, they will not be part of solution space.

Ea O Ka Aina: The Solution Space - Part 3 8/17/15
Proposed solutions which depend on energy-intensivity will lie outside the solution space.

Ea O Ka Aina: The Solution Space - Part 4 8/18/15
The shift to lower consumption will be imposed on us. The choice will be only in how we face it.

Ea O Ka Aina: The Solution Space - Part 5 8/19/15
The solution space will be inexpensive, small-scale, simple, low-energy, and community-based.

Ea O Ka Aina: From Here on Down 8/4/15
Keep your head down, your nose clean and your hands busy! Get used to it and thrive!

Ea O Ka Aina: Oases on a future Eaarth 6/28/15
It may seem like slow motion, but the unraveling is happening as quick as it can go.

Ea O Ka Aina: Food, Water, Energy & Shelter 1/31/13
As things seem to be degrading or coming apart you will have to step in to provide for yourself.

Ea O Ka Aina: Embrace the Change 7/24/12
Considering the alternatives, there really isn't that much choice.

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Exit from the Megamachine

SUBHEAD: Why a social-ecological transformation is impossible without changing the deep structures of our economy.

By Fabian Scheidler on 22 April 2016 for Degrowth.de -
(http://www.degrowth.de/en/2016/04/exit-from-the-megamachine/)


Image above: Waiting inside thr Megamachine. From original article and (http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-22/exit-from-the-megamachine).

Opening a newspaper or listening to the radio news exposes us to a flood of catastrophic messages: devastating droughts, failing states, terrorist attacks, and financial crashes.

You can look at all those incidents as unconnected singular phenomena, which is exactly what the common presentation of news suggests. From another angle, however, they appear as symptoms of a systemic crisis, with different branches that have common roots.

But in how far are we part of a larger system? Definitely, a Kenyan peasant and a Wall Street banker; a German Secretary of State and an Iraqi policewoman have totally different living environments – and yet they are connected by a global system that ensures that the Secretary of State can drink coffee from Kenia and that the banker’s penthouse is heated with oil that flows through pipelines guarded by the Iraqi police.

This system accommodates flows of goods and financial capital as well as flows of information and ideas on how the world is and how it should be. This complex network has – like all social systems – a history. It has a beginning, an evolution and – eventually – also an end.

The Megamachine

The global system that connects us is known under various names: Some call it “the modern world-system”, others “global capitalism”. I use the metaphor of the megamachine, coined by the historian Lewis Mumford.

The modern megamachine emerged in Europe around 500 years ago in long-lasting social struggles and has spread around the globe with explosive speed ever since. From the beginning, it provided a fabulous increase in wealth for a small minority.

For the majority, by contrast, it has meant impoverishment, radical exploitation, war, genocide and the destruction of natural resources.

In the early modern era – starting in the 15th century – the foundations of a transnational trade and finance system and a global division of labour were .

However, these economic structures were unable to function by themselves. They were and still are dependent on states that can enforce property rights, provide infrastructure, defend trade routes, cushion economic losses and reign in resistance against the system’s injustices.

In the light of this, state and market are not opposite forces (as frequently claimed) but have historically emerged in a co-evolutionary manner as parts of a greater structure.

This system also encompasses an ideological framework legitimizing the forceful expansion and implementation of the system and portraying it as salutary mission. A popular contemporary example for this is the invocation of our “Western values”.

Formerly, terms such as “Christianity” (as opposed to the “pagans”), “occident” or “civilization” (as opposed to the “savages”) or “development” (as opposed to the “under-developed”) were used for this purpose. The dominant organizing principle of the megamachine is the endless accumulation of capital or, put more simply: to multiply money forever. This is something new in human history.

Before, there were many systems in which people accumulated immense riches through the exploitation of others.

There were also societies that have destroyed their own natural resources and livelihoods and thereby themselves. None of them, however – from the Roman Empire to the Mayas – was based on a never-ending accumulation; i.e. on the virtually automatic augmentation of goods and money that became an end in itself.

This bizarre logic that emerged in the early modern era is the central motor for the aggressive expansion and permanent growth that the system needs to exist. New markets and energy sources have to be made accessible by all means – including violence – and ever bigger landscapes are exploited for the economic system.

According to this logic, any pause, any deceleration or moderation is equivalent to crisis and collapse. This is why – as we will see later – all hopes that “green technology” alone will save us from ecological collapse are delusive.

In the gears of never-ending accumulation

The logic of money-accumulation has its own dynamic reaching far beyond individual greed. One example for this is the legal form of joint stock corporations that has developed around 400 years ago, constituting one of the main motors of accumulation ever since.

In private, the chairman of the board of a large stock company might be greedy or modest, a greenie or a climate-denier; but regardless of his personal preferences, his function is simply to optimize the quarterly result of the company. If he does not fulfil this function or does so insufficiently, the system spits him out.

The most powerful organizations of the world are built according to this principle. The 500 largest companies in the world – most of them stock corporations – generate half of the global GDP. Their products – cars and medicine, soothers and machine-guns, animal fodder and electricity – are interchangeable means to their real end: the endless multiplication of money.

Once the demand for certain products is satisfied, new demands need to be created. This is why it is indispensable to turn people into consumers whose contribution to social life is reduced to buying things, however meaningless, unnecessary or even damaging they may be. In this logic, there is no room for common decisions regarding the purpose and meaning of economic activities and for asking what people really need and how they want to live.

The system’s limits

In the twenty-first century, however, the five-hundred year-long expansion of the megamachine is reaching insurmountable limits.

On the one hand the accumulation-machine is stuttering: the huge numbers of poor people across the globe and the crumbling middle classes do not have the money to keep buying a growing production at profitable prices. This is why the economy is shifting to finance speculations that erupt in ever deeper crashes, further destabilizing economies as well as states. The more effectively capital owners manage to dump wages and evade taxes, the more the crisis escalates.

A massive taxation of wealth for financing redistribution and public economic stimulus programmes might be the only way to reverse this trend and get the megamachine running again.

However, this is exactly what almost all predominant forces driven by short-termed self-interest strongly oppose. But even in case of success such a new growth programme would make us feel the second limit all the faster: the destruction of our natural livelihoods.

This limit does not concern the climate alone but also our soils, our fresh water reservoirs, biological diversity, the oceans and forests that are all exposed to an accelerating process of devastation. As you cannot eat money and there will be no economic growth on a dead planet, the limits of the biosphere are ultimately also the limits of the megamachine.

The illusion of “eco-social capitalism”

Time and again it is stated that we can modify this system in a way that decouples the production of prosperity from its devastating effects.

The question is: Can there be such thing as a green, social and peaceful megamachine? The proponents of concepts like “green growth”, “a green new deal” or “blue economy” answer this question with the affirmative. Their line of argument is: If we use fewer resources for each Euro of GDP we can keep accumulating money while reducing our ecological footprint. In this way we could, it is argued, create an ethereal capitalism that is light on resources.

Undoubtedly these concepts contain some meaningful proposals, for example the deviation of investments towards renewable energies and resource-effective production. But the elephant in the room that has caused the misery in the first place – namely the logic of endless accumulation – is ignored.

In practice this leads to the illusion that we can keep the deep structures of our economy unchanged while creating the necessary change by a few technical innovations and ecological guidelines. The delusiveness of this way of thinking becomes obvious when we look for example at the boastful projection from the 1990s envisioning the transformation towards a “dematerialized” economy based on the spread of computers and the internet: less use of paper and energy, less traffic – a disembodied green service-economy.

What came out of it? During the last 15 years the commercial transport sector in Germany has increased by about a third. The Germans – in the meantime equipped with countless computers, tablets and smartphones –are still using, in addition to their gadgets, as much paper as 1,5 billion Africans and Latin Americans altogether.

Only the economic recession during the financial crisis in 2008 left a dent in this curve, which is one of the many indications implying that true ecological relief is impossible without shrinking the economy. However, in the logic of never-ending accumulation this means crisis, mass unemployment, aggravated social conflicts and state bankruptcies.

Only change is realistic

In order to escape from this dilemma we need to change the deep structures of our economy and drop out of the machinery of endless accumulation. We need economic models that serve the common good instead of profit. To achieve this we have to change not only our mode of consumption but also our institutions, the way we produce and the logic of state action.

We need a strategy for massively fostering common-good-oriented economic activities based on local and regional networks while shrinking economic sectors that are bound to the principle of accumulation and predatory exploitation. Utopian? Possibly. But certainly not out of touch with reality.

In the face of the global crises, the idea of keep going with a few cosmetic amendments appears unrealistic. In the light of the looming chaos, radical change is the only realistic option. This change will come, whether we like it or not. The only question is: how will this change look like? Who will shape it and push it in which direction?

Nothing points towards a soft transition. On the contrary, times are turning uncomfortable for more than one reason: Due to us having held on to the illusion of a green capitalism for too long, we now lack concepts for exiting the megamachine. In the meantime the global elites fence themselves in high-security gated communities and seem determined to defend their privileges by all means.

A fight for the pockets of affluence seems to be on the horizon, and in many countries authoritarian, fundamentalist and racist forces are ascending.

Because a transitional plan is lacking we have to anticipate ever more dramatic systemic breakdowns: financial crashes, ecological disasters and social crises. So how can social and ecological movements prepare for this?

In such situation the movements striving for a social-ecological transformation will only have a chance when they join forces, when they leave their niches and occupy political spaces becoming vacant along the decay of the old order.

If ecovillages and the initiatives against evictions, nurses on strike and rebelling professors unite, they might gather enough energy to become systemic. There are positive examples available, such as the Spanish “rebel cities” like Barcelona and A Coruña where municipalities were conquered by social and ecological movements.

However, as soon as such movements leave their niches, adverse winds also increase. This is because the path towards a truly common-good-oriented economy that is viable for the future is no win-win game. To walk this path means to defy powerful interests and question ownership structures.

Most people in cities for example are forced to participate in the accumulation as wageworkers in order to pay rent pocketed by a clique of real estate fat cats and funds in order to keep the wheels of the financial markets turning.

A serious transformation is unthinkable without changing ownership structures. The same applies to the struggle for decentral energy structures, other forms of mobility, food sovereignty, patent-free products and our water and health supply.

We are moving towards a new era of revolutions. It is impossible to project the final results: whether it will be a world even more shaped by injustice than today, or a more peaceful world. Only one thing is for sure: in a chaotic system even a butterfly’s flap can cause a storm on the other side of the World. It is up to all of us.

English Translation: Christiane Kliemann

This article is based on the book “The End of the Megamachine. A Brief History of a Failing Civilization” (“Das Ende der Megamaschine. Geschichte einer scheiternden Zivilisation”), published by Promedia Press in Vienna in March 2015. For more information please visit: www.megamaschine.org


• Fabian Scheidler will be on a lecture tour across Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 2016. You can find all dates here: www.megamaschine.org/on-tour/lesereise-2016/

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The SYRIZA Experience

SUBHEAD: Entering the ominous battlefield of the 21st century, the left will either be relevant or it will be obsolete.

By Andreas Karitzis on 17 march 2106 for Open Democracy -
(https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/andreas-karitzis/syriza-experience-lessons-and-adaptations-0)


Image above: During the sovereign debt crisis European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker leads Greek Prime Minister Alex Tsipras by the hand to his unhappy ending. From original article.

The impact of the strategic defeat of last year is still very strongly shaping various reactions within the Greek left. Some people seem content with superficial explanations of what happened and return to habitual ways of thinking and acting; others sense the strategic depth of the defeat and turn inwards to disappointment and demoralization.

Still others are trying to learn from the “SYRIZA experience” in order to make themselves more useful to people in the future. All of us sense the dangers lurking in front of us but we are far from having a common and feasible strategy.

In a situation like this, political priorities change and ‘novel’ tasks emerge. For example, people far beyond those affiliated with the traditional left are scattered and in disarray, but also full of energy, determination and skills. What should they do?

Another urgent task is how to transmit the 'SYRIZA experience' abroad, facilitating the left in other countries in the fight against neoliberalism and increased hostility of the elites. ‘Novel’ tasks require a different mentality and operational qualities from the ones we used to deploy through traditional political action.

But first we need: (i) a thorough understanding of the positive and negative aspects of the 'SYRIZA experience', and (ii) an open, bold and innovative process of arriving at the new conditions of doing politics. These are some preliminary thoughts in this direction.

The failure

SYRIZA failed to stop austerity and neoliberal transformation in Greece. One could argue that SYRIZA also betrayed the hopes and aspirations of the popular classes and those fighting against financial despotism. It chose to remain in power, thereby ‘normalizing’ the coup we witnessed last summer and accepting neoliberal coordinates that shape governmentality today in Europe.

SYRIZA's choice deprived the people of a crucial ‘tool’ in this fight by its painful defeat: the political representation of non-compliance with financial despotism. SYRIZA eliminated the chance of a ‘tactical withdrawal’, a collective process of reassembling our forces that could take into account the escalation of the fight provoked by elites - and forming a more effective and resilient ‘popular front’ that would build its resources to challenge neoliberal orthodoxy in the future.

The experience of the SYRIZA government in the months after the agreement, shows that there is no middle ground between financial despotism and democracy and dignity; if you try to reach such middle ground, you are quickly converted into an organic component of the biopolitical machine aimed at dehumanizing our societies. Arguing that the implementation of the agreement is the only way out of the present situation is just a reformulation of the neoliberal core-argument that There Is No Alternative; no strategy for continuing the fightback against financial despotism.

However, there is a danger of underestimating the brutal strategic defeat that we all suffered in 2015, hiding from ourselves the extent of our current impotence as regards any serious challenge to financial despotism. We must dare to perform an extensive reassessment of our methodology and tools if we want to be relevant in these new conditions.

And to do so, we should not preoccupy ourselves with the self-evident negative nature of SYRIZA's choice and comfort ourselves that this is the source of our  problems. The choice SYRIZA made is – among other things – a symptom of the deeper, structural weaknesses of the left.

Today in Greece a ‘Left government’ is implementing austerity, leftwing people are confused and ‘The Left’ is turning into a pro-memorandum political force in people's minds. Nationalists and fascists have remained the only "natural hosts" of popular rage and resentment, the expected emotional outcomes of the burial of hope we witnessed last summer. Greeks are sensing that the future of their society is severely compromised.

The majority of Greeks have been sentenced to misery and despair through the imposition of newer harder austerity measures without any real hope for the future. If we add to the economic and social disaster that austerity is inflicting on us the huge waves of refugees that are entering Greece - especially the complex and contradictory ways in which their drama impacts on the abused psychic economy of the Greek population - and add also the fear of increased geopolitical instability in the region, then it seems certain that prosperity, stability and peace has left Greece for the identifiable future.

These are exactly the suffocating conditions that prevail in a society before it explodes – due to a random incident – deepening even further the decline, and plunging existential depths. It is like we are walking on thin ice from now on in Greece. In moments like this we have to remain calm and think clearly if we want to arrive at what is needed to adapt and to be effective.

The sad case of Europe

The neoliberal EU and Eurozone has transferred a bundle of important policies and powers that once appeared to belong to the nation state out of the reach of the people. At the same time, a vast array of neoliberal regulations and norms govern the function of the state. In the EU and Eurozone today, the elected government is no longer the major bearer of political power. In the case of Greece, democratically electing a government is like electing a junior partner in a wider government in which the lenders are the major partners.

The junior partner is not allowed to intervene and disturb decisions on such crucial economic and social issues as fiscal policy, banks, privatizations, pensions etc. If it does intervene and demand a say on these issues, then the people who appoint it are going to suffer the consequences.

The elites – by extracting important powers and decisions on crucial issues from the democratically structured institutions of the bourgeois state – have managed to gain unchecked control over the basic functions of the society. It is up to their anti-democratic institutions to decide whether a society will have a functional banking system and sufficient liquidity to run or not.

That's what happened to Greece; that's the core argument of the president of Portugal behind his initial decision to appoint a pro-austerity minority government: ‘I am preventing unnecessary pain.’ Pain that will be caused by the naivety and dangerous ignorance of the people and political powers that still insist on people's right to have access to crucial decisions, while at the same time they do not have the power to shape these decisions.

It is evident today that the EU is an openly anti-democratic institutional structure. The left must embrace the crude reality: in Europe a new kind of despotism is emerging fast.

The time lag of the left

In western societies, the left, but not only the left, of a robust democratic constitution has been trained to do politics within the coordinates of a post-war institutional configuration. We assumed that the elites were committed to accepting the democratically shaped mandate of an elected government.

If they did not like the policies that it promoted, they had to engage in a political fight; opposition parties must convince the people that this policy is neither desirable nor successful and use the democratic processes for a new government of their preference to be elected.

But was this ever truly the case even for western societies after the Great War? This is surely a debatable issue. However, it is sufficient to assume that this was at least the dominant conception of political functioning that shaped the methodology and strategy of political agency over the last decades, even if it does not correspond fully to reality.

According to this conception, the post-war global balance of forces inscribed in state institutions a considerable amount of popular power, so that people without considerable economic power nevertheless have access to crucial decisions. Of course, the quality and the range of the access was a constant issue of class struggle.

The elites were obliged to fight according to the rules (or at least to appear to do so) and at the same time they were working deliberately to diffuse a kind of institutional configuration contaminated by popular power. In recent decades (not accidentally after the fall of the Soviet Union) they made decisive steps towards diffusing this kind of power and hence limiting the ability of the popular classes to influence crucial decisions. Today the elites feel confident enough to openly defy democracy. Democracy is no longer a sine qua non.

Based on the premise that the framework in which politics is being performed hasn't changed significantly, SYRIZA did what the traditional way of doing politics dictates: supported social movements, built alliances, won a majority in the parliament, formed a government. We all know the results of such a strategy now. The real outcome was totally different. There was virtually no change of policy.

Prepare for landing

A strategy that wishes to be relevant to the new conditions must take on the duty of acquiring the necessary power to run basic social functions.

Mo matter how difficult or strange this may sound in light of the traditional ways of doing politics, it is the only way to acquire the necessary power to defy the elites' control over our societies.

Is this feasible? My hypothesis is that literally every day human activity – both intellectual and practical – is producing experiences, know-how, criteria and methods, innovations etc. that inherently contradict the parasitic logic of profit and competition. Moreover, for the first time in our evolutionary history, we have so many embodied capacities and values from different cultures within our reach that we are bound to progress our collective intelligence in this regard if we put our minds to it.

Of course we are talking about elements that are not developed sufficiently yet. Elements that may indeed have been nurtured in liberal or apolitical contexts often functionally connected to the standard economic orthodoxy. However, the support of their further development, their gradual absorption in an alternative, coherent paradigm governed by a different logic and values, and finally their functional articulation in alternative patterns of performing the basic functions of our societies is just a short description of the duty of any left that wishes to take up a clear, systematic and strategically broadbased orientation.    

Based on people's capacities, proper alignment, connection and coordination it is possible to acquire the necessary power to at least be in a position to assume the basic functions if needed. We can do this by ‘extracting’ the embodied capacities of the people and putting them into use for the liberation of society.

For those who are frankly skeptical of the possibility of laying the groundwork for such a process, let's see the potential in the stark case of Greece.

SYRIZA at its peak had approximately 35,000 members, the various solidarity networks included thousands of people and from experience we know that plenty of people were available to help SYRIZA with their expertise if there had been suitable processes to “extract” their embodied capacities in an efficient way (which was not the case).

Furthermore, massive unemployment provides us with huge numbers of people who would be willing to participate in networks of a different nature as long as we can build and expand processes of this kind in a systematic way. So, it is possible to pursue such a path as long as we apply the proper methodological and organizational principles in our way of doing politics.

In the worst case scenario, we will achieve some degree of resilience; people will be more empowered to defend themselves and hold their ground. In the best case, we will be able to regain the hegemony needed: people could mobilize positively, creatively and massively, even decisively to reclaim their autonomy.

Redesign the 'operating system' of the left

We know that the popular power once inscribed in various democratic institutions is exhausted. We do not have enough power to make the elites accept and tolerate our participation in crucial decisions. More of the same won’t do it. If the ground of the battle has shifted, undermining our strategy, then it's not enough to be more competent on the shaky battleground; we need to reshape the ground. And to do that we have to expand the solution space by shifting priorities: from political representation to setting up an autonomous network of production of economic and social power (NESP).

We must modify the balance between representing people's beliefs and demands and coordinating, facilitating, connecting, supporting and nurturing people's actions. Instead of being mainly the political representative of the popular classes in a toxic anti-democratic European political environment designed to be intolerant to people's needs, we must contribute heavily to the formation of a strong 'backbone' for resilient and dynamic networks of social economy and co-operative productive activities, alternative financial tools, local cells of self-governance, democratically functioning digital communities, community control over functions such as infrastructure facilities, energy systems and distribution networks. These are ways of gaining the degree of autonomy necessary to defy the control of elites over the basic functions of our society.

It is not only in Greece that there is a growing exclusion of people from having a job or a bank account, having a ‘normal life’. Modern society in general is in decline. From history we know that societies in decline tend to react in order to survive. It is up to us to grasp this and start building networks that can perform basic social functions in a different way – one that is democratic, decentralized and based on the liberation of people's capacities.

First, this would allow people who are being excluded today to survive.
Second, this could begin a transition towards a better and more mature society.

And last but not least, there are no empty spaces in history, so if we do not do this, the nationalists and the fascists – with their own militarized ways of performing these basic functions – may step in to conclude the decline.

Shifting the battlefield

Our opponents have already spotted the shifting nature of the battlefield and have moved to new unclassified ways of organizing and acting. They develop new kinds of institutions (a Greek example http://www.corallia.org/en/) compatible with the emerging environment of fast flows of information, digital frameworks of action and production etc.

They also explore new methods and models; for example, “open innovation” models have emerged in the last few years to enable the R&D departments of big multinational companies to cope with the current distributed nature of knowledge and expertise that exceeds past means of control and usurpation of human intellectual creativity and innovation.

We have to create new popular power if we want to bring about substantial change or make ourselves resilient instead of just handling the remaining, seriously depleted if not already exhausted popular power inscribed in the traditional institutions.

The question is what does it look like to do politics in order to produce popular power without presupposing traditional democratic functioning – to restore it by newly transforming it? In other words, what are the modifications needed in our political practice for the constitution and expansion of NESPs?

What about political representation?

The function of political representation is a fundamental one in complex societies. It's the function that political parties mostly perform and that shapes everyday thinking regarding what ‘politics’ is about. The task here is not to revive neglected aspects of politics - like building popular power - or to reinvent collective and individual qualities; the aim is to explore novel ways of performing the function of political representation in order to upgrade significantly the political leverage of the people.

Of course, building popular power will also invigorate and possibly transform the institutional framework, giving substantial meaning back to political representation. But, the expansion of a network of the sort we are discussing here and the changes it could generate at various levels of the social configuration must be reflected on the function of political representation itself. We need to evaluate and explore concepts like the “commons”. Advancing a project to shape political representation as “commons” could give us valuable insights into new ways of performing vital functions that transcend the traditional, institutional framework of representative democracy.

Democratising the state?

The left talks too much about the democratic transformation of the state. In practice, the driving concept is the restoration of state functions as they were before the neoliberal transformation. But the expansion of a network of economic and social power under people's control could unlock our imagination towards more advanced and better targeted reforms of state institutions. In theory this is an old idea: the transformation of the state is a complementary move to the self-organized collectivities of the people outside it, driven by these forms of self-governance.

These modifications may be classified in three categories: political imagination, methodology and organizing principles. From my experience, the very same people who energetically claim that we need to be more innovative, better adapted and more efficient, when they actually do politics, reproduce priorities, mental pictures, methods and organizational habits that they already know are insufficient or inadequate.

There are ingrained norms in terms of methodological guidelines that decisively shape the range of our collective actions, rhetoric, decisions and eventually strategy. In the same vein, we believe in and fight for the promotion of the logic of cooperation and democracy against the logic of competition, but in practice our organizations suffer severely in terms of cooperation and democracy on the operational/organizational level.

We need to recognize these blind spots and set up a process of identifying best practices, methods and regulations – both from the experience of our collectivities and from expertise in management, leadership, organizational complexity and network systems theory etc. – in order to operationally upgrade our forces.

Furthermore, our actions and initiatives are not properly connected up, but fragmented and isolated, destined to face the same difficulties again and again. We need to upgrade our operational capacities through appropriate nodes of connection, facilitating smooth flows of know-how and information, transferring best practices, building databases and accumulating knowledge and expertise in an easily retrievable and useful way.

Actually, this is the advantage of multinational and large corporations in general, in comparison to others: they have a vast social network and powerful databases that gives them the necessary tools to plan and pursue their goals while their smaller competitors seem in disarray in a global environment of rapid changes. We need these qualities if we want to be really useful today.

Actually, this is exactly what our opponents did consistently and persistently during the last decades: they were designing and implementing reforms in various levels of state institutions based on the methods, the criteria and the functioning of their own “social agents”, namely the corporations and their own understanding of the nature of public space, namely the market. This is exactly the “mechanics” of transformation that various intellectuals and leaders of the left described in detail a long time ago. Perhaps, by shifting our priorities we will be able to revive old but useful ideas that have been forgotten in practice.

Mind the gap

The “SYRIZA experience” will be worthless if we do not resist the temptation to replace one mistake with another. The failure of SYRIZA - the failure of focusing solely on traditional electoral politics to radically change the dominant neoliberal framework - creates favorable conditions for notions like “self-referential alternativism” and “vanguard isolationism” to emerge and preoccupy the minds and hearts of those who are willing to continue fighting.

But choices like these just repeat what SYRIZA did, justifying fully the threat of our opponents: either you will be marginal or you will become like us! The existential threats and crucial questions regarding their future that our societies face today have nothing to do with a strategy of building “arcs” that aim to safeguard the “Left” or any other identity.

Entering the ominous battlefield of the twenty-first century, the left will either be relevant and useful for the defense of human societies, or it will be obsolete.








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A Landscape of Dreams

SUBHEAD: Our political system is so deeply entrenched in its own fantasies that a complete breakdown, near term, is a possibility.

By John Michael Greer on 7 October 2015 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2015/10/a-landscape-of-dreams.html)


Image above: The Statue of Liberty mashup up with an oncoming storm. From (http://12160.info/photo/ny-1?context=user).

Maybe it’s just the psychology of selective attention, but tolerably often when I want to go into more detail about a point made in a previous essay here, stories relevant to that point in one way or another start popping up on the news.

That’s been true even during this blog’s forays into narrative fiction, so it should be no surprise that it’s happened again—even though, in this case, the point in question may not be obvious to most readers yet.

One of the core themes of the Retrotopia narrative I’ve been developing here over the last month or so is the yawning gap between the abstract notion of progress that we all have in our heads and the rather less pleasant realities to which this notion has been assigned.

The imaginary Atlantic Republic, the home of the narrative’s viewpoint character, is a place where progress as we know it has continued in exactly the same direction it’s been going for the last half century or so.

That’s why it’s a place where income is concentrated in ever fewer hands, leaving most of the population to struggle for survival via poorly paid part-time jobs or no jobs at all; a place where infrastructure has been allowed to fall into ruin, while investment gets focused instead on a handful of high-tech services such as the metanet (my hypothetical 2065 “improvement” of today’s internet); a place where people make do with shoddy, wretchedly unpleasant consumer goods because that’s what a handful of big corporations want to sell them and there are no other alternatives, and so on.

Now of course the immediate response of many people to this characterization can be summed up neatly as “but that’s not progress!” Au contraire, the changes just noted, unwelcome as they are, are the necessary and inevitable consequences of exactly those technological transformations that have been lauded to the skies in recent years as evidence of just how much we’ve progressed.

In the same way, my imaginary Lakeland Republic, with its prosperous working classes, its thriving urban centers, its comfortable clothing, and the like, has those things because it made certain collective choices that fly in the face of everything that most people these days understand as progress.

For instance, to cite a detail that sparked discussion on the comments page last week, the Lakeland Republic has abandoned computer technology—or more precisely, after the Second Civil War and the crises that followed, it rebuilt its infrastructure and economy without making computer technology part of the mix.

There were a variety of reasons for that choice, but one was an issue I’ve raised in these essays several times already: when you have an abundance of people who want steady employment and a growing shortage of the energy and other resources needed to build and operate machines, replacing employees with machines is not necessarily a smart idea, while replacing machines with employees may just be the key to renewed prosperity and stability.

That’s an issue in the story, and also in our lives today, because computers have eliminated vastly more jobs than they’ve created. Before computers came in, tens of millions of Americans supported themselves with steady jobs as typists, file clerks, stenographers, and so on through an entire galaxy of jobs that no longer exist due to computer technology.

The jobs that have been created by computer technology, on the other side of the balance, employ far fewer people, leaving the vast remainder to compete for the remaining bottom-level jobs, and this has driven down wages and widened the gap between the well-to-do and everyone else. That’s not what progress is supposed to do, according to the conventional wisdom, but that’s what it has done—and not just in this one case.

Since 1970, in point of fact, the standard of living for everyone in America outside of the wealthiest 20% or so has skidded unsteadily downward. The nation’s infrastructure has been abandoned to malign neglect, and a great many amenities that used to be taken for granted either cost vastly more than they once did, even corrected for inflation, or can’t be had for any price.

We pretend, or at least the vast majority of us do, that these things either haven’t happened or don’t matter, and certainly nobody’s willing to address the possibility that these things and other equally unwelcome changes have been the result of what we like to call progress—even when that’s fairly obviously the case.

What’s going on here, in other words, is the emergence of a widening chasm between the abstraction “progress” and the things that progress is supposed to represent, such as improved living conditions, a broader range of choices available to people, and so on. The sort of progress we’ve experienced over the last half century or so hasn’t given us these things; quite the contrary; it’s yielded degraded living conditions, a narrower range of choices, and the like.

Point this out to people in so many words and the resulting cognitive dissonance tends to get some truly quirky responses; put it in the form of a narrative and—at least this is my hope—a larger fraction of readers will be able to recognize the tangled thinking at the heart of the paradox, and recognize a dysfunctional abstraction for what it is.

Dysfunctional abstractions, though, are all the rage these days. A glance through the news offers a bumper crop of examples. One that comes forcefully to mind, just at the moment, is the ongoing attempts on the part of US political and military spokescritters to find some way to talk about the US airstrike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, without actually mentioning that the US carried out an airstrike on a hospital and killed twenty-two civilians, including three children.

It really has been a remarkable spectacle, and connoisseurs of weasel-worded evasions have had a feast spread out before them. Early on, the media in the US and its allies was full of reports that the hospital had been hit by an airstrike that somehow didn’t get around to mentioning whose aircraft was involved.

Then there were stalwart claims that it hadn’t yet been confirmed that a US aircraft carried out the strike.

Once that evasion passed its pull date—the Taliban, after all, doesn’t have an air force, and the public relations flacks at the Pentagon apparently decided that it just wasn’t going to work to insist that they’d somehow come up with one just for the sake of this one airstrike—the excuses began flying fast and thick.

The fact that the four officially promulgated excuses I’ve seen so far all contradict one another doesn’t exactly make any of them seem particularly convincing.

What the excuses and evasions demonstrate, rather, is that the US military and government are treating what happened entirely as a matter of abstractions, rather than dealing with the harsh but inescapable reality of twenty-two smoldering corpses in a burnt-out hospital.

To the media flacks at the Pentagon, evidently, this is all merely a public relations problem, and the only response to it they can think of involves finding some set of excuses, euphemisms, and evasions that will allow them to efface the distinction between a public relations problem and a war crime.

Now of course it’s not as though this sort of atrocity is unusual for the US at this point on the sorry downslope of its history. The only thing that makes the bombing of the Kunduz hospital at all unusual is that a significant fraction of the targets weren’t locals—they were physicians and hospital staff from the international charity Médecins sans Frontières, who can’t be ignored quite so easily.

For well over a decade now, the US government has been vaporizing assorted groups of people all over the Middle East via drone strikes, and according to everybody but the paid flacks of the US government, a very large fraction of the people blown to bits in these attacks have been civilians.

Here again, Washington DC treats this as a public relations problem, and simply denies that anything of the sort has happened.

The difficulty with this strategy, though, is that sooner or later you run up against an opponent that isn’t stuck on the level of abstractions, isn’t greatly interested in public relations, and intends to do you real, rather than abstract, harm. To some extent that’s what has sown the whirlwind that the US and its allies are now reaping in the Middle East.

In many of the tribal cultures of the Middle East, vengeance against the killers of one’s family members is an imperative duty, and it doesn’t matter how airily the flacks in Washington DC dismiss the possibility that the latest drone strike annihilated a Yemeni wedding party, or what have you.

The relatives of the dead know better, and the young men among them are going to do something about it, whether that involves hiking to Afghanistan or, say, joining the current mass migration into Europe, lying low for a while, and then looking for suitable targets.

The same difficulty has shifted into overdrive over the last few weeks, though, with Russia’s entry into the Syrian civil war. Russia’s current leaders are realists, which is to say, they assign abstractions the limited importance they deserve.

The Russian presence in Syria, accordingly, isn’t a mere gesture, it’s the efficient deployment of an expeditionary force that’s clearly intended to wage war, and is in the early stages of turning that intention into hard reality.

In an impressively short time, the Russians have built, staffed, and stocked a forward air base at Latakia, and begun systematic air strikes against rebel positions; work has gotten under way on two other bases; weapons and munitions are flooding into Syria to rearm the beleaguered Syrian army; the first detachments of Revolutionary Guard soldiers from Russia’s ally Iran have arrived.

Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) and airborne units are en route to Syrian soil, where they and the Iranians will doubtless have something to do besides soak up rays on Latakia’s once-famous Mediterranean beaches.

Meanwhile Russia’s Black Sea fleet, led by its flagship, the guided missile cruiser Moskva, has positioned itself off the Syrian coast. That in itself tells an important story. The Moskva carries long range antiship missiles and an S-300 antiaircraft system; there are reports that another S-300 system has been set up on land, and Russian electronic warfare equipment has also been reported at Latakia.

Neither the Islamic State militia nor any of the other rebel forces arrayed against the Syrian government have a navy, an air force, or electronics sufficiently complex to require jamming in the event of hostilities.

The only nation involved in the Syrian civil war that has all these things is the United States. Clearly, then, Russia is aware of the possibility that the US may launch an air or naval assault on the Russian expeditionary force, and has the weaponry on hand to respond in kind.

Last night, working on this post, I wrote: “The Russian airstrikes so far have concentrated on rebel forces around the edges of the territory the Syrian government still holds, with some longer-range strikes further back to take out command centers, munitions dumps, and the like.

The placement of the strikes says to me that the next moves, probably within weeks, will be against the rebel enclave north of Homs and the insurgent forces in Idlib province.

I expect ground assaults backed up by artillery, helicopter gunships, and close-in air support—vastly more firepower, in other words, that any side in the Syrian civil war has had at its disposal so far.” This morning’s news confirmed that guess, and added in another factor: Russian cruise missiles launched from the Caspian Sea fleet, most of a thousand miles from Syria.

Once Idlib and the rest of western Syria is secured, I expect the Russians and their allies to march on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s notional capital—and I don’t expect them to waste any more time in doing so than they’ve wasted so far.

All this poses an immense embarrassment to the United States and its allies, which have loudly and repeatedly proclaimed the Islamic State the worst threat to world peace since the end of the Third Reich but somehow, despite a seemingly overwhelming preponderance of military force, haven’t been able to do much of anything about it.

Though it’s hard to say for sure, given the fog of conflicting propaganda, it certainly looks as though the Russians have done considerably more damage to the Islamic State in a week than the US and its allies have accomplished in thirteen months of bombing.

If that’s the case, some extremely awkward questions are going to be asked. Is the US military so badly led, so heavily burdened with overpriced weapons systems that don’t happen to work, or both, that it’s lost the ability to inflict serious harm on an opponent? Or—let’s murmur this one quietly—does the United States have some reason not to want to inflict serious harm on the Islamic State?

I suspect, though, that what’s actually behind the disparity is something far simpler, if no less damaging to the prestige of the United States. I commented in an earlier post here that the US has been waging its inept campaign against Islamic State as though it’s a video game—hey, we killed a commander, isn’t that worth an extra 500 points?

Look at that from a different perspective and it becomes another example of the total disconnection of abstraction from reality.

The abstraction here is “fighting Islamic State.” You’ll notice that it’s not “defeating Islamic State”—in the realm of dysfunctional abstractions, such differences mean a great deal. Obama has decided that under his leadership, the US is going to fight Islamic State, and that’s what the Pentagon is doing.

At intervals, accordingly, planes go flying over various portions of Syria and Iraq to make desultory bombing runs on places where some intelligence analyst in suburban Virginia thinks an Islamic State target might have been located at some point in the last month or so.

That’s “fighting Islamic State.” Nobody can point a finger at Obama and say that he’s not fighting Islamic State, since the Air Force is still obligingly making those bombing runs.

It doesn’t matter that none of this has done anything to slow down the expansion of the Islamic State militia, or to stop its appalling human rights violations; that’s in the grubby realm of realities, into which fastidious minds in Washington DC are unwilling to stoop.

Another abstraction that’s getting a lot of use in the current situation is “moderate Syrian rebels.” In the realm of realities, of course, those don’t exist. The Pentagon’s repeated attempts to find or manufacture some, to satisfy Obama’s insistence that a supply of them ought to be forthcoming, have yielded one embarrassing failure after another.

This is for quite a simple reason, all things considered: the word “moderate” in this context means, in effect, “willing to put the interests of the US and its European allies ahead of their country and their faith.” (When American politicians use the word “moderate” about people in other countries, that’s inevitably what they mean.)

Nonetheless, since the abstraction is so useful, the politicians and the Pentagon keep on waving it around. You have to read carefully to find out that some groups being labeled as potential moderates, such as the al-Nusra Front, are affiliated with al-Qaeda—you know, the outfit that the Global War On Terror was supposed to fight.

Such things should probably come as no surprise during the presidency of a man who got into office via a campaign that was never anything more than a blur of feel-good abstractions: “Hope,” “Change,” “Yes We Can,” and the like. Barack Obama will go down in history as one of the United States’ least competent presidents precisely because everything he’s done has been so utterly fixated on the realm of abstractions.

The wretchedly misnamed “Affordable Care Act” aka Obamacare is a fine example. Its enactment has made health care more expensive and less available for most Americans; it took what was already the worst health care system in the industrial world, and accomplished the not inconsiderable feat of making it even worse.

To Obama and his dwindling crowdlet of supporters, though, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the resulting mess corresponds, to them, to the abstraction “national health care system.”

He promised a national health care system, we have a national health care system—and of course it’s not exactly irrelevant that the privileged few who still praise that system are by and large those whose wealth shields them from having to cope with its disastrous failings.

It’s only fair to note that, deeply immersed in the realm of dysfunctional abstractions as Obama is, he’s got plenty of company there, and it’s not limited to the faux-liberal constituencies that put him into his current address.

Listen to the verbiage spewing out of the overcrowded Republican clown car and you’ll get to witness any number of vague abstractions floating past, serenely disconnected from the awkward realm of facts.

For that matter, take in the outpourings of the establishment’s pet radicals—I’m thinking just now of Naomi Klein’s embarrassingly slipshod and superficial book This Changes Everything, but there are plenty of other examples—and you’ll find no shortage of equally detached abstractions drifting by in the breeze, distracting attention from the increasingly dismal landscape of fact down there on the ground.

What troubles me most about all this is what it says about the potential for really serious disruptions here in the US in the near future.

I’m sure my readers can think of other regimes that reached the stage where moving imaginary armies across a landscape of dreams took precedence over grappling with awkward facts, and once that happened, none of those regimes were long for this world.

The current US political system is so deeply entrenched in its own fantasies that a complete breakdown of that system, and its replacement by something entirely different—not necessarily better, mind you, but different—is a possibility that has to be kept in mind even in the near term.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Retrotopia Part 1 - Dawn Train from Pittsburgh 8/27/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Retrotopia Part 2 - View from a Moving Window 9/2/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Retrotopia Part 3 - A Cab Ride in Toledo 9/9/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Retrotopia Part 4 - Public Utilities, Private Good 9/23/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Retrotopia Part 5 - A Change of Habit 10/1/15

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